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By, Jacob Krueger

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What makes writing a screenplay so much different from writing a play?

Transcript From Podcast:

 

The process of writing a screenplay is different from writing a play in many essential ways. The first is the difference in the use of action.

 

For screenwriters, action is the primary tool of structure. But for playwrights, the primary tool is dialogue.

 

Don’t get me wrong. As a playwright, you need to visualize to some degree what is happening on the stage in order to really create your dialogue, in order to create the piece. But you don’t have to communicate that to anybody else. People don’t need to see your play in their mind like they do when reading a screenplay; they need to hear it, and they need to see the big elements.

 

You get to rely on the director, because plays have this thing called rehearsals.

 

It is crazy that rehearsals, for the most part, don’t exist in filmmaking. Even though some of the really great film directors do rehearse-- for example Francis Ford Coppola had a history of bringing the cast up to his estate to rehearse-- most film directors don’t rehearse at all.

 

That’s for a very simple reason: stars cost about $20 million bucks, and who has that kind of money to spend on rehearsal?

 

So you end up in this very weird process where not only you are going to have no rehearsal, but also you are going to shoot all your scenes out of order. So you aren’t even going to have a continuity of knowing “this, leads to this and then this leads to this and then this leads to this…” as you shoot your film. So it becomes much harder to track the structure from scene to scene as you shoot, as you could if you were rehearsing a play.

 

Writing a play can take place on a much more intuitive level, because you don’t have to communicate what you’re seeing to anybody else beyond just the very basics. But for a screenplay you need a much more substantial infrastructure.

 

The second element that makes playwriting so different from screenwriting is that plays have fewer moving pieces than screenplays.

 

Screenplays have way too many moving pieces! And this is actually part of what led me to create Seven Act Structure for myself.

 

When I was a playwright, I didn’t need any way of consciously dealing with structure, because intuitively I am pretty good at structure. So, when I was a playwright I didn’t think about things like “Okay what is going to be the big turn or the big structural choice here?” I just got to dig in.

 

As a playwright, I always thought of writing like peeling the layers of an onion. I want to meet some people who want some stuff, and as they try to get the stuff that they want, slowly I am going to get to know who they really are and what they really want. Slowly they are going to reveal themselves to me, and to themselves, and to each other over the course of the play. And that is a very intuitive process; it is like getting to know someone. It’s the same thing that you do every day when you connect with someone… You meet somebody you think, “Oh they are cool!” So, you hang out.

You think you know who they are, then you start to learn things as you both pursue what you want in the relationship-- you start to learn who they really are, and who you really are with them, and who you both really are in relation to each other. And changes start to happen; sometimes they are beautiful changes, and sometimes they are catastrophic changes and usually they are both.

 

So that is a very intuitive process and it is one of the reasons we are able to channel it faster as playwrights.