Supplement to the Art of Dramatic Writing

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	• The Playwright's Process: Learning the Craft from Today's Leading Dramatists Buzz McLaughlin Back Stage Books, 1997 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Playwright's Process

I started college to become a Drama Major, not knowing which part of the industry I would enjoy most but, I knew I would not enjoy being an actor
so after taking theatre appreciation I decided to try my hand at writing, and while my grammar may not be the best on earth if you've been reading this and grading me.
This book helped me understand the process of creating everything about my characters and how to fit them into the world I had created for them. Also what elements to work with first, and how to decide if what I had in my mind was even worth pursuing.

All, in all. this is a awesome book recommended to me by my teacher.

Thanks!

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Pupils of Buzz

We are in Buzz McLaughlin's playwrighting class at Drew University. His book is the textbook for the course, and moreover our personal Bible(kidding). If there is one word to describe Buzz it would have to be visionary. The way he explicates the process of playwrighting with wonderful accessible analogies is genious. We have personally never had such a text. The writing flows beautifully and the interviews are nothing less than illuminating. We are only in the middle of the course now(1/31/02) but we can already see that this class will be one of the highlights of our college careers.

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Supplement to the Art of Dramatic Writing

This book is full of quotes from leading dramatists, yes - which sometimes agree with McLaughlin's discussion of process, and sometimes hint that there's a lot more there. He is a very good writer, and can be persuasive in getting his point across, but the "process" he outlines is essentially an attempted refinement of Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing - in other words, classical prescriptivism.

I'm on the record, of course, for disagreeing with Egri - I don't believe that premise should be central for your entire play, and I find Egri's method of three-dimensional character development by writing biographies to be tedious, boring, and inherently untheatrical. McLaughlin re-creates Egri's methods in a tone that is more accessible to the playwriting student of today, but he lacks Egri's penetrating analysis of conflict and takes Egri's tools out of their context, where the original presentation was superior if you happen to agree with the ideas.

It's worth talking about premise, since the matter is so controversial among playwriting texts. There are two points of view on the subject: premise is central to a good play, and theme arises from the play and should not be put first. Essentially, those who place premise first are realists, and tend to write plays in the realist vein. I am not a realist, though I recognize that excellent plays can be and have been written in that genre. If you want to write realist plays, this book works well as a supplement for Egri's Art of Dramatic Writing; it is not a functional substitute. If you don't, you should head to other texts, because this one is quite openly biased.

Still, McLaughlin has a couple of good points of view in the book for any playwright. His chapter on ideas is one of the better ones out there; if you need help on that area, this book might be worth it on that alone. And his chapter on practical issues in playwriting is solid, if not perfect, but this advice would be available in books that will be more amenable to your style.

If you agree with the realists that premise should be central, buy this and Egri. Use Egri for your dramatic theory, and McLaughlin for your practical writing. If not, look for another text.

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Sad day to receive this book,

This book reached my door the day that playwright Wendy Wasserstein died so it was a bit ironic. Here I was ordering the book to write my first play. So far I have found this to be a helpful and entertaining book. Hopefully my play will someday appear in a future chapter.

Great book for beginning playwrights

There are some good suggestions in this book. I used it to write plays for a playwriting class, and it was full of useful tips.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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