This is a guide to writing short radio plays. A major part of my work this year has been the setting up of “Little Wonder Productions”, a production company to produce and publish short radio plays on the internet. You can listen to our first effort here, and we will publish more plays soon. Later in the year we will have a whole run of brand new plays, and I wrote this guide to help my writers. If you’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 you’re interested in paper books I rather like Writing for Radio by Shaun MacLoughlin.Ī short play is a whole story–told fast. A sketch is a joke – a setup for a punch-line. Although she has kept it quiet all this time, she has finally decided to seek help. For years she has held a closely guarded secret she sees terrible events before they happen. A short play is a full story, beginning, middle and end, conflict, character development, the whole deal. Milly is a troubled young woman in her twenties. A attempts to get past B to what they want but fails because of some flaw in their personality. 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. You guys know this stuff already, of course, but there’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. 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 they’ll get bored, and they’ll let you know. 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 audience has little time to adapt from play to play, so the sooner they can go “oh this is the one about the cow who’s trying to get to the moon but the farmer keeps sabotaging their rocket” the more chance they’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).īut write a story not a sketch. Be funny as you like (please do be funny) but force a character to confront a difficult change. How can you tell you have a sketch and not a story? The easiest way is if you’ve got to about seven pages (or less!) and you find you’ve finished, you’ve probably written a sketch, and your editor will ask you to cut it to two pages. They can be performed virtually anywhere … all that is required is a keyboard, the performers and a few simple props.A story with rich characters and proper development will have you ripping your hair out to reduce it to fifteen minutes or less. For each piece, the words have been humorously updated whilst the music is mostly that of the original composer with a modicum of new and transitioning pieces by Christopher Wortley. Ĭomic miniOperas by Christopher Wortley Principals : 2m, 2f Support : 1m/f NarratorĪ collection of six comic mini-operas, each about seven minutes long. and you might be interested in these too. All are either winners or runners-up of the annual Pint-Sized Playwriting Competition held as 'Script Slam' at Theatr Gwaun in Fishguard, Wales. Thirteen monologues and five duologues of between three and seven minutes duration.Ī large range of short and very short plays. Most have cast sizes of three or less.Īn English Country Garden by Jane Lockyer Willis Some are 3-5 mins, but most are between 10 and 15 minutes long.
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