Chapter XI: Part 11

=Theodore Seixas Solomons=: I never had a course. I have studied, or rather carefully read, one or two books on writing, and numerous articles. I think that the idea of unity has been the main derivative to me. The rest I usually saw to be true enough, almost axiomatically, from general considerations of art, but I do not think they helped--probably more because I did not actually study such writings than because they are incapable of lending real help. I do not see how a proper study of them in connection with exercise in writing can fail to be beneficial. Yet such works, for the most part, are analyses of the reasons for things which must be understood instinctively and by experience, and then acquired, before the reasons make such appeal.

=Raymond S. Spears=: No literary course except reading, deliberately undertaken for certain purpose, as reading Ruskin to learn how to describe.

I've read and tried to profit by practical books, handbooks, books on authorship, writers' biographies, etc. But I find my own view-point and methods are nowhere described or much helped by experience of others.

=Norman Springer=: No. I once tried a university extension course in play writing. It was silly. Of course, I read all the books I could find on the subject of story writing. They didn't help much. They told me something about the mechanics of a story (though even this information was usually buried beneath mountains of pompous academic phraseology), but they never gave me a clue to the solution of the more important question that worries the beginner--"How can I infuse spirit into the story; how can I make it live?" This questionnaire is really the first attempt I have encountered to _get behind the mechanics_.

Being of the "self-raised" variety of writer, I've had some experience with the "How To Write a Story" books, and I confess they harmed rather than helped me. All those I opened merely told me in technical, often almost unintelligible language just what my story sense was telling me in simple language. I didn't find a single book that took me behind the mechanics of the story.

That is where the beginner is always trying to get to. About the hardest thing he has to learn is how to weigh, select and subdue thoughts. Memorizing all the rules and learning all of O. Henry's tricks by heart won't help him. But access to information such as your third query will bring out will help him. So will the news that he must discipline his imagination and make it obedient. Think how we run wild and waste ourselves in the beginning.

=Julian Street=: No courses. I've read, written and in my early stages been criticized by abler men--men like Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson. I think it well for the absolute greenhorn to read and learn everything he can about the art, but he must have the power to discriminate between good and bad advice; and he must know whether he himself wishes to aim high or aim low--whether he wishes to run the risk of trying to produce something that may possibly live, always facing the great danger of failing in that aim, or whether he wishes to write popular truck. That will be determined ultimately, I think, by the character and tastes of the aspirant, but the sooner he acquires a definite aim, the better for him.

=T. S. Stribling=: Have never had classroom or correspondence course in fiction. I did pay a dollar once to have a story criticized. Afterward I wrote to the man and offered him his criticism back if he would return my dollar, but he wouldn't do it.

=Booth Tarkington=: No course or books on writing fiction, ever.

=W. C. Tuttle=: I have never had any instructions on story writing, beyond the kindly help of a certain editor. Once upon a time I bought some books on short-story writing. After reading them I ached from the reaction. I understood that I was all wrong. But there seemed to be no help for it; so I hid the books and went back to work.

=Lucille Van Slyke=: Very superficial daily theme course in college my freshman year. Very bad for me, I think, because I did it easily, got good marks and took no pains whatever. Took me years to live that down! I have read and continue to read every book on fiction writing that I can find. In the elementary stages they helped a very little--oh, very little. Not their fault, but mine, because I did not see how to apply them to my case. Beyond the elementary stage I found that Polti's _Thirty Six Dramatic Situations_ helped me to straighten out the plot difficulty I already mentioned. ----'s _Short Story Writing_ did me good this way--I disagreed with it so violently that it cleared my ideas on many points--but I found myself singing, "Now mother has a sausage machine and to-day she said to me, Tom, Tom, hurry back home, there'll be sausages for your tea--"

=Atreus von Schrader=: I put in the winter of 1913 working with Walter B. Pitkin at Columbia; I had written, without success, for some time. His genius, for that is what it amounts to, gave me a foundation and understanding that have been invaluable. General formulas and methods can be used to great advantage; to the greatest advantage when practise has made their use instinctive.

=T. Von Ziekursch=: Never had anything in that line. Was introduced to a teacher of how to write fiction once and he bored me.

