THE MINUTES PLAY SCRIPT FULL
THE MINUTES PLAY SCRIPT FREE

How can you tell you have a sketch and not a story? The easiest way is if youвЂ™ve got to about seven pages (or less!) and you find youвЂ™ve finished, youвЂ™ve probably written a sketch, and your editor will ask you to cut it to two pages. Be funny as you like (please do be funny) but force a character to confront a difficult change.

THE MINUTES PLAY SCRIPT FREE

The audience has little time to adapt from play to play, so the sooner they can go вЂњoh this is the one about the cow whoвЂ™s trying to get to the moon but the farmer keeps sabotaging their rocketвЂќ the more chance theyвЂ™ll remember your play amongst the others, and the more free you will be to go break the rules of drama and be all radical or whatever (or just tell a damned good tale).Д«ut write a story not a sketch. You do story however you like, but key to a radio short is to get your want and your obstacle right up there in the first paragraph.

THE MINUTES PLAY SCRIPT FULL

How do I tell a full story in time it usually takes me to write one half decent sentence? If you give them a punchline in the place of a play theyвЂ™ll get bored, and theyвЂ™ll let you know. You guys know this stuff already, of course, but thereвЂ™s a temptation with a short to take one cute idea (or joke), present that as your 10-minute play, and think your work is done. They attempt to overcome this flaw, and in a final confrontation with B either succeed in changing (comedy!) or fail to change (tragedy!) There were go. A attempts to get past B to what they want but fails because of some flaw in their personality. A short play is a full story, beginning, middle and end, conflict, character development, the whole deal. A sketch is a joke вЂ“ a setup for a punch-line. If youвЂ™re looking for more information about writing radio shorts, I recommend A More Perfect Ten by Gary Garrison for your Kindle as a great guide on ten-minute plays in theatre (plus excellent examples of ten-minute plays), and if youвЂ™re interested in paper books I rather like Writing for Radio by Shaun MacLoughlin.ДЄ short play is a whole storyвЂ“told fast. Later in the year we will have a whole run of brand new plays, and I wrote this guide to help my writers.

You can listen to our first effort here, and we will publish more plays soon. A major part of my work this year has been the setting up of вЂњLittle Wonder ProductionsвЂќ, a production company to produce and publish short radio plays on the internet.

This is a guide to writing short radio plays.

The minutes play script