Exposition is not allowed and other tips
Is there a type of story that is more suited on the stage (performance/plays/theater) than others? This question previously had details. They are now in a comment. Profile photo for Marcus Geduld Marcus Geduld , Published author, lifelong reader. Answered Jan 12, 2014 I’m a theatre director, and I have three thoughts for you:
Obviously, there are exceptions to this. Shakespeare wrote soliloquies, and Tennessee Williams used a narrator in “The Glass Menagerie.” Doing either well is extremely hard, because narration and inner monologues are literary devices, not immediately at home on the stage. If you employ them without having the talent of a Shakespeare or Williams, you risk writing plays that seem as if they were poorly-adapted from novels.
It’s tough to tell an entire story with just behavior, because you need the audience to understand key plot information, and beginners often can’t figure out ways to convey it without having a character simply tell it to the audience.
One failure is the non-theatrical, literary speech. The other way is to insert clunky exposition into dialogue: “Here it is, 1986, and you’re wearing a fedora!” You need to find another way!
Read this: David Mamet on Dramatic Writing.
If you insist on narration or soliloquies, make sure the character wants something and is using his speech to try to get it. That (using words to get something) is a form of behavior. That is dramatic. In Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy, Hamlet is actively trying to figure out whether to kill himself or not. He’s not explaining plot the the audience.
It’s instructive to track Anton Chekhov’s growth as a playwright. In his first major play, “The Seagull,” he created a fairly naturalistic world. That is, in general, it doesn’t break of the fourth wall. Except it does—awkwardly—a few times. It’s very odd. You feel like you’re watching a play similar in style to something Ibsen might have written, but then, out of nowhere, a character starts talking to the audience. Or maybe he’s just talking to himself … out loud … for a really long time. The young Chekhov simply couldn’t figure out another way to structure his play.
Since he’s Chekhov, the speeches themselves are fantastic, so it’s almost forgivable, but it still feels as if he’s mashed two types of drama together in an unholy union.
His next play, “Uncle Vanya,” suffers from the same defect. It’s a brilliant play. One of the best ever written. But, again, it’s basically naturalistic, except in two places where characters talk to … no one? … to the audience? Still, it’s more skillful than “The Seagull.” In this later play, the monologues happen when characters are extremely agitated, so it’s sort of believable they might talk to themselves. Chekhov was clearly wrestling with the problem, trying to find ways to make these speeches plausible.
In his next play, “The Three Sisters,” he figures it out! He comes up with dramatic excuses for characters to talk to themselves at length. In one case, it’s because a character is drunk. It’s plausible, because drunk people sometimes think they’re in company when they’re alone. In another case, it’s because a character is talking to someone else who is offstage.
In his final play, “The Cherry Orchard,” Chekhov was able to completely dispense with soliloquies. He figured out how to tell an entire story using interactions between characters—using behavior. And then he died. Which sucks for those of us who love his plays, but it’s kind of a neat ending.
Every single thing a character does and says should be an attempt to overcome an obstacle in pursuit of his goal. If not, it’s undramatic. Which is why exposition is a no-no. “Making sure an the audience understands a plot point” is not a tactic that will get the character closer to his goal.
A major bug in plays by inexperienced writers is what I call “the debate scene.” It usually means the writer is more concerned with an idea than with character. You can certainly express ideas with plays, but you must make them organic to the characters.
Or it means he’s painted his characters into corners where they have goals but no possible options for achieving them. If your goal is to get me to give you a dollar and I’ve let you know there’s no way I’ll ever do this under any circumstances, it’s not an interesting scene if you just keep saying “Come on! Give me a dollar!” over and over. If I simply won’t give it to you, I’ve won and you’ve lost, and the scene should either be over or you should have a new goal: maybe stealing the candy bar you were going buy with my dollar.
In debate scenes, two characters argue for pages and pages. Neither seems to really be pursuing a goal, aside from maybe trying to convince the other of some intellectual point. And when it’s clear that’s not working, the characters don’t give up or switch tactics, they just keep on debating. At his worst, Shaw writes this way.
For an other example, read the end of “Medea.” I’m currently working on a production, and I wouldn’t be bothering with it if I didn’t think it was a great play, but it suffers at the end by turning a little debate-ish. Which makes it hard to stage without boring the audience.
I’m going to quote* at length, because I want you to see what I’m talking about. The following occurs after all the main action of the play has concluded. [Spoiler:] Medea has triumphed over Jason by killing their children, as well as killing his bride. He’s totally screwed. And he can’t even take revenge, because she’s floating above him in a magic chariot. He can’t reach her. There is nothing he can do. He know it; she knows it. She’s won. He’s lost. The end … except not:
MEDEA Your sons are dead. How does that feel?
JASON They live on as spirits, who will haunt you to Hell.
MEDEA The heavens know who started this.
JASON They know your evil heart.
MEDEA Hate on! I am so sick of your pathetic voice.
JASON And I am heart-sick of yours. I would never hear it again.
MEDEA Willingly. What are your last words to me?
JASON Allow me my dead children— to bury them in peace, and mourn them.
