Henrik IbsenWriting Style

In the second act of A Doll's House, a letter that will end a marriage drops into a locked mailbox in the hall, Torvald keeps the only key, and Nora dances the tarantella so wildly that her husband stops watching the box and starts watching her. The furniture has not moved. The talk is still about money and Christmas, and the danger in the room is a signature she forged on a bond years earlier, when her husband was too ill to be told what the trip south had cost.

That is the Ibsen engine. His plays open long after the decisive act. The plot is the bill arriving. Mrs. Alving built an orphanage to bury her husband's reputation, Consul Bernick let another man carry his scandal for all the years before Pillars of Society begins, Rebecca West talked Rosmer's wife into the millrace. None of it happens on stage. All of it is what the stage is for.

The dialogue carries two jobs at once. Above the line, Pastor Manders wants to know whether the new orphanage should be insured, and whether insuring it would look like a lack of faith. Under the line, he and Mrs. Alving are settling how much money it takes to keep a dead man's name clean, and neither of them says so.

Because the effect depends on when a fact lands, the labour is structural. Ibsen worked through complete drafts rather than polishing a first one, and the work between versions went into order: who knows what on page one, which admission comes second, how long a household can keep pretending. Revising in this mode means moving a single disclosure one scene earlier and reading what breaks.

The permitted subject

Every household keeps a list of topics it may raise out loud. Money, health, servants, the neighbours, a child's schooling. Ibsen runs the dangerous conversation through one of those, and the charge comes off the gap between the subject on the table and the subject in the room. Nora and Doctor Rank discuss a pair of silk stockings while he tells her he is dying and she works out that he is in love with her. The tool asks for patience more than skill, because the moment either speaker names the real business the pressure vanishes, and you have to be willing to write a full page about hosiery to get there.

The account that comes due

His characters live on credit taken out years before the curtain, and the play is the collection notice. The Master Builder gives Solness a crack in a chimney he kept quiet about, and the fire that came later cleared the ground his whole career stands on. Bernick's silence bought a firm and a marriage. Mrs. Alving's silence bought her son a father worth respecting. Each purchase was real, each one is now payable, and the arithmetic keeps the moral question from floating, since a debt has a date, an amount, and a creditor. The hard part is making the original bargain one a decent reader would also have struck. When your reader would have refused it, you have written a play about a fool.

The witness in the next room

Put somebody within earshot. Ibsen's rooms have doors that open at the wrong moment and walls that carry sound, and half his scenes take their shape from a person who must not hear what is about to be said. Gunhild Borkman sits below her husband and listens to him pace the floor above her head, and those footsteps describe the marriage better than any speech either of them is given. A listener turns a private argument into a public risk and compresses time, because a character who might have taken an hour to be honest now has four minutes. Timing is where this goes wrong. An entrance that arrives at the convenient second reads as authorial help, so give the interrupter an errand of his own and let him be early.

The thought a character will not think

Baxter's name for the load under a Chekhovian scene is the unthinkable thought, an idea that would dissolve a person's account of himself and has therefore been pushed to the margin of the mind, where it sits and works. Ibsen's version is louder than Chekhov's. Hjalmar Ekdal cannot think that his household is a performance funded by the man who ruined his father, and when Gregers makes him think it, the family comes apart and a child dies in the loft. Relling names the mechanism inside the same play when he defends the life-lie as the illusion a person needs in order to keep going. Write down one such thought per major character, then decide, before you start, whether your story intends to break it.

One rupture of manners

Ibsen writes people who behave well, then gives each play a moment where somebody stops. Nora dances past the point of decorum. Stockmann stands on a platform and insults the town that came to hear him. Hedda pretends to mistake her husband's aunt's new hat for the servant's, which is a small piece of vandalism dressed as an error. Baxter's argument covers all three: good manners make behaviour invisible, and bad manners put a person on a stage, so if you are looking for the soul, watch for the rupture. Ration these. A household that makes a scene every ten pages has no code left to break, and the code is the thing that made the rupture legible in the first place.

