In fact, theater is an experiment. It is as if the novel is a theoretical science, and the theater is an experimental science. The novel is written in a beautiful and perfect way, and then printed out. Drama is not, no matter how well written, have to go through the director, the actors, through the costumes, choreography, music, play on the stage dozens of rounds, after the audience's reaction, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. A good play must be rewritten for at least a year to several years. In this regard, any book on playwriting is not a bible, and cannot be blindly copied; its rules and regulations are all based on experience. Experience is a superposition of localized experiences, and there are times when you can't see the forest for the trees, so you can learn from it, but you can't believe in it. Everything should be used for my use, ready to break the format, push the new.
But there are some basic principles that you should know, like a house has pillars and beams, it has to be load-bearing and stable. Because the troupe has to spend a lot of money, with many people, with one or two months of precious time, in your script on a play, like real estate developers according to your drawings to build a house. A bad script is a labor of love to the extreme. Actors direct years of training to perform the play you wrote. The audience spends a lot of money to honestly sit in a dark house, motionless, for two hours. This is very much against human normality, and demands that your play give the audience enough enjoyment to teach him that it is worth his sacrifice. In Beijing, the audience has to eat early, or else they are starving, and ride a long way to find your theater. They have to endure all these tortures to come to your theater. You have to make the audience enjoy and make him feel that all the sacrifices are worthwhile. And, next time, he will make a bigger sacrifice to come to your theater.
Every word of yours eats up a lot of other people's blood, sweat and money. Think every moment, is the word worth it?
The content of the play:
1. Characters: the main characters related to the conflict.
2. Theme: about what? It must be about something worthwhile.
3. Structure: the overall design of the story as it is presented on stage.
4. Conflict: the driving force of the drama.
5. stage set: the visual content
6. subtext: the character's words in moderation.
7. Ideology: your own opinions and values.
8. Voice: your own unique voice as a playwright
Before I continue, I'd like to make a few clarifications:
One, I've seen few plays in this country, but I've seen a few problems. There is a little too much water in the play, combined with a lack of skill in the script, which always makes people impatient, and some of them are really a waste of actors.
The second is that the occasional writing of "theater is not art" has given rise to different points of view. It's good to know that if there are no different sides to the coin, it must be false. If you've ever worried about your job, you'll understand that theater is actually an industry. Just like catering is an industry, travel agency is an industry, IT is an industry. It has to be made solidly as an industry first before there is fertile ground for art.
Thirdly, I feel that the script is the form of writing that requires the least "attainment" and dogma in literature. Look at the theater inside the play for a long time, the playwright with attainments, write something is difficult to penetrate the reality, and life in the experienced amateur writers, have to penetrate the social feelings and experience. A little knowledge of the basics of the script, you can write a moving book. What China lacks is such fascinating and moving scripts.
There has long been a desire to write something. Originally, I wanted to translate a book on screenplay writing, but every book I read had something I didn't agree with or something that didn't match the reality in China. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a book on the subject, but I'm sure I've never seen one before.
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Among all the elements, I would like to emphasize characters. Because theater is different from novels, novels face readers with words, while theater communicates with the audience with characters. Drama can be written without a script, with actors, with the audience, there will be a play. Characters inside the theater, or lovely, or hateful, or annoying, with the audience not only have a storyline on the exchange, but also have a sensibility or rationality on the exchange, but also to let the audience feel, so that the audience does not have a feeling of the role of the novels, like nonsense. Inside the script, the words are not the language, the playwright has to use the characters to tell the story, the characters are the real language of the script. The characters are the real language of the play. Novels are written in words that are vivid and detailed, with a vividness that jumps off the page. Scripts, on the other hand, use stage cues to suggest the inner workings of the characters, leaving ample room for the actors to perform. The dialog of the script should be left and left again. Some people in the United States have done research and found that novelists become successful playwrights rarely, but journalists can easily become playwrights, because journalists know how to concise language, know how to capture the reader with short language, and know how to make a fuss out of small things to create suspense. Poets can also become good playwrights, because poetry leaves a lot of room for the reader to think rather than speak.
To practice speaking with characters, there are many techniques. Because it's not just words that people communicate with each other, the use of eyes, body language, props, and costumes are all in the realm of language. This requires more observation, more practice, more reading of the script (pay attention to the excellent script stage directions STAGE DIRECTION writing). More importantly, pay attention to the details of people's communication in daily life.
