Playwrights Using Creative Style

When I think of creative writing, I think of something fictional that usually contains a fair amount of dialogue. The first creative style piece that comes to my mind is a two-person play titled “Assault Toast” that I performed in high school Forensics. This piece is extremely easy to read and understand. The Flesch Reading Ease score is 73.88 and only four to five years of education are required for understanding. I think this is because there are a lot of one-word responses and the piece was written as a dialogue between to teenage sisters that are in an argument. The tone of the play would have been lost if it was any more difficult to read and understand. I think that creative writing can vary in its complexity and readability, but for pieces like the one I chose that are reliant on dialogue, simpler content and word choice are necessary.

“Assault Toast” was written by Bradley Walton, a comic book author turned playwright from Virginia. Walton began his career in the creative world by writing and illustrating comic books. This led to little success and he found himself working in the high school library of his alma mater. His love for acting and forensics during high school got him the job of forensics coach and play director. These new positions shifted his career as an author, and he quickly became a successful playwright with almost too many published works to count. He writes mostly short comedies for a small cast, which makes him a popular author in forensics competitions. “Assault Toast” fits that description. This play depicts a conversation between two sisters. The younger sister is attempting to modify the toaster such that it becomes a home security device. The older sister questions her logic and doubts her ability to perform such a crazy task. This dynamic continues throughout the entirety of the play and bickering that you would expect from teenage sisters is very prevalent.

This play uses a handful of rhetorical devices throughout the short excerpt that I have chosen. These include alliteration, repetition, amplification, and others. It also uses sentence structure to help emphasize the tone of the play and of each character. One character is questioning the logic of the other, so she uses short, to the point sentences to portray her confusion and irritation. The other sister tries to defend herself using larger terms and longer sentences to seem as if she knows what she is doing. The author of this play uses creative styles to allow for different emotions to be felt by the audience and by the characters in the play. To the audience, this is a comical depiction of an argument between sisters, but the sisters, especially the younger, are being serious.

Creative style strategies are used in play-writing as an attempt to keep viewers engaged in the performance the entire time, whether that is for a few minutes or a couple of hours. It is important for the success of the author and the performance to keep people anticipating what is coming next and willing to watch the whole thing. The creative style allows for an author to take advantage of sentence structure and word choice to keep the piece interesting and stay away from monotony. Plain or official styles wouldn’t be able to capture the interest of people in the way the creative style does. The use of a variety of rhetorical devices and sentence structure contribute the most to the creative style in this piece as well as in other plays or movie scripts. They are important devices used a lot in written dialogue and can even be picked out of spoken word. Creative style is necessary to escape to monotony of plain and official styles and allows the reader or viewer to fully immerse themselves in the work.

Kelsie K.