9 Months To Birth Your Play
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Structure & Form (And How This Impacts Content…) by Carmen Nasr
Grounding Your Play
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Plan
A question I regularly get from playwrights who are starting out is:
When in your writing process do you find the right structure for your story?
OR
How do you go about finding the right form for the play’s content?*
*See James Fritz’s beautifully clear definition of the difference between content, structure, and form
Of course, very often my most immediate thought is:
I honestly have no idea, I guess it just kind of comes together somehow!
But the more truthful answer is, that while sometimes the form or structure of a play is clear as day, right from the start, more often than not, it can involve a great deal of grappling and wrestling and stumbling. It’s an act of reaching out into the dark and trying to instinctively feel your way around time and space and narrative, somehow hoping to find your way home. It can be exasperating, and at times, frustratingly elusive.
However, over the years I’ve discovered (and stolen!) some brilliant tools and exercises that have made this process less vague, less disorientating, and most importantly a little less painful. The secret? I learned to love THE PLAN.
The tried and tested ‘three stage’ process
In my very early days as a writer, I attended a panel event, where a playwright (I can’t quite remember who – sorry!), talked about the three stages of their writing process as: Dream, Vomit, Sculpt. I jumped on this bandwagon and have never looked back. Good advice travels fast, and this concept is now pretty widespread among playwrights I speak to. So, while this may not be new territory for some, just so we’re all on the same page, let’s briefly define each of these stages…
DREAMING – This covers everything from the first tiniest seedling of an idea, to dreaming up fully-fledged worlds, through to methodical research. This is the brilliant bit when everything seems possible and the play you image is utterly extraordinary. The length of this stage varies wildly, from one to two to ten years.
VOMITING – This is the painful bit, the moment when you have to stop dreaming, sit yourself down, face your own mediocrity, and actually write the bloody thing. The dreaded first draft.
SCULPTING – This is the ‘are we there yet?’ bit, or the re-drafting stage, which also includes a variety of well-meaning people giving you their illuminating (but often conflicting) thoughts. This can last anywhere from five drafts to ten drafts, to twenty.
Feels like something’s missing…but what?
During the writing process of my first few plays, after I finished the often delicious Dream stage, I would obediently sit down and open a new word document, I’d call the file ‘[Insert play title here]_Draft 1’ and then sit and stare at it. Then, THE FEAR, would start creeping in, my mind drawing frequent BLANKS. Soon, SELF-DOUBT would firmly take root, and the act of drawing out the first draft of the play, required BIBLICAL levels of suffering, as I painfully squeezed the precious water from the stone.
Let’s be clear, writing a play is HARD. However, I now know that I was just making it even harder for myself by outright refusing to plan. I was always so resistant to planning. I could plan a party, a holiday, maybe an essay – but not something as creative, instinctive, and magical as a play. It felt counter-intuitive and ‘just not me’.
But over the years, I’ve learned how to listen more deeply to my writer’s intuition, and it’s been somewhat of a shock to discover that I am indeed – A Planner. Of course, some writers aren’t planners, and that’s perfectly fine. Some plays simply defy planning, and like with unruly children, you sometimes just have to bend and give in to their whims. But most of the time planning is crucial to my process, and I soon realised that there was a key step missing in that tried and tested three step plan….
I like to think of the planning stage as ‘Grounding’ my play. Pulling it out of the airier dream space and giving it some roots. Some people include the planning stage in the Dream stage, but there’s something about preserving the open and fluid nature of the Dream stage that feels important to me. So, I’ve built a little bridge to help me cross over to the next step: The Grounding Stage.
So what exactly is this ‘Grounding’ stage?
There’s always this moment when content suddenly lurches towards structure and form, and sometimes they meet in a natural embrace, folding into each other like long-lost lovers. While at other times, it can feel like two magnets, stubbornly repelling, or a rubix cube where the squares seem to keep changing colour, or a puzzle that is going really well until you realise a key piece is missing, never to be found again. It’s in these latter scenarios that I find the Grounding stage is a particularly useful step, saving you from some of the pain of a first draft. I’m all for finding ways to ease the pain, to lessen the struggle – art as creation, not art as suffering.
The Grounding stage is often the moment where I begin to grapple with structure and form, ahead of writing a first draft. It looks something like this:
But it’s worth adding that there have been plays that have somehow resisted grounding, and so I’ve done it this way around:
And then there’s those bigger, more unwieldy plays that have benefitted from another round of grounding between first and second drafts, for further development and formal discovery:
Feel free to use the Grounding stage as you see fit, this is not a set of rules, but an offer.
Ok, we’ve finally arrived, and here it is….
A Seven-Step Blueprint For Grounding Your Play
(Otherwise know as planning)
You can complete this in 7 days, or 7 weeks, or 7 months, one step might take you a few hours, or a few days – this is a blueprint, so feel free to tweak it, to swap things in and out, to add new bits. Make it your own.