I think the emotional communication in theater is richer, more delicate, and more real. Many audience members don't go to the theater to find the truth, or to cry, or to laugh, or to be happy or sad; the audience needs to feel more.
If we take the characters as the language, as the language of emotional and rational communication with the audience through the story, each character's past history and present situation should have a detailed conception. Even what he likes to eat, what he drinks, why he sleeps with the light on at night. Any character traits that are directly or indirectly related to the plot should be clearly thought out. The character has to come to life in your mind first, you know how he would eat if he ate with you, what he would do if he met someone who asked for a small fortune. When you are able to see his heart through his history, and even feel that he is a part of yourself, then you will be able to use this character as a language to express your feelings, thoughts and philosophies on stage. If you don't, you'll write the character as a stick of firewood, with no subtext to **** off the audience, and the pace will be unbearably slow. When you can become the mind of each character, melting a part of yourself into that character, your characters come alive on stage, flesh and blood, and you can say everything you want to say. Such language is more vivid than poetry, more vivid than music, more vivid than paintings, more revealing of deeper meaning, more capable of giving the audience feelings and thoughts far richer than words.
I instantly fell in love with the theater, just because of the expressive power of the stage, which no other form of literary art can match.
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Theme:
The general feeling is that the concept of theme in Chinese writers is still one level higher than in the West. Many entertainment plays in the West are not very profound in their thematic content, yet they are very popular with audiences in small folk theaters.
Looking at some of the history of Broadway, I found that many of the very "hot" shows had a strong connection to the darker side of reality, and to the social context of the time. Successful shows about blacks, gays and lesbians, etc., all had to do with the social context of the time. These plays reveal the reality and at the same time go ahead of the reality to reveal the deep philosophy and enlighten people.
The plays always express in-depth themes, always attempt to reveal deep philosophical aspects of human nature, society and politics, always explore the edges of human cognition, and push our thinking about religion, philosophy, life and death to a deeper level. While not all screenplays have grand themes, they should at least express themes that the author feels are important. This is not the case with movies and television, which are fine as long as one event follows another and a story is told to entertain the audience.
The script of a play has always been a part of literature in the West, and the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize have been awarded for plays, but not for movie scripts. It shows that the play has always been with the novel, poetry, prose and other forms of literature side by side. In fact, as a visual, auditory, verbal - "multimedia" form of literature and art, it is more popular, and has a deeper impact on society.
Structure:
Every time you read a play, you have to go back and look at the author's structural design of the story, scene by scene. This is another thing that makes theater very different from other forms of literature. Theater has a strong time-space limitation, acting plays are usually performed for two hours, a small stage, only possible to change a limited number of scenes. Not only that, the audience sitting in the theater is completely different from the readers lying on the sofa drinking tea and leisurely holding a novel. Not only are they more critical and suspicious, but their attention is easily distracted. Stories that seem dramatic in the written word fall flat on the stage. This is one of the reasons why adaptations of novels for acting fail.
This requires the playwright to make a strong structural design based on the story.
Modern audiences, influenced by film and television, need the momentum of drama more than ever, and need playwrights to speak in stories rather than directly preach, and need the subtlety of naturalism more than ever. Therefore, modern playwrights need to know how to cut a story, not only to make the story suitable for the stage body, but also to attempt to use the structure of the story, the story in the time-space of the ups and downs of the implicit and blunt, conflict and negotiation to express the story of the depth of sensibility and rationality. The thematic idea has to be built inside the framework of the overall structure.
The story of a play is performed, so the whole story has to be written from the actor's point of view, each actor is a tree not a forest, but the author does not really become the character, moving randomly without limits. The character is actually the author's language for building the overall idea and story. Novels can be written in any chapter to describe big directions and ideas, to talk or tell stories at random, and to transcend the limits of time and space, interspersing stories from different times and places. In a naturalistic play, an actor cannot casually discuss ideas outside of his or her own perspective, cannot tell stories about the past and future that he or she cannot possibly know, and can only perform according to the narrowness and limitations of the character. This places an enormous responsibility and burden on the structure of the acting story, and it becomes the playwright's lifelong quest to use the overall structure of the story to express the ideas and ambiguities while keeping the audience attentive and motionless in their seats.