=Henry Kitchell Webster=: I've never had a classroom course or a correspondence course on writing fiction. I have read books on it, some of which interested me because I agreed with the writers and some of which interested me because I disagreed with them altogether. I am not conscious that the first sort ever caused me to cry out, "Eureka!" though I may have decided, over an item in the second, "This is what I never do."

=G. A. Wells=: I have had no classroom course in story writing and deplore that fact a great deal. Correspondence courses are valuable to this extent--they urge one to work and study by the reflection that he will have thrown away his money if he doesn't. The same results may be obtained by investing in a few good books on the subject of writing. I would strongly advise the beginner to let the correspondence schools alone. I have had much experience with them. None of them can possibly do what they so boldly assert in their literature. Not so long ago I paid ninety dollars cash for a course in picture play writing. For that sum I received two thin books of instruction, three detailed synopses of plays produced (all of them rotten!) and twelve pamphlets of lectures. I learned nothing that I had not previously learned from text-books got from the public library. Never again: (Right hand up and left on heart.)

It is of interest that most of these correspondence schools can't cite students who have been successful. One school cited me ---- ----. Her stories appear in the ---- but nowhere else that I have ever noticed. I do not call that success. That is the only school of correspondence of about a dozen I have investigated that can cite a student who has had anything published in a reliable magazine, and I think that unless such a school can show such graduates it is scarcely worth bothering about.

I attach great importance to books on the art of fiction writing. They have been of great value to me. The chief fault I find with these books is that they refer the student for examples to stories that are not easily available to a great many people. Too, they incline too much toward citation of the classics, such as Poe, Dickens, Thackeray and others. The student should have for his examples Kipling, O. Henry, London, Melville Post and the modern writers. Current magazine fiction is as a rule out of the question.

But after all the only way to learn to write fiction is to write fiction. I am of that number who contend that fiction writing can't be taught. It must be learned. But first of all one must have talent for it. That talent can't be acquired, though, given that, it can be cultivated. If one hasn't a talent for writing fiction all the teaching of all the teachers won't make one a writer of fiction. Education alone will not suffice, though I have had people say to me, "He should be able to write stories, he is so highly educated." It is to laugh. I say that the man with the gift or knack for writing fiction will turn out a writer in the end if he applies himself, regardless of schools and books teaching the method and art.

In this town is a woman, very highly educated, who studied two years in the classes of Dr. ---- at Columbia. She has tried time and again to sell stories she has written, but up to date without success. From time to time I have had people come to me for information on the business of writing. The first thing I ask for is some of their stuff. Not an editor in the country would print such truck. This is rather unseemly in one who himself turns out a great deal of worthless truck, but I can see the faults of others better than my own. I can't see my own at all.

The best text books on the subject are to be found on the news-stands--_Adventure_, _American_, _Saturday Evening Post_, _Harper's_, etc. These should come first because they show the finished product of people who are actually succeeding at what the student aspires to do. It is the whole machine that can be taken down to learn how it was assembled in the first place.

Text-books, I think, are valuable to the student in proportion to their relationship to him. Are they really prepared for the student, or written because the author had certain views he wished to publish about a certain subject? I think they should suggest rather than dictate. The author should say, "Let's try this and see what happens," and not "Do this or you are damned." In short, I have found most text-books far too dictatorial.

Detailed laws and rules should be avoided. The student should get the general impression, but be left free to modify his performances to suit existing needs or to satisfy his individual point of view. Of course there are certain laws of story writing that preclude dispute by their very obviousness. I don't pay any more attention to the rules of story writing than I do to a fly on a Chinaman's nose in Canton.

It therefore galls me to have a text-book author tell me that I must do thus and so. All I want him to do is to give me the platform to stand on. I'll make and speak my own piece in my own way. If he is going to write and make my speech I'll step down.

=William Wells=: No.

=Ben Ames Williams=: I've never taken any "course" in story writing. I once read a book on it. It helped me not at all. The books that have helped me most in the technical work of writing are books of criticism. Any of the standard works.

=Honore Willsie=: Neither.

