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Authorlink welcomes award-winning playwright Dale Griffiths Stamose as a regular monthly columnist.
"To be a playwright, like any other kind of artist, is to be addicted to your art." —Stamos
Since this is my first column for authorlink, let me introduce myself. I am Dale Griffiths Stamos. And I am a playwright. …Sounds like I’m confessing to an addiction, doesn’t it? Well, maybe I am. To be a playwright, like any other kind of artist, is to be addicted to your art. It is also to be a soul excavator, to be a little crazy, to stare the odds in the face and persist anyway, but more than anything, it’s to put in the work. The hard, steady, often inspired, but also intensely thought-out process of crafting a play from beginning to end.
I use the word “craft” purposefully. Playwriting, to be most effective, does not just come from strong dialogue, no matter how well expressed. That dialogue must be spoken by compelling characters placed within a dramatic story structure driven by powerful internal and external forces of desire and opposition that drive the story to an inevitable conclusion. Making all these elements come together in just the right way is not easy, but it is your job as playwright to make it look easy when an audience comes to see your play. Or rather, they will be so absorbed in the story, all the structure and technique you used to tell your tale will fall away like so much invisible scaffolding. But make no mistake, without that scaffolding, you have no play.
". . . craft is not a dry intellectual process." —Stamos
I hope, as we go along, to show you that craft is not a dry intellectual process. Instead it is a living evolving transliteration of ideas, emotions, and deep-felt truths into powerful dramatic form. It is the use of story technique, which has been around since the beginning of time, to touch the universal in all of us.
I will be dividing my columns into sections on Prewriting, Writing, Rewriting and Marketing. In this way, I will take you through the process of playwriting from inception to production and beyond. We will cover such topics as: Premise, Character Arcs, Rising Action, Exposition, Rewrite Questions, Public Readings, Getting Productions, and much much more.
Next time, I will begin to discuss the topic of prewriting - and why this early stage is so important to the future development of your play.
Join me on the journey…
About the Author
Dale Griffiths Stamos is an award-winning playwright whose work has been produced and published in the United States and abroad. She has been on the faculty of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and will be teaching a “Finding Your Story” workshop at Cal Arts in the fall. For more information, go to www.dalegriffithsstamos.com
