Chapter XIII: Part 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

QUESTION VIII

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

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

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

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

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

ANSWERS

=Bill Adams=: Character and color, (when I've got 'em I say, "Hang you, Jack--_I'm_ all right.")

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

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

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

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

=Edwin Balmer=: Answered under I.

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

=Frederick Orin Bartlett=: Material.

=Nalbro Bartley=: Character development.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

=Robert V. Carr=: I do not know.

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

=Robert W. Chambers=: Fifty-fifty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

=Captain Dingle=: Material, setting, character.

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

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

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

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

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

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

=Arthur O. Friel=: Material, setting, character.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

=Joseph Hergesheimer=: Humanity! Understanding!

=Robert Hichens=: Everything's important.

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

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

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

=A. S. M. Hutchinson=: Character.

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

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

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

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

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

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

=Sinclair Lewis=: How can one segregate them?

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

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

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

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

=Crittenden Marriott=: Mostly plot; sometimes all color.

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

=Ray McGillivray=: Character, plot. See previous answers.

=Helen Topping Miller=: Character and setting interest me most.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

=Sir Gilbert Parker=: All are important.

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

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

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

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

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

=Eugene Manlove Rhodes=: Character, plot, color.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

=Theodore Seixas Solomons=: Structure and character. Structure will make or break any story, because the reader's fiction curiosity or interest is not to be satisfied unless you rigidly adhere to certain laws of interest by which he is governed. And character is the vitalizing principle that gives snap and satisfaction to his reading. To put it metaphorically, if the structure is not right he simply can't swallow the story, because it opposes corners and angles to the form of his mental gullet. But even given a proper structure, the story is insipid to the taste unless the people are real and enough out of the ordinary--have enough "character"--to be interesting. The other elements you enumerate, especially plot and style, are great aids, merely.

=Raymond S. Spears=: I find material, characters, setting (atmosphere "color"), the most interesting; but this betrays, of course, my lack of scholarship.

=Norman Springer=: I think in about the following order--character, color, style, structure, plot, material. But not always.

=T. S. Stribling=: I am simply delighted with every one of the elements of a story which you mention. Take any one out and it is like taking the tires off an auto. To me it is not a rational question. For instance, which do you like best, the tires, seats, engine or chassis of an auto? Sure I like them best.

=Booth Tarkington=: I don't make your subdivisions.

=W. C. Tuttle=: It is rather difficult to say which part of the story is of the most importance to me in writing. The character has always been foremost, I believe; because style, structure, setting and color must follow in order to complete the characterization.

=Lucille Van Slyke=: Something you left out of your list! Something Barrie calls "that damned thing called charm!" Ohee! If I could put on paper _that_--I'd let any old body have the plot and character and the rest! But trying to get it there is like walking on a tightwalker's rope over Niagara--you're liable to slip off and get drowndededededededead! End as plain mush.

=Atreus von Schrader=: Of all these, color is most important to me; _i. e._, purposeful characters in colorful settings. I prefer stories wherein people do things to those in which nothing moves but the wheels in the characters' heads.

=T. Von Ziekursch=: Structure, material, color.

=Henry Kitchell Webster=: The most important and interesting thing to me, in writing fiction, is character.

=G. A. Wells=: I consider character the most interesting feature of a story. A story without character is minus. Plot also interests me. However, not too much should happen. About two years ago I read a story of about forty thousand words. In every line something happened, and when I had finished the story I was decidedly tired, both mentally and physically. There is such a thing as having too much action in a story. I don't care for a story that lacks structure and style, though if the plot is strong and the character-drawing good, structure and style can go hang. Setting is important.

=William Wells=: Oh, Lord!

=Ben Ames Williams=: Under these various heads: Plot in a short story is often the most important element; in a longer story it is interesting chiefly for its effect on the characters of the characters. Structure always of first importance. A story can be made, or ruined, by using narration instead of a scene; by inverting the order of incidents; by neglecting "sign-posts"; by cheating the reader out of the big moment he expected; by putting your climax too early--or too late. Or by many another structural coup or mistake.

Style is essential--and various. I try to tell my story, produce my effect in the simplest possible way. Material not important except in the negative sense that some themes are taboo. Setting not important in a short story, though it may be made so. Always important in a novel. In a short story you may lift your characters out of their background and deal only with them. In a novel you must set them against their proper surroundings. Character: The more definite, the better. Or in other words, the more the better. Color: I see no difference between color and setting. In this paragraph I assume to express only my own views, of course. I've stated these views dogmatically for the sake of brevity.

=Honore Willsie=: I could not differentiate. All are essential to the finely rounded tale.

