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]

In plays, social context is the network of social forces that surround and shape the characters and the action—the norms, power structures, institutions, and collective pressures that exist beyond any single character’s psychology. Put simply: social context answers the question, “What world is pressing in on these people?” [more]

A tragedy asks a moral or human question that cannot be answered cleanly. Examples: What does it cost to be right? What must be destroyed for love to survive? When is faith indistinguishable from delusion? If the question has an easy answer, it won’t sustain tragedy. [more]

In plays, character arcs are less about accumulation and more about pressure.  A play traps a character in time and space and asks: what breaks, what bends, what is revealed? A character arc is the journey from one governing belief to another — or the failure to make that journey. [more]

In playwriting, “the rules of the game” are the internal laws that govern how reality operates inside that specific play. They’re not moral rules or plot beats — they’re the physics of the world you’ve built.  Once established, they must be obeyed, or the audience feels cheated. [more]

Story Theatre sits somewhere between oral storytelling, ensemble theatre and playwriting. You’re not “writing scenes” in the traditional way so much as composing an event where narration and enactment constantly trade places. [more]

The architecture of story is the invisible structure that holds meaning, tension and transformation in place.  Like a building, it determines how an audience moves through space — emotionally, intellectually and morally — without necessarily noticing the beams. (more)

Starting in the fast lane means: the central tension already exists when the lights come up; the audience enters mid-motion, not at rest; relationships may be established, but the problem is alive, not pending. (more)

In a play, the inciting incident is the moment — often small, sometimes explosive — that disrupts the existing order of the world onstage and makes the central conflict unavoidable. It’s the event that forces the play to begin rather than merely exist. (more)