FICTION WRITERS ON FICTION WRITING (continued 7)

Frederick Moore: I can not gauge what the classics have done for me. There is some "bunk" about classics. But I believe that behind every writer there is the inherited tendency to write. This trait seems to well up, even if several generations have been skipped in the art. The creative urge does not always show itself in the same metier—for instance, it will crop out as music in one generation, as painting or sculpture in another, or as invention.

Talbot Mundy: God knows. I haven't read much. Kipling has given me more pleasure than any other writer. Have only just begun to read. Had no particular education, beyond the usual grounding in Latin, Greek and "English"—all worked into me with a stick and with all the useful parts left out.

Kathleen Norris: The best modern authors, and all the classics one can assimilate, seem to me indispensable. But unless one can read them in their own languages it is obvious that the only gain would be in plot, construction and character work. But every one, from Milton to Galsworthy, for style.

Anne O'Hagan: I can't answer this, but I should say that I had learned most of my craft from reading the English classics.

Grant Overton: In the beginning I really learned everything from reading. I do not think one learns his writer's craft directly from reading either current authors or the classics. I think he gets from good reading a mental elevation and impetus. The rest must come out of himself.

Sir Gilbert Parker: Nothing. I have always gone my own way, good or bad.

Hugh Pendexter: I am not conscious of being helped by current fiction, which I read for entertainment purely. I studied and taught Latin and Greek but could never discover my work in those subjects has helped me any in my work of writing.

Clay Perry: I am afraid it is impossible to answer such a question. Undoubtedly the reading of the classics when I was a boy has had a more lasting influence upon me than the reading of current authors in the past few years. If by "classics" is meant recognized craftsmanship by modern authors, I should say that I had learned a great deal from such writers as Jack London, Edith Wharton, Hall Caine and a score of modern writers whose style and craftsmanship is good. (One or both.)

Michael J. Phillips: I have not read the classics extensively. I can't see Dickens nor Shakespeare. I consider Charles Reade, the Cricket on the Hearth fellow, and Blackmore, who wrote Lorna Doone, great artists and I suppose they influenced me.

Of course I have been taught very largely by my job, which has practically always been newspaper work. In the shortest newspaper item there must be a certain construction. It must have a beginning, tell its story in orderly fashion, and an end. In my formative newspaper days I had the advantage of being trained by a metropolitan newspaper man who was the best judge of news values I ever knew. He taught me unerringly, or nearly unerringly, to put my finger on the novel, the dramatic, the leading feature of a newspaper article, or "story," and play it up. I think that this has been of great assistance to me in fiction writing; that is, I believe it has taught me selection and emphasis—what to write and what was the more important.

Walter B. Pitkin: What I have learned about writing has definitely come from little reading, much observation, and an irresistible tendency to write about all sorts of things. Nobody ever urged me to write. I began it when I was a schoolboy, kept elaborate journals, sold a story when I was about ten years old for ten dollars, wrote essays, treatises, fantasies, poems, everything but plays, in fact; and have probably written in my life, in one way or another, at least twenty million words of copy. I have never liked the classics; have read very little in them; know only three of Dickens, four of Thackeray, never a novel of George Eliot, and so on. Am bored to death by things that are not contemporary and verifiable in my own life. (This is probably a violent reaction against too much study of ancient philosophy and literature when a youth.)

E. S. Pladwell: Classics and current authors have their reflective influence upon the mind; but I have refrained from trying to study any of them with one exception. Kipling's magnificent condensation I believe to be worthy of emulation. As for O. Henry, I think he is the curse of American writers. The person who reads one of his stories can not help but try, unconsciously, to ape the brilliant gallop of his style, and they all come to grief. The other authors have their styles, but to me they give little that is remarkable. With them it is the story that counts.

Lucia Mead Priest: I have always been a reader; I can not answer you. May be all I have ever done has come out of the reservoir of many years' storage. I should say it is a toss-up between the classics and modern literature.

Creative power is low and I have been a great reader; there you are! May be all of me is somebody else. Can you unravel that?

Eugene Manlove Rhodes: Current authors, none. The classics, all.

Frank C. Robertson: I should say that I have learned about seventy-five per cent. of my craft from reading current authors, and about one per cent. from the classics. Perhaps this is because I have devoted about the same proportion of time to reading each.

Ruth Sawyer: Everything I know has been gained through contact with authors—and these largely the so-called classical. Coupled with these, the most helpful stimuli I have had have come from the constructive criticisms given by kindly and humane editors.

Chester L. Saxby: The classics are mainly barren stuff for me—labored writing, involved presentation, devious and unnecessary description and reference, slag-heaps of introspection. I've learned from them—what not to do. But from current authors I have gained everything. I could say I have my little saints: Mary Johnston, Booth Tarkington, Jack London, Margaret Deland, Ben Ames Williams, Richard Harding Davis.

Barry Scobee: Tee-totally nothing, unless it might be for a few minor—what shall I say, tricks of technique? This in the current story. I seem to have been unable to get anything from reading other writers, except in the instance of one or two I have come to know.

R. T. M. Scott: So far as current authors are concerned—and even the classics—I find that, when I try to derive benefit from them, I imitate and fall down. In other words I fail to be myself and a man can be nobody as well as he can be himself. Of course a man may derive knowledge and inspiration from all good authors, but he takes those qualities and builds them into himself so that they are part of himself. In this way all good reading is beneficial and I have benefitted. One thing might be pointed out. The classics stick in my memory much more than does the work of modern authors.

Robert Simpson: I have learned a great deal from studying how "the other fellow" did it. This applies to all sorts of writing from that of the rawest novice to Scott and Boccaccio. But Dumas, Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Stevenson, Kipling, O. Henry, Addison, Swift, Lamb, Newman, Carlyle, Emerson and several others of the big guns among fictioneers and essayists have had most influence on whatever style and technique I've achieved in twenty years of trying to learn how to write.

Theodore Seixas Solomons: I have no idea how much current authors have taught me. Mighty little that is useful, I believe, in comparison with the dangers to imitation they have constituted. The classics, however, read largely in youth, must have been of tremendous influence, but chiefly, I think, in the matter of expression. I think the story-telling art is a thing antecedent to any influence of stories or story-tellers, common or classic.

Arthur D. Howden Smith: Most of it, I should say, in about equal proportions.

Raymond S. Spears: I read magazines rather than authors, for I find that magazines generally group authors rather sharply—perhaps I should say magazines group moods of authorship. I read what I like, and I have five feet of bandits, badmen, desperadoes above fifteen feet of Mississippi River; and ten feet of outdoor hand-books and information, including pearls, formulas, wild animals, under six feet of classics, including Borrow, Plutarch, Poe, Ruskin, Emerson, etc. I am not conscious of playing any favorites among classics, dime novels, hand-books, government documents, poetry, history, natural history, etc.

Norman Springer: Practically all I have learned about story writing. I've tackled the living and the dead both, with good results.

Julian Street: I've read both—that is in English. I believe that Latin and Greek (languages I don't know) tend to increase one's vocabulary and beautify one's style. I know some French and Italian and I think languages help. It is good to read French—for delicacies of expression and grace of style. "The style is the man."

T. S. Stribling: I think I picked up most of my ideas on how to write from the Russians.

Booth Tarkington: Learned nothing from reading current authors; all from authors now dead. From the classics, I don't know what proportion.

W. C. Tuttle: At the risk of being called a "low-brow" I must admit that I do not enjoy the classics. I have only read a few, which is another "low" admission. I feel toward them as I do toward the old masters in art—admit that they are wonderful—and change the subject.

Lucille Van Slyke: I ar'n't larned me my craft and never expect to. I don't want to be either a deliberate or unconscious copy cat. But I'll tell you this—it sounds funny but it isn't—Mother Goose is actually the biggest help I have as a writer. Almost any situation in life or books or plays will sum itself up in a Mother Goose rhyme, plot and all. And if any writer knows a better 'ole—let him go to it!

Atreus von Schrader: With rare exceptions I find that I very much prefer the classics, using that term in its broader sense, to current writers. This is true only of the longer forms of fiction. The short story, in its present state, has been developed within the last decade or two. Jack London, for example, is of another period; tremendously colorful, but too often lacking in plot. Upon rereading your question, I find I have only half answered it. I believe the modern American short story is in a class by itself for neatness and finish of plot. But for color and substance, for care and matured thought, the older writers are our masters.

T. Von Ziekursch: Do not believe I have learned anything much from reading current authors. Do not know about the classics. Like the Greeks, the Latins, the French and Russians. Thoreau, Anatole France, etc. Am at a loss to answer this. John T. McIntyre, who to me is a master of technique, has probably done more than anything else for me by pointing out faulty tendencies to be guarded against.

Henry Kitchell Webster: I don't know.

G. A. Wells: What I have was gained both from moderns and the classics in about equal proportions. I would say that the classics taught me style, the moderns structure. The two writers most responsible for what style I may show are Macaulay and Emerson, though I would feel guilty did I fail to mention Lowell, Stevenson, Addison, Carlisle, Fenimore Cooper. There are others I can't call at the moment. To me, Macaulay is the peer of all writers, whether modern or classic, and I attribute my style to him.

