Playwrights Practice: Playwriting Made Easy

Self-guided. Write, edit and workshop original short plays. Examine and change your life. Train the playwright in you!

Created by: Jack Sullivan
Comedian-Writer-Educator-Web Technologist & Worker Bee

What Will I Learn?

• Learn the skills to create your own short stage plays from idea inception through polished final draft execution, ready for contests, readings, and workshops.
• Master short stage play structure.
• Discover formulas, shortcuts, methodologies and creative insights to help jumpstart your journey as a playwright.
• Identify and overcome major flaws found in both new and professional writers today.
• Understand what makes an idea right for theatrical exploration (versus cinematic exploration or literary exploration).
• Study and master the art of nuanced dialogue creation.
• Manage character and audience expectations.
• Create and manipulate rising tension.
• Uncover tips and tricks to help you avoid cliche in your writing.
• Demonstrate and duplicate proper stage play format.
• Enable you to examine and change your life through playwriting.
• Valuable feedback provided when you pay full price for this course. No feedback is provided when this course is purchased at a discount.

Requirements

• With Library Access, you can read the 4 (Four) Plays discussed in course lectures for free. These plays are: Tennessee Williams, SUMMER & SMOKE; David Mamet, AMERICAN BUFFALO; Harold Pinter, THE CARETAKER; Samuel Becket, HAPPY DAYS. To the best of my ability, I do try to cover these plays in the following lectures with enough depth that, even if you are unable to read the play itself, you will still benefit from the concepts presented in the lectures. Please don't take that statement as permission to not read the assigned plays: you will benefit far more from the lectures if you have knowledge of the actual dialogue created by the playwrights in each work.
• You should have access to some sort of portable audio recording app/device, as well as a small notebook, a pen and a pencil.
• You should have access to a computer and/or a word processor (programs like Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter are industry standards and preferred; free alternatives are suggested in the course).

Target audience

• This introduction to the craft of playwriting, along with its online table reading component, is designed to be helpful and beneficial to writers of any level.
• Screenwriters can benefit from this course through mastery of the art of dialogue creation. Extensive exercises have been created to help you write brilliant, nuanced dialogue that stands out and gets noticed.
• This course is ideal for Low Budget Filmmakers and Scripted Content Creators, anyone who wants or needs to improve their speech/dialogue writing skills, anyone interested in developing their writing through constructive criticism [for online table readings], anyone who wants an opportunity to examine and change parts of their life, anyone who wants to make an audience pay attention and influence opinion, or anyone who needs a better understanding of their place in the world.