Chapter XVII: Part 17

=Talbot Mundy=: The typewriter seems best, but I am going to try a dictaphone by way of experiment. As regards the losing of ideas, "when found make a note of" is probably the remedy. Then the only difficulty is to force yourself to consult your note-book and, having consulted it, to link up again the hurriedly made note with the wonderful winged idea that inspired it.

The only stuff really worth writing is poetry, although I'd hate to have to read nothing else! The stuff I enjoy reading most of all is philosophy and metaphysics. Next after which, good books of travel and treatises on finance and bee-keeping hold the board.

I believe that the apex of exquisite enjoyment is, for instance, reading Kant or John Wesley and shooting their arguments all to pieces. But I can't afford to enjoy myself.

=Kathleen Norris=: To "lose ideas" seems to me to imply an untidy sort of brain. The imagination needed for a story should not be a spasmodic, incoherent, impulsive sort of business, but an orderly production. A person who would lose ideas would also lose her purse, her friends, her petticoat, and eventually, I should suppose, her mind.

=Anne O'Hagan=: I think I'll answer this the other way around, naming the things that oppose the _most_ check in their order--pen, stenographer, typewriter, pencil.

=Grant Overton=: I always compose on the typewriter. I should lose ideas if I had to write by hand, but I generally sit down to a day's work of possibly three concentrated hours with only a vague idea of what I shall write about. I may know a sentence or two. I let it build itself up from moment to moment. All the ideas and most of the pictures grow out of the moment before.

=Sir Gilbert Parker=: I could not dictate a word, and I never used a typewriter. All I do is written by hand with a pen.

=Hugh Pendexter=: Often. But they usually come back to me without any conscious effort to reclaim them. The typewriter is my best medium for setting down the story. I never use pen, pencil, or dictate. But there is no medium ever invented that can keep up with a man's imagination and preserve all the coloring and minutiæ of effects.

=Clay Perry=: I used to lose ideas because of being unable to get them on paper fast enough, but since I educated my two forefingers to the hunt and touch system on the typewriter that happens very seldom. Having done practically all my fiction work for the past five years on a "mill" and never through dictation, I can not say whether dictation would help more. A pen or pencil would "cramp my style" very badly, now. I've synchronized my mind to the "mill." However, I believe this is purely an artificial, mechanical condition which could be worked out, one way or another, in necessity.

=Michael J. Phillips=: Newspaper training has disciplined my mind so I lose nothing through failure of speed to transcribe. It is all right for some, but I would be afraid of a yarn that forced me to such speed. The thing would be impossible when I had finished it. Usually use typewriter and copy all of my own short manuscripts, having longer ones copied by stenographer. The newspaper game has taught me to dictate either over the phone or to stenographer; to typewrite; and to write with pencil with equal freedom. I wouldn't care for a pen. Under the circumstances, the typewriter is the most practicable, so I use it almost exclusively.

=Walter B. Pitkin=: I lose much through inability to record fast enough. I work best when typing myself; next best with a pen or pencil. I am totally unable to dictate anything but the deadest form-letter stuff to even the most sympathetic stenog! I have two utterly distinct styles and manners, one when writing freely and one when talking to a secretary or stenog. The latter is simply awful.

=E. S. Pladwell=: No. My imagination travels fast but I do not lose ideas because of it. Out of a hundred ideas, five are good. Those five, if good, need not be forgotten. It works out automatically. I remember a good idea. The rest can go hang.

Being a newspaper man, I use the typewriter constantly and now I can not write longhand without a cramp in two minutes.

=Lucia Mead Priest=: Sometimes my thoughts get ahead of me. If they are not nailed down they are likely never to come again.

I can keep up fairly well--if I do not have to _decipher_ the _next day_, I am safe.

I do not use the typewriter for several reasons. Mechanical things are irksome; I am lazy.

I use a pencil and a stenographer does the rest.

=Eugene Manlove Rhodes=: Yes. Pencil.

=Frank C. Robertson=: I find it pays to turn the imagination loose until the story is well outlined in the mind before touching paper. Then it is comparatively easy to concentrate upon the immediate problem before you when you sit down to write. I compose only on the typewriter.

=Ruth Sawyer=: Yes. I prefer typewriter. And when the material is definitely clear and fresh in my mind I prefer dictating.