For structure I would earnestly recommend Post, O. Henry, Kipling, Mrs. Rinehart in the novel, and De Maupassant; and more intimately, Gordon Young, Mundy, Solomons and Pendexter, to mention a few. A student should not study the classics for structure, provided he wishes to write modern fiction. And to even matters, he should not study the moderns for style. Moderns have style, but it is not the quality of the classics.

William Wells: Don't know; have read very widely, some translations of the classics, am familiar with nearly all that is best in both American and English literature.

Ben Ames Williams: I'm unable to recall having learned anything about writing from reading modern authors. What I have learned from them has been acquired unconsciously. I've read comparatively little written by living writers, except that for four years I read all the magazines, every issue, all the way through. I had never read Conrad at all till some fatuous reviewer compared one of my stories to his work; the same is true of Hardy. I am entirely at odds with the play-in-the-dirt school of modern writers. They may be right; but the things that seem to them ugly and depressing seem to me beautiful and even glorious. They, I think, look at them from the outside. But as the fellow said, many an honest heart beats under a ragged jacket. I'm not talking about sex stories. I've no quarrel with them. I'm talking about the Main Street school. If a man tries to take care of his family and help them forward, I don't care whether he appreciates Dunsany or not; and if a woman loves her husband and her children, she doesn't lose caste in my eyes by failing to appreciate Amy Lowell. There are other tests of manhood and womanhood besides a razor-edge taste in literature; and one of the most valorous and admirable men I know, a guide in the Maine woods, who loves his neighbors, speaks not uncharitably, helps when he can and tells the truth, can not even read his own name. There is a splendor in the commonplace life which most of us live, even though the only novel in the house may have been written by Harold Bell Wright, and the only poetic works may be the Book of Job and the Song of Songs. The assumption that when fine men die they must pass an examination on art before entering the pleasant ways that wait for them seems to me utterly unsound.

But this is beside the point; a digression. To the second head of the question:

I get a distinct inspirational stimulus from reading the more-or-less classics. Kipling, De Maupassant, Poe and some parts of O. Henry; all the Frenchmen with whom I am familiar except Balzac; Fielding, The Tale of Two Cities, The Way of All Flesh. Balzac is over my head. Dickens, outside of the novel named, seems to me a caricaturist rather than a novelist. The Growth of the Soil I hold to be the finest novel I ever read. No need of prolonging the list. Reading them over and over, the books which most appeal to me, I always put them down full of a brave determination to write something as fine. That the resultant effort dwindles out discourages me only until I have read the book again. I know no better way to put yourself in the mood for trying to write good stuff than by reading good stuff.

Honore Willsie: I have read and studied current and classic writers constantly as training for my work.

H. C. Witwer: Nothing from either.

William Almon Wolff: I don't know that I can distinguish between classics and modern authors. I've learned most of what I know that way, I suppose.

Edgar Young: Can't say. Have read many of the modern authors and most of the classics. Also have read rather widely in Spanish.

Summary

"Classics," of course, is a variable term, but even when not specifically defined it serves the general purposes of the question.

Of 113 answering, 58 found the classics useful to their craft; current authors, 49.

Some benefit: classics, 10; current, 13. Yes: classics, 32; current, 21. Much: classics, 14; current, 13. All: classics, 2; current, 2. Little: classics, 11; current, 10. None: classics, 13; current, 18. Waste of time: classics, 0; current, 1. Harm: classics, 3; current, 4. Don't know: 17. Not classified: 4.

The tabulation is on both influence and value. From the answers one gathers that the classics are read for: the fundamentals, highest art, clearness, vocabulary, characterization, style; current authors for vocabulary, what not to do, modern style, popularity, short-story structure.

While allowance must be made for those deriving benefit from both, the 107 who found benefit from reading other authors contrast strongly with the 25 who stated either elementary or advanced benefit from classes, courses and books (all or any) on how to write.

It must be borne in mind that what some consider benefit would be considered a loss by others.

A rough checking up of the answers shows that, while some 90 authors or books were mentioned, no one of them was mentioned often:—Kipling 8; the Bible, Dickens and O. Henry, 4; Maupassant, Conrad, Jack London, 3; Milton, Emerson, Scott, Homer, Sophocles, Hall Caine, Balzac, Anatole France, the Russians, Poe, Gautier, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Richard Harding Davis, 2. Since no general expression as to particular books or authors was called for, these chance expressions are not indicative of anything except that no particular ones seem found sufficiently valuable to bring about much spontaneous mention. Among the manuscripts (the total submitted, not merely the accepted ones) coming in to my own particular magazine the writers whose influence seems most marked are Kipling, O. Henry, Conan Doyle, Jack London, Stevenson. The list would vary at other editorial desks, but at most of them these five would probably be included.

Only 7 of our answers warn against the dangers of imitation. The warning is badly needed, particularly by beginners. The essence of style is expression of self, not of some one else, yet the manuscript world is tragically full of writers who are straining every nerve—and killing or drugging the individuality that alone can get them to any place really worth reaching—in a silly effort to write like some one else. They can't, for the simple reason that they can't be this some one else. And meanwhile, instead of expressing themselves, they are burying themselves.

Possibly O. Henry, Kipling and Doyle produce the greatest numbers of imitators, but current fiction provides many ephemeral models that produce noticeable waves of imitation.

Even with successful writers, who can say where the benefit from studying other authors ends and harm begins? Of what value is technique if gaining it has suppressed any of the individuality whose expression is technique's only warrant for existence?

Few indeed are the writers who can not profit from a study of good models, yet few are they who can unerringly reap the undoubted benefit without paying for it in some loss of individuality. Perhaps those most safe against the danger are those least in need of the benefit. There can be no question of the benefit to be derived, but to every beginner—and to most writers on the highway of success—there is need to shout a warning against letting the models absorb him instead of his absorbing the models.

QUESTION VII

What is your general feeling on the value of technique?

In the following each writer naturally answers according to his own particular definition of technique, only a small minority expressing any doubts as to its exact meaning, but the general conception is sufficiently common to all for the purposes of our questionnaire:

Answers

Bill Adams: I do not know what technique is. I have bronchial asthma.

Samuel Hopkins Adams: That it is one writer's meat and another writer's poison.

Paul L. Anderson: An author can not have too fine a technique, any more than a machinist can have too fine tools; technique is a tool, and the better it is the better the work that can be done with it. But either artist, author or mechanic can become so interested in his tools that he over-elaborates his work—authors and artists do this more often than machinists!

William Ashley Anderson: An author ought constantly to try to master his technique in the hope of reaching a point where his ideas may be put into form without hesitating or wasting effort over the means of expression.

H. C. Bailey: I rate technique high but second to knowledge of men and the world.

Ralph Henry Barbour: Technique is something you ought to have and not be aware of the fact. When you know you have it you become a pest. It's like happiness. Being happy is fine, but when you make a cult of it and become "glad, glad, glad!" folks will run away from you. To the beginner I'd say, "Don't worry." Write your story and let technique take care of itself. Let it go hang, for that matter. Paraphrasing a chap who could write pretty good fiction himself, "the story's the thing."

Frederick Orin Bartlett: Technique to be valuable should be unconscious. The best way to get it is to be born with it. The next best way is to absorb it through the work of those already masters of it. The poorest way is to study it deliberately and practise it consciously.

Nalbro Bartley: It is essential and a most admirable thing to possess it, but to my mind, technique can be dispensed with if one has to choose between the red-blooded story and the purely mechanical perfection of transcribing it.

Konrad Bercovici: A little technique does not hurt. It is like salt and pepper in a dish, but who wants a dish of salt or a dish of pepper?

Ferdinand Berthoud: I don't quite understand. Do not feel enough of an authority to have an opinion on the subject.

H. H. Birney, Jr.: Almost impossible to answer. Just what do you mean by "technique"? Webster's definition, summarized, is "artistic execution." Taking it as such, technique is almighty important. To sell, a story must "read well." It must be smooth, finished, plot must be well developed, interest sustained, etc. All of this can be classed as literary technique.

Farnham Bishop: Technical training is good in so far that it teaches a man to use the tools of his trade. But unless he was born to the trade, he'll never master it. Creative ability is as the Creator is pleased to bestow it. The very small quantity that I possess has been much more helped than hindered by my teachers.

The more a man writes, the better his technique should become. To tell a good tale plainly is better art and harder work than jig-sawing and bedecking a poor little bungalow of an idea to make it look like a palace.

Algernon Blackwood: I have never consciously studied technique. Up to a point technique must be instinctive. But it can be over-stressed. It can overlay an idea, especially a thin idea. Its value, of course, can not be over estimated. It is essential. But no text-book has ever helped me much.

Max Bonter: Wish I knew more about technique. Am trying to learn.

Katharine Holland Brown: Profoundly valuable—if the story lives, too.