=H. C. Witwer=: I have never had any course of any kind in short story writing, or, I should say, in writing. Nor have I read or studied books on the art, gift, trade, profession, crime, or whatever it may be. I have about me at all times as working tools, a dictionary, Roget's _Thesaurus_, Shakespeare, _Encylopedia Brittanica_, Bartlett's _Familiar Quotations_. Find all invaluable.

=William Almon Wolff=: No courses at all. The best book I know is not about narrative fiction at all--it's William Archer's _Play Making_. That has been and remains, invaluable to me. I think, incidentally, that it's helpful to think of a story in "scenes."

=Edgar Young=: No classroom course. Wrote several stories before I ever knew there was such a thing as a book on the subject. Must have learned something by reading current magazines but was where I couldn't get them for years when in South America. Since being here in New York have read many of the books concerning writing.

SUMMARY

Of 113 answering, 55 have used neither class, course or book, 56 have tried one or more of these, and 2, saying only that they took no course, are probably to be included with those having tried none of the three.

Of the 56 who have tried one or more of the three, 40 give definite reply as to whether, in the elementary stages, they derived benefit, as follows: much benefit, 6; benefit, 4; some benefit, 5; total 15. No benefit, 11; some harm, 1; harm, 2; much harm, 1; total, 15. There are 10 who state they derived "little benefit" and this presumably is to be taken as a negative answer. In any case, out of 40 there are 25 who derived little or no benefit in the elementary stages of learning their art, and 4 of the 25 state that they derived actual harm instead of benefit.

Add the fact that if the remaining 16 of the 56 who have used one or more of the three derived any benefit they did not take the trouble to say so, which would indicate that, if there were any benefit at all, it was not a considerable one. Add the additional damning fact that of the 113 answering the general question 55 (probably 57) have not found it necessary to success to use any of the three. Out of 113 writers only 15 claim any benefit, in even the elementary stages, from classes, courses or books purporting to teach the writing of fiction! Ninety-eight against fifteen!

That testimony fills me with joy. Yes, I've written a book myself on fiction writing, but it had not been published when this questionnaire was answered, it was written largely as an earnest protest against present methods of teaching fiction and a chief purpose of this questionnaire and of this present book giving its results was to get proof in facts from a final source that present teaching methods, as practised in all but a tiny handful of cases, are badly in need of revolutionary revision.

My feeling in the matter was not due to theorizing. For twenty years my life-business has been the handling of the results of those methods as they pour in in the form of submitted manuscripts across the editorial desk. For twenty years it has been my business to deal with the authors and would-be authors who write those manuscripts, to try to find their strong points and their weak points and to ferret out the causes and the remedies. They have worked with me to this end and have talked frankly. Even if there had been only the manuscripts themselves to look at, it would have been evident enough that there was some general cause, other than the writers' inabilities, for the wide-spread and persistent weaknesses that were making most of those manuscripts unavailable or at least far below the standards possible to their authors.

If only half of our 113 successful writers have been touched by these methods, remember that the successful writers are only some ten per cent. of those who write and that the remaining ninety per cent. are more prone to turn to formal books and teaching. The man or woman with pronounced native ability is more likely to hew his own way or go to first courses, particularly after examining the outside helps available. Do not forget, too, that these prevalent weaknesses in manuscripts are due not only to positive faults in teaching methods, but to the lack of really helpful, constructive advice and guiding.

A chief bad result of these teaching methods will be taken up in our consideration of the question on the value of technique. To take up all the bad results in detail would fill more space than the nature of this volume warrants its devoting to the subject.

While only 15 derived benefit from these methods in the elementary stages, still fewer--10--found benefit in the more advanced stages. One might expect the falling off to be still more pronounced until one remembers that these books and courses, whatever their general faults, do cover a vast number of specific points and that in the discussion of these points a writer who has already built his own foundations can often find suggestion and information of decided value to him without suffering from the general faults. None of our answerers reports harm, in advanced stages, from these methods and none reports failure to get benefit in the advanced stages specifically, though many simply give a "no" to the general question of benefit.

