The Project Gutenberg eBook of Fundamentals of fiction writing
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Fundamentals of fiction writing
Author: Arthur Sullivant Hoffman
Release date: August 16, 2025 [eBook #76688]
Language: English
Original publication: Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1922
Credits: Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FUNDAMENTALS OF FICTION WRITING ***
FUNDAMENTALS OF
FICTION WRITING
_By_
ARTHUR SULLIVANT HOFFMAN
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1922
BY ARTHUR SULLIVANT HOFFMAN
_Printed in the United States of America._
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH &. CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS.
BROOKLYN. N. Y.
_To_
JAMES H. GANNON
Whose Understanding Cooperation Has
Made the Application of These
Principles a Pleasant Task
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I By Way of Introduction
II A General Survey
III Creating the Illusion
IV Your Readers
V Distractions
VI Clearness
VII Overstrain
VIII Convincingness
IX Holding the Reader
X Pleasing the Reader
XI Plot and Structure
XII Character
XIII Individuality vs. Technique
XIV The Reader and His Imagination
XV The Place of Action in Fiction
XVI Adaptation of Style to Material
Appendix: Your Manuscripts and the Editors
Index
{1}
FUNDAMENTALS OF FICTION WRITING
CHAPTER I
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
Living in so complex a civilization, we generally fail to realize how
complex have become our mental habits. We have come more and more to
think upon complexities until, for the most part, the more elementary
facts, processes and approaches are slighted or omitted as beneath
the high development of our minds. However learned our thinking may
be, its foundation must be elementary thinking, and, if elementary
thinking is neglected because it seems too elementary for attention,
the result is likely to be unsoundness of the whole structure because
it has been erected on unsound foundation.
Add to faulty thinking habit the human {2} tendency to accept as
established what has been handed down to us by our thought
predecessors, dead or contemporaneous. Progress can be made only to
the extent this tendency is overcome by chance or guarded against.
Guarding against it requires particularly the close scrutiny of
elementals.
It is particularly unfortunate that, the specialists of course being
the most complex thinkers of us all, we have allowed our habit of
specialization to leave to them more and more the guidance of general
thought, thus drifting further and further from elementary methods of
thinking.
The more thoroughly you analyze modern thinking methods and their
results, the more evident becomes the damage done.
Simplicity is the key, but, being rather proud of our complexity and
advancement, we have become such strangers to simplicity that we even
distrust it when we meet it. It is most pitiful of all that a mere
outward show of complexity gains more respect than does a simple
essential unadorned. Yet it is true. Almost automatically
simplicity produces in us a reaction of contempt, a feeling that our
highly developed minds have long {3} ago passed on beyond such
childish matters. We are too advanced to bother over the elementals
and the result too often is much frantic "progress" along wrong paths.
In the course of my editorial work it impressed itself on me more and
more that there was somewhere unsoundness in both the editorial basis
of criticism and the writers' basis of creation. Being afflicted
with the prevalent complex method of thought, it was only gradually
that I came to suspect that the unsoundness traced back to some of
the elementals all of us seemed to be taking for granted. My
suspicions have grown the stronger during the years of "laboratory"
work, at some points ripening into convictions, so that in this book
intended to be of practical service to writers of magazine fiction
they will inevitably show. They must, therefore, be labeled in
advance as departures from the usual dicta laid down, so that the
reader can make allowance accordingly.
While my personal history is unimportant, some of the details that
may indicate, or that seem to have influenced, the theories developed
have place in this book as guide-posts in valuing or discounting it.
{4}
It is, for example, only fair to make plain in advance that I am
probably far less familiar with books on how to write fiction than
are most beginners who may read this book, and probably know--or
remember--less concerning the dicta of critics and other authorities
on literature in general. On the other hand, in view of the probable
reaction to some of my unacademic views, I claim the right to state
that these views do not result from lack of academic training. Also
a brief statement of my experience as editor and writer seems called
for by way of warrant for my venturing to advance any theories at all.
I have been an editor more than twenty years, a magazine editor for
nearly twenty, serving on seven widely different
periodicals--general, specialized and fiction--_Chautauquan, Smart
Set, Watson's, Transatlantic Tales, Delineator, Romance, Adventure_.
At intervals during that time I have contributed fiction and articles
to _Everybody's, McClure's, Bookman, Country Life, Delineator, Smart
Set_ and half a dozen others. Previous to this there were nearly
three years as editor of a country weekly and two years of teaching
English and literature in high school. I {5} specialized in English
at one university and added some graduate work in fiction writing at
another.
As a child my home influence was decidedly literary, even to a point
that might be designated "highbrow," with the natural flavoring of
science rather to be expected in a house largely occupied by my
grandfather's microscopes and shelves of specimens. In a word, my
early training was decidedly academic, and as a "cub" I came to the
magazine "game" spelling "literature" with a very large capital "L"
and with more than the usual cub reverence for books and magazines
and all that pertains thereto.
Like the majority of magazine editors, I found that my first task was
to shove most of my academic training and point of view into the
background, making of them an accessory rather than a guide, and
adopting an altogether new scale of relative values. A few months
accomplished the greater part of the change, but it required years to
develop suspicion of that new and commonly accepted scale, to ripen
the suspicion to conviction and to build up a third scale to take its
place in my work.
{6}
Before entering the magazine field, I remember only one questioning
of precepts and tenets. About 1900 I refused to read any more
authors "for style," realizing I was against my will absorbing too
many of their individualities, Stevenson's sentence-rhythm in
particular imposing itself on my literary efforts to a decided
degree. "Style is the man" seems to have been one of the textbook
statements that sank in deepest, and it gave me courage to rebel
against another of its kind.
In my college course three things stand out as strong in influence.
All were encountered in work of the thesis class conducted by
Professor Joseph Villiers Denney with a sound judgment and breadth of
view that were bound to be stimulative and give permanent value.
First, laboratory experiments upon the class itself showed us, to our
great surprise, the tremendous degree of variation in individuals as
to the quality and degree of their imagination-response to the
printed or spoken word. I have met few writers or editors who had
any conception of this variation or who had even given the matter a
thought, yet it is of basic importance to both.
{7}
The second idea outstanding from my college course is the explanation
of the psychological appeal of fiction given by George Henry Lewes to
the effect that man finds enjoyment in fiction because by following
the fortunes of the hero or identifying himself with him he can
attain vicariously the perfections and successes he can not attain in
real life. I have not seen it for twenty-four years and may have
distorted it, but the idea as stated has been the one acted upon.
Third, there was Spencer's economy as a basis of rhetorical theory.
I remember nothing whatever about it except that he included economy
of the reader's attention. To what extent this phase of his idea is
responsible for my own theories I do not know. Memory tells me I
recalled it only after working out my own, but it is reasonable to
hold it a cause though an unrealized one.
_Analytics of Literature_, by L. A. Sherman, made a decided
impression on me during college or in the years immediately
following. Undoubtedly I gained much from it, but at present I am
unable to state its content in any but the most vague way and can not
detect any but academic influences from it, though {8} in this I may
be doing it serious injustice. De Quincey's _On the Knocking at the
Gate in "Macbeth"_ made vivid the use of relief scenes. From some
book by Brander Matthews I learned that the short story should have
only one point.
Five years after college I read Tolstoy's _What Is Art?_ Read it
with interest, resentment, bewilderment and enthusiasm. It was the
first real blow to my unquestioning acceptance of all the usual
canons of art. The impress was tremendous, but, quite in keeping
with my miserable memory, the only definite, abiding impression I can
identify is the emphasis laid on simplicity, with the corollary that
creative work must reach peasant appreciation if it is to be classed
as art. Years later I came to attach more and more importance to
simplicity, arriving at that attitude by paths leading from practical
experience--laboratory work, as it were, paths that to my vague
recollection seem not at all those of his approach, but I can make no
exact measure of the extent to which Tolstoy may have done my
thinking for me or at least influenced it. Probably the influence is
far greater than I realize.
{9}
In any case, the above are the _total_ of the outside influences. It
is, of course, impossible for any one to live in contact with his
fellows in a world filled with type and opinions without absorbing
ideas from others, but in the sense of influences sufficiently
definite to make conscious impress I can add nothing to the above
list. In nearly twenty years, if I have read any book or article
dealing with the philosophy of literature I do not recall the title
or the occasion. Five or six years ago I read a third or half of a
book that taught the writing of fiction, but laid it down because it
was too difficult for me to understand and seemed not in accordance
with my own ideas. I have never read any other text on fiction
writing, though I have spun the pages of a number of them to gain a
general idea of methods and theories, finding only the usual ones.
This lack of reading authorities was at first due to lack of time,
but for years I have carefully avoided the influence of others'
theories to the best of my ability so that I should not be diverted
or forestalled in an effort to work out my own. Naturally, most of
the accepted theories and methods are current because {10} they are
sound, but there is a minority of cases in which a dissenting view
seems warranted.
My warrant for dissent is that to a very great extent the main faults
(other than those due to lack of natural ability) in the fiction
submitted to magazines seem directly due to faults in accepted
theories and methods. These faults in theory and teaching may be
roughly summarized under two heads:
(1) Assigning to readers theoretical reactions based on traditional
editorial and critical precepts instead of basing editorial precepts
on actual reactions of readers. In particular, lack of emphasis upon
preserving the illusion.
(2) Overwhelming writers with demands of technique and academics and
thereby doing all possible to ruin individuality and real ability.
For getting data on the first of these points I have been
exceptionally well situated. More than any other magazine on which I
have served, more than the half dozen others under the same roofs,
more, so far as I can judge, than any other magazine I know, {11}
_Adventure_ gets definite, concrete response and criticism from its
readers. So far as the male sex is concerned, probably no other
magazine has a more generally representative audience, ranging
through all classes from the highest to the lowest brows. The great
number of letters and talks resulting from this keen personal
interest of its readers in the making of the magazine has been
invaluable in giving its editor, for more than ten years, the actual,
specific reactions of readers, as opposed to the theoretical
reactions that accepted editorial theories assign to them.
The overemphasis on technique and academics I consider the most
harmful factor at work in the field of American fiction, from both
the literary and the magazine point of view. I can claim no special
equipment for speaking on this point other than a decidedly academic
training followed by over twenty years of practical laboratory work,
and arrival at conclusions by abandoning all accepted precepts and
going back to the simple elementals.
The object of this book is not exploitation of theories but practical
service to writers and {12} would-be writers. It is aimed directly
at the faults that are the chief causes of rejection of manuscripts
by magazines and book houses. General theories are used chiefly to
give foundation and perspective, so that a writer, knowing the
general ends in view, may be enabled to solve intelligently and
consistently even those problems in his work that can not be covered
specifically by any "book of rules." It is a crying need that
writers should learn to work less by rule of thumb and more from a
general understanding of what fiction really is and of what
determines its success. For twenty years I have watched the flow of
manuscripts--more tens of thousands than I like to remember--and am
year by year more convinced that more embryo writers of appreciable
ability are ruined by an overdose of technique at the hands of their
literary doctors or by slavish copying of the work of some
"successful" writer than by any three other causes you please to name.
Technique, naturally, should be a means, not an end. In most of the
teaching of the day so much emphasis is placed on it and such large
quantities of it are shoved down the beginner's throat, before he has
developed {13} himself sufficiently to digest it instead of merely
chew it, that in a majority of cases he loses himself and his talents
in an empty struggle with formulas and formalities. He may learn to
chew very well indeed, but the odds are that he isn't chewing
anything and that he has starved himself to death. As a matter of
fact, he has ceased to be himself.
Perhaps the reason for this overemphasis on technique is that those
responsible for the books, classes and correspondence courses
designed to help the budding fiction writers are, with very few
exceptions, chiefly theorists with no great background of either
actual editorial experience or an even fairly considerable
accomplishment in writing fiction. Those who have both, even a
moderate degree of both, are so very few that in number they
constitute only a fraction of a per cent. of those at work in this
field. The teachers of fiction, a good many of them, give extremely
valuable service, but the majority of them either approached their
work from abstract and academic beginnings or, having sold fiction
themselves, built too much from their own experiences, knowing too
little of the many different paths by which others must {14}
progress. Both groups seem to have been too much influenced by
technique and academics in general.
The editors, too, for the same and other reasons, have contributed
toward making technique too great a factor. It is physically
impossible to give individual criticism to every manuscript that
comes in, or, when given at all, to give it fully in all cases.
Almost never are the reasons for an acceptance given and only in a
general way at best. As a result, writers in their early formative
stages are left in the dark unless they turn to the other teachers.
Much of the criticism given by editors, too, is academic and centers
on technique--because that kind of criticism is easier for us to
give. Still again, we often mislead a writer by failing to
distinguish carefully between the needs and likes of the particular
magazine as opposed to those of magazines in general.
Whatever the reasons for the exaggerated part technique plays in
American fiction, it is the chief hope of this little book that it
may to some degree counteract this curse of formula and encourage
beginners to more direct effort for individuality and a more natural
expression of it.
{15}
Perhaps this is not a book at all, but merely a collection of talks.
Certainly there is little attempt at carefully unified structure.
Its writing must be done at odd moments, for I am still in editorial
harness. Also it will be done only in such moments and manner as
make the writing of it a pleasure rather than a task.
I use the pronoun "I" without stint or apology, for that is the
natural method to follow when one person speaks to another and, while
I object strenuously to an author's obtrusion of himself into his
fiction, the first personal pronoun in books of exposition is often
of distinct advantage in precision as well as in ease and clearness.
Finally, this book is not meant for geniuses. They should by all
means march their own paths, finding or making their own methods,
each to his taste. Though this is a book of suggestions, not of
rules, the genius does not need it. But wait,--alas! half my
possible readers are gone from me at the ending of that last
sentence, self-dismissed as indubitable geniuses. I'd forgotten that
the writing world is composed chiefly of geniuses, most of them
indubitable and--self-dismissed.
{16}
But _you_--I think you'd better read on until you find stronger
reason to turn away, for, to be friendly frank, the odds are so very
heavily against your being a genius. As for me, I don't even know
more than three or four geniuses at the very most and you can be
entirely at your ease in my quite ordinary society.
{17}
CHAPTER II
A GENERAL SURVEY
Let us take a general survey of what is to follow, beginning with
fundamentals.
_The Art Process_.--The art process of fiction involves three
elements--the Material, the Artist and the Reader. So far as my
experience and observation go, the Reader is not regarded as a part
of the art process and in both theory and practise fails to get
anything approaching due consideration. For that reason his part in
the art process will receive full treatment in this book, while
Material and Artist, being already amply covered in thousands of
texts, will receive more cursory treatment. The reader can,
nevertheless, be made a complete basis of both rhetorical and
fictional theory. Almost any important element can, for that matter;
it is merely a matter of choosing the point from which you shall look
at the circle. The reader's having been {18} hitherto slighted in
this respect is alone sufficient reason to choose him if for no other
purpose than that of viewing the art process from a new angle and
thereby getting a more balanced concept of it. Personally, I believe
the reader's angle the correct one, being the final step, the test of
the other two.
Philosophers will at once quarrel with both my theory and my
terminology. If they will confine their quarreling to the field of
philosophy, they may settle the issue as they please. Must a genius
think only, or at all, of his readers when he sits down to write?
Probably not, but this book is not written for geniuses, who need no
rules or guidance or at least think they do not. Certainly either
genius or plain human will fall into ruin if he thinks overmuch on
rules and regulations of any kind when he should be giving himself up
to creating. But I've noticed that even geniuses generally revise
their work after its first launching in ink. Why?
Must art be seen or heard by others before it can be art? Naturally
I realize that the Venus de Milo was a work of art before it was dug
up, but what of that? It was only a potential work of art from any
practical point {19} of view and of no good to any one until brought
where material and the artist's work on the material could continue
and complete the process by creating in human beings the thoughts and
emotions they strove to express. In that word "express," by the way,
lies the whole divergence of theory. Theories have made it
practically subjective only, ignoring its objective side--the
recipient. Can you, outside the most abstract abstractions of
philosophy, express anything without expressing it _to_ some one? If
you think you can, how are you going to be sure that you have
expressed it? Who is to be the judge on this point? You, the
artist, alone? Perhaps the philosophers can show me my position is
untenable, but they can't show me one single fiction editor in all
the world who wouldn't throw up his hands in despair at the very idea
of letting every "artist" be the judge as to whether he had expressed
what he thought he had expressed. Even non-editors, who haven't been
tortured by the mistaken idea of "artists" that they have succeeded
in expression, would be more than slow to admit the artists
themselves as competent judges or to abide by the artists' judgments.
{20}
Consigning abstraction to the background, you are a fool if you put
into material what no one else can get out of it. And I'd say that
you were not a genius, the two terms not being mutually exclusive,
for a genius--at least all whom the world has been able to
discover--does not fail to convey his message to at least a few.
To how many people and to what grades of intelligence must the artist
convey his message in order to prove himself an artist? I do not
know. Neither, I think, does anybody else. There seems almost equal
disagreement as to the character and quality of the message to be
conveyed. But I can see no doubt that some message must be conveyed
to somebody and it would seem that the greater and better the message
and the more the recipients, the more successful is the work of art.
On the practical basis that the would-be fictionist wishes to sell
his fiction to the magazine or book houses, it follows naturally that
as a first step his success will be measured by the number of people
to whom he is able to convey his message, the thought and feeling he
desires to express. After reaching them, it of course becomes a
question of the quality {21} of his message, but that quality can be
known only by those readers reached by it. It becomes a question,
also, of the degree to which he reaches them.
But first, and most of all, he must reach them.
_Clearness_.--It follows that the prime essential is clearness. If
they are to get his message at all, they must be able to understand
what he says. If they are to get it fully, he must express exactly
what he means and do so in such manner that they will understand it
exactly as he means it. This may seem too elementary for
consideration. It isn't. The theory is readily admitted but not
sufficiently practised. The guiltiest are often the most unconscious
of their guilt, for it is a common serious failing of writers to
believe that because they have made things plain to themselves they
have made them plain to others.
Clearness is not merely a question of unambiguous sentences, though
the majority of writers do not successfully mount even that simple
hurdle. Clearness includes supplying all necessary details,
suppressing the unnecessary ones, giving to each the proportionate
emphasis you wish the reader to give to it {22} and seeing to it that
his response is exact, and so shaping your presentation of the story
that the reader _must_ follow the exact path you have mapped out for
him.
_Other Essentials_.--A valuable accessory in attaining clearness is
simplicity. But most writers abhor simplicity, apparently because
being simple seems to them to ruin their chance of being "literary."
Clearness, simplicity, force, but the last two of this old triology
of the rhetorics are really included under clearness in its full
meaning. So, too, perhaps, are unity and structure. In any case,
all are necessary in getting the writer's message to his readers.
Shall I sound hopelessly elementary and banal when I say that, to
register his message in full force, the author must enlist his
reader's sympathies? Yet the majority of those who attempt fiction
either give this necessity no thought or are unbelievably crude and
stupid, not only missing chance after chance to secure this sympathy,
but continually and needlessly alienating it. I do not use
"sympathy" in its sugary sense, but shall attempt no exact definition
in this chapter of preliminary survey.
{23}
As essentials for the securing of the reader's sympathies may be
included unity and structure--in some of their phases more properly
included here than under clearness.
Also, he must economize his reader--carefully regulate demands on
attention, thought and feelings according to a human being's normal
ability to respond as well as according to the varying needs of
different parts of the tale.
_The Illusion_.--Lastly, to convey his message fully, he must _impose
and preserve the illusion of his story_. In this are really included
all the necessities named, even clearness. And, I think, all
necessities that can be named. This, it may be said, _is_
fiction--the imposing and preserving of an illusion. I make it the
basis of this book because it offers what seems at present the angle
of approach most needed in teaching the successful writing of
stories, in correcting the faults most common and most fatal, and in
providing writers with a consistent and comprehensive theory that
they can apply to their needs and problems as these arise.
Itself a return to the solid foundation of underlying elementals, it
has the very {24} practical merit of compelling writers to make the
elementals the constant test of their work. Necessarily involving a
constant and careful consideration of the reader, it seems the best
remedy for the greatest weakness in fiction writing--the tendency to
limit the art process to the second of its three steps, Material,
Artist and Reader. If the third step can be helped to its due share
of attention, the first step can wait its turn, at least so far as
the successful writing of magazine and ordinary book fiction is
concerned.
Do I then mean that the prime object of fiction is the imposing of an
illusion? That here lies the test of fiction? That no fiction is
written or read or valued except for its success in creating an
illusion? The imposing of an illusion is the object and test of
fiction _as fiction_. Fiction serves many purposes. It may teach
something, show something, what you please. But for these things it
is only a vehicle, and the test of it _as a vehicle_ lies in its
success at imposing an illusion.
As to whether my theory of fiction is "new" and "revolutionary" I can
offer only that it was new to my experience and revolutionary only in
that, in the actual editorial work of {25} helping writers develop
their abilities for fiction, it has seemed to effect results that no
other theory was able to effect. I might add, also, that the fiction
department of a Coast University, having come across some of my
correspondence with contributors, wrote me that the fully developed
principle of preserving the illusion had not, to their knowledge,
been elsewhere advanced, that they had adopted it as a regular part
of their course, and that it had satisfactorily stood the test of
several years. On the other hand I have learned, even since the
actual writing of this book was begun, that for several years Doctor
Dorothy Scarborough has taught this principle to her classes in
short-story writing in Columbia University.
As to the newness of dividing the art process into the three steps of
Material, Artist, Reader, I can not say. So far as I know, it is my
own idea, the joining together of two lines of thought on which I had
been working. On the other hand, I should be amazed if others had
not previously advanced the same theory.
_Literature vs. Magazine Fiction_.--What distinction do I make
between literature and magazine fiction? In fundamentals, none.
{26} Only a small percentage of magazine fiction is literature in the
distinctive sense of that term. That so little of it is literature
is partly due to the arbitrary and entirely non-literary restrictions
imposed by the magazines with their various aims as to types of
audience. Some will not accept unhappy endings, some bar sex
questions, some use no stories of foreign lands, some demand action,
some permit no mention of drink or tobacco, some will have no
"problems," some require a breezy, sophisticated style, some must
have this, some abhor that. Most writers must sell what they write
or stop writing through lack of means or lack of tenacity. Naturally
they generally strive to make their goods acceptable to the market,
writing with a careful eye on the likes and dislikes of the magazines
and all the more harassed and limited because what is one magazine's
meat is another magazine's poison.
Some, like Sinclair Lewis, Talbot Mundy and others, fully realizing
the situation and keeping their heads, write what they know will
sell, write it as well as they can under the limitations, and keep on
writing it until they have attained sufficient standing and {27}
financial foundation--and sufficient mastery--to write what they wish
and in the way they wish. But the vast majority become permanent
slaves in the galley where they must serve their apprenticeship,
perhaps growing very skilful in handling one oar among the many oars
but hopelessly unable to paddle their own canoe.
If money success is essential or preferred, by all means draw a sharp
distinction between literature and magazine fiction and, unless you
are quite sure your talents are considerable, confine yourself to the
latter. On the other hand, granted sufficient ability, aiming at the
former may very well carry you further in every way. If what you
wish is, regardless of worldly success, to write the best that in you
lies, forget everything else, including the restrictions of the
magazines.
Another cause of the scarcity of literature in magazine fiction is
that writers, editors and readers become obsessed with fads,
generally of a superficial nature, as to style, or treatment, or
types of material. Underneath this is a more fundamental cause--the
habit of imitation. O. Henry wrote and died and even yet the mails
are full of manuscripts {28} from writers who are trying to write O.
Henry stories--and can't, for the simple and everlasting reason that
no one of them is O. Henry. Every John Smith of them would do better
work if he wrote John Smith stories, but lots of them are still
selling O. Henry stories because editors too are still under the O.
Henry spell or know that many of their readers are. Kipling, Doyle,
James and other famous authors have each their army of imitators,
many a sheep-like soldier serving in several armies at once.
Nor do the imitators always aim so nigh. Any writer popular in the
magazines, no matter how ephemeral his vogue, serves them almost
equally well. The lowest depths are reached when the model is no one
in particular but merely a composite of all that is most hack and
usual on the printed page.
Not long ago there arose again the fad of beginning a story with a
paragraph of philosophy. It has spread like a disease and, I think,
is one. There were--or are--the era of glittering sophistication in
style, the _Dolly Dialogues_ and _Prisoner of Zenda_ eras, doublet
and hose, business, sex, Stevensonian rhythm, and so on.
{29}
But all these fads and other limitations serve only to lower the
proportion of literature in magazine fiction. Neither they nor
anything else creates any fundamental difference between the two.
Both are fiction, both subject to the laws of fiction. And even that
magazine fiction beyond the pale of literature is aimed, somehow, at
the reader and is to be judged on that basis.
{30}
CHAPTER III
CREATING THE ILLUSION
By creating the illusion I mean making the reader forget the world he
really lives in and carrying him into the world of the story, either
identifying himself with one of the characters or looking on and
listening entirely absorbed in what he sees and hears. The illusion
is wholly successful, fully effective, only if the reader is made to
live altogether in the story world. He must forget that he is a
reader, that he holds a book or magazine in his hands, that the story
is merely a story instead of actual happening. He must forget that
there is such a thing as an author; he must forget the method and
manner of telling in the telling itself. He must _live_ the story.
_The Illusion and Its Hold_.--Naturally perfection of illusion is not
generally attained, and naturally what holds some readers in {31}
thrall may not hold others. The more sophisticated the reader, the
more difficult, other things being equal, to make him lose himself
utterly in the story. Probably, too, the more fiction one has read,
the less readily is one swept away into the story's spell. The same
obstructions hold in any art, or in eating or any other pleasure.
The penalty of sophistication in anything is further removal from the
direct, elemental appeal. The penalty of satiety and overuse is a
dulling of response. But these facts do not alter the matter of what
the appeal is.
But do not the sophisticated get more out of fiction--out of the
"highbrow" fiction they tend toward--than do the unsophisticated out
of the same fiction? Get more what? More of the finer shadings
undoubtedly, but less of the elemental appeal. And is it really
fiction they are reading or something else mixed with fiction, and is
it from fiction or other things they draw pleasure or edification?
Their attitude is at least partly that of a critic rather than a
recipient; their interest in "What is happening" is at least partly
distracted to "how it is written." From fiction itself, from fiction
as fiction, the unsophisticated, {32} granting them understanding of
the words they read, in most cases get a greater intensity of appeal
than do the others. Understand, I am speaking not of general
sophistication but of sophistication in fiction.