=Chester L. Saxby=: Pen or pencil is a greater drag on me than a typewriter is. Due to habit, no doubt. I have never dictated. Oh, yes, ideas crowd on at times; but with a pencil I should find the crowding rushed my writing into chicken-tracks I couldn't read afterward. The very fact that typewriting holds me back I regard as an advantage; the first impulse must too frequently be rejected. Literature should be cooked up in hot blood--and then written _cold_.

=Barry Scobee=: I would lose ideas because my imagination travels faster than my typewriter, but I jot down points for my story, even pages ahead, as I go along and they come to mind. Typewriter affords least check for me. Never tried a story with any other tool.

=R. T. M. Scott=: I lose a few ideas because my imagination travels faster than my means of recording but I usually pick up others, equally good, which I would have missed had my recording kept pace with my thoughts. The typewriter affords me the least check, but I believe that to be a matter of habit. One thing about a typewriter is that you get a better look at your stuff as it goes down.

=Robert Simpson=: I don't lose many ideas owing to a rapid fire imagination. I haven't got one. Frequently it goes wandering off into bypaths, but the only thing I lose then is time. Everything I write is first written and revised in pen and ink. I detest a typewriter.

=Arthur D. Howden Smith=: No. Typewriter.

=Theodore Seixas Solomons=: I seldom lose ideas in that way. From my answer to II you will see that even if I happen to think faster than I can write, if the thought is a useful one it automatically attaches itself to my memory. As to the mechanism of writing, I am only now abandoning the pen and using, for almost all composition, the typewriter. But for the greater legibility and the quickness, when quickness is needed, of the machine, I should continue with the pen, for with me it is most conducive to careful first expression. I write with widely separated lines--about twice the usual spacing, or even three times. This, either with the pen or on the machine. My purpose is to avoid the necessity of making a new draft on new paper when I come to revise. I now use but the one manuscript draft, making all my changes on that. Occasionally I am obliged to prepare some new sheets, but ninety-five per cent. or more of the original sheets are retained. If I happen to be in my stride, or, what is more likely, if the matter happens to be easy to write, a page or two may escape with little correction. Again, I may line and interline, but I have the space and by using a fine script, which comes easy to me, I am able to make great changes and additions while retaining the original page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

=Atreus von Schrader=: No. Typewriter.

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

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

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

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

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

=Honore Willsie=: Sometimes. Soft pencil.

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

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

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

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

SUMMARY

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

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

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

THE END

Transcriber Notes:

Passages in italics were indicated by _underscores_.

Passages in bold were indicated by =equal signs=.

Small caps were replaced with ALL CAPS.

Errors in punctuations, inconsistent hyphenation, and inconsistent were italics were not corrected unless otherwise noted.

On page 7, "etc?" was replaced with "etc.?".

On page 25, "propellor" was replaced with "propeller".

On page 31, "told it me all wrong" was replaced with "told it to me all wrong".

On page 35, the period after R. T. M. Scott was replaced with a colon.

On page 78, "1 receive these" was replaced with "I receive these".

On page 81, "whether logical or no" was replaced with "whether logical or not".

On page 96, "It's aim," was replaced with "Its aim,".

On page 119, "that is too minute.." was replaced with "that is too minute.".

On page 121, "Mary Stuart Cutting" was replaced with "Mary Stewart Cutting".

On page 124, "subconciously" was replaced with "subconsciously".

On page 127, "Dicken's" was replaced with "Dickens'".

On page 138, a period was put after "(hope I'm not getting atrophied!)".

On page 154, a period was put after "it is a terrible arraignment to numbers".

On page 165, a period was put after "Otherwise I think there is little if any difference".

On page 193, a period was put after "I had been reading (by somebody else!)".

On page 198, "as I want them too" was replaced with "as I want them too".

On page 207, "Imagaination" was replaced with "Imagination".

On page 288, "Mauspassant" was replaced with "Maupassant".

On page 309, "Gilbert Chesterson" was replaced with "Gilbert Chesterton".

On page 327, "Anna O'Hagan" was replaced with "Anne O'Hagan".

On page 328, "attention to style, If by that" was replaced with "attention to style, if by that".

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End of Project Gutenberg's Fiction Writers on Fiction Writing, by Various