Playwriting in Process: Thinking and Working Theatrically

This book is a great tool for disciplined writing exercises. Get's you thinking and writing when you're stumped!

Writers who invest themselves in the art for the long term are always looking for ways to improve their skill. And playwrights are always seeking the best way to express their material for performance, rather than literary, purposes. This book combines both pursuits.Using the games format familiar to any of us who have spent any time onstage, Michael Wright gives writers an opportunity to find what works for them, a chance to devise their own style. Much more free than the prescriptivist style favored by most writing texts, this approach allows an individual writer to discover what works best for the self, what the writer's personal style is, even what kinds of characters a particular playwright works best with.Nor is the book solely intended for novice writers. There are games intended to work out stuck scripts in progress, teach experienced writers new techniques, and more. There are even games intended to teach experienced playwrights how to collaborate, which is difficult even for the best. As with common theatrical games, different approaches to the same old game can unlock unexpected potential, and even using the same old game over again on a new play can teach volumes.This book isn't a magic bullet to make you a better writer. However, it offers you the tools to build up your own writing ability. Even prose writers and screenwriters can make use of many of these games. Invest yourself in what the games have to offer, and see if you don't come out a better writer in the end

Michael Wright's book offers you a jillion different exercises to stoke your creative furnace. It is a manual that I use for my intermediate-level playwrights to work their playwriting chops. He breaks down the playwriting exercises or "etudes" into several areas including Technique Etudes, Character Etudes, Plot Etudes, Etudes for Structure, Collaboration Etudes, and Unblocking Etudes. Most importantly however, his guiding principal is based on theatricality or "why must this story be told on the stage?" In the field of American playwriting, so many manuals on this process focus on realistic technique. Michael's book is one of the first that addresses ways to stretch your technique in new directions.I've put Michael's ideas to work in my classes and more importantly in my own work as a playwright, and it has had profound effects on the quality and output of my writing. He makes you look at your characters, plot, and structure in so many different ways. My writing has become richer, more theatrical, and more inventive having experimented with etudes such as the "Age Exploration," "Imperatives Only," "Spoken Subtext," or "Secret Past."If you're serious about playwriting, and want to really challenge yourself as a writer, buy this book, do the etudes, and watch your work take flight. You need to workout constantly as a writer, and Michael's book provides the way to do this.

I just finished teaching a two-week intensive playwriting course in which a combination of novices and former self-proclaimed failures at playwriting were asked to complete a ten-minute play. The course was a success, mostly because all of the students actually completed a draft of a ten-minute play. All were acceptable, many showed great potential, and at least two could be produced as they stood at the end of the session. The reason for success? All of the students were ultimately able to drop their artistic pretentions and expectations, and approach writing a play as a craft. Many of the exercises that helped those students do so can be found in Michael Wright's little gem of a book. You can't really teach playwriting, but you can learn to use a set of tools that will help you write a play, write a play that will work dramatically. And that is the place to start. That is the way you'll actually get your characters from the beginning to an eventual end of a play. That is the way you'll get a first draft that can actually be developed.If you want to develop the craft that will let that artist in you emerge, read Playwriting in Process, and do those wonderful etudes that Michael Wright offers up over and over again. Who knows - one day you might wake up, look at yourself in the mirror, and discover you're Tennesee Williams, or Sam Shepard, or David Ives, or Wendy Wasserstein, or Paula Vogel, or Marsha Norman, or Eugene O'Neill or...

If you don't have Playwriting in Process in your library, then you're missing out on an incredible companion. Whether you're a playwright, a screenwriter, or even a novelist, this book is essential for creating strong story foundations in your writing, overcoming writer's block blues, and crafting characters that actually live and breathe! This book doesn't presume to tell you HOW to write--it challenges you to write better by focusing on process rather than product and providing constructive methods and exercises to help you answer your own questions. Anyone can put together a by-the-numbers, weekend-writer type book. Wright has given playwrights (and other writers) a resource many thousand times more valuable.