Play Writing in Depth (Part 4: Character Development)

Welcome to part 4 of Play Writing in Depth. After last week and us finishing up the beginnings, middles, and ends of plays, I believe it is time for me to get into the nitty gritty parts of writing plays. This part is going to be talking all about character development. Now I know I did touch on this a little in last three parts but I feel that this is such an important part of plays that it deserved its own part.

Character development is an extremely important part of plays in general, but is it the most important part of play writing, no, but it is still important. It may not be as important as plot, or setting but I mean you still need it. Imagine watching a play with an amazing story, with a beautiful setting, but there is truly no character to speak about, or there is character but they stay the same throughout the entire play. That would either be really boring or it would get very old very fast.

Now you also have to be very careful with character development and not over develop your characters because that it also a very big problem you can run into. See under developing your characters is bad but it is not the worst thing in the world and in some shorter plays you can get away with not really developing your characters. But if you are spending more time developing your characters then you are your plot, you have a very, very big problem. See if you develop your characters to much it again ca either can really boring or very old very fast.

So how do you make sure you that you aren’t over or under developing your characters? I really only have one answer to this one, ask others. But you have to make sure you ask the right people. You have to make sure that it is someone that will tell you the truth no matter how hard it is. And if some tells you that you don’t have enough or you have too much you now know what you need to fix. This also servers another purpose have people proof read your plays.

Thankfully in this series I will not be covering proof reading, but I might save that for another time. So next on our schedule is part 5: how to do stage directions.