T. Von Ziekursch: To spin the tale in such a way that the reader must live through it.
Henry Kitchell Webster: The best advice I have to give a beginner is that he write, and keep on writing; that, when he has told his story, he despatch it to an editor, or a series of editors, and forget it, telling a new story, if he has a new one to tell, instead of trying to improve an old one.
G. A. Wells: The advice to the beginner to condense is important. Most stories printed will stand pruning, many of them to a considerable extent. I would also impress upon the tyro the absolute necessity of work.Work!He can't observe union hours. Twelve hours a day is about right; fifteen if possible. Read anything and everything. One class of literature is likely to make a parrot of him.
Only those who have the grace to see good in a rejection slip belong in the game. The beginner must make up his mind that possibly (very likely) he will have to struggle years before he breaks through. Far too many aspiring young men and women go into the game of authorship with a guess-I'll-write-a-story-and-sell-it-for-a-thousand-dollars spirit. First stories do get across now and then, but they are the exceptions and not the rule. I sold my first story six years after I began to write, and in the meantime accumulated a bale of rejection slips. I am still at it.
Most aspirants quit cold after a few rejections. They haven't the guts (pardon) to stick it out. There are a number of would-be authors in this town. One by one theycrop up, bloom a while in the sun of anticipation, then the vitriol of disappointment withers them and they fade again into the soulless clerks and truck drivers of yore. Too much stress can not be placed upon persistence. Persistence alone may mean the difference between success and failure.
I would advise the practised writer to turn out less and better work. He should forget money and write for the sake of art. He should not depend too much upon past performances, for even laurel withers. Most important of all, he should quit while the quitting is good, and not go on and on until his work shows that he has lost his grip. Mark Twain went too far. London also. ——'s later stuff is insipid. —— is beginning her second childhood in authorship. —— used to write good stories. It is perhaps a blessing that O. Henry died before he ruined himself with "serious stuff." I admit that later work has a finish, a polish that early work lacks; but very seldom does later work show the fire, the vigor, the enthusiasm, the freshness that early work does. So it is a good idea for the practised writer not to make a marathon of what should be no more than a dash.
William Wells: Oh, Lord!
Honore Willsie: Study story structure every day. Use a dictionary and thesaurus constantly. Practise the forming of sentences and paragraphs as constantly as you would practise scales were you a musician. I have no suggestions for the practised writer.
H. C. Witwer: To a beginner I would suggest a thorough reading of the popular magazines, a shot at the newspaper game if possible, plenty of clean white paper, a typewriter, and a resolution to take punishment in the form of hard work and rejections. The first time an editor says or writes, "... but your work interests me, and I would like to have a talk with you," all will be forgotten! To a practised writer I would say this—apologizing for what might be thought patronization—don't forget they arecoming up from the depths every year, just as you came up. Editors, as a whole, crave "discoveries," new names, fresh viewpoints, etc. Don't think of attempting to rest on past laurels. Don't keep a once popular character too long before your readers, work harder now than you did before you landed. Look around you, the biggest "names" are the biggest producers, year after year. You're a writer—all right,write.
William Almon Wolff: For the beginner: Be sure you have something to say. Retain a single point of view in a short story. Know—and make clear—exactly why people do what they do, and see to it that they never do anything simply to help the plot along.
Who am I to suggest things to the practised writer? But those three things, and, especially, the third, are pretty good things for any one to keep in mind, I should say.
Edgar Young: Write what you know about; do not take other men's underlying ideas and try to make a story from them, for the result will be weaker than the original; do not lose faith in your own values of your work.
Summary
Obviously little comment is needed from a compiler. Here both the beginner and the practised writer have the best advice from those best qualified to give it—those who have proved their theories by success. The road to that success is no more a common one than it is a royal one. What serves one writer best, serves another little, not at all or very ill. The beginner's own intelligence must choose for him among all these offerings of advice the ones best adapted to his own particular case. Taken as a whole, the advice given is invaluable—stimulative and soundly helpful. But the test of its value to any writer must lie in his own discriminating judgment based on a sure knowledge of his own gifts, weaknesses and habits.
Since it is brought out so forcefully in one of the answers and forcefully enough in so many others, one point deserves notice. An answerer gives, as his advice to experiencedwriters, "For God's sake don't talk somuch!" It may sound flippant. It may sound presumptuous, since to some experienced writers this man may be unknown. Almost certainly it will not be taken seriously by those who most need to heed the advice. Knowing the man, I know it is not flippant; knowing his work, I know it is not presumptuous, for he has gifts of expression that most of our best known writers can never attain. There can be no doubt of the soundness of his advice or of the need of it. That it should be given so many times in these answers is particularly significant.
There is frequent discussion of the difference between literature and "magazine fiction" including what is found between book-covers. It is a hardy analyst who would attempt drawing a definite and final line of demarkation between the two, but one easy distinction may be made. Literature expresses what needs to be expressed; the greater part of our magazine fiction expresses too largely for the sake of hearing itself talk prettily and a great deal, or because its authors have found they can get money and popularity and standing from a gift of cultured, or mere taking, gab. This is perhaps even more true of established authors—yea, even some of our most famous—than it is of our beginners.
I do not mean that all of them analyze the situation and follow the method as conscious policy. It would be more hopeful if this were the case. The bulk of them are proudly content under the amazing delusion that what they write has literary quality. It hasn't. The best that can be said of it is that it is fool's gold, for it glitters exceedingly despite its lack of worth. It is, for the most part, words only. Generally beautiful words or amusing words or very scholarly words, all skilfully and pleasingly joined together, sprinkled heavily with a cheap cologne giving off a strong smell suggestive of literary quality and interspersed with modest little cries of "Note the genius in this turn of phrase! And, prithee, do not miss the scholarlydistortion of this simple sentence or the very literary vagueness in the expression of this elementary and commonplace idea! Behold, too, how the really skilled hand can stretch this infinitesimal atom of material into pages of exquisite and delightful reading! How crudely would one lacking literary gift have set it forth in a few plain words! And, pardon, reader, but you haven't been so dull as to miss noting the heights of sophistication from which your author looks contemptuously down upon the puppets he moves with careless skill upon his board, upon the board and even upon the very moving?"
Or perhaps such cries are omitted and the reader merely confronted with an army of words marching impressively in literary formation without worthwhile distinction, carrying no baggage and with no literary reason for marching at all.
