The Playwright's Guidebook: An Insightful Primer on the Art of Dramatic Writing

The Playwright's Guidebook: An Insightful Primer on the Art of Dramatic Writing
ISBN-10
1429934212
ISBN-13
9781429934213
Category
Performing Arts
Pages
392
Language
English
Published
2002-03-29
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Author
Stuart Spencer

Description

An accessible, contemporary guide to the art of dramatic writing During the ten years that Stuart Spencer has taught playwriting, he has struggled to find an effective playwriting handbook for his courses. Although most of the currently popular handbooks have good ideas in them, they all suffer from the same problems: they're poorly organized; are composed mostly of quirky, idiosyncratic advice on how specific playwrights have gone about writing their own work; and are full of abstract theorizing on the nature of art. As a result, they fail to offer any concrete information on how to construct a well-written play or any useful guidelines and exercises. Moreover, few of these books are actually written by working playwrights. Out of frustration, Spencer wrote his own book. The result, The Playwright's Guidebook, is a clear, concise, and engaging handbook. Spencer addresses the important principles of structure, includes insightful writing exercises that build upon one another, explores the creative process, and troubleshoots recurrent problems that playwrights actually face.

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