MEDEA No. I will bury them myself. …
JASON Then I call on the Fury of vengeance, and the agents of Justice, to cut you down.
MEDEA What god or higher power would listen to an oath-breaker and liar?
JASON Filth! Child-murderer!
MEDEA Go back and bury your bride.
JASON I came here a father, and go home childless.
MEDEA Your grief is just beginning. Wait until you’re old.
JASON Oh my children, dear sons.
MEDEA Dear to their mother, not to you.
JASON So dear you killed them?
MEDEA That you might die of grief.
JASON Let me just touch them once more: hold them in my arms and kiss them one last time.
MEDEA You rejected them, sent them into exile, and now you want their kisses?
JASON One last time …
MEDEA No. You waste your breath.
It kind of feels like this could go on forever. It could last for another few lines or another few hundred. There’s no forward momentum. Medea’s goal is to make Jason suffer, but she’s already achieved that. “Making him suffer more” isn’t an interesting dramatic goal, because it doesn’t up the ante of the last goal. It’s just the same goal all over again.
And aside from a few lines in which Jason asks to hold his dead children—which he’s already tried without success—he’s not really doing anything except saying forms of “I hate you.”
It’s very hard for actors to make stagnant scenes like this work, but if they can’t overcome the playwright’s blunder, the audience will start shifting in their seats. So don’t write debate scenes!
Contrast the above with this scene from Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” in which Lady Anne is pointing a sword Glouchester, who murdered her husband.
He lays his breast open: she offers [points] at it with his sword
GLOUCHESTER Nay, do not pause; for I did kill King Henry, But ‘twas thy beauty that provoked me. Nay, now dispatch; ‘twas I that stabb’d young Edward, But ‘twas thy heavenly face that set me on.
Here she lets fall the sword
Take up the sword again, or take up me.
LADY ANNE Arise, dissembler: though I wish thy death, I will not be the executioner.
GLOUCESTER Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it.
LADY ANNE I have already.
GLOUCESTER Tush, that was in thy rage: Speak it again, and, even with the word, That hand, which, for thy love, did kill thy love, Shall, for thy love, kill a far truer love; To both their deaths thou shalt be accessary.
LADY ANNE I would I knew thy heart.
GLOUCESTER ‘Tis figured in my tongue.
LADY ANNE I fear me both are false.
GLOUCESTER Then never man was true.
LADY ANNE Well, well, put up your sword.
Here, Gloucester has a goal, which is to stop Lady Anne from fighting with him and agree to be his lover. She wants him dead, but internal obstacles (cowardliness) are stopping her from killing him. He understands her weakness and is exploiting it. This is forward momentum. This is actable.
For more information about goal-based dramatic writing, see the following books, which are for actors, not writers, but that doesn’t matter. They’re awesome for dramatists, too:
Amazon.com: A Practical Handbook for the Actor (Vintage) eBook: Melissa Bruder, David Mamet: Books
Amazon.com: Working on the Play and the Role: The Stanislavsky Method for Analyzing the Characters in a Drama eBook: Irina Levin, Igor Levin: Books
Amazon.com: The Actor and the Target eBook: Declan Donnellan: Books
For instance, a historical novel has to waste thousands of words trying to evoke a Victorian dining room, whereas a film can do that instantly with an image. Films, on the other hand, have a hard time conveying characters’ thoughts, whereas a novel can do that effortlessly.
Here’s the twist: each medium is at its strongest when it evokes what it has the hardest time evoking.
I’m sure that’s confusing, so let me illustrate with radio plays. What does the radio play have a hard time evoking? Images! It has to do all its storytelling with sounds. When I was younger, I wanted to write and direct radio plays, and I wrongly thought the best stories for radio were ones in which images weren’t important. So I came up with ideas like plays that were just phone conversations.
Then, one day, I heard a science fiction radio play in which a character said, “Oh my God! Look at the size of that ship!”
And it blew my mind. I realized it was the perfect line for a radio play. It evoked an image in a non-imagistic medium. If felt like magic, because “you can’t see things on the radio.” And yet it made me see something. That single line evoked a bigger space ship than the one at the end of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
In film, the most powerful moments are implied by cuts. We can’t get inside the character’s head, but we can see a shot of him staring at something. Then we can cut to what he’s looking at: a girl in a bikini. As if by magic, the film evokes lust—an internal state, something it can’t literally show.
In a play, the magic happens when you evoke the stuff plays can’t literally display (without being clunky). The two main ones being inner psychology and offstage action.
Please read that last paragraph while keeping in mind my first two numbered points, above. I’m not suggesting you write a monologue in which a character explains what he’s thinking. I’m suggesting that by watching his behavior we should come to understand what he’s thinking.
And I’m also not suggesting a messenger should run on and describe the battle happening in the wings. I’m suggesting behavior should evoke an world beyond the stage’s boundaries, as in “The Three Sisters” when characters long to go to Moscow.
The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it’s simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.
– Stanley Kubrick
The most powerful aspect of the “Mona Lisa” is the thing she’s smiling about. How did da Vinci paint that?
