Playwriting: The Structure of Action - Softcover

Smiley, Sam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300107242 ISBN 13: 9780300107241

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2005

Synopsis

A classic guide to dramatic writing now revised and expanded for a new generation of playwrights and screenwriters

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.

About this title

About the Author

Sam Smiley is a playwright, screenwriter, and former professor of theatre at the University of Arizona. Norman Bert is a playwright and professor of theatre at Texas Tech University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Playwriting

THE STRUCTURE OF ACTIONBy Sam Smiley Norman A. Bert

Yale University Press

Copyright © 2005 Sam Smiley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-10724-1

Contents

Preface...................................................ixPART I THE PLAYWRIGHT'S SOLITARY WORK1 Vision.................................................32 Finding and Developing Ideas...........................203 Drafting and Revision..................................41PART II PRINCIPLES OF DRAMA4 Plot...................................................735 Story..................................................1016 Character..............................................1237 Thought................................................1518 Diction................................................1839 Melody.................................................22610 Spectacle..............................................25211 A Way of Life..........................................285Appendix 1 Manuscript Format..............................295Appendix 2 Copyright Protection...........................308Bibliography..............................................311Credits...................................................317Index.....................................................319

Chapter One

Vision

... each one, by inventing his own issue, invents himself. Man must be invented each day. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?

A writer needs something to say, an attitude about life, a point of view about existence. A drama without ideas and attitudes is a work without substance. But with few exceptions, the best playwrights don't preach; they weave ideas into the fabric of their work. After careful research, Arthur Miller employed strong convictions about integrity and resolve to write The Crucible, and the play bristles with ideas about courage in the face of persecution. As writers select characters and build stories, they put ideas to work.

So before plunging into the process of creating a script, a dramatist must decide what to write about. What gives life order and meaning? How should a person behave in extreme circumstances? By contemplating both the trivial and the momentous problems of existence, a writer ponders significant questions and examines possible responses. Only by taking the time to consider what's important in life does a writer develop something worthwhile for other people to absorb. A dramatist needn't be a professional philosopher, just a perceptive thinker. From daily experience and ongoing education, a writer devises or adopts ideas that establish an intellectual framework for grappling with existence. Every thoughtful writer, like every thinking person, faces the challenges of developing a behavioral rationale and perfecting a code of ethics. Creative work begins with ideas about the nature of human existence, and the writer's store of ideas spurs the creative act.

Seeing into Life

Vision more than skill determines the quality of a writer's work. In this context, vision means using perception, intuition, and logic to develop a system of attitudes about the world. Life experience isn't enough. A writer needs the ability to discern the emotional characteristics of people in difficult situations and the sensitivity to empathize with them. The best writers also benefit from sagacity enough to penetrate the hidden nature of things, intelligence enough to recognize universal human morality, and wit enough not to take themselves or anyone else too seriously. Creative vision is the artistic gift of seeing into life and fortifying pieces of art with meaningful insights.

A writer's vision consists of a complex system of emotional and intellectual perceptions, sentiments, and beliefs. Playwrights tend to create form in the disorder of existence. In daily life focused unity is impossible, and so writers often reject what they see and reconstruct through their personal vision a substitute universe in their art. For that material, space, and time, they destroy some of the world's confusion. Artists don't want to end the world; they wish to create it.

Some possible components of an artist's vision are awareness, perspective, good and bad dreams, and intoxication with life. Also important are issues worth fighting about that lead to battles with self, society, and the powers of the universe.

Every writer needs to maintain an intense awareness of the world, especially of humanity's recurrent questions. Why do people suffer? What is the meaning of death? Where do human struggles lead? The best writers also react to the major issues of their time. How can nations resolve their conflicts and live in peace? How can various groups live harmoniously? How can civilization survive the rising human population? How can the people of the world learn to protect their environment? The issues of a writer's country, too, may be of concern. In the United States, for instance, writers may deal with the issues of exploitation, waste, materialism, and violence in their writing. As they wrestle creatively with such problems, they focus their vision.

Without perspective, an artist cannot help but produce art that is private and arbitrary. Every writer needs to establish a perspective, an awareness of his or her place in the world and a basic attitude toward existence. A writer's perspective develops in the interaction between that person's inner life and external events. For a playwright, perspective dictates the sorts of action most appropriate for that writer's plays.

