[THE WRITING AND READING OF PLAYS]
Being a discussion as to which pursuit is the more painful, with various entertaining and instructive remarks as to the method of following both.
At my side lies an advertisement reading: "I will teach you to write plays for $10!"
If the professor means that he can teach you to write plays that will bring you ten dollars, he may be speaking the truth. If he means that for ten dollars, or a hundred dollars, or a hundred thousand, he can teach you to write plays, he is a liar!
Aunt Emma, who represents the palmy days of the stage, and "used to be with Booth and Barrett", once gave me her opinion of schools of acting. "One can learn to fence", she said, "and to walk and articulate properly. But one cannot learn to think or to feel, and without thinking and feeling there is no acting." Precisely the same thing may be said of playwriting.
Of course, there is a great deal that the dramatist must know about drama. W. T. Price's interesting volume on the subject contains about a hundred iron-clad principles that should be read, and re-read, and then forgotten. Such of the number as cling to your subconsciousness can't do you any harm, and probably will do you a lot of good. The others might help to make you a capable mechanic. Rostand's rooster, once he had been told how to crow, couldn't crow—fell to the ground, as it were, between two schools. Bronson Howard, asked to compile a book of rules for playwriting, declined on the ground that he feared being tempted to follow them.
To learn to do anything—do it! If you would know how to write plays write them, read them, go to see them. Then think a while, and write some more. If you feel sure you have a big idea—and sometimes it seems to me that the big ideas come most often to people who can't use them—pool it with the skill of someone who is willing to give craftsmanship for inventive genius—and watch him. Avery Hopwood collaborated on "Clothes" before he went single-handed at "Nobody's Widow", and, midway, he leased his experience to the novelist who furnished the plot of "Seven Days." Harriet Ford helped Joseph Medill Patterson write "The Fourth Estate", and now Mr. Patterson is exhibiting signs by which one may predict that he will do something alone. Wilson Mizner worked with George Bronson Howard on "The Only Law", and with Paul Armstrong on "The Deep Purple", and we may expect soon a piece that will bear only the name of Wilson Mizner.
"What a lucky fellow!" we say occasionally of some new author who springs into notice. "His first play, and a huge success!" But every professional reader in town could tell you that this success wasn't "his first play." While I was reading for the firm of Sam S. & Lee Shubert, I saw three or four manuscripts from the pens of Rachel Crothers and Thompson Buchanan. "The Three of Us" did not surprise me, nor "A Woman's Way." I knew, and every man in my profession knew, that Miss Crothers and Mr. Buchanan had spent years turning out pieces they could not sell. They worked, and they studied, and they went to the theater thoughtfully until they could write pieces that would sell.