Some playwrights are cruel bastards. I think this every time I see a monologue show in which the author has forgotten that his purpose for writing should be to engage me. Not to simply give me a history lesson, or convince me that his Aunt Gladys is the best person in the whole world, or show me that he is one of the few people who still knows how to use the subjunctive mood and describe what the starshine on the sweat on his lover's ass looks like. When stuck watching such shows, my jaws clench and something in me thinks, "Oh God, here comes the lyrical imagery. BARF!"

It's perfectly all right to want to be lyrical and historical and laud Aunt Gladys, but for the sake of all that's holy, make it interesting.

I've had some success with writing in the monologue format (stand-alone pieces -- not speeches taken out of standard plays) and thought I would share a couple of tips for anyone attempting to try their hand at it. I do this for purely selfish reasons -- so that, when your monologue show comes to my town and I have to sit through it, it doesn't stink and make we want to plunge salad forks in my eyes.

1.) Know who is speaking

Writers are always telling you to create character biographies, write pages and pages of character biography until...well, until you have pages and pages of stuff no one wants to read and you have tagged and numbered every sub-particle of your fictional personage. From my experience, it is enough to know what kind of person your character is. Does he like sports to the point of ignoring his family? Is she obsessed with cleaning things? If you can explain how your character would react in any given situation, and how his or her reaction would be different from yours or those of other characters, then more than likely, when performed, he or she will come across as an individual.

A technique I use is to personify some aspect of my personality. When authors try to write from their own experience, they often try to depict everything about themselves, which ends up making the protagonist a mishmash who doesn't seem like much of anything. In truth, as individuals, we are various people at various times. Choose one of your many moods and write from that place. What would your melancholy say? Or your rage?

A nice twist is to give your creation traits that are at cross purposes with his/her occupation or current situation: i.e. the elegant guy who has to work as a men's room valet, or the macho car mechanic who has to wait in Victoria's Secret while his wife shops. Knowing the kind of person from whose point- of- view you're writing will also help color their diction (or word choice) so they don't sound exactly like you.

2.) Know WHY this person is speaking.

The cardinal sin committed in many monologues (as occurs in one-person shows like The Belle of Amherst, in which Emily Dickinson just starts blabbing about herself until you want to throw her out the window) is that the playwright forgets to give the figure speaking a REASON to be speaking. Writers sometimes think that because they are interested in what their pen just squirted on paper that everyone else will be interested, too. Not so! Your character should have a motivation for opening his/her mouth. Speech is an action. You don't talk unless something prompts you to. And you don't speak at length unless you are attempting to wrangle an outcome in your favor. Even people who seem to go on for hours not saying much have a reason for doing so -- quite often it's to calm themselves or hold another person's attention because the speaker is inwardly lonely. Now that you have a character, put her in a situation in which she needs to accomplish an objective. Think of your monologue as a dramatic scene and it will become more active and consequently more engaging.

3.) Know TO WHOM this person is speaking

The listener is an element all too often overlooked in many monologues. Some playwrights are primarily interested in what they themselves have to say, their own clever turns of phrase, classical allusions and sparkling metaphors. They never stop to think who the other poor dolt is who has to sit and hear all this crap.

Who has to listen to this joker blather about himself? What reaction is the message having on the listener? Note that when you are trying to convince someone of something and you recognize that you are failing that you will naturally change tactics in order to become more persuasive. "Well, I tried to pretend to be her best friend and that didn't work, so maybe I'll try a guilt trip...or to elicit her sympathy for what a pitiful mess I am." Therefore, adding a listener will put your speaker on his toes -- it's not going to be easy for him to just spew soliloquies about sunsets. He's going to have to WORK. Or, at the very least, a defined listener will give the speaker a specific target to vent at. In the same way that you decided on what kind of person the speaker is, choose what sort of individual he is talking to. The speaker will tailor his delivery to his intended audience (not the theatre audience). Think about it. You converse differently with your boss than you do with your son or your mother or the garbage man. A defined listener will have his own agenda for being in the same room with your gabby protagonist, and this will naturally add conflict, which will up the dramatic potential of the monologue as a scene and make it more compelling, and best of all, it won't make your audience want to scream and tear their hair out and burn you in effigy.