Showdown: Page vs performance

We've now reached the end of our series of showdowns! Thanks for coming along on this journey with me. If you want to dig deeper into the topics we've been covering the last few months, leave me some feedback about it—I'll be turning this series into a standalone publication later in the year, which will allow me to expand on some things.

If you've only just come on board and don't know what I'm talking about, you can get some context from the first post in the series, where I compare long and short forms of writing. You can also catch up on the discussions of fiction and non-fiction texts and prose and verse.

One of the most unique forms of written media is scriptwriting. Whether you’re writing for the stage or the screen, performative works are almost always collaborative efforts, and require a completely different set of considerations to non-performative texts. Most writing advice you’ll find assumes that your work is going to be read, and if you want to write for theatre, film, or television you have to look pretty hard to find something specific to guide you. Let’s have a look at what it is that makes performative texts so special.