The Dramatic Writer's Companion: Tools to Develop Characters, Cause Scenes, and Build Stories

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2009, 2017 by Will Dunne

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49408-1 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49411-1 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/97802262494111.001.00001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dunne, Will, author. | Supplement (work): Dunne, Will. Character, scene, story.

Title: The dramatic writer’s companion : tools to develop characters, cause scenes, and build stories / Will Dunne.

Description: 2nd edition. | Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017020150 | ISBN 9780226494081 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226494111 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Drama—Technique—Handbooks, manuals, etc. | Authorship—Handbooks, manuals, etc. | Playwriting—Handbooks, manuals, etc. | Motion picture authorship—Handbooks, manuals, etc.

Classification: LCC PN1661 .D86 2017 | DDC 808.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020150

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

The Dramatic Writer’s Companion

2nd Edition

TOOLS TO DEVELOP CHARACTERS, CAUSE SCENES, AND BUILD STORIES

WILL DUNNE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

Books by Will Dunne

The Dramatic Writer’s Companion: Tools to Develop Characters, Cause Scenes, and Build Stories

Character, Scene, and Story: New Tools from the Dramatic Writer’s Companion

The Architecture of Story: A Technical Guide for the Dramatic Writer

In honor of LLOYD RICHARDS

and with gratitude to MARY F. MCCABE

CONTENTS

About This Guide

Exercises at a Glance

DEVELOPING YOUR CHARACTER

STAGE 1: FLESHING OUT THE BONES

Basic Character Builder

Begin to create a new character by fleshing out key physical, psychological, and social traits and by identifying some of the important experiences that have shaped the character by the time the story begins.

What the Character Believes

The character’s personal beliefs have a huge impact on how he or she sees the world, makes decisions, and behaves. Twenty topics lead you through an exploration of this credo and—like the next two parallel exercises—ask you to respond through your character’s unique perceptions and voice.

Where the Character Lives

Whether or not story action actually takes place in the character’s home, it is a personal domain that can reveal much about who your character is and isn’t. Twenty questions lead you through this exploration.

Where the Character Works

The activities, culture, and experience of work provide another key source of character information—even if this work doesn’t figure prominently in the story action. Twenty questions lead you through this exploration.

Getting Emotional

Dramatic characters tend to be driven by strong feelings. Learn more about your character by exploring his or her primal emotions—anger, fear, and love—and the stimuli that trigger them.

Into the Past

One key to a great story is a great backstory. What has your character experienced in the past that will shed new light on his or her behavior now? Starting at the precise moment the story begins, this exercise leads you backward through time, step by step, to discover important truths.

Defining Trait

What are the bold strokes of your character—positive or negative—and how do these dominant traits inform and affect story events? This exercise helps you explore the causes and effects of the character traits that matter most.

STAGE 2: GETTING TO KNOW THE CHARACTER BETTER

Allies: Then and Now

Drama is about human relationships and how they function under pressure. This exercise defines different types of allies, such as the dangerous ally, and asks you to find examples of each in your character’s life.

Adversaries: Then and Now

This exercise picks up where the previous one left off, defining different types of adversaries, such as the friendly foe, and asks you to find examples of each in your character’s life.

Characters in Contrast

Compare two of your principal characters in categories ranging from key strengths (such as extra special talent) to key weaknesses (such as extra special lack of talent). You may find similarities and differences that help you better understand both characters and their relationship.

Finding the Character’s Voice

A fully developed character has a unique way of expressing thoughts and feelings. Explore some of the long-term and short-term factors that can affect this voice. Then compare the voices of any two of your characters.

Three Characters in One

See what truths, lies, and delusions you can uncover by exploring a character from three different perspectives: that of the character, that of someone who knows the character well, and that of an objective outside observer.

The Secret Lives of Characters

The secrets that characters keep suggest a lot about what they value and what they fear. Explore different types of character secrets and how they might affect the direction of your story.

STAGE 3: UNDERSTANDING WHO THE CHARACTER REALLY IS

The Noble Character

Great characters tend to be noble in nature, even if they are also flawed and behave badly. This raise-the-bar exercise challenges you to explore the nobility of a character and build on this to create a more important story.

