Playwright\'s Guidebook by Stuart Spencer the Playwright\'s

Playwright's Guidebook By Stuart Spencer

The Playwright's Guidebook: An Insightful Primer on the Art of Dramatic Writing

The Playwright's Guidebook: An Insightful Primer on the Art of Dramatic Writing by Stuart Spencer is a pragmatic work based on the author's own experience writing plays -- Resident Alien, being the most well-known. The book offers no-nonsense advice on how the playwright can structure a play, create conflict in a play, and develop characters. The 400-page book is relatively new, as it was published on March 29, 2002 by Faber & Faber, and is aimed at contemporary readers, aspiring playwrights and veteran hands as well. Spencer teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, and also offers private tutoring for writers in New York City.

Main Body

As dramatist Stuart Spencer writes in the masterful tutorial, the Playwright's Guidebook, "A play is more wrought than written. A playwright constructs a play as a wheelwright once constructed a wheel: a general shape is laid out, and then hammered, bent, nailed, reshaped, hammered again and again, until finally a functionally and artful product has emerged."

This is very practical, yet wise, advice for the aspiring playwright. Popular culture is filled with images of artists being inspired to create master works. Think of Tom Hulce's portrait of Mozart, where he seems not to be writing music, but simply taking transcription from God. But, in reality, there is, as the old saying goes, one percent inspiration and 99% perspiration in the artistic process.

A drama, a play, contains characters. These characters are people who want something -- often desperately. As Spencer puts it, there is "action" and there are "stakes" in a play. "Action is what a character wants," writes Spencer. "Stakes are what the character has to gain or to lose."

For a play to keep the audience's attention, in addition to action and stakes, or conflict, there must also be what Spencer calls "an event."

"What happens at the end," writes Spencer. "It's a colloquial way of saying it, but it's as good a way as any to describe what we mean by the event of a play." Getting to the event of the play -- getting to the end -- is what playwriting is all about, one is led to believe by the master craftsman Spencer's account here.

Take the "wheelwright" metaphor at the beginning of this paper. One literally starts with the characters in action and then, as Spencer puts it, hammers the material until one gets a functional, artful play.

For example, Spencer writes, "Let's say that we have a character named Joe. Joe wants a glass of water. Wanting that glass of water is his action." To be sure, different playwrights may well utilize other words to describe the same phenomenon. "They may say it's his objective, or his goal, or his need. I use action, but what matters is the concept not the word," writes Spencer.