_Fiction a Vehicle_.--As you run over in your mind various writers of
acknowledged rank you may feel that, in face of that rank, illusion
is an unsound basis of test and comparison. The stumbling-block is
that much of what we call fiction is not pure fiction but a hybrid, a
cross, a half-breed or even a quadroon--fiction plus an essay,
treatise, study, sermon, analysis, philosophy, satire, propaganda, a
performance in technique, an exhibition of style, what you will. It
is often the other element or elements, or the combination of
elements, that appeals and that gives rank and value. There is no
reason why writings should not be read and written for the sake of
these other elements or of the combinations, but such writings are
not pure fiction.
In such cases fiction is used not for itself alone but as a vehicle
for something else. The wagon and its load may be more pleasing and
valuable than the wagon alone, but {33} only the wagon is fiction and
therefore it is with the wagon alone that we are now concerned. No
matter how good the load may be, you can not carry it unless you can
build and drive a good wagon. Probably the majority of writers will
profit most by giving their whole attention to the wagon, partly
because they haven't a sufficiently valuable load to put in it and
partly because they need their undivided effort to make the wagon fit
to carry anything. Certainly it is sound for ninety-odd per cent. of
fiction writers to master their vehicle before they attempt hauling
messages and information in it.
This book deals with straight fiction only. Straight fiction may of
course include analysis, philosophy, technique, information and all
the other things for which it is so often made the vehicle, but if it
is to remain straight fiction, these must be really integral and
necessary parts of it--analysis of or by the characters themselves,
the information inherent in the material, the technique necessary for
presentation, the philosophy of a character, locality or nation.
Having sufficiently mastered straight fiction, a writer is infinitely
more likely to be successful in registering on {34} his readers
whatever it is he may wish to convey through fiction as a vehicle.
His message may be so interesting or important that people will seize
upon it eagerly, no matter how crude or weak the fiction-vehicle may
be, but it would reach them all the more strongly if the vehicle were
a competent carrier.
_Illusion the Essence of Fiction_.--The very essence of straight
fiction is the creation and maintenance of an illusion. That this
truth has been so largely lost sight of is due largely to the
frequent mixture of fiction with other things, so that the mixture,
instead of fiction itself, has tended to become the model and
standard. If American writers are to make more rapid progress toward
real success, they would do well to segregate fiction and study it
for itself alone.
_Illusion Easily Shattered_.--Successful illusion depends on an
infinite variety of things, is as sensitive to breakage as is a
bubble and, once broken, though it can be again created, its strength
is irremediably impaired. A writer of any merit can impose his
illusion, yet often he does so apparently through instinct only,
without evidence of carefully {35} considered knowledge and intent.
Certainly it is maddeningly common to see him again and again destroy
his illusion, if only temporarily, with some "little" flaw that would
almost unconsciously be avoided if he had clear conception of the
fundamental importance of perfect and uninterrupted illusion.
The importance of maintenance of illusion can not be too much
stressed. As a reader can you keep yourself within the spell of a
story you are reading if you are subject to constant physical
interruptions--conversation directed at you, people coming in and
going out, loud and sudden noises? No more can a reader keep himself
within the spell of a story if he is subject to constant
interruptions from within the story itself. How can a story maintain
its spell over you if you are again and again reminded by its text
that it is, after all, only a story, somebody's words typed on the
pages of a magazine you bought at the corner stand?
_Costliness of Breaking the Illusion_.--Each such interruption or
reminder does its share in wrecking the illusion, each compels the
story to begin over again in the business of making you forget your
world in its world, each leaves the remainder of the illusion the
{36} weaker. Even a single one in a story works very appreciable
damage to the illusion as a whole, lessens the net result of the
story's impact upon readers. Instead of the story's registering one
hundred per cent. of its value, it is, as a result of a single break
in its illusion, likely to register, not ninety-eight or ninety-five
per cent., but eighty-five or seventy or sixty per cent. There can,
of course, be no exact measure of the loss in the story's
effectiveness, of the amount of failure in the third step of the art
process, but very surely this loss is almost universally
underestimated or altogether ignored.
Whatever the value of your story as fiction, you can not afford to
have its one hundred per cent. reduced even five per cent. in its
register upon your reader, and the instant you remind him that he is
still merely himself in his same old world--or, even worse, make him
momentarily a critic instead of a reader--you seriously damage the
illusion and lessen your story's effect. The break may occupy only a
fraction of a second's time, the reader, after a few paragraphs may
forget all about the break, may even be wholly unconscious at the
time of its effect upon him, but {37} the harm has been done
nevertheless. It can be no comfort to the writer that the reader
doesn't know why the story failed to register its full strength; the
important point is that it did fail.
Some breaks in the illusion accomplish even more harm than letting
the reader escape from the story's spell, since it is always so
easily possible to lose a reader's sympathies or, worse, let him fall
into a critical attitude, or, worst of all, cause him irritation or
arouse his hostility. If, in reaching the reader, a story loses part
of its value by merely letting him get from under its spell, the loss
is still greater if it loses his sympathies, for even when he is
again brought under its spell he can not possibly be so wholly given
over to it as he was before. If you have made of him a critic--well,
how much sympathy has a critic? If you have irritated him, naturally
your chances of pleasing him are sadly diminished, since you must
overcome a heavy handicap before you can even begin to do so. And if
you have made him your enemy, you may as well bid farewell to any
chance of your story's success. No matter how good the first two
steps {38} of that story's art process--Material, Writer--if the
third step--Reader--can not be taken, then nothing has been completed
except an unrealized potentiality.
_Need of Emphasizing the Illusion_.--And yet, when it comes to the
actual writing of fiction these practical, common-sense, vital facts
are unrecognized or forgotten to an almost unbelievable degree. Day
after day the magazine offices are rejecting manuscripts that would
have been accepted but for the failure of illusion. Generally the
editor calls it "unconvincingness." Year after year class-room and
text-book go on teaching plot, style, characterization that go for
naught if they are unable to register upon the reader. Year after
year writers, oppressed with rules and abstractions, laboriously
build pieces of machinery and expect readers to take these obvious,
clanking collections of bolts, girders, wheels and cogs for something
that is alive. Why not? They've been taught to consider only the
making of a perfect machine according to formula. They find the
magazines heavily laden with machines and are the more convinced that
machinery is the ultimate attainment. Little teaching do they get
that {39} helps them put the breath of life into their stories or
gives them the habit of seeing also from the reader's point of view!
They "try it on their friends"--God save the mark!--their friends
respond or pretend to and the problem of the reader, if it arose at
all, is satisfactorily settled for all time.
But mustn't they be taught plot, etc.? Of course. But plot, etc.,
are merely tools. A man may be passing skilful in the handling of
chisel and mallet yet fail dismally as a sculptor. Plot, etc., are
necessary, but they must be taught, not as abstractions, but as
reasoned and reasonable outgrowths of something more vital than they.
_Individuality Crushed by Rules_.--Some writers escape from the net
or are too big to be caught in it. These are in a painful minority.
The tragedy is in the host of those who had sufficient talent and
individuality for a moderate success but never attain it because
their talent is diverted to formulas and their individuality crushed
by academics.
Those who escape do so generally through either disgust or despair.
They sweep the rules away or turn their backs upon them and--go ahead
on their own. One advantage {40} gained thereby is instant,
inevitable, automatic, for they have made an all-important step
forward--being no longer ridden and haunted by formulas and rules,
the writer at last has _a chance to live the illusion of his own
story_ and therefore a far better chance of making the reader live it.
The following is part of a letter from a writer who appears in _The
Saturday Evening Post, McClure's_ and other magazines of that grade.
Years ago he used to send me well-made but colorless and formal
stories. During some of the years between he had done no writing.
Then he sent me one of the new kind. Amazed at the remarkable
improvement in his work, I asked him what had happened. In his reply
the omitted name is that of a magazine:
In those days I was rigidly following the rules of what I call the
---- school of the American short story.
---- stories and the stories of the school which it dominated, were
all like Fords. They were of limited horsepower, neat, trim and
shiny, taking up very little road space, structurally correct and all
following the blueprint without the slightest deviation. There
weren't any big powerful Cadillacs zipping along, or any dirty,
greasy trucks hauling huge burdens and disturbing and upsetting {41}
the normal run of things. It was an endless highway just jammed with
Fords.
The ---- story, from a standpoint of construction, was astonishingly
well done. It had a beginning, a middle and an end, but few
intestines anywhere along the route. The workmanship was wonderful.
It was astonishing how many people there were who could write such
beautiful English. There was one punch, one climax, which was very
carefully led up to, and that was all.
Well, I tried to follow the rules as apparently laid down. I
agonized over each word and sentence to get 'em just exactly _right_.
I have sat at my typewriter for an hour to get just the few syllables
that their standards seemed to demand.
The Hades of it was that the reader was being cheated all the time.
He got a lot of very fine writing, but not much story. It was like
sitting down to a dinner where the appointments were perfect, the
water clear and ice-cold, the napery thick, the glassware thin,
flowers on the table, an orchestra, perfect service, and not enough
food for a canary-bird. In other words, a race of bird-shot stylists
was being propagated who could write beautifully about an ant-hill
but hadn't the equipment to do anything for a mountain.
I trailed along because I didn't know any better and because I hadn't
been waked up and shaken down. I had lived, but I had not
assimilated and correlated my experiences.
Now his present method, and if your nose is inclined to turn up at
his idea of style, before you let it, make very sure that he {42}
hasn't taken the one sure road to the only kind of style worth any
one's having. And note carefully what he says about the outside of
the motor-car:
I try to give the reader a lot for his money. I don't try to do any
fine writing. Only one of a million of us can be a polished stylist.
I'm not that one, but I think I can evolve a story and tell it. So
there is no more agonizing about the style. I try not to make the
outside of the motor-car which bears my people all gold and shiny and
flower-decked so that the countryside will look at the car, and not
at those it contains. I just try to make it a good, suitable,
unobtrusive vehicle which will start and get to the journey's end
without any tire trouble or backfires. I try to imagine real
people--very often they are friends and acquaintances whose mental
reactions I have noted under circumstances similar to those described
in the yarn. And I try to visualize every important scene before I
set it down. That is, I shut my eyes and see the people as though I
were looking at a scene from a play.
And it's just a joy, under those conditions, to write. To go to my
machine with the keenest anticipation. It is the finest sort of an
adventure to translate a good story and send it on its way. I write
much more easily and I think less artificially than in those days of
deadly correctness--and dullness.
There are thousands of other cases--proved, not yet proved or never
to be proved--of writers whose individuality has been {43} crushed
out or whose success has been prevented or delayed by the present
academic and unhuman methods of teaching the writing of fiction, by
forgetting the illusion and the reader for the sake of the _means_ of
securing them. Here is an example so extreme that it must in
fairness to other teachers of fiction be labeled as the last word in
formula. It is, nevertheless, only the usual method fully and
relentlessly developed. It is taken word for word from the teacher's
printed statement of his "mathematical rule" for plot:
If the thread A, or viewpoint character, figures with the thread B in
an opening incident of numerical order "n" there must follow rapidly
after the opening of the story an incident n-plus-1 involving threads
A and C, an incident n-plus-2 involving threads A and D, an incident
n-plus-3 involving threads A and E, and so on, up to perhaps at least
n-plus-4 or n-plus-5; and furthermore, n must produce n-plus-1,
n-plus-2 must be the result of n-plus-1, n-plus-3 must be the result
of n-plus-2, and so on.
That formula is, I dare say, sound and, if sound, undoubtedly useful.
The teacher sells his own stories regularly to magazines and, as he
is an apparently successful teacher, {44} probably numerous pupils of
his are doing the same. (It is stated that his output for the last
five years was about one million words, with sales of about
ninety-six per cent.) Yet I think you will agree that his formula
leaves something to be desired.
If I have talked overlong of Reader and Illusion in their general
aspect it is because I have found that, while some writers grasp the
idea at once, a minority seem incapable of seeing any possibility of
difference between what a writer intends the reader to get and what
the reader really does get, incapable of believing that they have not
expressed in full and with perfect exactness all that they saw and
know and felt when writing, and incapable of conceiving any reader
who would not be spell-bound by their stories and in full sympathy
with every shading and inflection whether real, imagined or flatly
reversed in expression.
The interrupters and destroyers of illusion are almost infinite in
variety and number. The means of avoiding them, indeed, constitute a
complete set of working rules for the writing of fiction--better
still, a basis from which a writer can draw his own rules to {45}
meet all occasions as they arise. They may be very roughly divided
into classes, the small, cruder interruptions that are comparatively
detached and temporary and the more fundamental, organic and
permanent ones. Most of the latter being treated, though from a
different point of view, by the usual textbook, the smaller ones are
in greater need of consideration and will be taken up first.
It is understood, however, that definite classification is not
attempted and that the division into sub-groups is for convenience
only. An item in one group may belong equally in several others and
will often be treated under more than one.
{46}
CHAPTER IV
YOUR READERS
Readers of course vary in susceptibility to the illusion of
fiction--vary in concentration, reading method, background of culture
and of experience in life, familiarity with the ways and habits of
fiction, critical attitude, imagination, particularly strength and
quality of imaginative imagery, and in everything else that makes up
mentality and individuality. Must the writer satisfy and hold all
these from one extreme to the other? Yes, if he is to do perfect
fiction. Possibly perfect fiction exists, but fortunately readers
can be more or less divided into classes or types, each class capable
of being very roughly characterized as a unit. The more classes
reached and satisfied by a story, the better the story.
_Be Clear as to Your Audience_.--The fiction author can follow one of
three courses:
{47}
(1) He can "just write," disregarding the question of who his readers
may be and trusting that his style and methods may happen to be such
as will win him an audience. This is an admirable method provided it
chances to succeed. If it doesn't, he will have to abandon it for
one of the others.
(2) Choose a particular class for his audience and aim directly at
them. Naturally he will have to study his audience very carefully
and know them rather thoroughly if he is to succeed. Limiting his
audience, he limits the scope and therefore the degree of his
success; a story satisfying the highest class can not be so good as
if it satisfied both the highest and the next highest class or
several other classes. It is entirely possible to do both, as
Shakespeare and others have proved.
(3) Aim to reach as many classes as possible. Here, too, he must
study and know his audience. Obviously it is a higher aim than the
second, demanding more of the author. Having a larger audience to
draw on, it is likely to attain greater success as measured by number
of readers, though it is always a nice problem to decide in a given
case {48} whether more readers can be secured by playing for your
share of the majority, against all competitors, or by concentrating
on a minority, against fewer competitors.
Considering carefully these three courses, it is necessary first to
know your audience and keep them very definitely in mind, unless you
are willing to write wholly from the subjective point of view and go
it blind as to your audience, taking the extremely long chance that
your substance and style may happen to satisfy a sufficient number of
readers. It generally doesn't. Second, it is advisable to reach as
many classes of readers as possible. Your task, then, is to know and
to consider constantly as many classes of readers as you can. And
knowing them means much more than having a general knowledge of their
tastes.
_Fundamental Reactions Universal_.--Some will straightway object,
"But I prefer to write for only the highest class of readers." It is
their right to do so, and their choice may be a wise one. But I
maintain two points. First, it is not the highest aim. Second, the
writer who prefers this aim is probably most likely of all to fail to
know his audience. The {49} mistake to which he is peculiarly liable
is that of forgetting that the highest class is not a thing apart but
merely all the other classes plus something more. His tendency is to
believe that they have passed on beyond all the tastes and reactions
of the other classes far more than they really have. Most of all, he
is likely to credit them with having risen above the cruder, more
fundamental tastes and reactions of the other classes. They haven't.
They have merely piled upon the fundamental reactions a larger
collection of refined--and often artificial--reactions than have the
others. The fundamental reactions may become somewhat blurred and
aborted, are certainly less consciously active and generally less
active in fact, but they are still there and still operative and
sometimes in full strength. That is as true as any general rule that
can be laid down concerning the human mind and too much emphasis can
not be placed on it.
_The Target_.--To reach any audience perfectly you must reach them at
all points, satisfying all demands, overcoming all their inherent
obstacles, allowing for the varying equipment ranging from the lowest
to the {50} highest among them--equipment of background, imagination,
concentration, general intelligence and so on. And on each point you
must reach those most gifted in it, most difficult to satisfy in that
respect. It is not enough to satisfy those with little cultural
background; your story must stand the test of those who have the
most. It must reach not only those who set particular store by the
delicate shadings, but those who demand a definite story interest.
On any point you must aim to reach the individuals who are most
difficult to reach on that point. In no other way can you hope to
reach all.
It is not easy to do. In fact, it isn't done. But it must be the
target aimed at. It is not easy to reach both the person who reads
word for word, extracting the full flavor of each, and also the
person who skips sentences, paragraphs and pages in mad pursuit of
"what happens"; nor him who at a word or two from you reconstructs a
whole scene in his mind's eye, and him whose imagination can vision
for him only what you describe in detail. Yet, if you are to attain
the degree of success possible to you, you must aim to satisfy in
each such dilemma the extreme that for you is most difficult.
{51}
_Study Human Beings_.--First, last and all the time, success means
study of the reader. That means study of human beings, not merely of
opinions of them or of effects secured or apparently secured on them
by other writers. The opinions may be mistaken; the effects may be
there, but you and the other writers may fail to assign to them the
proper causes. Strangely enough, the causes most often overlooked
are the elemental tastes and reactions common to all normal humans.
It is more "literary," and more convenient, to study lists of "best
sellers," to read critical reviews and academic essays, to be given
rules and standards by some one else--who got them from reviews,
essays and "best sellers." But it is human beings who are your
readers. Get your data at first hand.
{52}
CHAPTER V
DISTRACTIONS
To hold a reader in the illusion of a story it is of course necessary
to hold his attention, not merely in a general way, but entirely and
without break, interruption or hindrance. He must live wholly and
every instant in the story world--must never be recalled for even the
fraction of a second to the real world he lives in.
In writing any story there are a thousand chances of breaking the
illusion by some little touch. Most of these are almost
automatically avoided even by writers of small ability. Otherwise
there would be no fiction. The point is that what are usually a very
small minority are not avoided by most writers. The result is that
editors are likely to reject the story because it does not "hold the
interest," is not "convincing" or "lacks punch." Their finding is
probably just, though they may not have analyzed for {53} causes, and
the writer is not enlightened or even convinced of the finding.
_Disproportionate Damage from Distractions_.--Failing to avoid even
an extreme minority of the chances for breaking the illusion is
enough to injure the story very seriously. You can't afford to let
your reader escape from the story's spell, slip back into the world
he really lives in, even momentarily. For you have to waste at least
a little of the story's potential force in getting him back again,
which means that you can never get him back _quite_ so fully as you
had him before. You may even not get him back at all. You can't
afford to have him become even momentarily a critic, for you must
waste at least a little of the story's potential appeal in order to
change him back from the critical attitude to sympathy and
absorption. You can't afford to let his attention wander off to
side-issues, for the story has to stop working at being a story in
order to get him back on the main line and it needs every atom of its
strength for the main job.
We recently published one of the best stories _Adventure_ ever
printed, a combination of simple narrative appeal and of literary
{54} excellence of the first water. It is bringing us many letters
of appreciation. To-day I read a long letter from one reader who had
found in that story nothing, either good or bad, except that there
was an indirect inconsistency as to one character's exact age. That
was what you might call the _net result_ of that story on a reader.
All the strength and merit of an otherwise splendid story completely
wrecked for a reader by that one trifling point! Undoubtedly others
detected the same inconsistency but suffered less acutely or did not
register their "kick." But in each case the appeal of the story lost
strength out of all proportion to the size of the detail involved.
It is a typical, not an exceptional, case, except for the unusual
merit of the story ruined. Thousands of letters like that come in
from readers, often many on the same tiny slip or discrepancy. To
those readers the story in question left as its chief impress upon
them a violence--at one tiny point--to their knowledge of fact or
sense of consistency. In each case how many other such readers are
there who do not write us?
Other thousands of readers protest over {55} such slips, such
distractions from the illusion, but are not so completely swamped by
them that they fail to consider the merits of the story as a whole.
But, even with them, how big looms the tiny flaw in proportion to the
whole! In each case how many other such readers are there who do not
write in?
_How to Use Your Friends_.--No point that may distract a reader can
be so small that it is not serious. You can not measure the harm
done; in one case there may be no harm, in another a little, in
another a great deal. But if writers who have their friends
"criticize" their stories would ask these friends to give less
attention to "literary" points and take careful note of every little
thing that in any way attracted attention to itself or sent the mind
wandering off to things outside the story, they would get some
invaluable pointers--of the only kind that the usual friend is really
capable of giving. If some day the colleges make systematic
laboratory tests along these lines they should get data as surprising
as they would be useful.
_Unusual Words_.--Consider how tiny a thing is capable of pricking
the bubble of illusion, of jerking the reader for a brief {56}
instant back into his real world so that he must be drawn again into
the fiction spell. If in reading a story you come upon some such
word as "pringle," "anodic," "calipash," "mansuetude," "spiracle,"
"frigorific," "cambist," "gibbous," "ortelic" you probably find it
unfamiliar and, if so, of course know that you do. Therein lies the
breaking of the illusion. However brief the total time occupied by
your reaction to the word, however slightly you may seem to have
paused over it, you _paused_ and you paused over _it_--gave attention
to _it_, not to the story. You had to _remember yourself_, your own
knowledge and experience. Quite possibly you also considered the
author's contrasting knowledge and experience, and the author is not
the story. Possibly you tried to figure out the meaning of the word
from its derivation or the context, or dredged your own memory for
it, making your pause over it still longer. Perhaps your pause
totaled only a few seconds or a fraction of one second, but--the
illusion was broken and had to be rebuilt.
Far less unusual words than those cited will be unfamiliar to part of
most audiences.
{57}
Would one such word do very serious damage? Very unlikely. But it
would do some, and even a small damage is to be avoided if possible.
Would four such words? There can of course be no definite
measurement, but one thing is sure--_four would do far more than four
times as much damage as one_. The effects are cumulative, following
a kind of geometrical progression. And no one knows when a serious
breaking-point may be reached.
Is a writer never to use a "big word"? Not if it's too big for his
audience. In the mouth of a character he may put any word he
pleases, provided it is used for sound purposes of characterization
or for some other specific demand of the story itself, but not for
the mere telling of the story. He might, for example, wish to
impress a learned or scientific atmosphere. In this case, too, there
is the saving fact that the reader need not know the meaning of these
words, and knows that he need not, just as he would know he need not
if he were actually living in the scene. He does not feel challenged
by them. "Big words" may be justified in scores of typical
instances, but there is no instance in {58} which it does not pay to
consider whether the damage may not outweigh the gain.
Even an unusual word whose meaning is at once apparent to any one,
like "cat-silent," should be carefully weighed as to advantages _vs._
disadvantages before it is used. And only in the rarest instances
can there be justification for using such a word more than once in
the same story, lest the recurrence added to the unusualness make a
double distraction.
_Foreign Words_.--The same applies to words from foreign languages.
Undoubtedly they are valuable in giving color, but this value is too
often attained at too high cost in distraction and is frequently
attainable through other means without loss. The damage they do is
by no means theoretical, for readers do not hesitate to complain to
editors on this score. I do not remember their doing so in the case
of "big words," for naturally a man doesn't go to the trouble to
admit he doesn't understand words in his own language, while often
rather proud of not understanding foreign words. Sufficient color
through foreign words can be gained by using only a few, even if
these few are repeated, and by using only those instantly clear from
{59} the context or from unmistakable similarity to the corresponding
English word (like "_fader_") if context heads the reader in that
general direction. There is comparatively only a slight risk in
using those that are very generally known, like "_ami_" or "_mon
chère_" also ejaculations that are evidently such and therefore make
no demand on the reader's understanding.
_Classical, Historical and Fictional References_.--The danger, of
course, is that the reader may not be familiar with the reference,
knows that he is not, and therefore becomes conscious of himself as a
reader. Another risk is that, being familiar with them, his mind
drifts off to them more than the writer intended. Used with
discretion, they may have value, but they are generally not used with
discretion and, generally speaking, a story is the better for telling
itself without covering part of the ground by means of what are
practically quotations from other stories. Also, there are other
dangers than that of simple distraction, which will be covered under
other heads.
_Unusual Proper Names_.--To put this case concretely, here is the
list of the male {60} characters in one single story I read yesterday
in a manuscript: "Tom Goit," "Braith," "Grahame," "Tim Stine," "Linus
Kime," "Jestock," "Bissonet," "Heads," "Arnet," "Jimson,"
"Kliedjorn," "Jed Willoughby," "Andy Meenal," "Yard Sant," "Simson,"
"Angus Stell," "Gant," "Beezaw," "Colin Corbin," "Happy Falls," "Jim
Light," "Rafe Gillen," "Charley Jance." It is probably not entirely
complete, but was made by running through the pages and taking all
names noted, usual or unusual. Can any human being read that story
without having his attention distracted to the fact that those names
are violently unusual? Doesn't the fact that they are unusual add an
air of unreality to the whole story--story-book names instead of real
people's names? Won't many readers be definitely irritated by the
artificiality and mannerism? Aside from this and similar breakings
of illusion it was a good story and will undoubtedly be printed
somewhere. Its author is a successful writer of fiction. But hasn't
the story lost very appreciably through that amazing collection of
proper names?
On the other hand there is a certain advantage in the use of such
names in some types {61} of story and for some audiences, though not
in the story from which the above are taken or for the audience at
which it is aimed. Some readers like proper names that are baldly
fictional and unreal; that is what fiction means to them--unreality,
utter difference from their own lives. These are much the same
readers who like their stories filled with duchesses, earls and
ancestral halls. A generation or two ago these were a rather large
group, and larger still before that, but nowadays folks are more
sophisticated in their fiction and need illusions that run more
nearly with reality. And, at best, isn't it rather a cheap method of
abnormality?
Unusual names serve also to make the characters more vivid to the
reader's mind, but this method of characterization is a crude one
that should give way to better ones entailing no risk.
In humorous stories of a certain type they are entirely legitimate.
On the other hand, look carefully at your proper names lest, in a
serious story, you give a character a name like "Hencastle" that
brings a grin where you do not wish to have a grin.
Alliterative proper names are another {62} phase of the evil in the
case of readers sufficiently sophisticated to note the alliteration
at all.
Avoid proper names that are difficult or ambiguous of pronunciation.
