therefore, at a disadvantage. There are certain capacities he must have; certain things he must do. He must have a good command of English, because the great bulk of his interest will be achieved by his ability to explain the actions of his characters. If he has no command of expression he is defeated from the start. In order that he may write with authenticity about characters and their background, he must learn observation, and he must keep in mind that he is writing not for himself, but to awaken an emotional response in the reader. Therefore, he must learn to record his observation in terms of emotional appeal. To plot well, he must realize that there is a skeleton outline to every story, and he must be able to visualize his story within that skeleton outline as a series of scenes. Until he can do that, he can make no real progress in writing short. stories. In short, he must be constantly alert to react to everything he sees in terms of fiction values. But he can have all these qualities, do all these things, and never produce a good story if he does. not have the capacity to work hard and to keep on working. He must have above all, the strength of character to resist all temptation to turn from his work to something more enjoyable. The production of a short story, although it is a simple process, is not an easy one. If I did nothing more, I should feel that I had been a help to short-story writers if I warned them against the people who are preying upon the public by intimating that the writing of a short story is something which is easy to learn. The person who says to you that shortstory writing is easy is telling you something which is not true. It is wrong to urge people to write by implying that writing is easy, or by citing instances of the over-night success of unknown writers. Writing is not easy, and those successes are few and far between. Success in writing comes, usually, after prolonged effort. New writers cannot hope to compete with the old established writers. What an editor wants is a continued output of good fiction. His experience has taught him that certain writers can be depended upon. He knows that, on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, the names of writers like Thomas Beer, or John P. Marquand, or Richard Connell, or Mary Roberts Rinehart, will automatically raise the newsstand sales of that issue by several thousands of copies. An editor knows, too, that writers like Frank R. Adams and Irving Cobb, and Adela Rogers St. John, and Kathleen Norris have a definite following who will read everything they write because they have found their previous writing satisfactory. He knows that a whole group of people will await with interest any story which appears over the signature of John Galsworthy, or Wilbur Daniel Steele, or John Russell, whether that story appears in the Saturday Evening Post, the Red Book, Harper's, The Cosmopolitan, or the Atlantic Monthly. That knowledge makes any editor hospitable to the established writer. While this condition may appear pretty hopeless to the aspiring writer, it is not so in effect. Those established writers cannot produce a sufficient number of stories to fill the requirements of all the good fiction magazines. The average output of an established writer is twelve short stories a year. The Saturday Eveing Post, alone, uses four hundred, at least, which would give forty established writers a definite livelihood at this rate. Established writers cease writing short stories temporarily to produce a novel, or a serial, and sometimes a play. During that time the stories which they would ordinarily have written have to be written by others. It is thus that the beginner receives his opportunity. If he makes good he gets a chance to repeat. I know of several writers who have started selling stories to the cheaper magazines for one hundred dollars, and who, within a year, have been receiving five or six hundred dollars from the more popular and better class magazines, and within two years have received as high as two thousand dollars a story. In the end, it all boils down to hard work, intelligently directed. A good critic can indicate your faults and suggest methods of improvement. But that is only starting your feet upon the long, long road. You must do the walking yourself. He can help you to cut down your period of apprenticeship by pointing out certain principles of craftsmanship. In the profession of short-story writing there is plenty of room at the top, but there is no royal road. If what I have said may sound discouraging, that is the way I want it to sound, because the person who is discouraged upon finding that success comes only from hard work, is much better off in some other profession, and the sooner he is turned from his ineffectual attempt the better it will be for himself and the public in general. But for those who are prepared to work hard, the rewards are great, and satisfying. It is the quality of your work that VE counts, whether you are a beginner or an established writer. The Saturday Evening Post stated in an advertisement: During the past year we have published stories and articles from sixty-nine writers, none of whom had previously figured as contributors. Of this number four were short stories by writers who had never appeared in print eleswhere. This answers the question often asked us as to whether it is possible for new writers to break into this magazine. The search for new blood is one of the primary functions of the editorial staff." Mr. Balmer, the editor of The Red Book, said recently: "Rudyard Kipling did his best work on the way up. This holds true of most writers. That's why we 're putting more new writers in Red Book. Names don't mean a thing- unless the writing under those names is the best that can be produced. McKeogh and I have shocked a good many well-known writers because we've turned down stuff which was, in our judgment, mediocre." Technique for Radio Dramatists By WILLIS KNAPP-JONES ERY few authors, I suppose, have ever written for the blind. Ordinarily we set down words expecting them to meet the eyes