It’s playwright — W-R-I-G-H-T. As in shipwright or wheelwright. The point being that plays are never so much written as they are wrought: crafted, shaped and honed until they meet both the structural and artistic demands of the dramatic form.

The key components of what’s called the dramatic arc — exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and denouement — are as indispensable to a good playwright as blueprints are to a master carpenter.

Dramatist Sam Shepard may have stated the case for the playwright-as-craftsman most baldly: “For me playwriting is and always has been like making a chair.

“Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don’t have these essentials you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.”

The rules of dramatic construction may be ironclad but they lend themselves to an infinite variety of uses and styles. Everything from a Shakespearean tragedy to a network sitcom to a five-minute blackout sketch adheres to the same basic tenets: characterisation must be revealed by the action and the plot should be as close to airtight as possible, beginning, middle and end dovetailing together in a seamless progression of storytelling.

Dialogue — whether it exalts the poetry of language or amounts to rapid-fire bursts of witty one-liners — provides the playwright with his or her grace notes and can only be polished once the overall structure of the plot is complete and locked into place.

In other words, it’s a painstakingly intricate and often frustrating business. If the end results look effortless on stage, that almost always speaks to the endless hours a playwright has put into writing, re-writing and re-re-writing his or her material (“Writing is easy,” one anonymous scribe deadpanned. “All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”)

The Bermuda Musical & Dramatic Society’s Famous For 15 Minutes festival, now in its 13th year, provides local theatrical talent with the opportunity to have their original scripts for one-act plays reviewed by an international juror.

As the festival’s name suggests, none of the short plays can exceed a quarter-hour in length and the number of characters is limited to four, at most. Following the judging, the six best entries are staged at the BMDS Daylesford Theatre, with an overall winner — based entirely on the quality of the writing — announced on the closing night of the run.

This year’s selection demonstrates a keen appreciation for the niceties of dramatic structure — there isn’t a single play, to borrow Sam Shepard’s analogy, which could be classified as a two-legged chair: they are all solidly constructed and, at the very least, competently plotted. The subject matter, ranging from the poignantly bittersweet to the anarchically irreverent, is impressively eclectic. And the stagings are simple, clean and understated as befits the small scale of the material.

Nathaniel Butterfield’s deliciously sardonic 101 Ways To Kill Janice intentionally echoes such twist-in-the-tail murder mystery comedies as Sleuth and Deathtrap.

The practical-minded title character (Patrika Ferguson) is recruited by her friend Mary (Caitlin Westhaver), a creative writing student, to help her plan the perfect murder — her own, it turns out, not simply the full-proof plot device for a stalled story idea.

Westhaver’s effervescently homicidal Valley Girl provides a giddy contrast to her would-be victim, the stolid, matter-of-fact Ferguson. The two actors exploit fully the comic possibilities of their characters and the unexpected plot reversals under the capable direction of Stephen Notman.

Catherine Hay’s Tell Me, Please is an ambitious if somewhat elliptical ghost story — perhaps a wee bit too ambitious and too elliptical given the constraints of the festival.

Attempting to telescope too much exposition into too little time, the play is a mood piece about the ghosts — both spectral and metaphorical — which haunt modern-day Bermuda.

Boasting some perceptive observations about our racially and culturally divided past and those segments of our community which remain entirely unreconciled to the unhappier chapters of Bermuda’s history, Hay’s work would have benefited from a bigger canvas.

Nevertheless, Reuben Flood as a sensitive young Bermuda blue blood who would like to atone for the sins of the fathers and Rayann Burrows as an enigmatic young woman he encounters outside a boozy yacht club shindig bring an appealing authenticity to Hay’s characters and dialogue. The always reliable Laura Bardgett provides yeoman’s service as director.

Helen Jardine’s Cold Feet is a splendidly observed romantic comedy, a battle of the sexes staged on the eve of the marriage between Beth (Chinyere Nwasikem) and Steve (Micah Jiminez) following an endlessly protracted courtship (based on his fear of the C word — commitment).