Seven Deadly Sins

Whether or not your characters are religious, the concept of sin offers opportunities to explore their individual strengths and weaknesses. Use the traditional seven deadly sins to develop capsule portraits of your characters.

The Dramatic Triangle

In a relationship between two characters, there is often a third party affecting what happens between them—even if the third party is not physically present. Learn more about a key relationship by analyzing it as a dramatic triangle.

Spinal Tap

The spine of the character is the root action from which all of the character’s other actions flow. This big-picture exercise helps you explore a character’s spine and use it to trigger new story ideas.

Character as Paradox

Fascinating characters tend to manifest contradictory traits and behaviors. By exploring your character as a paradox—a self-contradiction which is true—you can add to his or her complexity and generate new ideas for story action.

The Character You Like Least

To develop any character, you need to understand how he or she experiences the world. Try this character exploration if you find yourself with a two-dimensional bad guy whom you are having trouble writing.

In So Many Words

This exercise helps you establish a big-picture view of your character and then gradually focus in on his or her most important characteristics.

CAUSING A SCENE

STAGE 1: MAKING THINGS HAPPEN

Basic Scene Starter

This simple writing warm-up offers twelve basic questions that can help you prepare to write any dramatic scene.

Where in the World Are We?

The setting for a scene can be a rich source of story ideas if you take the time to discover what’s there. This physical life exercise guides you through a visceral exploration of the place where a scene will occur.

The Roots of Action

Explore the given circumstances for a scene and use this scenic context to fuel the emotions, thoughts, needs, and behavior of your characters at this particular time in your story.

What Does the Character Want?

Dramatic characters act for one reason: they want something. Explore five types of objectives and figure out what specifically your character wants in any scene of your story.

What’s the Problem?

Conflict in drama is obstacle. Explore different types of obstacles that your character might have to face while pursuing a scenic objective.

Good Intentions

Right or wrong, characters act in pursuit of what they perceive to be good at the time. Find the good intentions behind even the worst behavior so that you can better understand the characters you write.

How It Happens

Characters try different strategies—some planned, some spontaneous—to achieve their objectives. This exercise helps you figure out the beginning steps of character action in a scene.

Character Adjustments

Your character has a certain observable attitude or emotion that can affect how a scene begins or unfolds. Use this exercise to explore different possible adjustments for your character during the course of a scene.

Scene in a Sentence

No matter how many different actions and topics it involves, and regardless of its complexity, a scene is about one thing. This exercise helps you explore the main event of a scene from different angles that may lead to new story ideas.

STAGE 2: REFINING THE ACTION

Seeing the Scene

A picture is worth a thousand words. Streamline the need for dialogue by exploring new ways to literally show, not tell, your story and create a simple visual storyboard of the scenic action.

There and Then

In drama, the term exposition refers to anything that is not observable in the here and now. Use this exercise to turn expositional facts into story action that fuels your story instead of stopping it.

The Aha!s of the Story

Characters continually acquire new knowledge about themselves, others, and the world at large. Explore three types of character discovery and how these aha! moments might influence the dramatic action of a scene.

Heating Things Up

One way to heighten conflict is to make confrontation between your characters unavoidable. Explore different conflict techniques, from a binding disagreement to such devices as the locked cage, ticking clock, and vise.

The Emotional Storyboard

Character feelings are an integral part of story structure. Map out the emotional arc of each character in a scene, and explore how this emotional life both creates and grows out of the dramatic action.

In the Realm of the Senses

Sense experience and sense memory are key ingredients of our participation in your story. Add visceral power to a scene—and trigger new ideas—by doing an in-depth sense study of its setting, characters, and dramatic action.

The Voice of the Setting

Whether indoors or out, every setting has its own voice. Explore different ways to use the nonverbal sounds of this voice to help set the scene, create a mood, or tell the story.

Thinking in Beats

The beat is the smallest unit of dramatic action. By doing a beat analysis of a scene you want to revise or edit, you can not only pinpoint dramaturgical problems, but also evaluate your current writing process.

