Author: Mike Heath
-
New Playwriting Short-Courses Start Next Week
Right then. If you’ve been telling yourself you’ll “get back to that script soon”, consider this your friendly nudge. My next block of WriteForTheStage online playwriting courses kicks off next week. I’ve condensed university-level learning into accessible 5-week courses, so if you’re preparing your script for a competition or performance, you’ve got time to hone your text.…
-
How to Focus — A Playwright’s Tips on Getting to the End of Your Draft
They say that we all have a book in us. Or maybe it’s a play? Everyone has a story to tell, but not everyone has the time or the skillset to get it down on paper. But, actually, that’s a bit of a fallacy — we can all write a story. We just need to…
-
Stop Press: Online Playwriting Courses Starting in June (and Over the Summer)
If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to get your play moving again, June brings a whole run of opportunities to dive back in. Our Top of the Stack series returns — three focused online courses that guide you through the architecture of your play, act by act — followed by the WriteForTheStage Summer…
-
The Best Playwriting Apps for theatre — Ranked by a Playwright
Finding the right playwriting app for theatre isn’t about bells and whistles. It’s about whether the tool actually supports the messy, intuitive, character-driven work of writing for performance. And after twenty years working with new writing, teaching playwrights, and developing scripts for stages big and small, I’ve tested the apps that genuinely help writers get…
-
10 Playwriting Exercises That Sharpen Character Voice
Are you struggling to find distinctive voices for your characters on the page? You’re not alone. Even experienced playwrights hit the point where every line starts to sound like a slight variation of themselves. When voices merge, your scenes begin to flatten, and the stakes blur, and the reader has to rely on name tags…
-
The Difference Between a Character’s Want and Need
Are you struggling to navigate the middle of your story? Think of the middle as two separate parts, the rise and the fall where the character pursues an objective, then resists what they need once they’ve achieved the principal objective. But what IS the difference between a character’s want and need? And could defining the…
-
Top of the Stack: What We Cover In our Online Playwriting Course
Are you struggling to find the right starting point for your play? Are you getting those frustrating first-round competition rejections confirming you didn’t get past the 10-page sift? You’re not alone. There’s nothing more irking than the knowledge that your script was rejected based on its first ten pages. It means that the reader didn’t…
-
The Art of the Subplot: Revealing What the Main Plot Can’t
Is the middle of your story feeling a little flat? Are you struggling to show your protagonist’s true humanity? Maybe you’re trying to discover your character’s need? It sounds like you could do with a subplot. Whether you’re writing a play, a novel, or a screenplay, we all reach a point in the story where…
-
The Falling Action of Act 2: Where the Real Drama Lives
Every storyteller knows the thrill of building the Rising Action of Act 2. We love the chase, the tension, and the sense that the protagonist is inching closer to the thing that will finally fix everything. The momentum feels like progress—like the story is climbing toward certainty—but it’s not as dramatically interesting as the Falling…
-
Online playwriting courses for everyone with WriteForTheStage
Every writer knows the feeling: you’ve got a story you believe in, characters who won’t leave you alone, and a play that should be working… but somehow isn’t. This is where online playwriting courses bring the learning to you. Maybe your first ten pages don’t land. Perhaps your Act 2 sags – the emotional logic is fuzzy,…