Yes, I'm bitter. And very, very sick at the stomach. For most critics call this procession of words literature, and most of the public meekly accept the dictum. Worse, it becomes a model for other writers. And all the time it builds up the ruinous idea that literature is something apart from life and reality, incompatible with simplicity and naturalness, an inorganic thing of exotic plumage, something not everlastingly dependent upon the anxiously exact adaptation of expression to something worth expressing.
In our answers above I have in more than one place omitted the name of one of the best known American magazines because of unfavorable mention. In one case part of an answer was omitted bodily because its whole point was the advice to practised writers not to read that magazine or the work of a certain well-known writer not included among our answerers. The reasons for that advice were not stated, but that magazine is perhaps the chief exponent of the surface-glitter and infinitely wordy type of story, shaped editorially with no consideration of real literary worth or anything else except large popular salesand adherence to a formal morality rather lacking in ethics. Yet it is a strong factor in providing standards for critics lacking any of their own, in influencing both editors and writers toward similar material and in lowering the tastes and standards of the general reading public.
Unfortunately it is not the only exponent of the over-written story. You find them in most of our best magazines, in the school of realism as well as that of idealism or romanticism. If you doubt, analyze one of them. Remove the word-wrappings and search beneath. You will find, quite often, incident, sometimes a great deal of it; sometimes a real plot, though generally a threadbare and slight one. But in most cases you will find little structure worthy of the name, sometimes because there is nothing much with which to construct and sometimes because if the author had ability for structure he would not prostitute himself on that kind of story. You may find caricature, even characterization done with a clumsy brush in gaudy colors and jutting outline, but no characterization that warrants the story's existence on that score. Color very probably—a whole box of colors melted under a forced draft. Probably so much setting that the photography of it contributes much of the illusion of the story's being literature. Other things, of similar quality and degree. But literature? Not even a chemist's trace.
I am heartily glad some of our answerers turned the light where it is needed. Probably the chief weaknesses in present-day American fiction are three in one:
1. Wordiness
2. Lack of simplicity
3. Surface tinsel
Teachers of fiction might contribute a worthy service by compelling all students to gaze upon, say, the relentless brevity and simplicity of De Maupassant that yet gives more and more subtle shadings, even in translation, than most of the wordy ones can give in five times the space. Or Flaubert's exquisite nicety in word selection, not forthe mere sensual sound of the word but for the word's real office in expression.
Perhaps such frank expression may seem out of place in this volume. But being a magazine editor and the compiler of this book does not free me from all other obligations. And there is need of every voice that can be raised in outcry against the tidal wave of words that is drowning so much of American fiction. As to good taste, I am less interested in it than in trying to help against this increasing evil. The advice of our answerer ought to be nailed to the wall above the desk of—what per cent.?—of our established writers: "For God's sake don't talk somuch!"
QUESTION X
What is the elemental hold of fiction on the human mind?
What is the elemental hold of fiction on the human mind?
Answers
Bill Adams: Life pitched against death; and man the master.
Samuel Hopkins Adams:
"The devotion to something afarFrom the sphere of our sorrow."
"The devotion to something afarFrom the sphere of our sorrow."
Paul L. Anderson: The inherent necessity for excitement, which, despite the Puritans and the high-brows, is as much an elemental need as food.
William Ashley Anderson: It is a mental stimulant. Like every other stimulant, the doses vary, and it affects various tastes in various ways. It has the power of frightening, amazing, inspiring, amusing, enraging—in fact working upon all the human emotions. It has the power to derange human minds; it has also the power to soothe them. Its appeal rests directly upon the curiosity of man, i. e., the insatiable desire of man to hear something unusual he has not already heard.
H. C. Bailey: Tell me a story.
Ralph Henry Barbour: The satisfaction of a craving for romance in a civilization that is more and more coming to look on it as sinful.
Frederick Orin Bartlett: The desire for emotional reactions greater than those the average life affords.
Nalbro Bartley: The opportunity to phantasy in a harmless fashion. The average person occupied with average tasks demands a release from monotony which wholesome fiction supplies. They want to see the commonplace glorified—even if it is between the pages of a book.
Konrad Bercovici: The human mind has never held anything else but fiction. It is the only real thing in life. Science is a myth. It has been invented by fiction writers.
H. H. Birney, Jr.: Fiction takes the reader out of the drab monotony of life into a new world of color and action and romance. He finds there what Jack London calls his "purple passages." That's why the shop-girl readsThree WeeksandThe Sheikwhich bore most men to tears. Most women cherish, unknowingly perhaps, a suppressed eroticism. Sex-interest and sex-emotions are to her the greatest factors in existence. The average man takes his sex-emotions casually. Woman is essentially monogamous, man polygamous. (Gosh, I didn't mean to get in that deep! My wife would run me ragged if she read it. Sounds like I've been reading friend Freud, doesn't it?)
O. Henry covered the appeal of fiction to the average individual when he described the tired clerk who would remove his shoes, place his aching feet against the cold radiator, and read Clark Russell!
Farnham Bishop: Story-hunger, which is as strong as any of the other natural appetites.
Algernon Blackwood: I do not know.
Max Bonter: Fiction seems to take the reader over the hill—beyond the horizon. The mind takes a voyage into the mysterious, reveling in strange scenes, characters and situations. Then it swings back from exoticism with renewed zest for the commonplace.
Fiction is the "holiday spirit" in literature. It is an orgy in which we spend our emotions. We feel better afterward.
Katharine Holland Brown: The fact that we all like to dramatize ourselves,—and the story-writer helps us do it? (This is a question, not a reply.)
F. R. Buckley: I do not know. Guess—vicarious adventure.
Prosper Buranelli: The Arab spinning tales before afire, or the drummer telling a nasty story. Shocking the boobs and pleasing the scapegraces with accounts of marvels either small or great, in which the narrator would like to have figured—only he has a broken backbone.
Thompson Burtis: The fascination of overcoming, by proxy, through the personalities of hero or heroine, difficulties, dangers and problems, and of temporarily feeling with one's self the greatnesses of the storied person. Particularly in fiction of more adventurous type, I believe John Smith's kick comes from perceiving how much like Daring Dave Devere he really is.
