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.