I'd Like to Do It Again

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.

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 Act 2 equal Act 3. I have altered that a little in my own work, and I think I could express it as: the characters of Act 1 multiplied by the emotions of Act 2 equal Act 3. A play really is a character driven by an emotion along a definite line to a definite end. Mr. Malevinsky states somewhat the same thing. I fully agree with him that every play expresses a definite emotion, but I do not think the author is or should be conscious of the fact. In the end any carefully written play results in a story line marked out by one character, driven by one dominant emotion to the definite climax of that emotion—success, failure, love, death, whatever it may be. But if one wants a successful play, it must have an ending absolutely made imperative by what has happened in the first part of your story, plus what has happened in the second part. If two-thirds of the way through you have a possible choice as to the outcome, you will have a failure every time. Authors write first acts and second acts, but the audience writes all good last acts. A modern audience cares very little whether your play ends happily or not, but they insist upon its ending along the line you yourself have started it on, and audiences know a lot more about play writing than any dramatist ever knew.

6. Don’t try to tell of the sort of life you don’t know anything about. If you know the little girl next door, tell a story about her—forget the King of France.

7. If, after you have written a speech, and read it over and find it sounds very beautiful to you, cross it out; beauty in the modern play is in the thought, not in the words. This is a tough lesson for us old-timers to learn, and to this day the last thing I do before I send my manuscript on its first journey is to comb it over for stray “effective speeches” or bits of bombast, once my specialty and now my bitterest enemy.

8. Don’t give a thought as to how big or how little your cast is, or how much or how little your production is going to cost. If it’s a good play it can’t cost too much, and if it’s a bad one it can’t help it.

9. Get yourself in the habit of reading over all you have written previously before you start each day’s work, and as the manuscript grows force yourself to be more and more critical of what you have done. A play should consist of at least a hundred thousand words, twenty thousand on paper and eighty thousand in the waste basket.

10. Don’t worry about how long it is going to take you to finish your task; it doesn’t matter. Some days you won’t be able to write at all, and other days you can’t stop writing. I have written through hundreds of lunch and dinner hours and thousands of business and social appointments. Don’t let any one bother you when you are writing or anything. If the ‘phone rings, don’t answer it, and if your wife rebels, divorce her. Nothing and nobody is important when the thoughts are boiling. Nobody expects a dramatist to be a respectable member of society, and any crime is justified. If you find yourself bored at your desk go and play golf, play anything, but stop writing. If you find yourself in your stride keep at it. I wrote one entire act of THE DETOUR without getting up from my chair, sixty-five hundred words in longhand in eight hours. Teach yourself this trick of crawling into your shell like a mud turtle and letting the world roll by.

I have developed a habit of concentration until it is an almost idiotic habit. When I have a play in my head neither time nor space exist for me. I am forced to keep a car and a man to drive it because I have so trained my mind to focusing that the moment I sat back in a seat on the subway it was a foregone conclusion that I would be put off the train at Van Cortland Park when I lived on East 63rd Street. For a time I tried driving a car myself, but no sooner did I find myself on a straight road than my mind clicked back on its job of play making until I drove into a ditch or ran through a traffic light. At length I was persuaded to give up driving, not entirely out of respect for the law, but because the roars of outraged traffic cops disturbed my train of thought.

Some years ago my wife was taken to the hospital for a critical operation and I spent the most horrible day of my life awaiting a verdict that meant life or death. At length I was allowed to see her for five minutes and told to go home and not to return until late the following day. Absolutely broken by what I had been through I returned to our empty rooms; it was ten o’clock at night; sleep was out of the question. I sat at my desk making marks on a pad of paper. Suddenly I was struck by, of all things, an idea for a farce, and I started to write. Sometime later I had a feeling of fatigue, and I sadly said to myself: “I’m getting old. I’m not the man I was.” Then I noticed that, although my lights were burning, it was broad daylight outside. I looked at my watch and discovered that it was two o’clock. I had been writing for sixteen hours. When Mrs. Davis came back from the hospital two weeks later I had written, sold, cast and started rehearsals of EASY COME, EASY GO, and she was rather curious as to where this stranger had come from.

I wrote a melodrama called HER MARRIAGE VOW in three days, many years ago, and it played three years. On the other hand, I worked eleven months on THE NERVOUS WRECK. Time doesn’t mean a thing. Any good newspaper man will tell you that if he couldn’t turn out three thousand words of copy a day he couldn’t hold his job. A play is seldom more than twenty-one thousand words, seven days’ work if you want it to be, seven years’ work if it happens to come that way.

