The formats are different, and the screenwriter is under far more of an obligation to produce action to go with all that dialogue. Let me insert a brief note here regarding the playwright’s close cousin, the screenwriter. Some of our finest plays, such as Our Town, have minimal scenery. First of all the people in charge of actually staging your show will want a big say in how each scene is set. Only Rodgers’ music could fully bring out the sarcasm of Bloody Mary or the anger of You’ve Got to be Taught or the heartbreak of Once This was Mine.īack to the art of writing plays with words only, you will be relieved to a far greater extent than the novelist, from writing extensive description. If you are not familiar with the show, then feel free to YouTube the dickens out of it. Take, for example, the musical, South Pacific. Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics, by themselves, make for excellent poetry, but Richard Rodgers’ music turned those words into great poetry. The partnership that springs first to my mind is Rodgers and Hammerstein. If you choose well, the composer can add tremendous depth to your sung words. Where you do have a choice is in selecting your composer to write the music. Speaking of musicals (and, by extension, opera), you will not get to choose who will direct your show or who will act in it. The same words the performer is to sing in your script will be repeated on the score. If you are writing a musical, and suddenly a character’s dialogue goes into all caps for several lines, that character is not shouting, he is singing. The name of the character speaking at any given moment must be separated from his or her dialogue by putting the name in bold type or caps. For example, stage directions (which should be as sparse as possible directors do not like to be micromanaged) are typically in italics. To make your intentions clear to all those people, you will be expected to use different formats. You are writing for the director, the stage manager and every performer who takes the stage. If you are writing a stage show, then you are not just writing for the reader. One thing that makes the playwright’s job more difficult, at least on a mechanical level, is that you cannot chug merrily along writing word after word in the same format, as your narrator is presently doing. Well, now, wait a moment, you might interject, if you are the sort of individual who typically converses with the essays he reads, what about talking books? They are not the same thing as a stage show, mostly because, you only hear a talking book, while you both hear and see a stage show. That is not to say the novelist has an easier job. On the other hand, the fiction writer has no one to give emotion to his words, so, in a way, he has more responsibility than does his counterpart. For example, he (or she, in all cases, but, for the sake of brevity, I will use just the one pronoun going forward) can express a character’s anger by writing: “’I know what you did last night,’ he snarled.” The playwright can write the same quotation, but will not have a stagehand standing by to tell the audience, “This guy is really perturbed.” The playwright must rely on the actor and the director to pick up on that. The author of narrative prose, on one hand, has a great deal more control of the finished product than does the playwright. Leaving aside poetry, which is, perhaps, a separate topic for another day, let us - well, let me, actually all you have to do is keep your eyes on the page and pay something in the realm of attention - compare the two. The playwright, the poet and the novelist are all writers, to be sure, but the disciplines of their respective arts are anything but congruent. Theatrical stage play script writing services.
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