How do you avoid writing a boring, uninteresting play?
I read more than 300 play submissions during our 2018 Little Wonder Radio Play competition and there were an astonishing number that fell into one of the three types:
Some has an interview and discovers it isn’t what it seems!
Someone is in a strange place and discovers they are/were actually dead!
And worst of all…
Someone is waiting for something… but nothing happens!
But there have been some great plays like this!
All three of these story formats can (and have) be very successful – but they’re also very dangerous. In this article I’m going to talk about why your play about something waiting to be interviewed to get into somewhere only to discover they are actually dead is BOOOORING, and what you can do to avoid writing it again.[i]
Samuel Beckett made theatre more difficult for us all.
Of the three, the interview is the one with the most obvious potential: you have a character who wants something, and something is in their way – essential components of drama. But it fails if it’s all built around a final twist, which is too often the case: you’re so invested in your ending you forget to have a beginning and middle. Discovering you’re in purgatory isn’t a story, it’s a plot point. And as for waiting… wow, the theatrical equivalent of watching paint dry.
Your first danger is that, if you’re a theatre fan, you can think of a dozen examples of plays were this works. Beckett and Pinter wrote some spectacular pieces which mostly involved people waiting and, erm, talking about waiting (Waiting for Godot and The Dumb Waiter spring to mind).[ii] But the genius of these works is they take something not inherently dramatic and instil the drama in the characters. If you’re trying to be the new Pinter by writing about waiting, you’ve got something thinking to do.
These ideas tend to put the tension in the wrong place.
If you read the last article in this series, “Don’t build to a Climax: Start with a Bang!” you’ll remember that the two peaks in tension in play need to be right at the beginning to grab the interest of the audience and at the midpoint when the character must face their own weakness. Our “surprise interview”, “wow I’m dead”, and “waiting for nothing” stories all rely too much on the big reveal at the end.
Put simply, there isn’t enough story. And, worst yet, it’s in a form people have seen a thousand times before – so the chances of them giving up and deciding it is rubbish are hugely increased.
You need more ideas. One is not enough. In television the talk about the A plot and the B plot, and we should be using the same concept in theatre and radio – one story is not enough, one idea is not enough. So how do you go about getting ideas?
Keep a writer’s journal – and get used to having ideas.
This is in like every writing article ever, so I’ll keep this short. Get yourself a nice book you enjoy writing in and whenever you have an idea write it in the book. Good stories come not from one idea, but from throwing different ideas together and seeing what catches on fire. So, you have a great idea about an interview that turns out to be a St Peter’s Gates. Ok. What if you mix it with that idea about sentient sharks trying to get a place on the UN security council? Check back through your journal and find something interesting to mix in. Possibly less silly than the shark one, but hey, who knows?
Putting the journal to one side for a minute, you need to get used to having ideas. If someone says, “give me ten ideas for how someone can be trapped in a room”, and you’re a writer, you should be able to answer straight away. Practice this. Do it in your journal. Then, when you’ve got a half idea like “someone imagines meeting their ex-husband in the moments before they die” you can come up with a dozen other ideas to help turn this into a story. Which is when we need the next step.
Go big and make things worse
Now, I’m not saying everything should be laser wielding sharks battling in spaceships.[iii] But you should always tend towards making things worse for your characters, making the situation direr, making the sentiment more dramatic. Not clichéd. But go where it hurts. Ask yourself two questions:
How could I make this situation worse? [e.g. The interview room is flooding]
How could I change the characters so that this situation would be especially bad for them? [e.g. The protagonist is an aquaphobe]
Immediately our play is more interesting and thus better. We’re writing radio so flooding a room is easy. And having an A plot (getting through the interview) and a B plot (surviving the food – and why is she an aquaphobe?) allows one to comment and feed upon the other.
Now, I know I tend to go on about bigness in terms of spaceships, explosions and sharks. But it really doesn’t have to be that way. How about this:
How could I make this situation worse? [The interviewer is the protagonist’s mother-in-law]
How could I change the characters so that this situation would be especially bad for them? [The protagonist is just about to divorce her partner]
No spaceships there, but plenty of drama. Introduce the mother-in-law in the first two minutes (as a surprise, of course – always show the big stuff, don’t hide it off-set and introduce it in dialogue), then the choice about revealing the divorce at the half way point. Boom. Problem solved. Now we are starting to write a play.