As a matter of fact, I figure that it takes me one hundred hours to write a play, which, of course, can be one hour a day for one hundred days, or ten hours a day for ten days; but please note that my trick is never to start writing until I have solved every problem, drawn every character and completely laid out my story line. The trick of carrying all this in your mind with absolutely no notes to fall back upon is rather a difficult one to master, but it is, I am sure, of great value. What really happens is that in the course of the weeks you go about with this junk shifting about in your head, the sub-conscious part of your mind does most of your work for you, and when you start to write it out you will be amazed to read what your own hand has written.

When I am writing, I make it a rule to go over my story fully in my mind just before I go to sleep and to start writing the next morning before I have read my mail or even the morning papers. Very often points are clear to me that were clouded the night before, and I find that the part of my mind that remained active while I slept has been helping me to pay the rent.

There is a great difference between inspiration and imagination, and although I believe in inspired writing—that is, I believe that some men and women upon some fortunate occasion write from an emotional prompting deeper and finer than their conscious mind could inspire—I do not confuse the mental pictures of an imaginative mind with so exalted a word. There are and always have been two sorts of writers, the writer who tells what he sees, or has read or thought or been told, and the writer whose mind is a sort of old-fashioned kaleidoscope that forms little mental pictures quite without conscious effort. In other words, one writer uses trained observation, and the other has the gift of spontaneous creation. I have on several occasions seen the story line of an entire play laid out before me in one flash at a time when I, to the best of my knowledge, was not thinking of any such thing at all. I can, on a bet, at any time close my eyes and shake my head and look up and tell a story that, so far as I can discover, I have never for a moment thought of before.

As a matter of fact, this very unusual development of the power of sub-conscious creation is a terrible nuisance to me, as my mind races along so easily down any path that I am dragged along after it without stopping long enough to make sure that this path is the one that taste and prudence dictate. I often envy the writer who is forced to stop and build his plot brick by brick, but so far as I know I never work out a story at all. The story comes to me as Topsy came to an unappreciative world “born growed.” If a story of mine is challenged by a manager in whom I have confidence it is no trouble at all for me to say, “Well then, suppose it went like this,” and rattle off a completely different fiction. I have never been able to harness this trick of mine, and often when I have made up a story in a flash and sold it to some friendly manager I have gone home and started to write it to discover that it insists upon coming out entirely different, and that the manager who loved the first one has to recall to me the details of the plot I have quite forgotten.

Once about ten years ago I read a play that never existed at all to a famous manager. I had promised him a play, and when the time came to deliver it I hadn’t had a moment to think of it, so I took with me to his office an old typed manuscript and gravely read it to him in the rough, a play that I made up as I went along. The manager liked the play very much, but when I handed it in a few weeks later he said he had never in his life seen so many changes made, and that he vastly preferred the first draft.

11. Keep in mind that no part of a play, and this is especially true of farce, is effective when it is not convincing. The more belief you create in your characters and situations, the greater your success. Truth in play writing is quite as valuable as it is in life, but, just as in life, there is a limit to the extent to which simple truth telling may safely be indulged in. When Hamlet told the players to “hold the mirror up to nature” he was quite aware that when they looked in that mirror they would see a reflection, not nature itself. In the arts, truth is art, but it isn’t always true. We value a play either because (1) of its truth, (2) of its wide departure from the truth, or (3) because of a romantic desire excited in us that these related incidents should be true.

We, the audience, must follow each step of a play with full belief in that step, but where the dramatist’s skill comes in is in being able to make of himself such a glamorous and subtle liar that what he feels to be true becomes the truth. It is the same with any of the arts of the theater; our skillfully placed lamps give us a feeling of sunlight, but they are not the sun. The great actor doesn’t die before your eyes, but he seems to die, just as he doesn’t live, he only seems to live. For a while, here in America, we playwrights fell very much under the Russian influence and rather wandered about in a fog. “Why?” we asked, “should this play be a failure? Isn’t it true?” The answer was of course that the probability is that if it had not been quite so laboriously true it wouldn’t have been quite such a bore. Bad smells are true, rainbows are lies. No man has ever put wisdom into simple and understandable words better than Shakespeare did and Hamlet’s advice to the players remains a marvelous guide both to the actor and the dramatist. “Hold the mirror up to nature” but show it reflected—a mirage.

