Course Description
Developing the full length script for performance.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
More ambitious projects in addition to research on industry history and conventions for script development.
Athena Title
Advanced Dramatic Writing
Prerequisite
THEA 4000/6000
Semester Course Offered
Not offered on a regular basis.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
- Students will identify and analyze a broad range of full-length dramatic works for the stage and screen.
- Students will conduct research required to treat a full-length dramatic text.
- Students will compose backstories, scenarios, characters, and relationships for a single full-length project.
- Students will reflect and critique one's own dramatic writing and the works of others based on best playwriting practices.
Topical Outline
- Month one: identify and analyze, from a writer's perspective, a dozen to twenty works
(cinema, cable, TV, stage) that might serve in one respect or another as potential
models for the work to be attempted. Go to the library or do other research to get
sufficient background on the topic to begin writing. Write backstories, collect
information, tell the basic story a dozen or hundred different ways until the story,
from each major (and supporting) character's perspective, becomes completely
familiar, as familiar as if one were talking about family secrets and legends.
- Months two, three, and four: write, rewrite, cope with critiques, rewrite some
more, do trial readings, and finally do a draft that's for the semester.
