Plots: They Come in Pairs

THE PLAYWRITING SEMINARS > STRUCTURE > SHAPE > DIAGRAM > INCITING > PLOTS >

'I used to think that you could just start to write and see what happened. Now I find that if you do that, it doesn't turn out; you may not get anywhere that's interesting. There are drives to plays. Sometimes I think of them as pieces of machinery. With a destination, lots of things come into focus for you as a writer.'

-- Marsha Norman

We sit through those 4 hours of HAMLET because we want find out if this dithering Prince will kill the King before the King kills him.

But that's not what Old Bill wanted to spend his time on. [It's what Screenwriters spend all their time on.] But he also knew -- as nearly every produced playwright knows -- that he needed an excuse to hold audiences in their seats. Then he could spend 90% of the play exploring what he really wanted to write about: the Emotional Consequences of Claudius having killed Hamlet's father.

That's where the Twin Plots come from.

The purpose of the Suspense Plot -- the What-Happens-Next of a play -- is to give you an excuse to write about what you're really interested in: the Emotional Plot.

No matter how great your Emotional Plot may be, you can't hold an audience for more than about 20 minutes if you don't have that Suspense Plot doing the dirty work for you . . .