  Drama
This week: Edited by: Joy  
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"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."
Alfred Hitchcock
Hello, this is Joy , this week's drama editor.
Drama exists everywhere,and its existence often fills us with tension and excitement. Drama can be tragedy or comedy, and it can come in the shape of a play, movie, fiction, real life story, and poetry. Let us look into some ways that may enhance the drama in our writing.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
This week we will examine a dramatic setting, the road. As a part of our everyday life, the road, street, highway, path, or alley may offer true drama for the writer.
On the subject of the roads, writers and poets usually focus on intangible meanings such as spiritual roads, roads to recovery, the wrong or the right roads of action, etc. Sometimes, a road may even symbolize the meaning of one's life journey.
On the other hand, the factual road people walk or drive on everyday may offer more excitement for the writer's pen. If you take a walk on an average street and observe the events around you, you will come up with outer motivation and conflict for your characters or you will at least find fillers for your subplots.
While walking on a road, you might meet beggars, vagrants, criminals, traffic, accidents, roadkill, animals, plants, and people interacting with each other. You might also notice the physical condition and the moods of the road, the buildings on its sides, and the distance it stretches.
Many fiction and travel writers and playwrights use concrete descriptions of the roads in their works. 1988 Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, the author of Children of the Alley, Midaq Alley, Palace Walk, Sugar Street, has built quite a few of his stories solely around factual roads to support his dramatic scenes and portrayal of complex characters in depth.
In Grapes of Wrath the Joad family and other Okie farmers, during the dustbowl disaster, are forced out of their homes to go on the road to make a living. Jack Kerouac's On the Road depicts the adventures of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as they cross continental America in the late 1940s. Nelson Algren's realistic first novel Somebody in Boots follows the travels of "Tex" Cass McKay as he walks the gloomy streets of El Paso, New Orleans, and Chicago in the 1930s. Then, closer to today, who can forget Debbie Macomber's The Shop on Blossom Street and the yarn store or the vivid setting of Lois Lowry's Autumn Street?
For any writer, when using a certain road, street, alley, pathway, or a highway as a dramatic setting, vivid, concrete imagery is a must, because the sense of sight is the primary sense and it can be manipulated in many ways to serve the writer's purpose. Sense of sight easily leads to other senses and provides a transitional hook to what is intangible.
Introduction of fictional roadways in a real city can be acceptable if done with taste. While creating fiction with the facts of a local thoroughfare, a writer should be careful to protect the reputation of the place to avoid irritation.
As a writer, if your setting of a road is a real place within your reach, visit the location. Walk on it; feel it. To aid you later, take photos. Then, do not depend on the visuals only. Take a tape recorder or a note-pad and pinpoint the smells, sounds, textures, and other physical assets. Do not forget to add weather, climate, and mood, as well as the average characteristics of the people you notice on that road. If you are writing historical fiction, you can investigate the backstory of the street in the local library or the town's archives. Adding factual roads and places to dramatic fiction makes a story more convincing and paints a more complete background.
When people read about a real street, they automatically assume all the details are accurate; therefore, a familiar road that plays an important dramatic role in a story delights the readers of any town or city. If you use one of the roads of any small town as your setting, you can be sure that town's local library will carry your book. |
For those of you who would like to try your hand in writing a play or those who like to write plays, here's a contest you might be interested in:
Now, a few items that use the road image effectively, penned by our WC writers.
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Have an opinion on what you've read here today? Then send the Editor feedback! Find an item that you think would be perfect for showcasing here? Submit it for consideration in the newsletter!
https://www.Writing.Com/go/nl_form
Don't forget to support our sponsor!
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Short Story Contest:
Prompt: Write a short story or a narrative poem, as short or as long as you wish, with the setting as an actual road. It may be any kind of a road, say an alley, a path, an interstate, main street, a street you lived on, etc.
Post a link to your story in "Drama Forum" . Deadline: July1, 2008, 11:59 PM
Prizes will be announced later, and top three stories will be showcased in this newsletter.
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Igor 
"Until recently, most of my writing (and reading for that matter) has been normal prose (by that I mean short stories, etc. often narrated from a first or third person point of view). Now, however, I have discovered the wonderful world of theatre and plays and all of that (sorry for the generalization). I think I'd like to also start writing maybe a little bit in this genre type thingy (y'know). But I'm finding the transition is a bit difficult. I know one of the major things is the absence of direct narration and the prominence of dialogue, but I was wondering if you could give some pointers on how to do that."
That is a valid question, and thank you for asking it. The answer is far too long. I'll address it in detail in the future newsletters.
Theatre is bare bones, but the story is constructed like any other story with characters, conflict, climax, etc. As you pointed out, narration is omitted in stage plays, unless through an actor's dialogue. If you are writing a screen play, however, you can explain more and give more elaborate directions to actors; not that they'll listen, but you can.
If by transition you mean adapting an existing work, short stories usually adapt better than novels. Yentl was a short story; it did well. As to novel-adapted movies, if we have read the novel first, we may feel disappointed with the movie. This happens especially with slow-paced, introspective novels.
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Amazon's Price: $ 12.95
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Drama: May 07, 2008 Issue [#2368]
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