The most important things inside the structure are the beginning and the end.
When writing a play, you can't forget the audience, you can't forget the director and the actors, and you can't forget the theater.
The play begins with an unfamiliar audience. The audience is more skeptical than religious, more indifferent than enthusiastic. How to write the beginning of a play is a difficult thing. Some playwrights take a slow and gradual approach, slowly warming up the audience with the suspense of the story, while others shock the audience suddenly 。。。。 There are so many different ways to do it, you can invent a million ways to start and choose the one you think is best. But the audience must be remembered.
Playing a play is face-to-face with the audience, and face-to-face with some distance. That distance doesn't have the intimacy of standing in front of it, nor does it have the imagery of looking at it from a distance and shaping it into something beautiful. Those who have been teachers and have been on the podium know this kind of psychology very well. Some teachers deliberately step down from the podium and get close to their students in their first class to alleviate this sense of distance and strangeness, others like to break the ice with jokes, and I used to like to use questions to dissolve this frozen start. Acting doesn't have that luxury. You can do this in small theaters, where the actors walk out into the audience and get up close and personal with the audience. But the average big theater doesn't allow that. The story of an acted play begins with far more obligations than a novel.
American playwright NEIL SIMON, based on his many years of experience, says that when writing comedy, don't start out extremely funny. His comedies always start out unfunny and get more and more humorous. It is because the audience has a familiarization process with the actors. Some playwrights desperately want to capture the audience at the beginning, so they use every trick in the book to add an element of attraction, but most of the time it backfires. When I wrote Charmed, I used the prologue's massacre scene to throw the audience into a shocking suspense, and the director used dance to render the atmosphere, which diluted the audience's sense of unfamiliarity. But such a start increases the audience's tension and makes it difficult to cultivate a sense of intimacy. I actually prefer the kind of slow starts that are bland, yet suspenseful, show character relationships, and are rich in subtext. Goodnight, Mommy, for example.
But remember to hold on to the words of any celebrity as dogma. Theater is like a world where any kind of thing is possible. I saw a one-man show on Broadway. The actor came out of the gate with a fantastic physical performance of an old woman, and immediately called for laughter from the entire audience, instantly removing the feeling of strangeness.
So where to start and how to present your story is going to take a lot of work. The main goal of this beginning is to capture the audience, to connect with them, to cancel the unfamiliarity as soon as possible, and at the same time to give you the best possible setup for the middle and end of your story. Some plays feel the ingenuity of the beginning when they read the end.
While the content of a dramatic story is literature and requires a genius for storytelling, structure is skill and can be learned. Experienced playwrights can take a very prosaic story and weave it into a compelling story.
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Screenplay Writing Tips
<<Preface>>
Writing a novel and writing a screenplay are two different things.
To write a good screenplay, you must know the basics and theories of screenwriting and figure out the laws of the movie!
Simply put, to write a good story, you must first conceptualize where your story is going, the relationship of the characters, the climax of the plot, the theme idea, etc....... American Hollywood has a set of screenwriting laws: i.e., beginning, setting up contradictions, resolving contradictions, and then setting up contradictions again, until the ending. China also has its own law of screenwriting: beginning, bearing, turning, and closing.
Attitude
The most important thing in writing a story is the attitude towards the story, and different attitudes will produce different effects. To take a simple example, if the same story is about a woman in a brothel, and if the author writes it with an obscene and erotic attitude, the story will naturally focus on the part of love between men and women. On the contrary, if the author is to write with a sympathetic, respectful attitude, the story will focus on the depiction of a brothel woman forced to sell her body, the body can not help the poor, helpless ......
Theme
Before you put down your pen to write a story, you must ask yourself: what kind of story are you going to tell? Is it a friendship between friends (as in the movie Midnight Cowboy Lang-midnight cow boy), a love between a man and a woman (Titanic-Titanic), an alien invasion of the earth (Heavenly Fury Earth Strikes Back), or a story of an accusation of war (The Killing Fields-platon) and so on. That's the theme.
