The basis of a stage play is plot and action, so the characters and language need to be carefully crafted. If you want to be like Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Arthur Miller, you need to write a bold story with distinctive characters that are suitable for the stage. If you’re lucky, you’ll experience the thrill of watching your script be put on stage.

Write Script

Start writing with the characters. The script develops as the characters develop. The dialogue between characters is the basis of the script, so the characters should be as real as possible. In all great plays, the inner tension between characters is expressed through their actions. In other words, the characters’ actions should reflect their problems.

• What does your character want? What made them get what they wanted? What is preventing them from achieving their wishes?
• Developing a character can give him an interesting job. What is the most difficult job you can imagine? What job are you most curious about? Who can be a podiatrist? How does one accomplish such a job?
• Don’t worry about the character’s name or appearance. Knowing that a character is named Rafi does not necessarily mean that he is six feet four inches tall, has strong abdominal muscles, and sometimes wears T-shirts. When naming a character, it should be distinctive and able to describe a certain characteristic of him. Maybe your character has a dog bite scar on his eyebrow, or maybe your character never wears a shirt. These traits reveal their past and give the characters depth.

Consider the context of the story. The background of a drama is when and where the action of the story takes place. Placing characters in tense environments or locations is an important way to create a plot. The combination of characters and background is an important way to develop the character’s image. Imagine what kind of plot will result from the character’s position in this environment. If being a podiatrist sounds interesting to you, how about a podiatrist in Paris or Texas? For example, what kind of person can become a podiatrist in Paris or Texas? What happens next?

• Be as professional as possible when you write about background development. “Modern Times” is not as interesting as the background of “Dr. Wilson’s Home Pedicure”. It is a suburban supermarket in Xishan, south of the city, on Friday afternoon at 3:15. This description is more accurate and more helpful for the development of the following plot.
• Consider other characters introduced in the background. Who works the front desk at a pedicure office? If it was a family business, it would probably be the podiatrist’s daughter. Who has an appointment for Friday’s treatment? Who’s waiting in line? What occupation do they have?

Discover the inner plot. Internal plot refers to the psychological conflict of the characters. These are all foreshadowings in the story, and you should be aware of this when writing the script. The inner plot will guide the characters to make decisions in specific situations. The more concrete the inner plot, the easier it is to write the characters, and they will make their own decisions.

• Maybe your podiatrist wants to be a brain surgeon but lacks the skills. Maybe the pedicure plan plot is dragging, and in the medical school version of the plot, the characters can stay at the school and party after passing all the exams. Perhaps the podiatrist was very unhappy and dissatisfied that he had never left Paris.

Combine inner and outer plots. Bad plots always look back to the past, but good plots look forward to the future. If your script has a podiatrist harping on about the profession and eventually killing himself with shoe polish, that won’t appeal to the audience. Instead, it can be fascinating to place your characters in an exciting environment and see how they adapt with their courage and change.

• If it’s Good Friday, the retired podiatrist’s parents (who themselves were former podiatrists) come to the Easter dinner. Is this podiatrist a devout religious person? Will she go to church? Will she come home and clean the house before the weekend? Will her father come and ask her to check his bunion again? Could this be the trigger? What happens next?

Understand the limitations of the stage. Remember: you are not writing a movie. The script is based on a series of character conversations that move forward. The focus should be on character conflicts, verbal tit-for-tat, and how to make characters more believable. Shootings, car accidents, etc. are not a particularly good way to represent conflict.

• Of course, you can also break with the conventions of traditional theater and write a script with a scene that doesn’t seem suitable for stage performance as an exploration of dramatic writing. If you have no idea how to plan a script, think of it as a poem with a unique form. Brecht, Bertolt Brecht, and Antonin Artaud were all pioneers in theatrical innovation, incorporating audience participation and other elements of absurdism and surrealism into their plays.

Read some plays and see them produced. Just as you wouldn’t try to write a novel without reading it, becoming familiar with contemporary theater is a good way to learn to write a play. See how your favorite plays you’ve read translate on stage. David Mamet, Tony Kushner, and Pauly Stidham are all well-known popular playwrights.

• If you want to write a new play, it’s important to look at recent popular dramas. Even if you already have a good foundation in drama writing and like Shakespeare, familiarity with current new plays is still very helpful for writing. You didn’t live in Shakespeare’s time, and there’s no point in writing a play as if you did.

Write a Draft

Write a tentative draft. Even if your plan for “Easter with the Podiatrist” looks like it’s going to win a Tony Award, you still need to give yourself something new in the writing. You may have the greatest idea in the world, but you still need to be able to express it fully.

• During the drafting stage, don’t worry about formatting or having to follow a set formula. Just write smoothly and naturally. Once you have a beginning, middle, and end in mind, you can start writing.
• Maybe a new character added to the script will completely change the plot you expected, just let it take its course.

The more concise the script, the better. The script is a partial representation of life, not a biography. To attract audiences, biographies skip ten years and go directly to the future, or the protagonist quits his job in a pedicure office to become a successful actor in New York, and the stage play is not the best vehicle for conveying the huge changes in the characters.