George M. A. Cain: I believe it is love of the more intense emotional states. Fiction provides these by proxy for those whom circumstances or indolence prevents from actual experience in sufficient frequency. Others seek in artificial stimulants the heightening of emotions not normally excited by circumstance itself. A few go after the actual experiences. The trouble with this is the rarity of really thrilling experiences, even for men or women able to spend their lives in hunting for them, and the fact that no experience can hold its grip on the emotions through repetitions. The actually thrilling experiences readiest to hand for everybody are those of animal appetites, and these are the most dangerous. Gambling, a little higher in the quality of its thrills, is hardly to be recommended. Yet a certain amount of excitement is really wholesome, necessary to save the mind from rusting in grooves too well worn to call forth its activities. Personally, I believe that mild alcoholic stimulants have always been a benefit to the race, all their after reactions notwithstanding. But the raising of emotional states through imaginary experiences offers what, in these days, is as readily obtainable stimulant as alcohol has ever been, and one freer from the objections of after reactions and of peril in excess. Hence the value of fiction in inducing exalted moods.
And this leads to my ideas of character drawing. On the assumption that the first appeal of fiction is as anopportunity for proxy experience of emotions, it seems obvious to me that extreme character drawing is generally a mistake. The reader can not imagine himself as a hero whose characteristics are extremely different from his own, as any extreme characteristics will surely be. Even when a character is so well drawn as to arouse strong feeling of liking or dislike, I doubt if the ordinary reader can take the interest in him or his imagined experiences that he will instantly feel in himself as placed in the same series of events. It is certainly difficult to acquaint a reader with any one in the limits of a short story, for whose fate his interest can be aroused to equal his good old love for himself. For this reason I rarely draw a strikingly marked character for the hero of a story.
Robert V. Carr: Perhaps a desire to escape the commonplace, or, perhaps, mental laziness and the desire to ride on the imagination of another.
George L. Catton: To be amused. Eight-tenths of the population of to-day are too cowardly to think and want nothing but full guts and to be amused. Comedy will sell to-day, and slapstick comedy at that, faster and quicker than anything else. And that rotten sex stuff—who but a moron would read it?
Robert W. Chambers: Amusement.
Roy P. Churchill: Voyage into new seas. The elemental pull toward new experiences.
Carl Clausen: Ask a college professor who teaches fiction writing but does not write himself.
Courtney Ryley Cooper: Fiction is the world of our dreams come true. For the clerk in the store, his dream is adventure. For the girl in love, it is the Prince Charming. For the discouraged man, it is the yarn of the fellow who fights past obstacles. We like fiction because in that we see the things we would like to do become realities in the person we easily can imagine ourselves to be. Did you ever see a reader wanting to be the villain of a story? Hardly.
Arthur Crabb: Among the upper classes, a means of passing away an otherwise unoccupied hour or two; to the middle and lower classes it is either a stimulant to a poor imagination or takes the place of imagination entirely.
Mary Stewart Cutting: It expresses what we would like to express.
Elmer Davis: Relief from troubles. This, I think, is as true of realism as of the so-called "literature of escape." Realism at least turns your attention from your own worries to other people's.
William Harper Dean: The elemental hold of fiction, if I get your point, is through humanity's inner craving to see itself mirrored, to have its tragedies and triumphs interpreted, so that each of us may say, "Oh, that's me—my life! I have lived that, felt it. I'm glad some one understands."
Harris Dickson: Perhaps, that each of us is his brother's keeper and likes to hear what Bud is doing. Some of us love small-town gossip, some crime yarns, some revel in the poetic, the romantic, the imaginative. But from the dawn of time the Teller of Tales has been a force—like the troubadour whose songs were legal tender for his welcome everywhere.
Captain Dingle: Wonder, I imagine.
Louis Dodge: That it enables an individual to go places and do things (vicariously) and utter sayings which would otherwise be beyond him. A reader is a man with a score of eyes and hands and feet.
Phyllis Duganne: Interest, I suppose. The main object of most people's lives is not to be bored—and fiction can help them attain that grand end considerably. And for people whose lives are dull and rather empty, I suppose fiction offers an outlet; the reader can become hero or heroine and do grand and noble things. Just like the movies.
J. Allan Dunn: In an attempt to be brief, I think it is a conjuration of what he or she would like to have been iftheir lots had been cast differently. I think it sometimes stimulates to adventures, to a struggle against the commonplace. That it can undoubtedly mold opinion and create a recognition of the virtues. That it can show—if the fiction is painted with the colors from the palette of Life itself, excellent example. That it is the poor man's purse and the stay-at-home's vicarious romance. It is Aladdin's Lamp—the Magic Carpet.
Walter A. Dyer: This is rather too deep for me. Fiction is, in a measure, in its relation to life, what massage is to exercise. Mighty useful sometimes.
Walter Prichard Eaton: Say—have a heart! Well, in one word—"Escape."
E. O. Foster: To my own mind fiction is as necessary as food to the body. The tired man or woman may throw themselves out of the ordinary routine returning refreshed to take up again the "hum-drum" labors of life.
Arthur O. Friel: Entertainment; refreshment by substituting new pictures for those of every-day life.
J. U. Giesy: The spirit of play—make-believe—the element of the "might have been"—relaxation, change. The mind reaches out to contact other than routine experience.
George Gilbert: Its power to lift the reader out of himself and make him live in another realm.
Kenneth Gilbert: A sincere desire to escape if but momentarily from the commonplaces of life. If we have imagination at all we are adventurers; we have a curiosity to see the odd and unusual; to possess a helmet of invisibility and the power of levitation; to have the under-currents of human impulse that we sense yet can not describe run before us as we would have them do.
Holworthy Hall: Love—Success—Youth.
Richard Matthews Hallet: A good yarn carries you out of yourself. It's a red wishing-carpet, a transporting cloud, nothing more or less. Makes you forget for a time the "everlasting, tormenting" ego.
William H. Hamby: Answered in above.
A. Judson Hanna: I believe that suspense is the elemental hold in fiction, having in mind the average reader, and the editors' demands. Speaking personally, the elemental hold is character and development. I have a sort of cynical contempt for happy endings because they do not ring true. Events and episodes in real life so rarely end happily, in my experience.
Joseph Mills Hanson: The elemental hold of fiction on the human mind I take to be the fascination of uncertainty.
