Entrances and exits are storytelling tools, not traffic patterns.  Treated well, they create meaning before and after a character speaks. An entrance is a claim on the room. Ask: What changes because this person arrives? Are they early, late, unexpected or unwanted? Do they interrupt, observe or pretend not to listen? [more]

Exposition is the information the audience needs in order to understand what’s happening — who these people are, how this world works, what happened before now and what’s at stake. Exposition is pressure. It’s the past intruding on the present. It’s context arriving at a moment when it’s inconvenient, painful or destabilizing. [more]

In most stories: Protagonist = the character whose goal/need drives the plot. They make the key choices, take the biggest risks and experience the main change (or refusal to change). Antagonist = whatever most actively blocks that goal. This can be a person, but also a system, a force of nature, a community, a lover, an institution, time, addiction, grief, shame, etc. [more]

Writing a mystery romance play means braiding two engines at once: desire and secrecy. The audience should lean forward because they want answers — and because they want these two people to collide. [more]

A dramaturg reads an early draft, gets what the writer is doing, then becomes a long-term advocate — connecting the playwright to theatres, keeping the play alive across years and productions. Example: Dramaturg Lauren Halvorsen read an early draft of Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is the Villain, messaged her enthusiasm, introduced the play to colleagues and pushed for it to be programmed. [more]

Dramaturgy is the craft of helping a play (or musical/opera/dance piece) make sense and land with an audience. It’s the bridge between the script, the production team and the world the piece comes from.  A dramaturg is the person who does this work. [more]

Visual imagery in theatre is everything the audience sees that carries meaning — sometimes louder than the text. It’s not “pretty pictures;” it’s story, pressure and philosophy made visible. [more]

In a play, the point of no return is the moment when the characters’ main problem stops being avoidable and becomes inevitable.  After this beat, the story can’t go back to “before” — even if everyone suddenly wanted to. It’s often called the commitment or crossing-the-threshold moment (not necessarily the climax). The rest of the play becomes the cost of that choice. [more]

Two wants, one room: Write a 2-page scene where each character wants a different concrete thing and neither can leave. End with a small betrayal. Power flip: Same scene premise, but on page 2 the lower-status character gains leverage without raising their voice. The unsaid line: Write a scene where the most important sentence is never spoken — but the audience can tell exactly what it is. [more]

Character development for a play is less about “deep backstory” and more about stageable pressure: what they want right now, what blocks them and what they’re willing to do in front of us to get it. Here are some of the most reliable methods. [more]

In a play, silence in dialogue is not absence — it’s action. Silence is the moment when: a character can’t say what they want; a character won’t say what they know; power shifts without words; meaning lands instead of being explained. Silence is where the audience does the work. [more}

Subtext is what characters mean, want, fear, or avoid, expressed indirectly through what they say and do. In plays, subtext carries enormous weight because the form is spoken, embodied, and immediate. The audience reads between the lines in real time. [more]

A scene is the smallest complete unit of dramatic action.  It isn’t defined by location or time so much as by a change in the balance of power, knowledge or desire.  Good scenes do something — they turn the story. Someone enters wanting something specific and urgent. Rule: If no one wants anything concrete, the scene has no engine. [more]

In a play, the point of attack is the moment in the story where the dramatist chooses to begin the onstage action. It is not the beginning of the story’s chronology. It is the moment when the dramatic pressure becomes unavoidable. The point of attack answers this question: Why does the play start here and not earlier or later? [more]

In playwriting, craft is the set of deliberate, learnable choices a playwright makes to turn raw impulse — idea, feeling, argument, obsession — into an experience that works on an audience in real time. [more]

Offstage characters in a play are characters who exist in the story world but aren’t physically visible onstage (either ever, or for a long stretch). They still function dramatically because the audience experiences them through speech about them, messages, sounds, consequences or the onstage characters’ behavior. [more]

A beat is the smallest unit of dramatic action — a moment when something changes onstage. More precisely: a beat is a shift in intention, tactic, emotion, power or information within a scene. [more]

If you’re doing research for writing plays, it helps to think of research not as fact-gathering but as pressure-building — material that sharpens conflict, behavior and theatrical choice. Plays run on what people do under pressure, not what is true in the abstract. [more]

A “good” play title usually does one of three things: creates tension, implies a question, or names a metaphor — often in very few words. They are a promise made to the audience. [more]

In plays, speech replaces narration.  Every line should do something: pursue a want, block another character, reveal a decision and/or change the power dynamic. If a line could be removed without altering the scene’s trajectory, it’s decorative. [more]