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CHAPTER IV
MATERIAL
We have said that dramatic material is found wherever there is human experience. We have impressed the necessity of cultivating your powers of observation. Remember that your characters build their own plots. In the study of drama you must go back of the action and learn the emotional cause which prompts it. Now we have come to another phase of our study — the sort of material to select for use. Of what human experiences shall it be made?
It must be that which furnishes the most dramatic appeal and affords pictorial opportunity. It must have interest and entertainment as well as truth. Then it must be given some degree of new treatment; and, because he is interpreting life through an art, the writer must illuminate his work with something of ideality, of beauty.
DRAMATIC APPEAL
Let us first consider dramatic appeal. What is it? It is that peculiar quality in a photodrama which stirs feeling — the feeling which makes the spectator catch his breath and exclaim, "How true!" Such an exclamation means that he has seen something of universal appeal depicted in the writer's characterizations. It is a test of worth.
But to arouse such feeling, the writer himself must have first experienced it. He must be able not alone to affect the ones who view his play, but to affect them as he wishes. And it is a difficult thing to get into your work the thing which you yourself most feel. You may think that you have done so. But you may be using up all this feeling in your own being, and leaving your work passive and uninspired. You are surprised and hurt when others find it so — after all the stirring emotion you have felt while writing it. It is best, therefore, to put it
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