of a person endowed with all his senses (unless we write musical comedies for the tired business man or movies for the typical movie audience). Such a reader is capable of helping us out through his own experiences. Authors, accustomed to such writing, have generally failed to make a success in supplying material for the radio. Recently I had the pleasure of talking with Mr. William Ziegler Nourse, Director of Play Night of the WMAQ radio station of the Chicago Daily News, and I want to pass on some of the tips given by this pioneer in the field, who for nearly three years has been giving a weekly play over the air. Of course the most obvious difference between radio plays and other kinds is that the medium of communication between author and audience is reduced by half. In the theatre when the curtain rises, you see the setting with either the realism of a Belasco or the imaginative touches of a Gordon Craig. At a glance you can see that grandad is old, and son in the soldier uniform lost a leg overseas. The morning sun through the window, the clock on the mantel, and the boudoir cap of sister tell their story without need of a word. The shabbiness or elegance of the setting proclaims the status of the family. And all this we learn before a character utters a word. But if you imagine giving the same play at a home for the blind you see the problem that arises at once, a problem that has not troubled playwrights for at least four hundred years. Before the days of elaborate settings, dramatists had their difficulties. Juan del Encina, for instance, in Spain of the late fifteenth century, had to make his characters describe what his bare stage was supposed to contain. At the opening of his "Eclogue of the Heavy Rains," one shepherd exclaims: "Oh, but I'm wet and cold! Won't it ever stop raining?" "But here's a fire," his companion replies. "Step closer; only don't scorch your woolly coat." Shakspere, too, met the the difficulty. With his stage of nothing but curtains and bare walls, he had to paint the scenery in the mind of his spectators. Examples could be culled from any of Shakspere's plays. "As You Like It" announces the setting almost at once: Oliver-"Know you where you are, sir?" Orlando-"Oh, sir, very well: here in your orchard." The first scene of "Hamlet" sets mood and atmosphere and stage. Consider these lines from "Romeo and Juliet" which more than one critic called the high water mark in English poetry: "Night's candles are burned out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top." To a keen imagination, it works just as well as the spots and floods and borders with their color medium in a present-day theatre, and for a radio audience it is a thousand times superior. The author, then, must learn to paint his setting and his characters with his words. When we get to the play itself, we notice other differences. On the stage, pantomime is used by a good playwright to avoid banalities. The hero enters. Never does the girl say: "Won't you come and sit by me?" The slightest of inviting gestures with the hand, the arch est of glances, and everybody in the audience gets the point. But such stage directions will never pass in a radio play. The action must be dressed in words. Each entrance and exit, too, must be audible. Molière is full of illustrations of how it shall be done. "Exit Damis. Enter Tartuffe," is never suffiient for him. The stage directions are put into Dorine's mouth. "Hush, he is coming. Retire." At the end of "Misanthrope," Act 1, Oronte says: "I am wrong, I own it, and I leave the house." Scattered throughout the play we run across all sorts of entrance lines. "Arsinoe, Madame, is coming up to see you." "But here comes your valet, seemingly excited." "Here is Eliante. She shall judge the matter." "Here they are now." "Here he is." "Holà, there, enter." In fact, as Mr. Nourse says, the classics can be put on the air practically unchanged; but the modern plays must be revised and annotated. And Mr. Nourse has had to do it because he could find no one to relieve him of the task or supply him with original plays along the lines he requires. Those who heard Drinkwater's "Abraham Lincoln" given over the air from WMAQ on Lincoln's birthday had a good chance to study the technique of this new type of writing, provided they followed the production with a text before them, or checked up afterward. Several scenes were changed a little to make them tie together, and the final scene was practically rewritten - or we had better say, rearranged, because the words were all in Drinkwater's play. In the stage version, the action takes place back of the box where the President sits. In the radio version, it takes place in the orchestra section of the theatre. The introductory conversation, heard above the music of the intermezzo, is the small talk among a group of friends sitting together and waiting for the curtain to rise on the next act. Presently: very well and happy this evening, does n't he? Mrs. Saunders - Yes, indeed. No wonder. He must be a proud man. How well Mrs. Lincoln looks, too. Miss Foster - Oh look. The President is bowing and smiling to those people in the opposite box. Perhaps he'll make a speech. clamation such as "Will you listen to me?" "Will you wait?" "What do you think of that?" Mr. Nourse's comments on the comedy gave me a good insight into what he requires for the air. "It's too thin," he Crowd - Lincoln... The President ... Speech kept repeating throughout the first act. Abraham Lincoln . . . Father Abraham .. See, he's rising . . . Hush (There is a slight pause) Lincoln My friends, I am touched, deeply touched by this mark of your goodwill, etc. You saw this whole scene perfectly, yet no announcer spoiled the dialogue with explanations. The actors painted the scene for you. No wonder Mr. Nourse gets letters saying: "When we listen to your players, we think we are actually in the theatre." It is his aim to make everything clear, not only to the players, but to those who have never seen the printed version, and do not know the story, or do not attend the theatre regularly. Speaking