A GOOD STORY TO TELL
Where do Novelists get their Stories from?
I said a moment ago that no teaching could impart a story. If you cannot
invent one for yourself, by observation of life and sympathetic insight
into human nature, you may depend upon it that you are not called to be
a writer of novels. Then where, it may be asked, do novelists get their
stories? Well, they hardly know themselves; they say the ideas "come."
For instance, here is the way Mr Baring Gould describes the advent of
"Mehalah." "One day in Essex, a friend, a captain in the coastguard,
invited me to accompany him on a cruise among the creeks in the estuary
of the Maldon river--the Blackwater. I went out, and we spent the day
running among mud flats and low holms, covered with coarse grass and
wild lavender, and startling wild-fowl. We stopped at a ruined farm
built on arches above this marsh to eat some lunch; no glass was in the
windows, and the raw wind howled in and swept around us. That night I
was laid up with a heavy cold. I tossed in bed and was in the marshes in
imagination, listening to the wind and the lap of the tide; and
'Mehalah' naturally rose out of it all, a tragic gloomy tale."[13:A]
Exactly. "Mehalah" _rose_; that is enough! If ideas, plots of stories,
and new groupings of character do not "rise" in _your_ mind, it is
simply because you lack the power to originate them spontaneously. Take
the somewhat fabulous story of Newton and the apple. Many a man before
Sir Isaac had seen an apple fall, but not one of them used that
observation as he did. In the same way there are scores of men who have
the same experiences and live the same kind of life, but it occurs to
only one among their number to gather up these experiences into an
interesting narrative. Why should it "occur" to one and not the others?
Because the one has literary gifts and literary impetus, and the
others--haven't.
Is there a Deeper Question?
Having dealt with that side of the subject, I should like to say that
all novelists have their own methods of obtaining raw material for
stories. By raw material I mean those facts of life which give birth to
narrative ideas. It is said of Thomas Hardy that he never rides in an
omnibus or railway carriage without mentally inventing the history of
every traveller. One has to beware of fables in writing of such men, but
I have no reason to doubt the statement just made. I do not make it with
the intention of advocating anybody to go and do likewise, but as
illustrating one way of studying human nature and developing the
imaginative faculty.
It will be necessary to speak of _observation_ a good many times in the
course of these remarks, and one might as well say what the word really
means. Does it mean "seeing things"? A great deal more than that. It is
very easy to "see things" and yet not observe at all. If you want ideas
for stories, or characters with which to form a longer narrative, you
must not only use your _eyes_ but your _mind_. What is wanted is
_observation_ with _inference_; or, to be more correct, with
_imagination_. Make sure that you know the traits of character that are
typically human; those which are the same in a Boer, a Hindu, or a
Chinaman. It is not difficult to mark the special points of each of
these as distinct from the Englishman; but your first duty is to know
human nature _per se_. How is that knowledge to be obtained? do you say!
Well, begin with yourself; there is ample scope in that direction. And
when you are tired of looking within--look without. Enter a tram-car and
listen to the people talking. Who talks the loudest? What kind of woman
is it who always gives the conductor most trouble? The man who sits at
the far end of the car in a shabby coat, and who is regarding his boots
with a fixed, anxious stare--what is he thinking about? and what is his
history? Then a baby begins to yell, and its mother cannot soothe it.
One old man smiles benignly on the struggling infant, but the old man
next to him looks "daggers." And why?
To see character in action there is no finer vantage-point than the top
of a London omnibus. Watch the way in which people walk; notice their
forms of salutation when they meet; and study the expressions on their
faces. Tragedy and comedy are everywhere, and you have not to go beneath
the surface of life in order to find them. It sounds prosaic enough to
speak of studying human nature at a railway station, but such places are
brimful of event. I know more than one novelist who has found his
"motif" by quietly watching the crowd on a platform from behind a
waiting-room window. Wherever humanity congregates there should the
student be. Not that he should restrict his observations to men and
women in groups or masses--he must cover all the ground by including
individuals who are to be specially considered. The logician's terms
come in handy at this point: _extensive_ and _intensive_--such must be
the methods of a beginner's analysis of his fellow-creatures.
What about the Newspapers?
The daily press is the great mirror of human events. When we open the
paper at our breakfast table we find a literal record of the previous
day's joy and sorrow--marriages and murders, failures and successes,
news from afar and news from the next street--they all find a place. The
would-be novel writer should be a diligent student of the newspaper. In
no other sphere will he discover such a plenitude of raw material. Some
of the cases tried at the Courts contain elements of dramatic quality
far beyond those he has ever imagined; and here and there may be found
in miniature the outlines of a splendid plot. Of course everything
depends on the reader's mind. If you cannot read between the lines--that
is the end of the matter, and your novel will remain unwritten; but if
you can--some day you may expect to succeed.
I once came across a practical illustration of the manner in which a
newspaper paragraph was treated imaginatively. The result is rather
crude and unfinished, but most likely it was never intended to stand as
a finished production, occurring as it does, in an American book on
American journalism.[18:A]
Here is the paragraph:
"John Simpson and Michael Flannagan, two railroad labourers,
quarrelled yesterday morning, and Flannagan killed Simpson
with a coupling-pin. The murderer is in jail. He says Simpson
provoked him and dared him to strike."
Now the question arises: What was the quarrel about? We don't know; so
an originating cause must be invented. The inventor whose illustration I
am about to give conceived the story thus:
"'Taint none o' yer business how often I go to see the girl."
"Ef Oi ketch yez around my Nora's house agin, Oi'll break a
hole in yer shneakin' head, d'ye moind thot!"
"You braggin' Irish coward, you haint got sand enough in you
to come down off'n that car and say that to my face."
It was John Simpson, a yard switchman who spoke this taunt to
a section hand. A moment more and Michael Flannagan stood on
the ground beside him. There was a murderous fire in the
Irishman's eyes, and in his hand he held a heavy coupling-pin.
"Tut! tut! Mike. Throw away the iron and play fair. You can
wallup him!" cried the rest of the gang.
"He's a coward; he dassn't hit me," came the wasp-like taunt
of the switchman. "Let him alone, fellers; his girl's give him
the shake, and----"
Those were the last words Simpson spoke. The murderous
coupling-pin had descended like a scimitar and crushed his
skull.
An awed silence fell upon the little group as they raised the
fallen man and saw that he was dead.
"Ye'll be hangin' fur this, Mikey, me bye," whispered one of
his horrified companions as the police dragged off the
unresisting murderer.
"Oi don't care," came the sullen reply, with a dry sob that
belied it. Then, with a look of unutterable hatred, and a nod
towards the white, upturned face of his enemy, he added under
his breath, "He'll niver git her now."
This is enough to give the beginner an idea of the way in which stories
and plots sometimes "occur" to writers of fiction. It is, however, only
one of a thousand ways, and my advice to the novice is this: Keep your
eyes and ears open; observe and inquire, read and reflect; look at life
and the things of life from your own point of view; and just as a
financier manipulates events for the sake of money, so ought you to turn
all your experiences into the mould of fiction. If, after this, you
don't succeed, it is evident you have made a mistake. Be courageous
enough to acknowledge the fact, and leave the writing of novels to
others.
FOOTNOTES:
[13:A] "The Art of Writing Fiction," p. 43.
[18:A] Shuman, "Steps into Journalism," p. 208.