Every time I read a script, I have to go back to a scene to see the author's story structure design. This is another point that drama is very different from other literary forms. The time and space of the play are limited. The general performance lasts two hours. The stage is small and only limited scenes can be changed. Not only that, the audience sitting in the theater is completely different from the readers lying on the sofa drinking tea and holding novels leisurely. They are not only more critical and suspicious, but also easily distracted. A story that looks dramatic in words is unremarkable on the stage. This is also one of the reasons why the adaptation of the novel into a script failed.
This requires the playwright to make a strong structural design according to the story.
Influenced by film and television, modern audiences need drama more, playwrights need to tell stories instead of preaching directly, and naturalism is more important. Therefore, modern playwrights should know how to cut a story, not only make the story fit the body of the stage, but also try to express the emotional and rational depth of the story with its structure, ups and downs in time and space, implication and directness, conflict and negotiation. The theme idea should be established within the framework of the overall structure.
The story of the play is a performance, so the whole story should be written from the perspective of the actor. Every actor is a tree or not, but the author doesn't really become this role, and he moves freely without restriction. This role is actually the author's language, which is used to build the whole idea and story. The novel can describe the general direction and ideas in any chapter, discuss or tell stories at will, transcend the time and space constraints, and intersperse stories of different times and places. In naturalistic drama, actors can't talk about their own views, can't tell the past and future they can't know, and can only perform according to the narrowness and limitations of their roles. This adds a great responsibility and burden to the structure of the drama story. How to express the implicit artistic conception with the overall structure of the story, and at the same time make the audience concentrate on sitting still, has become the playwright's lifelong pursuit.
The most important things in the structure are the beginning and the end.
When writing a script, don't forget the audience, the director and the actors, and the theater.