The Art of Writing Drama

by Michelene Wandor

  There must be no eye contact or conversation with anyone else sitting in the classroom. The audience, I say, does not exist. You do not know we are here. Students may have trouble with a word on the page and their instinct is to look at the student/author for clarification. Some may lose their place on the page and say ‘sorry’, or ‘where was I’, or ‘whoops’. As soon as this happens (and it always does at some point) I stop the reading immediately and say we must go from the top, from the beginning of the scene.

  I explain, of course. As soon as you speak, I say, you are doing a number of things: you are ad-libbing because you are speaking words that are not part of the text (no crime against that, but it is a skill in itself, relevant in a different kind of situation); you are jumping out of ‘character’ and speaking from your ‘real’ self and on the other side of the footlights your real self does not, and cannot, exist. Finally, you are ignoring or blurring or pretending that, or behaving as if, the fourth wall between performers and audience does not exist. This happens also when the performers giggle or

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  whisper to each other in the middle of a scene. In your performer persona, all you have are the words on the page. There is nothing else.

  The empty space against the wall facing me is the ‘backstage’ area.

  As soon as everyone has a copy of their script, I call them up to the backstage area. This often takes some time, since the first thing everyone does is bury their head in the words, to see what they are about to speak. This is symbolic of the entirely appropriate fact that they are each responsible for their own part, but it is also problematic, because it means they have not yet made the conceptual leap to an understanding that the fourth wall divides performers and audience, and that once they have gone to the performing end of the classroom they have become part of an entirely imaginary world and can/are about to relate only to each other.

  If you exit from your scene, I say, do not come back and sit in the audience. We do not exist. We are not here. Your space remains in the imaginary world where, even when you are ‘offstage’, you are still part of the imaginary world. This takes a while for some people to absorb and understand. I repeat it. In some circumstances I might refer to Stanislavsky’s idea of the ‘circle of attention’, but only if it helps to speed up the process. Most people who come to any kind of drama-writing class are not necessarily even familiar with his name and virtually no one has ever read any theory, or if they occasionally have, everything goes out of the window as they grapple with the work of writing and the practical implications of performance.

  Each student thus constantly moves between writing and performance, so he/she can experience (hear, see and feel) the difference and the interaction. Acting ability is entirely irrelevant. It is not an acting class, though the presence of even one person who has done some acting can be exciting for everyone. The only thing I ask is that everything they say should be audible on the other side of the room. Everyone always participates. Everyone always becomes more comfortable in the space during the course, more expansive with their body language, very often prepared to do slightly unusual

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  things, such as lying down, or hiding behind a chair. Everyone improves as a performer through the course.

  If at any point you are unsure, I say, work it out in silence. It doesn’t matter if the scene gets into a muddle. Silence and moving around do not break the atmosphere in the way that words do. This, in its own specific way, serves also to highlight the determining role in drama of the words, the dialogue.

  Analysis and possibility

  Each student’s short play is built scene by scene, week by week. Each scene is analysed in terms of a series of very specific issues, out of which the possibilities for development emerge, each choice hopefully enhanced by greater understanding. This seems to be a relatively unusual way of working – the only other author of a how-to-write-drama book who seems to share some of this approach is Noel Greig. Even though, as I have pointed out, he also advocates leaving the dialogue to last, he comments, ‘even the most basic text contains within it the potential seeds for further development.

  When working with writers on their plays, I have found that the best way of moving forward is to address the clues that the text already provides.’1 Although he is referring to dramaturgical work done on already written plays, the same principle carefully developed and applied is, I am convinced, by far the best and most grounded way for each student to develop his/her writing in class.

  If discussion of the first scene centres on questions about the relationship between the two people, the discussion proceeds without the participation of the student who has written the scene.

  Other students suggest different kinds of relationship, always, at my insistence, with verbal evidence from within the scene. If there is no obvious evidence (i.e., gender indicated by the names on the left, a 1 Greig, op. cit., p. 31.

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  son calling his mother ‘Mum’, or just characters called A and B), then other students draw on related circumstantial evidence in the scene. Sometimes the scene might be read again, with the process helping to sharpen hearing, perception and memory of the writing.

  I always take notes and I regularly suggest to students that they too should take notes.

