There'll Be Drama In Your Writing If There's Drama In Your Life

( Originally Published 1944 )

Exiled from home I sleep in my own bed;

THROUGH all the ages writers have been viewed dubiously. Why? If they have a headache it is dramatized into the possibility of a brain tumor. If they so much as meet a dame and take her around a bit it is an immortal love affair. If they have a fight with their wives (and Heaven gives special dispensation, I here-with inform authors, to those of their numbers who feel called upon, at more or less regular intervals, to mistreat their wives!) they are likely to hang them-selves . . . and so on.

The sort of writer who will most easily succeed at the novel or the short story is one who habitually dramatizes himself. The type of writer who should write nonfiction instead of fiction is the type of writer, usually, who does not so dramatize himself.

Everlastingly writers hand me scripts and urge me to read them with the thought plainly in the fore-front of their minds that they do not themselves know whether their work is good or bad. They think, when they hand their work to other writers for appraisal, that the other writer, who may have sold a few things, can detect the presence or non-presence of prose-magic in it. And it is possible, often, so to do. It comes about somewhat as follows:

The writer who should be writing non-fiction instead of fiction customarily does not dramatize. Very often he writes almost perfectly, so far as rhetoric, syntax, and neat phraseology are concerned, but there is nothing dramatic about it. This type of writer is the devil to deal with. He knows he has written well; he knows that his style is good; he knows that his characters are capably drawn; and yet he has an intuitive distrust of the whole thing. Why? It is be-cause without being able to put his finger on it he senses that there is something not in his script that should be there. Perhaps drama lies only in hyperbole, or over-accentuation, or merely in sheer exaggeration. But "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing."

There is another type of writer who stinks of clichés, wallows in homilies, smells of the. conventional, and yet as I read his junk my subconscious sets off a bell and I know that I am reading the work of a potential writer. His grammar may be as bad as mine. His style may give off an almost overpowering odor. But I know he has the one thing that will excuse all his other faults after he has had a bit of practise: the ability to make drama appear. I often resent this sort of writer, and I lean fondly toward the guy who writes well but has no drama to speak of yet I know that this latter man's efforts will only break his heart unless he turns to non-fiction; and I know that the other one will very likely crash into Big Time, and readers will love him. When other writers, however, read him, they will scowl and twitch and say: "How can this crazy so-and-so get by with this junk?" The reason the crazy so-and-so can get by with that junk is drama: his inherent feeling for the electricity of prose which lights up even the most stupidly-written stuff for the average reader.

How I wish I could define drama. Let us look at it in a more homespun light. Take the nice young man with a knife-edge crease in his pants, a balance at the bank, and a good job, who goes to a girl and declares his love for her. The girl looks him over. She thinks to herself: "Geez, if I grab this stupe I won't ever have to work." She considers his reliability, his good looks, his flair for dress, the respect he has from those around him. She admits that he has everything, and she decides to marry him. She tells him so. He says thank you, kisses her, and doesn't even ask for pre-marital credit references. He goes off to build a house for her. And so there she is all set to marry the lug and lead a comfortable life.

But along comes another moke who also goes for her. He tells her that he is devastated because she is engaged. He goes off (because he dramatizes himself) and gets stinking drunk. He doesn't really care a whoop about the dame, but he must dramatize the whole situation or bust. The girl hears that he has lost his job because he got drunk. She goes to him. He is ashamed of himself for having wasted so much time and money over one dame when he has the phone numbers of a dozen others, so, to cover his stupidity, he dramatizes himself further. He tells her that if she doesn't marry him he will kill himself. To his stupefaction (and annoyance) she-tells him she will marry him. Because he is a feckless lug and can't think of any convenient way to get out of it he marries her. From that time on he worries hell out of her, is untrue to her, makes her miserable, yet she never regrets marrying him, and never (except in moments of hypocritical recrimination) wishes that she had married the other guy.

There is drama in its clearest essence working in devastating fashion. Call it disorder; call it chaos; call it, perhaps, positive meeting negative and short-circuiting the works. I do not believe that William Shakespeare could define "drama." It's like body odor; you have it or you have it not. Sheer petulance, uncontrollable temper, unreasonableness, perhaps, can contain drama. It is the greatest motivating influence in human life. In vain the philosophers inveigh against it and try to establish reason and order in its place. At the first bugle call thousands of young men rush off to put themselves into a position to be shot. Hundreds of others hang back and try to haggle them-selves out of induction with their draft boards. The first are motivated by drama, and would be potential fiction writers; the second are motivated by reason, and could be potential non-fiction writers.

Let us sum it all up, then, rather improvidently to be sure, to this: A fiction writer is a natural dramatist. One sign of this will be his habit of dramatizing him-self in all his human relations. It is, perhaps, the only touchstone by which one may judge the natural dramatist. And without a flair for dramatizing I do not see how the most exemplary putter-together of words can ever be a successful fiction writer; on the other hand I have often seen how the sloppiest of writers can go to the forefront of commercial writing with little or nothing but a flair for drama.