THE SCENARIO

A scenario is a scene-by-scene outline of the action of the play. In its final version, your scenario serves as a plan for action, guiding your daily writing routine and leading you to successful completion. Your scenario enables you to imagine your play as a comprehensive whole. To create a play without a scenario is akin to building a house without a blueprint. Your first step will be to design a rough scenario.

Think of play construction as designing performance through units of action. The play, the largest unit of action, should be built with unity, wholeness, and completeness. A thirty-minute play has a single act as the major unit of construction. Full-length plays have two, three, or as many as five acts. Being able to construct a unified and complete one-act play will lead to the greater challenge of constructing full-length plays.

UNITS OF ACTION

Construct units of action (plays, acts, scenes, French scenes, and beats) with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning gathers possibility for action that causes a middle. A middle is the effective result of what went before and creates probable action that causes the end. The end, a necessary result of what went on before, resolves the action. A cause and effect chain reaction of events leads from the possible through the probable and ends with a necessary conclusion. In successful drama, the ending is a surprising, necessary and logical result. Create surprise by focusing on one line of probability, while still developing a line of likelihood that leads to the conclusion. The audience looks back and sees that the evidence was there all along.

After acts, scenes are the next largest units of construction; they are major turning points within your story. The beginning of the play turns the circumstances of the story into an action-goal, the middle complicates or alters the action-goal, and the end completes the action-goal. A scene is a large unit of action made up of smaller units called French scenes.

A French scene begins and ends with the entrance or exit of any character. The dramatic situation changes with the people who remain on stage. Characters enter with new information, further complications, or a new perspective on the established argument. French scenes can be further reduced to small units of actions called beats.

A beat, the smallest unit of action, changes every time there is a change in thought or emotion. Usually, these changes are accompanied by a change in the subtext, the hidden meaning of the character's words. When the character introduces a new subject, changes feelings, develops a new desire, or establishes a new mood, a beat has taken place. Beats may be as short as a few seconds or as long as a couple of minutes.

Units of action are building blocks for the play, connected with the mortar of logical progression. Ideally, one event (unit of action) leads inevitably to another. To build that play, begin with a rough scenario.

Also see the Checklist for the Rough Draft.

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