How to Write a Play

Think in what an actor can do on a stage. A camera can cut to a flashback or a car chase; a play makes the audience believe in what it can see and hear in front of it. That limit is the form's strength: one location and a ticking clock give you pressure for free. If the idea needs ten locations, it may be a screenplay.

Start with the shape the idea needs, not the longest one. Ten-minute plays are the usual way into festivals and readings, and most festivals cap them at ten pages. Inside each scene the engine is the same as any drama: someone wants something, someone else is in the way, and by the end of the scene the situation has moved. If a scene ends where it started, cut it or merge it with its neighbor.

Before Act One, a play script carries a title page and a page that lists the characters, each with a line of description such as age and relationship, followed by the setting and the time. Number the pages. Producers and literary managers read many scripts a week, and a script in the format they expect lets them read the play rather than the layout. The example below is set exactly as Plot prints a stage play.

To build the template in a word processor instead, set Times New Roman 12 point, one-inch margins and single spacing, then make three paragraph styles: a centered capitals style for character names, a full-width style for speech, and a style indented 1.5 inches for stage directions. Add page breaks before every act and scene. It works, but you will keep fixing the styles by hand when text moves, which is what a script editor does for you.

Stage left and stage right are the actor's left and right as they face the audience; upstage is away from the audience and downstage toward it. Avoid directions that tell actors how to say a line or what a character feels, such as "angrily" or "she realizes she still loves him"; write what she does instead. A short direction inside a speech, such as (Beat.) or (She puts down the cup.), sits on its own line at the same indent. Many published plays are full of long directions written for readers; a script you send out should keep them lean.

Plays allow longer speeches than film, and a monologue can carry a scene if something is at stake while it is spoken. Give each character a way of speaking that no one else in the play shares. To mark overlapping dialogue, many playwrights put a slash (/) at the point where the next character starts speaking, and explain the mark in a note before the play begins.

After a table read, cut before you add. Most first drafts of plays are too long in the first scene and too fast in the last one. A staged reading, where actors hold scripts and move a little, shows you whether the stage directions work. Keep each draft, so you can go back to a line or a scene you cut if a later reading shows you needed it.

Ten-minute play festivals are the most open door for a first play, and a reading or a production there gives you something to put in a cover letter. Development conferences such as the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference take open submissions for full-length plays. Keep a list of where each play has gone and when to expect an answer, and send it to the next place the same week.