Lewis Wood's New Writers Guide

Thanks so much for subscribing to my newsletter for new writers. Every two weeks I'll be sending out a tip that I've noticed from my script reading experience, alongside with something you can do this week to improve your writing.

This week's tip: understand what your character wants

It sounds obvious, but having a clear motivation for your characters makes a huge difference throughout your text. At the end of every script report I’ve ever written, I like to ask the writer a series of questions to help them understand their intention with their text a little more. One of these is always “What does your character want when the play opens? How does this change as the play continues?”.

In order to have effective characterisation, you should think at the beginning of your play about what your character really wants, and how that fuels what they’re trying to achieve across the course of the show. This will give us a much firmer grip of the character when watching the show. If you’re not sure what this is, then you need to work to understand your own character a little more.

One helpful way to do this (kind of an additional exercise in this week’s newsletter) is to map out three stages of their journey and focus on what’s driving them. Take the opening, mid point, and last scene of your play. At the opening, what do they want? At the mid point, do they still want the same thing? At the last scene, have they achieved this, or have they changed their mind on what they wanted in the first place?

This week's exercise: what do you really mean?

This exercise is designed to tackle one of the main issues that I see with new writers - using too much dialogue to portray something. This ties in to our previous thoughts on exposition, but it can mean that conversations go round and round in circles as writers feel the need to lengthen out their dialogue.

For this week’s exercise, I’ve put together a couple of pages for dialogue for you, available here:

(if you can’t access it, email me at [email protected]. Google drive scares me sometimes)

This dialogue is intentionally written to be overly slow. I’d like you to identify the moments where lines can be cut down in order to make the scene more interesting. Download the document and try and turn the dialogue from a two page scene into a one page scene.

Once you’ve done this, review the superfluous lines and your process in eliminating them. What bits did you tend to get rid of? How could the dialogue have been improved? What was the effect of reducing these lines?

Then, next time you go to edit a piece of your own dialogue, try and view it with the same eyes. What dialogue do you have in your text that could quite easily not be there?

Want to get in touch about something in the newsletter or interested in having me produce a report on one of your plays? Get in touch here.