Questions I've Been Asking My Students

My students wrote 30-page plays. Now they're moving into the revision phase. I've been trying to give them questions and exercises to poke them toward revisions, mostly to make sure that what they're doing is to a purpose, and toward the play they're writing. Below, things I bugged them about this week (good reminders for me, too)

1. Does your play move in time and/or location? In each instance, WHY?
2. Does each character have an emotional investment in the story's outcome? If not, why not?
3. Have you cut for answered questions, stated emotion, repetition, filler words? If not, why not?
4. Use it or lose it. How does each scene forward your plot?
5. Remember retrospective inevitability. If you start with the last moment or incident in your play, what incident MUST happen to get you to it? What incident must happen to get you to THAT incident? etc... work backward.
6. What do your characters know when? What does your audience know when? What is the timeline both of the story and of the audience's experience of time on stage? What do you gain or lose based on how those match up or not?
7. What order of scenes and/or revelation of information will have maximum impact on your audience?
8. Think of Chekhov's gun: if there's a gun onstage in the first act, it will go off by the fourth act. Are there objects, images, people onstage that don't advance your story? If not, they're probably detracting from it (or give me a good reason why you need them).
9. Climax. It's gonna tie to the protagonist's journey, or the audience's journey.
10. Avoid navel-gazing. We don't go to the theater to see characters reflect. We go to see them ACT in ways that cause US to reflect. Even Hamlet was doing a lot (you want an argument for this, go read David Ball's Backward and Forward).

Yes, these are dictatorial. I tend to state things to my students like they're commandments. They can hate me and/or argue later...but most of these things will keep them out of hot water...and by the time they reach the play where these DON'T hold true, they won't need me anymore anyway.