F. R. Buckley: Technique is essential: technicalities (as above) seem to me murderous. Most important point of technique (to me) is tempo—taking the two extremes of dull legato and fatiguing staccato and hitting the exact point between them, using the exact combination of them, you need to produce the particular effect you want. Never saw anybody try to teach this. Doubt if it could be taught.

Prosper Buranelli: Technique is everything. A writer who can not write is an illiterate. The trouble with letters in this country is that its literary men are illiterates—I mean even fellows like Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson.

Thompson Burtis: I am somewhat uncertain as to what technique means, to be truthful. If it means skilful construction, well-turned phrases, proper handling of suspense, etc., as my instinct leads me to believe, I am strongly of the belief that it is very important. I read so many good stories that interest me not at all—so many others which, boiled down, have nothing much to them but which through the skill and facility of the writer are charming and interesting to me. I have read stories where the young fellow met the girl, they liked each other and got engaged, which pleased. Others with colorful background, unusual characters and rapid-fire events have been murdered for me because I sat back and watched the green author botch them, annoy me with missed opportunities, prick me with unfortunate phrasing, harass me with clumsy construction, etc. There are a fluency, an inevitable, logical interest and a sense of complete satisfaction in a sound, properly constructed, skilfully written yarn told by a master of his craft which are unmistakable, I believe. Tricks of the trade, many of which I see through, nevertheless add life and personality to a story for me. Take Talbot Mundy and his trenchant by-passages on everything in general. I enjoy them, and yet I can see him sticking them in, sometimes. And I couldn't read a page without knowing it was Mundy writing.

George M. A. Cain: In that attitude, technique has become so much a habit of feeling that I can not tell where it begins or leaves off in my own construction of a story. Where I consciously resort to technical tricks of writing, such as deliberately arranged shifts from one to another view-point for the sustaining of suspense, I am always hampered with a sense of cheapening the work by the introduction of a mechanical device.

Robert V. Carr: I am insensible to technique. I know what the dictionary says about it, but the dictionary is full of words. A lot of things that many discuss glibly are just words to me.

George L. Catton: Am in doubt of your use of the word. My dictionary says: "manner of artistic performance," which would be, in this case, style. And in this age of a used up supply of plots and themes and characters and incidents, style must be about everything. An author's personality is the only new thing possible to-day in fiction.

Robert W. Chambers: It is an essential part of all creative work.

Roy P. Churchill: Frankly, technique is something I have never seen a synonym for. It is evasive. Perhaps you might say that technique is the life of the story. Without it a story is dead. With it alive. And there are a great many kinds of life. Some pleasant and some ugly. Some appealing to one person and some to another. For me this thing called technique must be in a yarn to make it live, and the more of it the stronger. That's why just polish isn't technique.

Carl Clausen: If over-emphasized, it kills the spontaneity of the story.

Courtney Ryley Cooper: Technique is excellent, but it is like the frosting on pie. Sometimes we would like to scrape it aside and find something REAL underneath.

Arthur Crabb: I think it is at least one of the most important things in writing. Some genius may get along without it, some isolated individual may evade the issue for a while, but not for long.

Mary Stewart Cutting: I think technique has great value.

Elmer Davis: It can be overdone, but most of us are in no danger.

William Harper Dean: I feel that technique is the leaven in a story—you can ruin the possibilities in a situation in its development if your technique is poor. Illogical sequence in the development, the stressing of minor situations, the slighting of the weightier ones, the faltering in the forward march to the climax—these things mean poor technique and a poor story.

Harris Dickson: Technique, it would seem to me, is the handling of a story in harmony with its matter. Naturally the method of handling a detective story is different from that of a treatise on esoteric Buddhism. A negro story violates every known rule of white technique to follow a rambling and garrulous illogical method of its own—which becomes logical when applied to our brother in black, for that is the process of the African mind. He's a curiously devious oriental.

Captain Dingle: I don't understand exactly what this question means. In fact, except in the matter of plot, I scarcely know what "technique" means. As for plot, I believe that far more stress is put upon this as an essential than any audience or readers demand.

Louis Dodge: As for technique, I like the technique of Jack Dempsey, who hits first and hardest. I don't mean that he hasn't any technique: I mean simply that he is Jack Dempsey.

Phyllis Duganne: My general feeling is that technique saves time and labor—and that you get it only through much previous time and labor.

J. Allan Dunn: The value of technique in story writing is, I think, in exactly the same ratio as technique is to the painter, the singer, the musician, the sculptor, the architect. It is more elusive in writing, but it must be acquired. The world is full of chaps who mistook an ear for music, an eye for color, a faculty for mimicry and a desire to write as a token of genius that would flow like buttermilk out of a jug. Technique constitutes the difference between the amateur and the professional in every profession.

Walter A. Dyer: If I did not still retain a belief in the value of technique I should be in despair.

Walter Prichard Eaton: Without technique not one in a hundred can get by—and the one exception who does will be found to have created a new technique!

E. O. Foster: My training in newspaper writing is that technique is a most valuable asset. With the proper technique a man can make even an ordinary newspaper story interesting.

Arthur O. Friel: A minor consideration. Subordinate to the actual story. A "tool" only.

J. U. Giesy: I admire a good technique—just as I admire any finished work by a finished workman. I would not however damn a virile and entertaining bit of plot or narrative because of faulty technique unless hopelessly defective, I think.

George Gilbert: Technique is merely a means to an end. Many of the world's biggest stories are weak in technique, but go big because of their theme.

Kenneth Gilbert: I have a high regard for technique. Nothing disgusts me more than serious technical flaws, yet I try to be temperate about it because I realize that I may be more alert for such faults than is the average reader. I firmly believe that unless technique can be supplanted by really worth-while originality, it should always be observed in a general way, at least.

Holworthy Hall: You might as well ask my general feeling on the subject of "technique" in art or music. Technique constitutes the only difference between what is good and what is bad. But if you ask me what technique is—I should have to write you a book about it, because the expression itself is a paradox.

Richard Matthews Hallet: I am a little suspicious of the word "technique" as applied to writing. Fiction has two parts, form and essence, or matter. Technique, I take it, runs to the form and governs the method of presentation. If the matter is there, it will carry nearly any natural kind of presentation with it. Technique is too liable to be synonymous for complexity and subtlety. Technique ruined Henry James. Few candid people will say that his later work is even half as good as the simpler Roderick Hudson. The earlier stuff of Conrad and Kipling is better than the later, for the same reason. The fact is that generally speaking, animal spirits and a living zest in the things of this earth are a big element in fiction, and as a man's senses dull and his experiences get more commonplace, his matter crumbles through his fingers, and then he resorts to technique to cloud the issue, much as a cuttle-fish squirts ink.

A little technique is as good as a lot.

William H. Hamby: I don't think much about it. I do not believe a writer who is a clear thinker and has mastered the rudiments of expression need spend much time thinking of his style.

A. Judson Hanna: Technique, if striking enough, seems to give a writer a strong, but temporary, vogue. For instance, the technique of O. Henry and Ring Lardner and George Ade. The only striking technique I recall at the moment which, I believe, will become classic, is the technique of Kipling.

Joseph Mills Hanson: Good technique undoubtedly will help a mediocre story to "get across"; but if a story is inherently unique and forceful, it will get across whether it is technically excellent or not.

E. E. Harriman: I feel that too much emphasis is placed upon technique by many, to the exclusion of clearness and simplicity. Yet a certain amount is essential.

Nevil G. Henshaw: To my mind technique is invaluable. It will save a poor story when nothing else will.

Joseph Hergesheimer: Naturally, one must write well.

Robert Hichens: I do not believe in writing at haphazard. The best writers take infinite pains. Joseph Conrad and George Moore are examples of this. Guy de Maupassant, one, I think, of the most perfect story tellers who ever lived, was trained by Flaubert in the art of writing. Young writers should not hurry or think that anything will do. I believe in writing with enthusiasm and then considering the result with critical coldness.

R. de S. Horn: Technique is a word that always brings Stevenson promptly to my mind. Because technique is the part of the art that comes from long and careful study and practise alone, and Stevenson is the shining light along these lines. He set out deliberately to be an author and put weary years in at the task before he ever tried to capitalize it. But look what a master he became. Technique is the polish on both the diamond and the paste jewel. It enhances the real thing and makes the imitation salable. A story may sell that is naturally strong in itself even though it be weak in technique; but this is no argument for neglecting technique. Just think how much more wonderful it would have been with the extra luster added. And this much is certain: no master of any art ever lived who had not added to his natural gifts the added technique acquired by long practise and study.

Clyde B. Hough: In my opinion technique is second only to plot.

Emerson Hough: More thought and less technique would be better for the country.

A. S. M. Hutchinson: I never think about it.

Inez Haynes Irwin: This is a very difficult question to answer. Technique is highly valuable of course—necessary. Some writers give one the impression that they have more technique than matter. As between the two, I would rather have a great deal to say, even if I said it awkwardly, than nothing to say even if I said it exquisitely. I suppose the perfection for which most writers aim is fullness and originality of matter, plus a beautiful technique.

