FICTION WRITERS ON FICTION WRITING (continued 10)

The advantages of this will be manifest when one considers the value of having before one constantly, in his revisings, all his past thought and expression. Here, in my way of working, I have before me always the complete history of the fashioning of the thought—the sentence or paragraph. Often I later resume the original form, having found, by the lapse of time, that the improvement I sought and fancied I had achieved involved some objection greater than that I strove to remedy. This and many other advantages of this method would be impossible if a completely new copy were made, for one would never think to go back to the old, and if he did it would be difficult and cumbersome. Incidentally, it is a time-saver. When my first draft is a typed one I revise with the pen on the same sheets.

Raymond S. Spears: I can keep up with my typewriter, when writing stories. If my mind jumps ahead too fast, I make a pencil note to recall the look into the future of the story.

Norman Springer: The mind always runs ahead of the work. It plays around the sides of the story, so to speak. But I don't think there is any loss. If an idea isn't used, it sinks back into the mind and some day it pops up again.

I compose on a typewriter. It is a plodding business. But fast enough, for I find myself pausing only too often.

This query brings up another item. It is the difference between thinking a story and writing it. And I find that this too is a common experience among writers I know.

Thinking up the story is fine work, pleasant and exhilarating. When you have your materials and your characters you think out the yarn from beginning to end. Everything seems crystal clear, every detail in its proper place, every difficulty solved. It appears to you to be a very good story indeed and ridiculously easy to write.

You begin to write, and alas, the story that seemed so clear in your mind turns out to have been not clear at all, but nebulous. As you thought it, it was beautiful; as you write it, it is a mess. No matter how hard you try, you can never get down upon paper the wonderful story you thought. The best you achieve is a caricature.

Another common experience is what I call "bumping into the stone wall." There comes a time in every story, usually toward its end, when you get stumped. By this time, anyway, you are usually pretty well disgusted with the tale. It is so inferior to what you planned, so different from the fine story you saw when you thought it out. Your mind is also eager to be at new work. So you bump into the stone wall.

This wall is usually some little hitherto unconsidered detail that suddenly assumes huge proportions. It seems to have wrecked your story. There is nothing to do then but plug, and pretty soon the difficulty is surmounted.

I mention this because I've noticed that the "stone wall" is the place where the new writer is apt to throw up the sponge.

Julian Street: I have that tendency but have trained myself to catch the ideas as they come by. The fancies that come when one is writing I have often called "butterflies of thought." One must be ready always with the net and get them before they fly out of the window again.

T. S. Stribling: I never lose my ideas if I catch any. Anything will do except a stenographer; I can't bear to have another person in the room while I work; they disturb me just as much sitting silent and motionless as if they were raising bedlam.

Booth Tarkington: Sometimes. The pencil is best for me.

W. C. Tuttle: I have never dictated any copy. I am not fast on a typewriter—using only two fingers and profanity—but I am never more than two chapters behind my imagination. Seriously, I never know what the next paragraph is going to contain.

Lucille Van Slyke: I'd like to kid myself along by thinking I lose heaps of ideas that way, but common sense tells me they aren't very impressive or I wouldn't lose them. Typewriter. Except at those heavenly, rare—awfully rare—moments when I get a faint inkling (no pun intended!) of how it must feel to be an inspired writer instead of a bungling, struggling tortoise of a scribbler who is handicapped by being a trifle softheaded and by having to carry a beloved house around on her back as she crawls. At those times I like a big fat pencil, a whole box of big fat pencils.

Atreus von Schrader: No. Typewriter.

T. Von Ziekursch: Find the typewriter most satisfactory. Occasionally have stopped to jot down a note on some touch that I know I wanted to add later in the story and might forget in the fever of the story.

Henry Kitchell Webster: I don't think I ever lost an idea because my imagination had outrun the means of recording. I sometimes dictate, sometimes write on the typewriter; I think the difference is unimportant.

G. A. Wells: My imagination would move miles ahead of my writing instrument if I let it. I therefore adjust the tempo of my imagination to keep pace with the recording instrument. I think the use of a recording instrument depends upon the mood. I have trouble using a typewriter in artificial light. Can not use a pen during the day with the same facility as at night. I detest a pencil and very seldom use one. My mind is more free with a pen than with a machine, though most of my writing is done altogether on the machine.

William Wells: No, because I can call them back. Typewriter; can't dictate, get all balled up; maybe lack of practise.

Ben Ames Williams: I use a typewriter and find it satisfactory; to use pen or pencil for more than a few minutes tires me, physically, and my handwriting becomes entirely illegible.

Honore Willsie: Sometimes. Soft pencil.

H. C. Witwer: I have lost many ideas, plots, titles, bits of dialogue, etc., because my imagination has traveled faster than the means of recording it. It has not always been convenient to make notes. For example, I might be working on a story and later be at a theater or almost anywhere, and an idea for a funny or dramatic scene in this particular yarn will strike me. By the time I get back to my story, intervening events may have driven the idea entirely out of my mind. Yet weeks afterward it will crop up again most unexpectedly, apropos of nothing at all, and I'll think, "Darn it, I should have used that in such and such a story!"

I find the typewriter affords least check and work on it exclusively.

William Almon Wolff: I can keep up with my imagination when I use a typewriter; I can't with pen or pencil. I can't dictate at all. That is, I suppose, a matter of habit and custom.

Edgar Young: Write directly on a typewriter by touch system and rewrite from another person's reading where I catch many inconsistencies and change them as I write. I consider composing on a typewriter a very poor method and wish I had always used a pencil, marking out swiftly when the wrong word or sentence was put down. This letter is a fair sample of what I compose at a first draft.

Summary

Total answering, 111. Losing ideas through too slow means of recording, 43; 10 of these prevent a final loss by making notes. Not losing, 55.

In tabulating the means of recording affording least check or preferred for general reasons, in several instances where a writer habitually still uses more than one, a score has been given for each. The heavy predominance of the typewriter was rather surprising to the tabulator, as was also the greater use of pencil than of pen. Typewriter 63; pencil 24; pen 23 (4 of these specified fountain pen and 1 a goose quill); longhand (neither pen nor pencil specified) 1; dictation to stenographer 9; any 1; any but stenographer 1. No dictaphone except 1 prospect.

This tabulation, like all others in this book, though carefully made, can not be exact, some answers not lending themselves to definite or even entirely satisfactory tabulation. This is of little moment, since in all cases the only purpose to be served is that of ascertaining general tendencies and drawing general comparisons.

THE END