Solving Your Script: Tools and Techniques for the Playwright

Solving Your Script is a hardheaded approach to solving technical problems in scripts. In down-to-earth chapters, award-winning playwright and screenwriter Jeffrey Sweet introduces tools enabling writers to:

• write exposition using the future tense
• make characters vivid even before they appear
• find the idiosyncrasies in a character that will generate story

Each chapter includes a discussion of a particular technique, followed by an assignment from Sweet's workshop and scenes written by his colleagues and students. There are also detailed discussions of what works in the scenes, what is problematic, and why.

Jeffrey Sweet's plays - including Porch, The Value of Names, and Routed - have been presented off-Broadway, internationally, and in a variety of regional and developmental theatres. His American Enterprises won the American Theatre Critics Association Award for play-writing. His book for the musical What About Luv? won the Outer Critics Circle Award, and he is the author of the book and co-author (with composer Melissa Manchester) of the lyrics for the musical I Sent a Letter to My Love. Sweet has written drama, sitcom, miniseries, and TV movies for ABC, NBC, and CBS. His work has won the Writers Guild of America Award and been nominated twice for the Emmy.A popular teacher and author of many newspaper and magazine articles, Sweet is also the proud father of Jonathan Sweet.