Writing 1: Narrative & Dialogue

1. Writing dramatic narrative, including sections: Getting an idea, What world? Which genre? Introducing characters and Dialogue, Improving what you’ve written.
2. Story: events, structure and outlines, including sections: What is narrative? Story and plot, From story event to outline, Structuring outlines: beginnings, middles and ends.
3. From first outline to treatment, including sections: Writing a proposal, Treatments and how to write them, What is a scene? Plausibility, causality, significance and ‘big turns’.
4. Radio, screen and theatre, including sections on Radio drama, Radio drama and what it can do, Radio terms and techniques, Screenwriting for Films – economy and imagery, Knowing where to cut, Screenplay terms and techniques, Theatre as narrative, and Filling the empty space.
5. Finding a market and revising your work, including sections: The business end, Writing a one-act play and Redrafting your work.

This introduction to narrative and dialogue focuses on scriptwriting as a vehicle to help you learn to write in any form that requires plot, structure, dialogue and character and that can ‘tell a story’. So, it’s not just for dedicated scriptwriters but also for students whose primary interest is the novel, the short story or narrative poetry. The skills learned in plotting drama are transferable – and indeed vital - in plotting prose fiction.

The course will help you to:

• Plan and develop your stories in an outline and treatment. Editors, directors and/or producers may ask you to write these, but even if you’re not aiming for publication at this stage you’ll find that planning in this way will help you to avoid getting ‘stuck’.
• Understand the basics of plotting and structure, including: beginnings (e.g. back story and set-ups), middles (e.g. progressive developments) and ends (e.g. climax and resolution).
• Understand, invent and develop characters: for example, the different uses of protagonists and antagonists (heroes and villains) and the crucial importance of obstacles in the creation of character and story and for exploring themes and ideas.
• Write better dialogue by understanding the uses of obstacles and conflicts, text and sub-text.
• Understand the differing technical and creative requirements of stage, screen, and radio drama and understand how to format your work for these different forms.
• Acquire useful techniques and terms to help you edit, redraft and improve your writing. These will be writers’ terms and not necessarily literary, academic or readers’ terms. For example, rather than asking ‘What does this scene mean? Why is this play good/great?’ you might ask ‘What’s this scene for? What are you trying to do here and is it succeeding?’
• Adopt a critical approach to your own work and rectify perceived weaknesses in the light of constructive feedback.