One must be prepared for this sort of thing and resolute enough to thrive on it, as success very rarely comes upon a young playwright very suddenly. It doesn’t sneak up behind one and thrust fame and fortune into one’s lap, fame and fortune being very timid birds, more likely to fall into the lap of the one who goes out after them with a gun than to the dreamer who sits at home and waits patiently. In my experience patient waiting never got anybody anything. All the prizes worth having are for the daring—the one who sits and waits never got anything—except fat.
A dramatist isn’t a dramatist at all until he has had a play produced, no matter how many plays he may have written, and he must get that first production at any cost. It is natural enough that the managers should hesitate before purchasing the play of an untried writer, especially as there are only a few of them who themselves know enough about a play to have any real confidence in their own reaction. The successful author, of course, has a great advantage, and a man with one or two hits to his credit can get a pretty bad play accepted. Yet Mr. Shaw’s observation that “If it’s by a good writer it’s a good play” doesn’t mean quite as much as it used to, since the critic of late has developed a rather alarming habit of eagerly leaping at the throat of the man who is obviously trading on an established reputation and trying to get away with careless and sloppy work.
In some ways it is, I think, more difficult for a beginner to-day than it was in my youth. In those days almost any play that got itself produced made some money for its author and any honest writer of long experience would own up to considerable sums made from plays that cost their producers a lot of money. To-day, however, plays die quickly and a failure means that the writer gets little, if anything, more than the trifling sum of his advance, which is seldom over five hundred and almost never, in America, over one thousand dollars. The pleasant old custom of a manager keeping a young writer’s bad plays running long enough for the writer to live comfortably until he learned how to write a better one has passed along with the other nice old romantic notions and to-day he has to hit it the first time or walk the plank.