The Art of Writing Drama

by Michelene Wandor

  3. A developed grasp of differently voiced and inflected dialogue, achieved through an understanding of register, and the ways in which register and different speech-defined forms of articulation interact.

  4. The importance of completing short plays within the classroom time and course length. The text is absolutely as complete as it can be, because that is what the dramatist does. The dramatist must imagine, conceive, write, rewrite, structure, refine, begin, middle and end, within the conventions and devices available to the dramatic writing process.

  5. Use of scenarios or plans only as relevant, at different directed moments of the writing process and never at the beginning.

  6. Complete freedom with regard to subject matter. Notions of ‘idea’, ‘premise’, discussions of subject matter and theme are highly significant, but to be explored post hoc, or, if relevant, along the way, not foreclosed at the start.

  Such an achieved set of awarenesses, through the production and discussion of dramatic fiction in the classroom, does not amount to a training for professional dramatists. After all, the drama has and

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  will sustain itself perfectly well without any formal training in the art of writing drama. The great advantage of the fact that drama writing has moved into the academy is that opportunities can be provided for study, understanding and practice for a range of people who might otherwise remain outside the benefits of such exploratory time.

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  12 The pedagogic process

  This chapter is as accurate an account as I can give about the way I teach. This is not just a narcissistic indulgence. It is my attempt to convey the ways in which I implement the principles and theorising which comprise the rest of this book. My teaching approach did not develop ‘out of’ or ‘from’ theory. The theorising evolved as my approach evolved and as I became clearer in my thinking, so my teaching in turn also modified. Writing this book has been a way of rounding up, making coherent and codifying the combination of theory and practice, which I believe can help transform the art of writing drama. This is a practical, as well as a polemical, aim. I deploy this approach in both adult education and in university courses. Reading lists, where I compile and require them, are modified according to the educational context.

  All my work, and all the learning, is based on writing done by students in class. Over the course of each term, or module, each student produces a complete short play, written in class, cumulatively built up and explored at every stage, on the page and in the classroom space. At no stage are value judgements used during the exploration or analysis of scenes. In formal courses assignments are produced at the end, written independently by each student outside the classroom and these are marked in the usual way. In this respect, teaching the art of writing drama is no different from any other academic subject. Teacher–student

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  contact provides the information and builds the expertise, and assignments are evidence of the student’s ability to translate his/her understanding into independent work.

  Overheard conversations

  Aural and verbal acuity is developed in a number of different ways.

  Ongoing weekly ‘homework’ is particularly important in this process. This consists of requiring students to write down any overheard conversation (or fragment of a conversation) between two people verbatim during the week. These can come from any conversation, anywhere and about anything. Bring in at least one, I say. Carry around a notebook, so that if you are somewhere and remember, you can write stuff down. Do not judge or make any kind of decision about whether it is an ‘interesting’ or ‘important’

  conversation. No value judgements. The only important thing is to remember to do it, have paper and pen, and get it written down on the spot, exactly as you are hearing it.

  At the beginning of each class we go round and hear these snippets, without explanation or discussion. Even a relatively simple-seeming task such as this reveals some interesting issues.

  Many students apologise because what they have written isn’t

  ‘interesting’. This can go on for weeks. Suspending judgement is not always easy for people. Sometimes it is just an excuse not to do the exercise, even though I explain very carefully, repeatedly, that it is a very important part of the process. It tests the circle between ear, mind and the act of listening, hearing, retaining, writing, refining memory and practice. It is similar to what happens if someone has to take notes during a lecture; the difference is that my requirement is that the words they hear and the words on the page must be the same, verbatim. If someone hears a conversation but is unable to write it down on the spot, the exercise is still worth doing at home although it then becomes an unverifiable test of memory.

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  Some people will just turn up with one line. This is fine as a first stab, but I suggest that, even if they just bring two lines from two different speakers, they should concentrate on the moment of exchange. This directs attention not only to the words themselves, but to the moment of initiation, of reaction, embedded in dialogue.

  This can take students some time, since their attention must be divided between two voices. It helps to transfer the concept of imaginative writing from prose-related practices to dialogue-related procedures.

  Alternatively, students may turn up with a page and a half of dialogue and will claim that yes, they did hear it all and yes, they did write it down exactly as they heard it at the time. Given that we write more slowly than we speak, this is clearly a case of great economy with the truth. Such students basically want to show off and will have made up some, if not all, of the dialogue. I stress that the exercise is not about finding ways to begin a scene and then continue it (in other circumstances this might be interesting).