The theme must be very clear, consistent, and unquestioning. You can't write a set of war clips that at one point cast doubt on war and at another point glorify it. A theme is like a compass, it guides you through the creation of the story, and through the loose ends of the story. And most importantly, it prevents you from straying from the main path in your writing. Try to give an example, the Qing Dynasty Emperor Yongzheng in the wild history is a kill brother, kill father to seize the throne, rape his brother's wife of the beast. However, Yongzheng in the Yongzheng Dynasty (an early TV series aired on ATV) author's writing Yongzheng, is a good emperor. Because the author's theme is to write a good emperor, so in the story will only see Yongzheng sleepless nights to criticize the zhangzhi, inspect the farmers, tax cuts, the implementation of good governance and other scenes, there is no kill brother, kill his father and other scenes.
So a successful script is one that allows the audience to read it and clearly understand the ideas and themes that the author is trying to convey.
Creating character conflict
Character conflict is a great way to engage the audience. This includes the conflict between the characters in the story, the conflict between the character and his own values, and so on.
Methods to create character conflict:
Method 1: Potogonist Vs Antogonist
The character in the story wants to do something, but there is a force that is fighting against him, this is the Potogonist / Antogonist
For example, in the movie Falling Down, the protagonist has just been killed in a fight. ) In the story, the protagonist has just finished a painful prison sentence, and when he gets out of prison, he is bent on seeing his wife and living a normal life again (Potogonist, the thing he wants to pursue). But his wife shuns him and disowns him, and the people around him discriminate against him because of his criminal record (Antogonist, the force that prevents him from achieving his goal).
Method 2: Unbreakable bonding
The good part comes when there is a conflict between the characters and there is an inseparable knot pulling them together. To give a simple example, the hero's wife is a woman of the third degree and gossip, while the hero's mother is a traditional woman who observes etiquette. Because of circumstances, the protagonist and his wife must move into the house with their mother. Imagine two people in total conflict: a daughter-in-law and a grandmother when pulled together by an unbreakable bond.
Creating dramatic tension
How can you create a tense scene?
Method 1: Let your audience know something that the characters in the story don't
For example, if the protagonist of a story breaks into an enemy base, and there's a gun sticking out of the darkness aiming at him (which the audience knows about, but the protagonist doesn't), and the enemy is about to shoot, and the audience is worried about the protagonist.
Method 2: Make your audience feel that the character is going down the wrong path
The protagonist's mother is sick, and he only has a hundred dollars to spend, so he goes to the casino to try his luck. The protagonist keeps on winning, and he has a few thousand dollars, which is enough to pay for his medical bills. However, he is so greedy that he does not know how to lose and continues to gamble. As a result, he loses game after game (the audience knows that he is already on the wrong path). In the end, he even lost the one hundred dollars in his hand, and went so far as to ask the loan shark to borrow money (he used the wrong method to attempt to achieve his goal).
Method 3: Deadline
There are certain events in the story that have a time limit, or a time bomb, that can give the audience a sense of tension, and that tension can be maintained for a long time.
In twelve hours, a meteorite will strike the Earth, killing more than half of all life on the planet. (Movie - Meteorite Impact)
The bus must travel at 120 km/h or the bomb on board will explode. (Movie - The Speed of Life and Death)
Method 4: Turning Point
The use of turning points creates an unexpected effect, arouses the audience's anticipation, and strengthens the tension of the plot, thus sustaining the audience's interest in the story. Turning Points are most often found at the beginning and end of a story. Turning points in the first part of the script are usually used to open the story and show the choices that the protagonist is going to face. Later turning points point to the protagonist resolving the crisis and wrapping up the story.
For example, in the famous movie Born on the fourth of July, the protagonist faces the first turning point at the beginning of the story: whether or not to fight in the Vietnam War. The protagonist finally chooses to join the war and goes to war. However, this is not always the case. During the war, the protagonist's legs are broken and he is wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life. The original patriotic protagonist changes his mind after experiencing multiple events. This leads to a very surprising turning point in the ending of the story, where he goes from being a main war activist to an anti-war activist, thus bringing out the theme of anti-war.
Planting
I'm sure anyone who has written an essay will know what it means to plant an ambush! Planting an ambush can attract the audience to follow the plot. For example, in the movie Mind Tricks, the main character Tommy reveals early on that he has the ability to mimic people's signatures and behaviors (the ambush), and when the story develops to the point where he kills the rich man Dicky, the audience already knows that the protagonist is going to impersonate Dicky by virtue of the ambush.
