There is an interesting, aesthetic, formal literary reason why it may be harder for women to opt for writing drama. Writing drama involves not only finding a ‘voice’ in a characteristic, distinctive literary sense, in what is called the ‘style’ of each dramatist. Writing drama entails dialogue, which even at its most introverted moment creates social interactive action. The dramatist makes inner private
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Culture and representation 179
voices become public utterances, invents public interaction and creates active, effective relationships. The dramatist does not have recourse to the private-seeming world of single-person narrative, with access to the inner, invisible consciousness.
A woman dramatist is potentially in a very powerful position. She animates a staged public world in which there are multiple voices, engaging with each other, inventing and creating an imagined world and its history, creating and controlling the voices of others (the characters, the performers), while developing her own literary style, interests and stamp. She is controlling the voices of others who speak in public, while, paradoxically, having little public voice in her own cultural right, as a woman.
Our public cultural world still does not accept or sufficiently encourage women to give public voice, for reasons which relate to long-standing gender taboos on public speaking and holding public authority. We only need to think of the news, day after day and evening after evening, showing male politicians in interchangeable grey suits pronouncing on issues which concern us all, male and female. As academic Cora Kaplan wrote, ‘Public writing and public speech, closely allied, were both real and symbolic acts of self-determination for women.’5 Although Kaplan was writing about women in the nineteenth century and although things have shifted somewhat, we are very far from parity, socially and culturally, in the power of the female voice in public. This is critical to the backdrop against which any dramatic writing may be taught.
A woman dramatist is still reacted to as a woman as much as, or sometimes more than, she is as a writer. A woman dramatist has more to overcome before she can be accepted as an artistic ‘equal’ in the dramatic worlds of production. Artistic directors who run theatres and make decisions, even sometimes women artistic directors, are often operating a hidden agenda in which the norms 5 Introduction to the reprint of Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (The Women’s Press, 1978), p. 9.
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of important subject matter, as well as literary capacity, are still determined by men, or by points of view determined by men: the decision about what is considered proper or interesting or important subject matter.
Like other creative writing classes, drama-writing classes tend to have more women than men in them. Their relative invisibility at professional level contrasts with this fact, as it does with their participation in amateur theatre. While the case study of gender in relation to writing drama demands attention in its own right, it is a vital indicator of ways in which similar understandings need to be developed in relation to other kinds of cultural resources. It is part of the ongoing struggle to increase cultural representation to match that of our demographic cultural reality, and has a particularly vital role to play in the representation of dramatic writing and in work with students to foster the art of writing drama.
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15 Conclusions
Anyone can write dialogue; we all have conversations, real and imagined. Writing drama, however, is something else. It is dialogue, aesthetically shaped into the conventions of the dramatic genre, involving choices which may be unthinking, unconscious and spontaneous. It produces drama which then can have another existential life as a performance artefact. The dramatic media came into being without schools of dramatic writing and will no doubt continue quite happily in the same way – constantly inundated with scripts from enthusiastic and ambitious people. To put it frankly, the dramatic media are not dependent on courses in the art of writing drama. Nor, it must be said, will the presence of such courses necessarily produce new geniuses of the dramatic art. The primary purpose of a course in the art of writing drama is to deepen an understanding of the genre from a writerly perspective, for each student to develop her/his own practical skills, and to understand what is involved in the distinctive journey between imagination, page and stage.
Each of the chapters in this book approaches this project from a slightly different angle, and is consciously addressed to teachers and students and to the dramatic media. I am very aware that teaching imaginative writing in any genre, on its own, separate from a study of the history of the genre, its typologies, its theoretical and critical approaches, is a partial activity. Teaching drama writing shares in
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many of the contradictions which currently surround creative writing in general. At the same time, it is one of the most exciting new arrivals in the academy.
Imaginative writing can be, and is being, taught. The art of writing drama can be, and is being, taught in universities, in adult education, in film schools and some theatres. However, it cannot be detached from its cultural and intellectual contexts: a study of dramatic history and its products (plays and scripts), a study of the performance media which interest the student (theatre, film, TV, radio), the critical and theoretical writing which addresses these, and the mercurial, exciting material and illusory object that is performance itself. Writing drama is one part of this cluster. In adult education students enjoy the benefits of just choosing courses they want to take; higher education has a more serious responsibility, to provide critical and contextual studies into which the art of writing drama fits.
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Document Outline
Cover
Contents
Introduction Learning to write drama
Creative writing and drama
Backgrounds
After censorship
Positioning dramatic writing
From imagination to page and stage
Writing drama per se – the complete text
The Death of the Author and the birth of the dramatist
Drama – the ‘complete’ text
Received clichés
Chapter One: Drama – the apparently incomplete text Drama as collaborative art
Writing drama as an imaginative mode of thought
Drama as a visual medium
Drama as the novel manqué
Conclusions
The compleat dramatist
Chapter Two: The emergence of the dramatist and drama in education Drama and education
Teaching drama after World War Two
After censorship, new dramatists and new drama
Chapter Three: The performance text Theory
Anthropology
Performance and meaning
Audience as political and social entity
Theatre and semiotics
Competence and performance
The performance triumvirate
Performance theory and the Death of the Author
The Death of the Author and the fourth wall
Audience as active
Conclusions
Chapter Four: The text from the other side: director and performer The director
The performer, acting and the text
The fourth wall
After Stanislavsky – new objectivism
Conclusions: performance and immediacy
Chapter Five: The novel and the drama Size matters
Narrative voice, point of view, character and subjectivity
Poly-vocality and the dialogic
Narrative, structure and causality
Chapter Six: Methods of teaching – the workshop Early workshop history
The tutorial precedent
Workshop pedagogy
Authority
Workshop practice and power-relations
Criticism and value judgement
Training professional writers versus self-expression
The workshop as a House of Correction
The workshop as therapy group
Theatre workshops
Conclusions
Chapter Seven: The concepts in how-to books on dramatic writing Action or character?
Action, conflict and crisis (actions speak louder than words)
Character
Premise, idea, vision, theme
Scenario
Dialogue
Narrative and causality
Drama and creative writing
Conclusions – dialogue – the absent centre
Chapter Eight: Stage directions Main or subsidiary
From directions to performance
Extradialogic stage directions
Extra- and intra-dialogic stage directions
Conclusions
Chapter Nine: The compleat dramatist – preparing to write Copyright
The story so far
From prose to dialogue
Narrative through dialogue
Monologue and character
Monologue and prose
Chapter Ten: The text – dialogue and relationships Dialogue, action and speech acts
Dialogue and voicing
Dialogue – turn-taking, exchange
Reaction and interaction: dialogue and relationships
Response as the condition of dialogue
Relationships and character
Chapter Eleven: Teaching and learning the art of writing drama Aims and boundaries
Chapter Twelve: The pedagogic process Overheard conversations
Languages and individual resources
Words on the page, in the air and on the floor
Scenes on the air and behind the fourth wall
Analysis and possibility
Plan, event, conflict and subtext
Time and place
Structural imperatives – beginning, middle and end
Immediacy, pivot and exposition
Example: narrative and causality
Structure
Pivot
Chapter Thirteen: Subject matter, character and follow-up Subject matter, theme and message
Character
Rewriting and further writing
After class
Chapter Fourteen: Culture and representation Gender as a case study
Women dramatists
Chapter Fifteen: Conclusions
Bibliography
The Art of Writing Drama Page 20