Script Development

                The script is the most important part of the show.  It serves as the foundation for everything that you do.  “If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage.”  If you ever watch interviews with famous actors, you'll often see them talking about how long they worked on the characters (often times it's several years).  What they're really talking about is script development.  Good scripts take time to write.  In particular, this one took three years.

                A script is a story told through dramatic events.  The keyword here is dramatic events.  In a bad script the story is told through an exposition.  In a good script, the plot unfolds through the drama of the scene.  Expositions are boring.  Drama is not.  After the first draft of a script, I’ll go through each and every scene and ask myself the following questions:  What is the event?  What is really going on here?  What is happening between these characters that makes this scene exciting to watch?  If I don’t have a good answer to those questions, I’ll go back and revise the scene until I do.  Good writing is rooted in behavior, NOT dialogue.  Dialogue is a subset of behavior, and while it can add a lot to a play, a good scene can be acted without words.  If you need words to do the scene, there is something fundamentally wrong with it.

That’s not to say that words are not important.  Well written dialogue and alliteration can do a lot for you (like help the actors affect their scene partners, improve the tempo, etc), but the words need to be rooted in non-verbal behavior or they have no meaning.  After I feel like I have a strong event for each individual scene, I’ll go back through the whole play and re-work the dialogue – focusing on tempo and continuity.

After all that’s done, I’ll start to collaborate with other artists (like a director and actors), and do table reads.  It’s important to get good actors for the table reads.  If you don’t, the reads won’t do you much good.  You’ll just want to bash your head in from hearing a bad actor butcher your words.  Table reads do a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff in terms of the writing.  You’ll quickly find out what works and what doesn’t.  The stuff that works well - you keep.  The stuff that doesn’t – back to the drawing board.  Rinse and repeat until you feel the work is ready for the public.  Just to give you a benchmark, we did well over a dozen table reads for this project.

                This is a very basic overview of what script development is like.  The actual nuts and bolts of it is very complicated, and way beyond the scope of this blog.  You have to understand how to give a writer feedback that’s going to help him and not confuse him.  There’s a real art to that.  You have to understand the commentary on life he (or her) is trying to make, and help guide the script in that direction.