Will Irwin: Naturally an author, like a painter, must have technique. The best of thought and feeling must remain private thought and feeling unless the writer learns how to put it into a form which is pleasing and convincing to the reader. Naturally, too, technique may be overdone; and it can not conceal barrenness of thought imagination and feeling.

Charles Tenney Jackson: As to your question on technique, I assure you, in reading, it is everything to me. I will lose interest in any tale at once when I see it is not well written. Plots seem so dolefully commonplace, they are all ragged to tatters; and if an author can not present his stuff with some attempt, at least, to distinction, to personality, I can't go him much. The setting, the color, the style and material are more than plot, which will wander away into unrealities and commonplaceness in no time if not worked upon by sincere discrimination. A plot is no more than a dead dog which a good taxidermist can make to stand up stuffed so artfully that you believe it might wag its tail. If you can get it to bark—good! You're a genius, but after all the bark and not the dog is the important thing, and the art of it.

Frederick J. Jackson: I don't know. I have known brainier men than I hope to be fail dismally when tackling the fiction game because they had stuffed themselves so full of technique that it stuck out all over their stuff. University fiction course professors hold technique up as a sort of bogy. They overemphasize its importance, in my estimation. The word itself scares many beginners. Why don't the profs come down out of the clouds and use a simpler word, namely, mechanics? I look upon a story as a matter of mechanics. Certain set elements make a story. Conjunction of these elements, plastered up with new stuff, or a new way of portraying them, makes a salable story. I have made speeches before journalism classes, classes in short story writing, one of them the extension course of the University of California. I quoted to this effect: "A story is never so dead as when buried in words." I emphasized it. I scandalized several admirers of certain well known writers, one sonorous, heavy, wordy gentleman in particular when his name was mentioned, by stating frankly that even while I envied his vocabulary, his characterization, his color, I always passed up his stuff because it wandered too far afield, because he lacked plot, or because the plot was submerged so deep in words that I could not pump it out. A story with me is a matter of mechanics, but I do my best to eliminate visible traces, and above all to make the story human.

Mary Johnston: It has great value, but content comes first.

John Joseph: Generally speaking I divide all stories into two classes. One class I call a painting, the other a mechanical drawing. The painting will live and be read from generation to generation. The other will be read and thrown aside and forgotten. You can't lay off a painting with compass and try-square. For that reason the more rules a writer is compelled to keep his eye on, the less able he will be to express the thing he wants to express, the less chance he will have to achieve that elusive, intangible, subtle something that distinguishes the story that is a painting from the one that is merely a mechanical drawing.

One of the greatest afflictions of mankind is his tendency to jump to conclusions, and to assume something to be true when he does not, as a matter of fact, know whether it is true or not. Theorizing is perhaps the principal avocation of mankind, and to the chronic theorizer facts mean nothing. Add to this the curse of precedent and the getting into ruts which is often miscalled "policy," and you have the cause of half the failures in every walk of life. Too, independent thinking is the rarest of all achievements. All of which means that in my opinion the editor who will get out in the highways and byways and find out who is reading magazines and why they read a particular magazine will get the surprise of his life.

I have had this writing bug in my bonnet ever since I was a kid. Never till lately have I had time, or tried to write for publication, but I have made a very careful study of readers during all these years. I am quite certain that I have quizzed at least five thousand persons as to their likes and dislikes in the matter of fiction, always with the view to some day having a try at it myself.

I think that the value of "structure" or "technique" is vastly overrated by the editor generally. That is, if he is trying to please the largest possible number of readers. Of course if he is merely trying to get out a perfect magazine, from a literary standpoint, that is a different matter. The reader—the general reader—cares not a whoop about these things. He demands just one thing in his fiction, and no more: The story must absorb him, and that's all there is to it.

Lloyd Kohler: A knowledge of technique is essential.

Harold Lamb: Technique? It must be all-important, but if you think about it too much, you are apt to make a mess of things.

Sinclair Lewis: I don't know what this question means.

Hapsburg Liebe: My general feeling as to the value of technique? One should study and cultivate it. I haven't been able to do it, so far.

Romaine H. Lowdermilk: Fortunately for fiction, technique can not ride it to death. Good fiction, especially adventure and humor, are to a certain extent immune from technique. Of course technique, properly applied, is necessary and used in every story whether knowingly or not. Still, it is nothing in itself, to my notion.

Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.: Technique is so often over-stressed that beginners are in danger of thinking manner comes first and forgetting matter entirely. Have something to say first; then try to say it. If you don't get it said, then go to a technician to find out what's wrong. So, little by little, you will get the technique, and in a way that it becomes a part of you. Like hydrogen in the air, technique can't be rated too highly, but taken alone it's dangerous—to the beginner. A natural born story teller intuitively tells his yarns without knowing a single rule of technique. But natural born or not, I'm in two minds if it would not be as advantageous for all beginners to tell stories a year or two before they tackle technique at all. Then, when they do, technique will help them, and may not hurt them at all.

Rose Macaulay: Technique means, to me, the whole art of writing, so of course I regard it as valuable to writers.

Crittenden Marriott: Wish I had it.

Homer I. McEldowney: Perhaps I overrate the importance of technique, but I believe that it is the fundamental factor in success. In my mind, it comes before plot. I have read a good many stories with next to no plot at all—but they were "put across," and I enjoyed them. And I have read half through more stories and chucked them aside—even though their plots might have been regular knockouts, had I stuck around to see.

Ray McGillivray: I believe technique strictly a minor consideration—after true interest and sympathy and punch are achieved. And of these, punch is most important. No one I know—and Rascoe, Mencken, Fanny Butcher and some others drop into this honored (?) class—so far has stopped to pick to pieces Growth of the Soil to find out whether or not it violates rules of novel technique. No boxer lately has made more than a four-round study of the question as to whether Mr. Dempsey utilizes crude or polished technique in his art. Champions, both. Both have the punch, and a thoroughgoing sincerity about landing it at precisely the right place. Technique, you say? Perhaps, but if so, technique is a quality inherent in worth and can not be achieved at all in a story which simply is written according to a ruled line drawn on graph paper. For my reading or my writing give me sincerity, sympathy and punch, and I'll let the French fiction fans worry about the mold into which any tale is cast.

Helen Topping Miller: As a teacher of technique, I realize the value of it to the beginner in arriving early at a certain mechanical facility in writing. Too devoted a study of methods, however, I think has a tendency to weaken the self-confidence of a writer and to hamper and stifle the imagination. I have never studied technique, except in teaching it to others. I had become a contributor to The Saturday Evening Post before I had ever studied the subject at all. My advice to beginners is to learn technique—and then forget it.

Thomas Samson Miller: It can be overdone, but Lord spare us the eeny meeny miney moists. Some stories read like Turkish prayer wheels. Conrad has an English that entrances, but has no idea at all of plot construction. Browning—Robert Browning—wrote the best short stories, in monologue. Fra Lippo Lippo, Andrea del Sarto, etc., are perfect short stories of the theme kind—theme and human interest.

Anne Shannon Monroe: There's a right way to do everything, and the wrong isn't worth doing. I believe in revising till you sweat blood—but I can't afford the time always to do it. One must live. When one realizes what it means to put a piece of matter before the eyes of the world—the typing, reading by editors, setting up, proof-reading—hammering and pounding a thing into a fixed place, it seems nothing short of criminal to do all this work—and make a place for a thing that has not reached its highest point of perfection—to materialize a lot of crudity. Every writer should go through the printing trades, know the publishing business from a to izzard,—and then I think he would feel more keenly the actual crime in putting out something that isn't worth all this putting into form and shape. Imagine setting up, in the composing room, all the mistakes of the careless writer—deliberately setting up mistakes! It's a fright!

L. M. Montgomery: I feel that its value is great up to a certain point. But when you become conscious of a writer's technique that writer has reached the point of danger. When you find yourself getting more pleasure from the way a writer says a thing than from the thing itself, that writer has committed a grave error and one that lessens greatly the value of his story. Carried too far, technique becomes as annoying as mannerisms.

Frederick Moore: There isn't any authorship without technique. It may be natural, that is, unconscious—but it must be there. The title of a story is part of the technique.

Talbot Mundy: Its importance can hardly be exaggerated, although I have ignored it consistently and without excuse. Technique is as important to the writer as it is to a swordsman or a boxer or a diplomat, but it is rarely to be found in hand-books. It varies limitlessly with the individual.

Certainly the knowledge of how other men achieved particular effects can do no harm.

But to make technique anything more than a means to an end would be fatal.

Kathleen Norris: That technique is merely interpreted personality, and personality is the most fascinating thing in the world.

Anne O'Hagan: I feel that the value of technique is enormous.

Grant Overton: I do not think the value of technique can be exaggerated, but I know of no method of directly acquiring it.

Sir Gilbert Parker: Vastly important, but the story is everything.

Hugh Pendexter: This query is blind (for me).