STAGE 3: REFINING THE DIALOGUE

Talking and Listening

Dialogue is heightened speech that sounds like everyday conversation but isn’t. Here are some general guidelines to help you revise your dialogue so that it accomplishes more with less.

Unspeakable Truths

What your characters don’t say is just as important—and often more important—than what they do say. Explore the subtext of your characters and how to communicate it without actually stating it.

Universal Truths and Lies

A great story imparts not only the specifics of a plot, but also statements—true or false—about the world we all live in. Elevate your dialogue by exploring character beliefs about the human condition, and blending these universal truths and lies into plot details.

The Bones of the Lines

While there are no rules for writing dialogue, certain basic principles tend to govern the power of dramatic speech. Use these principles as editing guidelines to refine your dialogue from a purely technical angle.

BUILDING YOUR STORY

STAGE 1: TRIGGERING THE CHAIN OF EVENTS

Whose Story Is It?

A dramatic story may center on one, two, or more characters. Use this exercise to find the right character focus for your story if you are having trouble figuring out whose story you are writing.

How Will the Tale Be Told?

From what vantage point will we experience the world of your characters? Develop a point-of-view contract to define how you will limit—or not limit—our knowledge of story events.

As the World Turns

What is the world of your story? Trigger new story ideas by fleshing out the physical, cultural, and political dimensions of this realm as well as the values, beliefs, and laws that govern it.

Inciting Event

Every story is a quest triggered by a turning-point experience that upsets the balance of a character’s life in either a good way or a bad way. Explore your story’s inciting event and how it affects your character.

The Art of Grabbing

Great stories grab us by the throat and don’t let go. Increase your story’s grabbing power by looking carefully at what you have accomplished—or not accomplished—during the first ten pages.

STAGE 2: DEVELOPING THE THROUGHLINE

Step by Step

Drama is about life in transition. This exercise helps you plan the big transition of your character’s dramatic journey, using a step outline to track and analyze key events.

Turning Points

Your character’s dramatic journey is a sequence of events that can sometimes turn in unexpected directions. Learn more about your story by fleshing out two basic types of turning points.

What Happens Next?

Suspense is a core ingredient of any dramatic story. Use basic principles of suspense to strengthen your story and keep your audience engaged.

Pointing and Planting

Foreshadowing can help you strengthen your throughline by finding the relationships between story events. Use this exercise to explore how setups and payoffs can heighten suspense.

Crisis Decision

The crisis is when your subject, theme, character, and story all converge to create the most difficult decision your character must face. Construct this crisis decision by examining the gains and losses that hang in the balance.

Picturing the Arc of Action

This exercise can help you visualize the throughline of your story, find telling images of your character at the most important points of the dramatic journey, and understand how these points connect.

Before and After

Define your character’s dramatic journey by comparing its starting point to its final destination and determine how the character has been affected by what happened.

Twelve-Word Solution

Work within given limits to explore your story globally and define the key events of your character’s dramatic journey.

STAGE 3: SEEING THE BIG PICTURE

Main Event

No matter how complex its characters, plots, and subplots may be, a great story usually adds up to one main event. This focusing exercise helps you understand what happens—or what could happen—in your story overall.

Your Story as a Dog

By translating your story into totally different forms, such as a newspaper headline or poem, you can simplify and prioritize your story ideas, get a clearer view of the big picture, and have fun in the process.

The Incredible Shrinking Story

Developing a synopsis is a great focusing process that can help clarify what you are really writing about. This exercise helps you get the most out of this process by writing not just one but seven different levels of summary.

What’s the Big Idea?

As you review your script, you will probably find a number of themes woven throughout. Use this focusing exercise to figure out which of these ideas is most important, and develop a theme statement that can help guide the rest of story development.

What’s in a Name?

This exercise might help you find a great title for your story, but its primary purpose is to use the naming process to explore the big picture of your story and figure out what matters most.

The Forest of Your Story

The forest is what we discover when we can finally see more than just the trees. What is the forest of your story? This summary exercise leads you through a detailed big-picture analysis of your material.

Ready, Aim, Focus

This focusing exercise asks you to think a lot but write only a little as you give one-word answers to big questions about your story, such as What does your main character most want?

