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.  One would be tempted to hope much of an author who habitually and unaffectedly thus “lisped in dialogue for the dialogue came.”

Ought the playwright, at an early stage in the process of each act, to have the details of its scene clearly before him?  Ought he to draw out a scene-plot, and know, from moment to moment, just where each character is, whether He is standing on the hearthrug and She sitting on the settee, or vice versa?  There is no doubt that furniture, properties, accidents of environment, play a much larger part in modern drama than they did on the Elizabethan, the eighteenth century, or even the early-Victorian stage.  Some of us, who are not yet centenarians, can remember to have seen rooms on the stage with no furniture at all except two or three chairs “painted on the flat.”  Under such conditions, it was clearly useless for the playwright to trouble his head about furniture, and even “positions” might well be left for arrangement at rehearsal.  This carelessness of the environment, however, is no longer possible.  Whether we like it or no (and some theorists do not like it at all), scenery has ceased to be a merely suggestive background against which the figures stand out in high relief.  The stage now aims at presenting a complete picture, with the figures, not “a little out of the picture,” but completely in it.  This being so, the playwright must evidently, at some point in the working out of his theme, visualize the stage-picture in considerable detail; and we find that almost all modern dramatists do, as a matter of fact, pay great attention to what may be called the topography of their scenes, and the shifting “positions” of their characters.  The question is:  at what stage of the process of composition ought this visualization to occur?  Here, again, it would be absurd to lay down a general rule; but I am inclined to think, both theoretically and from what can be gathered of the practice of the best dramatists, that it is wisest to reserve it for a comparatively late stage.  A playwright of my acquaintance, and a very remarkable playwright too, used to scribble the first drafts of his play in little notebooks, which