Don't give your characters the same names as those of real people
prominent in the public eye unless a name is so common that it is not
likely to distract the reader from the story's illusion through
thoughts of the real person; even a too similar name is risky in some
cases, _e.g._ any variation of the unusual name "Roosevelt."
_Dialect_.--While belonging more properly under later heads it
serves, too, as a simple distraction in itself. Its advantages are
obvious, yet some readers will read no story with dialect in it and
some magazines will print none.
_Mistakes_.--A typographical error, a mistake in spelling,
punctuation or English is sure to check and drag out of the illusion
any reader who notes it. Such matters are definitely the editor's
responsibility, but he is far from infallible and the author would,
in most cases, profit by safeguarding against him. An editor will be
grateful, particularly the assistant {63} editor who edits copy and
reads proof. In our own office we can quote you lots of rules as to
correct English--and show you violations of them in our own pages.
Mistakes in fact and statement will be considered later.
_Unusual Mannerisms of Style_.--Distinction is to be made between, on
the one hand, individuality and deliberate shaping of style to attain
a particular atmosphere or suit particular material and, on the other
hand, mannerisms that are necessary to neither of these ends and
harmful in distracting attention to themselves. No one can possibly
draw a definite line between these two groups, but a warning is badly
needed against forgetting the danger. It is a question for
laboratory test. Try to get your friends--or better, your
enemies--to read your story with this point in view, or do not
mention it beforehand and cross-examine them afterward as to what
mannerisms registered on their attention. And don't hand-pick your
critics or "dogs" from any one class or group unless you mean your
story to appeal to no other.
A novelette, which had to be rewritten because of it, used the
following mannerism {64} hundreds and hundreds of times until each
recurrence was not only a distraction but an agony: "he ran, and
running, laughed aloud," "he sang, and singing, voiced his mood," "he
fought, and fighting, worked toward the house." Another writer
habitually, in the words following or introducing a line of dialogue,
carries the legitimate "he said," "he urged," "he encouraged," etc.,
to such distracting extremes as "he frightened," "he anguished," "she
informed," "he recognized," "he remorsed." Of late years there has
developed the fad of saying "the heart, or soul, or head, of him" for
"his heart," "his soul," "his head," etc. This variation from the
usual has, in prose, a very limited field in which its advantage
exceeds its damage.
A mannerism of style is warranted if it so fits into a story that it
is an integral and practically unnoted part of it; otherwise it is a
harmful factor. A better adapted mannerism could have gained the
desired effect without making of itself an obtrusion.
_Fiction as a Vehicle_.--There are two ways of writing a story. One
is to write fiction only; the other is to combine fiction with
something else. Readers like both and both {65} are legitimate, but
the latter is of course not pure fiction; fiction is merely the
vehicle for the other thing or things. One of the greatest evils
among present-day fiction writers is the failure to make this
distinction and keep it clearly in mind. Too often a writer does not
realize that there is anything else mixed with his fiction;
consequently his product is not straight or well-built fiction nor is
the fiction part of it a carefully made vehicle for the other thing.
To make fiction serve any end other than its own is very likely to
weaken its value as fiction, and before a writer thus weakens it he
should make very sure that the advantages gained from making it carry
something else compensate for that weakening. If he wishes to give
his reader, for example, some direct philosophy, well and good, but
he should--and seldom does--weigh the attendant loss.
There is a second distinction that should be made. When I say "plus
something else" I mean plus something else that is added as a load is
put upon a wagon, not something that comes to the reader as a result
of the fiction. To say in a story "a man may prosper exceedingly on
a policy of utter selfishness, but, {66} having all his life taken
without giving, in the end he gives for what he took" is putting a
load on the wagon. To let the story itself say that, merely to tell
a story that illustrates and brings home that truth without
mentioning it specifically (unless through the mouth of a character),
is only letting straight fiction perform a natural office, though a
natural office that can be overworked at the cost of a well balanced
whole. The former is the easier and less artistic method, and far
too many writers follow it far too often. Its evil is that of any
"load"--it breaks the illusion, tending to make the reader think of
the person who hands him this bit of philosophy, of himself, of the
world in general, instead of the story world only.
The present-day fad of opening a story with a bit of philosophy,
though objectionable on another score, does little damage to the
illusion, since it comes before the spell begins and may even serve
as an intermediate step.
_Obtrusion of Author_.--This is a crying evil, a serious damage to
the illusion. The author has no more business to appear concretely
in his story than a playwright has upon the stage when his play is
being acted. Once in ten {67} thousand times he may himself be
sufficiently interesting to atone for the wreck of the story's spell;
the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times he is a
mistake, a bull in a china-shop. The following, all taken from
submitted manuscripts, range from crude to subtle obtrusions:
"At the time of which I wish to speak"
"you must understand"
"consider the case of John Holt. But first consider the environment"
"see him"
"and it is the correct word"
"it is necessary to add, in explanation of this seeming paradox"
"had, somewhat grumbingly, be it said,"
"he had, for instance, tried,"
"and disappears from this story,"
Each of these compels a reader to realize that some one is talking to
him. You can't be carried away in a dream when conscious that some
one is telling it to you. Sometimes the point is made that an
author's obtrusion puts the reader on more intimate terms with him.
What has that to do with fiction as such? If the author didn't
obtrude himself, the reader would have no interest in intimacy or
non-intimacy with him. If the author is the one out of ten thousand,
all right; otherwise, not.
{68}
If a writer must express philosophy or opinions specifically, let him
use the legitimate device of the first-person narrative, taking care
that the narrator is cast in such character as to make these opinions
natural to him. Or else baldly use fiction as vehicle only, making
his story a conversazione.
There is another legitimate device. Kipling ends a story with "I
think he was right." But he begins that story with "When I was
telling you of." In other words, he tells the story in an
undeveloped frame or brackets. Partly by leaving the frame
undeveloped and impersonal, his skill is sufficient to make you feel
that it is not Kipling himself who talks to you, but some unknown
participator in the action of the story or an onlooker. It is
really, in effect, a first-person narrative with the privileges of
such.
First-person narratives, unless presented as addressed to a
fictitious audience such as the narrator's children or grandchildren,
of course permit a fairly free direct address to or at the reader,
since the writer poses as the actual teller. Incidentally, however,
it is not consistent with his telling what goes on inside the
characters unless made plain to him as one of them.
{69}
As found in submitted manuscripts, the great majority of authors'
obtrusions seem unconsidered, and are accompanied by the damage to be
expected from walking in the dark. The remainder, almost without
exception, seem ill-considered. One exception out of a thousand
instances is not a heavy average.
{70}
CHAPTER VI
CLEARNESS
Anything that is not clear to a reader either causes him to skip it
and therefore miss part of the story's substance and effect, or else
makes him puzzle. In either case the illusion suffers. If he
puzzles, he has to use up attention on a point the writer had counted
on being clear, his mind is on the puzzle, not obsessed by the spell;
the story's flow is stopped, the reader is conscious of himself, his
difficulty and limitations, perhaps also of the author as the cause
of his troubles--in a word, the reader has got away. Every time you
confuse him you lose him. Deliberate mystification is a writer's
prerogative; having all his plans upset by mystification where none
was expected or desired is a calamity.
_Author's Ostrich Habit_.--Naturally enough, authors are inclined to
a kind of reversed ostrich habit. If a point was clear to them when
they wrote it, they take for granted that {71} it must be clear to
the reader. They forget that they have full knowledge of all that is
or happens in their fiction, while the reader can know only what
comes to him from the printed page. Often when an editor points out
an unclearness they argue with him, blissfully ignoring the fact that
the editor is himself a reader and that the reader found it unclear.
Possibly the author proves his case--that is, he points out other
passages in the story which do clear up the unclearness if the reader
remembers them and makes the correct inferences and connections. The
fact that, in the actual test, these passages failed to produce the
intended results on the reader slides off the author like water off a
duck. Still less does he get the idea that a reader shouldn't be
distracted from the story by being compelled to go into a more or
less complicated reasoning process in order to get what should have
been handed to him on a platter. Even if several editor-readers
found the point unclear, he stands by his guns.
Aside from the author's vastly superior knowledge of his material and
intentions, many of his readers may be his mental inferiors. Also
many of them may not be so {72} interested in his story as he is and
so give it less close attention than he expects. Part of them
habitually "skip" through a story and demand a plain and shining
path. Certainly no one mind is exactly like another and all readers
will not respond as does the author to any given set of stimuli if
even a tiny loophole is left open. A rule given playwrights is that
if it is essential to impress a basic point on the audience, the
point must be made at least three times in the first scene. So
extreme a rule is not needed for fiction, but the necessity of
clearness, even on minor points, is no less pressing.
It is a natural and common mistake to overestimate the average
reader's interest and attention and his ability and willingness to
solve puzzles when he sits down to read a story. A writer usually
forgets that to the reader his is merely one story out of dozens or
hundreds recently read, out of thousands and ten thousands total.
The writer's friend-critics have a personal interest in him and a
very special interest in his story that carry them smilingly over
many obstacles; to the average reader the writer probably means
nothing whatsoever personally--quite {73} possibly his name at the
head of the story was not even read--and the story is merely one of
very many. Any special attention to it must be won by the writer's
skill and careful work.
Talbot Mundy, knowing in advance the general lines of this book, has
furnished me from his voluminous reading with various quotations
bearing on points covered, among them this from Quintillian:
"Care should be taken, not that the reader may understand if he will,
but that he must understand, whether he will or not."
And from Whitman:
"Nothing can make up for the lack of definiteness."
_Ambiguous Words and Sentences_.--Any good text-book on English
covers the subject and most writers would profit by the study
thereof. If when they try a short story out on their friends they
would ask for practical detailed criticism on such points as this,
they would get laboratory results far more valuable than the
proverbially undependable criticism of friends on the story as a
whole.
_Proper Names_.--Be careful to give your characters names no two of
which are similar. {74} The reader meets them for the first time and
has the task of identifying each name with the proper character
whenever it occurs. Why confuse him with two characters named "Lowe"
and "Rowe," "Towne" and "Browne," "Morgan" and "Mordan," or even
"Hadley" and "Hatfield"? Yet many and many a manuscript contains
this needless stumbling-block for readers.
The same mistake is made in names of places, ships, and so on.
Another maddening and very common practise among writers is to use
sometimes a character's last name, sometimes his first. Even a short
story with only two or three characters can be made a needless
omelette of confusion, for this bad habit is extended to include
titles and nick-names or familiar forms of the full names. Consider
"Doctor James Stanley," "Edward D. Gage" and "Captain John S.
Tompkins." "Gage" is a lawyer and often called "Judge" by his
intimates. "Tompkins'" lack of height earns him the usual "Shorty."
The author uses some of each, possibly for the sake of "variety," and
the three characters become, to the reader, an army and hopelessly
{75} confused--"Stanley," "Ed," "Cap," "Gage," "Shorty," "Jim,"
"Judge," "John," "Doc," "Tompkins," "James," "Johnnie," "Edward."
Such a confusion is alone enough to ruin the blissfully unconscious
writer's story. For the simple reason that readers can only half
know what is going on. Yet in practise it is a very common mistake.
_Technical and Foreign Words; Classical, Historical and Fictional
References and Allusions_.--The confusion arises when a reader
happens not to understand the word, even from the context, or to be
unfamiliar with the reference. Writers seem to take it for granted
that all readers will grasp the meaning without effort or delay. Or
mystify deliberately to air their culture. The warning seems silly
when set down on paper but is warranted by the number of offenses in
actual practise.
_Naming Characters Early_.--Sometimes an effect of reality is gained
by not at once naming characters in a story, giving the reader as it
were, the effect of looking down upon a new world whose figures are
no more known to him than they would be at first sight in a real
scene. Generally, however, a reader is likely {76} to resent being
left to follow, for even a few pages, the fortunes of a nameless
person. Include particularly the narrator in a first-person story.
_Dialogue_.--Over and over again an editor is compelled to go back
over a passage of dialogue in manuscript and "count out" with finger
or pencil until he finds a line that is definitely connected with a
particular speaker. The characters are not sufficiently
individualized to be recognized from their lines, context fails to
identify, the lines are not labeled with the speakers' names and the
least flicker of attention leaves one lost at the end of a dozen or
even half a dozen speeches. Sometimes the author himself gets lost
and mixes or omits. An ordinary reader doesn't have to "count out"
as does the editor--he is more likely to snort and pass on, with part
of the story lost to him and its net register on him badly damaged.
If he doesn't snort and pass on he stops to puzzle it out. Why
injure a story by so crude an omission?
_Too Many Characters_.--The heading is self-explanatory. All the
characters in any story are utter strangers to the reader until he
becomes familiar with them; he can keep clear {77} in his mind only a
limited number of new acquaintances all made in the course of a few
minutes; the kind of writer who uses many characters is usually the
kind who is unable to individualize them with any vividness. A novel
or novelette gives greater scope, but in a short story it may almost
be given as a general rule that the fewer the characters, the
stronger the story, not counting characters used in blocks, such as
mobs, armies, spectators. Structure and proportion, as well as
clearness, are of course involved.
_Dialect and Slang_.--Neither is familiar in all places or to all
classes, and on the point of clearness both are to be condemned.
Their advantages will be considered later.
The stupidest blunder in handling dialect is to misspell a word
without really changing its pronunciation, thus confusing the
reader's eye yet gaining only the appearance of dialect--and the
reader's irritation.
_Contradictions and Inconsistencies_.--Their variety is infinite and
their occurrence in submitted manuscripts frequent beyond the belief
of those who read only the corrected printed page. A woman changes
the color of her eyes; with a conversation that could {78} occupy
only one minute there is coincident action that couldn't possibly be
compressed into five, or, _very_ commonly, a bland lapse of even more
time without any action; a six-shooter emits seven shots without
reloading; of a party of fourteen, five turn back and ten remain; a
character uses a word that would never be used by such a person in
real life, or acts, without explanation, entirely at variance with
his nature as the author has pictured it; the hero acts on
information he has not yet received; a man's name changes during the
story; a woman opens a door already open; a character goes somewhere
else without leaving or becomes present without arriving. When you
encounter such a break in a printed story doesn't it jar you out of
the illusion, lessen your respect for the author, and therefore
permanently damage his story's hold on you?
There can be no general rule for correction. When not the result of
sheer carelessness and indifference, such errors are due to the
author's failure to visualize, to live his scenes himself. This
failure in some cases is due to real inability or comparative
inability, but in very many cases to attention so obsessed and {79}
ridden by principles of plot, rules for character drawing,
regulations for niceties of style, application of technique in
general and requirements of various magazines that there's no
brain-force left for making the story world a really convincing and
natural one in its all important details.
_Holding Reader to Correct Plot Line_.--In other words, proportion
and emphasis. Briefly stated, what is meant here is clearness of
path for the reader through the incidents of the story, so that his
mind will follow or leap ahead only in the exact direction the author
wishes for the fullest effectiveness of his story. This will be
taken up in detail later.
_Simplicity_.--The following from Schopenhauer (thanks to Mr. Mundy)
gives us the heart of the matter:
"Nothing is easier than to write so that no one can understand; just
as, contrarily, nothing is more difficult than to express deep things
in such a way that every one must necessarily grasp them."
Yet to most of those sending manuscripts to magazines simplicity,
particularly simplicity in words and style, is very pointedly
something to be avoided whatever else is {80} done or left undone.
The twin cause of this appalling idea, this curse stupidly laid upon
American fiction, is the firmly rooted belief that literature must be
an expression that is, first, unnatural, second, learned, recondite,
even sophomoric. In its lowest and very common form it is no more
than the crude idea that editors must be very scholarly persons and
that therefore they would scorn any manuscript that didn't have a lot
of "big words" in it. The simple language of Shakespeare, Homer,
Virgil, the Bible and other really enduring classics loom before
their eyes, but no, they follow the jack-o'-lantern of "big words."
They have this excuse--much of the fiction published in magazines and
books is fairly rotten with "big words," a reflection on editors and
reading public as well as writers.
The hard practical argument against "dictionary words" is that most
people find them difficult to understand or at least lack the
definite, vivid, full connotation for them that they have for the
simpler and more common words of our very rich language. Such words
reduce the size of an author's fully appreciative audience. Another
point is that the {81} writer who doesn't know any better than to
make a business of using them is very often himself lacking in an
understanding of their finer shades of meaning. A third point is
that, unless such words are part of his own every-day vocabulary he
is being unnatural in using them and thereby ruins his chances of
attaining real style or producing real literature. Also he gives
through them to his story an unnatural, artificial quality, an air of
being forced. In the eyes of all those with a real understanding of
real literature he makes of himself a plain darned fool.
But can there be no great literature without simplicity? None that
couldn't be greater with it. A straight line is the shortest
distance between two points; any deviation from it is lost motion,
unnecessary; the best literature contains no lost motion and nothing
that is unnecessary. But is not a "big word" sometimes the straight
line? Yes, but for one case of this kind there are twenty when it is
not. Sometimes the author uses it for a simpler phrasing not
sufficiently mastered to come to mind at need; sometimes it is
necessary only because he has committed himself by some roundabout
phrasing demanding it {82} for completion; sometimes he commits
himself to it by following the inferior method of telling the reader
what is inside a character instead of making it plain through what
the character says and does and what other characters say and do to
him.
The final test for the use of "big words" is the nature of the
material or ideas handled. In some cases they are necessary to a
degree, sometimes to a great degree. But in practise the nature of
the material is generally not correctly assayed, or is mishandled, or
the need imagined. The ignorant use them through ignorance; for
those with a good knowledge of words it is generally easier to use
the "big word," the Latin derivative instead of the simpler
Anglo-Saxon.
Is it not therefore more natural and so better for this last class to
use the "big word"? That depends on why it is natural--or on whether
it is natural or merely habitual. A writer may have come into the
use of them, not by natural development but through deliberate
effort, a stunt for the sake of seeming learned or being impressive,
so that their use, while easy to him, is merely the result of his
having made of himself a kind of abnormality--an artificial result of
artificial talking {83} and method of thought. On the other hand is
the far rarer case of him whose mind naturally expresses itself
through polysyllables, generally because of an education from books
instead of people. I know one writer who spoke to no one for two
years except for the barest necessities because when he used what to
him was perfectly natural language the people he met thought he was
"stuck up" or showing off.
I do not know why Henry James wrote as he did, but contrast the two
following cases:
I once shared an apartment with an ardent admirer of James and as I
did not share his admiration we argued frequently. James came to New
York while my friend was preparing a bibliography of his idol's
works. There was some question as to several early articles or
stories that had magazine but not book publication and my friend
wrote for the simple information necessary. It could have been given
amply and courteously in two or three sentences. The reply was
appalling in its totally unnecessary complexity, length and creation
of detail, so much so that my friend woke me up to show it to me and
joined in my unholy glee. It was, surely, a natural expression, but
why was it natural? {84} And certainly it was not adapted to the
nature of the material or idea.
Now read the first one hundred and fifty words of _A Coward_ by De
Maupassant, even in translation, then write down the things you know
about the character described in those few very simple words and you
will be amazed at the length of the list.
Consider that De Maupassant and his master Flaubert stand
preeminently for unrelenting search for "the one word" and that both
of them are characterized by extreme simplicity of presentation. And
is any character of Henry James' so much more intricately drawn than
"Madame Bovary"?
Among more modern writers take Joseph Conrad. I am a Conrad "fan,"
but consider him, comparatively speaking, a poor workman though a
great artist. Here we have simplicity of words but not of expression
in a general sense. I do not by any means fully understand most of
his stories and I find that others are about equally at sea if they
are honest or are cross-examined. In most of the qualities that make
a great fictionist he stands in the front rank, but he is lacking in
_corresponding_ ability to simplify and clarify his thought, to make
the proper abstraction {85} and selection of thought expressions.
His content and gifts are so rich that even only a part of them
registered on readers is sufficient to rate him a master, but the
fact remains that he conveys only a part of what he has to say.
Instead of a direct, clear-cut, simple path to his goal he gives the
reader a maze of paths that is not lacking in blind alleys.
Whatever be the generally accepted academic philosophy of simple
versus complex expression, it can not outface the fact that the
minority of readers can not so fully understand or appreciate
complexity and that with them the effectiveness of a story is thereby
crippled. Certainly in practise there is crying need for the mastery
that can say all yet say it simply. If, instead of straining for
complexity, beginners would aim at simplicity, especially of words,
they would not only come closer to writing both good magazine stories
and good literature, but would find themselves able to "handle"
greater and greater complexity of thought and with a precision and
effectiveness that can not be equaled by the other method.
Remember that the simple, every-day words are in almost all cases the
_stronger_ ones.
{86}
_Repetition_.--Before leaving the subject of clearness as a whole (it
will come up again in connection with other subjects), a word might
be ventured on repetition. The present horror of it is a badly
exaggerated reaction. To repeat without due cause an unusual word or
phrase in a short story, or a usual one too close to its first use,
is a distraction and therefore harmful to the illusion, but sometimes
due cause is ignored. A story, all so clear to its author, presents
hundred of facts with which the reader must familiarize himself. The
easier you make this for him and the more you insure his getting all
the points necessary to a full appreciation of your story, the more
fully will your story register on him. To present a vital point once
so vividly that it is almost sure to register is best of all and
correspondingly difficult to do, but keep your eyes open for cases
where repetition, probably not in exactly the same words, will
accomplish the same purpose nearly as well and perhaps more surely.
Aside from clearness, in skilful hands repetition can become a most
subtle and powerful instrument for dramatic and poetic effects of
high literary quality.
{87}
CHAPTER VII
OVERSTRAIN
A reader has just so much of attention, interest and appreciation to
give to any story and, to hold him in the illusion, it is of the
highest importance not to wear him out before you are through with
him and not to use him up on minor points or on matters that should
put upon him no strain whatever.
_Brevity_.--Most of all, don't talk too much or too long. A story is
never so dead as when buried in words. Most of the stories submitted
can be cut to advantage, often very heavily cut. The reader gets
worn out waiting for something to happen--is bored by being told in a
hundred words what he could have grasped in twenty.
Do not feel that you must give the entire history of the hero's life
in a short story; only a certain few incidents and facts have direct
bearing and the remainder must be mercilessly cut out. Nor all the
scenes and {88} action of any story. Make it your object to have as
much as possible happen off-stage; what forces itself to the
footlights will probably belong there.
_Unclearnesses and Distractions_.--Any unclearness or ambiguity or
any distraction is of course a profitless strain upon the reader.
Don't compel a reader to _reason_ out things that should be clear at
a glance. Even the intentional unclearness of subtlety, though by no
means a fault, must also be weighed as to disadvantage in strain.
All the points covered in Chapter VI apply in this one.
_Sentence Length_.--Vary it. If you can, vary it in accordance with
variation in emotions of material, in desired effects on reader, but
vary it in any case. The very monotony of a long succession of
either long or short sentences is wearing.
Don't drag a reader through a sentence so long that in following it
he tires out before he can draw mental breath.
_Hold Reader to Correct Plot Line_.--From first word to last, don't
wear him out by letting him cover useless distance over false trails.
{89}
_Classical and Other References_.--In addition to their dangers of
distraction and unclearness they force a reader, if they reach him,
to picture or consider characters, events and scenes in addition to
those of the story. They are of course justified in comparatively
rare instances.
_Dialect, Archaic Speech, Slang, Foreign, Unusual and Technical
Words_.--All these offer obstacles to at least part of your audience.
To a probable minority dialect is a delight, it is of course
necessary to faithful realism, and it undoubtedly gives color. Yet
many will not read a dialect story, their chief reason being the
labor necessary to understand it. There are, too, those who
consciously or unconsciously object to anything foreign, meaning by
foreign anything different from their own. It is, for the author, a
question of weighing advantages against disadvantages. Archaic
speech, as far as strain is concerned, is merely dialect. One writer
makes the rule of using the speech of the time in which his story is
laid for all periods following and including that of Elizabeth, using
modern English for all earlier periods, his argument being that her
reign {90} approximately draws the line between speech that is now
intelligible with little or no effort and speech that is not.
Archaic forms of foreign tongues must be rendered to us in English,
so fall under the same rule.
Slang, too, is to be weighed as to advantages and disadvantages. It
is perhaps more difficult than in the cases of dialect and archaic
speech to compute the proportion of readers to whom it will be
sufficiently intelligible. On the other hand, it is generally in
itself humorous and therefore of particular value when a humorous
effect is desired; gives color; aids in characterization.
The danger of foreign, unusual and technical words is much the same
on the score of strain as on the score of distraction and unclearness.
_Relief Scenes_.--At some point a reader's response to a demand on
his emotions ceases and he grows callous to the appeal, but writers
often forget this fact and continue to demand long after he has lost
his ability to respond. Perfection is to bring him to your climax at
the full flood of response, but to do so requires careful handling.
A steady, gentle increase of demand is best if you can be {91}
absolutely sure of results, but a most useful safeguard is the use of
relief scenes. If you've keyed him up to a dangerously high pitch,
give him a rest-scene before you add a further call upon his
emotions--shift the scene or time and let him look a moment at a
quiet landscape or gentle action. Make the change a decided one and
you not only rest him but profit by the sharp dramatic contrast
between the relief scene and those following and preceding it.*
*Read De Quincey's _On the Knocking at the Gate in "Macbeth."_
_Frames or Brackets_.--That is, a story within a story--a story one
of whose characters tells the main story. Its advantage is a gain in
semblance of reality--if it is handled with sufficient skill. It
very seldom is. Its disadvantage is an overstrain, in demanding of
the reader that he form two illusions instead of one, and a
consequent dividing and weakening of attention. Having accomplished
the task of getting clear in his mind one setting and one set of
characters, he is forced to take up a new set of characters and
probably a new setting, a double strain within the compass of a
single story. If, as is {92} often the case, a character in the
frame (or several characters) persists in interrupting the course of
the inner, the real story, conflict or confusion of illusion is
compounded.
Most writers could profit by not attempting the doubly difficult task
of a bracketed or framed story. Unless exceptional skill is brought
to bear, the frame-story is almost sure either to be too slight and
unconvincing or to be made more or less convincing by being developed
at such length that it is too serious an encroachment upon space
needed for the real story. Yet it is a favorite attempt with those
least able to handle it.