Considering class, course and book separately, of 13 reporting definitely on class experience 7 state benefit of varying degree in elementary stages, though one of these expresses doubt; 1, "little"; 4, none, 1 of these reporting harm. Only one reports on advanced stages--no benefit.

On correspondence courses, 8 state experience; 3, benefit; 1, probably some; 1, "little"; 3, none. This as to elementary stages. On advanced stages only 1 reports--some benefit.

On books 40 report. On elementary stages, 35; benefit, 14; possibly, 1; little, 10; no benefit, 7; harm, 3. On advanced stages, 10, including some of the 35 reporting also on elementary stages; benefit, 3; little, 3; no benefit, 4.

Tabulating negatively, 78 of the 113 specifically report no class experience; 73 no correspondence course; 47 no book. As already stated, 55--or 57--make a blanket report of using none of the three.

Unfortunately the questionnaire did not include a specific question on benefit derived from magazines devoted to writers and their art. In spite of this omission three or four voluntarily reported benefit therefrom in elementary stages and no one volunteered to report harm or lack of benefit. If reports had been asked for on these magazines, I believe it would have been far more favorable than on books, classes or courses.

These magazines use many articles by writers telling their own experiences, difficulties, solutions. The people best equipped to teach others are those who have themselves learned how--who have accomplished, not merely theorized. Each is handicapped as a teacher by the facts that his methods and principles are naturally those he has found best adapted to his own individual case, that the needs of no two individuals are exactly alike and that his methods may be for some others altogether useless or even harmful. But in these magazines where many writers are heard from these very differences appear and the intelligent reader can pick and choose with profit. Most of all, he learns that no one rule applies to all writers alike.

QUESTION VI

_How much of your craft have you learned from reading current
authors? The classics?_

ANSWERS

=Bill Adams=: I have to admit that I know no current authors--I _never_ read a magazine story, and exceedingly seldom a book. Used to read a great deal twenty to twenty-five years ago.

=Samuel Hopkins Adams=: How can one tell? I might guess at half and half.

=Paul L. Anderson=: Mostly the classics: that's one reason I haven't sold more stuff--too old-fashioned.

=William Ashley Anderson=: Not much--if any--from current writers, with a few isolated examples--except for those who have already become standard: Kipling, and authors of similar standing in various countries. I believe strongly in the classics and regret very much that they were not very deeply ingrained in me when I was at school, as they were fundamental in literature. I believe just as strongly in the standard works of literature. But I believe a professional author wastes time reading current authors, unless the work has distinct and special merit and is brought to his attention.

=H. C. Bailey=: I should put the classics (using the word in the widest sense, say from Homer and the Bible to Maupassant and Mark Twain) first. Good models are of any time and all time. From good models living and dead and what I know of their methods I learned any craftsmanship I have.

=Edwin Balmer=: When I began writing I considered Kipling and Richard Harding Davis and Sophocles about the best writers in the world. I had taken a great deal of Greek in college and took an M. A. at Harvard in Greek and when I finished I could read classical Greek almost as readily as English. I remember consciously admiring and trying to put into my writing some of the sense of quantity which the Greeks used. The first story I ever sold to a magazine was certainly strongly influenced in its wording by Greek models. I still think Greek literature second to none.

=Ralph Henry Barbour=: Who knows the answer to this question? Not I!

=Frederick Orin Bartlett=: I have absorbed, rather than learned, a great deal from current authors--especially English authors. The classics I feel to be an invaluable background--a background that too many American authors lack.

=Nalbro Bartley=: From the classics, I think I have learned much--also from the daily newspapers but not from current authors.

=Konrad Bercovici=: Reading current authors I have learned what not to do. I have only learned something about writing from the Bible, a little more from Balzac, and if writing were a trade and I were a young man, I should apprentice myself now to Anatole France.

=Ferdinand Berthoud=: None. Don't read current authors. Have never read the classics. I wrote my first story for my own amusement and without knowing that it was a story, and without any single thought of how other people wrote.

=H. H. Birney, Jr.=: Can't honestly say I've gained a great deal from either. Try to read current authors to learn, if possible, the secret of just how they "put it over." Have read most of the "classics" and have doubtless, though unconsciously, benefitted from them.

