How to Format a Play Script

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Laura Turner and today I'm going to talk with you about how to format your play script. Now there are many different ways to format a play script and this is just one way that I am telling you in which to do it. The hardest thing about starting to write a play is figuring out first how to exactly put it on the page. This that I am going to show you here, this is page one of a play that I have written. It is pretty much standard play format. You can sort of number your scenes in any format that you would like. The only thing that matters is consistency. Here I have tabbed in five tabs and written Scene 1 in upper case letters or capital letters. In italics I have written the stage direction so the actions and the actors are going to be taking on the stage and the description of the stage looks like when the lights rise. So here we have lights rise on Mrs. Height's classroom, prison like feel, seemingly colorless and cold. I capitalized Height's name because she is in the scene and she is going to be actually capitalized throughout the rest of the play so she needs to be sort of highlighted within the stage direction so she can also know where she is going to go and also where she is sitting, Height is sitting upstage, center of the room behind a large desk which hides her own bigness behind it. So you see sort of why if you are looking through this big sort of block of italicized letters you are going to be looking to find as an actor what you are doing in this block. So we get down to the dialog and the teacher Height's first line is five tabs in, "What is it now, Frank?" Everything is pretty much normally formatted here and then always with the character's name, five tabs in and then the stage direction is three tabs in so we will notice that from the beginning up here as well. You will always also like here on page 5, the second page of the play here, if you have stage directions that come before a line they are called sandwich stage directions and you are going to want to tab them in as many tabs as the other stage directions but put them in between the character's name and the line that they are speaking so that the actor knows to say this line for example to the other students so when there is more than one character in the scene that she could possibly be talking to other people. But as I said before it is very subjective as far as how you should sort of format your play script, just as long as you have it formatted consistently, everything should be fine and people shouldn't really give you any real flak for it. So that's how to format a play script."