Task
Before you start to redraft your play, set yourself an objective or an area you want to focus on. Don’t try to do too much. Instead, focus on one thing at a time – your central character’s journey, for example, or developing a certain theme. Make sure to set yourself a deadline by which to complete your draft.
Task
To help with your redraft, create a spreadsheet with a list of your scenes across the top row and all your characters, themes and any other key elements listed down the left hand column.
Example spreadsheet
Work through your play and track each character, theme and any other strands you want to keep an eye on. Note down where they appear in the play.
As you redraft, this will help make sure that you reflect changes throughout the play and are consistent in your storytelling. For example, if you say it’s summer in scene one but then you forget that detail later on you may need to go back and rework your later scenes.
It will also help you to understand how your play functions. For example, if your central theme doesn’t actually emerge until the fourth scene, you may need to go back to the previous scenes and rework them.
Next steps
Congratulations for completing our Introduction to Playwriting workshop. We hope you found it useful and that you can apply these exercises and ideas to your own process.
If you’re interested in finding out more about playwriting you can download our free Inside Guide to Playwriting pack, which contains interviews with writers at different stages of their careers, further exercises to help you on your writing journey and links to opportunities. You could also try our Introduction to Monologues workshop.
We’d love to know how you got on. You can reach out via social media @oldvictheatre #OVJoinIn to let us know what you thought of the workshop.