Copy something wrong.
So, your writer’s journal is empty, you’ve decided (wisely) to ditch interview/purgatory/waiting for something new, but nothing new is coming. I know I said any writer should be able to come up with ten new ideas at any time, but we’ve also all faced the terror of the blank page. So, we need a new story. Where to get one. One perfectly good solution is to steal it.
Stick with me.
This is a technique that Chris, our lead sound guy for Little Wonder and a superb musician, uses all the time when composing. Recently I asked him for some RnB. He composed me a fantastic piece of 1960s RnB (which we used in the play.) But what I needed was one of this awful auto-tuned boring drumbeat meaningless lyric pieces of crap that the youth listen to (yes, I am enjoying becoming a grumpy old man, thankyou). Neither of us had any real idea how to make this sort of music. I basically get stuck if there aren’t guitars, or maybe a piano. But Chris has a great solution to this.
He picked out a piece that had been in the charts last year and tried to copy it by ear. Naturally, he got it wrong. He played with it some more. And in the process, he came up with an original piece of music – something reminiscent of the original, but more importantly that spoke to what interested him in the music, his strengths and feelings as a musician, and what makes him special as an artist.
We can do the same thing in writing. Think of a story you read (ideally a while ago) and note down the outline. Then take another idea and mix the two together. If you aren’t starting to have new ideas now, things you want to change, places to go crazy, you aren’t a writer (or you’re having a bad day, go watch a movie, eat something nice, and try again tomorrow.)
Snow White meets Die Hard? Star Wars where Luke is Beauty and Darth Vader is the Beast (gay Star Wars, yes, I want that now please.) You get the idea.
Now, you may be thinking “but this is plagiarism.” Nonsense. Every story you ever write draws on all the stories you ever read. The important thing is that you use this as a starting point to stimulate your imagination.
Use the personal
Tricky one this. Your life is unique. Your experiences, told right, are interesting. But for God’s sake don’t be that guy who writes all about his ex. I mean, people may well enjoy it, but you’re a scumbag.
Still, we all have stuff boiling inside us that we need to talk about. This is where the mixing ideas thing becomes useful. I once saw some people burn to death. It wasn’t very nice. I have spent some time over the years wondering, with no little futility, if there wasn’t more I could have done. There probably wasn’t. But it might just liven up our interview story, no?
Some writers spend their whole careers pouring the souls out on the page as if the stage was just a physical form of their Live Journal (does that even exist anymore?) If you never look outside yourself then you’re probably not a very interesting person, never mind an interesting writer. But don’t be (too) scared of drawing on your own experiences. Your life is interesting.
Read newspapers and steal liberally.
Speaking of looking outside yourself, media is full of amazing, interesting, powerful things happening every day. This doesn’t (just) have to be Donald Trump saying something stupid. The pensioner protesting the demolishing of a local flower display on page 12 of your local newspaper can be a starting point.
Just as you should be in tune with yourself, and with the stories you’ve read, you should look and write about what is going on about you. The front page of a newspaper has at least three decent play ideas right there. Just mix two of them together. Theresa May goes for a walk to Grandma’s house but meets the Big Bad Wolf. Ex-ISIS fighters returning from Syria discover the Birmingham is under siege from a Zombie Apocalypse and they’re the only ones with the combat experience to protect a local populace who think they’re evil terrorists (and may be right). See what I’m doing?
Steal, throw together, copy badly, invest yourself in the story. Originality comes from contrast and unique perspective. You have both of those things in your grasp.
This was the second of nine articles I intend to write off the back of the competition. As I get them written, I’ll put links here. If you have any questions or simply enjoyed an article, please leave a comment and share!
- Don’t build to a climax: start with a bang
- Waiting for an interview in purgatory: on originality
- How to format a radio play. Again.
- Calculating length and what should happen when
- Casts and Cast Lists: Your underappreciated friends.
- The Delights and Dangers of Offence
- Preaching to the Choir is Boring for the Choir
- How to Earn your Ending
- How to stop writing crap dialogue.
[i] Why yes, I have written all three of these stories before (at the time of writing, the last Little Wonder play with my name on it is, erm, an interview that isn’t what it seems). Some of them were probably boring. I hope not all of them!
[ii] Before you leap to the defence of these plays – I know!!!
[iii] Everything should be laser wielding sharks battling in spaceships.