Clay Perry: I believe that technique is something that comes absolutely last in the consideration of creating a story.

Michael J. Phillips: I have to be restrained when technique is mentioned. Any person who deliberately strives to say things in fiction in an impressive manner, to roll out sonorous sentences and use nice, long, mouth-filling words, is either a wonderful stylist or an ass. If he is a wonderful stylist, well and good; his stuff will be worth reading for the gorgeous riot of word-pictures on which one may feast his inner vision. If the writer is not a wonderful stylist, he is an ass. Also a hypocrite, intellectually speaking, because he is trying to be what he is not. He is trying to set himself up as a magnificent fellow who is to the manner born and tosses big words about in the air as a juggler does oranges.

To me ideal technique is the manner of writing which best expresses the character, personality and flavor of the person who is writing while at the same time it permits him to tell his story in the clearest, simplest and most understandable manner. Any pretentious style says: "I'm a devil of a fellow, but my story may be rotten." Simple, natural expression says: "Here's my story, told as best I can tell it."

Walter B. Pitkin: My early classical training, especially my long study of Aristotle, gave me an insight into the fundamental worth of technique and, I think, enabled me, fairly early, to distinguish between technique and the humbug recipe-formula stuff which half of the college teachers and the correspondence quacks peddle. Technique in the Greek sense is the basis of all good art, even the most lyrical. For all great art is communicative in some degree; and technique is the science of effective communication. No more, no less.

E. S. Pladwell: I know nothing of technique except in a general and hazy way. Technique to me means three words: Tell the story.

Lucia Mead Priest: I should think technique is as essential to the writer as the foundation of a house is to a builder. As I think of it, the art of the writer is like the history of Italy's painters. Her old masters had great stories to tell but they were minus technique. They had no perspective, no anatomy. Hampered by these limitations, there came a day when their intelligence was aroused.

Every man was so interested in the new things he was learning—the technique, he entirely forgot his story. Then came the giants, they whose hearts were full of grand themes, whose minds and hands were trained to the doing. Unhampered by the machinery of their art, they gave forth masterly interpretations of great stories. This is, I think, the evolution of the individual worker, whatever the craft. Most particularly is this true of the writer's.

Eugene Manlove Rhodes: Nothing worth while without endless labor.

Frank C. Robertson: My feeling in regard to technique is that it is something that must be mastered before any real success can be achieved. But I feel that a writer should to a certain degree master a technique that is peculiar to his own personality. That is why I am skeptical about a too rigid adherence to the rules laid down in the text-books. The first consideration, in my estimation, is to write the story, then smooth it over with the shining gloss of technique. Then you will have used no more technique than is necessary; but try writing the story according to the rules and it is liable to be cramped and artificial.

Ruth Sawyer: I think there always must be technique. It is something that must be mastered in the beginning and then allowed to drop into the subconscious mind and stay there. I can not imagine a good story being written by any author who is conscious of his technique.

Chester L. Saxby: I put too much store by it. I warm to a delicately sculptured story, a thing of shape and beauty apart from the plot. But I strive to break myself of this weakness. The true technique is directness almost crude, restraint of emotion, fullness of fact with scant explanation. "Look into your heart and write" is a mistake of which I'm the victim. Heart serving mind—that's writing. Jack London had the secret.

Barry Scobee: Technique is certainly necessary for any writer. It is the letter, and of course the letter of itself avails nothing. There must be the spirit. But the spirit must have technique. In my elementary work I learned something of technique. I am not aware any more of how much I do use, until, as on only two or three occasions, I have looked over a raw beginner's manuscript. But the book learning on fiction writing is a part of me despite my unawareness of it. And I learn more all the time, but I haven't studied short story writing in three or four years. But in my opinion technique is as essential in this as in any trade or profession.

R. T. M. Scott: I just looked up "technique" in four dictionaries:—Worcester's (1887), Collins' (not dated), Murray's (1908) and Hill's Vest Pocket French-English (1898). The word wasn't there. What does it mean?

Robert Simpson: Technique, to my mind, is of the first importance. True, a man may write a perfectly good story without an ounce of real dyed-in-the-wool technique in his system, but the same story, technically correct, would be a much bigger and better story in every way. No artist can possibly do justice to his art without a practical understanding of technique.

Arthur D. Howden Smith: I find myself constantly valuing it more and more.

Theodore Seixas Solomons: My feeling on technique is that, like those bodies of it, so to speak, which make up text works on the subject, it is "after the fact." Like grammar, they undertake to examine writing (speech) and tell us facts they ascertain about its structure. But the structure—the story, the English speech—antedates the analysis, having been formed unerringly in adjustment to the laws of receptivity and response in the auditor. Both grammar and expositions of literary technique have been too empirical to be of much assistance in guiding the formation of speech practises and fiction practises. Something more fundamentally psychological must be devised before either will be of much actual help.

Raymond S. Spears: Two things are indispensable in my stories: a certain group of data and a certain form of technique. Editors usually look for technique, and often don't know it when they see it; I refer, of course, to simple plot, (Aristotle's definition), requiring complex plot only. The truest, highest, broadest things I do are commonly simple plot, with beginning, continuity, end, but without complexity. Most editors say "Fine—but no plot!" of this type. So, to live, I have to complicate. Of course, technique is utterly indispensable though it may be unconscious.

Norman Springer: I think the writer must learn how to use "the tools of his trade." If he is to make the most of his material, he must study technique; or acquire it in some way, by absorption, or anyhow. From my own observation, I believe there is a danger in technique—it lies in worshiping it, in placing it before the story, in making the form assume more importance than the substance. The oldest error in the world, I suppose. Think of all the writers who are masters of technique, wonderful technicians of language, and who are empty, with nothing to say. They've lost their guts getting a style. Certainly a writer must acquire technique—just as a painter acquires skill with a brush, or a bricklayer with a trowel.

Julian Street: There must be technique, but technique is not so important as character or story. Joseph Conrad is a wretched technician, but is a big man with a big sense of character and story and a powerful picture-maker. But he is clearly always tangled up in method. His trick of having a man tell his story instead of telling it himself is a great error—an error into which the author of If Winter Comes fell, in that book, when he did not take the reader to the court-room for his "big scene" but had a character tell about it.

That is like the horse race that occurs "off stage" in the theater. The actors pretend to look through glasses and shout "Now they're at the quarter!"—"Salvatan wins!" But we—the audience—don't see the horses running. True, that method is sometimes inescapable, but Conrad could often avoid it, and Hutchinson could easily have avoided it in his delightful novel. If Winter Comes deserves its success, but it would have been a much finer book but for certain revelations of absolute ineptitude.

T. S. Stribling: Without technique a writer is lost, but I think it should be subconscious, just as one's feeling for English rhythm and the picturesque effect of words is subconscious.

Booth Tarkington: The same as Tennyson's: "It's not what we say, but how we say it; but the fools don't know that."

W. C. Tuttle: I believe that technique is the greater part of a fiction story—and the hardest to master.

Lucille Van Slyke: If by technique you mean facility—I'd say it was immensely valuable to those who can grab it—I never could—writing gets harder and harder the older I get.

Atreus von Schrader: Technique is valuable in that it does away with hit-or-miss writing. The author who knows his technique will know when a story is a story, and why.

T. Von Ziekursch: I am hardly competent to judge.

Henry Kitchell Webster: If there is such a thing as a positive technique, I do not know it. I have been writing stories for the past quarter-century, and I don't know how to do it. I have learned, in that twenty-five years, an immense number of ways not to do it. I can sit all day rejecting seductive-looking devices as they occur to me,—sometimes because I can see just what the snare is that they are spreading for me; sometimes because nothing more than instinct bids me beware of them—and when a real, honest, eighteen-carat, sound-to-the-core story comes along I think I have learned to recognize it three times, perhaps, in five. What technique I have managed to acquire, then, after laborious years, is almost wholly negative, and I've learned to be thankful even for that.

G. A. Wells: Many writers (the majority of them it seems to me) get by without technique. That is, they are not consciously aware of the fact that they have technique. That is, in the highest form. Walpole, Galsworthy and perhaps Richard Washburn Child, are deliberate technologists. That is to say (as their work appears to me) they are purposely aware of the rules of writing during the entire process of writing. Technique shows in every line they set down. The contrary of this is what I mean when I say that most writers are unaware of the fact that they have technique. Galsworthy never forgets the rules. He would never wittingly express himself in a manner that did not conform with the highest form of technique. Gilbert Chesterton and, I think, H. G. Wells are of like caliber. I think the writer who leaves conscious consideration of technique out of the question predominates.

But there is this much about it—no writer can produce first-class work (literature as the term is strictly applied) until he has fully mastered technique. The better the architect the better the structure. The architect who does not understand wind pressures, tensile strengths, compression, torque, weight stress and the other values of construction can never design a perfect structure. The same way with a writer. A low grade of technique produces a low grade of literature. I rank technique very high. Possibly my respect for it comes of the lack.

William Wells: Oh, Lord!

