Writing for Stage and Screen:  Creating a Perception Shift in the Audience

In this structured look at the way audience members progress through a work in real time, I use plain-spoken vocabulary to help writers and directors discover how to make work that will mean more to their audiences. By using examples drawn from plays, film, and streaming series, ranging from A Streetcar Named Desire to Fleabag to Pirates of the Caribbean, I attempt to make my concepts accessible to a wide range of artists who work in timebound art.  

Combining a step-by-step analysis of the technique of writing for stage and screen with how the mystery, poetry and emotional momentum is achieved for the audience, I hope this book is an empowering, original guide for both emerging and established writers.

The book also features multiple exercises, developed with MFA writers in The Iowa Playwrights Workshop and The Michener Center for Writers, which provide entrance points for artists to approach and consider their work.

Writing for Stage and Screen:  Creating a Perception Shift in the Audience

I have been waiting a decade for this book. Not since Lajos Egri’s classic “The Art of Dramatic Writing” have I been so excited and inspired by and grateful for the ideas contained within a text on dramatic writing. Reading and digesting the lessons in this book can be of greater value to an aspiring dramatist than years in an MFA program. Whether you are writing for the stage, screen or audio, this book is an invaluable teacher and guide to have by your side throughout the development and revision process.

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Playwright and Former Head of Playwriting, UC Santa Barbara

It's hard for me to think of anyone who has shaped the way I think about playwriting more than Sherry Kramer. While most of my education as a playwright was awash in silly rules surrounding plot mechanics, Sherry showed me how plays are organized in more meaningful and fundamental ways. While others taught me the structure of playwriting, she taught me the poetry of it.

Samuel D. Hunter, Playwright and 2014 MacArthur Fellow

Sherry Kramer is a brilliant and uncommon mind, someone who mixes a keen understanding of narrative structure and mechanics with a reverence for theatrical magic. I will never forget the first time I heard her talk about the DNA of plays, how they code themselves line by line, how they reveal to an audience how to understand them – and, to their writer, how to be faithful to their core questions. As a former student, I'm still using the many tools she gave me, both when writing a new draft or when in the throes of rewrites. Sherry is an artist and a teacher, and her ability to harness pedagogy to illuminate instinct is one of her many unusual gifts.

Jen Silverman, Playwright

This book does what no other playwriting book in my experience has done, it offers a new way of seeing and conceiving how theatre makes meaning and carries emotional impact in performance.

Suzan Zeder, Professor Emerita and former Head of Playwriting at University of Texas at Austin

Sherry Kramer understands the clockwork of plays. And because it is an understanding that applies -- quite remarkably -- across all boundaries of style, intention, or form, her approach is as refreshing and clarifying to the writer of a dark commotion as to the writer of a costume comedy. By focusing on the ways that a play comes to life not on stage but rather inside of an audience, Sherry gives to writers that thing we all crave: a thoughtful way to make good choices.

Steve Moore, Playwright

Sherry Kramer is the best kind of playwriting guide — generous, ingenious, and wise. She is an audience’s best friend and the fairy godmother of storytelling. Without Sherry’s big ideas on structure, magic, and perception shift, I’d be lost as a writer and teacher. I plagiarize her daily. Most books on the playwriting craft are derivative and oddly traditional — Sherry’s guide is both the tornado and yellow brick road. You will never go back to thinking about drama the same way again.

Austin Bunn, screenwriter, playwright, is an Associate Professor at Cornell University.

Sherry taught me not only the craft of playwriting, but she helped me find the soul of it.  Her wisdom is matched by her humor, as this book will be a boon companion to her thrilling dramatic work.

Kirk Lynn, Founder and Co-Producing Artistic Director of the theatre collective Rude Mechs in Austin, TX, and head of the playwriting area in the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin

Following her courses and workshops, Sherry's students consistently  make use of her vocabulary and approach in responding to each  other's plays and working through problems in their own work.  Sherry's approach helps them achieve clarity about the dynamics of  their work and about how plays work in general.

Art Borreca, Head, Iowa Playwrights Workshop, University of Iowa