=Farnham Bishop=: I've read everything from Diamond Dick to Marcus Aurelius, beginning early and sitting up late, mixing my reading till now it is utterly hopeless for me to disentangle the results and reactions. There are huge gaps in it, and some rather odd specializations. How much have I learned from Homer and Vergil, and how much from Kipling and Conan Doyle? Blessed if I know the exact proportions! But I think that varying your reading is a safeguard against writing pseudo-Kiplingese and diluted O. Henry.

=Algernon Blackwood=: None. I read little fiction. As a boy I missed the classics, and have only made up a little of this leeway since. I never read a story without feeling how completely otherwise my own treatment of his idea would have been--probably, that is, how much better his treatment is than mine.

=Max Bonter=: Whatever I may have learned from contemporaries has been acquired unconsciously and without design.

I studied Milton intensively with the idea of letting some of his wonderful construction sink into me--particularly the first two books of _Paradise Lost_. Have never regretted the time so spent.

=Katharine Holland Brown=: Hard to answer. Reared on the classics,--by the simple device of keeping them on the top shelves, with the grave command, "Not to be read till you grow up." Will admit to an extreme preference for the most recent of the current fiction.

=F. R. Buckley=: Hard to say how much I got from classics and so on. A great deal. Rough guess--should say Rudyard Kipling and an English author named Neil Lyons were my best teachers.

=Prosper Buranelli=: Reading current literature does nothing but harm. Read Sophocles.

=Thompson Burtis=: I should say that all the superficialities of the craft I have learned from current authors. Fundamentals, such as vocabulary and characterization, I believe I learned from the classics. As a young and green writer, I believe I am picking up tricks of the trade constantly from my contemporaries.

=George M. A. Cain=: How much I owe to reading current or classic authors I have not the slightest idea. I have not consciously studied the work in half a dozen stories. And I have not, within my memory, read a story without a certain critical attitude which unconsciously noted its structural features. For all the readiness with which my mind conjures settings for what I read, I don't think I have ever read anything without constant consciousness of the man who wrote it, or ever forgotten to watch the writing. Though I was late in putting my efforts to actual use, my desire to write fiction goes back of my memory. At twelve years of age I was habitually putting into words every emotion and situation and scene I saw, experienced or felt. I shall never know in this world to what degree that has reacted upon me to make me everlastingly the actor of what I imagined I should be rather than the natural doer of what I was. Perhaps I should put it that the expression of things has always assumed entirely undue importance. In that attitude, I have unconsciously studied everything I have read. And here I might mention that, for me, the greatest difficulty of the relation between reading and writing is the avoidance of unconscious imitation. I can not read ten pages of Addison or Irving, still less of Gibbon or Macaulay, without having my writing run into sonorous cadences that frequently are as out of place as a Gregorian hymn-tune for a coon-song's words. Writers of striking idiosyncrasy, like O. Henry, or Samuel Blythe in his humorous sketches, Wodehouse, or Harry Leon Wilson, or anything in slang or dialect, are completely fatal to the straightaway putting of what I want to say which is my only notion of a style of my own.

=Robert V. Carr=: I might imagine some writer helped me, when he merely salved my prejudice or put into words certain racial memories that harmonized with mine.

=George L. Catton=: Consciously, little. Subconsciously, it is hard to say; perhaps all of it. From the classics, ancient classics, none. Never had the patience to wade through a lot of explanatory matter and minute detail I found in the so-called classics--to get at a fact or truth that could have been put in one sentence to stand out in the clear. Classics? Not to my way of thinking! I don't have to be told one thing twenty different ways to get the guts of it. Classics? old-fashioned expositions of old-fashioned views and ideas, most of which have been exploded long ago.

=Robert W. Chambers=: Current authors, nothing. Classics, much.

=Roy P. Churchill=: Both are necessary. The classics for vocabulary. People and current writers for modern styles. One is as valuable as the other to me.

=Carl Clausen=: A great deal.

=Courtney Ryley Cooper=: None from current authors. A lot from the classics, all devoured by the time I was sixteen. I had read everything from Dickens to Gautier by that time.

