Earlier this month, I decided to write a ten minute play. Why? Because 2025 is the only year I am eligible to enter this ten minute play contest, and because writing a short play sounded like fun. I'd never written a play before, although several years ago I adapted one from a book of stories that I greatly enjoyed. I've also read a few short plays for children, so I had a very slight idea of how the script might look, but was pretty fuzzy on details.
How hard could it be?
Here's what I found: Writing a short play seems to have a lot of similarities to writing a short story. Obviously there are differences between the two, but if you've written a short story (or multiple), you can probably write a ten minute play. If you have not written a short story, well, you can still probably write a ten minute play.
Once I had decided that I was going to write a ten minute play, I came up with a vague idea for the storyline of it.
Then, being a newbie to playwriting, I googled "how to write a ten minute play." I opened up half a dozen or so fairly promising looking tutorials and I quickly read through them, looking for tips that were mostly mentioned across at least two of the articles. I compiled these into a document on my computer, read through them again, and began writing my ten minute play. Here are some of the tips I gleaned through my research.
Centre your play around a question.
- This can be a broad question, or a very specific one.
- Make sure that you use your play to answer the question you ask. The question my play asks? Do you have fat-back? My play is called Fatback & Molasses. But that's a different story.
Be creative.
No dilly-dallying. Cut to the conflict, asap.
- You don't have time to waste. Well, you have ten minutes, but wasting them is not wise.
Be professional. Make the layout of your play manuscript easy to comprehend and read.
- Because I didn't really know much about this, I looked at several scripts online, but ultimately settled with skitguys.com and the preview of their Christmas play We Four Kings: A Christmas Whodunit as a guide to help me format my play. Obviously there are going to be different ways of formatting, so I just chose one that seemed reasonable to me.
Pare down. Pare down a bit more. Ask yourself: are all of the details present necessary to the narrative? If not, cut them out.
- Make sure that everything you include is actively working to keep the story moving forward. This is especially important given the length of this play.
Don’t rely solely on dialogue/monologue. Add depth using body movements, etc. into your stage directions.
- Don't go overboard on this—leave room for the play director to be creative.
Avoid simply creating a sketch. Make sure your play has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
- On this note, playwright Alex Broun says that,“The secret to a really good ten minute play is a great middle. Something needs to happen around the four to six minute mark that both raises the stakes and accelerates the action." According to the way I have been measuring my "minutes" (1 page = 1 minute), the four to six minute mark would be equivalent to four to six pages.
- Need more semblance of structure? Take a look at 10-minute-plays.com's page-by-page summary of where you should be at in your ten minute play. You can find their structure suggestion here. I used this as I was writing my play, although I did abandon it before I reached the end. Still, when I went back and looked, my play follows fairly closely to the structure, although it does vary in places. Don't take this structure as law, take it as a suggestion or guide.
Keep your play to ten minutes or less. It's a ten minute play, alright?
- To give you a rough idea of how many pages your ten-minute play ought to be, the play contest I wish to enter calculates play time as 1 page = 1 minute. Under this definition, your play can be up to ten pages long.
- To get a decent sense of how long your play really is, of the articles I looked at suggested doing something called a "table read," where you sit down with several people (probably at a table), designate them each as a particular character, and have them read the lines supposed to be spoken by said character. You can have a person fill in for more than one of your play's characters. The point of this exercise is to see roughly how long your play will take to perform, so make sure to time your table read!
After compiling my list of tips and reviewing them, I typed...
Beginning:
Middle:
End:
...into my ten minute play computer doc. Then I filled out what I thought the main points of my story would be (which ended up largely changing as I wrote my play). Even if you don't stick to your originally planned beginning, middle, and end, writing them out will give you some general targets to aim for.
I mostly looked up specific things about play formatting as I went along, since I really just wanted to dive right into the actual writing stage. You can refer to We Four Kings: A Christmas Whodunit, for a beginning dive into formatting, but you may want to search a bit wider for other tips on how to format your own play before you begin writing it.
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Okay, you've done your research (or you are planning to wing it and research as you write, kind of like I did) and you have a story idea scribbled out in the form of a beginning, middle, and end. The next step is to pound out a first draft of your play.
It took me roughly three or four days to go from start to finish on my first draft, so it is possible to pull one together pretty quick. I am still working through editing my play, but I found the hardest part was getting the first draft down.
Once you have a complete first draft, put it away for (preferably) at least two days before pulling it out to edit. Letting your play sit for a few days will help you catch mistakes better. Stepping back from your play will allow you to take a fresher look at it since you have let it cool off for a bit.
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You've written a play. Allow me to congratulate you!
Since you went to all of that effort, I encourage you to share it with someone or to send it somewhere for potential publication.
My ten minute play is going to this ten minute play contest. It's solely for 11th graders, though. If you aren't in 11th grade, I would start by googling "ten minute play contests" to see if that comes up with good results. I'm sure you can find something. And when you do, be sure to look it over carefully. I have two blog posts that you may find helpful. Searching for Writing Contests will give you a quick summary of some details to watch for. My blog post How to Find Publications That Fit Your Writing goes farther into depth on many of the same things that I touch on in Searching for Writing Contests.
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P.S. If you are looking for more tips on how to write a ten minute play, I found E.M. Welsh's article, How to Write a 10-Minute Play, quite helpful.