How to Make Your Monologue Dramatic; Emerging Writer’s Workshop Two

I’ve written a few monologues before, but all have read like a sprawl of thought slammed onto the page, poorly written and certainly not dramatic. Thankfully, Angela Street showed me and the rest of her Emerging Writer’s Workshop how to make a more engaging monologue through three simple steps, giving us the confidence to rewrite our attempts.

1. Is your central character doing something to someone?

This forms the basic action of the scene; what your character is doing. The prisoner struggles to persuade the interrogator of his innocence. The boyfriend tries to apologise to his girlfriend. A patient struggles to hide their pain and convince a loved one of their comfort. It’s much like a scene in any film or play, except the character cannot just be retelling a story, or else they are a narrator, saying what happened instead of trying to achieve a goal.

Before the class had even begun, Angela tasked us with writing a monologue inspired by bits of fluff and glitter left on the floor by an earlier art and craft session. I was a bit nervous as we only had a few minutes, and ended up writing a fantasy story about a father’s mistake.

Was I too late? Did I not say the words in time? These stars; her ashes, poor little ashes are all that remains of her. I didn’t believe, I didn’t want to believe, and my imaginative lack the chain that choked her life away. Is this how they all end, in a puddle on the floor, from long life or from the likes of me, a disbeliever, chanting with refuses of, “they don’t exist.” Such childishness. She was right, and Christ she’ll be back soon. Could I say I spilled some art and craft kit? Perhaps a sign, yes for Aunt Jude’s birthday – but what sign? Do I have time to make one? Or will she know? She knew a lot; she must know how fairies reach their end.

Rather than addressing the audience, this is just the father’s internal thoughts. If he spoke to us as if a friend, for example, it could work, but only if he tried to do something to that friend, perhaps justifying an action, such as to hide the dead fairy and conceal the truth.

2. Why is your character saying it now?

In Dial M for Murder, Tony decides to kill his wife Margot because of the secret affair he discovers she had with Mark, who is now right under his nose. A character must act for a reason. Perhaps they have witnessed something shocking, or need to borrow money after losing a job, and must turn to a parent without appearing to be a failure. My attempt seems obvious; he’s just killed a fairy by accident, but why? If he hasn’t believed in fairies his whole life, why is this the first to die? Are they in a new house near fairies? Or, has he had the time to play along with his daughter’s ideas until a new project at work stole his attention, repressing his imagination to the point that he no longer played along with her beliefs?

3. Who is your character speaking to?

You might have already done this when considering your character’s basic action, but you need to know who your character is speaking to. It could be a radio show, a board-room meeting, or an alien communicating with the mother-ship. It could be anything, so long as one character is doing something to another. In my example, I could put someone in the room with him, such as his daughter, and have him conceal the truth and make up excuses on the spot, or it could be him telling a friend about the situation. In the latter example, he needs to be doing something other than telling. Perhaps his daughter came in and he made out he’d spilt an art and craft kit, and allowed her to use the glitter/fairy entrails to finish the birthday card she’d started to make her fairy friend, and Dad is now struggling to justify his actions to a friend, trying to make out that he was protecting her from a painful truth.

I recently heard a great monologue on a radio play called, The Interrogation, which started with a husband telling the story of how he lost the trust of his wife after an accident hurt his child, and how he now felt like a stranger in his own home. What made it work was how it revealed the husbands violent outbursts towards his wife and how he didn’t want to admit he was a bad man.

1. Is your central character doing something to someone? His basic action was to justify his violence to the audience and himself.

2. Why is your character saying it now? His estrangement had bubbled to the point of him striking his wife.

3. Who is your character speaking to? This was a little vague, though I could imagine he was talking to a friend, or perhaps this is the argument he later tells the police.

These three steps have already given me an idea on how to rewrite my monologue. It’s all very new to me, but underneath are the same principles of storytelling, though this form seems more about how the words themselves are actions; tools in your characters’ arsenal to get what they want. Hopefully, practice with the characters I’m currently writing will not only reveal more about them, but hone my dialogue skills as well.

You can find out more about Angela Street and her writing workshops on her website.