=Arthur Crabb=: I think I have learned very little from reading current authors, if you mean by current authors the average writer for the popular magazines. I used to read a great many stories, but of late years have practically stopped doing it. I have read and am reading constantly classics, if by that you mean great books written in the last three or four hundred years. I think that one of the reasons I am not more successful is that I try to write, as I see it, along the lines of the great novelists and haven't the goods. If I aimed at a less pretentious mark I would probably do a great deal better.

=Mary Stewart Cutting=: I have read everything classic and current that I could lay my hands on from the age of six.

=Elmer Davis=: Haven't learned it.

=William Harper Dean=: My work is influenced greatly from reading current authors. Little through the classics, unless you include Dickens among the latter. From him I have absorbed an invaluable conception of what the true meaning of atmosphere is, the weight of the short sentence and the power of the long one. But I am inspired in many ways when I read Hall Caine or Hutchinson or Hamsun or Conrad. I aspire to the easy, forceful style of Hutchinson, I want to be able to handle my characters with that charming grace which characterizes Conrad.

=Harris Dickson=: I read spasmodically current fiction, browse among the classics and naturally pick up ideas. These pick-ups are not, as a rule, conscious. Things just soak in, as water soaks into the ground and a spring comes out somewhere else.

=Captain Dingle=: Impossible for me to say. If I have learned from anybody it has been unconsciously. Had I taken a master, I suspect I might have got farther.

=Louis Dodge=: I get enthusiasm from reading current authors and the classics; but I try to find my own stories among people and tell them in my own way. To me a good book is like a preacher (the "ungracious pastor" of Shakespeare): it says to me "be good"--but it doesn't show me how.

=J. Allan Dunn=: I don't know. Don't believe much until I had myself acquired a certain amount of technique and could recognize the cleverness of others.

=Phyllis Duganne=: I've learned a great deal from reading current authors. It's interesting to read a story and like it, and then pick it to pieces to see how its writer made me feel as he did, how he made scenes so vivid and people so real, how he took an ancient plot and made it worth reading even when I knew after the first paragraph what the end would be. And it's instructive. And I suppose the same thing holds more or less in the classics. I'm much more interested in the modern school, so far as my own work is concerned.

=Walter A. Dyer=: I have read studiously both modern authors and the classics, and have got more inspiration from the latter.

=Walter Richard Eaton=: Nobody can say for me, I'd answer. One learns much of his "craft" (in both senses!) from a study of his market, the magazines. That is, he adapts the size (length) of his story, etc., to the editorial demands.

=E. O. Foster=: I have been an "omnivorous reader" all my life, the dictionary and encyclopedia being my favorite works.

=Arthur O. Friel=: Nearly all from current writers.

=J. U. Giesy=: All of it except what I have worked out myself. Have been a somewhat omnivorous reader all my life.

=George Gilbert=: No author can answer that, for he does not know himself.

=Kenneth Gilbert=: Current authors have been very helpful; classics scarcely at all.

=Holworthy Hall=: If I have learned anything at all about any "craft," I have learned it from Leonard Merrick, Mary Rinehart and Theophile Gautier.

=Richard Matthews Hallet=: I've probably learned a lot from reading current authors. Couldn't quite say how or what; and people who read me may doubt the above proposition. The danger of watching the tricks of a contemporary consists in liability to ape him in your own stuff, especially if he is a powerful contemporary. We have with us all the time young shadow-forms of Kipling, O. Henry, etc. I dogged Conrad nearly to my undoing. A man with some writing instinct can pick up the mannerisms of another writer as easily as butter absorbs a taint. The danger from reading the classics is less, and such reading is probably worth more to a man.

=William H. Hamby=: Not consciously from either: although I know I must have benefited from both, especially modern writers.

=A. Judson Hanna=: I can not say that reading the classics has helped me to write a story which will sell to an American magazine. I have received much valuable help by reading current authors. For instance, a story appearing in ---- has passed the test. By studying it I get an idea of what makes a short story. However, the most help I have ever received I gained from criticisms, by magazine editors, of rejected stories.