_Mystery Stories_.--These must be considered as a class by
themselves, for their deliberate intent is to make the reader strain
at solving a puzzle or at following its intricate presentation and
solution, and he turns to them at least partly for the mental
stimulus involved. Yet overstrain is entirely possible. In fact,
this type, by reason of its inherent intricacy and effort for the
reader, demands particularly that he be not compelled to strain over
points that are non-essential to the mystery proper. Unskilled or
unfair writers sometimes intentionally add {93} confusions that are
in no way necessary, and many a mystery story lessens its hold on
readers by unintended unclearnesses or suggestions that mislead in
unnecessary directions and to no purpose. A reader may like to solve
puzzles, but he most emphatically has the right to be at all times
clear as to just what the puzzle is.
_Plot_.--Unnecessary intricacy, of course, should be avoided in any
type of story; the difficulty in a given case is to draw the line
between necessary and unnecessary. But for any writer who has not
made very decided progress toward mastering his art a fairly safe
rule is to simplify his plot as much as possible. Perhaps that plot
might be made more effective if developed in greater intricacy by
skilled hands, but his hands are probably not sufficiently skilful
and the net result of his attempt is likely to be a reader worn out
by too many loosely knit threads of plot. As he grows in skill he
will find that more and more intricate plots become--for him--simple
plots and therefore to be undertaken with confidence.
{94}
CHAPTER VIII
CONVINCINGNESS
Among writers of some experience the rejection of a manuscript for
the quite common reason that it is "not convincing" is often
considered merely the editor's slipshod, evasive or ignorant excuse
given in place of some mysterious real reason or through lack of any
definite one. Sometimes it is, but, when honestly and intelligently
given, it is the best possible reason for rejection.
"Unconvincingness" means definitely and directly that a story fails
to impose its illusion--that it is merely words for the reader to
look at, not a world for him to live in. It is the death-knell to
the illusion.
An editor's failure to give the reasons why it is "not convincing"
may be due to his not having analyzed beyond the general effect, but
it may be simply because unconvincingness is not easy to reduce to
black and white and at best involves far more detail than his {95}
time permits him to handle. It is as various and elusive as human
nature itself, but the more common causes can be fairly well
indicated.
_Improbabilities and Impossibilities_.--Contradictions and
inconsistencies have already been considered in Chapter VI and are to
be included under this head. Improbability and impossibility are of
course relative terms; a wishing-ring, while an utter impossibility
in reality, is not even an improbability in a story of fairies; if
the reader accepts the major illusion of fairy-land there will be no
difficulty to his accepting the minor illusion of a wishing-ring.
But in a story of anything approaching real life absolute conformity
to the laws and facts of real life is relentlessly exacted, and in
stories dependent upon the acceptance of some fundamental premise,
like the reality of fairy-land or the possibility of being
transferred into the year 2022, there must be equally relentless
conformity to the condition of the premise.
I venture that not twenty per cent. of _accepted_ manuscripts are
entirely free from slips of this kind when submitted. Acceptance has
been in spite of them, each of them {96} lessened the chances of
acceptance, and sufficient increase in their number would have meant
rejection by any good magazine. There is, of course, the type of
story that depends upon sheer quantity and tenseness of action to
carry the reader along, despite all inconsistencies and
improbabilities--the "dime novel" type, but all the strain of a
bridge should not be upon a single girder.
_Improbabilities of Plot_.--Too infinite in variety for any attempt
at classification. The test in each case must reduce first to,
"Could it happen under the conditions?" And the writer--with help
from his friends if they can be induced to help in this more
practical fashion--must be the judge. Then he must narrow his
question to, "Is it so likely to happen that the reader will accept
it _without hesitation_?" Here is the real test and most writers
fail to meet it largely because they have not, under the present
system of teaching fiction, been trained to measure a story strictly
through the reader's eyes. Many a time every editor has been
"caught" by an author who wrote back gleefully or vindictively "but
it actually happened in real life!" Doubtless, but that doesn't mean
anything. {97} It may have happened a thousand times in real life,
but if readers can not believe it when they find it in a story it is
none the less an improbability in that story, a blow to
convincingness, a check to the reader, an injury to the illusion.
I have struggled so often, and so often vainly, to make writers
realize this distinction that I come to it now girded for the fray.
Can't they see that a fact can not be a fact to a reader if he
refuses to consider it a fact? Are they so hopelessly egotistic in
their outlook on life that, because an improbable or unusual thing
has occurred in their personal experience, it has thereby
demonstrated its possibility to every one else? Are they so
sickeningly conceited as to be sure that their presentation of the
fact is as convincing to others as was the fact itself to them? Are
they so imbecile as not to see that "proving" it to an editor _after_
the reading of the story does not in any way prove it to the next or
any reader _while_ he is reading it? That, if it were published,
they would never have the chance to prove it afterward in the case of
readers as they had had in the case of the editor? That readers,
ninety-nine times out {98} of a hundred, would not even bother to
challenge the author on the point but would merely class him as
"punk" and his story as "bunk" and go on to the next in the thousands
of stories they read?
Ah, no, it "really happened" somewhere! That ought to be enough for
anybody, even if he doesn't know it happened and is convinced that it
couldn't and knows mighty well that it is contrary to his own
experience!
A leprechawn or a magic carpet can be made entirely convincing as
part of the story's illusion by sufficient skill and in the proper
setting, while the wonderful drive you and a half-dozen other
witnesses saw John R. Smith make, on your club links a week ago
Wednesday can, if put into a story, seem nothing whatever but a crude
lie. Verily, truth is stranger than fiction--particularly good
fiction. Good fiction makes a business of being a little less
strange than truth sometimes is, so that it can be believed.
As a matter of fact, a "really happened" incident is likely to need
twice the amount of "framing up" that an imaginary but more usual one
would require.
The true addict to this stupid and stubborn {99} point of view scorns
the simple device, used by his betters, of presenting the unusual
_as_ an unusual thing. No, it must be accepted as normal; it
happened, you've got to believe it. It doesn't occur to him that it
was unusual to him, that he seized upon it as material for that very
reason, that it would be equally unusual to the characters in his
story and that, really to duplicate or simulate life, he must make
his characters register the same surprise and interest that he
himself felt as a result of its unusualness. You can make a reader
accept something as a remarkable occurrence which he would utterly
reject as a normal happening.
For example, take the common case of the very feminine heroine who
goes through the author's best hell of horror, desperation, bodily
strain and general nerve-shock and, when rescued at its very climax,
at once blandly regains almost entire poise and enunciates a very
charming love-passage or goes cheerfully and competently about her
other business. Most of us know that it is characteristic of the
female sex to rise to an emergency strain and collapse or violently
react the instant the demand is removed if not {100} before.
Consequently said heroine fails to convince. The author's logical
correction is to make this heroine conform to general experience,
but, if he simply can not or will not change this part of his plot,
why not give what convincingness he may by making her show at least
some effects of the strain, or making clear that reaction had not yet
come, or at least some such crude but comparatively desirable device
as "strangely enough"?
_Improbabilities of Character_.--Like human nature, too various for
specific classification. Most writers are capable of at least some
understanding of human nature and a weakness along these lines can be
partly corrected by a combination of earnest study and sincere care.
Failure to draw character convincingly is an absolute limit to
success except in the lowest grades of fiction and in such uncommon
types of story as are in no way dependent for interest upon fidelity
to human nature.
The wire-nerved heroine cited above is an example. Any expression,
thought, emotion or act assigned to a character to whom, as drawn, it
would not be natural helps destroy {101} the reality of that
character--the word "grievously" or "interrelation" in the mouth of
an ignorant, illiterate character; a thought of the Virgin Mary in
the mind of a Protestant during a crisis; a feeling of pity, not
specified as unusual, in a pitiless person; fumbling in an emergency
by a man drawn as cool, clear-headed and ready.
_Lack of Characterization_.--Unless a character is given at least a
semblance of individualization he will be unlike any human in real
life or else will be like some human viewed from a distant
mountain-top or air-ship, in either case unconvincing as a "close
up." Yet in the vast majority of submitted manuscripts characters
are proper names and nothing more. This will be taken up in the
chapter on "Characterization."
_Clanking Plots_.--"The framework shows through," "you can hear the
machinery go round," "artificial"--such plots are like the doggerel
whose author does violence to both content and expression in order to
get at the ends of lines words that approximate a rhyme. Lack of
plot is almost a synonym. Instead of building a plot that is the
natural result of character, conditions or conflicting {102} forces,
the author draws at will upon the universe at large for whatever
elements will lend what he considers strength and effectiveness.
Since the law of cause and effect holds in real life, such a plot is
unconvincing. In reading even published stories haven't you often
found something said or done that was obviously put into the story,
not for its intrinsic or relative value, but solely for the
plot-purpose of making other things connect and keep moving? And
what is the effect upon your belief in the story, upon your illusion?
_Hack Plots_.--I've forgotten who first said that there are only
seven--or is it nine or five?--plots in the world, but, whoever he
was, he's done a good deal of damage. With that hopeless dictum
looming before their eyes it is not to be wondered at that many
writers strive half-heartedly or not at all for originality of plot.
Add this to the majority's lack of invention, our ingrained habit of
copying and a tendency to take rather than make and you can see why
an editor can reject at a glance a large proportion of submitted
stories. Like any other reader, he has very thoroughly learned some
scores of {103} plots or plot variations and doesn't need to read
them any more. Usually the author who turns in a hack plot is the
author who has little to offer except plot. And quite often he
answers a rejection for hack plot by quoting "there are only five
plots in the world anyway." If that is so, five is enough to enable
better writers to write better stories.
The patent objection to hack plots is that they have outworn, with
all but the newest and most elemental readers, the power to hold in
illusion, therefore demanding an extra amount of excellence in other
factors. There is also the objection that this very repetition of a
formula identified with fiction, particularly poor fiction, gives
them at once the flavor of fiction instead of real life, and
successful illusion is thus made extremely difficult.
As a lonely little plea in behalf of wearied editors, couldn't you
arrange, when you wish to shoot or stab a character without removing
him entirely, to wound him somewhere else than in the shoulder? The
bullet that proved merely to have glanced off the skull is also
rather overworked. And must you turn for help to overheard
conversations?
{104}
_Coincidence_.--Coincidence is such a favorite device for attaining a
hack plot, a clanking plot and improbability in general that it calls
for a separate and emphatic warning. A reader's credence for
coincidences is strictly limited, especially if they are presented as
matters of course.
_Hack Style_.--Objectionable for the same reason as hack plot. The
inevitable connotation of hack words and phrases is of the "writing
game," of the printed page, of stories sold for money, not of real
life--too "magaziney" to be successful in holding illusions in which
magazines can have practically no place. Each hack phrase, moreover,
is a lost opportunity for a right phrase that would have added to
effectiveness. Also, readers are just plain tired of them.
_Frames or Brackets and First-Person Narratives_.--Guard against
letting the frame-story character who tells the real story talk so
long, fluently and perfectly that readers will note the impossibility
of his performing such a feat in real life. First-person narratives,
not in a frame, generally avoid this impossibility by having the
narrative written instead of spoken; otherwise they run the {105}
same danger. Most of all, don't let the narrator abandon his own
speech for that of the author himself. He generally does.
_Dialect, Slang, Foreign Words_.--All these, rightly used, tend
toward convincingness of color and character, but their effectiveness
is often measured by suggestion rather than quantity. Broad Scotch
dialect at full strength will give a very Scotch atmosphere, for
example, but many readers will refuse to enter that atmosphere or
will become lost in it if they do enter. Often idiom is a more
effective device than dialect.
_Ignorance of Material: Mistakes_.--There is, heaven knows, just
ground for the belief that writers are given to writing of things
with which they are not sufficiently familiar. Instead of using the
material they know best, as a class they are too prone to select the
material they'd like to know about but don't. Also to feign a
scholarliness they don't possess or to attempt a style they have not
mastered.
Lack or loss of faith in the author is as great a catastrophe as lack
or loss of belief in the story. Irritation against him is still more
fatal. If you have any doubt, an {106} editor's mail would dispel
it. Nothing brings so many or such bitter protests from readers as a
mistake in handling local color. Mark that well, you who "take a
chance" because you think you can--and often do--"get away with it."
Not only do you underestimate the irritation, sometimes amounting to
a virulence that remembers you and follows you with hostility through
your other stories, but your ignorance of setting, local color,
material blinds you to the infinite possibility for unconscious
mistakes that are instantly detected by those who know and make you
ridiculous in their eyes.
Your dialect, slang and foreign quotations gain you no color if you
make mistakes in them. Classical, historical and fictional
references, or "big words" in English, if incorrectly used, give you
no reputation for scholarliness. Having your villain run lightly
away with more dollars in gold or dust than he could lift from the
ground or using an "automatic revolver" does not impress readers with
your knowledge of what you write about. Giving Brazilians Spanish as
their native tongue produces very unlocal color. A negro strain in a
pure-blooded Creole shows no knowledge of types.
{107}
Add to these the mistakes considered in the chapter on
"Distractions," add all the other mistakes of which the uninformed
human brain is capable, and then take up your heavy burden of
becoming thoroughly familiar with the material you use in stories. A
month or two in a locality will not give to any save a Kipling
sufficient familiarity for safety. Most writers think it will. And,
whatever you do, don't fool with fire-arms or with anything
pertaining to ships until you have become a real authority! I speak
from bitter experience; editor, as well as writer, becomes the target
for almost venomous ire. And no detail is too tiny for detection and
wrath. The picture of a grizzly bear on a magazine cover brought a
vicious indictment because, while a grizzly has six toes, not five,
he does not show the sixth toe especially when in the position
depicted.
The convincingness of a story as a whole, then, is dependent upon
many detailed factors and there is some excuse for the editor who
does not give the analyzed reasons for his verdict of "unconvincing."
Such a weakness is due, on one hand, to {108} ignorance, deliberate
indifference or almost criminal carelessness or, on the other hand,
to failure to visualize clearly from the point of view of the reader.
The most practical remedy, for both classes of causes, is, aside from
the writer's own efforts, a fundamental change in teaching methods,
putting far more emphasis upon training writers to habitual and very
anxious consideration of the reader's actual reactions to every least
stimulus in a story.
{109}
CHAPTER IX
HOLDING THE READER
While most points that bear here fall more directly under other
headings, some definitely belong in this chapter. And, though I know
of no recipe for being interesting, there are certain things that may
be of help to that effort.
_Being Dramatic_.--All stories, to be interesting, I think, must be
dramatic, in the broader sense of the word, both in style and in
selection and recombination of material. The very demand for unity
and structure is a demand for the dramatic, the dramatic quality
being largely a matter of position and contrast, and a baldly
unemotional or matter-of-fact style can be strongly dramatic through
its contrast with the emotional material handled. However, lest I be
confounded by the philosophers, I'll discard "Being Dramatic" and
attempt instead, suggestions {110} as to "being interesting," not
with any idea of covering the subjects completely but rather, (as in
much of this book), calling attention to points on which writers
prove themselves particularly weak in actual practise and which seem
to call for more attention in teaching methods.
_Suspense_.--The chief warning needed is not to spoil it after you've
secured it. Over and over again a writer ruins his reader's suspense
by betraying the plot in advance and making a surprise impossible.
Sometimes it is inadvertent, but often it is deliberately done by at
least a general statement or hint of outcome prefaced with some such
phrase as "little did I know then that," "could he have known," "in
the light of what followed there was no need for my next step," etc.,
or even more baldly betraying, say, the outcome of an entire book
whose interest is at least partly based on whether hero wins heroine,
by such as "Now, with Nita and our children sitting by me as I write,
my doubts seem foolish ones."
To me one of the most amazing faults in the entire repertoire is the
flat betrayal of plot by the chapter headings. Why do it? Is {111}
it merely a slip due to concentration on the really nerve-racking
task of choosing an interesting and pertinent title for the chapter?
Or is the habit of not measuring by the reader's reactions so strong
that in so prominent and spectacular a place a writer does not even
note that he has advertised in advance to readers the very thing he
should be trying to keep as a surprise?
_Surprises_.--Be sure they are legitimate. It is one thing to shape
a story so that the reader will expect other than what is to happen,
but quite another for you to tell him definitely that he is to expect
the other. Yet some writers do this.
_Mystery_.--Naturally, play upon human curiosity and the human
hunting-instinct whenever opportunity offers, but, as in the case of
surprises, be sure your mystery structure and detail play fair with
the reader. Here, too, you may give him false scents to follow, for
he accepts them as part of the game, but, to change the figure, be
sure that the ladder by which the goal is finally reached has no
rungs missing. And in heaven's name don't fog your story with the
needless mysteries of careless unclearness and {112} confusion when
nothing but irritation is to be gained by it.
_Overstrain_.--Already covered. But some of its points demand extra
attention for the sake of dramatic effect.
_Light and Shade_.--Their proper use is essential to mastery of
dramatic effect. Just as a square of black on a white sheet stands
out far blacker and stronger than on a black one, just so does a
strong scene stand out stronger if preceded and perhaps followed by a
quiet scene than if merely one in a succession of strong scenes.
Such a succession, properly handled for cumulative effect and steady
rise to a climax, may as a whole be stronger than an alternation of
strong and quiet, but such a succession is itself a unit and as such
subject to the general law. There is always the danger of overstrain
in its use.
The above applies, of course, to the elements within a scene, in the
make-up of a character, or in anything else. For example, the traits
of a character all good or all bad are not so vivid as those of a
character partly good and partly bad--nor is the character so natural.
The element of unexpectedness in the sense {113} of particularly
sudden surprise is extremely effective by reason of the sharp
contrast involved.
_Repression_.--Often more effective than expression of emotion, for
the fundamental reason, particularly in the case of emotion felt by a
character, that, however strong the emotion, repression means the
addition of something sufficiently stronger to master it and of a
struggle for the mastery, even though neither is definitely described
in the story. There is contrast between emotion and will, between
the expression to be expected and the absence of it, perhaps between
one character's repression and another's lack of it. In the case of
repression by the author in the general handling of a scene an
advantage lies in his giving to each reader opportunity to fill out
the emotion in whatever way is most satisfying and natural to each
from the mere skilful stimulus furnished by the author. If this
advantage seems slight, consider the drawings for an illustrated
story. In how many cases does the artist's conception of characters,
scene and expression coincide with that of a reader? Supposing it
were possible for the artist to furnish only such {114} suggestions
as would enable each reader to fill out a picture in accordance with
his own conception, would not each reader find it more satisfying?
Incidentally, would it be a higher form of art?
Also there is enough of the Anglo-Saxon in our national character to
implant in perhaps most of us an impulse to run away from too free
expression of emotion. A reader's impulse to run away from a story
does not add to its effectiveness.
Certainly repression of emotion in the sense of condensing the number
of words used in expression could be practised to great advantage by
the majority of writers.
But, first, last and always, remember that repressing emotion should
seldom mean annihilating. Perhaps the correct idea is shown by
contrasting a spiral spring compressed to its least space and
greatest potential force with the same spring spent from being
sprung, or with the absence of a spring.
_Omitting Scenes_.--A story is at bottom a selection of certain bits
of material from an almost infinite number of bits or, put the other
way, the rejection of all material except the salient bits. Dramatic
effect is often {115} increased by keying the process of selection
and abstraction to a more rigid scale, even rejecting comparatively
salient bits. For example, a whole scene, though fitting into the
story's development, may lend greater effectiveness to the whole by
being inferred instead of enacted on stage.
_Condensation_.--It is safe to say that many writers could make most
of their stories not only more dramatic but more effective in general
by greater condensation. Those of you, especially, who aim for
popularity rather than the judgment of posterity should remember that
we live in an age of motion-pictures, that one of their chief
characteristics is speed, and that our youth are growing up with that
speed more or less fixed in their minds as a standard for all
narrative or expository art. What will they, consequently, demand of
fiction? Are they becoming impatient of what we have considered the
normal speed of fiction narrative? Just as they, and perhaps we
older ones, are already inclined to impatience over Cooper, Scott and
Dickens, perhaps because steam and electricity have keyed us to a
faster gait. Do you not find boys who will throb over a movie of
_The {116} Last of the Mohicans_ or _The Three Musketeers_, but who
can not be induced to wade through these stories in book form as you
and I so gladly waded? Is it merely that youth welcomes the quicker
path and that these same youths will in more mature years turn to the
more leisurely presentation? Even so, a slower speed may be losing
them as audience while they are ripening sufficiently to prefer it.
On the other hand, do motion-pictures overfeed us with speed so that
we turn with relief to the more leisurely methods of fiction?
I venture no final conclusion, but certainly the narrative art as a
whole moves faster than it did twenty or even ten years ago. Here is
opportunity for some college classes in fiction or psychology to
contribute exceptionally valuable data through laboratory or field
experiments covering at least a part of the ground.
Meanwhile there is no doubt that, by either old or new standard, most
writers would profit by more condensation. There is no surer way of
boring a reader than by talking too much, and even honey or strong
drink can {117} be diluted until it has neither strength nor flavor.
And remember, class-rooms, in judging this point from published
stories, that the editor has frequently done the writer's condensing
for him because of the story's need or the limitations of space.
_Short vs. Long Words and Sentences_.--Remember that in tense moments
or under extreme emotion most men resort to short, simple,
Anglo-Saxon words and brief sentences. Remember that therefore short
words and sentences are likely to be in themselves more tense and
dramatic and, though not so generally, more emotional.
Remember, too, the need of avoiding monotony from any word- or
sentence-length.
_Handling, Setting, Color and Character_.--Holding the reader is
essentially a matter of not being dull and there is no sovereign cure
for dullness, but the following device will go a long way toward
avoiding it.
Instead of giving the reader setting and local color in
discouragingly large pieces, weave them into the action. An old
device, to be sure, but one much too little used. Instead of
describing a vast plain, let a {118} character ride over it, speak of
it or think of it, thus at the same time developing scenery,
character and action for the reader. If you wish to picture the
plain's vegetation, incorporate some of it as even a very minor
plot-factor--have the rider pluck some of it, have his horse's
progress impeded by it, hide another character behind it. There are
a thousand ways of thus accomplishing more than one thing at once.
But remember, too, that a reader must be given his general bearings
as soon as he enters a story.
_Hack Work_.--Anything in your story, except material itself, that
has been used until threadbare by countless writers before you is
"hack stuff" and has small chance of holding your reader, for the
perfectly simply reason that he's tired of it before he reads it.
Whether a matter of plot or diction and no matter how good it was in
the beginning, it is a handicap that only a master can turn into an
asset. Avoid, however, the opposite extreme of being different to
such an extent or so clumsily that your effort is obvious. I know of
no recipe for avoiding "hack stuff"--no more than for avoiding lack
of individuality and other little matters of that kind, but {119}
surely a writer of even moderate discernment can detect and correct
this fault in some degree by taking pains to note and avoid the
elements that recur most frequently in poor or mediocre fiction.
Unfortunately most writers begin by copying (unconscious copying,
while more ethical, is harder to correct than is deliberate copying)
and your natural copier is not likely to be overly intelligent in
choice of models.
_Titles and Chapter Headings_.--This subject is too large for
discussion here, since it involves the psychology of both fiction and
advertising, but three rules can be given: (1) Aim at the very heart
of the subject-matter for your general title idea; (2) don't let them
betray too much in advance, but make them "lure"; (3) select chapter
heads with almost as much care as titles, for they are of great
psychological importance.
{120}
CHAPTER X
PLEASING THE READER
Divide all readers into majority and minority. It is legitimate and
profitable to aim at either. Now make your big decision, and it is a
very big one. At which of these will you aim? If the majority,
study and analyze their tastes and reactions. If the minority, study
and analyze the majority first; then study the minority. Their
tastes are not necessarily opposite, but they are necessarily
different, also various; the minority are a unit only in being
different from the majority. But you can reach them fairly well
merely by giving them the opposite of what the majority like. Your
problem is whether you can get a better slice of attention from the
majority of readers in competition with the majority of writers or
from the minority of readers in competition with a minority of
writers.
_Majority vs. Minority_.--Your own peculiar {121} gifts and
inclinations in writing should be the deciding factor, but you can
make no intelligent decision until you really have some understanding
of the two groups between which you must decide. If you write for
money only, study them till you have your human-nature formulas at
your finger-ends and almost automatically apply them to every idea,
expression or bit of material that comes up for consideration. If
you write for art only, study them just the same (you'll be getting
the best material in the world), but instead of turning the results
into formulas turn them into your understanding. If you write
according to the method--commonly called inspiration and attributed
to what we, sometimes hastily, term genius--of merely exploding
yourself into the world at large without deigning to look at said
world, continue to explode as usual, but when your creation is all
created go over it with pencil, blue-pencil and waste-basket in the
light of knowledge and understanding of whichever audience you prefer
as target, and make very, very sure that what you inspired into your
story is going to reach that audience just as you intended it should
and is going to please {122} and interest them as much as you fondly
imagined.
For, you see, you are almost certainly not a genius. A genius makes
his own rules and they are better for his case than are any rules
other people can make for him. If any genius is by strange chance
reading this book I hope he will stop and read no other in place of
it. He will almost surely do far better without. God knows the
world is too full of rules for writing fiction and of people who
allow the rules to ride them out of all ability to use the rules.
The proper function of rules is that of mere guides and suggestions
to be weighed, analyzed, and then either discarded or so thoroughly
absorbed that their application during the act of creating is
automatic and subconscious and their use as tests after creating is
no more than the author's own spontaneously critical view of what he
has written. Nothing in this book is intended to hang like a "Do it
now" motto on the author's wall; its one intention is to give him a
fresh point of view and the kind of foundation that will enable him
to make his own rules out of his own understanding.
In this book we are concerned primarily {123} with the majority of
readers and, unless otherwise specified, have in mind his likings and
reactions.
_Choice of Material and Theme_.--The majority of readers would
probably value their lives above any other selfish
consideration--life in the sense of existence but also in the sense
of health and vigor. Next, such things as love, success, wealth,
happiness, uplift, knowledge, beauty and contest, not necessarily in
the order named. These, or combinations of these, such as success in
a contest for life or love or wealth, offer a safe beginning in
selecting material or a theme for fiction. These are the fundamental
things vital to human beings. The further you get from them, the
more must you approach appeal to a minority. (The majority, of
course, does not always consist of the same individuals, but merely
of most individuals, and shifts in membership more or less with each
shift of point at issue.)
_Happiness_.--Human beings would on the whole rather be happy than
unhappy. Therefore happy themes and pleasant material are surest for
pleasing the majority. Generally speaking, people read fiction for
entertainment {124} and prefer feeling happier rather than unhappier
when they lay down a story. Sympathy, morbidness and a desire to
play with the fire of fear, horror and suffering give rise to
contrary tastes in fiction, the drama and other forms of art, but the
general, fundamental desire is for happiness.