Six Steps of Revision

The revision process is often when a script gets written. This exercise offers a series of suggestions and reminders to help you review a completed draft of your script.

FIXING COMMON SCRIPT PROBLEMS

Use exercises from this guide to address such problems as False Character; Unnecessary Character; No One to Care About; Not Clear What the Character Wants; Not Enough Conflict; Not Enough at Stake; False Starts and Stops; Strategy Gone Stale; Retrospective Elucidation; Punches That Don’t Land; Nothing Happening; Something Happening, but It Doesn’t Matter; Lack of Focus Early On; Main Character Too Passive or Missing in Action; Offstage More Interesting Than Onstage; Weak Throughline; A Crisis That Isn’t; Not Clear What Happened in the Story; A Theme That Isn’t; and Way Too Many Words.

Glossary

Acknowledgments

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

The Dramatic Writer’s Companion is a creative and analytical reference tool that has helped thousands of writers develop new plays, screenplays, and other types of stories. It is composed not as a linear sequence of chapters but as a collection of self-contained writing exercises to help you explore and refine your own unique material. These tools can be used at any time in any order and can be repeated as often as you like to make new discoveries.

This second edition of the guide has been updated to include chapter-by-chapter references to related writing exercises in the complementary guide Character, Scene, and Story: New Tools from the Dramatic Writer’s Companion, which uses a similar structure and approach to help you develop scripts. It is not necessary to have that guide in order to use this one, but having both expands the collection of writing tools at your disposal as you flesh out characters, scenes, and stories. Together, the two guides offer you more than one hundred script development tools.

For best results, please take the time to read this introduction, which explains more about this guide and how to use it.

TO THE DRAMATIC WRITER

As a dramatic writer working on a play or screenplay, you are engaged in the process of telling a story. It is a process both old and new—old because its roots stretch back through centuries and offer time-tested principles to guide you, and new because it must be adapted to an utterly unique set of dynamics: you and the story you want to tell.

This guide is designed to help you manage both the old and the new of the storytelling process. Written from a playwright’s perspective and making room in its embrace for both playwrights and screenwriters, the guide offers sixty-two in-depth character, scene, and story development exercises. The purpose of these tools is to spark creativity and steer analysis as you develop your script.

TOOLS FOR LEAPING INTO BLANK PAGES

The exercises in this guide build on certain basic assumptions. First, though stage and film are each a distinct medium, the writers of plays and screenplays are more alike than different. Both must create the blueprint for an emotional experience that is meant to be seen and heard. Both must tackle the idea that less is more and convey a lot—often a character’s entire lifetime—in one audience sitting. Both must use the present to imply the past. Both must figure out how to show, not tell, the story so that the audience’s knowledge of it comes not from hearing explanations but from observing and interpreting character behavior. Like storytellers of any kind, dramatic writers also must try to grab the audience from the start, keep them interested to the end, and communicate something meaningful along the way. It is common challenges like these that the exercises in this guide are designed to address.

Second, though there may be no rules for creating art, dramatic stories tend to reflect certain basic storytelling principles. For example, most plays and screenplays focus on the dramatic journey of one main character. This journey usually consists of a series of events that change the world of the story for better or worse. Most of these events are caused by the character’s need to accomplish something important and are shaped by the conflicts and risks that stand in the way.

Some dramatic writers adhere faithfully to classic principles like these and produce great works like A Streetcar Named Desire and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Other writers cherry-pick such principles—using some and ignoring others—to produce great plays like Waiting for Godot, where nothing really happens, and great films like Crash, which has no main character or central throughline. Whether you wish to use traditional techniques or ignore them, you can benefit from an understanding of storytelling principles that have proven to work. The exercises in this guide are designed to remind you of such principles and give you leeway to adapt them in whatever way best fits your specific needs and story.

American playwright and director Moss Hart once said that you never really learn how to write a play, you learn only how to write this play.

CHARACTER: THE HEART AND SOUL OF STORY

While emphasizing different aspects of the dramatic writing process, this guide draws from the theory that character is the root of scene and story. The more you know your characters and the world they inhabit, the better equipped you will be to discover and develop all of the other dramatic elements for your script.

