"Being boring is the most offensive thing anyone can do"
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Tooling Up

TOOLING UP

Mark Amery writes with advice from playwright tutors Gary Henderson and Ken Duncum

In this series designed as forum for sharing playwriting tools, we look at, as our guest advisor Gary Henderson puts it so well, "How to find that nice clean through-line, when you seem to be sinking in a morass of words, sub-plots, blind alleys, ideas and themes."

First draft tends to be when many writers are looking for some perspective, and hence some dramaturgical input. It is here when the writer must turn from what they know instinctly, to what they must now craft. It's much like a muscle in our body - it has its instincts but then must be exercised to perform certain tasks effectively. That first draft stage is often about making what you have written instinctively dramatically more engaging in terms of exercising what your play has to say. Sometimes the new writer can feel they've got a little lost in the world they've created, and need to find the path that leads us through this world. It's a good place for asking questions.

Dramaturgy is often about asking the right questions at the right time. These might not always directly lead to solutions, but they should help you clarify both your concerns and the strength of the work - what the pathway is. Sometimes it can be of great value to have someone else asking the questions, but ultimately you as writer have to ask them of yourself.

Following his recent time as playwriting lecturer at Otago University, Gary Henderson provided a masterclass at the Aotearoa Playwrights Conference which included simple, direct questions the playwright can ask to clarify characters, story, structure, and theme.

These questions are not always relevant - plays needn't be written by formula - but they provoke investigation into what is there and help you clarify your own understanding of what you're on about. Rules can be good things to test out your work against, in the knowledge that if you're going to work outside of them - and an audience's expectations - your work needs to be all that much stronger.

Ask yourself the following basic questions and write down your answer in a short sentence. (Note the writing down bit - getting things worked out with clarity on paper can be a really useful part of the clarification process):

What happens in your play? (The plot)
What is your play about? (The theme)
What are you saying about that thing? (The point of why one is bothering to write the play in the first place - the dramatic premise)
Gary suggests that every moment in a play should support that dramatic premise.

For most playwrights, character drives a play.

Who is the central character?
What do they want?
What's stopping them from getting it?
What do they do about it?

Many will baulk at the notion of a ‘central character'. Bear with the exercise however -electing one doesn't mean throwing your other characters into supporting roles. The exercise recognises that most plays have a central conflict and that we the audience will consider one character's journey the most important in what the work says to us, even if the other characters are vitally important.

Ken Duncum quoted Robert Bresson in his APC04 masterclass: "Only the knots which tie and untie inside the characters give the story its movement, its true movement".  People want things all the time - now, by the end of the play, in a lifetime. Look to reveal internal conflicts to make your characters alive and interesting to us: Where would your character rather live? Rather work? What do they wish they'd done? What event in their childhood affected them? What do they admire about their parents? What do they dislike? What are your character's contradictions? (they're giving/ but a sucker, confident/too proud) What are their flaws? Their passions?

Gary also suggests asking the following questions of your characters and their relationships.

What does the character want?  Why?
And - for each relationship between pairs of characters...
What does A think about B?
What does A think B thinks about A?
...and vice versa.

Enjoy exploring the world of your play. Check out how much you really know about your characters - the pasts, their present, their hopes for the future. This is valuable information to have up your sleeve when it comes to keeping work cooking and can help provide characters whose wants and needs are as complex as ours. When Royal Court Young writers Tutor and playwright Simon Stephens challenges his students to ask the hard questions, foremost is "to stare unrelentingly into the soul of your characters and ask of them what it is they want. It is not easy. It is far more complex than writing a few quips." 

Gary suggests these sets of questions can also be used as a starting point when starting writing a play and making up characters. Speed up that instinct! Spend only a few moments creating a character and start asking the questions.

Another quote care of Ken Duncum, from Lajos Egri who wrote the ‘well made play‘ classic The Art of Dramatic Writing: "Real characters must be given a chance to reveal themselves, and we (the audience) must be given a chance to observe the significant changes which take place in them."