Artists, especially writers, often project their good and bad dreams into their work. Everyone daydreams, and most people try to make their best dreams come true. Artists perfect a medium for the expression of their dreams. Works of fiction or drama, whatever their nature, reflect the dreams of their authors. So playwrights need to draw from their dreams and with imagination and intelligence shape them into works of art.

Intoxication with life also stimulates art. Despite an artist's social milieu, he or she remains an individual, a one among the many. Internally, each person experiences loneness, but for an artist, isolation often provides a heightened sense of life. Loneliness may make the artist sad, but loneness means inner freedom. When alone, a person can more directly face the terror of life and rejoice in its ecstasy. One driving force in any artist is intoxication with being, with living. Loneness and liveness furnish each individual the energy to create.

All dramatists eventually deal with conflict. They learn about conflict in life and employ it in their dramas. Like most artists, writers often experience battles with other people, with the collective forces of society, and with the natural fact of death. Genuine artists seldom allow others to dictate their feelings and beliefs; they insist on examining things for themselves and reaching their own conclusions. Engagement in social, personal, and political conflicts catapults people toward freedom of choice. From conflict, writers can perceive possible new patterns of behavior or reaffirm traditional values. The battles of life provide universal experience.

Ideas about Art

As a component of vision, every artist needs to discern the principles of his or her art through the study of aesthetics, the overall theory of art. In such a pursuit, thinkers of the past offer many useful ideas. For example, Aristotle and Benedetto Croce presented differing but valuable approaches to knowledge and aesthetics. Among their many influential ideas, Aristotle stressed the concept of action as central to drama (in the Poetics), and Croce focused the attention of twentieth-century artists on the importance of originality (in Guide to Aesthetics). Since artists are naturally eclectic, they can draw ideas from such theorists and blend them with their own.

Aristotle identified three types of knowledge-theoretical, practical, and productive-and divided all human activity accordingly. Theoretical knowledge deals with theory and logic. Practical knowledge applies to problems of everyday life. Productive knowledge helps people create functional things or works of art.

Many playwrights also find it useful to understand the four reasons why a work of art comes into being. Aristotle described them in the Poetics: material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause. In any work of art, material cause refers to the material, medium, or matter used in its formulation; in a play the materials are words and deeds, the sayings and doings of characters. Formal cause means the organization of the object; it's the overall structure or controlling idea. In a play the formal cause is usually a human action, a pattern of change. Efficient cause is the manner in which an artist carries out the work. In poetry it's the style that each writer's unique working process gives to the final product. Final cause refers to the purpose of the whole. In fine art, the final cause means both the intended and the actual function of an art object. For playwrights, the purpose of their play has to do with what sort of poetic-theatrical object it's meant to be, to whom it's directed, and what response it's supposed to elicit.

To clarify the four causes further, two simply sketched illustrations should suffice: the coming into being of a chair and of a play, for example, A Streetcar Named Desire. In the useful art of making a chair, the material cause is wood, metal, plastic, padding, and the like. The formal cause is the idea of what the finished chair should look like and how it should support a sitting person. The efficient cause is the style of the chair in design, decoration, and artisanship. The final cause includes the twin functions of the chair being useful for sitting and pleasant to look at. In the fine art of playmaking, the material cause of Streetcar consists of the words of the play, both dialogue and stage directions. The formal cause in the play amounts to the serious effort of Blanche, Stanley, Stella, Mitch, and all the other characters to find and preserve a happy, secure place in life. The efficient cause is the style Tennessee Williams used in writing the play-American, realistic, and poetic prose. The style for the whole production, in fact, is poetic realism. The final cause of the play amounts to the creation of an object of beauty, in the special sense of modern tragedy, meant to stimulate an aesthetic response in a contemporary audience. All four causes are crucial to the playwright's full understanding of a comprehensive method of play construction.

The fine arts belong in the realm of productive knowledge. But all three types of knowledge relate to each other. This book presents a study of drama in all three realms of knowledge. Part I deals with practical knowledge about the activities of the playwright, and Part II presents the theoretical principles of playwriting, treating the internal nature of drama as an art product.

The six elements of drama are plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. They form a comprehensive and exclusive list. All items in a play relate to one or more of these elements. The following arrangement reveals their relationships and connections with form and matter:

Form Plot

[arrow down] Character [arrow up] Thought Diction Melody Spectacle Matter

The arrows indicate how the elements work together in the formulation of a play. Reading down the list, each element acts as form to those below it, and reading upward, each element provides material to the items above.

