Naked Playwriting: The Art, The Craft, And The Life Laid Bare

by William Missouri Downs, Robin U. Russin

Offers a playwriting course, from developing a theme through plotting and structuring a play, developing characters, creating dialog, formatting the script, and applying methods that aid the actual writing and rewriting processes. This book also provides guidance on marketing and submitting play scripts for both contests and production.

Genres: Writing, Theatre, Nonfiction

341 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Crystal Wang · Rating 1 out of 5]

“Empathy happens when a playwright abandons external judgment in order to see things without prejudice. It allows a man to write a complex and believable woman, a woman to write a bold yet tormented soldier, a black writer to get inside the heart of a klansman, and a young writer to have some insight into the heartaches of a bitter octagenarian whose friends are dying or gone.” Such say William Missouri Down and Robin U. Russin, which is funny, because this book has done nothing but impress on me how lacking they are in empathy and any playwriting knowledge at all. The tips that this book gives - write characters with personal motivations! understand them as people! - are common-sense and not worth the money. More importantly, they are not worth the amount of casual racism and sexism present throughout this tome. Even in the quote above, Down and Russin claim that 1. women can't be bold, tormented soldiers, 2. Black people need to overcome "prejudice" to write believable Klansmen. This might not seem like a big deal, but precision of language is imperative to good playwriting. Later, the book incorrectly claims that "Pyramis" is the protagonist of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In another example, the authors suggest writing a play about a high school sophomore framing a teacher for statutory rape. Alone, these questionable parts of this book may not seem like a big deal, but they betray a larger issue with Down and Russin's playwriting philosophy: they do not recognize that art does not exist in a vacuum. It affects the way audiences think about real life, it has the capacity to help and hurt real people. What does it mean for two white men to accidentally claim women can't be soldiers? What does it mean if they are so certain that Midsummer has a male protagonist that they pull out the misspelled name of a character in the /play within a play/ of Midsummer? What would it mean for an audience of people who live in the real world, where true rape accusations get shouted down as false, to be fed 2 hours of a conniving fictional teenager who makes a false rape accusation? If you want basic playwriting tips, you can find them elsewhere. This volume leaves much lacking, and I genuinely shudder to think about future playwrights using it as a reference.
(Also, the authors keep trying to make jokes and they're not funny.)

[S.E. Reichert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Naked Playwriting (I read the 2nd Edition) is one of my favorite craft books. Even though I'm predominately a novelist and poet, this was and is a great resource for getting started in the art of playwriting. Downs and Russin make a great team and each chapter/section is filled with not only technical and craft advice, but advice on the industry. I would highly recommend it to any writer. It has helped my dialogue improve, and has helped me tighten up my work as well as given me great advice on creativity itself. It's also pretty humorous. Highly recommend.

[Robert John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best of many books I tried to learn how to write a play. I was looking for a tutorial on the unique opportunities and challenges presented by a stage play as well as a survey of techniques that have been used, and this book delivered.

[Tanyx · Rating 3 out of 5]

The bits on writing was tired, known stuff, but some bits specific to plays are easy, yet interesting reading.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good, easy to read/understand introduction to the art of playwriting.

[Danica Chen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Basic advice told in a boring and condescending way. Just find advice on the internet.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to sell a book these days, put 'Naked' in the title. That'll do the trick. I didn't buy this, just borrowed it from the library after reading a chunk of it while standing at the shelves.
There are lots of good things in here for any writer, not just playwrights. For someone who's read a lot of books on writing over the years, much of the material will be already familiar, but there is still more than enough here to help you think about what you're doing in your latest writing project. It's certainly helped me in that regard.
For someone completely new this covers just about everything you're likely to need, so it's very recommendable. It was a bit disconcerting to find that throughout the book there was an occasional word missing from the text, most ironically when commenting on a misspelling in someone's script!

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was recommended this book just before I taught an online playwriting class through the University of Southern New Hampshire. I had doubts about teaching this class online because what I love to do in playwriting classes is have the students' plays read by actors. In addition, some of my students had never written plays before.

This turned out to be the perfect book for the class. It helped the students a lot, giving them the needed concepts in storytelling. The things you learn in this book can be used for novel writing and screenwriting, too. The book is well organized and references some of my other favorite authors on how to write, people such as Lajos Egri, Robert McKee, and Anne Lamott.

I highly recommend this book.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strong introduction to playwriting. Provides all the pieces.

[devin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An indispensable resource for aspiring playwrights. or any writers at all, really. The insights into character development is particularly great.

[Blackbook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book for anyone who wants to get started writing plays and end up with something presentable.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely helpful with tips and insightful examples.

[Monty]

Really helpful for writing dialogue both in plays and prose.