Every exercise in this guide is, to some degree, a character exploration. Even when you are working through the details of a scene or building a story, you are making decisions about your characters: how each is unique and how each is universal. The success of your work will depend on how broadly and deeply you mine the truths of each character and use them to structure the dramatic journey. Such truths are most useful when you understand them emotionally as well as intellectually, especially when you are in the moment of a scene and need to know what each character will say and do next.

Plot is a critical element of any play or screenplay, but a script dictated by plot points may end up sacrificing truth for spectacle and result not in drama but in melodrama. By letting the plot evolve from the characters instead of forcing the characters into a prefabricated plot, you can keep the focus on truths that enlighten the human condition rather than exaggerated conflicts and emotions that exist only for dramatic effect.

Herein lies the simplest yet most powerful idea underlying this collection of dramatic writing exercises: The character is not something added to the scene or to the story. Rather, the character is the scene. The character is the story.

REAL STORY SOLUTIONS

Each exercise in this guide grew out of real issues that playwrights and screenwriters faced while working on scripts, side by side, in more than fifteen hundred dramatic writing workshops that I conducted over twenty years. Each exercise was then tested with different writer groups and refined as needed. The result is a collection of tools that translate dramatic theory into action steps and cover a range of topics from a variety of angles.

Some exercises focus on development details, such as defining a character’s credo or figuring out her scenic objective. Others address the big picture of the story by helping you explore subject, theme, and throughline. Sometimes the approach is instinctual—you work from the heart to find new insights—and sometimes intellectual: you work from the head to evaluate material, fix problems, and reach writing goals.

Each exercise tackles its topic in depth and provides step-by-step guidance rather than general directives. Though the guide is meant to have both educational and motivational value, no exercise is solely a lesson or creative diversion for its own sake. Rather, each targets information that you can import to your story so that you are always exploring your own material—not someone else’s. In effect, the exercises become part of your writing process rather than something you do in addition to it.

OTHER RELATED RESOURCES TO ENRICH YOUR WRITING PROCESS

This guide is complemented by two other guides that use a similar structure and approach to help you develop dramatic scripts. Both let you adapt writing tools to your needs by choosing the topics you want to explore at any given time during the writing or revision process.

• Character, Scene, and Story: New Tools from the Dramatic Writer’s Companion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) expands the collection of script development tools in this guide by addressing new topics and by exploring many of the same topics in more depth or from new angles. To facilitate this process, each exercise in each guide includes references to related tools in the other guide. Many of the tools in Character, Scene, and Story are visceral techniques that call for intuitive responses. For example, they help you dig deeper into your script by fleshing out visual images, exploring characters from emotional perspectives, and tapping the power of color and sense memory to trigger story ideas. The new guide concludes with a special troubleshooting section to help you tackle problem scenes.

• The Architecture of Story: A Technical Guide for the Dramatic Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) helps you develop your own dramatic scripts by exploring storytelling tools and techniques that other writers have used. Three successful contemporary American plays—Doubt: A Parable by John Patrick Shanley, Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks, and The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl—are each dismantled from a technical perspective to illustrate dramatic writing principles that you can adapt in countless ways to the scripts you develop. In addition to detailed analysis of these plays, the guide includes hundreds of questions to help you evaluate your own work.

HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE

You are welcome to sit down and read this guide from cover to cover, but that is not the intended use. Like any reference tool, the guide invites you to review its contents, select the specific information you need now, and use it to produce results.

NONLINEAR DESIGN: YOU CHOOSE WHICH EXERCISE TO DO NEXT

The exercises in this guide are each self-contained, so you can try them in any order at any time and repeat them at different times with different results. This approach reflects the idea that there is no single way to develop story and lets you adapt the guide to your individual writing process and level of experience.

ORGANIZATION FOR EASE OF USE

To help you manage the guide, the exercises are divided into three areas of content: character, scene, and story. Though character is the foundation of scene and story, the breakdown allows a different focus for each section.

Exercises within each section have been further divided into stages 1, 2, and 3. The purpose of these numbers is not to indicate degree of difficulty but to suggest the general stage of script development in which an exercise might be most appropriate, with stage 1 best suited to early development and stage 3 to later development. Attention to these numbers is optional. They are provided mainly for writers who prefer a more structured approach to choosing exercises.