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Finding your Character’s Voice: Angela Street's Role-Play Exercise

Last week at the Salisbury Playhouse, I went to the first summer term class of playwright and mentor Angela Street’s Emerging Writer’s Workshop, which aims to nurture new writers and provide a platform to discuss opportunities, successes and how to overcome physical writing problems. We looked at how to avoid on the nose dialogue and how to find and write the unique voice of characters by using an interactive role-play task.

It’s important to have each of your characters speak differently. A limp and an eye-patch as Blake Snyder liked to say. What you certainly don’t want is every character to sound like you. They are individuals, and you need to express their unique attributes on the page.

To get inside the head of our characters, Angela had us write a few pages of their interior monologue, then write a few interesting facts about them and what they’re afraid of.

The role-play needed two people to have a conversation, answering and speaking as their characters as if they were stuck in a lift together. We weren’t allowed to tell each other about our characters, everything had to come out of the dialogue. This presented a few problems, mainly gender and race; all the observable qualities of character. My role-play partner took a while to figure out my character, Fran, was a girl, and that changed the tone of dialogue considerably. It was interesting though, as my character is a bit of a tom-boy, so perhaps this is something that could happen to her, like Arya in Game of Thrones.

I did have a few surprises. The character in the lift with me was a drunken defeatist, and Fran told him off for swearing and drinking. When the lift started to smoke (an action given by Angela who was supervising the exercise) Fran sprang to life and tried to figure out a way to get them out the lift. So I learnt she’s morally strict, resourceful, and a natural leader.

Doing this exercise can show you how well you know your characters and indicate if you need to do more development. I found it hard to think of what to say, and most of the dialogue was simple hellos and Fran commenting on things going on around her. I think it showed I didn’t know her very well, which isn’t surprising as she’s a new character.

I think next time I would specify the setting a bit more. As the lift was just a random lift with no indication of the type of building, city, town, country. I found it hard to think of how she would react to things around her. It was hard also not really knowing why she was in the building in the first place, so perhaps a few useful things, such as, it’s a gratified lift in an apartment block, or it’s an immaculate shinny lift with a sofa, each indicating the type of building and person she might meet, enhancing dialogue with values, and possibly conflict.

It’s important to understand your characters personality if you want to capture their unique voice. This role-play can help you imagine what they’re like, what they value, what they desire and what they’re afraid of. I’ve never taken much stock in writing a character bio with every detail including favourite type of cereal and TV show (if they even like cereal or TV), but I suppose it is useful to try and think of more than the bare bones of story and spend a bit of time hanging-out with characters, learning as we do with a new friend what it is that makes them who they are.

The next Emerging Writer’s Workshop takes place on the 15th June, where Angela will be looking at a sample of our dialogue to give us useful tips. You can find more details on Angela Street and her upcoming courses (including a summer residential in Salisbury) on her website.

Do You Know the Story of Each of Your Characters? See the Benefits in Nordost

"On Wednesday October 23, at 9:05PM, 42 Chechens attacked a theatre in Moscow. They interrupted a performance of the musical Nord-Ost and took the entire audience hostage."

A piece of paper handed me by one of the young actors set the stage for this hugely gripping Company of Angels and Salisbury Playhouse theatre play, but despite its blockbuster feature film sound, it’s told on a static set through three monologues. It shows how inventive theatre can be, but more interesting, from a scriptwriting perspective, shows how knowing the journey of each of your main characters, and considering fresh perspectives, can help you write a better story.

Nordost follows the attempt of a Chechen leader to use young women who lost their husbands in the struggle, known as black widows, to hold hostage a theatre until Russian troops pull out of Chechnya. The three monologues are from the point of view of Olga, a lady who treats her husband and nine year-old daughter to the family musical, Tamara, a doctor whose daughter is in the theatre with a friend, and Zura, one of the black widows.

It gets off to a choppy start as each character introduces life before the event, but when it becomes clear that each is heading towards the theatre, the monologues rapidly cross-cut to a spectacular midpoint where the terrorists take over, and things go from bad to worse.

