One important aspect of any creative writing program is cross-training. Writers are expected to take courses in several genres, not just the genre they plan to work in or complete their thesis in. Thus the introductory writing course here covers the four genres offered: fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. Right now, I’m in the middle of the drama section—something I’ve never attempted writing before.
Drama
I’m finding this section both interesting (it is fun to try something new) and challenging. We just handed in a four-page stage play, which is basically four pages of dialogue. While I’ve attended lots of plays, trying to recreate that on paper was tough. Honestly, all my characters can do is talk? Everything I want to happen has to fit into their speech? That’s hard!
At the same time, I can see how that could help my fiction writing. Strong dialogue is important in fiction as much as in drama, so if I can write dialogue that’s good enough to hang a whole story on, then it will help when I’m writing short stories and novels too.
Screenplay
Our next project to is a five-minute complete screenplay, which is due on Monday (as a draft) and which I haven’t started on yet. To be honest, I’m a bit worried about it. I’ve probably talked before about being a novelist at heart… short is hard to write. Sure, I’ve done it (and I’ve even had three of my short stories published now) but most of my ideas run longer (one of those published stories is actually the first chapter of a novel idea). So doing a complete story within five minutes seems daunting.
Even as I see the value in studying drama, I’m honestly not sure I can see myself taking it any further. I’ve considered finishing the four-page stage play that I started—but I could also just convert it to a short story and send it to Pages of Stories. Trying to get a play produced sounds like a huge amount of work (the director of a local theatre came to our class on Monday to tell us about that process) for very little pay. I’m glad that others have a passion for stage and screen, because I like theatre and movies as much as anyone else. I just can’t see my writing going that direction.
3 Comments
Writer Mom – well, I handed it in today… so we’ll see what my peers think of it in our workshop on Thurs. Watching short videos on YouTube helped me get a better idea of what you can do in the space of five minutes. Still seems tight!
David – I know nothing about reading blogs from phones, as I never do that. So I’m not sure what sort of problem you had. I’m glad you enjoyed it anyways.
Hey, I am checking this blog using the phone and this appears to be kind of odd. Thought you’d wish to know. This is a great write-up nevertheless, did not mess that up.
– David
You can do it, KBW! Screenplays are a 3 act structure, so just intro it in the first page, then create some big conflict for your characters in the middle pages, and resolve it in the last page. It will be short, but screenplays are about visuals and action and conflict.
I recently read that the human eye soaks up all of the info in a visual in about 3 seconds, so you need to write movies to keep moving, keep showing, keep something happening.
Hope that helps. Have fun!