10. Don’t worry about how long it is going to take you to finish your task; it doesn’t matter. Some days you won’t be able to write at all, and other days you can’t stop writing. I have written through hundreds of lunch and dinner hours and thousands of business and social appointments. Don’t let any one bother you when you are writing or anything. If the ‘phone rings, don’t answer it, and if your wife rebels, divorce her. Nothing and nobody is important when the thoughts are boiling. Nobody expects a dramatist to be a respectable member of society, and any crime is justified. If you find yourself bored at your desk go and play golf, play anything, but stop writing. If you find yourself in your stride keep at it. I wrote one entire act of THE DETOUR without getting up from my chair, sixty-five hundred words in longhand in eight hours. Teach yourself this trick of crawling into your shell like a mud turtle and letting the world roll by. I have developed a habit of concentration until it is an almost idiotic habit. When I have a play in my head neither time nor space exist for me. I am forced to keep a car and a man to drive it because I have so trained my mind to focusing that the moment I sat back in a seat on the subway it was a foregone conclusion that I would be put off the train at Van Cortland Park when I lived on East 63rd Street. For a time I tried driving a car myself, but no sooner did I find myself on a straight road than my mind clicked back on its job of play making until I drove into a ditch or ran through a traffic light. At length I was persuaded to give up driving, not entirely out of respect for the law, but because the roars of outraged traffic cops disturbed my train of thought. Some years ago my wife was taken to the hospital for a critical operation and I spent the most horrible day of my life awaiting a verdict that meant life or death. At length I was allowed to see her for five minutes and told to go home and not to return until late the following day. Absolutely broken by what I had been through I returned to our empty rooms; it was ten o’clock at night; sleep was out of the question. I sat at my desk making marks on a pad of paper. Suddenly I was struck by, of all things, an idea for a farce, and I started to write. Sometime later I had a feeling of fatigue, and I sadly said to myself: “I’m getting old. I’m not the man I was.” Then I noticed that, although my lights were burning, it was broad daylight outside. I looked at my watch and discovered that it was two o’clock. I had been writing for sixteen hours. When Mrs. Davis came back from the hospital two weeks later I had written, sold, cast and started rehearsals of EASY COME, EASY GO, and she was rather curious as to where this stranger had come from.