Although it’s dramatic to see victims endure their ordeal, it’s Zura who really brings Nordost together. It’s her story and follows her change from loving death to loving life. She’s less driven by revenge for her husband than she is her desire for the terrorist leader, who takes a liking to her when he asks her to remove her Burka so he can take a look at her skin. She’s thrown into a dilemma when her nerves take over before the event, and gradually starts to question the raid when she befriends Olga and admires her courage with which she protects her family and others, and gradually, after a betrayal from the leader during the final siege, she manages to escape. It’s tragic as we know she’ll be on the run forever, but she wants to repent for her sins and embrace life, and there's hope she’ll find peace in the future.

The end was once again choppy as we followed the resolution for each character, but there was something interesting in the depth of knowing the ins and outs of each journey. I felt empathetic and didn’t want anything bad to happen to any of them, creating real moral grey areas, making the play more about inherent evil in the world, and the impact of war on individuals and how it can drive them to extremes.

Even more impressive was the choice to tell the story of one of the black widows. It could easily have been told from the point of view of Russian forces and their attempt to save the hostages, making the terrorists cardboard cut-out evil. Instead, it made Zura the protagonist and showed us how she was lured into this by another, misguided and misled, grappling with loss, anger, her place in her community, and its moral and psychological implications.

When writing a story, don’t just know your characters, like favourite hair products and breakfast cereals, know their stories. Tell us how they change. Even Olga changes from bubbly to vengeful and bitter, a great mirror to how Zura starts the story. Think also about whose point of view it would be more interesting to follow. What would happen if we focused on the criminals rather than the heroes? The victimiser than the victim?

Check out Nordost until Saturday 27th at Salisbury Playhouse, 7-8 May at the Egg in Bath, and 14-15 may at North Wall, Oxford. Nordost is written by Torsten Buchsteiner.

Theatre Writing South West – The Art of Adaptation Workshop

The Salisbury Playhouse was buzzing with creative minds during Saturday’s latest workshop from Theatre Writing South West. Both new and established creatives came for a series of lectures and workshops on developing and adapting stories, with a networking event, and hot drinks and lunch bundled into an intense, yet highly rewarding and informative day.

Playwright Nell Leyshon gave a speech about the benefits of developing stories across multiple formats, and discussed the different features of novels, radio and theatre.  She put emphasis on working out what kind of a writer you are, whether you write alone or devise ideas with others, and suggested no play be entirely written in a vacuum. She encouraged writers to think about their scenes visually, for example, she uses A3 charts with boxes for key theatrical moments, which she adds to in later versions. Her session ended with the group considering the challenges of adapting the short story, Ashputtel to the stage, which revealed a bad habit of writers using narration and other non-visual cheats to get out of problems, and once again emphasised her point on developing more story through visuals.

The Playhouse’s creative director, Gareth Machin, spoke on his keenness for new writing, which he feels will allow him to stage something more modern about the issues of today. He favours unique pieces that stand up on their own, and gets excited when he has to adapt moments that are seemingly impossible to stage.

A session of speed-networking had delegates darting between tables and discussing what they’d like out of theatre and skills they can offer. It was great not just for finding out about initiatives, like pop-up venues and fringe theatre groups, but for working out what it really is you want out of theatre, and discovering useful skills you might not have thought you had.

It was interesting to hear from Paul Milton, creative director at the Everyman theatre in Cheltenham, and his challenges staging Nick Dark’s adaptation of Laurie Lee’s, Cider with Rosie. Paul was unable to show the darker side of the original piece as his hands were tied by the Lee family. These restraints are often something we don’t consider as writers, and perhaps emphasises Nell’s point that adaptations require more collaborative development.

The day closed with Rebecca Manson-Jones and her work-in-progress adapting Henrik Ibsen’s, An Enemy of The People into a modern day setting (which I was interested to hear was the inspiration behind Spielberg’s Jaws). Her final advice on writing a compelling story made for a nice close; “Show me a story with people affected by the world in which we live.”

I got a much needed confidence boost after hearing from all these passionate, creative people. Nell reassured us not to take writing so seriously; we don’t necessarily need any formal training, just the willingness to write every day. With people willing to collaborate, opportunities for performances in theatres and pop-up venues, and producing theatres keen to support new writing, it’s certainly an exciting time to be a part of the theatre scene.

You can find out more about Theatre Writing South West on their blog page