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Normally my blog posts come out every other Sunday. I wanted to get this one out a bit early, though, because Sunday is World Theatre Day and theatre is the theme for this post.
The International Theatre Institute started the World Theatre Day tradition on March 27, 1961, when the UNESCO Theatre of Nations season opened in France.
Now, people all over the world celebrate the day with these goals:
Find out more about World Theatre Day at this link: International Theatre Institute (ITI)
If you didn’t know, my background is in theatre.
For my first degree, I studied theatre arts at the University of Oregon, and I have been involved off and on for most of my life in theatre and film, both as a hobby and professionally.
In honor of World Theatre Day yesterday, this week’s post is about:
Two quick points before we look at the formatting:
If you are submitting to a company, contest, or publication, it is waaayy more important for your submission to match those requirements than to fit any one particular style guide.
Some require the character names centered, while others want them to the left. Margins and indents will vary.
Study their requirements and follow them exactly.
It would be awful if they had to reject your fabulous play because you forgot to put your character names in all caps.
If you are writing a screenplay, the guidelines are different than for a stage play.
You might find The Screenwriter’s Bible useful. There’s a link to that here.
It is an industry-standard reference book that will show you how to format everything from a title page to a character entrance to dialogue.
These are general guidelines that will at least make it easy for someone in the theatre world to read and understand your script.
Use standard margins, which are 1.5″ on the left where you’re binding and 1″ on the top, bottom, and right side.
Using a single-spaced, twelve-point Courier font is the standard, although some people say it’s old-fashioned.
The benefit of being standard is that someone familiar with scripts can give a pretty good guess of what the running time is just by looking at the number of pages.
It normally works out to about one minute per page.
Center your character names and put them in all caps.
Don’t put an extra space between the character’s name and their line.
The line of dialogue should be single-spaced, start at the left margin (1.5″ in from the edge), and continue across the entire page to the right margin (1″ in from the edge).
It used to be that you indented stage directions 3″ from the left, in sentence case (this means that, like a sentence, the first word is capitalized, but the rest isn’t), put in parentheses, and had a blank line before and after them.
A more modern way to format them is to start them in the center and go to the right margin (NOT right-aligned! That’s different). The modern style also has them in sentence case with a blank line before and after, but they are not in parentheses.
Again, what matters most is the place where you are submitting it and what style they require!
At the beginning of scenes, there is often a description to set up the who/what/when/where of the scene.
That description is normally formatted the same way as the stage directions, so whichever style you decide to use, keep it consistent.
Here, character names are in capital letters.
You can include the act and scene in your page number, so it’s Act 1, scene 3, page 17 (1.3.17), or you can just call it page 17.
Either way, the page numbers should run straight through to the end of the script and not restart at the beginning of every act. So it would be Act 4, scene 1, page 80, and not Act 4, scene 1, page 2.
Your manuscript should include a title page first, which would include the title, genre, and your name in the center.
(PLEASE be careful with this and read the submission guidelines thoroughly if you are submitting to a contest.
At some places, they will automatically disqualify you if you put your name ANYWHERE on the document.
If a contest is being judged blind, the organization could be accused of cheating if the judge sees your name, so they just throw out submissions that don’t follow the formatting rules.)
Your contact information goes on the lower right.
The title page doesn’t get a page number.
After the title page, we come to the character page, AKA the dramatis personae.
This is where you write your character descriptions. Some playwrights add more description, some less; that’s entirely up to you.
“Cast of Characters” goes at the top of the page, sentence case, centered.
The character names are either in all caps or underlined down the left margin.
Put a colon after the character name, tab over a bit, and enter as much of a description as you need.
The character page doesn’t get a page number, either.
There are a bunch of places online that have sample scripts you can download. I like these:
So, are you ready to celebrate World Theatre Day by writing the next great theatre experience?
If you are not quite ready to start your script, but you know someone who might be, share this with them!
Or better yet, share this on social media and tag them, and me!
I help authors, researchers, business people, students, and web marketers to polish their writing before they send it out into the world.
Fourth and last (for now!) in our series of book reviews featuring Kindle Unlimited books that explain ways to outline a novel. Let’s get ready for NaNoWriMo!
Third in our series of book reviews featuring Kindle Unlimited books that explain ways to outline a novel. Let’s get ready for NaNoWriMo!
Second in our series of book reviews featuring Kindle Unlimited books that explain ways to outline a novel. Let’s get ready for NaNoWriMo!