of the pause brings up one of the most noticeable differences in technique. I was the guest of Mr. Nourse at a performance of "Butter and Egg Man." When the curtain rose, two men sat deep in gloom. One had his feet perched on a desk, the other glowered in a chair. For twenty seconds nothing happened. Then the man at the desk got up, rolled his cigar in his mouth, clasped his hands behind his back, crossed the stage, snapped his fingers, and returned to his place. For more than two minutes not a word was spoken. A wait like that is impossible in radio drama. Preliminary pauses are not only impossible, but unnecessary, for there is nothing to get across to the audience in the way of moon or setting, except what is said. After a scene starts, pauses can be made over the radio, and become as effective as on the stage, provided the actor knows the trick of these "radio pauses" sustaining the sound of the last syllable exactly as a note is sustained in singing, repeating one word, repeating a whole phrase, or using an abrupt ex "There's no worth while idea back of it." "But the people are laughing at the dialogue," I pointed out. "For those who know the inside of the theatrical business, it's certainly funny enough." "But it would n't do for radio drama. The people who like "gag lines" and "slapstick" are seldom the ones who write to a station telling what they like or dislike. They soon tire of what they like, because there's nothing to it. It is similar to slang, in that its vogue is very short; and anyway, what's the use of working with material that is listened to for barely a day?" While Mr. Nourse occasionally uses tragedy, a comedy with "meat" in it is what he wants above everything else. One program, for instance, was composed of Beulah Marie Dix's "The Snare and the Fowler," a war drama of the French Republic, and Colin Campbell Clement's "Curtain," which Mr. Nourse thinks one of the brightest comedies ever written. These two plays, contrasts and foils for each other in every way, make an excellent program for the radio hour. To show what he meant by revising a play, Mr. Nourse told me what he had done to a one-act comedy, "Gaspers," named after a popular British cigarette. The story deals with the guile of a flapper. Originally there were three characters, the young man, the girl, and a sleepy old man. But since radio audiences could not see him sleep, and since it would have made a comedy of a different sort to have heard him, the old man was announced as being on the stage, although no one played his part. Some of the comedy comes in the apparently bashful and coy manner in which the girl approaches her victim. On the stage it could be presented without a word, but for radio purposes, the revised form form makes the young man describe it. Talking to the old man, he says: "Oh, look at that pretty girl. She's a vision in gray. . . . . I believe she's coming here..... No, she's stopped. . . . I'd better not watch her. . . . . She seems to be looking for something." ... And she was - for a package of cigarettes (Gaspers) she has lost, as she confesses when the young man speaks to her. He joins in the search. He finds a package of Gaspers beneath the seat. He gives them to her - all told with appropriate conversation. She makes her "touch" and leaves. Then comes the surprise ending. The old man is supposed to awaken and start hunting for his own package of cigarettes. But when the play was broadcast, the old man existed only in the imagination of the audience. So, "What's the matter, my friend?" asks the young man. "What are you looking for What? I can't hear you. Your cigarettes? Gaspers?" And the characteristics of the beachwalking girl are at last revealed. Material-minded authors will doubtless wonder what there is in the radiodrama for them. Well, directly, there is royalty. Perhaps six first class stations are broadcasting plays regularly, and others occasionally. While the Chicago Daily News station makes it a custom not to repeat plays, other stations give several broadcastings of those that prove favorites. Only a little more care is needed to make plays for the visual stage prove available for the radio and therefore of double value. And once given over the air, with all the attendant publicity of printed program and announcement over the air, it is called to the attention of hundreds of thousands of listeners, some of whom are hunting for plays for their own dramatic societies. Others want to read more by an author who pleased them. After each production, Mr. Nourse often gets several requests for copies of the play, or name of the publisher. And if it has not been published, with a couple. of performances to its credit and some letters of comment, it is fairly sure of appeal to some publisher. Mr. Nourse's work on his plays is the same as the work that every intelligent director or producer gives to a play which he is rehearsing and preparing for the visual stage. Every play is written and rewritten, with many a revision before the opening night, and another usually before the end of the first week. After it has had a run of six months or so, it comes out in book form, and the public admires the finished product now ready for any stock company or Little Theatre producer's use. Each revision, by a person not intimately connected. with its composition, gives hints to an author. Such a revision is obtained when a nearly suitable play is submitted for broadcasting. The radio broadcasters are not appealing for plays written simply for the radio. They are seeking plays with an idea, plays that are not "thin." Good radio actors with brains and excellent voices of large range can take the "thinnest" play and make it go, just as good actors on the visual stage can make a success of a mediocre play that would fail in the hands of inexperienced actors. But good actors hate to work with poor plays; good raido actors are hunting for dramas with important themes, played up with all the power of this new technique of the radio drama. And if this new genre does anything at all, it should improve the quality of the drama. |