Write for the Medium

Scripts often read as if they were novels. A character is “haunted by a decision she made at nineteen.” A screenplay’s action line says she “feels the weight of all those years.” Neither can be filmed or acted, and the actor, designer, and director are left to invent what the writer felt. Inner life belongs in a script once it finds a performable form, and soliloquy, voice-over, and direct address exist for exactly this.

On January 11, 1924, four days before the BBC’s planned evening of radio entertainment, the director Nigel Playfair told Richard Hughes, a twenty-three-year-old playwright, that broadcasting wanted “stuff specially written for it,” and Hughes offered to write a play overnight. His account, published in The Atlantic in 1957, shows what he asked of the medium. The ear has no help from the eye, so the story would happen in the dark, and the characters would keep saying they could not see. Playfair supplied the first line, “The lights have gone out!” Hughes set the play in a coal mine and made the people lost in it visitors, because a cast of miners would be hard to tell apart by voice alone. A Comedy of Danger was broadcast on January 15 and is widely believed to be the first play written for radio.

The stage keeps the picture and pins it down: the audience occupies one fixed point of view and hears everything in real time, so a playwright who needs an offstage event must get it onstage through a sound, a report, or a reaction.

Screenplay format follows from the same fact. A scene opens with a heading in capitals giving interior or exterior, the place, and the time of day. Action lines describe what the camera could capture and are usually written in the present tense. Dialogue sits under a character cue. Feature scripts are expected in what the rules call “standard industry format”; the Nicholl Fellowships, for instance, ask for 12-point Courier and a length of 80 to 125 pages. These conventions exist because the page has to be read quickly by people who will have to build what it says. (Practice 94 asks you to learn conventions before breaking them.)

Bernard Shaw wrote stage directions that break all this and succeed anyway. When the flower girl first appears in Pygmalion, Shaw tells us that her hair needs washing “rather badly,” that she wears a shoddy black coat, and that she needs “the services of a dentist.” Some of that is performable, in costume and makeup. That she is “no doubt as clean as she can afford to be” is a remark to a reader and not an instruction to a designer. The printed play carries a preface and a prose sequel as well, so it was plainly addressed to readers as well as audiences, and Shaw knew he was writing for two channels at once.

Practice. Take one narrative beat, a character discovering that someone has lied to her, and write it three times in forty-five minutes, each under 200 words. First as prose, with whatever interiority you like. Then as stage: one continuous space, no cuts, only what an audience can see and hear from a seat. Then as screen: single shots, what a camera can isolate, including one close-up. After each version write two lines, what this form made impossible and what it made possible. Those six lines of notes are what the exercise is for.