3.5 Things You Learn from Writing Scripts

Summer is a great opportunity to further your writing and experiment a bit off the beaten path. It's a little less structured, and (I, at least) have a little more free time that I can devote to trying new things. One of these new things is Go Teen Writer’s 100-for-100 challenge and the Penprints Flash Fiction Dash is another that I am super excited for.

Another upcoming event I am super excited about is a local youth conference where participants write and perform ten-minute plays over three days. The conference also allows us to individually write one minute, one act plays for a small contest. 

When I participated in this two years ago, it was the first time I'd ever even tried to write a play. But writing a script is something that I’ve come to enjoy, and I've found that it's a great exercise. As fiction writers, there are so many things that we can learn from playwriting - and today I'm going to share three and a half reasons why.

If you look at a script, you might notice that there is a lot of white space. Formatting rules have come to mean that a “cluttered” script is equivalent to an ancient, technical medical textbook: few people enjoy reading it. Scripts remind you that “good” doesn’t necessarily mean “full,” a concept that is important in the fiction world as well.

Scripts are made to be read aloud, and to be performed. And that means that they need to be concise. Every word needs to move the scene along because if it doesn’t, it’s going to stick out and/or bore your audience to death. A ninety-minute play doesn’t have time to talk about the weather or how the main character hate gummy worms - unless it’s important to the plot. Instead, it’s going to have to spend that time furthering the plot.

Omitting these unnecessary details applies to fiction writing, too. When writing novels or short stories might allow more leeway with “unnecessary” description, but you still don’t want to devote too much of your time to it. The plot can’t be jumping every which way with fifteen bajillion little side plots. You need to know what needs to happen and how to make it happen, and what things are necessary to make them come alive, and you get a lot of practice with it in scripts.

 

Another thing you'll notice about scripts is that 95% of a script is dialogue. There is virtually no description: it is up to the actor and director to decide if a specific line is going to be “said happily” or “shouted as Max bangs his fist on the table.” Stage direction is used sparingly - about two or three times a page - and is generally short and technical as possible.

This lack of description means that your ability to write dialogue will improve a lot. Scripts are made to be read aloud, so you will be able to tell if your dialogue is unnatural. Scripts allow you to focus on your dialogue and improve it - and this will do so much for your fiction writing. Likewise, the dialogue is going to have to do its job without description or prose to move it along - it has to be strong on its own.

And because the script is 95% dialogue, it carries so much weight with your characterization. Dialogue is your medium to show the audience - or the actor, who will in turn show the audience - what each character is like. A nervous character might stammer, stumble over their words, or might barely speak at all and retreat. Before an actor brings them to life, a character is created by dialogue.

And this carries over well to fiction writing. The character can’t give us a huge info dump without it sounding really really cringy, because everything’s read aloud. Scripts teach you how to show instead of tell. You have to show through dialogue - is this character stiff, or is she generally energetic or naive? (I will admit that because of time constraints, the audience will sometimes forgive you for telling so long as you do it well, like readers may at the beginning of a book).

This reason applies to so many other types of art, too, but completely works for scripts. Writing a script after only writing prose for so long takes a little bit of mental gymnastics, as you try to understand what works and what doesn’t. It makes you study what you’re doing as a fiction writer and then apply that or change it when you write in this new form - and that by itself is a valuable experience.

  While writing a play is a unique art form in itself, there are so many things in is that carry over to fiction writing. Script-writing is a fun diversion from "usual" writing, and it's a great exercise in general. And scripts can be so much fun to read, to write, and to perform. One thing about a script is that while it's an expression of the writer's inner vision, scripts are really "bridge works," and are meant to be interpreted not just by the reader, but also by directors, actors, and crew members, to bring the story in a different form to a new audience. And that's one reason why I find scripts so neat.

Have you ever written a script, or would you be interested in writing one? What are your summer writing plans?