Creative Writing

Instructor: Chad Galts, Chadg@school-one.org

Course Overview:

This course introduces students to the craft of writing for performance, focusing on how playwrights and screenwriters use language to create dialogue, settings, characters and insight to build stories and experiences. Working across both stage and screen forms, students will learn how dramatic writing captures the way people actually speak, argue, evade and connect—and how those choices help us see each other and the realities of modern life more clearly. Students will draft original scenes and short pieces, workshop their writing with peers and study models from contemporary playwrights and screenwriters.

This course is broken down into 3 main units:

1. Foundations of Dramatic Writing: Character, Dialogue, and Setting

2. Conflict and Structure: Building a Scene

3. The Path to Performance: Revision and Table Readings

MATERIALS WE HAVE READ ALOUD OR COVERED IN CLASS:

Lady Bird (screenplay)

Contaminated?

Little Miss Sunshine (screenplay)

The Swaggering Soldier (opening only)

A Streetcar Named Desire (opening only; we also listened to the opening of scene 3)

Rear Window (screenplay)

Do the Right Thing (screenplay)

9/14 HOMEWORK

DUE 9/17: send to chadg@school-one.org

Write two pages of dialogue between two people waiting at a bus stop; the bus is late. Examples: an impatient teenager and a nervous old man, two people who just met and are attracted to each other, a boss and an employee, two siblings who are angry with each other. 2-pages.

Format:

Title
Character list: Who is in the scene? (very brief descriptions)
Scene-setting: Where is this in space and time? What’s the situation? (brief, but adequate)
Stage directions: (In-line with the script, but set off from dialogue.) What am I looking at and what is happening on the stage?
Actor/performance directions: (In-line with the dialogue.) How should the person reading behave, inflect, etc?

9/21 HOMEWORK

Write a one-page setup—characters with SHORT descriptions and scene-setting description—of a "typical" evening meal. Who's there? What's the situation? What do you need to state in the description that will be important to the story later (even if you will not write that story for this assignment).

Due by 9/23 at 9:30 a.m. if you want me to print it for reading aloud. (Jude goes first and can read this or the last one).

Also, I had the wrong email address in here before. Please use send to chadg@school-one.org.

See you Weds.

9/24 HOMEWORK

Describe a neighborhood (preferably your own, but not required) using four different locations in the style of a screenplay—introduce three different settings; characters can overlap, but each space or setting needs to be distinct. What do you need to state in the opening descriptions that will be important to the story later (even if you will not write that story for this assignment)?

Due on 9/28 at 9:30 a.m. if you want me to print it for reading aloud: chadg@school-one.org.

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