What is happiness? I attempt no definition. One man knows probably
as well as any other. All of us can watch other human beings and
have a very fair idea of what makes most of them happy.
Generalizations on human nature are unsafe but, to take an extreme
case, a story of cripples, deformities and disease, unless this
material is very strongly counteracted with success, love, sympathy,
etc., would please none but abnormal readers. Deformities and
disease offend the inherent love of life, health and beauty. Again,
the majority prefer non-tragic stories, preferring to think of life
rather than death, of success rather than unsuccess.
Let me make it emphatically plain that I am attempting no such
foolish thing as a catalogue of material for fiction. My one purpose
is to lead the writer into doing what he so {125} often fails to
do--_consider his material very carefully from the point of view of
the probable reactions of human beings instead of choosing it
according to God knows what silly rules for writing fiction or merely
repeating the material and themes he has seen that other writers use._
A few stray points may be of some service:
The beginners and the very young are as a class the writers most
given to tragedy and morbidness. As they develop they generally
change to more cheerful material.
The percentage of tragic and morbid stories would dwindle rapidly if
it were not for the empty writer's desire to "do something strong"
and his inability to get strength in any other way.
The horror story has its legitimate place, as has any story dealing
with human emotions, which are the very heart-food of fiction and of
unfailing interest to the human readers. Suffering, unsuccess,
death, all the unpleasant things you please, are good fiction
material. But, if I may make the distinction, they are good, not
because they hurt, but because, like happier things, they appeal to
the readers' human sympathy and understanding.
{126}
Since I shall not give it space anywhere else, the question of
realism _versus_ idealism may be dragged in here from the point of
view of the readers' liking. When I first came to New York, in
youthful throes over this and similar momentous questions, I had the
good fortune of a letter to William Dean Howells and, trembling at
this God-given opportunity, broached my chief problem. Mr. Howells
was incapable of anything but gentleness, and the process of his
gentleness in my case was so kindly that its words are no longer
clear in my memory, but the gist of his reply is very clear indeed.
He told me to go ride on a Fifth Avenue bus and write down whatever
caught the attention of a young man fresh to New York. I pass on to
others that very excellent advice. Go ride on a bus or sit still
somewhere and write about whatever catches your attention. The
question of whether the result is realism or idealism is one you can
afford to forget, for the main point is that you should follow your
own particular gift for seeing life. The only attention you need
give the result is consideration of its appeal to people in general,
changing or not changing the result according to the {127} relative
value you assign to popularity and art, remembering that the two need
not be mutually exclusive goals and that either realism or idealism
finds response in a sufficient number of readers.
_The Philosophy of Fiction_.--Doubtless there are a hundred
explanations of the fundamental appeal of fiction to human beings.
That given by George Henry Lewes seems particularly illuminating and
practically helpful.
It is, in substance, as I recollect it:
_Fiction appeals to man because it enables him to attain vicariously,
through the characters in the story world, the perfection and success
he can not attain in real life, and to live for a while in a world of
his own choosing instead of in the real world that has been thrust
upon him._
The first part of this definition does not seem to apply to realistic
and analytical fiction, though the second part does, nor does any of
the definition seem to take sufficient account of the reader's
enjoyment of the exercise of his sympathies or the broadening of his
understanding and knowledge or of his sheer joy in artistic
excellence. This {128} apparent failure to cover the ground,
however, is not so real as it seems. Joy over artistic excellence is
essentially a critic's feeling, not a reader's--the joy of a
technician, not of a recipient, of a cook, not of a diner. And if
you will apply my distinction between fiction and the various things
for which fiction is a mere vehicle, the contributions to
understanding and knowledge are not a part of fiction itself and
therefore need not be covered by the definition. The exercise of the
reader's sympathies may also be accounted for by strict application
of this distinction; or the "vicarious perfection and success" of the
definition may be broadened to a comparison of the reader's own life
with lives of the story people, better here, worse there, either
stimulating variety and satisfaction or affording the vicarious
improvement of condition.
But, whether or not you consider the definition all inclusive, there
is in it a fundamental idea whose practical application would go far
toward winning for most writers a far stronger and deeper hold on
readers. Sophomoric critics and writers may be inclined to sweep it
off the boards, since it both deals with fundamentals and undermines
some habitual {129} angles of criticism, but most submitted
manuscripts and perhaps most published fiction would be much stronger
if the writers thereof had made intelligent application of an
intelligent understanding of this principle. Perfection and success
have in them the element of completeness, and completeness is a
fundamental desire of the human being, partly because of the pleasant
restfulness of its attainment.
I do not say that every story should reek with success and
perfection, but I do say that before you even partly eliminate these
factors you should have an intelligent understanding of what you are
doing and should sacrifice them only for such other factors or
elements as you are sure will more than compensate in the particular
case.
Also I say, without hesitation or qualification, that, in the type of
story containing little or no fundamental appeal other than a march
of events and the success of a more or less perfect hero or heroine
(the type that includes the large majority of submitted manuscripts)
the application of this principle means an incalculable increase in
effectiveness. In other words, if the presentation of {130} success
and perfection constitutes a fundamental appeal to readers, see to it
that you give these things in rich measure unless you compensate
fully for their absence or partial absence.
Note that these elements are given lavishly in the "dime-novel" type
of story. This is probably the lowest type of all (not because of
the superabundance of action, but because of unnaturalness and
all-round poor workmanship), yet its audience is huge and its hold on
them tremendous. And if you think this audience is limited to the
unsophisticated and the very young, you are vastly mistaken; that
hold is too fundamental for a majority of even our cultured classes
to escape from if it is given fair opportunity. To advance exciting
and abundant action as the sole cause for this hold, as is commonly
done, does not sufficiently account for it. The proof is that
practically none of these stories is willing to trust to action alone
for popularity. They almost always include another factor. And that
factor is the double one of the success and perfection of the hero.
The authors of such stories may include this factor only because they
have seen others do so and may {131} not analyze beyond "people like
it," but in that analysis they are thinking straighter and truer than
are most of the learned and scholarly exponents and critics of the
writing art who lose themselves, their goal and their followers in a
maze of artificial regulations and meaningless formalities.
_Reality_.--To preserve balance, let us leap to the opposite point of
view and review in our minds what was said in the chapter on
convincingness. For the reader's pleasure in vicarious success and
perfection to have soundness and stability, or for any other fiction
purpose I can conceive, the story world must be a reproduction of our
real world or of a modified real world consistent within itself.
Part of a reader's fiction enjoyment lies in his familiarity with
things presented, in finding things in their proper place, in the
vanity of "I know that already." That a hero should attain
remarkably complete success is acceptable to our reason because such
success is frequently attained in real life. But a hero made
remarkably perfect in all respects is likely to be too much for our
common sense and to break the story's hold on us. "There ain't no
such animile;" we know it, and, {132} however much the joys of
vicarious perfection may lure us along through the story, the
illusion is seriously weakened.
The obvious remedy is a balanced middle course.
_Giving Characters Strong Appeal_.--In following this middle course
the need in fiction to-day, aside from the dime-novel type, is more
emphasis on the perfection element, not less. (Incidentally, it
would help characterize a hero, and an appalling percentage of
submitted manuscripts _lack even that amount of characterization_.)
Give your hero or heroine sufficient faults and weak points to make
him as human and fallible as you please, but give him also the strong
elemental appeal of being close to the limit of human perfection in
one or two traits of character, or physical or mental
characteristics, or along one or possibly two lines of ability.
Unless, of course, you are fully prepared to counteract the loss of
this valuable asset with other elements. A sadly large proportion of
would-be writers are not thus prepared, and many a story by a skilled
author could have been improved by an understanding use of this
element.
{133}
The same principles apply in less degree to minor characters.
Villains, of course, aim at perfection in evil and their success
generally must cease at whatever point will render the hero's success
most effective, but in their case the conflict between naturalness
and success-perfection is often easily avoided by the simple and
effective device of giving your villain a quite human allowance of
commendable or pleasing perfections, leaving the net villain-product
as evil as you please--the engaging villain, the fascinating rascal,
the merely human trouble-maker.
The usual fundamental compensation for a story's lack of perfection
and success appeal is the appeal to the reader's sympathy with
elements similar to those in himself or his life, including the
appeal to his sympathy for those suffering or enjoying as he has
done. Personally I'm rather inclined to believe the substitute not
quite so effective, the other appeal seeming the more elemental and
therefore the stronger of the two. Lewes' definition can be made
sufficiently inclusive if we say that fiction's hold is due to its
enabling the human being to live life vicariously, at his own
pleasure, on his own initiative {134} and always as the ultimate
controller of destiny, since he can at any moment toss the story
aside, wiping out the entire story world. But if this is so, isn't
it safe to say that the normal human being on the whole prefers
pleasure to pain and finds more pleasure in success and perfection
than in failure and imperfection? Psychologists can justly retort
with, "But what are pleasure and pain?" The common-sense answer to
that is that the psychologists can't agree among themselves upon a
definition, that fiction is not written for psychologists but for
people in general, and that most of us have a sufficiently definite
idea of what pleases people in general and what is disagreeable to
them.
When you come to the chapter on "Character" consider in connection
with some of the points suggested there the points here suggested as
to perfection of hero. Both there and here it might pay to run over
in your mind the story characters that have best stood the test of
ages, from "Achilles," "Ulysses" and the faithful "Achates" up to
modern times. Best of all, forget you are a writer and as a reader
shake yourself free for a few moments from all book learning and
culture, all {135} preconceived ideas, all opinions of all critics
and very particularly free from self-deception. Reduce yourself thus
to a plain, common or garden human being, open to any natural
impulses or likings and honestly willing to recognize and confess
them. Then pick out the heroes or heroines you most enjoy, that have
the strongest hold on your liking, being careful not to test by the
literary criteria that have been imposed on you. If you do this
honestly and keenly you may not wholly agree with my point of view,
but I'll venture you'll consider your time well spent and that your
allegiance to various learned dicta may be somewhat shaken.
Particularly if you habitually identify yourself with the heroes as
you read, don't you find yourself reveling in a hero's superior wit,
grace, comeliness, strength or skill? Isn't this proud joy in him
something deeper and more abiding than tests imposed by
sophistication? Be honest.
To get at the whole matter from a different angle, don't human beings
like to idealize?
One other point. When the world was young the individual rose or
fell, lived or died, in accordance with the degree of his {136}
physical strength, skill, courage and beauty. Mental and moral
values were later factors. The physical is the most elemental, the
most deeply rooted, in the race. Also, so long as we have wars and
policemen, it remains the strongest, the court of last appeal. A
thousand years from now it may have sunk into comparative oblivion,
but even then the racial instinct of respect and admiration for it
will persist. If you doubt its greater hold on human beings at
large, forget books and study people--not just one class or type but
people in general. No, I am not a materialist; the moral or mental
can overcome the physical, but it is the physical that is there
first, that is the more elemental in matters of liking and disliking,
the strongest in natural impulse. And what I am trying to drive home
is the need of greater consideration of the elemental likes and
dislikes of readers, for they are being forgotten under the more
vocal and visible likes and dislikes imposed by a civilization and
culture often artificial and therefore weaker.
Why not, then, whenever you can do so without sacrifice of values
more important to the particular case (as you generally can), {137}
see to it that your hero makes this fundamental appeal in some way?
On the other hand, remember the facts of life. Listen to the
following from William Ashley Anderson, a writer who, though an
American, fought through the British East African campaign and has
spent a good many of his years in meeting life in the raw at far
corners of the world as well as life in its softer centers:
"Villains who always look like monsters strike me as burlesque.
"Villainous-looking men are frequently good-hearted and heroic.
Good-looking men may be fiends. Character is really indicated more
by expression than features--and a clever villain can control his
expression. Primitive types, of course, betray themselves most
easily. The expression of the most cruel men is usually dull,
stupid, hungry--or with a look of wildness or concentration in the
eyes. A good man, drunk, may become an arch-villain. His looks then
might be the looks of an arch-villain; sober, he might have the
appearance of an angel. 'Lucifer was the most beautiful of all the
angels'!
"By the same token the employment of handsome, powerful heroes is
often exasperating. On the average, handsome men are less likely to
be brave than homely men--because of the very fact that they are
handsome; and a man with pretty features seldom has a strong
character (since the character is {138} often spoiled by too much
praise in youth, or too much flattery from women after reaching
adolescence). You remember Cæsar's encounter with Pompey, when the
former instructed his hard-bitten veterans to strike at the faces of
the handsome soldiers of Pompey.
"It is a fact that a man conscious of a handsome set of teeth recoils
more at the thought of losing several of them from a blow than he
does at the idea of broken limbs."
_Poor Heroes, Heroines and Villains_.--By all means do not idealize
into such perfection and success that your characters are unhuman and
unconvincing, but, I implore you, in making them human do not add any
recruits to the great army of main characters who are unintentionally
presented as imbecile. Sometimes carelessness is responsible for
this stupidity, but generally the cause is the writer's surrender to
the difficulties of plot--it is so easy to keep the plot machinery
clanking along by having the hero become a temporary idiot.
Misunderstanding may be the basis of tragedy and drama, but a man can
misunderstand without qualifying for an asylum for the feeble-minded.
Please also lend your efforts to the needed work of abolishing the
heroine, supposed to {139} be all that is most worth striving for,
who is really empty of everything except vanity, false pride, cruelty
and sublime selfishness--who, at her worst, offers her hand to the
winner of a contest or the performer of some feat. I wish some one
would organize a writers' league whose members were pledged either
not to let their heroes leap into the arena at her bidding or to have
them, after recovering her glove, throw it in her face. But I fear
she will continue to hold sway undetected, as she does in real life.
Perhaps the heroes are as bad, but I am a man myself.
_Moral Values_.--Nearly all people are moral to the extent of
preferring good to bad when they have nothing at stake, as, for
example, when reacting to merely imaginary people in a story. They
side with the hero against the villain.
Readers with a discriminating sense of moral values are likely to be
alienated by a character, supposed to be good, who is made to act
contrary to good morals or ethics by the apparently unconscious
author. Readers without this discriminating sense are a moral
responsibility laid upon the author; he is culpable if he still
further befogs their {140} discrimination between right and wrong by
winning their approval of a character and then letting that character
seduce them unawares into bad ethics.
Fiction is more than a reflection of the times; it is a builder of
its contemporaneous thought and morality. If I were asked to name
the five greatest influences upon the character of a people I should
most emphatically include fiction and it would be nearer first than
last among the five. Watch its effect upon your child. If you are
of analytical turn, seek far back in memory for the origin of your
own ethical standards and ideals, or for the influences that
strengthened or weakened them. Watch the mass of people respond to
the standards held up by fiction--and by the drama, motion-pictures
and other forms of art. Do not swallow the excuse that they "only
give what the people demand"; those of you on the "inside" will know
better.
I know the defenses offered for the picaresque story. I am familiar
with the plea of "art for art's sake." It seems to me mere idle
talk. Art is for life, not life for art, and if art, however
justified by its own laws, {141} pollutes the soul of a people, then
the cause of that pollution should be wiped out.
Realism and the spread of knowledge can justify a picture of life as
it is, though too often the author's real interest is not in the
reality of what he presents but in its ugliness. An author is
justified in using fiction as an instrument against what he sincerely
believes mistaken morality, though his own morality is impeached if
he ventures his dissent without most anxious consideration of the
seriousness of what he is doing. But there is no excuse whatever for
presenting ugliness as beauty, crime dressed in honor, vice as
admirable, crookedness as amusing, rottenness as normal, evil as
good. He who makes a criminal a hero is playing with hell-fire, if I
may use so old-fashioned a metaphor. He who writes a story of crime
triumphant is a debaucher of public morals. He who presents, however
bedecked and disguised, a parasite, a fop, a hypocrite, a brute, a
crook, as admirable is a dry-rot in the heart of the people. He who
fills his stories with sex, not for the purposes of honest realism
but for the sake of sex-exciting more nickels from human beings, is
far lower and less courageous than the pimp.
{142}
I can not ask you to accept my point of view in these matters, yet,
because of the broadcast, invidious evil involved and because the
morality of fiction seems a thing seldom touched upon by text-books,
I do ask that you weigh your responsibilities. A surprising number
of offenses are purely inadvertent and are eagerly corrected by the
authors when pointed out, for most writers are not evil in intent.
These slips, at least, can be more guarded against, for they are due
more to lack of careful weighing than to lack of a moral sense. One
common and easily detected lapse is the use of the principle that the
end justifies the means--the philanthropic criminal, for example, by
emulating whom any one can justify almost anything he wishes to do.
From the purely practical point of view these things are for the most
part irritations to the discriminating. Often with the
undiscriminating they add nothing to the story's effectiveness,
though operating in real life after the story itself is forgotten.
As to the popular and financial success of polluting fiction you will
notice that the public is sufficiently sound usually to react
eventually, {143} especially if given half a chance, against the very
thing it has embraced.
_Needless Offenses_.--Write it down in red ink that any slur upon any
religion that creeps into your story will cause everything else to be
forgotten by some of your readers in their indignation over that
affront. And make up your mind that anything offering even the most
remote possibility of being twisted into a slur will assuredly be so
twisted. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Scientists, all have
representatives with chips balanced on the edge of their shoulders.
Generally the slur is taken as a deliberate insult on the part of
both author and editor, often as sure evidence of a systematic
campaign of propaganda. If the hero happens to be a minister,
priest, rabbi or reader, other sects accuse you of propaganda in
favor of the particular religion involved. If the villain happens to
be one of these, then it is followers of the religion involved who
complain. More, the villain need be only a follower of some religion
to convict you of felonious assault upon that religion itself.
Fortunately, villains generally have no religion to speak of, but
sometimes it is essential {144} to the story's best interests to
include them at least formally in some particular fold. When it is,
do so, taking care to avoid any faint suggestion of connection
between their villainy and their faith. The type of mind that
considers the villainy of a single fictional character an attack on a
religion as a whole can be given consideration only within the bounds
of reason.
Readers are sensitive, too, on the subject of race. We have a saying
in the office that the only safe villain is an atheist American.
Since 1917 atheist Germans can be used; in fact, they are being used
until the monotony of it is wearing. A Swede as villain is taken by
some as sure sign of malignant persecution of the Swedes, an English
hero proves anti-Irish propaganda, of late even Mexicans and
Spaniards begin to protest against a fellow countryman's being used
as villain, thus robbing authors of a time-honored resource.
Even local pride rallies to the attack if fiction happens to paint
its locality in unpleasing colors.
Write your story according to its just demands, but avoid needlessly
trampling upon the toes of any of your readers. Sore toes {145} are
not conducive to the imposition of successful illusions.
_Positive vs. Negative Plots_.--Lack of consideration of this
fundamental question leads many writers into losing, unconsciously
and often needlessly, one strong, elemental hold upon the sympathies
of their readers.
Human beings like a hero better than a villain. They enjoy success
more than failure, construction better than destruction.
Consequently they derive more pleasure from following to success the
fortunes of a hero, with whom they sympathize or identify themselves,
than from following to failure the fortunes of a villain, who stands
always for the opposition. Both appeals are strong, but the point is
that the first is essentially the stronger.
Analyze a little further the reader's reactions to a negative plot.
The villain is the central character, the course of whose fortunes
forms the thread of the story. The reader, of course, knows this
from the start. He knows, too, from experience with fiction, that
this villain is almost surely doomed to failure and possibly death
and that the interest of the story lies in watching him be {146}
hunted down, defeat his own ends or get caught in a net. A strong
interest, assuredly, but inherently second in strength and lure to
that of a positive plot. In the first place, the reader knows that
he is going to a funeral, real or metaphorical. Some people like
that above all other things, but most do not. Vengeance is strong in
appeal, but at best vengeance is only an attempted and inadequate
compensation for loss of success or perfection. Second, the reader
can give only divided interest and allegiance. He generally prefers
that right should triumph, so he arrays his sympathies against the
villain, but fiction experience has firmly fixed in him the habit of
arraying himself with the central character, in this case the
villain. The usual result is that his interest has to
straddle--divide; he is at war with himself throughout the story. If
the villain succeeds, the reader's moral sense is hurt. If the
villain fails, the reader's primal sympathy with the central
character of a narrative is hurt. He can't have an unrestrained good
time no matter what happens. And his fundamental purpose in reading
fiction is to have a good time.
{147}
Fiction with only positive plots would be monotonous and the negative
plot gives a needed relief, but when you turn to it remember you are
under the handicap of a weakened hold upon your readers.
_Restraint at the Wrong Time_.--Have you ever considered how often
the reader is robbed of his vicarious enjoyment by being hurried on
when he'd really like to stop and revel or gloat? For example, take
the villain. After a career of hellish atrocities and maddening
injuries to others, often causing years of suffering, he is paid back
during the few seconds required to make a quick neat bullet-hole
through his forehead or to plunge him over a cliff. I confess myself
un-Christian enough to long for a more proportionate punishment. So
do all other readers I have questioned.
Take the lost-treasure story for another bald, extreme example.
After pursuing the treasure through a whole story of obstacles and
strain you finally get it. The author tells you you have it and
promptly drops the curtain. You don't get a chance to run the
doubloons through your fingers, to finger the jewels, to sit on the
bar silver, to review {148} happily all the pleasant things you can
do with it. Yet if you really found a treasure, in those first
moments of final attainment all the long struggle for it might become
as nothing and, in looking back, these might be the moments most
vivid and colorful. Generally when story people find the treasure
they don't seem to care a hang. In real life there would be
drunkenness or delirium of joy. Edwin Lefèvre first called my
attention to this cruelty by authors, vowing to write a treasure
story in which the reader would have a real chance to gloat. If he
does so, I've an idea most of us will get particular enjoyment
therefrom.
And the love-story. The monotony of what is technically and vulgarly
known as "the clinch at the end" is sound reason for not always
carrying the reader quite that far along the path of true love, and
yet, in spite of all our sophistication, don't most of us down in our
hearts enjoy that satisfying culmination of the events we've been
following with so much interest? Wasn't it what we wished to happen?
Why, then, should we enjoy leaving before it does happen, carrying
with us only a hint or an inference that {149} it would happen at
all? To be sure, we can imagine the scene to suit each his own
particular fancy instead of having to accept the author's, and,
however individual the story may have been, the "clinch" is
comparatively a standardized performance with fewer enticements of
novelty, and yet--most human beings are human beings.
The above are crude illustrations, but they illustrate an important
principle in the business of pleasing a reader. The usual failure to
take advantage of the opportunity is only another one of the thousand
losses of advantage resulting from not training writers to habitual
weighing of the reader's reactions, particularly his elemental
reactions. Proportionate space and emphasis in a story must be
determined primarily by relation to plot, but the object of plot is
interest and if you can, without much or any loss in general
proportion, give the reader somewhat more play at this or that point
for the natural reactions he wishes to exercise, why not pleasure him
instead of suppressing him?
It is not a question of pleasant _versus_ unpleasant reactions, but
of whatever the reader happens to feel. It may be horror or {150}
some other unhappy emotion for which he desires more time and space.
The important thing is to give him what he desires.
_Talking Down to the Reader_.--Naturally no reader likes it and
illusion suffers in consequence. Don't be a schoolmaster or an
encyclopedia to him. If it's necessary to give him information,
weave it gently and unobtrusively into the story. Don't tell him
things he is almost sure to know already. Treat him as an equal;
don't speak down to him from a superior height. It seems bad taste,
as well as a loss in effectiveness, to ask a reader's interest in
your characters and then sneer at them yourself. If you are asking
him to join you in the sneering, he may prefer a more kindly and
courteous attitude and be irritated at you and your invitation.
_General Irritations and a General Recipe_.--Most of the points
covered in the last five chapters have general application to the
reader's likes and dislikes.
Note this:
On most points bearing on the writing of fiction, a well-thought-out
violation of the general rule or custom can often increase
effectiveness. Old methods and formulas, {151} however sound as a
general rule, lose in effect through endless repetition. They have
become usual, have worn down their original hold, the reader knows
what to expect. Give him something different and he is grateful.
Merely to be on the lookout for such opportunities is good for you in
that it keeps you from falling into the hopeless rut of routine and
slavery to rules.
_First-Person Narratives_.--Do readers prefer them? I think nobody
knows--nor will know until somebody takes a national census on the
point. Why not decide the question solely according to the demands
of the particular story and your own bent of ability, since readers
are divided on the point? Some are irritated by too much "I" and by
a point of view limited strictly to one angle; others like the unity
and sharp definiteness of such a point of view and freedom from the
author's God-like ability to know so much of what goes on in the
minds of all the characters.
_Fooling the Reader_.--Making a fool of a person is not likely to win
his sympathy. There is a world of difference between legitimate
surprise and deliberately making a {152} reader create and live in an
illusion and then showing him he's a fool for having trusted you to
guide him aright. The story that, at the very end, proves to have
been all a dream (which the author led the reader into believing a
reality) is an example of this kind of vaudeville horseplay.
_Two Setting Appeals_.--Some readers get the greater enjoyment from
settings and material with which they are familiar, others from those
as far removed as possible from their daily life. In the first case
the appeal is probably that of realism mixed with the joys of
self-conceit and pride of knowledge, in the second, probably of
novelty and of the freedom from the imagination-fettering, homely,
routine details that is so characteristic of most classic and some
modern tragedy. Here again there is no comprehensive laboratory
knowledge, and the reader's reaction should not be made the deciding
factor when there is any doubt as to the author's comparative ability
or the demands of the particular story itself.
In the case of the "costume" or "doublet and hose" story, as in some
other kinds of unfamiliar setting, there is also the appeal of
pageantry.
{153}
Temporary factors play their part in influencing readers' reactions.
When the tide of war fiction began to ebb there was a noticeable
reader reaction toward anything that would take one's thoughts away
from the Great War. The magazines suddenly shut their doors against
stories of the war, but the mere absence of these was not enough:
there arose a noticeable demand for fiction that would carry one
clear out of these modern times into past eras of greater simplicity
and less wholesale horror. War itself was not tabooed, but it must
be war of the old-fashioned kind.
{154}
CHAPTER XI
PLOT AND STRUCTURE
Throughout all nature, throughout the universe so far as we know it,
there is a basic tendency toward unity and growth. The tendency is
of course present in the human mind. That is why the human mind
demands plot and structure in fiction. In nature's higher
manifestations of plant and animal the demand for unity progresses
into a demand for organic structure, an assemblage of parts whose
respective offices and limitations are determined by their relation
to the whole and which therefore, in addition to their intrinsic
value, assume a relative value that _outranks the intrinsic_. Add to
the tendencies of unity and growth a tendency toward limit of growth,
or perfection. Fiction plot is the result of these three universal
demands, and bearing them in mind is a sound foundation from which to
consider all problems in connection with plot.
