The Art of Writing Drama

by Michelene Wandor

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  Immediacy, pivot and exposition

  The work done on lifting the words off the page helps students to understand what happens on the other side of the written text, as it were, by giving them a chance to experience what performers must do. At the same time it serves to elucidate and confirm the determining element of both writing and performance: the sense of immediacy, of the presentness of drama. Anyone watching drama instinctively engages in a structured experience of immediacy; the dramatist needs to make that awareness conscious and to translate it into dialogue, which always takes place in its own ‘present’ tenseness.

  There is a creative writing cliché, which is sometimes adduced here: show, don’t tell. Like all other clichés, this can be deconstructed to a point where it is not particularly useful as a clear guideline. For example, every story is a kind of ‘telling’; in prose fiction, with the singular narrative voice, this is more obvious. In drama the ‘telling’ is oblique, conveyed through moving and speaking figures who appear to be showing as they go.

  However, narrative ‘telling’, as it is inflected in prose fiction, can be entailed in drama through the medium or device of exposition. In earlier twentieth-century drama (the ‘well-made play’ syndrome) it was common to have an opening scene which self-consciously introduces the audience (gives the audience ‘information’) about relevant parts of the story so far. Often such information is supplied by secondary characters – servants, adjuncts to the main story. The opening speech of The Second Mrs Tanqueray by Arthur Wing Pinero, is a rather wonderful example of this: MISQUITH

  Aubrey, it is a pleasant yet dreadful fact to

  contemplate, but it’s nearly fifteen years since I first dined with you. You lodged in Piccadilly in those days, over a hat-shop.

  Jayne, I met you at that dinner, and Cayley Drummle.2

  2 Trelawny of the Wells and other plays by Arthur Wing Pinero (Oxford, 1995), p. 143.

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  All this information is primarily for the benefit of the audience since we can assume it is already known to the others. We can assume this because it comes right at the beginning and is not elicited in response to a question such as, ‘Misquith, kindly remind me where we first met. I can’t remember.’ This kind of exposition, where information, provided from within the action, relevant only to the action, becomes a way to appear to leap over the fourth wall.

  Addressed directly to the audience, it is an example of concealed internal narrative.

  Student writing often includes dialogue of this kind. Sometimes this takes the form of reported speech. The ‘lesson’ is to identify exposition which is outside the immediate moment of dramatic exchange. The incorporation of such exposition may constitute a form of note-taking by the dramatist in dialogue form. It is the kind of information which might be more at home in a synopsis or scenario. That does not mean the student should immediately go off and write a scenario; this may or may not be an appropriate thing to do at that moment. The most important thing is an awareness of the distinction between the immediate and response/reactive speech, and the less immediate. In any case all dialogue must, in the end, be structured round the illusion of its present-tenseness.

  There is some useful work to be done exploring this. At the most basic level it involves demonstrating and analysing the difference between something which is happening ‘now’ and something which has happened in the past: this can be done by getting students to underline all verbs which are in the past tense: JOHN

  Would you like some scrambled eggs?

  JANET

  Yes, please. I haven’t had scrambled eggs for ages.

  Whatever Janet’s line might express, or be prompted by – pleasure, enthusiasm, wistfulness – it bears a direct relation to John’s question. However, it is not all a direct response to a direct question

  – for example, ‘When did you last eat scrambled eggs?’ It is,

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  therefore, another kind of exposition, of information which comes from outside the immediacy of the moment. It is a reference to a moment in the past, when something else happened. If it is relevant to the present moment, it has an active function. If it is just incidental information, as it were, then it is (possibly) unnecessary exposition (unless it becomes important later).

  After I have asked students to underline all the verbs in the past tense, we hear the scenes, read first in their entirety, then twice more: first with the present-tense sentences left out, then with the past-tense sentences left out. This is always exciting and illuminating – but again, it often takes students some time to comprehend and internalise the concept of exposition and its relationship to dramatic immediacy. The issue here is not about information leaping over the fourth wall, but rather to sharpen students’ awareness of those moments where they may want to include reference to events outside the scene, and to be able to decide what and why. Information, of whatever kind, which does not belong to the dramatic immediacy of the moment and is not integral to the action (physical, narrative, emotional) can be demonstrated to be superfluous. Students must be able to discern, and internalise, the difference between the immediacy of the dramatic moment and all matter that is outside it.

  There is a further exploration of exposition I often do. I suggest that each student should take two of his/her characters and write half a page of dialogue (taking five minutes to do it), in which each character only offers information in response to a question. This too is not always as straightforward as it might seem. It is not an

  ‘exercise’ in writing dialogue using questions, but in enhancing close focus on the way in which dialogue interacts, and then continues to accumulate and build. Every reaction (even a straight answer to a question) in dialogue is also a new action. Inevitably, dialogue always moves ‘forward’, generating more dialogue. This process of exploration also demonstrates the constant reactiveness of dialogue.