The hope is that going through these activities and exercises will help you in your discovery of how you want to structure your story, or the way you want to shape time and place into your chosen form.
Step One: Gathering
Take a moment (or a day or two) to gather together all the information, notes, research, images, thoughts, doodles and scribbles that you have collected and generated during the Dream stage.
During the Dream stage I use a technique I stole from a Q&A with David Grieg about twelve years ago. As I dream or research, I right down key bits on blank white cards – this could be a motif, a snatch of dialogue, an idea for form.
To wrap up the Dream phase & begin the planning, I look over all these cards, and then I look over my notebooks, my word documents, random post-its, and I add any final bits to my card deck. Now I’m ready. I return to this deck of ‘content’ thorough out the planning process.
Step Two: Focusing Objectives
At this stage, you might already know exactly which character(s) is/are driving your play. What are their desires? What are the obstacles they face? Or you might have no idea. Or maybe you think you know, but haven’t considered any other options.
This is a simple exercise to help you focus in on or discover the character objectives at the heart of your play, a way to lay down some roots. Apparently, it’s a technique Arthur Miller used…
Exercise
Try and do this without overthinking, lean into your instincts. Put ten minutes on the clock and write as many endings to the sentence starter…
This is a play about a person who…
Example:
This is a play about a good person, who does something stupid and loses everything.
This is a play about a person who speaks for others, until one day they start talking back.
This is a play about a person who throws everyone under the bus to safe himself.
This is a play about a person who breaks away from the play to escape judgement.
You’ll be surprised what you might discover….
Step Three: Generating Scenes
This is a simple exercise, in the same spirit at step two. You can do this per character, or per act, or per world – whatever your play needs.
Exercise
Put ten minutes on the clock and write as many endings to the following sentence starter as you can manage. Repeat as many times as you need.
A Scene Where….
Example:
A scene where Samira dances for Amira
A scene where Samira lists all the horrors she has witnessed and prophesises future horrors.
A scene in a neonatal class, where Dan tries to tell his wife, but fails.
A scene where Napoleon comes in on a horse.
In my experience this list is where content starts to amalgamate into structure. Time scales begin to emerge, spaces and places start to impose themselves. Formal options are gently illuminated.
You have a couple of options here. You might want to start writing the scenes on your list and generate pages of material to shape later. Or you can save the list and use it as a starting point for the first draft plan.
Step Four: Charting It
I love a table. It brings order to my thoughts, it helps me begin to visualise narrative shapes and structures. It helps keep THE FEAR at bay.
Take the scenes from your list, and start to put them into a table, make notes, add in new scenes, try different orders. The table is your oyster.
Step Five: Drawing It
This is an exercise that allows you to take a sort of bird’s eye view of your play’s overall form. The wonderful Tom Wright suggested this to me as an exercise and now I do it for every play I write.
What would your play look like as a graph? Give it a go. Or multiple goes.
This has helped me crystallise and discover (or abandon!) formal shapes and ideas.
Step Six: Writing Plan
This is the final stage, when I get my post-its out, or for some writers it might be a paper calendar, or a word document, or the back of a napkin. I make a plan, detailing the scenes I will write and what days/weeks I will write them by – but remember the plan is alive, it mutates and grows, it’s a shapeshifter – you can’t and shouldn’t lock it down completely. Use pencil, swap the post-its around etc..
Step Seven: Rest
Even God rested on the seventh day etc… Take a break, go for a walk, or a coffee, or a pint. Treat yourself.
I’ve finished all the steps…so now what?
Your play has grown its first little roots, it has descended from the dreamy clouds, and burrowed into the earthy soil.
These roots may be tiny and fragile, you may have to carefully uproot and re-plant them into a different shaped pot, or even move them into brand new terrain – but whatever happens, these roots will now blossom into a play.
You are ready to write your first draft, or your dirty draft, or your draft zero, whatever it is that your process or this specific play demands.
And now….VOMIT!
About Carmen Nasr…
Carmen is a British-Lebanese playwright. Her most recent work, THE CLIMBERS premiered at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, and THE MALADIES, made with the Almeida Theatre young company, premiered at The Yard Theatre.
In 2017, Carmen was a winner of the Channel 4 Playwrights’ Scheme, on which she was attached to the Finborough Theatre, where her play DUBAILAND premiered. In 2015 her play THE HOUSE OF MY FATHER was long-listed for the Burntwood Prize.
Carmen is currently under commission to the Kiln Theatre, Almeida Theatre, Hampstead Theatre, Sky Productions, and is adapting Booker Prize shortlisted novel BURNT SUGAR by Avni Doshi, for the Lot Productions. Her most recent project, I AM LYSISTRATA, is a radical reimagining of the Greek classic, made with a company of women seeking sanctuary in London. She teaches on the Playwriting MA at Manchester University.
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