=Joseph Mills Hanson=: It seems to me difficult to estimate how much of one's craftmanship in writing has been gained from reading the work of others and how much from his own impelling instincts and impulses. If he feels the necessity of expressing himself in writing, his natural abilities and limitations in narration probably govern his craftsmanship in greater degree than any reading. I believe, however, that my own _style_ has been influenced at different times by different writers who aroused my admiration, both current authors and classic ones. Such influence I think is detrimental to one's individual style and should be guarded against. Even a poor individual style is better than a poor imitation of another's style. But the _general effect_ of reading good authors can not but be elevating and improving to one's own imagination and narrative ability.

=E. E. Harriman=: Have developed more disgust than delight in reading current authors, because I find so much that is rotten-incorrect-ridiculous and out of reason in them. For instance ---- ---- telling us that when on skiis, crossing snow five feet deep, he found a bird sitting on its eggs in a nest. And ---- ---- giving a grizzly bear a round track.

The classics help me most. For clearness in composition--Shakespeare and the Bible. Drummond's poems aid me. Being foolish enough to do some versifying myself helps me in prose writing.

=Nevil G. Henshaw=: I've got a lot from both, possibly more from current authors.

=Joseph Hergesheimer=: All my early and important reading was in the English lyrical poets.

=Robert Hichens=: I have learned, I think, a great deal by reading certain authors, but not current authors. A book that has helped me is Tolstoy's _Author's Art_.

=R. de S. Horn=: After the beginner has got the fundamentals of writing straight in his mind the greatest assistance he can get anywhere is from reading current authors and the classics. The classics show him the art at its highest form: the models of technique. The current authors show him the popular style and the trend of the times. Neither one should be studied to the exclusion of the other. A fifty-fifty ration is best, I think.

=Clyde B. Hough=: "How much of your craft have you learned from reading current authors?" Absolutely all that I know. "From the classics?" None. I don't strive to write classics, so why study them? The classics of today, most of them, were not considered classics when they were written. And the good human stories of to-day will be the classics of to-morrow.

=Emerson Hough=: I hope I never imitated any current author. Could not any classic.

=A. S. M. Hutchinson=: I don't know; but I think wide reading (not necessarily, or even at all, fiction) is necessary to good writing.

=Inez Haynes Irwin=: I do not think I have gained anything technically from reading the classics--with the exception of the Elizabethan dramatists. And I can not say exactly that they helped me technically--they delighted, thrilled and inspired me. I suppose, to be perfectly fair, I ought to say that the Russian novelists, who also dominated my girlhood, gave me my taste for realism. I have learned more than I can tell from the work of my contemporaries. When I was at Radcliffe College, following I think the example of Stevenson, my Harvard instructor had the class write themes in imitation of the Bible, Dryden, Walton, Addison, Johnson, Goldsmith, etc., etc. I believe now it would have had infinitely more value if we had been studying the short stories which were appearing in _McClure's Magazine_ at that period--a great period in American short-story writing. I can not overestimate how much I have gained from the short fiction of such writers as O'Henry, Percival Gibbons, Edna Ferber, Fanny Hurst, Joseph Hergesheimer, Willa Cather, and of course Henry James and Joseph Conrad.

=Will Irwin=: I suppose that I have learned a great deal of my craft from both current authors and the classics. How much, it would be hard to say. One absorbs such training unconsciously.

=Charles Tenney Jackson=: As to "current authors and the classics" I read the former very little; and the latter seem to be part of a past curiosity which left me with a certain vague, large respect much as you would give to a ninth-century cathedral or a tapestry. I reckon they did their durndest in their time, but I could wish that some Athenian philosopher had stopped a moment to record what he ate for breakfast, how the family wash was handled, what he shaved with ... all about the life about him, in fact; the picture, the color, the motives of folk about him. My imagination turns from the temples to what possibly housed the cobbler who mended Caesar's sandals, and where his children played. The guesses of the classic writers as to the riddle of life are not of interest, for I have my own; but I would like to know the flavor of the common life about them.

=Frederick J. Jackson=: I can't say how much technique I have learned from reading current authors. The classics is an easier question. The answer is about nothing, net, plus war tax.

=Mary Johnston=: I do not know.

