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.