Ben Ames Williams: I rate technique highly. It seems to me a generalization from which there are few exceptions that with perfect technique any subject-matter can be transformed into a classic tale. My note-books are almost as full of articles of faith in my technical creed as they are of incident or description for later use in stories.

The most important single element of technique seems to me to be the introduction at every opportunity of commonplace details of daily life. To tell your reader that your characters get up at seven fifteen, take a shower, a shave, sing while they shave, put on their shoes, go down to breakfast.... These things lend, I think, a similitude of life to a story which can be had in no other way. It is the ability to do this in the highest degree, I think, which makes Tarkington's work so fine. If your hero and heroine wash dishes together, tell how they do it; hot water, soap-shaker, dry cloths. The reader will nod and say: "Exactly; I've done that myself. This fellow knows what he's writing about." And believe whatever else you have to tell.

Honore Willsie: I think technique is as valuable to the author as to the musician. It is to the story what the steel structure is to the sky-scraper.

H. C. Witwer: My feeling on technique is that it must obviously be present in some degree in all well-told stories, or let us say, in all stories acceptable to the better magazines. But I could not teach it and I doubt if it can be successfully taught. How many famous writers are graduates of such a course?

William Almon Wolff: The important thing to keep in mind about technique, it seems to me, is that it is a means to an end. Too many people think of it as an end in itself, which it can not be. These are the people who say that a writer who has broken their rules has not technique, or a bad technique. Rot! His technique is right if he has accomplished his purpose, which is to tell his story clearly and convincingly. What does it matter how he tells it? Technique is essential, indispensable—but its test must be a pragmatic one.

I think the reason for most failures though, is not technical but this—that the writer has nothing to tell. I remember what Freeman Tilden once told me:

"Very often I think a story is frightfully difficult, in a technical sense. I can't seem to get it done. And then I find out that the trouble is that I haven't a story—never did have one."

Edgar Young: In the widest meaning of the word technique is of great value.

Summary

Tabulating the above, out of 112 answerers we find 40 attaching extreme importance to technique, 45 taking a sort of middle ground, and 21 assigning it little or no importance. To the last may be added 3 who don't know the exact nature of technique but indicate that they assign slight value to it. Unclassified, 1; venturing no opinion, 2. To say that technique is not important in writing is to say that it is not important to know how. One can not write fiction at all without knowing how, without technique. Do 21 of our writers therefore not know how and do 45 of them consider not knowing how to be not extremely important? No, and as a matter of fact investigation would probably show that some of the 21 possess more technique than do some of the 40 who attach most importance to it.

It is evident that at least some of those belittling technique are thinking of technique in its most formal sense—of books of rules, of strictly academic instructions, of hours spent in intensive study of abstract ways and means. Bear in mind that while naturally no one is born in possession of technique there are some who, perhaps before they even begin to write, have unconsciously absorbed from reading fiction a good many principles of construction and general method, while to others reading has brought little understanding of technique and when they begin authorship they must make deliberate study of methods before they can produce anything resembling well constructed fiction. Any editor can point to authors whose earliest stories were written with sufficient technique to warrant publication, and to many more whose early efforts had great faults and who acquired technique only by slow development through practise and study.

This book has utterly failed of a main purpose if, through the answers of the writers themselves, it has not shown vividly and forcefully that writers vary in methods, principles and purpose fully as much as in natural ability and results. If all had agreed as to the exact definition of technique or as to its exact place in the scale of importance, it would have been a miracle.

Nor can I, or any one else, step in and definitely fix its relative importance or give it an iron-clad definition that will entirely satisfy all writers. But if we turn back to the discussion of technique in the chapter on thinking of the reader when writing we can find a definition of technique that will at least explain the differences of opinion that may now confuse us.

Technique is applied knowledge of all that facilitates and perfects expression.

Literature is an expression or interpretation. No expressing or interpreting can be done unless it is done to some one. Even when writing is solely self-expression the writer must constitute his "other self," his critical self, the representative of human minds in general and the judge of whether he has succeeded in reaching human minds with his message by recognized human symbols and in accordance with generally accepted human standards.

His other or critical self is the adapter of his creations to the demands of a common human standard of expression and understanding—is his guide as to technique and the repository of all he knows concerning technique. During creation he may or may not be conscious of this critical self, but he can be unconscious of it only if technique has been so thoroughly absorbed and assimilated that the critical self can apply it automatically, working in perfect unison with the creative self or, if you like, having become identified with the creative self or passed its knowledge on to the creative self until that knowledge has become a part of the creative self.

Of all technique that has not yet been thus thoroughly assimilated he will be conscious; the less assimilated, the more conscious; the more conscious, the more distracted and hampered by these tools that demand attention for themselves instead of fitting unnoticed into the creative hand.

In other words, technique so thoroughly assimilated that it is unconscious is mastered technique. No other kind is. So long as any bit of technique is still so strange to the creative hand that it has not become an unnoted part of it, that bit of technique may even then be a useful tool but it has not been thoroughly mastered. And to the extent that it is not mastered it will distract the creator's attention from the creating to itself.

Unmastered technique is therefore both bad and good. Good, because it is on its way to becoming mastered technique and because even in the process it has some value. Bad, because it distracts from the real creating, hampers and cripples it.

If a writer, whether beginning or experienced, adds new technique too rapidly, he will be too much distracted and slowed up and his individuality, upon which the value of all his creating is wholly dependent, is too much held back from free expression—blocked, cramped, suppressed and atrophied. There can be no general rule as to how much new technique a writer can take up and assimilate at one time any more than there can be a general rule as to how much a man can eat and assimilate during a given time, but in either case there is a line beyond which lie indigestion and harm. A man can kill himself by eating too much. The creative self can be crushed under too great a mass of technique fed to it in too short a time.

Because of this I do not hesitate to indict the entire present system of teaching the writing of fiction. That system, common to practically all colleges, correspondence courses, special teachers and books dealing with the subject, consists of seizing the beginner or comparative beginner, leading him to the dining-table and forcing down his throat at one sitting more food than he can digest in ten weeks.

Naturally, acute and often chronic indigestion results. In a few months or a year they feed him more technique than he will be able to digest in five years, if ever. The result is an appalling injury to his creative possibilities—an injury from which in the large majority of cases there is never a complete recovery and too often never even a partial one. The workman is crushed by his tools. Individuality is killed or aborted by the mere means for its expression. Sometimes they talk to him about "preserving his individuality," but they kill it just the same.

I do not base my charge on a theory. For more than a score of years as editor on half a dozen fiction magazines I've had the results of this teaching thrust under my eyes in an unending flow of its results—stories often perfect as to the formal rules of technique, but all merely mechanical constructions without a breath of life. As one writer has expressed it, these stories are an endless procession of Fords, each complete in all its parts, well built according to a plan, but all of them only collections of machinery and all exactly alike. No individuality, no expression of anything not expressed a million times before, no art. Just mechanics.

The cause is evident—more technique gobbled down than can be assimilated, so many tools piled on that individuality is crushed beneath the load. If proof is needed it can be found by applying the remedy. When one of these crushed, aborted writers discovers the seeming cause or has it shown to him, casts overboard all his hampering technique and creates freely, the results prove the diagnosis correct.

He can not afford permanently to abandon technique or the acquisition of technique, any more than a man can afford permanently to give up eating, but he can give up biting off more than he can digest.

Omitting from consideration writers who lack sufficient ability ever to succeed, most writers who fail do so because they write under a strain, artificially, mechanically. They write this way because, from instructions or from fiction itself, they have taken on more technique than they can digest or master. Self-expression becomes impossible. Individuality itself is stunted, buried alive or killed outright.

Experienced writers too often suffer from the same trouble. How many writers can you recognize from their stories if their names are covered up? So pronounced an individuality in their work may not be considered a necessity of good art, but, to present the situation more liberally, do you not find the book and magazine fiction of to-day for the most part very much cut from the same monotonous pattern or half-dozen patterns? Give to all writers the same material and plot and the resulting stories will for the most part be so much alike that any one of them would serve fairly well for all. Only the minority will turn out stories with real individuality.

A distinction should be drawn, of course, between really individualized creations and stories individualized only by mannerisms or affectations of style, which may or may not be really individual but are only surface phenomena. American present-day fiction reeks with these surface tricks—to the detriment of real art and of appreciation of real art.

One very particularly marked tendency toward degeneracy in our literature is the growing tendency to decorate a story with purely surface cleverness. Instead of expressing his material in the language that best conveys its meaning and spirit, a writer pretty well lets his real material shift for itself and seeks for language that in itself will allure and charm the reader. To him style means only an opportunity for parading his ability for quaint or taking phrase, glittering aphorism, cynical superiority, general sophistication. All these are useful tools if used in proper place, but writers of this type use them without discrimination. The result is a paste jewel that pleases many readers, but the result is nothing that even approximates literature. Ignore this glittering tinsel and look beneath. Generally you will find no characterization, no real portrayal of life, no anything that makes real literature. Sometimes a plot and often a situation, but the rest is emptiness. Often the glitter is a true product of individuality, but the individuality isn't worth putting on paper as literature. These writers should be essayists, not fictionists. As fictionists they are only vaudeville artists. Yet they are a real menace to American literature, for they appear regularly in most of our best magazines and between covers issued from our best book houses.

