Improve Your Storytelling with Playwriting Techniques

At first glance, novelists and playwrights seem to write in completely different mediums. 

Traditional theater’s storytelling is based on witnessing events from the outside, while books give readers a glimpse inside a character’s head. A theater audience surmises a character's intentions through movement, gesture, dialogue, and the audience understands the character's world from visual cues such as setting, lighting, costuming, and props. 

On the other hand, books get to construct that same world and character perspective in a much more intimate way. Readers use their imaginations to translate the words on the page into those visuals. What can a novelist, then, learn from a playwright? Quite a bit, actually!

Although novels and plays use very different types of writing, there are elements of theater that writers have used in books for centuries. Let’s take a look at what drama and fiction have in common and ways you can use techniques from theater and playwriting to improve upon on your book or story.

Dramatic structure: the plot

The most prominent example of theater’s influences on the story form is the development of plot structure. Aristotle, the ancient Greek playwright, explained how a drama should contain three parts.

Act 1: The Beginning (Prostasis) is where the characters and world-building is first introduced.

Act 2: The Middle (Epitasis) is where the protagonist undergoes a series challenges that become more difficult until they reach the climax (the high point) of the plot.

Act 3: The Resolution (Catastrophe) is where the challenges are overcome and affect the protagonist in some life-changing way. These events will have also changed the world itself. Catastrophe doesn’t imply a tragic end, by the way; in ancient Greek theater, the word simply means the ending to a drama.

Eventually, the three-act Greek drama evolved through the advocacy of the Roman poet Horace into a five-act structure. The five-act structure was a standard in Shakespeare’s canon of plays and became more formalized by the German playwright Gustav Freytag. You may already be familiar with Freytag’s Pyramid, commonly taught in school as the definition of basic story structure: 

• Exposition
• Rising action
• Climax
• Falling action
• Resolution

Scene by scene: goals, conflict, and outcome

Plays use scenes to move the plot forward, and well-written novels can use them too. Part of keeping that interest alive is making sure...

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