'I don't write, I listen, and I just take dictation. I was trained as a musician. I'm a terrible speller, and I don't have a sense of prose as a discipline. I only hear people talking, and I put down what they say.'
'I don't write, I listen, and I just take dictation. I was trained as a musician. I'm a terrible speller, and I don't have a sense of prose as a discipline. I only hear people talking, and I put down what they say.' -- Michael Weller
Playwrights build a physical construction on stage -- with spoken words. You can move around in it, as the performers do. But it's an invisible construction. And that makes it easy to think it's just words -- any old words that do the job. Well, it's not.
Any old words that just do the job are a crashing bore in the theatre. What playwrights do is make us hear things we've never quite heard in that way before.There's a simple rule for developing your unique voice as a
To be good at this playwriting business, you need to retrain your ears to hear how people really speak.Here's what to listen
A great way to start this listening business: Eavesdrop on your friends, your relations, and especially strangers on the streets, in restaurants, or stores. Be shameless, but don't be obvious. This sort of thing is not an endearing trait in the normal world unless you work for the FBI.
William Saroyan learned to write dialogue by keeping his ear to the upstairs heating vent while his parents entertained -- and wrote down what he heard.
Most playwrights don't duplicate on paper what they've heard on the street -- unless what they've heard is especially wonderful. By doing the work of listening and then writing dialogue, you'll gradually create your own special Voice. Doing this is almost pure magic. By listening and writing, your Voice will usually form on its own. And the best way to speed up this process is to keep Subtext out of the mouths of your characters.
http://www.vcu.edu/arts/playwriting/