Far too often plays are planned in this way. A writer thinks of some setting that will permit him a large amount of local color--a barroom, a dance hall, the wharf of an incoming ocean liner. Recognizing or not that most of this local color is unessential to the real action of the play, he does see that one or two incidents which are necessary and striking may be set against this background. Knowing broadly, how he wants to treat the scene, instead of studying the main and minor characters in it till he knows them so intimately that he can select from a larger amount of material than he can possibly use, he moves, not where the characters lead him, but whither, _vi et armis_, he can drive them. Rarely to him will come the delightful dilemma, so commonly experienced by the dramatist who really cares for character, when he must choose between what he was going to do and the scene as developed by the creatures of his imagination who, as they become real, take the scene away from him and shape it to vastly richer results.[14] When the dramatist interested only in situation shapes the acts preceding his most important scene, he searches simply for conditions of character which will permit this important scene to follow. Result: earlier acts, largely of exposition and talk, or of illustrative action slight and unconvincing because characters forced into a crucial situation can hardly reveal how they brought themselves to it. There is no middle way for the dramatist who seeks truth in characterization. Given a situation, either it must grow naturally out of the characters in it, or the people originally in the mind of the author must be remodeled till they fit naturally into the situation. In the latter case, all that precedes and follows the central situation must be re-worked, not as the dramatist may wish, but as the remodeled characters permit. A critic met a well-known dramatist on the Strand. The dramatist looked worried. "What's the matter," queried the critic, "anything gone wrong?" "Yes. You remember the play I told you about, and that splendid situation for my heroine?" "Yes. Well?" "Well! She won't go into it, confound her, do the best I can." "Why make her?" "Why? Because if I don't there's an end to that splendid situation." "Well?" "Oh, that's just why I'm bothered. I don't want to give in, I don't want to lose that situation; but she's right, of course she's right, and the trouble is I know I've got to yield."