Structure
Once you鈥檝e established the content of your work you need to consider its structure. The order of the scenes will have a big effect on the journey on which you take the audience. If your piece is non-naturalistic you may want to repeat scenes or moments through the piece and slowly reveal their significance to the audience as the piece unfolds.
You could choose to start at the beginning of the story and build in tension towards a climax at the end of the piece. When your work runs in chronological order like this, it is called a linear structure. If your work is inspired by Stanislavski you should use a linear structure to ensure it is naturalistic.
If you decided to begin by presenting the outcome of the story first and then move back in time to how it all began, this would be a non- linear structure. It doesn鈥檛 run in a The logical order of events in time, from beginning to middle to end. time sequence but moves about in time. This builds tension in another way. Revealing events and information bit by bit for the audience and providing clues to what happened keeps them engaged. The work is like a jigsaw puzzle for the audience which finally makes sense when all the pieces are in place. Changing the structure can have a profound effect upon the shape and impact of your drama.
Narrative and plot
Your devised work may have one clear storyline, or narrative, running throughout. If there are two or more storylines in your piece, you鈥檒l need to decide how you deal with these separate stories when structuring your work. You could run each story consecutively or decide that it鈥檚 more interesting to break up each story and interweave them, cutting from one to the other. This is called a fractured narrative. The trick is to leave each story at a point which keeps the audience wanting to know what happens next. It鈥檚 like a jigsaw that the audience have to put the pieces together for themselves.