12. I have often been asked what was the most valuable trait in the equipment of the dramatist and I always answer, “Courage.” I put that ahead of everything but genius, and genius is to me just an expression, like “plovers’ eggs.” I’ve often read of “plovers’ eggs,” but up to now I’ve never eaten any. I think I know personally all of the dramatists of America and many of the best of England. I am sure that there are more able and talented men and women writing for the stage to-day than ever before, but Eugene O’Neill is the only one I know with what I would admit to be genius. I don’t always like Mr. O’Neill’s plays and I never like all of any of them, but there is always something under them that the rest of us don’t get. To me he is a mile above the rest of us.

Sidney Howard, Max Anderson and, in melodrama, Bayard Veiller know their business better than he does, but O’Neill’s plays come from deeper down, not deeper in his brain as some people think, but from the depths of the particularly sensitive heart of a particularly sensitive man. So, leaving genius aside, I think courage the quality most valuable to the man or woman who expects to win a place in the very odd world of the theater where there are no standards at all, either mental, moral or ethical, and where the author must of necessity stand alone against groups with different and antagonistic interests. From the moment an author signs a contract for the production of a play until that play has lived its life on the stage, gone through its course of stock company and foreign productions and been sold “down the river” and turned into a moving picture, every single hand that comes in contact with that play is the hand of a potential enemy. The manager and his staff, the actors in a group, the scenic artists and the technical departments all have the power and as a rule they desire to put in a little something by way of change, something usually that will be to their advantage and destructive to the best quality of the work.

This of course means fight. An author surely might as well fight and be licked as to be licked without fighting, and the method adopted by the experienced street fighter of getting in the first punch is most earnestly recommended. There is to all these groups but one real hope in any play—the hope that the author wrote something; if he did, they all, manager, actor, etc., have a chance for success; if he didn’t they haven’t. Authors of plays, like dentists, are never popular; nobody really likes to have them around.

Writers are so different in their method that I hesitate to advise a course that has been very useful to me, that is to vary the form of writing often enough to escape the boredom that follows walking over the same path too frequently. I like to follow a heavy drama with a farce, and a light comedy with a melodrama. Of course, one man usually writes one form of play better than he does another; yet even in an age of specialists, the good marksman should learn to handle all the tools of his trade, and no man can write deep drama without a sense of comedy, and most assuredly can’t write farce without a definite note of tragedy.

I have always had a lot of fun writing mystery plays, although a well-built mystery drama represents a staggering amount of hard work. The formula is a very exact and very exacting one, and in addition to its mechanical difficulties the author must not only create an interest in who committed the crime, but, if he hopes for success, he must make them fear that some one character dear to them is guilty. In other words, the mystery play in which one hasn’t gone deep enough into the emotions to make the audience care who committed the murder is never successful, no matter how mysterious it may be.

Emile Gaboriau was the master of this form of writing, and to this day we all more or less faithfully follow his model, although his complicated plot structure requires more skill and patience than most modern authors are able to supply. Poe borrowed the formula, as he quite frankly admitted, and from him it descended to Anna Catherine Green, whose LEAVENWORTH CASE and HAND AND RING are fine examples of this form of writing. Jumping again across the Atlantic, we see in the Sherlock Holmes character, and in Watson’s shrewd “feeding” of that character strong traces of the Gaboriau style. After these came the deluge: Bayard Veiller, with his almost perfect THE 13TH CHAIR, several of my own and many others leading up to the endless stream of mysterious murders, strange disappearances, midnight crimes, haunted houses, etc., etc., etc.

I know hundreds of men who read one at one sitting, but I defy any man to write one in less than one hundred hours of solid work. When I tackle a job of this sort, my study looks like an architect’s work room, charts everywhere, on the wall and tables and even on the floor. I make a chart for each character, showing exactly where he is, what he says and what he is thinking of each moment of the play. In this sort of trick writing, every word one says is extremely likely to be used against him. Next to rough farce, the writing of a play of this sort calls for more technical skill and inventive power than any other form of play making.

The only thing I can add to these scattered notes about play writing is that no one should allow a failure to beat him. There isn’t anything at all remarkable about having written a bad play; it’s been done before and it’s going to be done again. It’s writing a good play that is unusual as the man who bit the dog; he’s the fellow worth talking about. No matter how much you may be scorned and derided for having written what you wrote, no matter how sure you may be that you never again will dare to look anybody in the face—for a dramatist’s failure in the theater, for some reason that escapes me, seems to carry with it a moral disgrace and a social ostracism—in spite of this you will get another chance when you get another play. I have always demanded that each new play of mine should be judged exactly as though I had never written one before, and, as I said earlier in this article, the critic must tell the truth; he may not want to, but if you really have done a good job he can’t help himself. Critics, like dramatists, are emotional idiots.