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  Example: narrative and causality

  The following exchange of dialogue is the basis of an illustrative discussion of how scenes (narrative) are linked together, with some form of necessary sequencing or causality.

  A

  No eggs. No eggs. What do you mean by no eggs?

  B

  It is not my fault. It is the act of God.

  A

  Blasphemy. You tell me there are no eggs; and you blame your Maker for it.

  B

  What can I do? I cannot lay eggs.

  A

  No need to make a joke of it.

  B

  Well, we all have to do without eggs if the hens won’t lay.

  A

  Now, you just listen to me.3

  What is the relationship between these two people? Likely suggestions might be: a couple, a married couple. If asked why, someone might respond by saying that one person wants eggs for breakfast, which the other person is responsible for cooking. Where is the information about breakfast or cooking, I ask? There is no answer to that. However, it appears to be generally assumed that eggs stand in for ‘breakfast’. The significant fact is that one person is in charge of knowledge about the eggs. With recourse to socially conventional roles, cultural assumptions, many people assume that since women tend to cook at home, that figure will be a woman and the other, therefore, will be a man. The text thus (a) reveals cultural assumptions, and (b) opens up alternative possibilities.

  On the other hand it might not be a domestic scene at all, but a scene in a restaurant kitchen. The relationships, therefore, might be hierarchical – chef and waiter/waitress, for example. Evidence?

  Well, one person is more assertive, angrier, perhaps, than the other:
3 Modified introductory dialogue from Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw (Penguin, 1981), p. 49.

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  ‘Now, you just listen to me.’ It could be two men or two women.

  They might be living together, because people have eggs for breakfast.

  Whichever it finally turns out to be, there is clearly some kind of serious disagreement about eggs and their availability. Of course, in the long run eggs may turn out to be a metaphor for something quite else, even profound.

  The scene is then examined for narrative, or story. What is suggested in this scene, which may already have happened?

  Evidence must be from the text. ‘You tell me there are no eggs.’

  This could indicate that B has discovered already that there are no eggs. This is confirmed by ‘We all have to go without eggs. The hens will not lay.’ There is thus at least one scene that happened earlier, which could be written: who are the ‘we’ referred to here?

  Any person directly or indirectly referred to in a scene is a possible character for the play, since the person concerned is already important to one of the onstage people. ‘I haven’t had scrambled eggs for ages’ suggests that the last time scrambled eggs were in evidence something important might have happened.

  What about a possible following scene? For what are the eggs needed? We may have thought previously about eggs and breakfast, but if the attention is given to future events, the eggs might be needed for other things: guests arriving. A cake for a special event.

  The arrival of an important guest (a soufflé?), either the special event itself, or a scene of further preparation for the event. What is the event? There is another possible absent person who might be important for the play.

  Structure

  Say we are running three sequential scenes. I will ‘spell’ out the link between each scene – or will ask questions: Scene 1: A discovers there are no eggs for a daughter’s twenty-first birthday party, and

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  there is a confrontation between A and B, who is supposed to have got the eggs. Scene 2: B has managed to buy some duck eggs and suggests to A that the cake can be modified. A is intrigued at first, then unsure. Scene 3: B has finished the cake and asks A to decorate it. No one knows what eggs are in the cake.

  Here Scene 2 follows Scene 1, since the duck eggs are a replacement for the hens’ eggs, which we already know are not available.

  Scene 3 includes a cake, made with eggs of some kind. The cake could not be made until eggs had been obtained.

  This is a perfectly sensible, logical, cause-and-effect order, in which each scene happens because of what has already happened in the scene(s) before. However, what happens if we change the order of the scenes? Not in order to ‘improve’ on the order we have, or because there is anything wrong with the order we already have. But just to see what effect changing the order might have on the narrative, on the order, sequence and implied cause-and-effect of the story.

  We begin with Scene 3. A cake has been made. We then have Scenes 1 and 2. Leaving aside any odd lines or speeches that may not perfectly ‘fit’ this order, we look simply at the sequence of events. If Scene 1 follows a successful cake it might be that the first cake was a trial run, or for a less important event, thus highlighting the particular significance of the sudden failure in hens’ egg provision.

  If, in what is now Scene 3, duck eggs are produced, the situation might be even worse, because the twenty-first birthday is of someone who is allergic to duck eggs.

  By changing the order of the events a different storyline is suggested, because of the ways in which we might link events, suggesting cause and effect, or setting up parallel storylines, which will develop separately before they come together. Cause and effect can happen over long spans of time, as well as in short discernible spans. This is one of the ways in which suspense or tension is built in to the narrative.

