For a writer, creating stories is like creating life, and plays bring stories to life with intensity. In a writer's life, the internal urge to do the best he can and to shine with creative ability is a fundamental emotional necessity. As a writer, you might say, " I am already a storywriter; why would I bother with a play?" Surely, no one can make you write what you do not want to write; however, even a good writer can learn a lot from writing plays.

After your first successful or even not-so-successful play, you will find out that you have gained strengths you did not think were easy to obtain. The brevity of a play will grant you focusing power. It will sharpen your wit. Better yet, it will make you learn how to capture the brilliance of the English language. All these and more will help you excel in other areas of writing.

Life experiences, self knowledge, and reliable faculties for observation of what and who is around you are certainly preconditions for writing effective plays. Then, the imperatives are: knowing the craft of the story, using the art of the story effectively in a way that it fits the requisites of the theater arts, and writing, rewriting, and revising your play many times until the final product is perfectly polished.

A good story makes for a potential good play, but failure to make the story work may bring on disaster. A playwright must first grasp the story basics. There is no getting around this, and as such, there is no successful playwriting recipe in a pill form. If anyone tells you it exists, they have a castle on Pluto to sell you.

Assuming you have learned the basics of storywriting by now, let us take a brief look at writing plays. It would help if you have done some acting first, but if you haven't, don't let this stop you. Just put yourself in an actor's place as you write, and ask yourself these questions: Can the actor enunciate the lines well and easily? Is the dialogue, brief, understandable, and lifelike? Are the stage directions enough or are they so much that the actor and the director may be confused? By giving too many stage directions, am I stepping over the director's territory? Are the physical directions achievable or are they thoughtless like the stage direction (takes three steps forward) when the actor is already at the tip of the stage and has nowhere to go?

Beginning playwrights can practice with shorter forms of plays to not tire themselves out, at the start. A word of caution here. Short plays are not easy. Actually, they are harder to write well, but they are good teachers, since even in a short play, you need to have a fully developed story.

One very popular short play is the ten-minute play, which has a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. A ten minute play should be about ten printed script pages, since the rule of thumb is one minute per page.

Then, there are one minute plays that can be only a little more than gags or jokes on stage or a brief monologue.

A one-act play is another option. It, too, has a complete story, but it comes in scenes instead of acts.

A full-length play has three to five acts. In general, a full-length, three-act play has forty to sixty scenes (100-130 pages of script). If you undertake a full-length play, be careful not to repeat the scenes. Since scenes make the play, construct each scene to be an original. If you don't, you'll bore the audience to death and make the theater critics sharpen their tongues and earn their money.