Drama: Playwriting

This practical guide provides the principles of dramatic writing. Playwrights and screenwriters will discover these essential principles and acquire the tools to put them to use. Sam Smiley incorporates extensive new material in Playwriting: The Structure of Action, a revised edition of the book that dramatists in theatre and film have relied on for more than twenty-five years. No writer, director, critic, or teacher concerned with dramatic writing should be without this intelligent and inspiring guide. Sam Smiley offers insights derived from a lifetime of writing, teaching, and consulting. While preserving the best of the earlier edition of the book, he offers new discussion on contemporary playwrights (Tony Kushner and Tom Stoppard), on copyright law, on new writing approaches, and on nontraditional dramatic forms. Reaching far beyond simplistic how-to instructions, the book focuses on identifying and explaining principles essential to creating dramas: plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. Smiley explains these classic topics and provides the modern keys for realizing each element in effective dramatic scripts.

Playwriting offers a practical guide to the creation of text for live performance. It contains a wealth of exercises for amateur and professional playwrights. Usable in a range of contexts, the book works as: a step-by-step guide to the creation of an individual play a handy resource for a teacher or workshop leader a stimulus for the group-devised play. The result of Noël Greig's thirty years' experience as a playwright, actor, director and teacher, Playwriting is the ideal handbook for anyone who engages with playwriting and is ultimately concerned with creating a story and bringing it to life on the stage.

The Art of Writing Drama is an indispensable textbook for wherever writing for the stage is taught, but also serves as a foundational book for any student taking courses in performance media - radio, television and film. Coupling theory with practice, the book opens with a survey of the current methodologies of teaching playwriting and of textual analysis. The theories of Bakhtin, Foucault and Derrida are examined as are the agendas of play reviewers from the national press. In the second section of the book, a wealth of guidance with practical exercises on the skills of writing for the stage is provided. Throughout the text, Wandor draws on her extensive experience as both playwright and teacher of creative writing to provide a guide that is both a scholarly and an immensely practical guide to writing for the theatre.