{155}
A similar process of reasoning from elemental beginnings would, if
relentlessly applied to the laws, traditions and superstitions of
art, do more than anything else to free it from chaff,
artificialities and misconceptions that have attached themselves to
it.
There is even advantage in considering examples from nature for the
sake of clearer understanding of the nature and requirements of plot.
You already know what plot is, but see whether comparison with the
following will not crystallize your concept of it to a degree that
will make you largely independent of rules and regulations:
A river-system, a river and its network of tributaries, is like a
plot. A unity with growth in a single general direction with its
mouth as climax or limit of growth; many elements combining smoothly
and perfectly into one.
The tap-root and subsidiary roots of many plants furnish a similar
illustration. A tree's framework is an inverted example.
A rope of vines or, more clearly, a man-made piece of rope in the
process of making with the loose strands gathered at one end into a
closely knit main line.
{156}
A snow-slide forced by the terrain to converge all its material into
a narrow gap at the foot of the slope.
It would be, I think, a pity if all trees and all river-systems were
made in strict accordance with one pattern, as the rules so largely
demand of plot-building. Yet either tree or river-system would be no
longer such--and a sad spectacle indeed--if it were cut into bits,
were large where it should be small or were otherwise changed from
its essential nature.
_Structure_.--It has been said that the short story is far more
exacting than the novel in demand for strict unification and rigid
enforcement of relative values. That is true in practise and I am
not sure that it isn't true in theory. Perhaps the novel escapes
through mere laziness or inability of writer and reader to create and
receive so large a unit perfectly constructed in all its many
details. Perhaps, on the other hand, the novel is a more natural
expression by the writer and a more natural and desired form for the
reader. Perhaps, if we draw the distinction between novel and
romance, only the latter should be held to the strict requirements of
short-story structure.
{157}
To take the form of strictest requirements, I have found only one
rule that seems in practise to produce satisfactory results:
The short story has one main point and only one. It may be the
climax of a course of events, an aspect of life, a psychological
impasse, what you will. But there must be only one of it. Every
other element in the story, every scrap of material, every bit of
color, every human trait, _everything_ in the story, must be
subsidiary to the main point. No elements are even admitted to the
story unless they serve in developing the main point. When admitted
they get space and emphasis only in proportion to that service. No
one of them is valuable in itself; their values are wholly relative,
not intrinsic. (Of course, there is no reason for not abandoning
this principle on occasion if you are _sure_ you can better satisfy
your readers by so doing.)
_Violations of Unity_.--Compelling your reader to follow alternately
two sets of characters in two sets of scenes is dangerous, since it
violates unity unless the reader is kept keenly conscious of their
inevitable convergence upon one point. Hopping back and forth in the
time of the action is in most {158} cases fatal to unity. Shifting
the point of view is objected to on grounds of violated
unity--telling your story first from the angle from which events are
seen by one character, then from the angle of another character or
from that of the author.
Do not leave loose strands dangling along your rope, like a minor
character who vanishes without needed explanation, or a line of
endeavor suddenly abandoned without a word.
Too many characters are not only an obstacle to clearness but greatly
increase the difficulty of unification.
Do not attempt to include too much material, color, life-history or
anything else. If your story refuses to unify satisfactorily it may
be because you are using more elements than you are able to handle.
Even if you can handle all you have, be sure that the expanse of your
canvass is not greater than the reader can look at conveniently and
without missing some of it. In a general way it is well to tuck it
in at the edges, so to speak, and enclose it in a fairly definite
picture-frame.
_Holding Reader to Correct Plot Line_.--It is {159} not sufficient to
select and assemble the proper elements according to their relative
values. The assignment of proper relative space and emphasis must be
managed with such nicety that the reader can not mistake their common
direction. He may be kept from knowledge of the goal, but he must
know and feel that everything in the story, carrying him along with
it, is sweeping along in one single general direction. If he is on a
tributary flowing southwest he must know that it is a tributary, not
the main stream, that it flows southwest and that the main stream,
while it may flow southwest, south or south-east, will hardly flow
north.
A reader tends to anticipate, to cast ahead. Make sure that, while
you hold from him sufficient to make any desired surprise effective,
he does not waste his attention-strength by casting ahead over false
trails leading away from your general direction. In other words,
keep him in hand from start to finish, being sure his feet follow
your path in your direction.
To instill a sense of plot, one must either go into endless rules,
exceptions, diagrams and analyses or else present only the
fundamentals {160} and commoner guide-posts, leaving the writer to
develop his own ability. There has been too much of the former
method and I shall not attempt to add further initiative-killing
rules, particularly as I believe that the majority of fiction rules
can often be violated with good results.
_Non-Conformist Plot and Structure_.--No rule for fiction has a sound
basis unless it is grounded on some such elemental in human nature as
an instinctive desire for growth, unity, completeness, a rounded-out
whole, symmetry, rhythm, contrast, and so forth. But even an
elemental desire can be led to the point of temporary satiety, even
contrast itself. Monotony is undoubtedly monotonous.
Consider the reader. Fed year after year with the results of the
same rules, with the same literary devices, the same general plots
and endings, the same signs along the way, isn't his appetite for
standard food sure to be dulled at intervals? He is far wiser and
more sophisticated in fiction than you probably think; if he goes
right on eating standard food it is often because he finds a scarcity
of other kinds. Why not study the condition of {161} his appetite,
estimating from how much of certain kinds of food he has had to eat
and for how long, and then make a business of feeding him a new kind
until he tires of it in turn? A most unliterary suggestion?
Perhaps, but I should not wholly relish the task of proving it such.
There are, at least, certain fashions in fiction and even in
"literature" that change and change back with the years. The costume
story reigns, sinks into oblivion, reigns again. The author chats
himself into his stories, keeps out of them, enters once more to chat
again. Romance and realism alternate in favor. The critics permit
it, though sneering perhaps at each change, just as they are inclined
to sneer at both change and permanence themselves.
Why not other changes? For example, more changes from the rules of
plot? Many fairly radical changes, indeed, could be made without
violation of the really fundamental rules.
Here is the story of an interesting laboratory experiment on the
reactions of readers. During the war our managing editor was
stationed in one of the largest officers' {162} training camps. He
made a business of watching the reactions of his comrades to magazine
fiction and of course to our own magazine in particular. It happened
that an author asked me to decide a question for him. He was writing
a novelette around an historical character and found himself on the
horns of a dilemma. Either he must do extreme violence to the facts
of that famous person's life, particularly as to sequence of events,
or else abandon any attempt at a real fiction plot. I suggested that
he abandon the attempt at plot and structure and make the story
practically a mere running narrative.
In the training camp the results of that experiment were startling
and very suggestive. Among all the stories in books and magazines
that structureless novelette reported by far the most comment and
praise. The most valuable point was that the readers were
sufficiently analytical to know, and state, exactly why they liked
it: "Different from other stories." "Couldn't tell what was going to
happen." "Couldn't predict the end after reading a third of the
way." "Like real life."
Many of them had read numerous other stories by the same author, Hugh
Pendexter, {163} dealing with similar material and times, but all
these stories had conformed to the laws of plot and structure.
Practically none of the readers was sufficiently familiar with the
historical character's life to know the material in advance.
Another laboratory experiment. One day in the office some one
suggested we hadn't had a "desert island" story for a long while and
ought to get one. All agreed, but of course with no enthusiasm; all
of us could tell that story in its essentials before it was even
written. Then some one wished they'd write "desert island" stories
that were different. All seven of us fell to outlining the kind we'd
like personally. All seven agreed. All wanted the usual "props"
left out and all wanted the castaways to have a real and a realistic
struggle for existence--"no self-sacrificing fish," as one put it.
There were to be no practical specialists like engineers, sailors,
carpenters and botanists in the party. Just every-day people like
ourselves.
Then we figured that, if this was the kind of story all of us craved,
there were probably many readers, just as sophisticated or "fed up"
as we, who also would welcome this {164} departure. We presented the
problem to J. Allan Dunn, asking whether he cared to write a "desert
island" novelette without any of the usual material therefor, no
savages, volcanoes, women, cocoanuts, socialism, rival party,
tropical vegetation, fierce beasts, animals waiting for
domestication, no specialists in the party, no supplies to draw from,
nothing, not even a pen-knife or watch-crystal. Each of us wrote out
a list of the things he knew or could do that might be useful in the
circumstances--unspecialized and, mostly, meager lists.
He accepted, after justified hesitation. We modified our terms to
permit him wild dogs and wild boars for excitement, meat and leather,
but it was understood that action, interest and whatever plot proved
possible were to be drawn from the barehanded struggle with nature
for existence.
The conditions and circumstances were given to our readers along with
the published story. It won a stronger response from them than had
any other story we'd published for several years. This from the
audience of a magazine devoted primarily to action stories of which
the usual "desert island" story is a {165} fairly representative
type, though it must be admitted that this audience has been
recruited from among those who prefer more nourishing meat along with
the action, insist upon a sound basis of fact or probability and are
too sophisticated not to have tired of the usual hack melodrama.
These two experiments are at least suggestive. You can doubtless
recall from your own experience stories that registered strongly on
you because of variance from the usual types. Generally, if the
story succeeds, the variance is attributed to genius or unusual
gifts; as a matter of fact it is in most cases due either to accident
or to a mere common-sense study of readers and what can be expected
to have dulled their appetites.
_Ending a Story_.--Variance from type in the ending is of particular
value. It must, of course, be an ending logically belonging to the
story, but surprise, or at least change, is entirely possible.
Yet is there any escape from the "happy ever after" ending of a
love-story? I suppose and hope so, but have my doubts except as to
the rarest instances. A love-story without at least the suggestion
of marriage or its {166} substitute as ending seems considered almost
as desolate as a love-story without either love or story.
Renunciation is a reversal of "happy ever after" rather than a
variation, and not generally popular. Death is very grudgingly
accepted as a substitute. I've made earnest effort to secure
variants--parties decide to be friends instead, one party proves to
love a third party or grows weary of the second, parties quarrel and
omit making up, death of either or of all hands, anything for a
change. No results except a death-rate well under one per cent.
Perhaps it is because writers believe editors will not accept
variants from the "happy ever after." I suspect their belief is well
founded, but I wonder whether in this case the editorial attitude is
not solidly based on a downright insistence from human-being readers.
Unhappy endings? The minority like them, the majority do not. I can
venture nothing more except that the size of the minority increases
if the line is drawn not between "unhappy" and "happy" but between
endings that leave the reader depressed and those that leave him
uplifted. Through the {167} latter, with their appeal of pathos or
high tragedy, there is decided opportunity for comparative variation
from the usual.
At the end of a story I think most readers rather resent loose
strands of plot left untied, like minor characters of whose future no
glimpse is afforded or some minor enterprise that has run through the
plot only to have its fate a mystery at the end. Skill, particularly
in unifying severely to the central point, can make the reader forget
the disappearance of minor strands at the very end, but it is well to
remember that most readers have a healthy sense of legitimate
curiosity.
_Beginning a Story_.--At the first word of your story the reader
knows nothing concerning it except what title, illustrations and
contents-page may have told him. Generally he doesn't know whether
it is laid in Africa, Alaska or New York City, or whether it is of
to-day, 1890 or 1700. The more quickly you tell him, the more
quickly can you draw him into your illusion. If you wait, you almost
certainly confuse and irritate him. Story after story comes in to
editors that leaves the reader groping and unable to settle down
until long after it is under way; often {168} he doesn't learn where
he is until he has wandered through several pages. Even a paragraph
is too long a wait--and waste. You need not make a business of
placarding date and place, but there are a myriad ways of introducing
him quickly to both. Failure to do this is so common and so
extremely injurious to the story's effectiveness that it affords a
most striking example of the disastrous effects of giving more
attention to rules than to common sense and of not drilling into the
very bones of writers the necessity of watching and measuring their
stories constantly from the point of view of readers.
Another common and bad mistake is to present any but a main character
first, preferably the main character. Indeed, in the short story
perfect unification almost demands that he be first on the stage.
But there is a common-sense reason aside from that of unity and
centralization. Long experience with fiction has taught readers that
the first character to appear is nearly always the main character,
therefore whatever character gets the initial spot-light is promptly
seized upon by them as the main one. If he isn't, they have to let
go of the story illusion they are already building and start {169}
building a new one around a new center and feel rather foolish or
cheated and irritated. As in the case of not setting time and scene,
the writer has failed to hold them to the correct plot line--even to
start them on it. Of what avail is knowledge of technique, or the
present method of teaching technique, if it fails to impress such
horse-sense points as these? Sufficient skill can introduce the
central character when and how it pleases, but most writers lack it.
In the case of the drama there is no harm in minor characters
appearing first. Stage custom has established this, not the other,
as the custom. Also, the stage, being better able to study its
patrons at first-hand, has realized the catastrophe of letting them
stray from the correct plot line and guards against it by giving out
programs in advance as keys to caste (with characters listed in order
of appearance), scene, time and sometimes even more; the rise of the
curtain instantly gives the audience its bearings in a general way,
and star, scene, time and even plot are frequently known before
entering the theater. Writers of fiction could profit tremendously
by careful study of the necessarily practical technique--or common
sense--of the theater.
{170}
CHAPTER XII
CHARACTER
For broadest popularity possibly the prime single requisite in
fiction is action plot, but, if so, character drawing is at least a
close second. Human nature's interest in human nature is undying and
intense. By the tests of the somewhat indefinite thing we call
literature, character probably ranks first. Action, on the other
hand, seems the more primitive and the more fundamental; early man
undoubtedly acted first and thought later; when he learned to analyze
his fellows it was for purposes of action.
_An Experiment_.--It is interesting to look back over the centuries
and consider the stories that have had sufficient hold to endure.
Which do you remember first and the most distinctly, "Sherlock
Holmes," "Mulvaney," "Richard Feveril," "Amyas Leigh," "John Silver,"
"Becky Sharpe," "Old {171} Scrooge," "Quasimodo," "Don Quixote,"
"Falstaff," "Hamlet," "Lady Macbeth," "Faust," etc., or the plots and
action in which they were concerned? "Arthur," "Tristan," "Roland,"
"Siegfried," "Finn McCool," etc., or their adventures? "Aeneas,"
"Hector," "Ulysses," etc., or what they did?
I have made no laboratory tests on other people, so can risk no
conclusions from this test beyond venturing that, as the race grew
older and its literature developed, character interest tended to take
first place over the more primitive action appeal. Make your own
tests, allowing for the differences between stories of the last few
centuries and those of long ago. After trying out yourself, try out
as many other people as you can. If you do, you'll get valuable
knowledge--and understanding--not likely to be found in books.
You'll get not only some useful fundamental ideas on the values and
relative values of plot and character, but possibly, by contrast with
others, a sound idea as to whether your real bent is for plot or for
character, and, best of all, you will have done something toward
forming or strengthening {172} the laboratory habit of examining
facts instead of swallowing at theories, and the habit of thinking
for yourself instead of using the weakening crutch of accepting other
people's theories that they in turn probably accepted from other
people _ad infinitum_.
In any case character drawing--human nature--is one of the two most
important elements in fiction. Yet the lack of it marks the majority
of submitted manuscripts. In many of these cases it is an utter,
total, complete, absolute lack, unless you count the crude class
distinction between hero and villain. Characters are merely proper
names, lucky if there is even an individualized or slightly
individualized physical body to cling to, and twice lucky if said
body has clothes or habits of its own. You can lift them out of one
story and substitute them in another with no damage to them or to
either story and with decided profit in the case of the first. It is
pitiful--and maddening.
The tragedy of it is that it can easily be remedied by any writer of
average human intelligence. All he needs for comparatively decent
characterization is a certain very simple recipe.
{173}
_A Recipe_.--I don't know whose recipe it is, having heard it years
ago and forgotten his name, though I think its accredited father
dates back a century or so, but he should be crowned in honor and the
use of his recipe made compulsory by law. Apparently not one writer
in ten thousand ever even heard of it.
You can dig out that recipe for yourself by the laboratory method
advocated above, if you will trace English literature back toward its
beginnings. And if I give you a broad hint by suggesting a bit of
thoughtful, practical consideration of the morality plays, you should
have no trouble at all.
There it is, simple, elemental, effective--_assign to each person in
your story one single trait of character and make him show it by
actions, words, thoughts._
Carry it into as much detail as possible. If I remember aright, the
recipe's reputed father took as example a character whose one trait
was cruelty and said that if he were made to walk in a garden he must
be made to knock off the heads of flowers with his cane as he passed.
That's as far as the recipe goes, so far as {174} I remember, but try
a second elementary step--show the reaction of this single
predominant trait upon the other persons in the story, in what they
say to him, do to him, think of him, always, of course, in the light
of their own single traits.
Third step: Assign one or more persons a second trait, a minor trait,
and proceed as before.
Try it, if you are not beyond the need of fundamental suggestions as
to characterization. You will not only reap a rich harvest of
concrete results but will also be getting a most excellent training.
Only a few days ago I was told of a case in which it has had a
thorough test. I've never read anything by the author in question,
but know that he turns out a consistent and steady flow of books
whose sales are enormous though treated with condescension by critics
of literature. The report is that in the actual writing of his
stories he does not even give names to his characters but uses the
name of the predominant traits he assigns to them--Cruelty, Honesty,
Vanity, and so on. When the story is finished he, or perhaps his
secretary, goes through the {175} manuscript, strikes out these names
of traits and gives each character whatever name meets general
requirements. _Voilà_! Personally, I'd give a good deal to know
what would happen to his sales if he abandoned this method and the
kind of characterization it produces--to know, rather, whether he
would ever have had enormous sales if he had not used this recipe.
Just using the morality plays--and _Pilgrim's Progress_--as a sound
foundation. Maybe it's funny, but maybe you could profit by it
yourself. Heaven knows that plenty of writers could!
_Tags_.--If I could, I'd hang over almost every writer's desk a large
card bearing in very black letters these words:
"Remember that yours is not the only story in the world and that it
has to compete for the reader's attention with countless other
stories. Your interest in it is particularized and personal; his is
not. Also, you already know everything in the story; he does not.
You may have failed to put on paper part of what you know; in that
case he will never know it.
"Remember that your reader has met many {176} people in real life,
forgotten all about most of them, including their names, and that in
the great number of stories he has read he has met a far greater
number of fictitious people who, along with their names, fail in even
greater proportion than have the real people to register upon his
attention, interest and memory. You are merely adding a few more to
his hundreds of thousands. The competition is heavy. You can make
no headway against it if your story-persons are only names, almost
none if they are only mildly individualized and characterized, little
enough even, if they are drawn fairly strongly.
"Remember, too, that when you introduce him to more than two or three
new people they have to compete, also, among themselves--that he is
likely to have difficulty even in straightening them out in his mind
and connecting the right name with each character. If you wish your
people to get and hold his attention and to have any place in his
memory, you must strive with all your might to _mark_ each character,
to individualize each character, by every means within your reach.
If you have not a natural gift {177} for character drawing, use
elementary methods."
The particular elementary, and very effective, method I have in mind
is to hang on to each character one or more of what in the writing of
plays are called, I believe, tags. It can be called, if you like,
advertising your characters. Most of them need it. Or might be
likened to the use of motifs in opera. Or you might find in it even
an approximation to the conditions of real life.
Put a strongly individualized label on each of your characters and
make the readers keep looking at it. This character continually
introduces his speeches with "Well now"; that one is always nervously
hitching up his trousers at the knees; John Jones is so interested in
golf that he is perpetually dragging it into conversation; Myrtle is
always tittering; Brown is conspicuously careful of his personal
appearance, while his brother George wears anything that comes handy
and Sister Isabel has almost a monomania for red; Judson habitually
looks into the eyes of people with an intent gaze that is hard to
meet; Henry in appearance and manner suggests a sheep; the peculiar
blackness of {178} Maude's eyes is her most marked and impressive
feature.
Never let a character remain long on the stage without presenting his
tag. It individualizes more strongly than a name. It is a most
useful guide-post to the reader. It strongly reinforces
character-drawing and may even serve as a cheap substitute, a
substitute at any price being preferable to nothing. Also, it
becomes an _asset in itself_, an element of appeal that runs the
range from farce to tragedy and you can mix or alternate these or
other appeals with strong results. Its effect is cumulative. There
is for its intrinsic value a sound grounding in fundamental human
nature--a reader's unconscious pride and vanity in "detecting" it as
characteristic, in being able to forecast its coming, his interest
and consequent like or dislike for tags in real life, his comfort in
having mental tasks made easy.
Of course, if you've drawn real character for the persons in your
story, make their tags consistent with character--or, rarely, in
deliberate and evident contrast. Equally, of course, a tag, like any
other good thing, must be handled with judgment and not allowed to
run riot.
{179}
_Results from Tags and High-Point Characterization_.--Study the
following fiction characters that have made a big and lasting "hit,"
so much so that they have been carried through a series of books:
"Sherlock Holmes," "Captain Kettle," "Don Q.," "Brigadier Gerard,"
"Tartarin," "D'Artagnan," "Athos," "Porthos," "Aramis," "Mulvaney,"
"Ortheris," "Learoyd," "Allen Quatermain," "Wallingford"; consider
also some characters of Dickens. Some of these are well-drawn and
well rounded out, but others reduce to the bare bones of the
"one-trait recipe" and the use of tags, really very elementary
creations. Yet all are made vivid and individualized by means of
tags and strongly emphasized traits of character. While the tags,
for the most part, are handled with at least a fair degree of skill,
the characterization in some cases, though of course not limited to a
single trait, is incomplete, very elementary and not very well done.
Yet all have gained a strong popular success, not just from the
stories in which they appear, but as characters.
It is clear from the above that while the "one-trait recipe" and the
use of tags do not necessarily spell literature they are by no {180}
means incompatible with it. They are merely first steps toward
really good character depiction. Their importance in any teaching of
fiction is due chiefly to the lamentable fact that most writers do
not take or even see them.
Even advanced writers can often profit from consideration of their
values. For example, in a certain successful series of novelettes
and novels told in the first person but centering on another
character, the narrator was almost entirely lacking in tags and
salient character traits and didn't even have a name, or a past, or a
body, or, often, clothes until well along in the series. He was
consistently drawn, so far as he went, but almost colorless and with
little grip on interest and memory, though having a prominent place
in the plot and not thus subordinated for the sake of relative values
and unity around the central character. The central character was
strongly drawn, tags and all, and the series as a whole had so many
other merits that the colorlessness of the fictitious narrator could
not wreck it, but its improvement was very marked when he was
developed and brought to his proper place in the lime-light by the
tags and salient traits needed in addition to the general filling in.
{181}
_Characterization in General_.--I attempt no covering of the subject,
desiring only to bring out the points that the general in-flow of
manuscripts shows are, in practise, most in need of attention. There
are already hosts of books giving detailed instructions, theories,
examples, analyses and exercises. Some of them are useful and
valuable in many cases. In general they seem to me likely to be
dangerous, unless the student uses exceptional care, in that they are
likely to encourage a tendency toward mechanics instead of art,
artificiality instead of naturalness, strain and limitation instead
of freedom, and copying instead of art. I am aware that tags and the
"one-trait recipe" seem open to the same charge, but their saving
clause is that they can teach the writer how to develop himself
rather than how to turn out finished work by rule. Also the present
need of them in practise is appalling, and perhaps that need would
not be so great if writers had been trained by more naturalistic
methods.
The only sound and comprehensive rule for characterization is:
Study people, first as subjects, second as recipients of the
knowledge you have gained.
{182}
CHAPTER XIII
INDIVIDUALITY VS. TECHNIQUE
Year after year editors sit at their desks and almost at a single
glance reject anywhere from sixty to ninety per cent. of the
manuscripts that come in, and, on the whole, they make few mistakes
in so doing. Some of these summarily rejected ones are so illiterate
that most freshmen in college would unhesitatingly turn them down,
but on the majority is the damning and almost unmistakable brand of
"no individuality"--merely another manuscript plodding blindly along
in the machine-like effort to turn out by machine-like methods
another one "like those they've read," another stilted, unnatural
attempt at producing a life-like copy of a model denaturalized, by
them or their teachers, into a mechanical and artificial collection
of rags, bones and hanks of hair that has never known the breath of
life.
{183}
_Lack of Individuality_.--How can the editor tell at a glance? How
in heaven's name can he help telling? He's read the same kind of
thing--the same thing except for variations of theme and
setting--thousands and thousands and thousands of times before until
recognizing it at a glance is as easy as recognizing a trolley-car
among other vehicles on his way to the office of mornings. The
tracks are no plainer in one case than the other.
But maybe the author does better farther on in the story? Doubtless
it has happened, but the instances constitute a negligible factor.
That poor editor learned to hunt no farther only by hunting farther
thousands of times, when he was new and optimistic, and finding
nothing. He has learned that any writer fool enough to begin a story
in so stupid a way is too much a fool all the way along to be worth
listening to.
Disbelieve this ability, if you like, and let's pass on to the
stories he does not discard at a glance. These he reads to varying
extents, according to their ability to hold him as an
editor--sometimes a cursory examination, sometimes solid parts here
and there, sometimes straight through, sometimes only part {184} way.
Many things, including mistaken judgment, can stop him, but oftenest
of all I believe it is the story's lack of individuality. He finds
he's read it too many times before and knows that his readers have.
The sameness may be in plot, theme, style, anything or all together,
but it's the sameness that stops him and kills the story. As a
reader, judge for yourself from the stories that get published, after
editors have discarded all but enough to fill their space--all but
one to five per cent. say, of the total submitted. Is there not
sufficient sameness in even these? Then judge what the discarded
ninety-five or ninety-nine per cent. must be, making any reasonable
allowance you please for the fallibility of editors.
_Reasons for the Lack_.--Much of the lack of individuality in stories
is due to lack of individuality in the writers. To what degree a
person can develop his individuality I do not presume to say, but
lack of real individuality in his stories is curable to exactly that
degree and no more.
But many of the writers whose stories show none, have individuality.
Why doesn't it show in their work? Because they have been {185}
taught by present methods of teaching fiction to be artificial, not
natural, or have themselves slavishly modeled themselves after some
one else.
What chance has your individuality if you turn your back on it and
resolutely try to copy another man's, or if you lose yourself in an
endless maze of rules and regulations? Rules and regulations
imposed, for the most part, by people equally lost in the maze.