E. E. Harriman: To me it seems that it lies in its power to reveal to one the minds of hundreds, to show in brief how other people live and think and act, and to cultivate in the mind of the reader wholesome ambitions.
Nevil G. Henshaw: Granting that you read what you like, I should say that it is the enjoyment of imagining some one's doing what you would like to do yourself.
Joseph Hergesheimer: The story!
R. de S. Horn: The elemental hold of fiction on the human mind is deep-rooted. It began in the make-believe days of childhood; it continues to death. It is hope, it is appreciation; it is akin to invention and progress. Without the imagination—and what is fiction but molded imagination?—life would be a pretty hopeless, sordid existence.
Clyde B. Hough: It is exactly in proportion to the humanness of the fiction. Humans are enthralled by fiction because it reproduces thrills, emotions, desires, etc., which they have experienced or can understand and which by the help of their imagination they re-live temporarily without any aftermath disadvantages.
Emerson Hough: Maybe bread and butter, and love.
A. S. M. Hutchinson: Being "told a story."
Inez Haynes Irwin: It offers release and escape from whatever burdens life has brought and it extends experience.
Will Irwin: It satisfies the social desire—the human love of knowing and, if possible, of liking, other people. And it gives the illusion of widened experience.
Charles Tenney Jackson: The elemental hold of fiction on the human mind appears to be that it is the last adventure, the last romance, the bringing of novelty, of charm, of forgetfulness. Life for men has become so standardized, so propagandized, chucked into routines by civilization, that his primal stirrings—which, primitively, he satisfied by clubbing his dinner out of the jungle or swiping a woman from his neighboring tribe—must now be soothed in reading about it in its modern phases. That's why you sell magazines—sure!
Frederick J. Jackson: Principally, I think, the chance it affords a person to get outside of himself, to be for the time being, while he reads, something he is not, something he wants to be, to live vicariously life and action that he has no chance to live in the flesh, but would like to live. Then again, to learn, to laugh—W. C. Tuttle's stuff holds more laughs to the page than that of any other writer, to me, at least. But what's the use? Some analytical guy will answer in a thesis on psychology that will "knock" 'em cold. I can't or won't.
Mary Johnston: It is a mode of truth.
John Joseph: It is based on the almost universal passion to see thetriumphof theright. And a story in which everything seems likely to go to pot and then suddenly straightens outrightwill always hold the reader provided it is plausibly told. Sympathy for the underdog is a phase of this point, too.
Too, every human is more or less of a hero worshiper, and has also a tremendous urge to get into the limelight himself. And if he can't actually get in, the next best thing is to imagine himself there. Hence there is always more or less of a tendency to picture himself as the hero.
This urge for the limelight is a fundamental trait of human nature, and a very necessary one. It is simply adesire to appear well in the sight of his fellowman; and it is really the driving-power behind all human endeavor beyond satisfaction of the purely animal desires. Hence, a story should 'rouse something in the reader that will make him want to get busy and take a hand himself, so to speak. That is my idea of a really good story—one that will hold the reader from start to finish—and no mere mechanical perfection or nicety of literary diction can possibly take the place of it.
I read lots of stories, (they seem to be published literally by the tens of thousands) and after I have finished them I sit and wonder why in Heaven's name they were published. And the only answer I can find is "technique, structure and literary polish." Toomuchinsistence on these points has a tendency not only to handicap the writer, but to standardize style, and I read magazines the subject-matter of which might every word of it have been written by the same author, as far as I could tell.
Curiosity is another powerful element. Perhaps the most potent of all, in a certain sense. A mystery story intrigues all classes of people. Of course it must have the other qualities mentioned, too.
Harold Lamb: To be honest, I don't know. A child likes a story because it opens a door that the child can not open of itself. It pleases a child to have imaginary experiences, giving pleasure, the stimulus of danger, and the satisfaction of curiosity.
A grown-up is pretty much the same. Except that a child desires especially to have curiosity satisfied, and a grown-up likes to forget things.
Sinclair Lewis: It affords an "escape"—the reader or hearer imagines himself in the tale.
Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.: Imagining yourself in the same fix.
Homer I. McEldowney: The impulse, weak or dominant, that is in all mankind—to be what he is not, to have what he has not, and to see that which he has not seen.That, I think, is the elemental hold of fiction on the human mind.
Ray McGillivray: The hypnotizing grasp it exerts upon imagination—persuading,compellingthe reader to project himself, his likes and dislikes, his sympathies and his ambitions into the story he peruses.
Helen Topping Miller: The withdrawing of the reader from his own world, transporting him into an imaginary place where he is able to picture things as he wishes them rather than as they are. Every reader has more or less yearning for the dramatic. In reading fiction he sees himself the hero, fights the conflicts and achieves the reward which the author supplies.
Thomas Samson Miller: Sentiment, curiosity, heroism.
Anna Shannon Monroe: The story hold—the love of a story, whether a crisp anecdote or a novel; the thing that lifts one out of his surroundings into another world for a little while.
L. M. Montgomery: The deep desire in every one of us for "something better than we have known." In fiction we ask for things, not as theyare, but as we feel theyoughtto be. This is why the oft-sneered-at "happy ending" makes the popular novel. Fairy tales are immortal—in some form or other wemusthave them or we die. Fiction redresses the balance of existence and gives us what we can't get in real life. This is why "romance" is, and always will be, and always should be more popular than "realism."
Frederick Moore: It is in the joy of make-believe. Animals have the same trait in some degree. Also, "Let George do it." That is, let the other fellow get shot while I enjoy the thrill but know all the time that my slippers are on and I'm safe enough.
Talbot Mundy: It reveals himself to every reader.
Kathleen Norris: Might it be that life disappoints most of us, and we like to lose ourselves in dreams where things come just a little nearer comedy, tragedy, retribution, revenge and achievement?
Grant Overton: On the part of the writer, a desire to make some one else feel what he has felt; on the part of the reader, the craving to understand something that one does not fully understand, even though one feels it and has felt it often.
Hugh Pendexter: To entertain. Once it captures the reader's interest its power is unlimited. It can teach and preach and direct the trend of national thought provided it continues to entertain. Christ taught His great truths by parables.
Clay Perry: Stimulation of the imagination; creation of a fairer, cleaner, or at least a different and more romantic world than that of every day.