David Mamet on Dramatic Writing
Note: this is a memo Mamet sent to his writing team of “The Unit,” a TV series for which he was head writer. I agree with everything he says, but he wrote it in all caps and didn’t edit, so it contained lots of typos. I’ve normalized the case and fixed the errors. You can find the original, here: David Mamet’s Master Class Memo to the Writers of The Unit
To the writers of “The Unit”:
Greetings.
As we learn how to write this show, a recurring problem becomes clear.
The problem is this: to differentiate between drama and non-drama. Let me break it down, now.
Everyone in creation is screaming at us to make the show clear. We are tasked with, it seems, cramming a shitload of information into a little bit of time.
Our friends, the penguins, think that we, therefore, are employed to communicate information— and, so, at times, it seems to us.
But note: the audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned to watch drama.
Question: what is drama? Drama, again, is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.
So: we, the writers, must ask ourselves of every scene these three questions:
1) Who wants what?
2) What happens if they don’t get it?
3) Why now?
The answers to these questions are litmus paper. Apply them, and their answers will tell you if the scene is dramatic or not.
If the scene is not dramatically written, it will not be dramatically acted.
There is no magic fairy dust which will make a boring, useless, redundant, or merely informative scene [dramatic] after it leaves your typewriter. You the writers are in charge of making sure every scene is dramatic.
This means all the “little” expositional scenes of two people talking about a third. This bushwah* (and we all tend to write it on the first draft) is less than useless, should it finally, God forbid, get filmed.
[* nonsense.]
If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it will bore the actors, and will, then, bore the audience, and we’re all going to be back at the breadline.
Someone has to make the scene dramatic. It’s not the actor’s job. (The actor’s job is to be truthful.) It is not the director’s job. His or her job is to film it straightforwardly and remind the actors to talk fast. It is your job.
Every scene must be dramatic. That means: the main character must have a simple, straightforward, pressing need which impels him or her to show up in the scene.
This need is why they came. It is what the scene is about. Their attempt to get this need met will lead, at the end of the scene, to failure—this is how [we know] the scene is over. It, this failure, will, then, of necessity, propel us into the next scene.
All these attempts, taken together, will, over the course of the episode, constitute the plot.
Any scene, thus, which does not both advance the plot and stand alone (that is [work] dramatically by itself on its own merits) is either superfluous or incorrectly written.
Yes but, yes but, yes but, you say: What about the necessity of writing in all that “information?”
And I respond “figure it out.” Any dickhead in a blue suit can be (and is) taught to say “make it clearer” and “I want to know more about him.”
When you’ve made it so clear that even this blue-suited penguin is happy, both you and he or she will be out of a job.
The job of the dramatist is to make the audience wonder what happens next. [It’s] not to explain to them what just happened or to suggest to them what happens next.
Any dickhead, as above, can write, “But, Jim, if we don’t assassinate the prime minister in the next scene, all Europe will be engulfed in flames.”
We are not getting paid to realize that the audience needs this information to understand the next scene, but to figure out how to write the scene before us such that the audience will be interested in what happens next.
Yes but, yes but, yes but, you reiterate.
And I respond figure it out.
How does one strike the balance between withholding and vouchsafing information? That is the essential task of the dramatist. And the ability to do that is what separates you from the lesser species in the blue suits.
Figure it out.
Start, every time, with this inviolable rule: the scene must be dramatic. It must start because the hero has a problem, and it must culminate with the hero finding him or herself either thwarted or educated that another way exists.
Look at your log lines. A log line reading “Bob and sue discuss…” is not describing a dramatic scene.
Please note that our outlines are, generally, spectacular. The drama flows out between the outline and the first draft.
Think like a filmmaker rather than a functionary, because, in truth, you are making the film. What you write, they will shoot.
Here are the danger signals: any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of shit.
Any time any character is saying to another, “as you know,” that is, telling another character what you, the writer, need the audience to know, the scene is a crock of shit.
Do not write a crock of shit. Write a ripping three, four, seven minute scene which moves the story along, and you can, very soon, buy a house in Bel Air and hire someone to live there for you.
Remember you are writing for a visual medium. Most television writing, ours included, sounds like radio. The camera can do the explaining for you. Let it. What are the characters doing—literally? What are they handling? What are they reading? What are they watching on television? What are they seeing?
If you pretend the characters can’t speak, and write a silent movie, you will be writing great drama.
If you deprive yourself of the crutch of narration, exposition, indeed, of speech, you will be forced to work in a new medium—telling the story in pictures (also known as screenwriting).
This is a new skill. No one does it naturally. You can train yourself to do it, but you need to start.
I close with the one thought: look at the scene and ask yourself, “Is it dramatic? Is it essential? Does it advance the plot?”
Answer truthfully.
If the answer is “no,” write it again or throw it out. If you’ve got any questions, call me up.
Love,
David Mamet Santa Monica, 19 Oct 05
(It is not your responsibility to know the answers, but it is your, and my, responsibility to know and to ask the right questions over and over until it becomes second nature. I believe they are listed above.)
23 March 2019