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Play Writing Articles on the Web

  • Five Reasons Why Writing Plays Can Make You a Better Screenwriter
    Despite the obvious differences in the final product, playwriting and screenwriting are closely related forms of dramatic writing. Want to improve your screenwriting? Here are five reasons why writing plays will help you.

  • How to Keep Your Story From Stalling
    Telling a great story has always been the key to writing a saleable screenplay or a play that everyone wants to produce—and it’s always been the hardest thing to get right. No matter how many car chases or dramatic screaming matches your script may have, if the story stalls, you’re going to lose your audience. Want to know the single biggest story staller there is?

  • Taking the Leap to Playwriting
    Are newcomers pretty much locked out of the drama market? Jonathan Dorf offers suggestions to someone looking to take the first step into playwriting.

  • The Lost Language of Story
    What is an act? Why is the second act twice as long as the first and the third? And if page length or count isn’t the defining aspect of an act, then what is? That hardly seems like a standard unit of measure. Yes, it corresponds roughly to “beginning, middle and end,” but how useful is it in guiding us in the completion of our story?

  • The Playwright's Guide to Submitting Smarter: A Baker’s Dozen Tips to Maximize Your Chances and Minimize Your Aggravation
    Submitting a play is time-consuming, the costs add up, and the odds are against you, but you can sell your work ifyou submit smarter. Here's how.

  • Victorians' Secrets: A Nineteenth-Century Guide to Screenwriting, or How the Victorians Invented the Screenplay
    It may seem peculiar in the 21st century to discuss screenwriting in the same breath as anything that had to do with the 19th century. What does one have to do with the other?

  • Writing Great Dialogue
    Great dialogue does not come from having a good ear for dialogue. It does not come from having some innate gift or talent for writing dialogue. It comes from this: knowing your characters so well that you know what they will say and how they will say it when faced with specific people, situations or events.