Payoff
The so-called payoff is the object that best symbolizes the whole story. For example, in the movie "Apartment", the key to the door is a payoff, and in the famous movie "Schindler's List", the list of Jews is also a payoff.
Montage
There are two images, which are shown in the same way, this is montage. is montage. For example, in the movie The Godfather, one side of the screen shows a church ceremony, such as a priest baptizing a child, praying to God, and so on. But on the other side of the screen, the evil side of the Church is shown, such as the leader of the Church going to the houses of those who oppose him and killing them in order to take over the power.
Montage can also refer to a number of different and unrelated images, when they are cut together, another meaning will be created, in simple terms, such as the first image of a hand is throwing a ball, and another image is another hand to receive a ball, but the ball does not necessarily have to be the same, but when the two images together, it is a person who throws the ball to the other, note / if the two images together, it is a person who throws the ball to the other, note / if the other is the same, this is not the same, but the other is the same. another frame is added in between, this means something completely different!
Three big taboos in scripts
Writing a script becomes writing a novel
Script writing and novel writing are two completely different things, to know the purpose of writing a script is to use words to express a series of images, so you have to let the people who read the script to see the words and be able to instantly associate them with a picture, to bring them to the world of animation. A novel is different, in that it includes not only images, but also lyrical sentences, rhetorical devices, and descriptions of the inner world of the characters. These should not be in a script. To give a simple example, in the novel there are such sentences:
"Today, the results of the examination will be released, students are very nervous waiting for the results, Xiao Ming said goodbye to his parents, then went to the school to get the results notice. The teacher handed out the result slips and Xiao Ming thought to himself: it would be bad if he failed this time.
He was very worried and afraid that he wouldn't know how to face his family after failing the exam ......"
Imagine if the above sentences were written in a script, how would you tell the actors to look at it and express it with their actions.
If you were to use a script to express the same meaning, it would have to be written as follows:
"Inside the classroom, the students were sitting in their seats with nervous expressions on their faces as they looked at the teacher standing outside. The teacher was holding a stack of grade notices in her hand, she looked at the one at the top of her face and called out, "Da Xiong Chen!" Daxiong immediately walked out to collect his report card. Xiao Ming was in a corner of the classroom, rubbing his hands together. He looked outside the classroom, and the scene gradually returned to that morning. Ming's parents had been sitting in the hall that morning. Ming had put on his uniform and was ready to go out, but when he looked at his father and mother and saw their serious faces, he didn't know what to say. Xiao Ming's father said, "will pass?" Xiao Ming said, "It ...... will."
"Called Xiao Ming!" The teacher's loud voice brought Xiao Ming back to reality from his memories. The teacher held Xiao Ming's report card in his hand and looked at him, Xiao Ming stayed for a while before walking out quickly to collect ......
Talking to deliver the plot
There shouldn't be too much dialog in the script (unless it's necessary for the plot), otherwise the whole story will become incoherent, lack of action, and the audience will look as if they were listening to the reading of the script. The audience will look like they are listening to a script reading. Realize that you are writing in movie language, not literary language. What is only suitable for reading but not for watching is not a good script. Therefore, a good movie script, the less dialogue, the stronger the sense of picture, the greater the power. The more powerful it is.
To take a simple example, if you write about a man on the phone, you'd better not have him sitting by the phone, not moving, just talking. If the plot requires it, have him stand up, or take a few steps with the phone, to try to avoid a dull and monotonous picture.
There are too many loose ends
Many people write scripts with too many loose ends, with lots of characters and interspersed scenes, which complicates the story and makes it difficult for the audience to understand what the author is trying to say. Imagine if there are more than a dozen important characters in a movie scene at the same time, and there are a lot of stories between the characters, you ask the audience in a short period of time that can remember each character so clearly.
In fact, there is a motto in screenwriting: "Simple is the best! Think of all the good movies you've seen, and see if they all have simple plots. For example, the movie Titanic is just about a big ship sinking, and in the middle of the sinking, the hero and heroine fall in love. Other movies, too, are so simple that a newspaper review can tell the story in just a few dozen words.
But the simple is always the hardest.
But simplicity is always the hardest.