c,
effective, inevitable (in the case of a serious play), or, in one word,
"right." An obviously makeshift ending can never be desirable, either
from the ideal or from the practical point of view. Many excellent plays
have been wrecked on this rock. The very frequent complaint that "the
last act is weak" is not always or necessarily a just reproach; but it
is so when the author has clearly been at a loss for an ending, and has
simply huddled his play up in a conventional and perfunctory fashion. It
may even be said that some apparently promising themes are deceptive in
their promise, since they are inherently incapable of a satisfactory
ending. 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. 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 cent