This course will help emerging writers identify and refine their individual artistic voices, while giving them a wide range of tools and techniques to use in brainstorming, outlining, drafting and revision. Students will write a full-length play (between 80 and 120 pages) with notes towards revisions. You’ve already learned about traditional structure, and you’ve tried your hand at writing a full- length. What does a play in your voice—drawing on your own history and imagination, your hopes and fears, your joy and rage—look like? Sound like, move like, feel like? What is the form of dramatic expression most organic to you? What do you have to tell the world that no one else can say? We will begin the semester with in-class and take-home exercises aimed at giving you space to discover your voice as a writer. You will try out new writing styles, employ new techniques, build a personal syllabus for the play taking shape in your imagination. We will use the elements of drama identified in Aristotle’s Poetics (Character, Story/Plot, Theme/Agon, Dialogue, Spectacle, and Music) to organize our explorations and our required reading.