Writing: Playwriting and Novels

I think I do something most people do not  - I read plays. In my fiction, I try to see action. I also think in terms of dialog. So, reading Improve Your Storytelling with Playwriting Techniques was both reassuring and educational to me who remains unsure about his writing.

Some excerpts:

Eventually, the three-act Greek drama evolved through the advocacy of the Roman poet Horace into a five-act structure. The five-act structure was a standard in Shakespeare’s canon of plays and became more formalized by the German playwright Gustav Freytag. You may already be familiar with Freytag’s Pyramid, commonly taught in school as the definition of basic story structure: 

• Exposition
• Rising action
• Climax
• Falling action
• Resolution

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That reaction and any consequences presented at the scene’s end should feed into the goals of the next scene. Overall, a narrative change happens between the beginning of a scene and its end. Characters could have a realization, travel to a new location, win a battle. If there isn’t a solid change, then maybe the scene isn’t necessary to the story— cut it!

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Theater is also action-focused — and the actor's physical choices help define the character. Novelists should keep that in mind too: a common writing weakness is presenting characters as talking heads without any physical descriptions of their surroundings and how they use it. Without these scene details, it is hard to visualize the characters and a reader can lose interest.

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 To construct livelier dialogue, when writing ask yourself these questions:

• What do characters want?
• What is their goal for that scene? 
• What can they say that doesn’t say outright what their goal is?
• What conversation methods do they use to achieve their goal? Do they investigate? Joke around? Provoke?
• By the end of the scene, do they succeed?

I will suggest anyone wanting to see what a playwright can do with the novel  read Robertson Davies' Cornish Trilogy.

I have an older post on dialog here.

4/30/22