  Sometimes students will precede the reading by starting off on long anecdotal explanations of where they were and what was going on. I interrupt and say that all that is irrelevant; all that is important is the dialogue, which we hear just as it is. This is a preparation and reminder of the relative ‘bareness’ of dialogue on the air and to encourage our focus as listeners not just on individual speakers, but on what happens at the moment of exchange and interaction, between speeches.

  When I ask students to read out the overheard conversations, I preface the first session by saying you can either read it yourself together with someone else, or give it to two other people to read.

  There will always be at least one student who wants to read the whole thing him- or herself: no one will be able to read my handwriting, they say. Fine, I say. Go ahead. The student begins to read and after a few lines, I stop him/her. What are we hearing? I ask. Various answers are given. The significant issue is that if one person reads out dialogue spoken by two people, what we are

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  actually hearing is a single voice and (effectively) a monologue. This is obvious, once it is articulated or written down, but it is never obvious to students unused to the difference between written and spoken dialogue. It often takes time, and sometimes a long time, for students to internalise the difference between the excitement of a singular mind (the student) imagining and writing in more than one literary ‘voice’ on the page, and its translation into multiple voices.

  Everyone can write dialogue without thinking about it, but it takes time to understand what it is and to develop the skills to think about it.

  Occasionally the ethics of the process will come up; sometimes people understandably feel self-conscious about writing down the conversation of strangers. Some will think it an intrusive thing to do.

  This can lead to a very inte
resting discussion about the way we feel/think about the ownership of our words and what happens if someone else appropriates them. By extension, it can lead at a later date to discussions about ‘using’ real life experiences, which might involve other people, as part of the source material for fiction.

  Languages and individual resources

  Early in the first class I go round the class and ask everyone about the language(s) they speak. I am careful only to ask about language and occasionally, just to clarify, if a student is bilingual, I might ask about where he/she grew up or went to school and learned language.

  The ‘personal’ questions go no further. During the process there is usually at least one person who says he/she speaks ‘ordinary’ or

  ‘standard’ English. This generates some discussion about the kind of English students thinks they speak, whether there might be some kind of regional or dialect-based element in the background –

  indeed, about how many ‘Englishes’ we all acquire and use during the course of our lives. At a later stage this might lead to a more formal discussion of register and the ways in which language is

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  differently inflected, depending on different situations and relationships, and how each individual produces such languages as part of her/his own ‘idiolect’. Without this kind of understanding to underpin it, discussion about the right ‘tone’ for each character is likely to be vague and idiosyncratic.

  Out of this discussion, at the beginning, and again later if it is relevant and productive, I actively encourage people to write in their other/first language(s) as well as in their various Englishes.

  Sometimes students might mix two languages, or even write whole scenes in another language. If I ask them to translate, so that we have two versions of the scene, the purpose is not merely for the rest of us to understand, but primarily for these students to explore how

  ‘their’ own languages interrelate and how they can be used as an imaginative and cultural resource. Matters of rhythm, pace, stress, the structure of sentences, idioms and a whole host of other linguistic elements resonate with possibilities for each student.

  Language is both shared and individuated. Importantly, again and again I have been delighted to see that exploring these different languages can lead to different cultural and social subject matter without explicitly raising this as a possibility. The way in through language enables each student (if she/he wants to) to explore her/his own distinctive imaginative resources and find material which interests her/him. More often than not, writing in another language leads to heightened, surer and more subtle applications of English(es).

  When a student writes in another language, other members of the class are likely to find themselves reading a scene aloud in French, or Italian, or even a non-European language. It doesn’t matter whether they can understand the words or not. It is extraordinary how a student who clearly will never make a performer (this is not an acting class, so it doesn’t matter), when she/he is reading a scene in Italian, will suddenly change her/his body language and gestures without even being aware of it. A whole different take on dialogue and subject matter is opened up. Through language, important areas

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  of cultural experience and subject matter come into the writing, all within the student’s choice and control.

  Words on the page, in the air and on the floor

  Each three-hour class is structured in more or less the same way.

  After the overheard conversations are read out each week, without comment or discussion, but always to a great deal of pleasure and entertainment, there is either a writing session of between ten and twenty minutes, or the completion of a round of work read aloud from the previous week.

  In the very first class the writing session begins after some brief opening discussion about language. All writing sessions are accompanied by a small number of ‘rules’, which are not initially explained, but which are later explored on the floor. The rules are quite simple: 1, no stage directions and 2, no monologues. Depending on what kind of scenes people write, later there may be some supplementary rules (though these always come with explanations): no telephone calls, no flashbacks, no therapists. No speech to run for more than three or four lines on the page.

