playwrighting format

>> Hi, this is Julia Fisher
teaching you Playwrighting 101.

Today's episode I'm very excited about,
I'm going to teach you formatting,

how to properly format your play.

And for this, we're going to
need to journey into my computer.

Let's go. All right.

Everyone, I'm going to show you one of a
variety of ways to format your play in a way

that looks professional to whoever you
might want to submit your play to and also,

it will be easy to follow along for your actors.

So you want to open up your
preferred Word processing document.

I will be using Google Docs.

And then your font in this
version will be Courier New.

Your font size will be 12 except for
your cover page which will be 14.

Your title will be bolded, but everything
else in your play will be unbolded.

Your line spacing should be single with
no spaces before or after your paragraph.

So if you look at custom
spacing, it should look like this.

And then for your cover page, you want it
to be centered so it'll be center aligned.

First, you'll have your title
in bold and in all caps.

So this is the title of my awesome play.

And then by, your first and last name,
underneath that, you're going to want

to put your address and your phone
number and maybe also your email so that

when you submit this and it wins lots of
fancy awards, they will know how to reach you.

If you are a member of a high school
or a college then you might also want

to put your school and your grade level
depending on who you're submitting this to.

Scrolling down to page two, at the top of page
two, you're going to want to add a header.

And what I have done is added page numbers
that start with one on the second page.

Because your cover page does
not count in your page count.

So you can go to insert, header and page number.

If you go to page number, you can click on
this second one here that shows a cover page

with no page number and the
second page with a one.

So that's what I did.

I selected that and made sure that it was the
same font and size as the rest of my document.

And then you'll put your title here.

This is the title of my awesome play.

So that if your play gets printed and it's
not stapled and it all gets shuffled up,

someone picks up page 13, they can tell which
play it's from and what page number it's from.

Then on your first page, you're going to
have the title one more time centered,

this is the title of my awesome play.

And then after that, you are ready to go.

So after the title, which is
centered, everything else in the rest

of your document will be left aligned.

And whenever you have stage directions of
any kind, it's going to be tabbed six times.

So as you can see, I have my first stage
direction here, and it is tabbed six times,

which means that when you
select it and you look up here

at this little blue bar thingy,
it's going to be on the three.

So you can see it is right smack on the three.

There's a couple different ways to get
your stage directions to come like this.

So first, if you have your
cursor over on the left,

you can hit tab six times on your keyboard.

So, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab.

And then you want to have your parentheses.

This is a stage direction.

Next, if you're going to have
another stage direction after that,

if it's going to be a longer
stage direction then you want

to do something a little bit
different because here's the thing,

if you tab it six times like
that, and you keep typing.

So type, type, type, oh, no,
look, it hasn't stayed tabbed.

So there's a couple ways to fix this.

The first is from the very beginning.

If you know that your stage direction is going
to be long then you can hit command or control,

depending on what kind of computer you
have, and hit the bracket button that looks

like -- Nope, that looks like this.

So it has this and this on it.

So if you hit command or control and then
that button six times, one, two, three, four,

five, six, then you can start typing.

Sorry, I'm not a faster typer.

Oh, look, as you go on to that second
line, it stays aligned with you.

So that's an awesome way.

If you already know that you're
going to have your stage directions,

just get used to that shortcut
and hit that every time.

Another thing that you can do, you
have your stage direction here,

and you realize that you didn't tab it in, you
can just select it, grab this blue bar up here,

and drag it all the way over to the three.

So any of those methods can get you
stage directions properly formatted.

We can go up and fix this one by
pulling this over to the three.

We also need to get rid of
this extra tabbing that we did.

So there we go.

We have a group of stage directions
that are all formatted properly

in parentheses tabbed six times.

Next, let's talk about character names.

So here's our character name.

Your character names, when they
are in front of a line of dialogue,

should always be all the way capitalized.

And they are also going to
be indented six times.

So this is one of those ways
where you can just tab six times

because you know your character name
will probably not be long enough to go

onto that second line, so you don't
need to do the command bracket button.

You can just tab it six times.

And then your line of dialog will be one line
directly underneath all the way to the left.

So here, tab six times in all
caps is our character name.

Directly underneath all the way to
the left is your line of dialogue.

Here's another thing about character names.

In a stage direction your character
names should also be all capitalized.

So, if we look back up here, it says at
Rise, MS, FISHER is sitting at her laptop.

MS. FISHER is in all caps.

And this is to help your actors out so that when
your actors are reading through their script,

they can see really quickly if a stage direction
is about them or not because their name is

in all caps, so they can see it more easily.

However, if your character's name
is mentioned in a line of dialogue,

it does not need to be capitalized.

So here are two examples.

If we have underneath this line
of dialogue, a stage direction,

you can actually put it here,
which I'll get to later.

Put MS. FISHER smiles.

The name will be in all caps, but underneath
if we tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab student.

Hi, Ms. Fisher.

