8 Inspiring National Theatre Discover Videos for Young Playwrights
Written by Ashleigh Gardner
January 22, 2018
When you’re a young playwright without much experience — or a mature playwright who’s just entered the playwriting adventure — it’s good to have a few tips to get you started with the craft of playwriting. National Theatre Discover has some great videos for every theatre artist, and the 8 below are excellent for playwrights of any age and experience level.
1. Top Tips for Writers
Some leading playwrights offer their top tips for first-time writers.
2. How Do You Write?
Some leading playwrights talk about how writing fits into the rest of their life and discuss where, when, how and why they write.
3. How to Create Characters
Some leading playwrights discuss the different ways of creating characters for a play.
4. How to Build a Plot
Some leading playwrights discuss the importance of a play’s narrative and offer some advice on how to plan out a story — and how to change it.
5. How to Structure a Scene
Some leading playwrights explain the some of the key elements to writing a strong scene.
6. How to Write Dialogue
Some leading playwrights from the National Theatre give advice on how to write great dialogue.
7. Finding a Writing Style
Some leading playwrights explain some of the many different stylistic approaches to writing plays and discuss the importance of finding your own individual style of writing.
8. Process
In this series, ten playwrights discuss different approaches to their craft, featuring writers Simon Stephens, In-Sook Chappell, Evan Placey, Alecky Blythe, Tanya Ronder, Suhayla El-Bushra, Ryan Craig, Lucy Kirkwood, Inua Ellams and Dawn King.
Interested in playwriting? Check out our other features below!
- Playwriting: Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process for Workshopping New Plays
- Playwright Interview: Jonathan Dorf
- Playwright Interview: Ricardo-Soltero Brown
- Playwright Interview: Crystal Skillman
- Playwright Interview: David-Matthew Barnes
- Playwright Interview: Rosary O’Neill
- Playwright Interview: David Valdes Greenwood
- Playwright Interview: Angela Cerrito
- Playwright Interview: Lisa Bruna
- Playwright Interview: Samantha Charlip
- 7 Tips for Beginning Playwrights
- Aristotle’s Three Unities — and Why You Should Use Them in Your Script
- Judges’ Tactics: How Playwriting Judges Score Superior Scripts
- 25 Plays All High School Seniors Should Read (Before They Graduate)
- 30 MORE Plays All High School Seniors Should Read (Before They Graduate)
- 11 Tony Award-Winning Plays (from the Last Eleven Years) You Should Know
Ashleigh Gardner received her MA in Literary, Cultural, and Textual Studies (with concentrations in Film, Gender Studies, and Psychoanalytic Theory) and her BA in English Literature (with concentrations in Victorian, Gothic, and Early American Literature and Gender Studies) from the University of Central Florida; she received her AA in Theatre/Drama/Dramatic Arts from Valencia College. She is a playwright, an actor, and PerformerStuff.com’s Editor.
Thumbnail image from National Theatre Discover.