  Surrounding all these is the primacy of the most difficult element for students to grasp: the immediacy, the present moment of the dialogue, the relationships and the first-person inhabitation of each speaking voice/persona. I tend not to use the word ‘character’ until much later in the process, if at all. For the sake of a kind of simplicity, and in order to sidestep whatever expectations students come with, I usually refer to the ‘people’ or ‘figures’ or ‘voices’ in the scene.

  The first ‘instruction’, then, is to write a particular kind of scene, with just two people in it. I am deliberately not spelling out the kind of scene I suggest, because each teacher needs to be free to evolve whatever starting point will yield material with which he/she can work.

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  From a classroom in which there has been an informal conversational mode of exchange, we move into a moment in which the room is filled with small pieces of art, all built just out of dialogue.

  Initially students are not aware of this change, but gradually the experience becomes more familiar as the weeks pass. If someone is unsure how to start writing, I suggest an opening line. Work thus begins immediately with dialogue. There is never any need to explain what dialogue is, although sometimes I need to explain briefly how to set out the dialogue on the page. My experience has been that most people who come to these classes will never have seen a published play, or read any drama on the page.

  Next, all the scenes are read, one after the other (with each

  ‘character’ separately voiced) with no comment or discussion. The next stage is to go round the room again, to hear each scene read again, stopping briefly after each scene to begin the structural and analytic process. This generates a pattern of analysis, which is repeated, with cumulatively different issues explored each time.

  After this first piece of writing I choose one of a number of basic very open questions. So it might be whether it is clear, from the dialogue alone, what the genders of the voices are. It doesn’t matter what the student who has written it thinks; we judge only from aural evidence in the text. Or the question might be what relationship the two voices might have with each other. Again, evidence must come from within the text, direct or circumstantial evidence.

  The second piece of homework is that each week students are asked to type up their scenes, making as many copies as there are voices, without extending the scenes, or rewriting them. From the second week on there will be two copies of each scene and if the number of characters expands, to a maximum of five for such a short play, there will be the appropriate number of copies made. If a student has not made copies the scene cannot be read out, since each performer needs his/her own copy. Again, while this sounds obvious, if not trite, experiencing it in practice reveals how centred we all are on the individually voiced text.

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  Scenes on the air and behind the fourth wall

  In the first week students read from their seats in a large circle, radiating out from my desk. Facing me at the top of the classroom is a gap with no chairs. This, effectively, makes the room into an informal theatre, with a huge space in the middle. A couple of chairs function as rudimentary indicators of set. From the second week everyone’s scene (or scenes, as they accumulate) are read out again on the floor. Each student casts his/her own scene(s) and they have the option of either being in their own scenes or watching others read them. Generally, however, the
y prefer to watch. I comment that it is important that everyone must get an opportunity to perform, so that each student knows what happens, what is involved and what it is like to be on the other side of the dramatic text; in other words to move across the fourth wall into the performance text. This is neither as obvious nor as easy as it might sound, even in an adult education class, where some of the students may already have acting experience. I have a strict routine for how this is set up, to give students some idea of the degree of precision and discipline involved in even the simplest form of performance.

  My instructions, from the second week on, are always the same; I have found they need to be repeated each week. The transformation from seated person-student into the completely imagined person, in relationship with others who are making the same transformation (i.e., performer/character), produces some taxing experiences and processes. In addition, every time a scene is enacted the space itself is transformed.

  If someone has forgotten to make a copy I delay the reading of their scene. It’s all right, they say, there are only two characters, we can share. I explain. If you are both sharing the same script, first of all it restricts the amount you can move around, because only one of you will be holding the script. This means that you both share a primary relationship to a piece of paper, rather than to each other, to the person to whom you are talking. With the right number of

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  copies there are other instructions to be observed, each of which leads to a greater understanding of the nature of performance and the role of the performer and/or director.

  First, make as much eye contact with the person to whom you are talking as possible. This entails compounding the relationship between the written, the spoken and the heard. It involves finding places to look up from the reading without interrupting the flow. It involves listening to the person who is talking to you, while preparing to respond with your own lines. In practice, this involves the eye taking in the next few words, which are still being spoken as the person returns her/his eye to the page, having also retained a visual memory of where she/he was. The acts of looking to and from the script are, in their microcosmic way, a means of constantly being reminded of the relationship between, and process of transformation from, written and performed text. This takes many people time to develop, but they all improve and therefore also sharpen their verbal, aural and visual acuity.