How to Write a Script Step By Step with Examples

hi everybody it's ingrid from twinkle and in today's video i'm going to be walking you through how to write playscript step by step if you've ever read script before you would have noticed that they follow very specific format it's laid out bit differently than short story would be for example which would be written in prose play scripts often begin with character list this names and gives us brief description of each character this is useful for actors because it tells them what the character is like and gives them ideas on how they can play them for example character description may mention age personality traits or important aspects of their physical appearance it may even mention whether they have an accent or not now let's take look at an example and go through some of the other features of playscript here is an extract from playscript telling the story of little red riding hood the first thing we have at the top is the scene number in plays scenes are kind of like the chapters of book so you might want to switch to new scene when the setting or the characters change or if you move on to another part of the story we've also identified the setting or where the scene is happening throughout the script you can make use of theater terms and vocabulary this can tell us what's going on with the lights the sound effects where on the stage characters are positioned that kind of thing if you didn't know different parts of the stage have different names like if you were standing in the middle you would be center stage fun fact did you know that the back of the stage the part that's furthest away from the audience is called upstage because back in the day stages were slanted downwards so that the audience could see everything that was happening easier this is why the part closest to the audience is called downstage and upstage is the part closer to the back if you're ever trying to figure out where stage right and stage left are think of it this way if you're performer standing in the middle of the stage and facing the audience it would be your left and your right this is because stage directions are written for the performers they're not written for the audience so it would be from the performer's perspective if they were facing the audience now let's get back to our example play scripts don't have to have narrator or person telling the story this can just be left up to the audience as they watch the characters and follow the story for themselves but they can like in this example we have two rabbits who are narrating the story as you may have noticed the playscript has been laid out with the names of the characters to the left and the dialogue or what they are saying is indented and to the right every time new character talks it should happen on new line this makes it easy for the actors to know where their lines are there are also no speech marks around the dialogue this is because we know that's what the characters are saying so we don't need to put that in the play script stage directions tell us what's going on on stage no one reads the stage directions out loud they're just there to let the performers know what should be happening on stage these are always in italics like they are here and they're written in the present tense as though they are happening right now if you're adding stage directions into the bits while the characters are talking they should also be put in brackets so we know it's not part of the dialogue and those are pretty much the basics on how to write playscript couple of top tips don't put too much detail into the stage directions leave it up to the actors and the directors to make some decisions for themselves also less is more when you're writing dialogue we don't need the actors to tell us how they're feeling or what they're doing because this is stuff that we can see when we watch them on stage finally make sure the formatting is as clear as possible it can be helpful to read other examples of scripts or even published plays to give you an idea of what it should look like that's all from me on how to write playscript but if you'd like more tips or materials to help you on this journey make sure you take look around the twinkle website as there are tons of great educational resources that you can choose from we have script writing templates example scripts playwriting checklists and much more so feel free to browse around thank you so much for watching and break leg you