Michael J. Phillips: Good fiction is a journey, all too brief, into fabled Araby—to lands of sandalwood and frankincense and myrrh and spikenard and all those other wonderful, glowing words of which I don't know the exact meaning but which lift us out of ourselves.
Lucia Mead Priest: We know nothing, truly, of mind and heart of even our nearest. The writer plays the part of Omniscience. We like to know how the other fellow feels; we like to see him messing about in situations in which we, too, have been lost—or found.
It is human interest in the virtues and weaknesses of our kind. Fiction is as old as man. Read it on the tomb of Ti or the more-up-to-date "Beowulf."
Is it not curiosity? Perhaps interest in the affairs of the other fellow, for we all love gossip—? Yes, all of us.
Eugene Manlove Rhodes: Putting yourself in his place.
Frank C. Robertson: It satisfies the longing for change. The body at best is a slow and cumbersome thing, and practically stationary compared to the flights of mind. In fiction we live thousands of lives—without it we live but one.
Ruth Sawyer: I should say the same hold that folk tales have had since man developed a mind. The desirefor idealizing; the enjoyment of seeing his own human activities re-created for him and the everlasting appeal of adventure. I believe that the adult quite as much as the child reader likes to picture himself as the hero or main actor in the stories. I suppose one could sum this all up in terms of imagination stimuli.
Chester L. Saxby: I can't answer this one, unless you mean the selfish desire in each one of us to picture ourselves as heroes—and the thing called sympathy that we can't disown. But perhaps evolution makes us crave these indirect experiences in lieu of direct ones.
Barry Scobee: Have ideas but I could hardly express them yet. Might be, "A feller wants company." Might be, it suggests strength, success, victory; contains warning. How's this for a theory? The human mind is eternally seeking harmony. A perfect story, or a well done story, gives a subtle sense of harmony, like music but more subtle. I think the answer goes still deeper, and I shall find it sometime.
Robert Simpson: Conflict—the clashing of forces, or the pursuit by one force of another that does not want to be caught. Conflicts may appear in many guises, from a young love interest to a mastodonic fight between prehistoric brutes, but in some form or another conflict must predominate.
Theodore Seixas Solomons: We are immensely curious about life, and in a way that mere description of it from the point of view of psychology, history, past and current, geography, industry and the like, wholly fails to satisfy. For it is man's specific reaction to his environment in his efforts to accomplish his urges in which we are principally interested, and in order that we may make comparison of our own reactions with those of others about us, we crave not those dry, statistical texts setting forth systematically acquired knowledge but instances of actual men's and women's reactions to environment—actual life itself. Thus any narratives of parts of the ordinary life of others aremore interesting to us, essentially, than text knowledge, but since life is so largely routine and monotony, since there is so little in any given actually true narrative that is likely to be in the least novel or to afford us the comparisons which we crave, our appetite has been wont to seek satisfaction in narratives specially selected to pretend the exceptional and unusual; and those who satisfy this desire are the story-tellers.
The impulse of the story-teller, then, is to present life in its exceptional and therefore interesting phases and happenings—interesting just in proportion to the degree in which it presents for our personal comparison men and women in situations, and engaged in actions, which lift them—and hence ourselves—out of the common routine. Thus, vicariously, we slake our thirst for varied, high tension living, with its emotional tests and thrills.
The fictional element is accidental, depending only upon the circumstance that actual life fails, usually, to furnish the story-teller with a completely satisfying narrative of strange and unusual reactions. Actual life is so conditioned by the usual and routine that even when the unusual thrusts up its head and people get into unusual situations, the routine and the usual quickly submerge the unusual—in fine, the story fails consistently to maintain our exaltation to a logical end. Hence the story-teller finds that in order completely to satisfy his hearers he must thwart this tendency of actuality by continually substituting and supplying. He does not take anything not found in life—else at once his art is defective. But he uses materials of life that never were actually found together in life, so far as he knows. He may find two-thirds of a story ready to hand in an actual life story, and then he needs to supply from his mind's storehouse of general-life happenings (i. e., things that are so natural that they either have happened or may happen at any time) enough to form the remaining third. The aim is merely to carry out as well as possible the aim of the story-desire he seeksto allay which is to experience vicariously sorts of life and living which, either because of their novelty to us, or because of special urgings and aptitudes, are grateful and satisfying to us.
Fiction, then, in the sense of its elemental hold on us, is that conscious modification of the actual occurrences of life by rearrangement of them so that they present to uscompleteexperiences of the sort for which we yearn. The more perfectly we are enabled to visualize ourselves as actually going through these experiences—and to visualize the characters going through them amounts precisely to this—the stronger the hold of the fiction because the more completely and perfectly it satisfies the desire to which it is directed. Hence the vital necessity of naturalness, whether the matter be of realism or romanticism.
Raymond S. Spears: Fiction is an adventure to the mind.
Norman Springer: An escape from reality, or, at least, from environment; and in fiction the reader realizes in a sense the wishes and ambitions that are thwarted in life. It is the power to make-believe.
T. S. Stribling: I think the main hold fiction has on human beings is that it gives them imaginary experiences which they could neither get nor think by themselves. It is first aid to the mentally lazy and dull. As proof of this, take the "movies." These are even more obvious and require less concentration than fiction, so they are correspondingly more popular.
I am speaking now of the appeal of popular fiction. It is the same thing to the public that the leg show is to the tired business man—born tired.
However, one should differentiate the stages of the human mind. Children read fiction out of curiosity about the world they are to enter, grown-ups read it to escape from the world they have entered, old age reads it to recall the world they have left behind.
Lucille Van Slyke: Oh, but you've asked a mouthful!What are Yonkers, anyhow? If you knew the answer to that you wouldn't be an editor and if I did, I'd weave it so hard into everything I write that even the most blasé editor in Christendom—or out of it—would be walking about waving the manuscript with sheer joy when he got to the end of it! But I'll venture a guess—that it's the same thing that made E. nibble the apple.
Atreus von Schrader: It is probably the same hold as that of liquor or drugs; it takes the addict away from himself, his troubles and his ennui.
T. Von Ziekursch: Perhaps to entertain, but I believe it goes further than this; the average person's life is a narrow thing—not what that person would choose at all probably. Fiction to the mass offers the opportunity to lift out of that close circle of existence, to live, to see, to mingle with the world, to do the things which they are physically, mentally or morally unable to do.
