Playwriting
WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
The Structure of Action
Revised and Expanded Edition
Sam Smiley; With Norman A. Bert
View Inside
Format: PaperPrice: $25.00
A classic guide to dramatic writing now revised and expanded for a new generation of playwrights and screenwriters
This practical guide provides the principles of dramatic writing. Playwrights and screenwriters will discover these essential principles and acquire the tools to put them to use. Sam Smiley incorporates extensive new material in Playwriting: The Structure of Action, a revised edition of the book that dramatists in theatre and film have relied on for more than twenty-five years. No writer, director, critic, or teacher concerned with dramatic writing should be without this intelligent and inspiring guide.
Sam Smiley offers insights derived from a lifetime of writing, teaching, and consulting. While preserving the best of the earlier edition of the book, he offers new discussion on contemporary playwrights (Tony Kushner and Tom Stoppard), on copyright law, on new writing approaches, and on nontraditional dramatic forms.
Reaching far beyond simplistic how-to instructions, the book focuses on identifying and explaining principles essential to creating dramas: plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. Smiley explains these classic topics and provides the modern keys for realizing each element in effective dramatic scripts.
Sam Smiley is a playwright, screenwriter, and former professor of theatre at the University of Arizona. Norman Bert is a playwright and professor of theatre at Texas Tech University.
“Revised and expanded for a new generation of playwrights and screenwriters the classic Playwriting…provides the principles of effective dramatic writing with how-to-instructions, focusing on identifying and explaining principles essential to creating dramas.” - Writers’ News
“I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this book. Always a classic on the playwright’s bookshelf; now that it has been substantially reorganized, updated, and rewritten for contemporary playwrights, I believe it is a must-own text for the serious dramatist.”—David A. Crespy,Writing for Performance Program, University of Missouri-Columbia
Publication Date: October 24, 2005
4