The name does not need to be capitalized
there because it is not telling me the actor

of Ms. Fisher, that I have
something to do there.

It's just someone mentioning my name.

So that does not need to be in all caps.

Your names should also stay consistent.

So if I decided at the beginning that I'm
going to refer to this character as Ms. Fisher,

then I should, not here, put Julia Fisher
because it's not consistent for the actors.

And it can get a little confusing
if you're talking

about the same character using different names.

So we're not going to do that.

We're just going to put Ms. Fisher.

All right, let's go back and talk about some
of the complexities of stage directions.

So there are three main types
of stage directions.

The first is if you want to tell
your actors how to say a line,

and how that will look is you'll have
Ms. Fisher, so the character's name.

And then directly underneath also
tab six times, you can put cheerfully

or whatever you want them to say.

You can maybe put like laughing.

And then you'll have their line of dialogue.

So Ms. Fisher laughing says, good morning.

Awesome. That was easy.

That is our first type of stage direction.

Our second type of stage directions
are stage directions that happen

within your character's dialogue.

So if Ms. Fisher says, good morning,
she opens the door for STUDENT.

And you can see here I capitalized student
because it's referring to that character.

And then I will continue with the dialogue.

How are you doing today?

Cool. So when we have stage directions
that are within dialogue like this,

this is one of the places where you can
kind of cheat the rule I told you earlier

about always having your
character's names in all caps.

Because since we know that
this is Ms. Fisher here,

because it's in her dialog, we can just put she.

And we don't need to put Ms. Fisher
in all caps because we know it's her.

If we're going to have a stage direction
in here with the student doing something,

it's going to look a little different.

And I'll show you that right now.

So, student, I'm great.

Cool. So if we want to show that
Ms. Fisher is doing something

as the student is talking,
this is what it'll look like.

So student says, I'm great.

Enter, enter.

We're going to tab six times.

And I know that this stage direction
might be a little bit longer,

so I'm going to use our shortcut
command bracket, bracket,

bracket, bracket, bracket, bracket.

Then I'm going to put Ms. Fisher moves desks
around to get ready at the start of class.

And then the student keeps talking.

So this -- Ms. Fisher is doing this
direction as the student is talking.

And then we're going to put
under here, student continued.

So you're going to put C-O-N-T
without little apostrophe

because the student hasn't stopped talking.

But we needed to enter for
that extra stage direction.

So student continued says,
how are you, Ms. Fisher?

Obviously, this dialogue is pretty terrible.

So that is our third type of stage direction.

These are also just guidelines.

You may run into some weird exceptions
to these rules where you're like, oh,

all of these things are happening.

And I'm not really sure how to
show this in a stage direction,

but if you stick to these three
rules that I've given you'll be OK.

So I'm going to go over those just one more time
so you can see them a little bit differently.

We can put -- So let's have
long stage direction here.

We'll put command, bracket, bracket, bracket,
bracket, bracket, bracket, parentheses.

Student two, student three, and
student four walk in through the door.

Student three says, yawning, morning, everyone.

And then we're going to have someone do
something while student three keeps talking.

So we'll put command bracket, bracket,
bracket, bracket, bracket, bracket.

Nope, that was one too many.

There we go.

Students two and four take off their
backpacks, oh, I cannot spell and sit down.

Student three continued, I'm
so excited for class today.

And then we're going to have
student three do something.

So student three sits down, I love playwriting.

Awesome. So we can see just in
that little bit of dialogue,

all three types of stage directions
underneath tabbed six times.

A way that you want to show them how to express
that next line of dialogue, action that happens

within someone's speech or
after someone's speech,

you can have here tabbed six
times separated by empty spaces.

And then stage directions that happen while
someone is talking themselves can just go

in parentheses within their own dialogue.

You can also see now that we've gotten onto page
two, that it's going to automatically generate

with the title of your play and
the page number up at the top.

And that's basically it.

When you are done with your play,
some people can put the end.

I think it's a little unprofessional.

So what I normally do is I'll just have my final
parentheses or my final stage direction be tab,

tab, tab, tab, tab, tab -- oops,
that was -- keep doing one too many,

blackout or curtain falls or
lights out or something like that.

And then that's it, your play is over.

So congratulations.

You now know how to properly format your
play so that it will look professional

and it will be easy for you and
your actors to follow along.

One last quick note about formatting is that if
you use this formatting procedure then one page

of your play will usually equal
about one minute of acting.

So you know if you have a 25-page play, your
play is going to run about 25 minutes long,

which is really helpful for you to know,

especially if you're writing a
play for a certain length of time.

So if you're writing a 10 page play,
then your play should be about 10 pages.

This also goes by this number,
not this number over here.

Up here, this says it's page one because
we're not counting our cover page.

Over here, it says page two,
but we're ignoring that.

We're just going by the page numbers up here.

Thank you so much for watching my episode.

I hope you learned a lot about
formatting and I hope you check out.

Some of my other videos on playwriting.

Thank you so much.

I'll see you next time.

And happy writing.