Henry Kitchell Webster: It is so elemental that it is pretty hard to get back to. I suppose it springs from human gregariousness. We feel enough alike, enough a part of all mankind, each of us, to feel that what has happened to another might happen to us. Reading fiction stimulates us, therefore, and exalts us with a sense of our own infinite possibilities.
G. A. Wells: Fiction is to the mind an antidote for the mental aches and ills of reality. It is in part a recompensation for living. It transports us from what is to what we would wish. It carries us back to the days of 'tend-like and restores the illusions of fancy. It is the oasis in the dry desert of life. It provokes and at the same time in a measure satisfies the spirit of adventure that we inherit from the race. We crawl as babies from the crib to see "what's around the corner." Most of us incessantly long for adventure. And, as we can not have adventures, we soothe ourselves by watching others at their adventures.
Life for most of us is rather colorless, a routine made up of meals, beds, offices and shops, with now and then adash of pleasure to make it all endurable. We move in grooves. We complain that nothing ever happens to us. We are discontented that nothing ever does. We may wish to march out with a gun and kill somebody. The law forbids. But there is that desire, so to satisfy it we turn to fiction and see other men march out with a gun and kill somebody. We want to go to Alaska and dig for gold and have all sorts of scrapes. We can't. So we let Jack London or Rex Beach tell us of more fortunate people who did what we wished to do. Fiction is a safety valve.
Ben Ames Williams: People read fiction, I suppose, for the sake of the emotions which it awakes in them. I'm speaking of the highest form of fiction, which we call art. To stimulate emotion is the function of art in any form; people enjoy this stimulant as they do any other, because it is a part of human nature to enjoy being stimulated. Volstead to the contrary notwithstanding.
Honore Willsie: The romantic appeal to the imagination.
H. C. Witwer: The reader's enjoyment in being a hero or heroine by proxy,i. e., the reader, for the time being, is the hero or heroine of the tale and rejoices or weeps according to the action of the yarn. When they are gripped by a story they stop for the moment wishing they were rich, beautiful, brave, famous, strong, clever, etc. While reading, they are all or any of those things, in the degree the leading character is.
William Almon Wolff: Its power to entertain. That is a statement of enormous implications, and much less simple than it sounds.
Edgar Young: Arousing memories of sights, feelings, etc., etc., from the subconscious mind above the threshold of consciousness, so that a re-experience takes place. Where no such experiences have taken place, sympathy from similar experiences of the reader.
Summary
The following state they do not know or don't understand the question—one that it is "an academic question":Edwin Balmer, Ferdinand Berthoud, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Hichens, Lloyd Kohler, Hapsburg Liebe, Rose Macaulay, E. S. Pladwell, R. T. M. Scott, Julian Street, Booth Tarkington, William Wells.
Here again the answers need no tabulation or extensive comment. Their greatest value lies in forcing upon beginners a general knowledge of the real nature of fiction. To a majority of them it is merely a game played by somebody's rules, a pastime with no rules at all, a chance of making money, an opportunity to pour out on the world a rather uncomfortable and obstreperous something inside them, a serious business of imitation, all these and more, but never a thing eternally based on the fundamentals of human nature.
Formal rules concerning it can mean nothing except as those rules are justified by fiction's human-nature fundamentals. And the beginner, buried under thousands of rules made by all kinds of people, most of them unequipped for the making of rules, has no way of telling an unsound rule from one worth observing unless he can test it by some fundamental principle that is adequate and satisfying to his intelligence. Nor, having found an equipment of rules to meet his needs, can he reconcile or even understand seeming conflicts among them, or make fully intelligent use of any one of them, when it comes to their practical application in the thousands of varying cases that will arise in his work.
No rule or collection of rules can cover the infinite number of those cases with fineness and nicety, or even cover them at all, unless back of those rules there is an understanding of the fundamental principles upon which those rules are based. If the writer is to stand and march upon his feet, he can not lean his weight upon crutches handed him by others. It is not possible to make all the crutches he will need. He must learn to do his own walking and he must himself know his direction and his path.
QUESTION XI
Do you prefer writing in the first person or the third? Why?
Do you prefer writing in the first person or the third? Why?
Though this matter is of far less importance than those thus far considered, it serves to settle a question that has been much discussed, probably even more by readers than by authors. That is, it settles the question in the only way it should or can be settled—by showing that there can be no definite answer. Not only must each writer decide according to his own individual case, but, unless his natural bent and ability lie very strongly in one direction or the other, he must—or at least should—make a separate decision as to each story he undertakes.
On various phases touched upon in even this simple matter there is flat contradiction of opinion. This wholesome difference again brings out the point that generalities, particularly when shaped into general rules, are not likely to be safe guidance.
The everlasting value to beginners in the writing game is that they themselves and their material, not definite, unyielding rules laid down by any writer or by anybody else, should be the deciding factors in their work of conveying to the reader what they have to say.
Answers
Bill Adams: Never tried the first.
Samuel Hopkins Adams: The third. Because I am prone to find myself hampered by self-consciousness in the first person, though not invariably.
Paul L. Anderson: The third; you can swing a wider loop. It is admitted, though, that the first person gives a more intense effect, and I sometimes use it.
William Ashley Anderson: It is immaterial, and dependsupon the nature of a story. But I think a story is most naturally told in the first person. This also insures the action being continuous. It also adds an illusion of authenticity.
H. C. Bailey: In the third person. The first person, apart from technical difficulties, seems to me to encourage diffuse writing on the insignificant.
Edwin Balmer: I occasionally write in the first person. It is a more limited way of writing than in the third person because, among other reasons, continued use of the first person in many stories of different character certainly breaks down the sense of illusion.
I think a man should never write in the first person as a woman and vice versa.
Ralph Henry Barbour: I prefer writing in the first person. Nearly every writer does, and will say so if he's truthful. I write in the third person because editors believe, correctly or incorrectly, that readers prefer it. I prefer the first person because it is easier.
Frederick Orin Bartlett: I prefer the first person because it offers a more direct way of telling a story. The public, I think, prefers the third person because this form permits a wider range of sympathies.
Nalbro Bartley: I prefer the third person for writing because it is more impersonal and one can get into the swing of the story in a more intense way.
Konrad Bercovici: No particular preference.
