Notes on Jeffrey Sweet's "Solving Your Script"
This is a practical book to help you develop playwriting skills, especially at the scene level, most useful after you have a good sense of the story's spine. These hands-on exercises are designed to help you master the skills described in The Dramatist's Toolkit.
Solving Your Script: Tools and Techniques for the Playwright
By Jeffrey Sweet
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001
Assignments:
By Jeffrey Sweet
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001
Assignments:
- Think of a word or concept. Write a speech for a character or a scene in which the word or concept is never articulated but is indirectly conveyed to the audience.
- Choose a physical object and write a short scene in which we find out who two characters are through the way they negotiate over that object. Don't allow the characters to explain themselves. Don't let them go into a lot of blather about their pasts. Have them deal with the here and now and the disposition of the object you've selected.
- Choose an object and define the relationship between two characters through the way they negotiate over it, adding punctuation to the scene by transforming the object in some way -- by modifying it, destroying it, or using it in a manner for which it was not intended.
- Write a scene in which the characters' relationship to each other is defined primarily through their negotiation over something other than an object.
- Write a scene in which a character's profession puts him or her at odds with personal objectives or values.
- Compose a scene in which your central character is torn between appetite and responsibility.
- Write two short scenes. Scene one will feather characters A and B. Scene two will feature characters A and C. That is to say, one character will appear in both scenes. The scenes are designed to bring out different sides of A (example: Jones and boss, Jones and bookie). The idea is to show the same character in two different contexts that, in a full-length work, might set up the choice that would provide the central issue of the story.
- Write a scene between two people in which at least one of the people assumes different voices with the other.
- Create a scene between two people that is high-context. There is a piece of information or backstory or existing circumstance between these two people that you want to get across to the audience, but you must not explicitly articulate it. Instead, you create a negotiation that makes the audience think, "Oh, they wouldn't be dealing with this problem if that circumstance didn't pertain."
- Invent a scene between two people in which we discover much of their past or given circumstances through the plans they make.
- Write a scene in which an established ceremony or ritual is disrupted.
- Focus on an expected pattern of behavior and, in the course of a scene between two people, violate that expectation.
- Come up with a location and write a short scene in which something occurs there that is out of character with this environment. Don't just go for Monty Python absurdity (like holding a murder trial in a laundromat). Come up with reasons why this is happening here and now. You may well find that an "ordinary" scene you've set up plays with a special sparkle by transposing it to an unlikely place.
- Write a scene in which you characterize a character primarily by the way the other people onstage treat that character or behave because that character is present in their lives. You can choose to either have that character onstage or off. But, if onstage, the character should do and say very little. The whole point of the assignment is to dramatize him or her through the behavior of the others.