Of this last type one good thing can be said—they are not suffering from too much real technique.

For writers in general there can be no such thing as too much technique, provided it is really assimilated. Nor can there be anything more harmful than a stomachful of technique undigested.

QUESTION VIII

What is most interesting and important to you in your writing—plot, structure, style, material, setting, character, color, etc.?

In going over the answers to various parts of this questionnaire there has again and again risen the speculation as to what would be the effect upon literary criticism in general, particularly professional literary criticism, if such facts as are here presented direct from the actual desks of the writers themselves were read and seriously studied by the critics. And applied not only to the writings of the authors here speaking, but to fiction in general. To how much more just assessment would it lead, to how much more real an understanding of actual and comparative values, to how much clearer a grasp of fundamentals?

There are good critics, to be sure, some very good, but many very bad ones. Professional literary criticism in America, including both the smallest local mediums and those of most repute, is, generally speaking, perfunctory, superficial, casual, over-sophisticated, sub-understanding, hereditary, hack, and a long list of other uncomplimentary adjectives. Perhaps the gravest indictment is that of being hereditary, for this is more or less the root fault. Critics, however inhuman their victims may consider them, are entirely human and therefore subject to the human failing of accepting the dicta of the past, not as merely the best the past has been able to hand on to the present, but as the final word that neither the present nor the future can improve upon and that neither should dare to question. If the past itself had acted wholly on this theory a century or five centuries ago, its bequest to the present would be lacking in a century or five centuries of accomplishment and progress.

The development of this speculation has little place here and less in connection with this question than with those concerning the imagination, but it has clamored for a hearing all through the compiling of this book. So now it's had it.

Reader as well as writer will find interest in the preferences shown in the following answers. To know a writer's "taking off place" is illuminating in any appreciation or understanding of his work. To writers there is here again further proof of the futility of general rules, and from the actual experiences of a hundred writers it is impossible that a beginner or even a writer of experience should not glean information that otherwise would come only through time, work and experiment.

Answers

Bill Adams: Character and color, (when I've got 'em I say, "Hang you, Jack—I'm all right.")

Samuel Hopkins Adams: It depends largely upon the nature of the stories. In my "Our Square" stories, setting, color, style and atmosphere. In my more serious works such as Success and The Clarion, character, plot, structure and the interplay of living forces which partake of and fuse all of these elements.

Paul L. Anderson: Character, material, color, style, structure, setting, roughly in the order given (not invariably; it depends on the story). Plot is essential; it's the skeleton on which the living thing is built. To my mind, the greatest of fiction writers, in the order given, are Shakespeare, Sienkiewicz, Defoe, and Hugo. The setting is, properly speaking, a part of the plot.

William Ashley Anderson: Material, setting, character, and color. But this is accidental, and the result of personal and unusual experience. All these elements ought to be of value, and relative importance.

H. C. Bailey: Character is far most interesting and important to me, then style, and construction comes in the third place.

Edwin Balmer: Answered under I.

Ralph Henry Barbour: I hold character the most important in writing. If you've got that, you've got the rest.

Frederick Orin Bartlett: Material.

Nalbro Bartley: Character development.

Konrad Bercovici: All the things put together make a story.

Ferdinand Berthoud: Setting. My old Africa always. I couldn't write a story of anything outside of Africa to save my miserable life. Then I like fooling with the various men I've known and making the poor beggars laugh and suffer. Those who are alive of my characters would murder me if they caught hold of me.

H. H. Birney, Jr.: To me, plot and material are the most interesting, but I consider structure and style by far the most important. Setting is of minor value if style and structure are good. Witness Arnold Bennett! A man who has solved the secrets of style and structure can write about anything and make it salable and interesting.

Farnham Bishop: Plot, probably, at present. I feel the story first, as a whole. Then I begin to see the men who are behind it and ready to begin living it—character. Perhaps I should have put material before plot, as the latter usually springs from the former. Setting and color I find very easily, after I have dug up all the available facts, which is much more fun than setting them down, for I write slowly and laboriously, forming each sentence carefully in my mind before I set down a word of it. Therefore my style is terse and bare.

Algernon Blackwood: Material, style, setting, character, color.

Max Bonter: Style, I don't bother about. I just try to make my lingo appropriate for the thoughts I want to express.

Material, setting, character and color always interested me more than plot and structure. I am just now beginning to realize the importance of plot and structure and to pay to them the attention that they require.

Katharine Holland Brown: Most interesting—and most difficult—the translation of the story, from an image (very much scrambled, but clear to myself,) to one that will be clear to others.

Therefore, the structure, and the pointing-up of the plot.

F. R. Buckley: Most important ingredient to me? Color! With five exclamation points.

Prosper Buranelli: Structure and style. The rest are easy.

Thompson Burtis: In order of interest: Characterization, plot, structure, material, color, setting. Style means nothing whatever to me as yet. It never occurs to me. I write as naturally and with as little trouble as I talk. Consequently I have no style, probably.

George M. A. Cain: I can not answer this at all. Plots are my chief difficulty. Structure comes next. Style is unconscious. Material comes easily after a plot. Settings present difficulty or interest to me, only when some peculiar market requirement demands fitting stories to them rather than them to the stories. My early ministerial experience fastened my attention upon characters, and I find them without effort. On the question of character in fiction I shall say more under X. Color interests me only when I have to get it from outside my own experience. To me the supreme interest is always the reaction between situation and character.

Robert V. Carr: I do not know.

George L. Catton: Theme first, then style, then characters; the rest about equal in importance, with color last.

Robert W. Chambers: Fifty-fifty.

Roy P. Churchill: Plot and character first with all the rest trailing after.

Carl Clausen: In their order named: Character, plot, structure, color and setting.

Courtney Ryley Cooper: All these ingredients are necessary, with plot, structure, material, and one which you haven't mentioned, accuracy, very much to the fore.

Arthur Crabb: Mind. Or if you prefer character. Next to that is style. The structure is, of course, taken for granted. The plot, setting, color, etc., seem to me to be, as I said before, frames of the picture. One of my greatest weaknesses is my inability, or possibly unwillingness, to make the plot strong enough.

Mary Stewart Cutting: I think that structure, style, material and character are important in the order mentioned.

Elmer Davis: Character, feeling. (If you've ever seen any of my stuff you won't believe this, but you ought to see the stuff I haven't sold.)

William Harper Dean: To me plot is the most interesting and important. The rest of it—style, color, setting, etc., can be sweated into keeping with the demands of the plot. But if plot is illogical or non-gripping (I do not mean exciting), then all the polishing and retouching in the world will not make a story of the piece.

Harris Dickson: In my own work this differs greatly. I have just finished a story that deals with the building of a levee. As levee construction is little known outside of this river country, I devoted much pains to the setting and color. Besides this, the background of this story wields a very strong effect on the characters themselves.

Sometimes a story is a character story, and incidents are chosen to develop that character—as in the first "Old Reliable" story. Sometimes it may be the story of a single adventure in which the characters may be subordinated to the events.

Captain Dingle: Material, setting, character.

Louis Dodge: The first consideration in writing a story should be to tell a story, I suppose; but that should go without saying, and certainly style comes second, and your style ought to be you, and not something you got out of a book. In other words, a story is wearisome if it isn't original, if it hasn't got something of the author in it.

Phyllis Duganne: I am more interested in character, its development and peculiarities than anything else, in either reading or writing. I like style and good structure, but I think that real people—real people in fiction, I mean—who interest me and make me either like or hate them, are most interesting.

J. Allan Dunn: I should be inclined to state that character drawing was the most important thing to me in my writing. It is very likely my weakest point but it is to me the most essential thing, the delineation of character and its working under certain circumstances. I try for style. Try hard to recognize of what my style may consist. I like to write a story through one pair of eyes, if possible, and that calls for an ingenuity that is interesting. Plot comes next to character, then style, then color and setting. I enjoy recalling local conditions, I revive the thrill of certain atmospheres, I get a thrill from trying not to let them run away with me and to use atmosphere and color only where they tie up with action. And I continually realize that I do not follow my own few rules.

Walter A. Dyer: Leaving out the question of what I believe to be the requirements of editors, I find the elements in writing most interesting to me in about this order: style, color, character, setting, structure, material, plot. Probably I've just reversed the needed order.

Walter Prichard Eaton: "Character is plot"—Galsworthy. He said it of plays, but it is true of stories. Character is always most important.

E. O. Foster: Plot, style and setting are to me the most interesting things in writing.

Arthur O. Friel: Material, setting, character.

J. U. Giesy: Plot first, character drawing. Structure is a part of plot, don't you think?

George Gilbert: The whole story is important; when I try, consciously, to pay any attention to the elements you mention, the story escapes; I have only rubbish left.