=H. C. Witwer=: Style and plot.

=William Almon Wolff=: Well, you have to have a story first of all. So, I suppose, plot comes first. But you have to have people, too, so character can be bracketed with plot. After that the importance of various elements depends, it seems to me, on the particular story.

=Edgar Young=: Style highly important, verisimilitude, plot. With style and verisimilitude a man can go far in story writing. By style I mean manner of narration in connection with the particular story being written.

SUMMARY

By assigning seven points to a first choice, six to a second choice, etc., we get a general perspective on the trend of these answers as a whole. Where several elements are named without indicating order of preference all are scored as first choice unless the order of the group is otherwise located. Of 108 answerers 3 were unable to assign relative values, 2 were not tabulated, 2 stated only that importance varies with each particular story and 1 replied, "I don't make your subdivisions."

Tabulating the remaining 100 answers we have a roughly formulated score as follows:

Character 430
Plot 329
Style 192
Structure 180
Setting 171
Color 166
Material 158
All 56
Action 21
Atmosphere 16
Situation 13
Development 7
Abstract Ideas 7
Clearness 7
Suspense 7
Surprise 7
Drama 7
Keynote 7
Humanity 7
Thought 7
Charm 7
Theme 7
Verisimilitude 7
Feeling 7
Philosophy 6
Period 6
Humor 5
Punch 3

The seven elements specifically mentioned in the question were merely the stock names commonly used in the profession that happened to mind and were of course intended only to suggest the general purpose of the question. Neither the seven nor the twenty-one other elements mentioned in the table are all mutually exclusive and on some there is no agreement of definition. This is of no moment. We are not compiling a dictionary or a mathematical table, though some of these summaries may give that impression. We are seeking only to discover general trends. Any deductions must be of a general, not a final, nature, and most emphatically there must always be allowance for the individual case, which on occasion can and should defy all general rules and trends.

The value of such laboratory tests as these lies in our using as a basis, not theories, but facts, our real purpose being not to prove or disprove accepted theories but to draw whatever conclusions the facts dictate. There is, God knows, little enough of this kind of work being done. Instead, the writing world is littered with thousands of hereditary rules, arbitrary dicta, theoretical conclusions and unsound generalities. Here are facts; let us get from them what suggestions we may, each after his own fashion and according to his own needs. I could fill pages with my deductions and conclusions from these answers, some of them perhaps very good for my own case and perhaps very bad for the next person.

It may be that the experienced writer can profit more from the presentation of these facts than can the beginner. Just as I with twenty years of editorial experience can profit from them infinitely more than I could have done five, ten, twenty years ago. We are all prone to conclude that we have solved a matter for all time, when in reality we have only become a little weary of learning and a little "sot" in our beliefs. On the other hand, a little learned in the beginning may be more effective than much learned later by experience, for experience means vanished years. That writers in general can and do learn from one another as to problems and methods there is no doubt, and here are writers by the score instead of by ones and twos.

These tabulations serve only toward a general perspective, the more specific values being in the answers themselves. A more general classification of the elements considered in this section of the questionnaire may be worth while, grouping them roughly as to general nature:

Plot, structure, action, situation, development, suspense, surprise, drama, punch--574.

Character--430.

Setting, color, atmosphere, period--359.

Style, clearness, accuracy, charm, verisimilitude--220.

Material--158.

Abstract ideas, keynote, humanity, thought, theme, feeling, philosophy--48.

QUESTION IX

_What are two or three of the most valuable suggestions you could
give to a beginner? To a practised writer?_

ANSWERS

=Bill Adams=: In the matter of hints--to beginners--don't begin yet. Wait till you've had a chance to learn a bit more. To practised writers, "For God's sake don't talk so _much_."

=Samuel Hopkins Adams=: To a beginner: to learn to look at men and things directly, not obliquely, to write what you want to write, not what others want you to write; to adopt and cling to their creed, abominated or considered heretical by most non-writers, that fiction is and always must be more interesting and compact than life, or it is not fiction.

As for advising a practised writer: why invite one to practise an impertinence toward those who know as much of the craft as I myself do?

=Paul L. Anderson=: To read _analytically_. To write.

=William Ashley Anderson=: A beginner ought to read voraciously, learning to distinguish the real from the false. He ought to study both history and literature. And he ought to start off with the thorough realization that the great writers were great thinkers, regular men and hard workers. He ought never make a pose of writing, but go at it, rather, as though it were a real job. There is nothing to say to a practised writer except that he ought to have an ideal and set high standards for himself, otherwise he will inevitably become hack. A writer must sooner or later show his personality in his works, and if he has no personality (it may be a personality formed by his brain and character; his physical appearance has nothing to do with it) he can never hope for continued success.

