28th August, 2009

Idea 6 – Runs Are Good


Running big sections of the play is A Good Thing. There is something about letting sections of the action unfold that is infinitely useful. It gives you a feel for the pace and shape of the play. It lets you see how sections link and work together. If you get too involved in stopping and starting the play, you can easily lose sight of the bigger picture, which is the creation of a story, with its own rhythm.

The idea here is to remember that big things are just as important as little things when obeying Rule 3 (Don’t Let Anything Go), and to look at the big things you need to observe big chunks of action. So – for example – your heroine may be doing a beautiful job of the comedy in scene 1 and the pathos in scene 2 when you look at these in isolation, but you may not have got the segue right to carry one into the other. And if that jars, then things are no good.