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Playwriting 101
Rating: 5.0 out of 5(1 rating)
10 students

Playwriting 101

A Quick Guide on Writing and Producing Your First Play Step by Step From A to Z
Created byHowExpert
Last updated 9/2020
English

What you'll learn

  • Playwriting
  • Playwriting Tips
  • Playwriting Lessons
  • How to Write Plays

Explore related topics

Course content

1 section • 9 lectures • 2h 18m total length

  • Welcome0:30

    Learn to write and produce your first plays with a step-by-step guide from A to Z, presented by expert Mark Cassidy and read by Philip Goodchild.

  • Introduction4:15

    Explore why writing a play fits theater lovers and how audience, purpose, and production shape your storytelling for stage, including entertaining, confronting social problems, or teaching lessons.

  • Part 1 - What’s the Big Idea?25:01

    Explore practical methods to spark play ideas, from observing your world and personal experiences to structured exercises like character interviews, traits, and objects.

  • Part 2 - He Said; She Said11:31

    Dialogue advances the plot, reveals character, and creates atmosphere by staying clear, appropriate, and natural. Listen to everyday conversations to capture differences, nonverbal cues, rhythm, and revise accordingly.

  • Part 3 - What a Character!17:47

    Develop memorable, complex characters through thorough analysis of their physical attributes, backgrounds, goals, and speech patterns. Reveal them in action and conflict to engage the audience and advance the plot.

  • Part 4 - Stages, Genres, and Styles, Oh My!19:55

    Learn how proscenium, arena, and thrust stages shape scenery from box sets to backdrops, along with conventions, genres (tragedy, comedy, melodrama, farce, tragicomedy), and styles (presentational and representational).

  • Part 5 - You’re Plotting What?18:55

    Craft a plot that starts with a problem, intensifies through rising action and turning point, and resolves at the climax and falling action, using cause and effect.

  • Part 6 - The Best Laid Schemes of Mice and Men29:58

    Explore how to fuse plot, central characters, and dialogue into a unified, universal play that engages audiences through clear purpose, setting, exposition, and the balance of unity and contrast.

  • Part 7 - To Market, to Market to Sell a Great Play10:13

    Explore multiple routes to production, from community theaters and schools to colleges and universities. Refine your script through local performances before submitting to publishers or professional theaters.

Requirements

  • No experience necessary - All levels welcome - Beginners, Intermediate, & Advanced

Description

To write for the theatre you need to know about theatre. Ideas are easy to come by. Examine your background, interest, and beliefs. Examine the world around you. Exercises can help you come up with ideas. Choose the audience you want to reach and write to that audience. To learn to write dialogue listen to and record everyday conversations. Dialogue should sound like ordinary conversations but has more direction.

Know as much as you can about your central characters. Do a character analysis. Choose the character traits to emphasize. A character should come across as both typical and individual. Most plays have a plot, which involves conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist. The parts of a plot are: inciting incident, rising action, turning point, climax, and falling action. Other types of organization for a play are circular and thematic.

Before starting to write, you need to develop a central idea. Plays exist for a number of reasons—entertainment, to bring attention to something, and to teach. You need to decide what you want to accomplish. It’s easier to gain an audience’s interest if you start with a theme they agree with.

A play needs a sense of universality. A play should be unified, but it also needs contrast. Since theatre is a collaborative art, the director, actor, and designers may see the different facets differently than you do. It’s not difficult to have a well-written produced. Possible markets are schools, organizations, and professional theatre. Finished plays have to follow a particular format.

Who this course is for:

  • People interested in learning how to write plays
  • Playwriting Enthusiasts

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