Although I remain firmly of the opinion that the talent of the dramatist, like the talent of the great singer, actor, painter and musician, is a thing born in them and not to be acquired by any other than the chosen few, I know that love and appreciation of the theater may be taught and hidden talents discovered and developed. When in my college days I was running one hundred yards in ten and one-fifth seconds I often thought that, in spite of the fact that few men alive at that time had me beaten that time, there were probably plenty of young fellows in the country towns who could have been trained to beat it. Every boy in the world doesn’t try to run a hundred yards, and of course many a doctor and lawyer and business man has been born with the gift of poetry, music, painting and drama and has neglected those talents or even been quite unconscious of them. These new classes of Dramatic Arts in the schools and universities will catch any submerged talent and bring it to the light and beside this they will make cultured audiences, and in the end good audiences will make good plays.

Our present bewilderment in the theater as to what the public wants would soon vanish if we had a public who themselves knew what they wanted and when the day comes when we have a large audience ready to express the growing demand for mature and adult drama even we laggards of the theater will hasten to furnish it—we are all of us hungry for success even to the extreme of being willing to do good work for it.

In November of last year a group of Harvard undergraduates, accompanied by Professor Parker of the Harvard English Department, called on me, and at the same time on Winthrop Ames and Lee Simonson and asked us to help them form a school of the drama in Cambridge. The Harvard faculty seemed unwilling to provide the desired instruction in the arts of the theater and since Professor Baker’s withdrawal there had been no Dramatic Department. Mr. Ames, Mr. Simonson and I called a meeting of Harvard graduates at the Harvard Club and asked these boys to meet us there and tell us their troubles and their desires. As a result of that meeting the Cambridge School of the Drama was organized with a board of governors whose names read like an all-star cast. At this school students of Harvard and Radcliffe and a limited number of outsiders may now take courses in dramatic technique and the arts of the theater.

The faculty of the school is composed of Albert R. Lovejoy, Walter Prichard Eaton and H. W. L. Dana. The visiting lecturers and board of governors, each of whom is to lecture once each term and meet the students for informal talks, are:

Lecturers on play production—Winthrop Ames, Vinton Freedley, Kenneth Macgowan, Gilbert Seldes, Maurice Wertheim.

Lecturers on drama and criticism—Heywood Broun, J. Brooks Atkinson, J. W. D. Seymour, H. K. Motherwell, John T. Williams, Isaac Goldberg, Professor C. T. Copeland, Norman Hapgood, Prof. J. Tucker Murray, Owen Wister, Robert Littell, H. T. Parker.

Lecturers on stage lighting, scene designing, etc.—Lee Simonson, Robert Edmond Jones.

Lecturers on play construction—Eugene O’Neill, Sidney Howard, David Carb, Philip Barry, Edward Sheldon, Percy Mackaye, Robert Sherwood, S. N. Behrman, Owen Davis.

Lecturers on the art of acting, etc.—John Mason Brown, Walter Hampden, Elliot Cabot, Robert Middlemass, Osgood Perkins.

There is a list for you! All Harvard men and all men who have done real work. I can remember when I was one of three Harvard men in the game. Now we are getting our new blood from all the great universities. Walter Eaton told us at one of our meetings that he had listed over five hundred universities and high schools in the country that were giving special courses in the Arts of the theater! Does that look like a dying institution? Five hundred schools turning out each year a flock of boys and girls who, if they have learned nothing else, have learned to love the theater.

To me that doesn’t spell the end of the theater, it means the beginning, and I am eager to try to teach our own little group all I can before they get started on their own and get so far ahead of me that I shall have to turn about and study their methods.

This school, with its staff of real workers, seems to me to be about the most practical place of instruction established since the day when the boy in NICHOLAS NICKLEBY was told to spell w-i-n-d-e-r, and then go and wash it. I know what meeting and talking to such a list of men would have meant to me thirty-five years ago. Among the warm spots in my memory are meetings I had years ago with Dion Boucicault, A. M. Palmer, Daly and Percy Mackaye’s famous father, and these men weren’t trying to teach me anything, they were trying to get rid of me as quickly as they could.