Or don’t. I can’t tell you how to write – I can only tell you how I write and you can decide for yourself if that will work for you, too. But I start with a character. So there’s that.
Start with a character. Conjure up a person who intrigues you. Ask yourself questions about this person until you feel like you know them well enough to speak with their voice through your fingers. Do you know their name, their age, their sex, their gender, how do they dress, how tall are they, how much do they weigh? Do you have a mental image of this person yet? Do you know how they stand? How they hold themselves when they have something they’re dying to say?
Good.
Invite them to tell you about their friends and their family and their life. Find out this character’s highest hopes and darkest secrets. What makes them smile, and what keeps them awake at night? Do they love anyone or anything? Do they hate anyone or anything? Do you know what makes them tick yet? Are they begging to speak?
Good.
Ask this character what they want. Write a monologue. Let them get angry, or hopeful, or sad, or indignant. What does your character feel strongly about? What do they feel compelled to do or what do they think the world owes them or what do they need out of life in order to feel satisfied? Demand they declare it: “I WANT ____________________________________________.” Your character can want to climb Mount Everest, or they can want to win a basketball game, or they can want to feel a certain emotion, or they can want to do something completely different. It doesn’t have to be a concrete thing.
This statement is your mantra. It is your character’s goal. It is the thing that, by the end of the play, they will have clearly achieved or failed to achieve. Decide if you want them to achieve it, and what some of the steps on the way to succeeding or failing are. Now put the monologue away. Maybe you’ll use it in the play and maybe you won’t. If you ever start to lose track of your character, pull the monologue back out and remind yourself who this person is. Otherwise, put it aside.
Decide who your character interacts with. Who are the people who populate your play and in what ways do they aid or impede your character’s pursuit of their goal? How are they connected to your character? How can you explore those relationships onstage? How can you put their history into their dialogue? Do they speak the same slang, share the same inside jokes? Or do they speak drastically differently to show the difference between them? Once you start to have solid ideas about how all these different pieces can interact with each other, you’re ready to start.
You can start your play at any point in the story that you want to. You can start it ten years after the fact and tell everything else as a flashback or you can start in the middle or you can start at the very beginning. Start where you feel the most comfortable jumping in and follow your instincts. If you realize you need to add a character, add a character. If you realize you need to take a character out, take a character out. If you realize you started in the wrong place, start over. The great thing about starting a play is that you haven’t put so much time into it that having to begin again is a tragedy. I’m all in favor of starting over as many times as it takes to find the “right” start. As in, the start that makes you feel like you could keep writing all the way to the end because it feels like the correct place to begin telling the story. A good start works like the first hill on a roller coaster – it gives you a burst of energy and sets the tone for everything to come.