  Such discussion often reveals social and cultural expectations. If a student suggests that a domestic scene might be a husband and wife, because the woman is serving dinner, if there is no actual evidence from within the scene, discussion might ensue about the possibility that it might be the man who is serving dinner. Discussions of possible relationships often become discussions about gender attribution and cultural expectation. Students may or may not have made their own decisions in writing their scenes, but even where gender is clearly indicated, rereading the scene with gender roles reversed can reveal all kinds of other relationships and storyline possibilities. Stereotypes may be observed, or they may be subverted. Students decide for themselves. The issue is never whether the class guesses ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but rather what possibilities are revealed as already inherently there within the text.

  The student/writer’s intentions are irrelevant to the discussion itself, and ultimately she/he always makes her/his own decisions.

  The analysis will always sharpen everyone’s perception of the written and spoken text.

  In anticipation of the next scene to be written, the first scene is read again and, still with close attention to the text and always quoting evidence from within the text, students are asked to think about what event might have preceded the one they have just heard and/or what event might follow it. This is a discussion of narrative, sequence and order, although not always explicitly identified as such at this stage. Again, we discuss only with evidence, what event might (at whatever distance of time) have preceded the one we have heard.

  There may be one obvious possibility, or there may be a number.

  For the next writing session each student decides whether he/she

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  writes a scene that comes before, or a scene that comes after. I suggest that the time gap between scenes should be quite short –

  perhaps within the same day or the next.

  Plan, event, conflict and subtext

  When each student has written three scenes and we have explored a variety of issues in each scene, there is a planning session, dovetailing in the scenes already written. Students are asked to write a plan for a short play, of between five and seven scenes (an odd number so that one scene can be at the centre). The scenes already written can be placed anywhere in this sequence. Each scene must be summarised in no more than two or three li
nes maximum, which describe the main event in the scene. No dialogue, I say; this is just a brief description of what happens.

  People have many different ideas about what constitutes an

  ‘event’, or something that happens. It is only sometimes physical; more often than not it is something emotional. ‘Susan feels betrayed by John.’ Of course, this is an emotional event and entirely valid; but it only becomes dramatic if it is built round a narrative event.

  This is a genuinely difficult matter. Words are ‘acts’ of a kind; a character feeling something strongly is also an event. The interactive event is, in most cases, the key. Scene 1: A wants B to make a birthday cake for C. This is more than just the single ‘want’ of A (i.e., the conventional idea that a scene is driven by a character who

  ‘wants’ something). A character who wants something can want it till the cows come home, but it is only when there is someone else there, with something interactive happening, that there is an event.

  The idea of ‘conflict’ is often used as a way of expressing the inevitability of interaction, but it is misleading. Not that ‘conflict’, or opposition between two people is wrong or bad, but because the immanence of action/event in any exchange between two people makes the whole issue both simpler and more complex. In the end

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  the definition of an action or event becomes contingent on the overall structure and on the ways in which events link together, lead to one another, or provoke each other.

  A

  Will you make a cake?

  B

  Yes.

  Even this apparently simple exchange, which appears to conclude in agreement, contains contradictory possibilities. Yes (if you will help me). Yes (I would love to). Yes (I am lying). Yes (when it suits me).

  Exchange in and of itself is nuanced, from two different points of view, becoming communication across the gap of difference, even difference in similarity. This is an example of what dramatists can mean when they sometimes say that the real action is in the gaps between the dialogue. It is also what is encapsulated by the term

  ‘subtext’. It is never a matter of ‘putting’ subtext in. There is always subtext, because there is always exchange and there is always an ‘in-between’.

  In the end it comes down to the way the drama is told or unfolds

  – the way the events or the happenings are linked together, rather than any abstract idea of what makes a ‘good’ story. We need only compare the murders and military events in Shakespeare’s tragedies and history plays with the subtleties of emotional nuance in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to see how wide-ranging the concept of action, conflict and narrative are. This is partly historical, partly stylistic, partly based on cultural expectation.

  What matters here is the way in which the student imagines or thinks the causal connections. After the plans are read out loud, we again go round, to spell out the cause-and-effect relationship between the one-line summary of scenes. The assumption must be that scene B happens because of scene A and that, without scene A, scene B could not take place. This logic can also be spelled out from the last scene backwards. During the rest of the course students write the remaining scenes, in any order they want, following the

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  plan. If new events arise and different scenes become relevant, the plan is not cast in stone.