No, you can't let your individuality run riot regardless of all
rules, for some rules are laws of the human mind to which all of us
are subject. But it does not follow that you must assassinate your
individuality. It is your main asset. Without it, neither empty
rules nor sound laws can build anything of themselves.
Technique? Of course you need technique, but if you make of it a
golden calf and bow down in worship, you perish.
Get technique; don't let it get you. What technique should give you
is tools, not rules. And not a monomaniac collector's collection of
tools, collected for the sake of including all tools known to man,
but only those tools so well mastered that they fit almost {186}
automatically into your hand, carrying out smoothly the guiding
impulse of your brain.
But you have to learn to use them before you can acquire such skill?
Yes, but remember the purpose of your learning--and don't try to
learn and use more tools than you can master. Remember that an augur
is an augur--that it's not a demand upon you to bore a hole in
something, but only a means of making a hole when one is needed.
Because a hammer is for driving nails do you have to use it when
you're modeling in clay?
I dare say it is bad taste for me to criticize other books on writing
fiction and other methods of teaching fiction, but, pardon me, I
don't give a damn. For years I've sat and watched teachers, poorly
equipped for the task and perfectly equipped for their manner of
handling it, blandly do their utmost to ruin a writer by holding
before his wide eyes so many rules that he finds it difficult ever to
see anything else. If among them are included some rules on
preserving his individuality while he's following all the other
rules, what can that mean to him? If his teachers perchance present
technique as tools, not rules, they load so many of them upon his
{187} trustful back that he can not walk, to say nothing of mastering
the tools.
The essence of their damage lies in two things:
First, the rules they pour forth so endlessly they themselves got
from some one else and accept them chiefly for that reason. Ask them
the why of each of their rules and there is likely to be a
considerable hiatus between their last book and the next.
Too often they seem to have been merely perpetuating an hereditary
collection of rules for the sake of preserving the collection as an
entity in itself, forgetting that some of the rules might be unsound
and neglecting--if they ever thought about them--to give their
students the foundations in human nature upon which the sound ones
must rest.
Second, the whole tendency of such teaching is to make the learner
look at other writers instead of within himself, to absorb other
people's style and methods instead of developing his own, to copy
rather than to think things out for himself, to be artificial rather
than natural, cramped rather than free, to waste his time on details
instead of giving it to vital things.
{188}
I should venture no such strong condemnation if I did not feel that I
am merely voicing the opinion of most editors--of the men and women
who are in best position to note the devastating effects upon
to-day's fiction. And I am, of course, speaking of the books and
teaching methods as a class. There are exceptions, naturally--though
one writer, for example, tells me he has read between forty and fifty
books on fiction writing, finding only one of them worth while--and
practically all such books can be of use, sometimes of very great
use, to the raw beginner. So can a rhetoric or a common English
grammar.
In the light of results, the fundamental point these books most fail
to make is that most of their contents should be read--not memorized
or swallowed--for stimulus and suggestion only, and that the student
must see to it that no rules turn him aside from his main business of
developing and using his own individuality.
I am painfully aware that in this book I, too, have given rules as
rules, but I have tried to give the foundations of a sufficient
number of them to lead the student into the habit of looking for
foundations himself and working {189} out his own destiny. For the
foundations I ask consideration, for my rules none at all except as
danger-signs erected from twenty years' experience to point out the
errors most common in actual practise.
I am still more keenly aware that in many instances I fail to meet
possible objections and justified exceptions. Often it is because I
fail to think of them at the time or never thought of them, but often
it is because there is a limit to available space and because too
many aspects and too much detail breed confusion. Literature is the
communication, between human beings, of human nature and human
experience. Who can give complete rules for a process and content so
infinitely various? Bear in mind first, last and always, that this
book does not attempt to be a complete treatise on writing fiction.
Its purpose is to emphasize those points and points of view that,
from years of examining the actual manuscripts submitted to
magazines, seem most to need emphasis, and, second, to raise against
the present fashion in teaching methods a small flag of revolt under
which I believe most editors and most discriminating readers will be
content to stand, no matter {190} how great may be their disagreement
with me on specific points.
_Unfamiliarity with Things Taught_.--Last week I borrowed three books
on the writing of fiction and ran through their pages. One was by a
university professor who gave a most interesting picture of the
editorial world, of its offices, their occupants, customs, rules,
policies, points of view. The title-page stated that he had formerly
been with a publishing house--probably for the sake of the
experience, during a summer vacation. I became fascinated, almost
wishing I could live in that world myself. I never have.
I realize that, for those entirely unfamiliar with the inside of the
editorial world, his picture of it was sufficiently near the truth to
be of decided practical value. Yet his almost glib generalities and
his choices for particularization made me shudder for the
misapprehensions that might arise from them. He was like the
European traveler who spends a month or two in the United States and
then describes and explains it to the world. Any conscientious
editor of long experience would, I think, hesitate before attempting
to present in a chapter or two of a text-book for earnest {191}
students a complete and final exposition of the editorial field. It
is too complex, too various, too changeable.
And if these teachers venture to expound so much and so finally from
so small a knowledge of what may be called the mere machinery of the
editorial world, it seems logical to conclude that they may have
equally insufficient basis when they attempt to explain what kind of
fiction the editors want and how to manufacture it.
_Evils of Models and Examples_.--But what struck me most forcibly in
those three books was the vast amount of space given to models and
examples. Stories were constantly being laid upon the operating
table, in whole or part, and dissected and analyzed. The pages were
strewn with dismembered parts, ticketed and labeled, to be sure, and
filed in most orderly fashion, but the panorama as a whole was enough
to ruin a writer forever if it did not drive him mad. Oh yes, I know
we must take a clock apart before we can learn how to make a clock,
but an artist should live in a studio, not an operating-room. The
use of examples and models is a valuable adjunct of teaching, but it
is not teaching. As far as {192} I can learn from cursory glances
from time to time, through inquiry and through noting results in
submitted manuscripts, dissected models and examples form the
backbone of teaching method. Use them, by all means, but only
sufficiently to show the student how to do his own analyzing when he
feels the need. And teach him general principles to make him keen to
the need when it is there. Teach _him_ to work; don't litter his
mind with the work you've done on a third person's work.
The mechanical method of teaching is perfectly adapted to those
students who by no possibility can be anything but mechanical
writers, working by rule of thumb, building a structure by foot-rule
and pouring in its contents from a graduated beaker. But is
producing such writers worth while or even justifiable? Even if your
purpose is the broader, industrial one of adding to the general
earning capacity of the nation? Of course, if you are merely writing
a text-book that will sell--
It is upon the writers who are not doomed by their own limitations to
be merely mechanics that the curse of mechanical teaching {193}
falls. The genius and the really strong individualist will escape,
but what of him with moderate or even considerable gifts? He goes
into the bed of Procrustes. He is lopped here, stretched there; he
is badgered and blinded with examples and precedents, kept from
natural development and natural expression by the study of rules for
growth and by listening to other people express themselves, prevented
from being himself and giving rein to his own individuality by the
constant study of individualities not his own. If only you could sit
for a year at some editorial desk and see these poor maimed fellows
come in endless line with their pathetic, lifeless wares! Well-made
stories, so much so that they are almost exactly like all other
well-made stories, but in them here and there a still unsmothered
spark that might have been a flame. And after the procession has
filed up to you for a while it is not the properly built stories they
lay on your desk that you see, but those countless other stories that
will never be laid on any desk. It is like looking out over the
world of children who can never be born, the better children, the
dream children, who could make the world so much {194} better if only
they were here. If you could sit for a year at some editorial desk,
you would join with me in saying, "Damn such teaching methods!"
_Individuality and Naturalness First_.--You who are learning to
write--and writers are always learning if they are worthy of their
name--put this little rule at the head of all your list of rules and
let no rule that follows seem to you one-half so well worth clinging
to: EXPRESS YOUR NATURAL SELF NATURALLY.
Believe me, it is worth clinging to, even at the cost of aches and
bruises. As for all the other rules, accept only those grounded
solidly in human nature and take for your guides, not the rules, but
their foundations. If you find yourself drifting into the stilted
dialect so many feel must be assumed on entering the printed page,
tear up what you have written and say your say in your own words.
Maybe the result will be sad indeed; there are always many things to
learn. But in your learning you will find no secret of technique, no
trick of the trade, that is not second in importance to the prime
necessity of developing and expressing your own individuality. If
they hold before your eyes some story by De Maupassant, Stevenson,
Kipling, O. Henry, {195} look by all means and study what you see,
but be sure that your strongest reaction is, "Yes, these are deft
uses of tools, masterly handlings of thought, and I will be awake to
similar opportunities in my own work, _but_ the fact remains that
what I have seen is only De Maupassant using his tools, Stevenson
using his, and the others each his own. I am not De Maupassant or
Stevenson or Kipling or O. Henry or anybody else except myself. I
can't possibly ever be any of them, and if I try to be any of them I
can't be even myself. Perhaps their tools and devices are not the
ones best adapted to my case, though they may prove valuable. Now
I'll go back to _my_ work."
And if they ask you to look at many other workmen, refuse utterly.
Do your own looking. You probably know far better than they what it
is you need to look for; if you don't know where to look for it, then
ask. You'll probably be looking enough without any one's driving you
to it. And, always, when you look, carry away with you only what you
can absorb. Undigested food of this kind will kill you.
_Being "Literary."_--Don't try to be "literary" until you know what
being "literary" {196} really means. Most writers do not know. I'm
not sure that I know, but certainly I know a few things it is and a
few things it is not.
It is not being queer for the sake of queerness. It is not using
large and learned words. It is not getting as far away as possible
from the language of life. It is not thinking, feeling or talking
artificially instead of naturally. It is not the copying of others.
It is not either wallowing in strong emotions or daintily avoiding
them.
It is telling things as you see or feel them. It is using the words
that accomplish this with least lost motion, words so natural and
familiar you are _sure_ they are exact to the case. It is the
preserving, developing and expressing of _your own_ individuality.
Style? Be yourself and your style will be born of itself. Be
anything else and, instead of style, you will attain only an
acrobatic performance. There are enough acrobats already, and enough
people who are not themselves.
I should like to add, with some bitterness, that a knowledge of plain
English grammar, even for writers who consider themselves "arrived,"
is an almost necessary step toward being "literary."
{197}
CHAPTER XIV
THE READER AND HIS IMAGINATION
When you read a story you live more or less in its story world.
There are printed words on the page and they cause your imagination
(I do not use the word in the sense of "fancy" but to indicate the
mental power that chooses and discards among certain things to
construct certain other things) to build from your own experience a
set of mental images or impressions. The story's world becomes real
to you in proportion as the story's words succeed in making you
reproduce it in your mind.
_Variation in Visualization_.--But the success of the story's words
in doing this is dependent not only on the skill and power of their
stimulus but also on _the ability of your imagination to respond_.
Success is dependent not only on the writer but on the reader.
Readers vary tremendously in the fundamental {198} ability of their
imaginations to respond, both as to quality and degree. It is
surprising that this fact is so little known, for its careful
consideration is of the utmost importance to success in writing
fiction. While my questionings have been only casual, I have not yet
found either a writer or an editor who took this variation as a
serious factor in his work or who had even discovered the existence
of the variation. Wherefore my gratitude is the deeper to Professor
Joseph Villiers Denney for having brought it to my attention in a
college class a quarter of a century ago.
If you have not already investigated, make the experiment upon your
friends. Ask your friends what they _see_ when they read a story and
you will find amazing variations. Some visualize clearly everything
mentioned or suggested--see the characters, actions and scene in full
detail just as on a stage or in real life. Others see things and
movement, but without colors in their pictures. Some see people but
without faces. Some see things only if, and only as fully as,
described by the author. Some see fully even if the author fails to
describe. Some make their own {199} images partly different from
even definite ones painted by the author, often because he fails to
impress his images first. (In the setting of a story, for example,
haven't you, if you visualize readily, had to change your picture of
the scene's geography or pick up the whole setting and twist it
around to make north come where you had had east?) Remember this when
you are the author, and save your readers this violence to the
illusion. Some have a stock imagination-picture that does service
for a concept in almost any circumstances. Some see _practically
nothing_--can not shut their eyes and see the very room in which they
are sitting or even the faces of their nearest and dearest.
I knew a high-school valedictorian who easily mastered every subject
until she came to solid geometry. In that study she could not even
make a start, was totally helpless--simply because she was
constitutionally incapable of looking at the two-dimension page and
seeing, in her imagination, the third dimension. She got raw
potatoes, cut them up to represent the three-dimension figures and
had no further trouble. Another woman overcame the same difficulty
{200} by the same vegetable route. I know an artist, very
successfully designing stage-settings, who can not "tell how things
will look" unless he looks at them, or pictures or models of them,
with his physical eye.
Yet most writers attempt to reach all these types of imagination
without giving the matter a thought! Generally they calmly take it
for granted that every one of their readers has exactly the same
qualities and limitations of imaginative visualization as themselves!
What rich opportunities are lost! Here is a matter in which you
should _not_, without very careful consideration, write things merely
as you see them, at least when it comes to revision, unless your way
of seeing them happens to be the way that is most effective with most
people.
Each author has his individual qualities in this respect. When he
paints his word pictures he tends to use only as many strokes of his
brush as make a complete and satisfying picture for _him_. But how
complete or satisfying will that picture be to the majority of
readers who may not even approximate his qualities of imaginative
visualization? The words he has set down give _him_ {201} the
picture, but will they give it to others? He can not test out the
visualization of the entire population, but he can at least assign
himself a fairly definite place in the relative scale, scrutinize his
word pictures from the point of view of those of different powers and
probably revise his painting methods so that his stories will gain
surprisingly in popular appeal, either by additional touches or by
changing the relative proportion of the various kinds of stimulus.
A certain writer of western stories found that his work made a strong
appeal to those it interested at all, but that the size of his
audience was far less than seemed justly merited. Apparently all the
elements of good fiction were present. But, if he had considered his
readers' psychology in other respects, he certainly had not done so
as to visualization. He himself could reread his words and from them
see his story world in full. So could I, for we both happened to
have the type of imagination that visualizes readily and fills gaps
when needed. But many readers haven't this type and, as finally
became apparent, these were largely the ones who had failed to become
part of {202} his normal audience. For he had not drawn any visual
pictures for those who need them. To them his story people were
merely names and dispositions, without clothes or bodily appearance,
that did dim things in unseen places. The author had deemed it waste
of words to describe things that were--to him--seen of themselves.
It was difficult to get him to "pad" his stories with visualizing
descriptions, but when he began adding them his audience began to
grow.
_Variation in Other Imaginative Powers_.--You will find that probably
a minority have imaginations that reproduce not only visual
impressions but those of the other senses. Some can hear the sounds
of a story--not merely have an intelligent concept of sounds
mentioned, but actually hear them almost as clearly as if they were
actual physical sounds. Some can taste _via_ their imaginations,
with such vividness that their mouths water. Some can smell the
odors in a story they read. Some can reproduce the impressions that
register through the sense of touch--smoothness, friction, impact,
pressure.
I hope to have for a later volume some statistics that will give some
idea of the {203} relative frequency of the reproduction of the
senses. In any case, the great opportunity for loss or gain of hold
on readers offered through visual imagination is considerably
multiplied by the cases of the four other senses. The field as a
whole is so important it is almost incredible that it does not play a
main part in all teaching of fiction writing. Appeal to the senses
may possibly be included, though I've not chanced on it in my cursory
glances at text-books, but, as previously stated, up to this writing
I've happened to find no writer who has even considered the variation
in sense-imagination among readers.
I recall a statement in Professor Denney's thesis class to the effect
that analysis would show the most popular poets, like Burns and
Longfellow, to be as a rule strongly marked by their imagination
appeal to all or most of the five senses. Is there any reason why a
similarly broad appeal in the case of prose would not reap like
results? The case would seem to be stated thus: The more fully you
reach a reader, the more fully you reach him.
Suppose your imagination sees and hears, {204} but does not smell,
taste or touch. Look at one of your own stories. Have you given
comparatively few pictures or stimuli to your readers' visual and
auditory imagination, perhaps taking it for granted that all readers
would supply them fully and satisfactorily, as you do? Or have you,
simply absorbed in your own personal equation, failed to put into
your story any considerable number of stimuli to smell, taste and
touch imaginations? In either case, consider how greatly you have
weakened your story.
{205}
CHAPTER XV
THE PLACE OF ACTION IN FICTION
As people progress in culture there is a strong tendency more and
more to consider physical action in fiction crude. This is
unfortunate--and unthinking.
_Action Considered Unliterary_.--The cause, I think, is twofold.
First, most of the crudest published fiction relies to a great extent
on action. It is natural and illogical to construct the following
syllogism:
All crude fiction is action.
Crudity is poor art.
Therefore action is poor art.
Second, as a race develops in civilization and culture it nearly
always tends to lose vigor, drifts further and further away from
physical action and more and more into ease, inactivity and softness.
It also tends more and more to nicety and detail and {206} away from
the elemental. Physical action is elemental and inclined to sweep
nicety and detail aside. Naturally both critics and writers come to
consider action crude, something behind and beneath them.
Consequently, as a rule, only the lower-grade writers use much
action. Consequently action stories as a whole sink to a still lower
level. Consequently readers feel still more justified in considering
action crude. But is it?
_False Culture_.--Things would be vastly simplified and improved if
all who think they know what really constitutes good literature
really did know. Nine out of ten have for sole standard the opinions
of others. The "others" are fallible, many of them distinctly
unreliable. The nine are, of course, unable to tell whose or which
opinions are worth while. None of them does any real thinking of his
own and most of them do not even make the attempt. There are nine of
them who do not to one who does think and does know. The resulting
standard is painful. Also artificial and unsound.
A sad feature is that their methods tend to unify their opinions and
thus give them the preponderating influence in shaping the {207}
opinions of all the people who don't pretend to know. Professional
critics being comparatively few, each critic sways many sheep. Also,
the sheep have been referred, rightly enough, to the _Atlantic_ as
the "most literary magazine in America." They accept its standard
without discrimination or understanding. If a piece of fiction is
different, in any way, from the fiction of the _Atlantic_, they
therefore consider it unliterary. Worst of all, many of those who
judge by _Atlantic_ standards have a bare bowing acquaintance with
that most excellent magazine.
Now the _Atlantic_, for all its scope and splendid humanness, in some
respects savors of the library rather than of the rough world at
large. Critics, being human, and being generally compelled to do a
lot of criticizing, weary of the everlasting fundamentals and seek
relief in attention to the niceties and curlycues, these being, also,
more plentifully at hand. The sheep herded by the critics and by the
_Atlantic_ "habit" naturally come to look down, way down, upon the
action story.
Also, popular demand for action in fiction {208} continues strong.
It is a cardinal tenet of the unliterary literary person's belief
that anything popular is therefore low. I shall not be surprised if
some day all fiction that interests in any way is condemned because
the popular demand is for fiction that interests.
Still another factor is at work. In clinging blindly to the classics
as standards and models many fail to discriminate either in
recognizing just which qualities in a classic entitle it to lasting
place or in allowing for the difference between the time in which it
was written and our own times. Some of its qualities stand forever,
but in many cases other qualities lack that permanence of appeal and
are very distinctly tuned to its own era. Is the verbosity of a
century or two ago, or the sentimentality of the early Victorian
period, in key with the spirit and genius of this century? How could
it be when our whole civilization has rushed us into a hundred fold
greater speed and intensity, surrounded us with a million incentives
to practical activity and hurry? Railroads, steamships, trolleys,
autos, modern newspapers, motion-pictures, telephones, telegraphs,
{209} wireless, electricity and machinery in general, these have
geared us to a far faster pace. We can no longer travel naturally in
stage-coaches. _The Vicar of Wakefield_, allowing it its
excellencies, is no longer geared to living man. Therefore, in that
respect, it is not a classic, not permanent, should not be even a
subconscious model.
And in the choosing of books to be labeled classics the natural
inadaptability of the old generation to the new, together with the
tendency to limit "literature" to products refined away from
elementals instead of merely away from crudities, has still further
cast action into disrepute.
All in all, the action story has a pretty hard time of it nowadays if
it dares plead any claim to being literature.
_Fundamental Tests_.--Yet, if the test of literature be its permanent
appeal to human beings, regardless of changing times, the action
story fares at least as well as the best.
To be permanent an appeal must reach the only things that are
permanent and universal in human beings, the only permanent and
universal things are the elementary, fundamental ones, and "action"
meets that {210} test at least as well as anything else. Undoubtedly
the race was acting before it was psychologizing or even talking.
If proof of this fundamental and everlasting hold is needed, witness
the wide-spread, undying demand for action stories. Also note the
fact that most of the classics that have lived longest are crammed
full of action--Homer, Virgil, any of the epics or sagas. No, they
don't live because of that alone, but could they have lived without
it?
If you think that, for all their culture, the most sophisticated and
literary specimens among us have really grown beyond the reach of the
action appeal, you are much mistaken. Try them, when no one is
looking, with a good action story, even one unsanctified as a
classic. Scratch the skin and you'll find red corpuscles in even the
most anemic blood. Somewhere deep in each of them is the impulse to
do, and the admiration for doing. As children they gave it natural
outlet; has the leopard changed his spots? Neither restraint nor
veneer, neither pose nor inactive living, can eradicate this thing
the child was born with.
I've particular reason to speak on that {211} point. _Adventure_ was
founded with the primary purpose of meeting this action demand on the
part of the more cultured classes, the people whose normal reading is
of the "highbrow" variety but who habitually turn at odd moments to
stories of action, who accept "trashy" stories if no better offer,
but prefer stories sufficiently well done to stand the test of their
sophistication. The fact that the magazine's secondary appeal is to
those of less literary sophistication and franker interest in the
elementals in no way invalidates the primary aim or seems to limit
its success. It is difficult to say which of these classes is
naturally the more given to writing letters to magazines, but it is
difficult to say which of them is the more heavily represented in my
correspondence basket.
The latter, I suppose, depends upon where you attempt to draw a hard
and fast line between the two classes. Professional men of all
classes form a large part of the audience--physicians, lawyers,
educators, scientists, engineers, statesmen, ministers and priests;
letters from those of undoubted culture in the ordinary sense of that
word are very {212} strongly in evidence; more than once the
definite, concrete statement has been volunteered that "I read only
two magazines--_Atlantic_ and _Adventure_." Yet, personally, I find
it not always easy to say that this general class has a keener sense
for what seem to me the essential literary values. More articulate
and with better opportunity for comparisons, yes; but with point of
view more obscured by their sophistication. However, there is no
doubt as to the common action appeal to both extremes of the
audience, and nearly a dozen years have eradicated my last doubt of
action response beneath even the heaviest veneer of culture.
Its audience is about eighty-five per cent. men, but other action
magazines, aimed at both sexes, have audiences nearly equally divided
as to sex. Eliminate sex appeal, the love element, and, even with
women, action appeal will take first place.
_What Is Fiction Elementally?_--Elementally a story is a narrative.
A narrative implies events, is a record of action, not a treatise, a
laboratory record or a post-mortem.
_The Rightful Place of Action in Literature._--In addition to its
claim to place in the best {213} literature because of its
fundamental and permanent appeal and in addition to its being the
essence of narrative, there is one thing more to be said.
In its crudest expression you may consign it to what depths you
please, but in its essence, in its potentialities, I challenge you to
deny it the highest rank of all as material of fiction. For _action
is the crystallization of psychology_. It is the ultimate, final
expression of character, of all a character has thought, felt and
said, of all a character is or can be. Physical action. It need not
be exciting and adventurous. It may be expressed negatively, through
repression. But psychology, character, morals, what you will, none
of these has been really born into the world, has borne recognizable
fruit, until it has in some manner acted physically, or taken
physical shape through action.
It follows that, in literature at its best, action must be the
perfect, logical, inevitable and complete result and register of all
psychology of the characters in relation to all circumstances and
conditions of the story. No other element of literature has so
difficult a test to meet, for, aside from its own {214} demands, it
must be _the final and exact expression of everything else in the
story_.
Yet the action story is sweepingly condemned _as a type_!
_The Place of Action in Practise_.--Nothing can make more plain the
undiscriminating contempt for action as fiction material than the
actual practise of most writers. Action being in its crude form the
simplest material as well as the most natural, the majority of
writers begin with it. Generally, as they gain in skill they
develop, at about equal rate, the idea that all action is crude and
that real progress lies in abandoning it as rapidly as possible. In
many cases the result is merely the absence of fairly good action
stories and the creation of very sad but very "literary" productions.
In nearly all cases the cause of the change is due to failure to
understand action's potentialities and rightful place, and the result
of that lack of understanding is generally failure to produce the
real literature intended.
By all means try to rise above the crude "Diamond Dick" type of
action story, but be sure you can substitute something better, aside
from improved technique. Better a {215} story of rather crude but
convincing action than a miserable mess of half-baked psychology and
falsely glittering "literary finish" whose chief proof of literary
quality must be its freedom from physical action. If you sincerely
intend to do real literature, get firmly into your head the truth
that action should be the perfect crystallization of all else in your
story and then use as much or as little of it as is needed for that
crystallization. If you try that, you will get an extreme test of
all the literary ability you can summon, and if you succeed, you will
have attained what only the comparative few are capable of attaining.
Even to make a start you must rid yourself of the absurd idea that
action _per se_ is unliterary.
_Popular Demand_.--Since the Great War popular demand for action
fiction is stronger than ever, despite the strong antipathy for
material directly connected with it and despite a definite reaction
in favor of quiet, peacefulness and things spiritual.
If it's popular demand you're considering, consider this: Real life,
perhaps now more than ever before, consists very largely of
restraints and inhibitions. Human nature is {216} just as human as
it ever was--there are just as many things in it to be restrained and
inhibited. And, underneath all our civilization, we're just as tired
of having to do it--probably more so, since our civilization is more
civilized and therefore more exacting than its predecessors. If we
can't escape from the fetters in real life, can't be free to follow
our undoubted impulses, as readers we'll all the more welcome a
chance for vicarious freedom.
{217}
CHAPTER XVI
ADAPTATION OF STYLE TO MATERIAL
If the theory suggested by the chapter head had not withstood the
test of ten years and the judgment of a number of people whose
judgment is worth having, I should not venture to present it here
even in brief space, for if carried into practise it would more or
less revolutionize the art of fiction. Perhaps, too, it has already
been advanced, though I have never happened to run across it or to
hear of it through others.
