Building Your Play: Theory and Practice for the Beginning Playwright

8. Dramatic Questions

 8 Dramatic Questions Using miniplays as building blocks will keep your scenes from being static and passive. Keep in mind that the four keys are always important elements. This chapter deals with another, and closely related, concept that can also help. What Are Dramatic Questions? To understand this new concept, let’s make a short classroom visit. When I teach this material to my students, I face them and say, in an extremely serious tone, “I am now going to teach you the single most important element of playwriting. Are you ready?” I wait about thirty seconds and then ask, “There. Did you get it?” Of course, they are confused. And so I do it again. “I am now going to teach you the single most important element of playwriting ” And after a long pause, “Did you get it?” By now they are lost. I then ask them to think back to those moments of empty silence and try to recall what was happening to them during the pause. After some discussion, we agree that those silences weren’t empty after all. They were filled with suspense and anticipation. The lesson is simple: the single most important element is suspense, making the audience anxious to pay close attention to the action in order to find out what comes next. However, we’re still a bit off the mark. The question still remains: Suspense 5XVK3W&KLQGG $0  PUTTING THEM TOGETHER about what? Anticipation for what? And, most important, how do you create it? I then ask my students to think again about exactly what was going on in their heads during that minute. Eventually, my students realize that the pause wasn’t silent after all. Actually, a wide range of questions was going through their minds. They were asking themselves all sorts of things. I ask them to list the questions: 1. What is the secret? 2. What’s he doing? 3. Why is he doing this? 4. Does he know? Is he serious or just fooling around? 5. Where is this going? 6. Did I miss something? 7. Will he tell us? And so forth, with many variations on these—some of them a little unprintable. Once this list is up, I draw their attention to the fact that what I have just done is what playwrights always do: I create suspense and anticipation in the audience by raising questions in their minds, creating a desire for them to know the answers, and then delaying giving them the answer as long as possible.And,because these questions are always related to some dramatic situation, I label them generically as dramatic questions.And this indeed is the single most important element in playwriting and bears restating: Raising questions in the minds of the audience, creating a desire to know the answer, and delaying the revelation of the answer as long as you can. Once this concept is clear,I return to the list on the chalkboard and draw my students’ attention to two very important factors: 1.The most interesting questions are those that begin with an interrogative pronoun or adverb: what, why, where, and so on. Look at the list above, and see if you can rewrite those that don’t. For instance, number 4 could become,“What is his real intention here?,” and number 6,“What did I miss?” 2.These questions fall into two major categories.Examine them carefully and see if you can spot what they are.Some of the questions are about information (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and others are about action, or plot (7). 5XVK3W&KLQGG $0  DRAMATIC QUESTIONS Questions of Information The first group of questions are those that seek information in their answer. What is he doing? Why is he doing this? Who is he? What has happened offstage? And so forth. The answer to these questions is always a fact of some sort: She’s doing this. He’s here because he’s hungry. She’s going to the store. He’s my brother. Grandma just got run over by a reindeer. The answer is a fact. Let’s give this category a name: questions of information, or QI’s. Let’s define it as questions raised in the minds of an audience that have a fact as an answer. This is a very broad category and includes a wide range of questions. All but...