=H. C. Bailey=: To a beginner--know people and sympathize with them. To a practised writer--don't use the same characters.

=Edwin Balmer=: To try it on editors and get their real reactions. Not to think you're good.

=Ralph Henry Barbour=: Suggestions to the beginner? Nothing new, certainly. Make your stories real, though. Have real characters, let them act naturally in natural scenes and talk natural talk. Don't strive for a "style." That comes. Or doesn't come. It doesn't matter in either case. I'm one of the old-fashioned sort who believe that writing is something that can't be learned as you learn china painting or bridge or how to conduct one's self in good society. I have a hunch that the ability to write anything any one else wants to read is somewhere inside one when one lets out the first infantile squall. I may be wrong. Writing, after all, is just a method of self-expression, like painting, music, sculpture. Successful musicians are not _made_. They may be perfected. That is likewise true of painters and sculptors. However, there are all grades of musicians, and likewise there are many grades of writers. Even a little natural ability will get you somewhere if you cultivate it. Any one who wants to write has my sympathy and good wishes. I say go to it. Only, if you're taking up writing merely because it looks like an easy path to affluence or because you're tired of gas-fitting or selling automobiles or doing housework, don't be disappointed if editors seem hard-hearted. To the practised writer I have no suggestions to make. I'm not that cheeky.

=Frederick Orin Bartlett=: My advice to a beginner would be to write all the time; to a practised writer, not to write all the time.

=Nalbro Bartley=: Don't write anything you are not familiar with. If you haven't worked on a newspaper, do so. Don't be afraid to revise if an editor says to do so--the "art" of your story is not likely to be imperiled!

Keep moving--in the way of getting new angles and fresh copy. A practised writer so many times writes a story which is hailed as his best, his masterpiece, and then he settles back into turning out endless echoes of the same, without realizing that he is retrograding. Don't mix too much with inky people--you will do nothing but talk shop and get into a deadly rut. Stay where you can see life--because authors are not going to buy or read your stories and the fiction reading public does not want to read about authors--they want to read what authors write about the fiction reading public.

=Konrad Bercovici=: If one feels it is the only thing he wants to do; if he feels within himself the call of the minstrel; if he can enjoy a good meal or a tall glass of wine one day and dry bread the next, a soft downy bed one night and the cold ground the following: if he feels he can live that haphazard life without any desire to equalize it, by spreading out his pennies so that he may have a little more than dry bread every day instead of affluence one day and misery the following: if he has had a manuscript returned sixty times and still invests the next twelve cents (borrowed from a friend) for a postage stamp to mail same manuscript for the sixty-first time, then there is some hope that some day he may become a writer. Every one writing is really an apprentice. It is the most difficult and the most impossible of all the arts, for none of us can really write.

=Ferdinand Berthoud=: Don't try to write of something you don't know about or have not experienced. Don't get the impression that copying the style and structure of any successful writer will be a sure stepping stone to immediate success. Pretty clothes are not much use unless you have something good to wrap them round. Don't get the mistaken idea that writers become sudden millionaires by sitting down and pounding the keys a couple of hours a day.

As to giving advice to a practised writer--I haven't the nerve.

=H. H. Birney, Jr.=: To a beginner I can only say that the way to learn to write is to write. No one ever learned to swim on dry land. Write all the time. Make yourself your own merciless critic. Make up your mind you're rotten and figure how to improve. Take some incident from the daily paper. Write a story from it--not over two thousand five hundred words for a starter. Lay it aside till it's "cold" and then go over it, thinking only "Here's a poor story by some one I don't know. How can I make a good, readable yarn out of it?" Realize that you can't be a Kipling or an O. Henry, but you can become successful just the same. As soon as you are suited with a story send it to a magazine for which it is suited. Ask for a criticism of it. Frequently you'll get one, as editors really want to help writers. Don't get discouraged. Remember that, as far as _sales_ are concerned, you're really writing for just one or two men--the readers on the staff of that particular magazine. What one reader doesn't like another might. Read _Martin Eden_ but don't let your ego get too big for your cosmos as "Martin" did. Remember that Jack London had been severely bitten by the bacillus of socialism, and make allowances accordingly.

I'll wait until I am a practised writer before I attempt to offer advice to one.

=Farnham Bishop=: Feed your fiction with facts. Never cheapen your name and your self-respect by writing a pot-boiler. Have only one grade: the best. If you can't make a living at first by writing, enlist or take a regular job--and learn about human beings and human nature in the barracks or the shop, till you have something real to write about. Learn to use a typewriter and always keep a carbon copy until the story appears in print.