=John Joseph=: Have been a tremendous reader and student of both current and classic literature, and if I know anything at all about writing I must have picked it up in this manner.

=Lloyd Kohler=: I think that it's safe to say that I've learned a good half of my craft from reading and _studying_ current authors and the classics. There is a danger in this, especially if one follows a certain current author too closely. It's best to read them all. As to the classics, there is little danger of ever getting too much of them--I'd venture that the average of us don't get enough of the classics. I know that I don't.

=Harold Lamb=: Current authors, no. I read them very little as a boy, and hardly at all as an author. The classics, yes, if you let me name my own classics.

They were my friends. They still are my friends. I refer to the coterie gathered together in the libraries of my grandfather and uncle. Messrs. Gustave Doré, Æsop, the Nibelungs, Roland and Oliver--the Song, you know--Pierrot, Prince of Tatary, The Apostles, Dante in Purgatory, Plato, Rider Haggard, Napoleon, Don Quixote de la Mancha (but Sancho Panza was a better chum). A host of others. But these had the finest pictures--an artist's library, and a poet's. So they were my earliest friends. I had others. Especially Francois Villon, Catullus, Henry, Babur, Li Po, Macdonald, Robert Burns.

=Sinclair Lewis=: I don't know.

=Hapsburg Liebe=: Since I never had any schooling, I guess I learned the little I know from reading, both modern authors and classics--I haven't read enough of the classics; they seem wordy to me. The average magazine, I guess, wouldn't buy or publish half the classics now if they were new.

=Romaine H. Lowdermilk=: Can't say. More from current authors, anyway.

=Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.=: Can't say, but doubtless I've learned a great deal from reading current authors (for technique in current fiction) and from the classics for the basic fundamentals.

=Rose Macaulay=: A great deal.

=Crittenden Marriott=: Mighty little.

=Homer I. McEldowney=: Thus far, I should say that current authors have had more influence upon my writing than have the classics, due to the fact that I read rather for amusement than for any lasting good which I might derive.

=Ray McGillivray=: In so far as any one must be blamed, I believe the classics--if you'll stretch the definition to include also Nick Carter, Old Sleuth and the Dalton Boys--are responsible. _I_ set the onus of responsibility at the door of my own general cussedness, the trait which makes me lay off _any_ labor any time a bunch of good pals takes a notion to drift from here to helangon, taking as equipment a deck of cards, a few well-hidden quarts, a couple of rifles and shotguns, a camera and some merry songs of the road as cargo for the old gas-buggy. Such a guy _must_ write; it's about the only excuse he's got to live--except the living, which is joy.

=Helen Topping Miller=: I read all the classics when I was very young. How much of my ability to write I owe to those early associations I am not able to judge. Of late I have naturally studied the craft of successful current authors. From modern novels I do not feel that I gain anything; indeed it is very rarely that I am able to finish a book without being dismally bored. On the other hand, scientific and historical works, especially ancient history and religious history, fascinate me. Travel also forms a large part of my reading.

=Thomas Samson Miller=: Impossible to say how much I am indebted to current authors and the classics. This is all subjective.

=Anne Shannon Monroe=: I do not read many current authors--haven't the time. I know many are good and I miss a great deal, but out on our coast we just have twenty-four hours a day, the same as in New York, and some of them must be spent in the open, when the open is such an enchanting wonderland. I read the classics in school-days--had bookish parents who drove them down our throats--but not since.

=L. M. Montgomery=: I think I owe considerable to my greedy reading and rereading of standard fiction--the old masters--Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne. Occasionally, too, a well-written modern magazine story has been helpful and illuminating. But, as a rule, I think aspiring authors will not reap much benefit from current fiction--except perhaps from a purely commercial point of view in finding out what kind of stories certain magazines take! Most writers, except those of absolute genius, are prone to unconscious imitation of what they read and that is a bad thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

=Michael J. Phillips=: I have not read the classics extensively. I can't see Dickens nor Shakespeare. I consider Charles Reade, the _Cricket on the Hearth_ fellow, and Blackmore, who wrote _Lorna Doone_, great artists and I suppose they influenced me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

=Henry Kitchell Webster=: I don't know.