Willard Mack says:  “‘Punch’ is the most abused word I know.  The dramatic punch is continually confused with the theatrical trick.  Critics said the third act of ‘Kick In’ [1]—­in which the detective is overpowered in a hand-to-hand fight after a hypodermic has been jabbed into his wrist—­had a punch.  It didn’t.  What it really had was a theatric trick.  But the human punch was in the second act, when the little frightened girl of the slums comes to see her wounded lover—­who is really dead.  If the needle should suddenly be lost in playing the third act the scene would be destroyed.  But the other moment would have its appeal regardless of theatrical detail.”

[1] Developed into a long play from the vaudeville act of the same name.

Punch comes only from a certain strong human appeal in the story.  Punch is the thing that makes the pulse beat a little quicker, because the heart has been touched.  Punch is the precise moment of the dramatic.  It is the second in which the revelation flashes upon the audience.

While whatever punch you may be able to add must lie in the heart of your material—­which no one but yourself can know—­there are three or four ways by which you may go about finding a mislaid punch.

If you have turned the logical order of writing about and let your playlet drag you instead of your driving it, you may find help in asking yourself whether you should keep your secret from the audience.

1.  Have You Kept Your Audience in Ignorance Too Long?

While it is possible to write a most enthralling novel of mystery or a detective short-story which suddenly, at the very last moment, may disclose the trick by which it has all been built up, such a thing is not successfully possible in a playlet.  You must not conceal the identity of anyone of your characters from the audience.  Conceal his identity from every other character and you may construct a fine playlet, but don’t conceal his motive from the audience.

The very nature of the drama—­depending as it does on giving to the spectator the pleasure of feeling omniscient—­precludes the possibility of “unheralded surprise.”  For instance, if you have a character whom the audience has never seen before and of whom they know nothing suddenly spring up from behind a sofa where he has overheard two other characters conspiring—­the audience may think he is a stage-hand.  How would they know he was connected with the other characters in the playlet if you neglected to tell them beforehand?  They could not know.  The sudden appearance of the unknown man from behind the sofa would have much the effect of a disturbance in the rear of the theatre, distracting attention from the characters on the stage and the plot of the playlet.

If your plot calls for an eavesdropper behind a sofa—­though I hope you will never resort to so ancient a device—­you must first let the audience know who he is and why he wants to eavesdrop; and second you must show him going behind that sofa.  The audience must be given the god-like pleasure of watching the other two characters approach the sofa and sit down on it, in ignorance that there is an enemy behind it into whose hands they are delivering themselves.