Writing for the Stage by Clark Anthony;

Author:Clark, Anthony;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crowood Press

Show, Don’t Tell

Don’t tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904)

It is said that an audience will appreciate your dramatic writing more profoundly if you can get them to use their imaginations to experience what you have seen, heard, thought and felt.

Didactic speechifying by characters who know themselves too well and tell you everything they are thinking, have done and are about to do is boring. Boring because the audience is given no opportunity to interpret the dramatic action for themselves. If there is a disjuncture between what we are told about a particular situation or character and what we then see, we engage actively in searching for the truth of the drama, as we would in a real-life situation. Ambiguity may be the enemy of accountability and progress, but it engages audiences who want to go on a journey of discovery.

As has already been mentioned in Chapter 2, a large part of who we are is expressed in what we do, and characters are better defined in drama through their actions. The word drama has its origins in the Greek word ‘drao’ meaning ‘to do, make, act and perform’.

When a character is using a monologue, or a soliloquy, to tell us what they are thinking about a particular situation, or something they plan to do or not do, or what they think about a person or group of people, as long as they are travelling with the words, by that I mean using the words to clarify their own thinking, something dramatic is happening. We will go on a journey with the character as they change.

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