In an earlier chapter was the statement that the art process of
fiction consists of three steps--Material, Artist and Reader and that
the third step fails to get anything approaching due consideration in
either theory or practise. This book is largely an attempt to
emphasize this fact and a plea that the reader be given greater
importance in the teaching of fiction writing.
{218}
While working out and testing this theory of the reader's place in
creative work I was testing out also another theory which seemed to
have little connection with the first and, with my perspective ruined
by specialization, it was only a year or two ago the almost
self-evident fact dawned upon me that the two fitted neatly into each
other and constituted a complete theory of the art process. Until
then each had been locked away in its own little compartment, there
being no intent of building up a rounded out whole.
While the first theory dealt with neglect of the reader in the
general art process, the other centered on the neglect of material as
an influence on style. In other words, writers seemed too
concentrated on themselves, the Artists, in the creative process and
too neglectful of the two other steps, Material and Reader.
_Rigidity of Style as to Material_.--To present the matter briefly,
all that an author has to convey to you comes to you through a single
medium which we call his style and which in practise is singularly
inelastic in relation to the great variety of things that must pass
through it. Take Maurice Hewlitt in {219} his earlier days when his
accentuated and highly individualized style make him a good example.
Through that one unchanging style had to come to you tragedy, comedy,
pathos, contemplation, action, love, hate, patience, anger, romance,
satire. All the gamut of human emotions in the material must be
crushed into uniformity of expression before it could reach you,
losing of its own essence in the process. All must be translated
into the one inflexible rhythm and jingle of that one
style--standardized, as it were, out of much of their individuality
and strength. Such a loss is a calamity, and, I think, to a marked
degree unnecessary.
In poetry the need of guarding against this loss is definitely
recognized, if not as a broad principle, at least in adaptation of
sound to sense and in selection of the metrical form best adapted to
a given theme. Why should it not be at least equally guarded against
in prose? Many of the distinguishing qualities of poetry as opposed
to prose vary with different races and with the march of time. Of
the universal, permanent distinguishing qualities are there any that
should differentiate poetry from prose as to the importance {220} of
the Material's influence on style in transmission of Material to
Reader through Artist?
That there are already in our fiction occasional and sporadic cases
of this adaptation of style to material shows the soundness of the
theory, for these examples are evidently not for the most part the
result of studied effort but instances in which the writer's art is
sufficiently developed to break through his usual style and
spontaneously adapt expression to the thing expressed.
There are even stray rules pointing in this direction, but chiefly
for dialogue where a demand for adaptation makes itself felt through
the need of making a character express his emotions as a real person
would express them in real life. For example, the use of short sharp
sentences and simple Anglo-Saxon words in most cases of emotional
stress.
But if you wish an example of what adaptation of style to material is
capable of accomplishing if used as a fixed and general principle of
composition, turn to Shakespeare, forgetting the non-essential fact
that he is a poet.
{221}
_Style in Relation to Material_.--Style is the expression of material
through the artist, of material as transmuted through his
individuality. He is, if you like, a part of his material, but, on
that basis, he divides cleanly into two parts, one of them, the
artist, expressing the other, the material. What I object to is the
attempt to express through a single, inelastic style _all_ of his
material, _all_ of himself as material, or _all_ of himself as
artist. There _is_ no one style that can even approximate perfect
expression of all that is in the world.
Do tragedy, comedy, pathos, love, anger, excitement, calm speak the
same language in real life? Must not human art at least approximate
human life if only by a kind of symbolism? What writer, or any other
human being, can approximate expression of all of himself through the
intoning of any one single style? Does he go from cradle to grave in
one single chord? Does he not respond to emotions, his own or other
people's, as a harp to hand? And yet, God save the mark, when he
comes to write he calmly tries to squeeze death and all living into a
single monotone!
{222}
Is literature merely the click of a telegraph key, crushing all juice
from life to reduce all life to its own inflexible code and flat
rhythm? Is an author merely a funnel through which all the juice of
life must emerge at the small end in a single thin stream?
_Demands of Unity_.--Art's demand for unity is fundamental and not to
be denied, but what has been our idea of unity of style? Merely to
whistle one note and call it a satisfactory expression of the author
and the universe. It can not be. And to attain this one note in a
story we place no limit to the violence needed to make all human
emotions give up their own individuality in order to be in key. It
is well enough, as far as it goes, but it is only a first crude step.
It is time we took a step beyond.
Can any artistic demand for unity be based on any elemental more
fundamental and indisputable than the irreconcilable difference of
opposite human emotions?
Let the author mold his material to his individuality, unify it
through himself, express it through his individual style. Let him
mold his material into unity around what single {223} thought or
emotion he please before he passes it through his style. But let him
make that style, not a single inflexible note, but a tune, a tune
that sings high or low, loud or soft, in majors or minors, harmony or
discord, fast or slow, expressing in delicate response the varying
emotions of its song through the singer, itself a unity and an
expression and in each of its parts a unity and expression of that
part.
_Let Your Style Respond_.--If you are sincere in your work, if you
really feel your material and if you are not so ridden and oppressed
by rules that you can not be natural, your style will of its own
accord tend to attune itself to what it expresses. Give it the
chance, encourage it to do so. Let no rule of misinterpreted unity
force it into one monotonous, inflexible note impervious to all the
emotions of the material that strive to break through into
expressions of themselves so that they themselves can reach the
reader in something of the fulness and color of reality instead of in
the shape of cold line drawings.
Let your tune follow the moods of what it sings about. If in your
material comes tragedy after a grayness of every-day affairs, {224}
will your song ripple on in unchanged measure? Why not let the
tragedy come through into the song itself? Let each mood of your
material come through into your song and to your reader. If there
follows a relief scene of comedy, how much of comedy will fail to
reach the reader if it fails to tinge even the medium of transmission?
If you are not musician enough to compose the various elements of
material into your style-tune, at least you can approximate by the
use of notes you know produce the general effect and are keyed to the
mood you desire to reproduce in your reader--rhythm changed to
smoothness or harshness, sentence-length changed to that generally
used in real life for the expression of that mood, words chosen for
slowness and weight or speed and lightness, skilful use of adaptation
of sound to sense, few words for speed of action, many for waiting
and suspense.
_The Need of Emphasizing the Relation of Style to Material_.--All
these things are done--a little--by a few. These few are of the real
artists. It is because they are real artists that their material
finds expression in their style. It is not because responsiveness
{225} of style to material is systematically taught. It should be,
if American fictionists are to attain the development their natural
advantages make possible to them. It is the art of artists that most
deserves teaching so far as it can be taught, particularly if it is
so potent that it pushes its way without encouragement and against
heavy odds of hindering rules.
I have only outlined the need and the possibilities and, I fear, made
a poor case of it. But some day some one else will give it full and
convincing presentation--if, indeed, some one has not already done so
outside my knowledge. In any case, there lies a line of development
that sooner or later fiction is bound to follow.
Whether you believe it or not, give it slow consideration in your
mind. Even if you decide against it in the end, the considering of
it will teach you more concerning style than you are likely to get
from the study of other people's rules.
Of _that_ I am very sure. In your case _you_ are the most important
authority. Appeal to that authority and see that it gives judgment,
judgment reasoned out, by _you_, from fundamentals. {226} Let no
rules by other people impose themselves until you have reasoned out
their worth. Keep and develop your own individuality.
And the one best way to learn to write is to--write.
I hereby absolve you from all rules in this book except such rules as
warn against rules.
THE END
{227}
APPENDIX
YOUR MANUSCRIPTS AND THE EDITORS
To new writers, and to most old ones, a magazine editorial office is,
among other things, a mystery, not the least mysterious of its
contents being the editors. It is, of course, no more mysterious
than the office of any other specialized business, and editors are
merely one small class among many classes doing various kinds of
specialized work. Certainly there seems no justification for the
traditional awe in which editors are held by so great a majority of
people. This awe is undeniably present and does more than a little
to prevent more comfortable relations between writers and readers on
one hand and editors on the other. Partly it is a "hangover" from a
past age when editors better earned an atmosphere of awe as
individual molders of public opinion, and partly it is due to
people's insistence on regarding with a peculiar and undiscriminating
reverence {228} anybody or any thing connected, however remotely,
with "literature."
It shouldn't be necessary to say so, but, if the testimony of one of
them can be accepted by those who persist in considering them
something very much above--or below--the normal, editors are just
ordinary humans no different in essentials from any other people of
ordinary education. As in any collection of people, there are all
kinds among us, even those who breathe a rarified atmosphere and hold
themselves superior to their fellows, but, heavens, think of waiters
you have known! While as to barbers and policemen--
Just humans, whose job happens to be that of trying to choose from
many manuscripts those the reading public will like best. If the
manuscripts they handle happen to be fact articles as well as
fiction, there is also the job of selecting with an idea of
education, or of advancing some cause or principle advocated by the
particular magazine, but even here there is also the job of pleasing
the reading public. Besides that, if the editor has a plain or
social conscience, the desire to leave people the better, rather than
the worse, for their reading. That's all.
{229}
A word more about that job, so that we editors may not seem quite so
mysterious, inconsistent, arbitrary and other things as we do at
present. Take the editor of any fiction magazine--or any magazine,
for that matter. So long as he works on that particular magazine his
job is, generally speaking, not to test a manuscript by its general
literary or its general magazine merits, nor to choose according to
his own personal tastes, but, to the best of his ability, to choose
first according to its suitability to _that particular magazine_. If
John Jones is editor of magazine B and then becomes editor of
magazine C, his manuscript tests will change instantly. He will
accept some stories he rejected for B and reject some others that he
would gladly have taken for B. That is, if John is a good editor and
has not deliberately taken up the task of making C as much like B as
possible.
Each fiction magazine aims at a special type of reader, or a special
group of readers. Therefore it tries to individualize itself in such
manner as to get and hold the interest of _that_ type. Its "policy"
may undergo changes, but it is always a more or less {230}
individualized one. What is one magazine's meat may be another
magazine's poison.
There are other reasons why the rejection of a manuscript is "not
necessarily a reflection upon its merits." It may fall fairly within
the individualized field of a magazine and be recognized by the
editor as of entirely sufficient merit, yet be sent back. A grocer
or a druggist or a delicatessen man acts exactly the same way. If
one hundred cans of corn is the number a grocer is justified by sales
in carrying on his inventory and he already has one hundred cans of
corn, he doesn't buy any more cans. If an editor estimates that his
readers' demand justifies him in buying about fifty love-stories,
five tragic stories, ten business stories, etc., per year and he
already has in stock the full quota of each that should be on hand at
any one time, he, like the grocer, buys no more of these types.
Length, as well as type, is also a factor that an editor must
consider in the light of his inventory.
Of course, there are all kinds of exceptions in applying the
inventory test to manuscripts, for stories are not standardized like
{231} cans of corn nor do all magazines adhere to so rigid a basis of
selection. Then, too, there is the fact that some types are,
permanently or temporarily, difficult to secure and, when
sufficiently well executed, are likely to be seized upon at any time.
Really good humorous stories, being notoriously difficult to find,
would hardly be rejected even by a magazine with its normal supply of
humorous stories already in the safe.
Also, manuscripts come in waves, not only as to number but as to
setting, material, theme, and so on. For six months, a year, three
years, there may be, for example, an oversupply of stories of
diplomatic life, rural stories, stories laid in Latin America, and a
dearth of stories of golfing, stories of olden times, sea stories.
By the end of a year or two the situation may be completely reversed
on any or all of these types. In most cases the change from dearth
to plenty or _vice versa_ is without warning or discernible cause.
After being caught by a few dearths an editor is likely to stock up
with a reserve on types that have shown themselves subject to
fluctuation in supply. On the other hand, he may decide that writers
as a whole, in {232} their fancy or lack of fancy for a type, are a
fairly safe index to the fancy of the public in general.
In any case, many factors besides merit, recognized or unrecognized,
and besides bad judgment by editors, decide the fate of manuscripts.
On the other hand, most manuscripts are rejected for the all
sufficient reason that they do lack sufficient merit.
Some ideas are prevalent that seem worth meeting.
A "pull" is seldom of service in gaining acceptance for manuscripts;
of none at all so far as my observation extends, and I can not now
recall, even from hearsay, any case in which "pull" took the place of
merit. Doubtless there are such instances, but, ethics aside,
progress through "pull" is not worth a writer's practical
consideration. Many beginners believe they will get a better hearing
for their stories if they present them in person instead of mailing
them. It's an editor's business to select manuscripts according to
their values, not according to his opinion of their authors, and I
think most editors do so. If he is subject to personal influence,
don't forget that you may make an {233} unfavorable, instead of a
favorable, impression. In any case you're taking from him time that
he probably needs badly and is not likely to be happy over losing.
What you have to say to him can almost always be said equally well by
letter, perhaps far better. A letter takes less of his time and--he
can choose his time for reading it.
I know of no fiction magazine that has a "regular staff" of writers
in the sense of its having no opening for new writers. Often a
magazine comes to depend for the bulk of its supply upon a
comparative few who have proved themselves best able to provide that
supply, but that does not mean that it hasn't a welcome for others.
The oft-heard wail that "a new writer has no chance with editors" is
merely silly. Weren't all the "old" writers once new? How, pray,
did they gain their first footing? In one sense, to be sure, new
writers have little chance with editors for the sweet and simple
reason that a majority of beginners haven't sufficient merit to earn
them a chance with any competent, fair-minded judge. Some of them
will never have. Some have not yet developed and are worthless to
{234} magazines until they do. If a writer can't develop unless
encouraged by acceptances before he has developed, he almost surely
hasn't in him the ability to develop in any circumstances.
Don't be discouraged by rejections. They are merely the usual thing.
They only class your manuscript among the eighty-five to ninety-nine
per cent. that every magazine turns back. Along with yours many
manuscripts of successful or even famous authors are rejected, and
some of these rejected stories, possibly yours among them, will be
accepted by other magazines. The only disgrace is in being
discouraged. If, instead of the usual printed slip, you get a note
from one of the staff, be glad, for your manuscript has raised itself
above the others and earned attention for its merits; your rejection
is really a step forward--the big first step.
Often the beginner's discouragement is due to his trying his wares on
the wrong market. Would you try to sell a lady's slippers to a civil
engineer, a soldier's boots to a dainty dame of fashion, a
policeman's brogans to a child? Yet that is exactly what so many of
you try to do with manuscripts. I {235} am, though an editor myself,
quite incapable of saying just which magazines will buy which
manuscripts, for an infinite variety of factors and circumstances are
involved, but the total ignorance of magazine markets displayed by
many beginners can be due to nothing but failure to give the field
even a rudimentary consideration before trying to master it.
The elementary rules for the actual submission of manuscripts have
been printed thousands of times, but the need for them abides:
Every manuscript should be typewritten. No matter how good
handwriting may be, it imposes a heavy handicap on any manuscript,
for, in comparison with other manuscripts in typewriting, its story
can unfold only on leaden feet even to the most patient, kindly and
self-sacrificing editor.
Double-space the typewriting. It reads more easily, allows you
sufficient space to make your own alterations and corrections without
messing parts of your story into illegibility, and, if the manuscript
is bought, gives space for editing it as copy for the printer to
follow.
{236}
Write on only one side of the paper. This custom is so firmly
established that it's folly to violate it and almost no one does.
There are plenty of reasons for the custom, but its mere existence is
practical reason enough.
Leave a fairly wide margin on the left-hand side of each sheet--as a
kindness to the editor in case your manuscript is bought and to the
compositor who must read and set what you have written and the editor
edited.
Type your name and address on the first page of your manuscript. For
common-sense reasons.
Number your pages. Consecutively straight through from beginning to
end. Especially if you hope for any chance of detailed criticism
from the editor.
Unless your manuscript is to be returned express collect, enclose
stamped, self-addressed envelope of sufficient size and strength, or
at least sufficient postage. As a matter of common honesty. A
surprising number of writers are not honest in this respect.
If you write to the editor when you submit a manuscript, see that the
letter is enclosed with the manuscript, not sent under separate {237}
cover. If your idea in writing is to further the chances of your
story, you're going about it in a poor way if you add to the editor's
troubles by making him handle your case in two parts instead of one.
Or by making him read your autobiography in full.
Several things will help toward a better understanding of the
editorial attitude toward manuscripts. First, tell me, did you ever
know a merchant to work hard day after day for the purpose of
_avoiding_ buying stock for his customers' demands? No, the editor
desires to buy; he spends his time trying to get stories, not to
avoid them. When he finds one that meets his needs he rejoices. A
minority of magazines seek first of all for authors with "big names,"
because of the following they command among the reading public, but
the editors of even these are inclined to pat themselves on the back
when they "find" a brand-new author of merit.
Second, to balance the above, remember that your manuscript is merely
one among thousands that come to an editor.
There is a wide-spread feeling that many manuscripts are rejected
only because they are read, not by the editor himself, but by {238}
some assistant. There are two "schools" of manuscript-reading. One
method is to let the most inexperienced readers weed out the bulk of
submitted manuscripts, thus saving the more experienced readers much
time. The other method reverses the process; a more experienced
reader does the first sorting. The latter seems to be gaining
ground; personally I believe in it strongly. My own experience may
serve to illustrate the situation. For years every manuscript came
to my hands first. As their number increased this became a physical
impossibility. Manuscript-reading is only one of an editor's many
duties, a fact that many lose sight of. At present from one to two
working days per week is probably a generous estimate of the time I
give to manuscript-reading. The reading is done mostly in bits--in
the evenings, on trains, in days spent at home for the purpose. In
the office itself I can't get time to read a dozen manuscripts a
year. And much of the other kinds of work also is done outside.
Many other editors are in similar case.
But in delegating the bulk of the work the most experienced editor on
the staff is the one who first reads the stories from {239}
"unknowns." Except in cases of appeal, stories by our "regular"
writers do not pass through his hands at all, but go first to editors
of less experience and from them to me.
Some magazines have a special "fiction editor," who is often the
court of final appeal, may have been chosen by the editor as superior
to himself in this branch of editorial work and may or may not be the
first to read manuscripts.
The thing to remember is that if the editor delegates the first
reading it does not follow that he minimizes its importance and he
generally takes care to put it into as capable hands as he can.
Remember, also, the general rule is that a first reader is instructed
to mark all doubtful cases for a second hearing; also that it's to
his own personal interest to "find" every good story he can if he
wishes to hold his job.
How much of a manuscript does a reader read? A sentence, a
paragraph, a few pages, maybe all of it. Unfair and inefficient not
to read all of each? My personal opinion is that manuscript-reading
is one of the things that can be learned by experience only. But,
having the experience, an editor can reject {240} the "culls" very
swiftly and with a good deal of sureness. He can tell all the hack
plots at a glance, knows the kinds of opening that are never followed
by a good story, can tell in a few sentences or paragraphs whether a
writer has sufficient skill in handling his tools to be able to turn
out an acceptable story and--has at his finger-ends all the kinds of
material, setting, plot, treatment, etc., that his particular
magazine does not use. If in doubt, he reads further or samples it
out here and there and glances at the end. If still in doubt, he
reads it all. Sometimes knowing the story to be unusable, he reads
it all because the author's possibilities are worth serious
consideration even if the story in hand isn't.
As to the final reading I think, from what data I chance to have,
that I'm not in accord with the majority custom. When I'm familiar
with a writer's work and he's fairly steady, the endorsement of the
man who passed it over to me is often sufficient, since he too knows
that writer's work and would have noted any let-down or doubtful
points. In other cases, sometimes a few pages--with maybe a glance
at the remainder--is {241} sufficient for rejection, unless the other
editor, having read it all, has voted for it or makes the point that
we can help the writer revise it into suitable shape. But what I do
read I read word for word page after page until I find definite cause
for rejection, for I can't believe that I can judge from the reading
public's point of view unless I read as I think most of the reading
public reads--word for word. Maybe other editors can, but, at least
in most cases, I can't.
But be sure of this--whatever their reading methods, editors are
trying to find good stories, not to reject them.
Many magazines contract in advance for stories by well-known writers,
buying sight unseen and trusting wholly to the writer's steadiness,
conscientiousness and popular following. In some cases this is
perfectly safe; in others decidedly not. It means, essentially, that
the writer has left the merit system and works on a sure-thing basis,
which is not good for most writers.
Do not decide that your story was rejected because an editor read it
when he was tired or his liver was out of order. Editors get tired
and their livers are as undependable as {242} anybody's liver, but
they know this and make allowances accordingly. In fact, it's a
pretty safe rule to decide that your story was rejected for lack of
merit or for unsuitability to the particular magazine. If not
convinced of the former reason, keep sending your story to other
magazines. Many a story has been rejected by five, ten, twenty,
fifty magazines and yet found an acceptance, perhaps by a better
magazine than some of those that rejected it, though the majority of
manuscripts submitted probably never find a taker.
Oh, yes, the editor is fallible like everybody else including
yourself. But after all he's an expert of experience in his own
particular line, experience has given him a perspective you lack, and
he has an understanding of his magazine's particular needs that no
outsider can have. In the long run you'll make progress faster if,
allowing for the fallibility of the genus editor, you decide to
accept his verdict as more dependable than that of your friends or
yourself. Anyhow, there's more to be gained from looking for weak
places in your work than from striving to prove its excellencies by
argument.
{243}
This is a rambling, hop-skip-and-jump chapter, but there are a
thousand little points that bob up one after the other and choosing
among them is haphazard work at best. All I've tried to do is to
give you a sketchy idea of editorial offices and their working so
that sending manuscripts to them will not be quite so much like
sending them out into a hostile unknown.
{247}
INDEX
Academic methods of teaching fiction: 5, 10-4, 38-9, 42-4, 51, 108,
134-5, 154-5, 168-9, 171-2, 180-96.
Action: 96, 129-30, 135-7, 205-16.
Ambiguity: _See Words._
Art Process, The: 17-25, 217-26.
Art: 17-21, 127-32, 217-26.
Beginning a story: 75-6, 167-9, 176.
Big words: _See Words._
Brackets: _See Frames._
Brevity: 87, 113-7, 147.
Chapter headings: 110-1, 119.
Characters: 76, 168-9, 170-1, 175-6, 179. (_See also
Characterization, Proper Names._)
Characterization: 100-1, 113-4, 117-8, 127-32, 132-9, 143-5, 170-81,
212-3.
Classical references: _See References._
Classics, The: 208-10.
Clearness: 21, 70-86, 88.
Coincidence: 104.
Color: 57, 58-9, 59-62, 75, 77, 89-90, 105, 117-8, 197-204.
Condensation: _See Brevity._
Contrast: 150-1, 160-5. (_See also Relief Scenes._)
Convincingness: 38, 52, 94-108. (_See_ also Illusion.)
Copying: _See Imitation._
Dialect: 62, 77, 89, 105, 106.
Dialogue: 76.
Distractions: 52-69, 88.
Dramatic element: 109-19.
Editorial offices: 227-43.
Ending a story: 147-50, 165-7.
Fiction, What it is: 17-24, 32-4, 64-6, 127-32, 140-2, 154, 212.
Fiction as a vehicle: 24, 32-4, 64-6.
Fictional references: _See References._
First-person narratives: 68, 104-5, 151.
Force: 22.
Foreign words: _See Words._
Frames or brackets: 68, 91-2, 104-5.
Friends as critics: 55, 63, 72-3, 198.
Happy endings: 123-5, 165-7.
Historical references: _See References._
Horror story, The: 123-5.
Illusion, Imposing and preserving the: 10, 23-5, 30-45, 52-181,
197-204.
Imagination response: 197-204.
Imitation, Evils of: 102-3, 104, 187-8, 191-5.
Improbabilities: 95-101.
Individuality: 118-9. (_See also Imitation._)
Individuality _vs._ technique: _See technique, Academic methods._
Literary, Being: 51, 195-6, 205-12, 214-5. (_See also Literature._)
Literature: 1-3, 25-9, 80-2, 85, 195-6, 215. (_See also Literary._)
Literature _vs._ Magazine fiction: 25-9.
Manuscript reading by editors: 182-4, 227-43.
Manuscripts, Preparing and submitting: 227-43.
Market, The: 227-43.
Material: 88, 95-101, 105-7, 117-8, 123-7, 143-5, 217-26.
Mistakes, Effect of on reader: 62-3, 77-9, 105-7. (_See also
Convincingness, Improbabilities._)
Models: _See Imitation._
Moral values: 136, 139-45.
Motion pictures, Effect of: 115-7, 140.
Mystery stories: 92-3, 111-2.
Obtrusion of author: 66-9.
Overstrain of reader: 7, 87-93, 112.
Plot: 39, 79, 88, 93, 96-100, 101-3, 109-19, 145-7, 149, 154-69, 171,
212-3.
Plot, positive _vs._ negative: 145-7.
Proper names: 59-62, 73-5, 75-6.
Readers, Your: 7, 20, 22, 46-51, 71-3, 105-6, 120-3, 150, 151, 153,
160-5, 197-204, 215-6. (_See also Illusion, Imagination Response._)
Realism: 126-32, 133-4, 140-1, 161-5.
References, Classical, historical, etc.: 59, 75, 89.
Rejections: 227-43.
Relief scenes: 90-1, 112-3.
Repetition: 86.
Repression: _See Brevity._
Rules: 44-5, 51, 121-3, 134-5, 150-1, 154-5, 160-5, 172-5, 181,
182-96, 226. (_See also Technique, Academic._)
Sentence length: 88, 117, 220.
Setting: 117-8, 152.
Simplicity: 1-2, 8, 22, 79-86.
Slang: 77, 89, 105, 106.
Structure: 23, 156-7. (_See also Plot._)
Style: 27, 38-43, 44-5, 63-4, 64-9, 79-85, 104, 117-9, 121-2, 150,
191-6, 217-26. (_See also Technique._)
Surprise: 111, 160-6.
Suspense: 110-1, 151.
Sympathies, Enlisting readers': 22, 120-53.
Tags: 175-80.
Technique, Over-emphasis on: 10-4, 38-44, 182-96. (_See also
Academic._)
Titles: 119.
Unconvincingness: _See Convincingness._
Unity: 23, 157-8, 222-4.
Unusual words: _See Words._
Words, Ambiguous: 73.
Words, Big: 55-8, 79-85, 117.
Words, Foreign: 58-9, 75, 89, 105, 106.
Words, Technical: 75, 89.
Words, Unusual, 55-62, 89.
Words, (_See also under Slang, Dialect, Proper Names._)
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FUNDAMENTALS OF FICTION WRITING ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