Ferdinand Berthoud: Third—for many reasons. One is that I know editors and the public prefer stories in the third person, and another is that it is easier and more convincing. A third reason is that I've never tried the first person.
H. H. Birney, Jr.: Depends entirely on the particular story. First person is ordinarily easier, but your hero can be made much more heroic if some one else is talking about him.
Farnham Bishop: In the third. When I try telling astory in the first person it makes me too self-conscious and gums up the action.
Algernon Blackwood: Third person. The use of the first person tends to remind a writer of himself, whereas fiction should mean an escape from one's tiresome self—a projection into others.
Max Bonter: I seem to have no preference in this regard.
Katharine Holland Brown: The first person. Easier. Besides, I like to be in it myself.
F. R. Buckley: Used to prefer first person. Now equally at home in both. Natural instinct when telling a pleasant lie is to have yourself in it. Later—third person gives you greater scope. The "I" doesn't have to be carried from place to place to report things.
Prosper Buranelli: I would rather be hanged than write in the first person. A fellow who can't thrust himself forward without the use of "I" doesn't know even how to brag.
Thompson Burtis: I have no choice. Humorous stuff I like to write first person, because of the latitude in language. Ordinary stuff, on second thought, I believe I would rather write third person, the reason being that I can then draw the character that "I" would represent more fully. Another great plot advantage is that by not tying one's self down to a first-person story he can present the mental reactions and innermost thoughts of both hero and villain. This adds a great deal to the opportunities of a story. The first person story is limited to the scenes and thoughts of "I" alone.
George M. A. Cain: I think I rather enjoy first-person writing best. But that is a matter I regard as entirely to be determined by the nature of the story. The first person carries a degree of conviction not so easily obtained in the third person. I really think it has no effect in the matter of the reader's ability to put himself in the hero's place. He reads it as "I." That is just as near him as"he." Obviously the first person can not be used (1) where the suspense concerns the life of the hero, who could not have died and told the tale; (2) where the mental processes of more than one character must be brought in, since the personal introduction of the writer himself precludes knowledge of the thoughts of others; (3) where the hero's acts are such that to tell them would be boastful.
My own rule as to persons is this: Where the character fitted to my general aim in the story is essentially too weak to hold the sympathy of the reader, I use the first person, even at the cost of straining to show others' mental processes by actions. I can not escape the conviction that there is a man-to-man-ness about the first person which commands sympathy. I should give up trying to write a story with a hero guilty of any real weakness, if I found it could not be done in the first person.
For a story in which a striking character is introduced as hero, I particularly like the use of the first person for a secondary character in the position of a witness. It affords easier conviction of truth as in its use for the hero. It provides instant opportunity to present the hero in attractive light. I should use this method to the limits of its possibilities but for the fact that it is the one which makes it most difficult for the reader to put himself in the hero's place. That fact relegates its use with me to stories of characters so strongly marked as to require the reader's friendship for, rather than his self-identification with, the hero.
Which indicates the place I give the third person by elimination. It becomes, after all, the one of principal use interfering with no manner of suspense, allowing for presentation of the reasoning of any or all characters of the story, commanding sufficient sympathy for any character from dead neutral up, if at all properly handled.
Robert V. Carr: According to mood.
George L. Catton: Immaterial. All depends on the requirements of the particular story. In the first personthere is less explanatory matter needed; that's the only difference.
Robert W. Chambers: It makes no difference.
Roy P. Churchill: I would rather be an observer than an actor, if I am to tell the story.
Carl Clausen: Third. First limits my view-point.
Courtney Ryley Cooper: It depends entirely on the story. I use the third person mostly, but there are times in stories of great sympathy when it is impossible to use anything but the first. Third person preferred, however.
Arthur Crabb: It depends on the theme to be developed; generally I should say in the third person. By that I mean that the author does not appear at all. A writer can do a whole lot more if he keeps himself out of it and then if he restricts himself to what he could see and know himself.
Mary Stewart Cutting: I prefer writing in the third person, though in two or three of my favorite stories I have written in the first person. Usually the third person gives you more scope.
Elmer Davis: Depends on the story. Obviously in an "I" story there are things you can't tell the reader without introducing the old expedient of the messenger or something like it. But it has its merits if the plot permits.
William Harper Dean: I seldom write a finished story in the first person. But (and here's something) did you ever write a story in the first person and then go through it and change it to the third person and inspect the result? I can write a much better story in the first person—a more spontaneous one than in the third. For in the first person I say what I would say under certain circumstances in the plot, feel what I would feel—whereas writing "He thought—," makes me stop and think—now whatwouldhe think? And right there you are in danger of inventing instead of interpreting as you should be doing.
Harris Dickson: I began writing in the first person. Don't know why I have abandoned it. I do believe, however,a tale in the first person, well told, takes a stronger hold on the imagination. Perhaps because, like every child who asks "Daddy, is it true?" we seem to get an atmosphere of verity from the fellow who says, "This happened to me." For the same reason the teller of anecdotes prefers to lay them on himself, or his friend.
Captain Dingle: First person, though it seems unpopular, so I don't indulge often. This way I fall into my characters' boots easier.
Louis Dodge: I like to write in the third person chiefly for convenience. The first person must go in at a door; the third may go in at a keyhole or through a wall.
Phyllis Duganne: I much prefer writing in the third person. The first person seems to have so many limitations; if the first person is your hero or heroine, there are so many things he can not tell about himself that have to be told in other ways. I don't like to read stories in the first person, as a rule; I don't find them so convincing. This "I" person is always getting in the way of the story. First-person stories are easier to write; I mean that they flow more easily, though I think they are harder to make convincing. I think people usually resent this "I" who thinks he knows so much, and talks at such great length. It makes a story out of it—an unreal thing—while a story in the third person has no one, ever present, to remind you that it's only a tale and may not be true anyway.
J. Allan Dunn: I enjoy writing in the first person but do not believe it attracts the majority. It smacks of conceit, for one thing, but if one writes of a character in which one can project one's own thoughts, character, successes, failures, hopes and despair, the intimacy is a stimulus. It has limitations because the hero, if he sees everything, condenses the narrative. And he is only a translator for the other characters. So I prefer the third for sheer craftsmanship. To write a first person narrative through the eyes of a third person, who may be a minor character but a shrewd observer, is one of my preferences.