At the end of this guide you will find a troubleshooting section that highlights twenty common script problems and suggests specific exercises to help you address them. For quick reference, you also will find a glossary of terms to facilitate nonlinear use of this guide and also to highlight the dramatic principles woven throughout the exercises. For example, the term beat appears in many of the exercises. While it may refer elsewhere to a pause in dialogue for dramatic effect, beat is used in this guide only to mean the smallest unit of dramatic action. Just as a dramatic story is made up of scenes, a scene is made up of beats. Each beat centers on one thing, such as one topic, one behavior, or one emotion. Beats bring variety to the dramatic action of a scene and determine its structure and rhythm.

EXERCISE ELEMENTS TO TRIGGER DISCOVERY

As you work with the guide, you will find that each exercise offers certain features to support your character, scene, or story exploration, including a summary, suggestion for when to use the exercise, topic introduction, exercise introduction, detailed action steps, and recap of key messages.

Since the exercises are designed to be self-contained and useful in any order, certain principles and questions are repeated among them. As you develop your script, these recurring elements can often lead to new discoveries. Use any recurring theory you encounter as an opportunity to reevaluate your current writing process, and any recurring question as an opportunity to rethink your material and gain new insights about your characters and story. Some exercises tackle the same subject but with different levels of depth or from different angles. Most exercises can be completed in about thirty minutes.

EXAMPLES TO ILLUSTRATE KEY PRINCIPLES

The guide is sprinkled with hundreds of examples from dramatic works, many of which have been developed as both plays and films. Some examples are quick references. Others include more detailed script analysis. The dramatic works used most often or in most depth include Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner, Ballad of the Sad Café adapted by Edward Albee from a book by Carson McCullers, The Bear by Anton Chekhov, The Beard of Avon by Amy Freed, Betrayal by Harold Pinter, Blasted by Sarah Kane, Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley, Doubt by John Patrick Shanley, Edmond by David Mamet, The Elephant Man by Bernard Pomerance, Frozen by Bryony Lavery, Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet, Hamlet by William Shakespeare, The History Boys by Alan Bennett, Hotel Desperado by Will Dunne, How I Became an Interesting Person by Will Dunne, In the Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks, Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill, Loot by Joe Orton, The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman and Ronald Harwood, The Piano Lesson by August Wilson, The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh, Proof by David Auburn, Psycho by Robert Bloch and Joseph Stefano, The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard, Search and Destroy by Howard Korder, Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks, A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, True West by Sam Shepard, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, and Wit by Margaret Edson.

GETTING STARTED

How should you begin to develop a dramatic script? Different writers address this question in different ways. In the end, their answers indicate not what is correct in the storytelling universe but rather what works best for them. Here are suggestions for getting started with this guide and doing whatever works best for you.

1. Select a section. Think about where you are now in the development of your script. Trust your instinct and pick one of three areas to tackle: character, scene, or story. Then go to the matching section in the table of contents.

• Use Developing Your Character to flesh out, explore, and understand the important characters in your story. Exercises range from a basic character builder to in-depth character analysis.

• Use Causing a Scene to plan, write, or revise any scene in your story. Exercises range from a basic scene starter to more advanced tools for refining dramatic action and dialogue.

• Use Building Your Story to spark global thinking and figure out how to compose and connect dramatic events so that they add up to one story. Exercises range from deciding whose story you’re writing to analyzing and revising the dramatic journey that emerged.

If you don’t know much about your story yet, or if you’re not sure what to try next, go to Developing Your Character. The more you know your characters, the more your story will write itself.

2. (Optional) Select a level. Choose the level of exercise that best matches your current knowledge of the story.

• Stage 1 starter tools can help lay the groundwork for a new character, new scene, or new story: you may use them any time in any order during writing or revision but might find them most helpful during early script development, when you have the most to figure out.

• Stage 2 exploratory tools can help you learn more about a character, scene, or story you’ve started. You may use them any time in any order but might find them most helpful during the middle to later stages of script development, when you want to get deeper into your material.

