Chapter VI: ◆ How to Write Three Hundred Plays

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I love farce, but of all the forms of dramatic writing it is by all odds the most difficult and demands more hard work and more technical dexterity of the writer than any other.

A good farce, in the first place, must have a plot that could as easily be told as a tragedy, and a character not only essentially true but completely familiar to any audience; and it must have at least three times as much situation in it as any other type of play.

We hear a lot of late of the technique of play writing, and I have grown a bit impatient of some of the dogmatic drivel laid before the eyes of would-be dramatists. In reality the dramatist sails on uncharted seas. There is no master to whose word he can bow, and no oracle to whom he can submit his questions. The only way to write a good play is to make it good. If I were asked to put into one sentence the result of my experience as a writer, I should say: “Dream out a story about the sort of persons you know the most about, and tell it as simply as you can.”

Of course, rules for play writing don’t mean anything, not even that the writer who lays down the rules ever uses them himself. He may be like the cook who prefers to go out to lunch, and yet I have picked up one or two tricks, short cuts, easy ways to do hard things, and I am going to write a few of them down in the faint hope of their being of some slight help to a beginner.

Of course, the usual way to learn to write is by repeated failure, by doing almost everything so badly that the awful consequences are so deeply burned into one’s memory that each disaster has resulted in being so terrified of one particular blunder that it can never be repeated.

Technique is, as I understand it, simply a facing of certain facts, a realization of some mistakes, a summing up of some experiences of one’s self or of others, into an expressed formula. I think I believe in that. It is a good thing to know thoroughly all the rules of play writing (only there really aren’t any). These rules, the result of one’s own experience or the theories of others should be carefully learned, and then twice as carefully forgotten. Conscious technique in any art is very painful. The sculptor knows that under his clay are the trusses to hold up his figure, but he doesn’t let them show. It might be well to note, however, that if he forgot to put them in, his beautiful figure would be a shapeless mass on the floor.

Of course, the man who knows the most about play writing doesn’t write the best plays, but quite as surely knowing a little about his trade isn’t going to hurt him. I quarrel sometimes with my friend, M. L. Malevinsky, over the real value of this special knowledge. To me play writing is almost entirely an emotional thing, and in the foreword I wrote for his quite remarkable book on THE TECHNIQUE OF THE DRAMA I tried to express my feeling of the limitations of technical knowledge by writing: “It is probable that the hedge sparrow has quite as much technique as the meadow lark, but only the song bird can sing.”

If you care to read the few observations I am about to write down, read them with the thought that they aren’t meant to be too slavishly followed; they are not words of wisdom at all, they are simply scars from the battlefield, and they are only meant as a sort of protective mechanism to save your fingers from being burned as deeply as my own have been.

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1. Don’t write at all until you have something you are sure is worth writing about.

2. Don’t make notes. Anything one may possibly forget isn’t worth remembering.

3. After your story has shaped itself in your mind, tell it to yourself over and over and over again—then try it on some one else. Wives are good; they have to stand for it. Let the first thing you put down on paper be an outline narrative of your play, written in two hundred words. If your story won’t go into two hundred words, throw it away. The next step is to write several more outlines, at first in narrative form. Later put in a little dialogue, not probably to be used in your final copy, but to give you a growing acquaintance with your characters.

4. Modern plays are about how characters react to situations, not about situations in themselves.

5. Be absolutely sure of your last scene before you write a word of your first act. Paul Potter, a master of the form of play writing, was the first to tell me that the French dramatists always wrote their last act first. I have never quite done that, but I do try to know exactly what I am going to do with my characters at the end of the play before I start out. One of the oldest mechanical rules of play writing is, Act 1 plus