Playwriting Exercises
Mark Ravenhill Writing Exercise #41
The awesome playwright Mark Ravenhill is offering 101 Playwriting Exercises to help writers develop their craft and provide inspiration if you’re looking for a spark. You can follow the thread on Twitter/X [@MarkRavenhill2] or, as I have done, sign up to a weekly email. It’s free. So why wouldn’t you?
My shame, these emails have been landing in my inbox and remaining unopened for quite a while now; I’d been meaning to give them a try without getting around to it. But I’ve finally had a go - I didn’t start at the beginning, and instead just attempted one of the most recent exercises. For me, this was Ravenhill’s exercise #41:
#41. The task is simple. Think of a scene that you’re working on or want to work on, and write out all of the actions in the scene without including any dialogue. Do this for 15 minutes.
I chose a simple scene about a young woman sitting down for a relaxing night of a movie and a takeaway who is interrupted when a man turns up at her flat demanding to see her brother.
The exercise was really useful. As I began writing, I imagined that there would not be much action to describe, so I was surprised by how much content I could generate just by thinking through the logical progression of how the scene might unfold. I’m definitely a writer who habitually starts from dialogue, so this was a great device for shifting my focus and drawing my attention to what was actually happening in the scene. However, I did find that lines of dialogue popped into my head, but rather than ignoring them, I scribbled them on the adjacent page.
Here’s what I wrote for the exercise:
She comes in from the kitchen with a bag of Haribo sweets and sits on the sofa. She has an exfoliating face-mask on her face. She changes position and stretches out on the sofa. She points the TV remote at the TV.
Phone rings. She pauses the TV and answers the phone. She talks on the phone.
Doorbell rings. She answers the door.
A man barges into the room. One leg drags behind the other as he walks. He is wearing a stocking over his face. He looks around. He looks into the other rooms.
She gesticulates. He gets closer to her and grabs her wrists. He shouts in her face.
She sits on the sofa. He interrogates her. He pulls out a knife. He grabs the bag of sweets and eats some Haribo.
He grabs the phone and tries to look through it. He hands it back and she unlocks the phone with a finger-swipe. He takes the phone back and looks through it.
Doorbell rings.
He answers the door and returns with two pizzas. He rings the phone. A phone starts ringing in the flat.
A man appears from behind the sofa. He yawns and offers a hand for a handshake.
The man takes off the stocking. Sits down on the sofa. He begins crying.
Well, it’s something to work with… fifteen minutes earlier I had nothing. I feel like beginning by concentrating on the actions will ultimately enrich the scene - I was forced to conjure the scene in my mind’s eye with greater clarity than would be necessary if just writing dialogue. My attention was sharpened, and I found myself thinking about the scene - revising and redrafting in my head - well beyond having completed the exercise.
I thought this was a fantastic approach to writing a scene. Obviously, this was all written off-the-cuff and is little more than a rough outline, but I’m really motivated to continue working on the scene and I’m excited to see how it develops. I recommend this exercise as a great way for entering a project and as a stepping stone for making an inchoate idea something more concrete.