Identify the age group you want to write for and whether you intend for them to act in the play themselves or to be in the audience and watch the story performed by adults. Play publishers and production companies divide the youth market into four groups: preschool, elementary, middle school and high school. Attend performances of children's plays geared toward your selected group and study published scripts from resources such as Eldridge, Contemporary Drama Service and PLAYS Magazine to familiarize yourself with age-appropriate language, structure, pacing and production requirements.
Come up with a theme, genre and storyline that will resonate with your target demographic's frame of reference. The younger the child, the more success you'll have with simple plots involving the same type of fantasy and adventure elements they're already familiar with in fairy tales. Older children tend to gravitate to longer scripts that are more reality based and deal with themes regarding friendship, family, peer pressure, social issues and cultural diversity. While children of all ages love comedies and mysteries, older grades are a better match for drama and light romance. (See the Tips section of this article for advice on what type of fare resonates best with each age group.)
Test your play idea on a child or two before you actually write it, by telling it aloud as if it were a short story. If they're hanging onto every word, it's a good sign that your plot is sustainable fare for a costumed production. If they're rolling their eyes, yawning or wandering off, you can expect pretty much the same response from other kids the same age.
Make a preliminary list of all the characters and settings you need to tell your story. For publishers and producers, large-cast contemporary plays with more roles for females than males are preferred over small-cast productions that require multiple backdrops, props and costume changes.
Create a three-act outline before you start writing your script. Even if you're penning a skit that only lasts 15 minutes, the structure needs to adhere to the traditional format of beginning, middle and end. The first act introduces the lead characters and establishes what the conflict is that will drive the rest of the story. The second act escalates the protagonist's problems and hints that there's a possibility she's going to lose her quest. The third act puts the protagonist between a rock and a hard place and forces her to take the biggest risk ever to resolve the conflict or quest that was introduced at the beginning. Strive for an equitable amount of action in each of the three acts.
Familiarize yourself with stage terminology so that you can convey on paper when and where your characters make their entrances and exits and where the furniture should be set up. If you're standing on the stage and facing the audience, this is downstage (DS). If you turn away from them toward the back wall, this is upstage (US). Stage left (SL) and stage right (SR) are your own left and right when facing the audience. Centerstage (CS) is in the middle of the stage. The letters "U" and "D" can preface the SL and SR directions to indicate placement that's above or below the center-stage line.
Open a new Word document, set your margins for 1 inch on each side and designate single spacing. Use Courier or Times New Roman 12 pt. Center the title of your play in caps at the top of the page and put your name beneath it. Insert four hard returns, return to the left margin and type the words "Cast of Characters" in caps. List each of the characters names on separate lines followed by a brief description of who they are. Example:
Emily Rathbone - a 10-year-old girl detective
Mr. Rathbone - Emily's father
Insert two hard returns after the last character's name and type the words "Circa and Setting" in caps. Two lines below this, identify when and where the story takes place (i.e., "The Present, a small town in Iowa"). Create two more hard returns and type the words "At Rise" in all caps followed by a colon. What you'll write next is a brief description of what the audience will first see when the curtain opens. This description should be no longer than a paragraph and explain what the setting is, where the furniture and props are and whether anyone is currently in the scene.
Set three tabs in your document. The first one should be at 2.25 inches, the second tab will be 2.75 inches and the third will be 3 inches. Playwriting is comprised of action scenes, dialogue and parentheticals (the cues on how a line should be delivered). To indicate who is speaking, tab to the 2.75-inch marker and type the character's name in all caps. If you want the actor to say the line in a certain way, insert a return and tab to the 2.25 marker; enclose the cue in parentheses. Insert another return and type the character's line of dialogue at the left margin. If it's a long line of dialogue, it should extend all the way to the right margin and then automatically return to the left.
Tab to the 3-inch marker if your characters enter or exit the scene or are engaged in some sort of physical action. What's a little cumbersome using Word to do this is that you'll need to align all of the stage direction in a block that doesn't shoot all the way back to the left margin.
Repeat these steps throughout the entire play. Recruit friends to read the dialogue out loud for you to ensure that it sounds natural. It's also a good idea to run a Flesch-Kincaid score on your finished product to make sure that the vocabulary you have used is consistent with the comprehension skills of your actors and audiences. This readability statistics function in a Word program is located in the same menu as spelling and grammar and generates an analysis of the reading ease and number of passive sentences.