Whether you have wanted to write a play or a screenplay or are involved in writing memoir, thinking like a playwright will help you tell a story well by writing in scenes, creating evolving characters (yourself and others in your memoir) and using plot that employs conflict and life obstacles.

Here are screen writing/play writing ideas to help you learn and practice these craft tools that will pay off in all of your writing.

Working on character as action
“What a person does is what a person is,” says Syd Field, author of Screenplay.

Begin this exercise by writing a synopsis for a screenplay in which any of your characters’ actions move the story forward.

State what your main character or any of your players needs or wants and how they’ll go about trying to get it.

Then write about what keeps your main character (you if you are writing memoir) from getting what they want and about how the action moves in a new direction because of this obstacle.

Next, write what your main character’s next attempt to achieve the desired goal and how that is met with an obstacle.

What does the character do next and do they get what has been wanted?

And after that, what does the character do next?

Seeing the “motion” in a story is good practice for a writer. As a  memoirist imagining herself as this main character the questions are: What have you wanted? What has gotten in the way? What occurs that allows you to achieve what you have wanted? What comes next?

Now, describe a way your main character habitually gets in his or her own way.  Write three scenes that show this dynamic:  one social, one private, one at work or in public.

You’ve now created a lot of information to work with in a memoir.

Deciding on your story’s time frame
How much time goes by in your story? Think of a way to frame the time that will help define the story–a particular number of days at a treatment center, a pivotal year in the life as an “Around the World in Eighty Days” approach or “The Same Time Next Year” approach of showing one afternoon every year for years. Or use a mad dash to accomplish something important to the main character–a contest with deadlines, a work assignment with a deadline, a move by the time new owners take possession, a coming to grips with a situation before a beloved close to death dies.

Writing scenes
Write what is called a sequence: a series of scenes tied together by an idea that has a beginning, middle and an end. Is it the character leaving home and arriving at a destination? What is in each scene? Is it that the character is involved in a game and someone must win and does? Is it an argument that lasts for hours and is resolved or not? What scenes show it lasting and its progress if any?

Write a long scene in which something crucial spins things in a new direction for the character.  What is it that makes that new direction mandatory?

As you write, look for materials in the setting that can help your characters move the story forward.  If a man and a woman have sexual tension and are moving in the direction of a liaison, what will compel the joining?  If they are in a park do they both grab for a child’s hand and their hands touch? If one of them is involved in a fund-raising car wash, does the other get his car washed and stand outside the car and get in the way of the water or a flying sponge or towel? Write a scene of connection between two characters that utilizes something from the environment they are in.

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Now see if you can get a play written by taking reality and spinning it just a bit (the imagination can be employed in a memoir as long as the reader knows it is in the speaker’s imagination):

• Write a one-act play composed of ten five-minute scenes, where two characters confront each other over a box one of them carries. In each of the ten sequences, make the two characters and the box or what it holds or is used for different than in the last sequence.
• Write a play for one character (you or someone in your life) who addresses the audience with a power point presentation or a slide show or with exhibits like one would bring to show and tell. What is the story this character tells about you?
• Write character descriptions for three people, from very different circumstances.  Write a description of a setting. Put the three people in that setting for a reason you invent. What happens when something upsets the day: an earthquake, a car crashing into the building, the sprinkler system going off?
• Write a play where a variety of service providers tell the audience about you and your problems–your car mechanic, your doctor, your lawyer, your hairdresser–each would know you in a different way and use vocabulary from their field to describe you.
• Write a one-act play or scene for two characters where their status vis-a-vis one another other changes–a housekeeper wins the lottery and has more money then her employer, the gawky new employee is a Nobel prize winner, a homeless street person turns out to be an undercover policeman.
• Write magical realism into a scene.  When a conversation becomes extremely heated, for example, have something inanimate come to life, or have the sun descend from the heavens and intervene or have a flock of birds drag the conversation away, word by word.
• Write a one-act play where two characters in strong conflict are unable to get away from each other–they are on a boat stranded on the ocean and one must bail it out while the other rows, are somehow locked out of a 21st floor apartment and are tied together on the balcony, are in a train wreck waiting to be rescued.  How many ways can they find to egg each other on and also isolate themselves somehow from the other? Whatever you write can become a metaphor for how the main character in a memoir feels with certain people.
• Take a song or a poem and write a play for two characters in scenes–one for each line in the song or poem.
• Give a character a quirky job–greeting card sales rep, recycling collector, cake decorator at a bakery, bagel baker.  Create a monologue for that character in which he or she discusses world problems using the terminology of their work and combine their philosophical thoughts with the process of doing their job. A sales rep might try to sell the audience on using greeting cards to solve the world’s problem’s, the bagel baker might show how baking fine bagels is like diplomacy, etc.
• Write a play that takes place in one room or spot–a classroom, a ladies’ room, a waiting room at a car servicing place or a doctor’s office or a hair salon, a forest fire look out, a car showroom, a sun room at a spa. Who walks in and out of that room and what drama can you show taking place there using what is available in the environment–phones, TV’s, magazines, trees, wind, others who come and go? Why is the character stuck there? What will allow the character to leave?

Here are three writings on screenwriting that I think will help you with dramatic writing whether for screen, stage, fiction or memoir:

http://writersrelief.com/blog/2014/01/5-things-novelists-can-learn-screenwriters/

https://www.emwelsh.com/blog/5-reasons-novelists-need-write-screenplay

https://litreactor.com/columns/how-the-rules-of-screenwriting-can-improve-your-prose-fiction

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Please leave a comment below to tell us how you think about the use of screenwriting skills in prose writing and what questions you have about the idea that these craft skills can help your prose and even your poetry.