• Stage 3 focusing tools can help you simplify, prioritize, and clarify your thoughts about a character, scene, or whole story. You may use them any time in any order but might find them most helpful during the later stages of story development, when you are more familiar with your script and have the most details to track and manage.

Some writers will choose to do stage 1 exercises first, stage 2 next, and stage 3 last. Others will gain more from ignoring these numbers and intuitively creating their own system of use. For example, you may wish to try a stage 1 exercise during later script development. The leap back to basics can help shake up material that has grown stale. Or you may wish to try a stage 3 during early script development even though you may not yet be prepared to complete many of the steps. The leap forward can help you plan the story or formulate questions to guide the work ahead.

3. Select an exercise. Scan the exercise summaries in this category at this level, and pick the most appealing one. Don’t worry about whether you are making the right choice, because while you are using this guide you cannot make a mistake. You can gain something useful from whichever exercise you choose to do—even if you simply select one at random.

4. (Optional) Explore the topic further. By reviewing the table of contents or the streamlined Exercises at a Glance, you may find other tools in this guide related to the topic at hand. If you also have Character, Scene, and Story: New Tools from the Dramatic Writer’s Companion, you can continue exploring the topic or a related one in that guide as well. To keep you aware of what the other guide offers, each chapter in this second edition concludes with suggestions of exercises to consider.

ONGOING USE OF THE GUIDE

You can use this guide periodically or every time you sit down to work on your story. Integrate the exercises into your writing process to help you warm up, find and explore new ideas, and analyze and solve script problems. Remember that you can use the same exercise at different times to find new material for your story.

As you become familiar with the guide, you can shortcut exercise selection by using Exercises at a Glance on page xxiii.

While you write and rewrite, you may wish to use the troubleshooting section at the end of the guide to tackle specific script problems. Remember that if the meaning of a term is unclear, you can always check the glossary for a working definition.

GROUND RULES

Before you start any exercise in this guide, be sure you are familiar with the following guidelines. They provide a foundation for each exercise and are designed to help you get the most out of this guide. For best results, revisit these suggestions now and then, and keep them in mind each time you do an exercise:

1. Trust your authority. A basic principle of these exercises is to proceed with confidence and turn off the censor inside you who says your work isn’t good enough. While doing each exercise—at least for that thirty minutes or so—you are infallible and simply cannot make a mistake. Enjoy it while it lasts.

2. Work fast. Another basic principle is to open up and let ideas flow by working as quickly as possible. Try to avoid thinking too much or getting too complicated. If you get stuck on a question, jot down any answer—even a bad one—and go on from there. Off-the-cuff responses sometimes have surprising payoffs later.

3. Look for what’s new. Some exercises may focus on material that overlaps with other material you’ve already discovered through another exercise or on your own. Keep taking creative leaps, and try to avoid repeating or rehashing what you already know. Use the exercises to make discoveries, not relive them.

4. Go one step at a time. The exercises tend to work best if you don’t know where they are leading. Once you get past the introductory material and into the action steps of the exercise, don’t look ahead. Focus on here and now.

5. Honor exercise limits. Most of the exercises are designed to be done in one sitting. Some have word limits and other restrictions. These limits are designed to boost your creativity, not stifle it.

6. Stay flexible. Some exercises ask you to explore several different possibilities to find one solution. For best results, complete the exercise even if you think you’ve already found a solution that works. It’s only an exercise, and the exploration could lead to valuable material where you least expect it.

7. Think big. These exercises are designed ultimately to help you discover and understand what matters most about your story. If you find yourself at a crossroads, unsure of which way to turn, always make the most dramatic choice.

8. Have fun. While some writers suffer in garrets and slave over their stories, others enjoy their work. The value of your script will not be measured by how much anguish you experienced in producing it. Dramatic writing is serious stuff—and it will often be challenging—but you can have a good time in the process.

EXERCISES AT A GLANCE

DEVELOPING YOUR CHARACTER

Stage 1: Fleshing Out the Bones

Stage 2: Getting to Know the Character Better

Stage 3: Understanding Who the Character Really Is

CAUSING A SCENE

Stage 1: Making Things Happen

Stage 2: Refining the Action

Stage 3: Refining the Dialogue