How to Format a Stage Play Script

Video Transcript

"Okay, folks, in this clip I'm going to teach you how to format a stage play, a written stage play. Stage plays are formatted slightly differently from screen plays, movies screen plays and scripts. There isn't a huge, huge difference, but some of the direction is different and the way that the actual lines are formatted and the action is formatted, basically, it's flip-flopped from a screen play. You'd start out, by setting the stage, describing, you know, what it is, where we are, basically, like where does the story begin. Then give us the action, like what happens on the stage, what is it that we see. Then, if the character has any sort of lines, or dialog, you'd format that. But the, the title, the name of the character would be placed in the middle and the lines, the actual spoken words, would be off to the left hand side of the margin. That's just the way it's formatted, and if you wanted to go back then, after that, after you've written his lines out and give him some action, you'd move back into the middle again. That is the way you format the action, the dialog, and then if you had to move and change settings, you'd go and do that in the next little bit as well. What I would recommend, is investing in a program like Final Draft, which is basically an industry standard for screen writing and it also has many, many, many different templates for stage productions, manuscripts, novels, treatments, anything you can think of, basically. It's not a lot of money and it saves you a lot of time because what it does, is it actually formats the screenplay, or stage play in this case, for you. All you have to do is tab your way down and it will automatically format it to the industry standard that, you know is very helpful, especially if you're trying to make your stage play look as professional as possible. However, you want to do it on your own, this format, the one that I just showed you, is the one you're going to want to follow. Setting, action, character, dialog, action, lay it all out there and you'll be well on your way to writing your very own stage play."