The playwright should by all means make sure that he has not run
up against one of these blind-alley themes.[12] He should, at an early
point, see clearly the end for which he is making, and be sure that it
is an end which he actively desires, not merely one which satisfies
convention, or which "will have to do."
Some dramatists, when a play is provisionally mapped out, do not attempt
to begin at the beginning and write it as a coherent whole, but make a
dash first at the more salient and critical scenes, or those which
specially attract their imagination. On such a point every author must
obviously be a law unto himself. From the theoretical point of view, one
can only approve the practice, since it certainly makes for plasticity.
It is evident that a detached scene, written while those that lead up to
it are as yet but vaguely conceived, must be subject to indefinite
modification.[13] In several of Ibsen's very roughest drafts, we find
short passages of dialogue sketched out even before the names have been
assigned to the characters, showing that some of his earliest ideas came
to him, as it were, ready dramatized.
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