essential steps to successfully writing a play

Starting a play isn’t about introductions.  It’s about immediate pressure.

Start late – after the world already exists. And don’t start off by explaining the world or the history. 

“Lights up” should only happen after something is already wrong.  A decision has just been made.  A secret is about to surface.  Someone wants something they shouldn’t.  The audience will catch up.  They always do.

Put people in a room for a reason.  Plays are about forced proximity.  Why are these people together right now?  Why can’t they leave?  What would happen if someone did?  If the room doesn’t matter, the scene won’t either.

Begin with action, not theme.  Theme emerges from conflict, not speeches.  Here are some good openings:

• An argument already in progress

• A transaction that goes wrong

• A ritual interrupted

• A silence someone breaks too soon

Bad openings:

• World-building

• Explanations

• “So ... how long have you lived here?”

Let the audience work.  Trust them.  Withhold backstory, refer to offstage events, but don’t introduce too many unnecessary facts: an audience needs to know what is important and what isn’t.  But, to contradict myself, confusion often creates attention.  Clarity can come later.

Establish the central tension immediately.  By pages 5-10, the audience should sense, a) What’s at stake, b) Who wants incompatible things, and c) What cannot continue as it is.  They don’t need to know why yet – only that the pressure is building.

Set the rules of the world.  Every play teaches the audience how to watch it.  In the opening moments, show:

• How language is used (naturalistic, heightened, formal)

• How time behaves (real-time, fractured, ritualistic)

• Whether humor, danger or intimacy is dominant

• Does the play employ flashbacks or flashforwards

Once taught, the audience will follow.

Avoid the “first scene problem.”  Many first scenes are actually scene two in disguise.  If nothing changes by cutting the first scene, it’s not the beginning.  The true beginning is the moment: after which things cannot go back to how they were.

Here’s a practical test.  Ask this of your opening:

• Could this only happen in a theatre?

• Does this demand live attention?

• Does it make leaving at intermission harder?

If yes, you’ve started the play.

For an example of a play with a beginning already in motion, see the sample preview of my play Panic.