To the practised writer: Join the Authors' League and the Authors' Guild. Build up your own staff of technical advisers; an astronomer to coach you in the ways of the moon, a retired sea-captain or naval officer, doctors, lawyers, engineers, buck-privates and other experts in all walks of life.

=Algernon Blackwood=: To a beginner--don't write unless you simply can not keep it back. Write to please yourself. Never think of a public. Reduce your first attempts to the briefest possible length. See in how few words you can make your idea or plot intelligible. To a practised writer--feel dissatisfied with everything completed, put it aside and forget it entirely, then read it over months later--and revise.

=Max Bonter=: I am only a beginner myself. Naturally I wouldn't be idiotic enough to offer suggestions to anybody.

I have often wondered, however, what my fate would have been if I had followed the line of least resistance. Looking at my first story after twenty-two years of rough house, I see that it was nothing but cub bunk. Nevertheless at that time the editor told me that I had "promise," etc., and advised me to keep going.

What would have happened to me if I had started to swell up at the tender age of eighteen and could have found a market for the stuff? Why, at that time I fancied that a swallow-tail coat represented the ne plus ultra of social advancement!

I must have had a grain or two of sense under my callowness. Now, after twenty-two years of real life, I feel justified in making a beginning. I think that maybe, if I work faithfully, I can say something before I quit.

=Katharine Holland Brown=: Don't write unless you are profoundly convinced that you will be miserable in any other occupation. Then, if you have determined that you will write, tramp straight over everything and everybody that gets in your way. Remember that to be a writer will cost everything you have got, and more too. But go up to the counter and pay. It's worth all you can pay.

After winning a certain amount of recognition, don't imagine that you can afford to lean back and relax. There isn't any back to a writer's chair.

=F. R. Buckley=: To beginner, read Kipling and write regularly without trying to imitate him. To old hand, don't tell your plots before they're written. Not because they're liable to be stolen, either.

=Prosper Buranelli=: I don't know of any suggestion--save don't write unless you can't do anything else. If you have the consciousness of genius, become a hobo, because you are feeble-minded.

=Thompson Burtis=: As from one beginner to another, without elaboration, I should say that the first dozen suggestions would all be comprised in one: write about the scenes, characters and events you know best and don't describe a single thing or type on which you have to use your imagination too much. Society girls writing about the untrammeled West and a Kankakee newspaperwoman writing about Reginald Vandervere are sad, and I think all people who want to write whom I have known have inevitably believed that their own actual experience and acquaintance provided nothing interesting. The other two suggestions I would make would be:

Go at writing as you would learning any trade--study published stories in detail; learn proper technical procedure from books or experienced writers, and _work_ at it, forgetting for the moment to consider it an art instead of a business.

Having decided to write about something one knows about, and having mastered technique enough to know that in plot, construction and material the embryo story is salable, do not let your wild desire to sell it and be a writer cause you to revise, revamp and change your story so much that it will lose its personality--its power of reflecting you yourself. The best story, I firmly believe, which I ever conceived finally ended up at half a cent a word after many weary hours of work on it because I had revised it until three prominent editors coincided in the judgment that it was "manufactured." It was woodenly written. I believe the first draft of a lot of stories beat the final one. Of course the newer the writers the harder they must work, but I believe stage fright often makes them as stiff as an amateur actor.

=George M. A. Cain=: My first nineteen suggestions to a beginner would be Punch's celebrated advice to those about to marry--_don't_. Literature is an art. If one can conceivably be happy outside it, he had much better stay there. As a lucrative profession it is simply a gamble. If a man is free of all dependents and can stay so indefinitely, he can afford to yield to the urge of the muse of fiction. Even then, better not. If he has dependents, no circumstance or artistic urge or anything else should lead him to engage in literature at the expense or to the exclusion of some other sufficient employment for a livelihood. Needs demanding a source of income half that of a plumber's helper will prove sufficient to hamper his advance in his art, turn his life into a rack of financial worries, spoil for him all natural affections, wreck his nerves, weaken his mental powers, break his health. I know. Almost every editor for whom I have ever written has insisted that my best stuff was worthy of a much better market than he could give me. The constant need of money to keep the family together has compelled me to sell my best with my worst, where I knew it would bring quick cash. It has driven me to make a nuisance of myself to editors who would be kind and quick; it has kept me from trying editors who could not render such prompt service. It has tied me to the cheapest and poorest markets. It has caused me to fill these to overflowing, only to the eventual loss even of them.

For the man who can not or will not take this advice, I know of no qualification I possess to give any other.

=Robert V. Carr=: I can think of no suggestions that would equal what a man finds out for himself.