  Time and place

  With each plan, each scene summarising (with a bit of luck and nudging) a single pivotal event, we can discuss chronology, or time lines, or timescale. This too is always flexible. A short play – fifteen to twenty minutes, which is a manageable length within the time span of a term/semester – concentrates the mind. If someone wants to cover a hundred years in such a short time, while, in principle, anything is possible, in practice the idea enables us to discuss, from the point of view of time, how the narrative connections, the cause-and-effect patterns, might work over time. Causality and time are always in some kind of significant relationship. I ask each student to plot out a provisional timescale in his/her plan, and to decide on a notional overall timescale, so that the story/narrative is contained in time. I suggest keeping the time sensibly contained – a few months at most.

  Some how-to books assert that a play’s ‘location’ is crucially important. This is linked to the idea that everything must be decided before dialogue can be written. In practice, the matter of location (where scenes take place imaginatively, as well as how they take place within the performance space) has more fluidity than might at first appear. In the end, there is always an active relationship between location, what takes place and how it takes place.

  Two lovers ending a relationship in a restaurant may do so differently if the same scene were set in private, in their shared kitchen. Here the differences are of contrast: an intimate, perhaps emotionally charged, encounter, which takes place in public, will have a built-in imaginary audience. In the privacy of a domestic setting emotional holds may not be barred. But it could work in precisely the opposite way. The private location could contrast with

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  a clipped, indirect, restrained emotional encounter, while the public location might provoke an emotional explosion. In the end what happens in a scene is most important and that is determined by the narrative context. It does not need a stage direction to place it. The place can, very often indeed, be decided later.

  The matter of location is something I explore on the floor, at appropriate moments during the course and generally at a later stage. While there are times when the location is glaringly obvious, most of the time there will be flexibility about where a scene or piece of dialogue may be set. A good example about the variability of location is often provided by television dramas. The American hospital series, ER, has numerous examples of a continuously written scene between two important characters, where the whole

  ‘scene’ is split up into different locations, which themselves provide an underlying narrative and sense of urgency in the speed with which the scenelets are intercut: the dialogue begins in a car, continues as the car is parked, continues through the car park, through the swing doors into hospital reception, along corridors, through scrubbing up and into the operating theatre, where the conversation turns to the medical work at hand. This is one continuous scene, broken up by location changes.

  Structural imperatives – beginning, middle

  and end

  When each play is ‘complete’ – i.e., all the scenes have been written

  – meaningful discussion on structure becomes possible. The opening of any narrative (the beginning of any drama) involves a disruption of the status quo: nothing happened before and everything happened before. Apparently. Such disruption of the narrative equilibrium is only possible to conceive because narrative is, in one sense, continuous and endless. The chunk of it which becomes the work of fiction is highlighted. It is, in a sense, all

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  middle. The rest, before and after, is the not-written story. This is not about constructing ‘back story’, but rather about the importance of the choice of start and end points. Often this may not be clear until everything has been written. Even pre-planning cannot absolutely legislate for the ‘correct’ beginning. In any case the end will always determine (in some crucial way) the nature of the beginning.

  The opening scene of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is repeated in the household every week, when the men read the Sunday papers. However, this particular week is clearly different from the others, because it sets the ‘story’ of the play in motion.

  Sundays may have happened before in a generic sense, but this Sunday (to use McKee’s phrase) is the ‘inciting
incident’ for what follows. It is the prime cause, as it were, of which the rest of the play is the effect.

  The end of every play heralds a resumption of order, some sort of invisible status quo, which is bound to be different from the status quo which has been disrupted at the start. Since nothing more is written, nothing appears to be happening afterwards. In reality, everything else happens afterwards, even though we have no evidence for what it is. The idea that any play can simply end by

  ‘leaving the audience to make up their minds’ is disingenuous.

  The evidence in the play always tends to at least one possibility.

  Even if a storyline appears to be wrapped up – i.e., they live happily ever after – there are two possibilities which follow: first, they do live happily ever after and second, they don’t live happily ever after.

  Evidence from within the play is likely to weigh towards one rather than the other, but it is always possible, of course, for two members of the audience to have different opinions, if different kinds of evidence (or even the same evidence) lead them to opposite conclusions. The end is never the end, any more than the beginning is ever the beginning. It is all middle. What is at stake here is the moment finally chosen by the dramatist to start the story and the moment chosen to end it.