Yesterday I taught my first playwriting class at the Colorado State High School Thespian Conference. The class was titled Writing the Play Inside You. And it was pure joy.
The kids were smart, creative and unerringly polite. They asked great questions. They responded enthusiastically to my writing prompts. And when it was over, several of the students couldn't wait to get home so they could finish the plays they'd started.
The focus of the class was how to use your personal experiences to write deeper, more satisfying plays. I've often found that the most boring, most pointless scripts I've ever based on real life.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Real life is a great source of material. It's just that we're often tempted to stick too close to the facts.
We're not reporters. We're artists. The story comes first. The truth--well, that comes way down the list.
So I read to the students from a couple of my 10-minute plays and explained how I've taken the people I've known and the emotions I've felt and shaped them into something that served the story. I also spent a large part of the class trying to convince these young Shakespeares that they shouldn't be afraid to open their hearts and let the blood spill onto the page.
I shouldn't have wasted my breath. In their writing, the students wore their hearts on their proverbial sleeves, and the snatches of dialogue that they wrote bristled with passion and conflict and pain. There were scripts about shoplifting. There were scripts about alcoholism. There were scripts about anorexia. And you could tell that every one of these stories came from a very dark and personal space.
What the students needed was guidance in the more advanced aspects of playwriting: using subtext, exploiting your concept, developing subplots, defeating the second act curse.
So next time, I'm going to change the focus of my class and work on these kinds of things. I just wish I didn't have to wait a whole year!
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