Retrospective exposition

The story is over before the curtain goes up. The play is the discovery of it. Ibsen delivers the past as something a character finds out in front of other people, at the hour that suits her least. Two things come free with the method: he can open on a household a reader would pass without a second look, and he can put ten years of consequence through a single afternoon. A flashback would spoil it, because a scene set in the past hands the audience the fact for nothing, and the pleasure here is inference, watching a room arrive at what the reader worked out ten minutes ago. Sol Stein describes the same move for novelists as foregrounding the background, where a whole childhood turns up inside an argument happening now.

Asymmetrical knowledge

Who knows what, and from which minute, is the thing Ibsen plots hardest. In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving knows that Regina is her late husband's daughter, Regina has no idea, Oswald has no idea, and Oswald has begun to court her. Nothing has to happen for that room to become unbearable. The gap also lets him write self-deception without a soliloquy, since a character reasoning from a premise the audience knows to be false gives himself away by the quality of his argument. Letting people say what they know would turn the same material into a report, and reports have no second act.

The prop as evidence

An object can be produced, hidden, burned, or handed to the wrong person. A symbol manages none of that. Hedda Gabler feeds Lovborg's only manuscript into the stove page by page while we watch, and the fire settles three separate things at once, since the manuscript is his future, Thea's work, and her husband's competition. An act later Tesman and Thea sit at a table trying to rebuild the book from Thea's notes, and the same object has changed sides. That is the test worth applying at home. A prop earns its place when it can move between hands and mean something different in each pair.

Recognition that lands with the reversal

Aristotle ranked recognition highest when it arrives together with the reversal and grows out of the incidents themselves, rather than out of a birthmark or a token produced as proof. Ibsen builds that pairing into domestic prose. Torvald reads Krogstad's letter and rages, a second letter returns the bond, he announces that he is saved, and in the same minute Nora understands what she has been married to. One beat, two effects. Hedda hears from Judge Brack how Lovborg actually died and grasps at once that her single free act now belongs to a man who will use it. The disclosure by itself would be trivia. What makes it a device is the change in what a person is still able to do.

Writing plain conversation and calling it Ibsen

The plainness was the disguise, and copying a disguise leaves you with nothing underneath. Ibsen's sentences stay ordinary so that the move inside them keeps working until it lands, and a writer who imitates the surface produces people who report their day to each other in period costume. Check any exchange of yours by comparing the first line with the last. Who owes more now, who is further exposed, who has less room to stand in. When the answer is nobody, you have a transcript, and a transcript can be well written for six pages and still be dead on arrival.

Building the reveal without the arithmetic in front of it

Secret letters and sudden confessions are the easiest part of Ibsen to lift and the least useful on their own. His disclosures work because the audience has sensed the missing piece for two acts and has been doing the sum in the dark, so the reveal completes a calculation instead of replacing one. Without that groundwork the reader has no job except to be told. Being told is not an experience a reader returns to. Aristotle put the token produced as proof at the bottom of his ranking of recognitions for the same reason. Ask which earlier scene your reveal makes unbearable to remember. When none of them changes, you wrote a twist.

Handing one character the author's opinion

Gregers Werle is what that habit looks like from the inside, and Ibsen wrote him as a warning. He carries a correct principle into a house that cannot survive it, and The Wild Duck lets him be right about the facts and catastrophic in effect, which is a harder and truer position than any speech could hold. A character who states the theme gives your reader a way out, since agreement is comfortable and the trap only closes on people who have not been told they are in one. Keep the norm in the furniture instead. Who gets an invitation, whose name can be printed, what a good reputation costs in cash.

Mistaking gloom for seriousness

His rooms are comfortable. There is a Christmas tree, a new hat, an inheritance, a promotion at the bank, and that comfort is what makes the damage visible when it comes. Turn the household hostile on page one and you spend the contrast the method runs on, because a reader can only watch a mask slip if somebody was wearing one. Piling on misery also flattens sympathy, and Ibsen keeps sympathy exact: you understand why Torvald wants the life he wants, which is precisely why his behaviour is painful rather than tiresome to watch. Gloom is a mood. His subject is the price of respectability. A price needs a currency the reader values.