Kenneth Gilbert: The most interesting and important elements in fiction to me are plot, style and color. Plot above all others; style that by itself may "put over" the story when the plot is not what it should be, and color that the story may grip the reader. Without color a plot is merely harsh charcoal strokes on a white background, and without style the story has no charm. Structure, of course, is important, and material, setting and character will serve to attract attention, but I hold the three first-named to be vital.

Holworthy Hall: First—always—the story; second, the style; third, there is no third.

Richard Matthews Hallet: I would sell my soul at any time for a good plot, but it must be one for which I can furnish background and foreground out of my own experience. A plot attracts facts and characters as a magnet attracts iron filings. If it is really a plot, and not a pseudo-plot or theme, which is the amateur's usual conception of a plot, you will be conscious of a quickening all along the line, and all opposition dissolves as you go along. If it is not really a plot, the obstacles will look big, the talk will lag and the characters will have paper legs and vacant faces. Touch a match to it and look for another one.

William H. Hamby: Of importance in the order named: character, plot, color.

A. Judson Hanna: The most interesting feature of my work is setting and color. All else—plot, movement, "punch" and "kick,"—is a rather weary necessity.

Joseph Mills Hanson: In practise, though perhaps not in theory, the most interesting and important to me of the elements mentioned by you in the writing of a story, are, in their order; plot, setting, character, material, color, style, structure.

E. E. Harriman: The most important items in story writing to me are—the appeal to a reader's sympathies—local color—character—and the work it will do in strengthening moral qualities, such as honesty, truthfulness, courage.

Nevil G. Henshaw: First and most of all character. Then plot, setting, structure and style. (I've lumped color with setting.)

Joseph Hergesheimer: Humanity! Understanding!

Robert Hichens: Everything's important.

R. de S. Horn: A question difficult to answer. It depends pretty much on the type of story. A character story would naturally depend hugely on the handling of character. I always have an instinctive feeling as to which is the most important in the story I am planning to write, and I try to capitalize it accordingly. Wouldn't it be better to say that plot, character and atmosphere should be considered of primary importance in the building of a story?

Clyde B. Hough: I'm interested most intensely of all in the action and humanness, that is to say the human action, realistic emotions, desires and ambitions of my characters which I strive to express in terms of action. Next is plot and next is structure. Material and setting are incidental. Style, characters and color should be adopted to suit the occasion.

Emerson Hough: The story. The period. The thing itself.

A. S. M. Hutchinson: Character.

Inez Haynes Irwin: All these things intrigue me but if I must make a choice, I will say I am interested in character first; atmosphere, which I think includes color and setting, second; style third. Of course I am assuming that I start with a plot but after all I should, I suppose, say plot first because until there is a plot, there is no writing.

Will Irwin: I am most interested in character, next in style, and next in color.

Frederick J. Jackson: Plot and material most important. Characterization vitally necessary to make the story real. Structure and style the most interesting, principally because I let them take care of themselves, if they will. Setting and color? Use a camel hair brush, not a shovel.

Mary Johnston: I can't say. All are so inwound.

Lloyd Kohler: The plot probably gets the most consideration; style is also an important consideration.

Harold Lamb: This is a knotty kind of question. Are not character and setting part of material, and color of setting? Chasing one's imagination, as it were, around a vicious circle? Just now, at least in tales based on history or folk-lore, I give most thought to material, least to structure.

Sinclair Lewis: How can one segregate them?

Hapsburg Liebe: The most interesting and important things to me in writing are—first character, then situation and setting, then—well, maybe structure.

Romaine H. Lowdermilk: Character. The characters must be individuals, not mere types. Oh, how I hate the hero, tall and handsome, a swift-roping, hard-riding cowboy! Characters must be human and have mannerisms and act natural! Plot is next. I must have plot or I haven't a story. "Style" stories are a bore to the kind of people I write to. All the rest—material, color, setting, structure and so on depend on the sort of story and the characters. I want (1) people, (2) action, (3) spots of humor, (4) plot—unless you call action the plot. I don't.

Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.: Plot—that is, characters acting and acted upon—is the most interesting and important to me in writing. All the rest is incidental.

Rose Macaulay: Style, on the whole. But all of them.

Crittenden Marriott: Mostly plot; sometimes all color.

Homer I. McEldowney: Character and color—with a hope that some day style may be the most important.

Ray McGillivray: Character, plot. See previous answers.

Helen Topping Miller: Character and setting interest me most.

Thomas Samson Miller: I put material first, character next, then structure; that is, I would prefer to put them so, but commercially, plot is first, puppet characterization next (editors have insistently congratulated me on characters who were not characters at all).

Anne Shannon Monroe: It is difficult to say what are the most interesting and important things to me in writing, for every bit of it interests me intensely. I even love to read proof—it's a thrill to look at a galley proof. But the characters, I believe, are of keenest interest—just as people are more interesting than trees or landscapes.

L. M. Montgomery: In my own writing character is by far the most interesting thing to me—then setting. In the development of the one and the arrangement of the other I find my greatest pleasure and from their letters it is evident that my readers do, too. This, of course, is because my flair is for these things. In another writer something else—plot, structure or color would be the vital thing. Only the very great authors combine all these things. For the rank and file of the craft, I think a writer should find out where his strength lies and write his stories along these lines. In my own case I would never attempt to handle complicated plot or large masses of material. I know I should make a dismal failure of them.

Frederick Moore: Plot comes first, structure next, characters third. If these three are handled skilfully, that is style. Setting and color not important. A good story is—a good story.

Talbot Mundy: I am afraid that abstract ideas are the important points of a story to me. I don't care so much about a character as why he does so and so. I like to know his mental arguments and all about his motives. But I'm afraid that is heterodoxy. Setting and color certainly mean a great deal.

Kathleen Norris: Setting is the most fascinating type of writing, to me. I should suppose character drawing to be by far the most important and the most difficult.

Anne O'Hagan: Character development, then setting, then style.

Grant Overton: It depends on the story. On the whole, the material seems to me the most important thing. I have seen all the excellences wasted on stuff that was simply not worth writing about.

Sir Gilbert Parker: All are important.

Hugh Pendexter: Drama, material, structure, atmosphere and character.

Clay Perry: Character, plot, philosophy, style, material, color, setting, structure. This is the order of importance in which I would place them. As to their interest, to me, I place character first, always; philosophy second, plot third and so on.

Walter B. Pitkin: The following order of interest holds in my case: 1, the thought of the story; 2, the plot; 3, the character (or revelation of human nature in action); 4, the setting; 5, the color (which merges, for me, with the setting).

E. S. Pladwell: Plot, character, color.

Lucia Mead Priest: "They are all like one another as half pence are." If you ask me which gives me the greatest pain I shall confess to plot and structure.

Eugene Manlove Rhodes: Character, plot, color.

Frank C. Robertson: The most interesting things to me in writing are character, material and plot. The most important, because I have to work the hardest upon them, are setting, structure and color.

Ruth Sawyer: Plot—and its necessary structure; character—and its necessary setting.

Chester L. Saxby: Can only say what I've already said on this point: that development is the thing. It's like saying, though, who is most necessary on a baseball team. Where would you be if one of them was lacking? Material is the most often slighted in writing, I believe. Stories are thin through lack of it.

Barry Scobee: All equally, I believe. If my story lacks any one in proper portion and keeping with the others it will drag with me, and when a story drags in the writing it makes me wonder, makes me feel something is wrong with it. However, a story will drag and bore sometimes when it is good, so one must be careful about self-hunches.

But I must have plot, a puzzle, a frame to hang the story on to get from crisis to crisis. To me, the plot lends the essential puzzle and drama arrangement. Structure tells it properly. Style—well, after all, I don't pay the slightest attention to style, if by that is meant "the writer's style." I don't know whether I have any style or not, or what it is like. No one ever told me. Material—that, after all, is the big thing. But I love the setting if it is in my beloved Southwest, or where I know every detail—blade of grass, or quirk of human, or smile of woman—that is, what's back of 'em. Character—well, I have found if I don't pal with my characters and know all their thoughts, the story doesn't appeal to the editors. Color? I don't know. Maybe I don't have much color. The word doesn't stir my thought much. Local color, do you mean? I'd get that in the setting.

R. T. M. Scott: Plot, structure, style, etc., are all equally interesting to me and equally difficult. Perhaps clearness, suspense and the surprise ending interest me the most. If there is anything else—all the better!

Robert Simpson: The most interesting thing about a story to me is the keynote. That decided upon, character, structure, style, plot and so on follow naturally. They can't help themselves. The keynote is struck, of course, in or about the chief character. As he or she is, the other "chords and discords" sound accordingly. I try never to write two stories alike. Each story, of course, may have a fairly general resemblance to all of the others from the reader's standpoint, but the note each strikes is as different as I can make it. I am referring now particularly to book length yarns, although my notion applies in a lesser degree to short stories as well.

Arthur D. Howden Smith: In order: plot, structure, character, color, material, setting, style.