Plot is the organization of an action, the arrangement of the sequential material into a whole. Plot and story are not synonymous. Story elements offer one of many ways to organize a plot. Plot stands as the form to all the materials of a play.

Character provides the most important material to plot. All the sayings and doings of the characters taken as an organic whole make up the plot. Also character gives form to the thoughts and feelings of individuals.

Thought amounts to everything that goes on within a character -sensations, emotions, and ideas. All the internal elements of a character taken together stand as the materials of characterization. Thought as subtext is the form of the diction. Some thought operates as the organization of every series of words, and those words are the material of the thought.

The diction, or words of the play, consists of individual sounds. Thus, diction is the form of sounds, and sounds are the matter of diction.

Melody in drama refers to the music of the human voice, the use of emphasis and emotive coloring to give words meaning. It can also mean the use of musical accompaniment and the application of atmospheric sounds.

Finally, spectacle refers to the physical actions of the characters that accompany the sounds and words plus all the details of the physical milieu-setting, lights, props, costumes, and makeup.

For a playwright, plot has the greatest importance; character is second, thought third, and so on. But as actors, directors, and designers prepare a production, they turn around the list of elements and use them in reverse order. Theatre artists normally consider spectacle first, then the other elements in ascending order. If dramatists understand the form-matter relationship, they can better utilize the elements of drama to formulate plays.

Art astonishes. The fine arts reflect the intensity of human existence, and the impact of art can be profound. Of course, nearly everyone has had some experiences with art objects-objects made by human beings and enjoyed by other human beings-that enhance life. The specific functions of art are as infinite as the number of artists and their individual works multiplied by the number of the people who come into contact with those works.

Art also has some identifiable general functions. First, art objects produce specific pleasure in human beings. That quality alone makes an artist's labor worthwhile, because life never offers enough striking experiences. Art can also furnish knowledge about human beings. It always signifies something about life, even if only a view, a feeling, or a question. Art functions as a special kind of order in the chaos of life. It offers controlled and lasting beauty in the midst of a dissonant world.

All human beings live most minutes of most days in a semiconscious state. Psychologists explain that people are fully awake only a few minutes each day. The noteworthy moments in anyone's life are the few experiences of intense consciousness. People live for those stimuli that cause total awareness of life. Such stimuli come from many sources and cause varying reactions. To look at the brilliance of a million stars at night, to feel the surge of sexual love, to watch the face of a child during a happy time-such common experiences may be memorable, live moments. Art, too, can provide such moments. At best, works of art can arouse in a person an intense awareness of life.

Artists' intuitions produce images, at once concrete and abstract. The image at the heart of every art object becomes its essence. In such an image, an artist's vision and intuition fuse into a singular perception. In this way, art requires more imagination than logic, more intuition than judgment. So it is with the work of playwrights.

Another way to understand drama is to place it among the seven traditional fine arts-architecture, dance, drama, music, painting, poetry, and sculpture. During the twentieth century, artists and audiences demanded that cinema be added to the list. All eight of the modern fine arts, then, are highly developed ways for people to transform their daydreams into concrete reality.

Drama sometimes encompasses features of the other seven fine arts. A drama is a repeatable object that exists in time and sometimes employs music and dance. Even when written in conversational prose, a play is a particular kind of poem, because like lyric or narrative poetry it is a construction of words. But in addition to words, drama uses physical behavior as material. Its form is a process of human action, a pattern of human change. Its presentation requires live acting that's quite different from the performance of songs or dances. Drama normally happens within an architectural building in space often sculpted with painted platforms, steps, and walls. But drama is more than a mere combination of other fine arts. It may share features with others or involve some of the same human skills, but it employs such features uniquely to provide audiences with a live enactment of human action.

Although theatre most often begins with someone writing a playscript, it never reaches fruition until actors perform that play. A written play, by itself, isn't a completed work of art, but an important ingredient for the creation of drama. Theatre doesn't come into being unless performed live onstage. In script form, a play remains merely a potential work of art.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Playwritingby Sam Smiley Norman A. Bert Copyright © 2005 by Sam Smiley. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300107242
• ISBN 13: 9780300107241
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 324