A writer’s relationship to drama can be challenging. [Literarydevices.net defines drama](https://literarydevices.net/drama/) as “a composition in verse or prose presenting a story in pantomime or dialogue. It contains conflict of characters, particularly the ones who perform in front of an audience on the stage. The person who writes drama for stage directions is known as a dramatist or playwright.” Another site (I lost the link, oh well) says it’s “great for a creative writing project” because it “offers opportunities to work on character development, story structure, and a whole other set of writing skills.” Sounds good to me! If you wish to explore this literary form, you will be able to focus on developing and strengthening writing as needed by planning, revising, and editing—this time through the lens of the dramatist or playwright. ## Take a look at some of these suggested [[mentor texts for drama]]. ### Then when you’re ready, jump into these suggested [[assignments for drama]]. #### What exactly *is* a play, really? If you ask me, it’s right there in the name: *play.* Kids do it all the time, without even really trying. Just ask [Captain Kirk](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Shore_Leave_(episode)): > "The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play." What? I'm not a nerd, *you’re* a nerd! 🤓 Anyway, we play to make sense of our world, to reality-test hypotheticals, to celebrate or commemorate an experience, to preserve cultural wisdom, to ask questions that we don’t know how else to ask, and probably for lots of other reasons besides. Here’s one way of defining what *a* play is: telling a story by way of actors doing actions and saying words. In a way, it takes the old “show vs. tell” dichotomy from fiction writing, and adds another dimension: “do.” #### Clueless about what to write for a play? ##### Here’s part of an email response to a student who was having trouble getting started with the play writing process: Yeah, it can be tricky to just “be creative” on demand, right? But then again, breaking through that resistance is one of the things this class is supposed to help you practice. Let’s see, what I would I do today if I had to just suddenly write a play about something... 🤔 First of all, I want to skim through some of the videos or [[mentor texts for drama]], to see if the ideas & suggestions in them would help me stumble across a good idea. Other than that, I would probably go to my favorite desk or table or nook or café (ugh, cafés are so expensive these days) and close out everything else on my computer besides a blank document in my favorite text editor, and just start letting two alternating voices have a conversation, without even trying to plan ahead or think about what it was eventually going to be “about.” Like literally, just alternating lines. I probably wouldn't even use names, at least at first. Maybe just pronouns or something? Example: > ME: Hey, what do you have to do to get a cup of coffee around here? > HIM: I don’t know, maybe it would help if you would come to the right part of the counter—you know, where it says “ORDER HERE” (_rolls eyes, continues looking at phone)_ > ME: (_feeling extremely out of touch and foolish but indignant at the same time)_ OK, sure. Yeah. > _ME goes to correct part of counter, but HIM doesn’t make any move towards coming over to help._ > HIM: Sorry, we’re closed. OK, so that’s completely goofy, and I have no idea where it might be going, BUT—I made myself chuckle a little bit, and now there's this burgeoning relationship between these two faint sketches of characters—now that they exist _at all,_ they can become more and more filled out and complete and complex as I go along. I could spend an enjoyable afternoon just typing away, letting them say whatever they want to say and do whatever seems like they would do next. Meanwhile, I would stay alert for any possible plot developments, conflicts, additional characters that could come in and join the fun, etc. I still don’t have to know where it’s all going, yet. But if I do this kind of random, imagination-land, stream-of-consciousness writing long enough to accumulate several pages, then I’m almost certain to have enough raw material to go back and start to tinker, adjust, revise. I can go back to the beginning and make something I wrote later make more sense, or go back and add in a detail that would foreshadow something I accidentally came up with later (making it look in the final product as if I had planned it all along; no one has to know that I started out clueless!), and so on. In the end, it doesn’t have to be _Great Literature®,_ it just has to tell some kind of story with a beginning, middle, and end; and it just has to do so in the form of dialogue and (probably minimal) stage directions, instead of being what we typically think of as traditional narrative prose. Like most things in this class, I believe it’s a good opportunity to practice “not overthinking it.” Experiment, play around, see what happens, and don’t worry about editing or polishing until the very last stage of the process. ![[writers-block-image.jpg]]