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  Pivot

  Each scene always has a pivotal moment, on which the rest of the scene depends. Or, to put it another way, without which the scene would have no rationale for being. This bears analogy with the concepts of beats and units, used by performers and directors.

  The pivot is always discovered only after the scene is written, after the event. It is not that every scene ‘must’ have a pivot. Every scene

  ‘will’ have a pivot, no matter what. In the exchange about eggs, the pivotal line is, ‘What do you mean by no eggs?’ Without this line, the rationale for the whole scene collapses.

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  13 Subject matter, character and

  follow-up

  There are some topics, considered as fundamental to drama, which have not been treated in detail in this book. This is quite deliberate.

  The first is the area covered under the various terms of premise, idea, super-objective (see chapter 4). The second is character.

  The premise/idea concept is virtually impossible to understand.

  As we have seen, it is a term interpreted in contradictory ways. It is taken to mean sometimes that the student needs to know everything about the drama before he/she starts writing dialogue – i.e., the story should already be structured; sometimes it means the message that is to emerge from the drama (what it ‘says’ or what the author wants to ‘say’); sometimes it covers the theme (what it is ‘about’).

  Clearly, each of these is an important issue, but equally, they are of limited use for the writing process. Some students will have a very strong notion of one or more of these, but others may not, either because they are genuinely unsure, or because they are not used to thinking in analytical, abstract ways.

  Also, as with any other kind of writing, discursive or imaginative, however much or little one ‘knows’ before writing begins, new material always emerges during the writing and thinking process.

  Thinking about what one is thinking, writing, reading, rereading and rewriting is vital. But good intentions, or explicitly articulated intentionality, is never enough. Performing a literary-critical operation on one’s own writing, to distil the message/theme/idea, is

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  notoriously unstable as an activity. The necessary skills take a long time and a great deal of experience to develop. There is a tension between knowing as much as one possibly can about what one is doing, and the activities of reading and exegesis performed on the writing by someone else who is ‘outside’ the process.

  Subject matter, theme and message

  In class, I generate discussion of these important matters only and always after the event, after the short play is complete – or nearly complete. The entire play is run and we then elicit suggestions first for subject matter and then for theme. What is it about and what is it ‘saying’? There are generally a number of suggestions in answer to both questions, with sufficient evidence from within the play to argue for any one. This is, of course, what critical interpretation is about. Subject matter, summarised in a single sentence, refers to elements in the narrative. So Hamlet is a play about royal succession.

  It is a play about a crisis in a mother-and-son relationship. It is a play about a man who cannot make up his mind. The theme of Hamlet is conscience. It is about ambition and greed. It is about the oppression of women, the way women are seen as passive. It is, whatever it is, an abstract noun. The message of Hamlet is respect your mother for being a person in her own right. It is that healthy government demands a close-knit family. It is that fate doth make cowards of us all. It is that brotherly love is a fine thing. It is some kind of moral, or polemic, or lesson. It could even be every single one of these all bound together.

  What
ever it is, it is never one single idea or premise. Colloquially, one might say ‘I have an idea for a play’, but that could mean anything at all. It is most likely to mean simply that someone is ready to start writing a play. Students may already have ‘ideas’ when they come to a drama-writing class, but in the end it is what they write that counts. What they write in class may or may not be the most

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  intimate expression of their soul, or even something they may feel passionately about, but that is, frankly, secondary to working with the convention, and acquiring the understanding and skills to do so.

  As has been briefly demonstrated, even the shortest snatch of dialogue already contains within it some narrative, the possibilities for a much longer narrative, relationships which compose the narrative, and a social world in which such a narrative takes place in the immediacy of the dramatic moment.

  This is, of course, not to argue against those who find it productive to write a detailed synopsis, with a moment-by-moment scenario breakdown, before they begin to write dialogue. It is, however, to point out that doing so keeps the imaginative and writing processes within the bounds of prose and the work, in a sense, must begin all over again when dialogue is written.

  The most productive way in the end is to move between the two, with the emphasis on dialogue; then, at a moment when there is already some substantial scenic material (in my classes at least three scenes), to draw back, think and plan, become aware of the overall timescale, the time gaps between scenes (if relevant), the total narrative, if it can be decided at this stage. Continue writing the drama (dialogue) and at intervals either repeat the analytical process, or leave it until the first version is finished, before analysing again.

  Structural and linguistic material thus constantly alternate and dovetail.

  Character

  Character is (forgive the metaphor) a can of worms. In earlier chapters I have discussed the way in which approaches to writing drama owe a great deal to critical approaches to the novel. Both the novel and post-Aristotelian approaches to drama often fall into the easy statement that the narrative is ‘about’ a hero or heroine, a central character. While there may be one such representation,