To continue with my last topic, great poets don't necessarily make great novelists. And great novelists don't necessarily make great poets. Fair enough. So why do great novelists so often write great plays? In the 20th century, writers like Chekhov, Camus, Sartre, and Beckett changed the face of modern drama. But each started off as a writer of short stories, novellas, or novels.
So how do we explain this pattern? For one thing, playwrights and novelists both need to excel at creating compelling characters. If you don't feel something for the characters onstage or on the page, all is lost. For another, both of these types of writers need to have a grasp of dialogue and suspense that a lyric poet, for instance, can sometimes survive without.
But, before we get carried away, I think we need a qualification or two. The revolutionary playwrights who didn't write much major fiction add up to a large and respectable group. (Some members include Ibsen, Brecht, and Arthur Miller.) And classic authors such as Miguel de Cervantes and Henry James were world-class novelists, but total failures as playwrights. Why, oh why are situations like these never clean-cut?
Do novelists and playwrights have similar skillsets after all? Tell me what you think, because soon I'll be returning to this subject from a new perspective.