• Scripts are better off ending with a simple decision, or with something the characters have never faced before. If your script ends with a character committing suicide or killing someone, it’s best to consider changing it.

The script needs to be constantly improved. In your first draft, you may want to write a lot of hanging-out scenes, and that’s okay. Sometimes you might write about a character having dinner with his brother-in-law and having an uncomfortable conversation, which will give you a new perspective on the plot. very good! That means you wrote successfully, but it doesn’t mean every dinner meeting in the script is important.

• Avoid any scenes where the characters are alone. On stage, it would be too boring to have a character looking in the mirror alone in a bathroom.
• Avoid too much foreshadowing. If the podiatrist’s parents are coming soon, don’t spend 20 pages preparing. Get them there as quickly as possible so you have more time to describe the plot below and write more calmly.

Discover the character’s voice. Characters reveal their characteristics through speech. How they say it may be more important than what they say.

• When the podiatrist’s daughter asks what’s wrong, the way the podiatrist responds illustrates the conflict to the audience. Maybe she was really acting it out, rolling her eyes nervously, crying, saying everything was terrible, and then suddenly throwing a stack of papers in the air to make her daughter laugh. But we do know that while she downplays it, something significant is going on. If she had said, “Nothing’s wrong, just go back to work,” we might have had a different view of her.
• Don’t let your character scream out his or her inner turmoil. Characters never yell, “I’ve been a loser since my wife left me,” or otherwise express their inner struggles. Let them keep their secrets. Let them use body movements instead of mouths to speak, and don’t force them to explain themselves to the audience.

Revise the script. The author must exercise restraint when writing and learn to endure pain and give up love. For your early drafts, you need to be a harsh critic so that you can revise the messy draft into the more critical and realistic script you want. Cut out those aimless pages and unnecessary characters to make the plot tighter and faster.

• Read your draft again and use a pencil to circle the moments that bring the plot to a halt and underline the moments that move the plot forward. Delete the circled parts. If 90% of what you wrote is deleted in the end, then delete it, and then fill it in with plots that can promote the development of the story.

Write more drafts if necessary, there is no length limit. Keep writing until you feel that the plot has reached the end and meets your expectations.

• Save versions of your script so you can reduce risk and review older versions frequently. The document takes up very little space and is effortless.

Modify Script Format

Break down the plot into scenes and actions. A show itself is a mini-drama made up of multiple scenes. The average script contains 3 to 5 acts. Generally speaking, scenes set the context for the characters. When a new task leaves the factory or the character goes somewhere else, it means you have reached another scene.

• It is difficult to distinguish one behavior from another. For example, a story about a podiatrist would likely end the first act when the parents arrive and introduce the main conflict. The second act may involve the development of the conflict, depicting the parents arguing with the podiatrist, preparing Easter dinner, and the church also figures in the script, while in the third act, the daughter may reconcile with the father and examine his sick foot, ending the plot.
• The more experience you have in writing screenplays, the better you will be able to develop ideas for actions and scenes when writing your first draft. Don’t worry about writing. Writing the right plot is more important than writing a formatted script.

Summarize the stage direction. Each scene is played according to the stage direction, which is your brief introduction to the stage layout. This introduction can be very detailed or very simple, depending on your script. This is your chance to influence the final presentation of the play. If you need to hang a gun on the wall in Act 1, hang it.

• Characters can also be introduced through dialogue. Actors are free to play and move around in dialogue if both the actor and director feel comfortable, but there are some actor movements in dialogue that you feel are particularly important. For example, a kiss is important to the plot, but don’t take it too far. Your Alfalfa Garden describes the actors’ movements down to the minute because the actors will definitely ignore such cumbersome instructions.

Dialogue that connects characters. In the play, all characters speaking in dialogue have their names listed in capital letters, listing at least four items. Some playwrights will cluster dialogue together, it’s up to you. You don’t need quotation marks or other symbols, just segment the dialogue by their names each time a character speaks.

Make a list of problems to face in the future. This includes an opening line you’d like to see in the play, a list of characters and introductions, your suggestions for staging or other directions, and ideally a brief summary or outline of the play, which can help you better put the script together.

Tips

• Don’t decide on a character before you start writing. When you start writing, you will know when you need characters and what they need to do.
• Don’t worry about the character’s name. You can modify it later.
• Allow time for scene changes so that the crew has time to switch sets and the actors have time to get into their proper positions.
• You can do some snippets of what happens when the characters enter the house (the house is the audience). This is used a lot in musicals, use it if necessary, but don’t overdo it.
• If the show is not a comedy but the audience sees something funny, the audience will be more likely to be offended by it. If it’s a comedy your range can be wider, but don’t screw it up. (For example, don’t make racial jokes, sexist jokes, or use children as suicide bombers. These only happen in movies. Sometimes people play with religion, but some people are uncomfortable with it.)