Bookwriting - Part III

Once you have the spine of a scene, a challenge unique to writing the book of a musical is deciding what’s spoken and what’s sung (check out Dating from our two-person musical comedy Regretting Almost Everything as an example), and how to move between the two. Where does the music start? Does it begin under the dialogue leading into the song? If so, how much dialogue is underscored? Or does the music start when the dialogue stops?

 When a scene contains a song, my habit is to end the scene with the song. If there’s dialogue that must be in the scene and absolutely cannot happen before the song begins, I try to find a way to incorporate it within the body of the song.

That said, at a reading of one of my first musicals I noticed that every scene was structured the same way: Scene. Song. (Applause). Which resulted in 100 minutes of Scene, Song, Applause. It wasn’t good. What do I do now to avoid this? First, I tend to have a couple of scenes without songs. Second, we don’t give the audience a chance to applaud after every song. Third — I don’t know.