The easy way to craft, polish, and get your play on stage Getting a play written and produced is a daunting process. From crystallizing story ideas, formatting the script, understanding the roles of the director stagecraft people, to marketing and financing your project, and incorporating professional insights on writing, there are plenty of ins and outs that every aspiring playwright needs to know. But where can you turn for guidance? Playwriting For Dummies helps any writer at any stage of the process hone their craft and create the most dramatic and effective pieces. Guides you through every process of playwriting?from soliloquies, church skits, and one act plays to big Broadway musicals Advice on moving your script to the public stage Guidance on navigating loopholes If you're an aspiring playwright looking to begin the process, or have already penned a masterpiece and need trusted advice to bring it into the spotlight, Playwriting For Dummies has you covered.

Reading the Written Image is a study of the imagination as it is prompted by the verbal cues of literature. Since every literary image is also a mental image, a representation of an absent entity, Collins contends that imagination is a poiesis, a making-up, an act of play for both author and reader. The "willing suspension of disbelief," which Coleridge said "constitutes poetic faith," therefore empowers and directs the reader to construct an imagined world in which particular hypotheses are proposed and demonstrated. Although the imagination as a central concept in poetics emerges into critical debate only in the eighteenth century, it has been a crucial issue for over two millennia in religious, philosophical, and political discourse. The two recognized alternative methodologies in the study of literature, the poetic and the hermeneutic, are opposed on the issue of the written image: poets and readers feel free to imagine, while hermeneuts feel obliged to specify the meanings of images and, failing that, to minimize the importance of imagery. Recognizing this problem, Collins proposes that reading written texts be regarded as a performance, a unique kind of play that transposes what had once been an oral-dramatic situation onto an inner, imaginary stage. He applies models drawn from the psychology of play to support his theory that reader response is essentially a poietic response to a rule-governed set of ludic cues.

""Naked Playwriting" is a complete, comprehensive playwriting course-from developing a theme through plotting and structuring a play, developing characters, creating dialog, formatting a script, and plying methods that aid the actual writing and rewriting processes. It also offers guidance on marketing and submitting play scripts for both contests and production, getting an agent, protecting one's copyright, and working with directors, actors, and theater companies. This new edition, in addition to fully updating the material in the popular first edition, adds detailed information on such recent develops as "Zoom plays" and "devised theater"; writing non-formulaic plays that create their own structures; a new emphasis on writing 10-minute and one-act plays; completely revised play submission guidelines that reflect a process that has wholly changed since the first edition was published; an section on the now-popular trend of moving from playwriting to TV scripting; material on the growing trend toward playwrights directing their own plays; and much more. Well-written and filled with illustrative examples, it provides both innovative and tried-and-true writing techniques, sage advice from veteran writers, a short study of the major schools of dramatic thought, and pertinent writing anecdotes. This one-of-a-kind playwriting book will help both novices and working writers discover and improve their playwriting skills and get their plays produced"--

This essential guide to the craft of playwriting, from the author of The Libertine, reveals the various invisible frameworks and mechanisms that are at the heart of each and every successful play.

Containing a wealth of exercises for individuals and groups involved in making theatre, this text offers a practical guide to the creation of text for live performance.

Louis Catron imbued experienced and fledgling playwrights with inspiration, guidance, and a passport to maximizing their writing skills as well as their overall ability to transform written words into a stage production. He understood that being a playwright is more than putting pen to paper. It involves expressing a personal point of view, bringing a vision to life, developing dimensional characters, structuring a play’s action, and finding producers, directors, and actors to bring the work to life. In the second edition Norman Bert infuses the enduring merits of Catron’s original work with examples, technological developments, and trends geared to today’s readers. Bert’s play references are familiar to contemporary students, including examples from plays written since 2000. He includes useful information on web-based research and the electronic submission process. A new chapter focuses on the playwright’s responsibility to lay the groundwork for production elements like casting, design, theatre architecture as it impacts audience–performer relationships, staging modes, and the uses and expectations of stage directions. Also new to this edition are reading resources for delving deeper into topics discussed.