Closeted with streetwise maid of honour Fiona (Savanna Darby) in the hours before the ceremony, Beth – a quintessential straight arrow — confides her last-minute doubts about the pending nuptials. Arrested adolescent Steve does the same with best man Pete (Ian Strachan), Fiona’s coarse-grained husband, a tough and canny veteran of the matrimonial battlefield (key survival technique: remembering to put the toilet seat up before peeing).

Flitting between the opposing male and female camps, the play offers up two couples who appear to be classically mismatched in terms of temperament and expectations. Offering divergent — and often completely irreconcilable — views of what marriage entails and hilariously contradictory accounts of how the flames of their respective passions were first kindled, Cold Feet is an object lesson in the unscientific rules of attraction (the audience can see what dynamics are at work between the characters even if they’re not always able to do so).

Under the deft direction of Chris Edwards, a bravura ensemble cast tackles the witty and engaging material with infectious enthusiasm.

A screwball comedy which veers off in a satisfyingly unexpected direction, Owain Johnston Barnes’s Nemeses takes the standard conventions of the form — a dizzy, motormouthed heroine seemingly in hot pursuit of a fusty, button-down fellow — and neatly subverts them.

The playwright himself is cast as the wealthy, urbane and reliably dull marketing executive Colin, a man for whom raw human emotions are apparently only useful when they can be teased and exploited by his advertising campaigns. Emily Ross is his relentless pursuer Margot, the spontaneous and irrepressible girl from the mailroom whose worldview appears to be entirely informed by comic books and bad movie clichés.

Presenting one of the most marked studies in contrast imaginable (Colin remarks, not altogether approvingly, on “the manic-pixie-dreamgirl thing” she has going on), the couple do not so much meet cute as meet weird when Margot breaks into the apartment of the unlikely object of her desire.

From then on audience expectations are continuously upended as the boy-meets-kooky-girl story races to an unexpected finish.

Director Deborah Joell nimbly orchestrates the two-hander’s breathless action and sparkling verbal volleying.

Andrew Whalley’s Sushi is a genre-bending hybrid of domestic comedy — Henry (Micah Jiminez) has once again forgotten the birthday of wife Anne (Izabella Arnold) — and Psycho. Think the Gold Watch segment of Pulp Fiction when Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames abruptly exit a 1940s’-style film noir storyline and find themselves embroiled in the plot of Deliverance, for the type of jarringly off-kilter effect the play seeks. If the execution is not quite as inspired as the premise, Whalley cannot be faulted for lack of creative ambition or a willingness to take risks. Some of the dialogue is genuinely inspired and Carol Birch directs the proceedings – a knife-edge balancing act between horror and humour — with trademark assurance. Adam Gauntlett provides an amusing turn as a character who may not be what he (or she) seems.

Birch herself wrote The Graveyard Club, the final play in this year’s showcase.

It’s a particularly apt choice to close out the festival. One of the pillars of the Bermudian theatrical community, Birch has produced a sensitive, subtle and finely balanced tragicomic piece about four women who meet every year in a churchyard to toast a friend who died while visiting India.

The play contains some autobiographical elements – most of the funds raised by Famous For 15 Minutes go to Bermuda Musical & Dramatic Society bursaries awarded in the name of Kate Huntington, the talented young Bermuda theatrical aficionado killed in a 2000 motorcycle accident in India. This real-life tragedy provides a poignant point of departure for an alternately elegiac and comic meditation on love, loss and the enduring bonds of friendship which even death cannot negate.

The likeable cast members — Natacha Kneeland, Lesley Wharton, Suzann Roberts-Houlshouser and Regina Ferguson — are pitch-perfect, realising the full humour and heartbreak of the material without ever slipping into broad comedic shtick or maudlin sentimentality. Sheilagh Robertson has directed with insight, compassion and restraint.

Effective drama has been described as life with the dull bits cut out. If that’s so, then it’s fair to say audiences won’t encounter many dull moments in the plays being staged at the 2015 Famous For 15 Minutes festival, a triumph of good writing, solid craftsmanship and engaging storytelling for Bermuda’s aspiring playwrights .

• Famous For 15 Minutes is playing at the BMDS Daylesford Theatre at 8pm, August 12-15. For ticket information contact the box office at 292-0848 on show nights or visit Premiere tickets online.