Walter A. Dyer: It all depends. I usually write in the third person, because in that form a character can be handled more freely, but I have written stories in a frame of mind that demanded only the first-person treatment.
Walter Prichard Eaton: It is easier to write in the first, because the process of thinking "I" identifies you with the character. Also, it is more dangerous, because the same process identifies the character with you. (This is really quite wise and intelligent.)
E. O. Foster: I prefer writing in the third person so as to have as little of my own personality enter into the story as is possible.
Arthur O. Friel: No preference. Depends on the story. Some are told more naturally in first person; others in third.
J. P. Giesy: The first, I think, since in it I may, as it were, vicariously live the part exactly as the actor lives his part for the time being and consequently enter very nearly into the thing. However, I very frequently choose the third because of the very nature of the subject in hand.
George Gilbert: Some stories can only be told in the first; some only in the third person. The story itself decides the person, not the author. If the story is one that can only be told best by one person's having knowledge of all the incidents, the first person becomes permissible, not mandatory. If the story is such that no one person could have had knowledge of all the details without recourse to the receipt of letters, telephone calls, confidences given in such a way as to interrupt the thread of the tale, the story calls for other treatment than first-person telling. The limitation on the first-person story, when the narrator is the hero, is this: It is plain that the narrator lived to tell the story, so no matter what peril he gets into during the tale, the reader must know he survived, unless it is a tale of a manuscript found buried or in family archives, etc. The first-person-narrator story is most effective when the narrator is not the hero, yet some finetales have been written that violate this rule of mine. In any event, the author must look into his story at the beginning and decide this point. Another author might have an entirely different idea on it, and succeed at a given tale where I would fail using my rule.
Kenneth Gilbert: While writing in the first person is the easiest way to tell a story, I prefer the third for the freedom of description it permits. Many stories, however, would fall flat if not written in the first person.
Holworthy Hall: Third person. Generally more convincing and less conceited.
Richard Matthews Hallet: I have written both ways. The first person makes an easier narrative, but makes it harder to develop a plot. And I find, curiously, by asking the question a great many times and from being criticized myself, that there is among a great body of readers an odd aversion to a story in the first person. I've never heard even the semblance of a reason for it, but no matter, it exists and will certainly work against the popularity of a story in the first person. There is also a considerable group of persons who profess unwillingness to read a story with the faintest touch of dialect in it; in spite of this dialect stories thrive. So do some stories written in the first person.
William H. Hamby: Really prefer writing in the first person, but rarely do.
A. Judson Hanna: This is a matter governed by circumstances. By far the majority of my published stories have been written in the first person. As a rule, I prefer to write them so because it allows so much freedom of expression and creates an informality between writer and reader that appeals to the reader. It is the personal touch.
Joseph Mills Hanson: I prefer to write in the first person because it gives me a sense of more intimate grasp of the motions of the characters and a more vivid realization of the situations. Nevertheless, I have written more often in the third person; perhaps because the former seems, also, egotistic.
E. E. Harriman: In the third person, because writing in the first gives a feeling of indecent exposure of the intimate corners in my soul.
Nevil G. Henshaw: In short stories I've no particular preference, although I think it a trifle easier to use the first person. In long work I find the first person much the harder, as then a vast number of facts and ideas must be presented from the single point of view. I also find the transition more difficult.
Joseph Hergesheimer: Third, for obvious reasons.
Robert Hichens: I prefer writing in the third person. I like to tell a story, not to tell about myself. As a rule, I dislike a novel written in the first person and I very much dislike a story told in the form of letters. I scarcely know why.
R. de S. Horn: I generally prefer writing in the third person. In this case I can go anywhere, describe anything. I am omnipotent; I can see through walls, read minds, experience emotions unlimited. In the first person I am narrowly proscribed. I can only represent my own emotions and what I can know through the medium of my five senses. The only advantage of the first person is that stories thus told have an air of veracity, of plausibility, that is particularly desirable at times. Furthermore, they can the more strongly enlist the reader's emotions and sympathies.
Clyde B. Hough: I prefer to write in the third person. It gives me more scope.
Emerson Hough: I don't know—as it chances.
A. S. M. Hutchinson: In the third. I feel my own individuality would get in the way if I wrote in the first.
Inez Haynes Irwin: I think writing in the first person is infinitely easier than writing in the third because inevitably onedramatizesmore when writing in the third person anddescribesmore when writing in the first person. Dramatizing is more difficult than describing. Perhaps that is why I prefer the third person—the otherseems too easy. Yet there's an ease about first-person writing, an informality.... It goes swiftly, breezily, directly.
Will Irwin: When I began, I liked best to write in the first person. Now I prefer the third. Why, I can not say exactly. Probably because your interests increase with years, and when writing in the first person you have limited yourself to the interests, experiences and observations of but one character.
Frederick J. Jackson: Third person. Simpler, usually more effective, is easier for me. Have written only two stories in first person.
Mary Johnston: Depends on what you're doing.
John Joseph: I very much prefer writing in the third person, but when it comes to an old-time western story—well, I have lived these things and the detached third person doesn't seem to belong, nor conventional English. I have heard these people talk every day for too many years, have heard too many camp-fire tales, I suppose, and the more a writer polishes his story the less real it seems.
Lloyd Kohler: The third person. I don't like that eternal "I." Still, I have read many authors who could handle that very same "I" convincingly. More power to them!
Harold Lamb: The first person is a little more fun. Because it gives a freer hand in description and more play to emotion.
Sinclair Lewis: Third, less (obviously) egotistical.
Hapsburg Liebe: I prefer writing in the third person because in the first I can't keep the perpendicular pronoun sufficiently down.
E. P. Lyle, Jr.: In the first person. Comes easier, less formal, your reader not a reader but seemingly a friend on the other side of the hearth. I'd recommend it to a beginner. Also tell him to forget he is writing literature, and to keep in attitude of writing a letter.
Rose Macaulay: Third. Because I dislike reading stories told in the first.
Crittenden Marriott: Third. In the first the quotation marks are such a bother.
Homer I. McEldowney: The third person. It is easier, for me, and, I think, more effective.
Ray McGillivray: Fifty-fifty with me. First person is easier. The third person style has been responsible for most of the best literature ever written. Not all, but most.
Helen Topping Miller: I have never written anything in the first person—it intrudes the personal idea and hampers my view-point. I prefer to see my characters impersonally.