In the most basic of playwriting classes, Playwriting I, students are required to submit a new scene each week. By the semester's end, we will have eked out some kind of a draft of a play. In this type of writing, the most basic concept is that a character wants something that another character somehow prevents. This is conflict, and this is what a play is about.
However, I feel that good writing should have a point. Pictures & Words class taught us this: don't just think of a story; think of a deeper message or theme that the work will explore. Thus, I want my play to have a deeper purpose and overall message. It also doesn't help that I'm in my second consecutive semester of Shakespeare. The genius playwright commonly featured at least a half-dozen themes in his writing. So now I have spent hours trying to find a non-hackenyed theme that will invite study of the human condition.
I'd also like it to be funny, but at the least, not melodramatically tragic.
I'd also like to sleep a bit.
One damn little scene of my proposed masterpiece needs to be finished within the next eight hours. I just need two characters who disagree enough to prevent eachother from attaining something for five pages. But I can't bring myself down to that level. I can't find a prompt. I can't even prompt myself into a prompt. I've stared at random pictures for an hour, trying to imagine a backstory for just one of them! Just one stupid conflict, and then I can make it into a masterpiece later.
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This might be terrible advice, but I would write it first and then figure out what the theme is. If I had to sit down and think of a theme before I wrote something, I would never write anything. So I write and then figure out what I've written about and then revise to make that more clear. Not that that's necessarily the best way to do it... I don't know. I think it's very ambitious of you to want to make your work deeply meaningful, but don't give yourself a brain aneurysm or anything.
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