How to Write a Play | Page 5

can't bring myself to admit that others are.
For a long time I imagined that the details, if they were ingenious, would please the public as much as an intrigue of which the ultimate result is usually given in the first scene. I was absolutely wrong, and I have suffered for it more than once. But at my age one doesn't reform. When I have drawn up the plan, I no longer want to write the piece. You see that I am a detestable collaborator. Say so, if you speak to me, but don't hold me up as a model.
Edmond Gondinet.
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VI.
FROM Eug��ne Labiche.
Everyone writes in accordance with his inspiration and his temperament. Some sing a gay note, others find more pleasure in making people weep.
As for me, this is my procedure:
When I have no idea, I gnaw my nails and invoke the aid of Providence.
When I have an idea, I still invoke the aid of Providence,--but with less fervor, because I think I can get along without it.
It is quite human, but quite ungrateful.
I have then an idea, or I think I have one.
I take a quire of white paper, linen paper--on any other kind I can imagine nothing--and I write on the first page:
PLAN.
By the plan I mean the developed succession, scene by scene, of the whole piece, from the beginning to the end.
So long as one has not reached the end of his play he has neither the beginning nor the middle. This part of the work is obviously the most laborious. It is the creation, the parturition.
As soon as my plan is complete, I go over it and ask concerning each scene its purpose, whether it prepares for or develops a character or situation, and then whether it advances the action. A play is a thousand-legged creature which must keep on going. If it slows up, the public yawns; if it stops, the public hisses.
To write a sprightly play you must have a good digestion. Sprightliness resides in the stomach.
Eug��ne Labiche.
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VII.
From Ernest Legouv��.
You ask me how a play is made.
By beginning at the end.
A novel is quite a different matter.
Walter Scott, the great Walter Scott, sat down of a morning at his study-table, took six sheets of paper and wrote 'Chapter One,' without knowing anything else about his story than the first chapter. He set forth his characters, he indicated the situation; then situation and characters got out of the affair as best they could. They were left to create themselves by the logic of events.
Eug��ne Sue often told me that it was impossible for him to draw up a plan. It benumbed him. His imagination needed the shock of the unforeseen; to surprize the public he had to be surprized himself. More than once at the end of an instalment of one of his serial stories he left his characters in an inextricable situation of which he himself did not know the outcome.
George Sand frequently started a novel on the strength of a phrase, a thought, a page, a landscape. It was not she who guided her pen, but her pen which guided her. She started out with the intention of writing one volume and she wrote ten. She might intend to write ten and she wrote only one. She dreamed of a happy ending, and then she concluded with a suicide.
But never have Scribe, or Dumas p��re, or Dumas fils, or Augier, or Labiche, or Sardou, written "Scene One" without knowing what they were going to put into the last scene. A point of departure was for them nothing but an interrogation point. "Where are you going to lead me?" they would ask it; and they would accept it only if it led them to a final point, or to the central point which determined all the stages of the route, including the first.
The novel is a journey in a carriage. You make stops, you spend a night at the inn, you get out to look at the country, you turn aside to take breakfast in some charming spot. What difference does it make to you as a traveler? You are in no hurry. Your object is not to arrive anywhere, but to find amusement while on the road. Your true goal is the trip itself.
A play is a railway journey by an express train--forty miles an hour, and from time to time ten minutes stop for the intermissions; and if the locomotive ceases rushing and hissing you hiss.
All this does not mean that there are no dramatic masterpieces which do not run so fast or that there was not an author of great talent, Moli��re, who often brought about his ending by the grace of God. Only, let me add that to secure absolution for the last