This, let me say, is my third attempt to write this booklet. Two drafts
went into the waste basket. The truth is that I found them too stiff
and formal, and in the doing of that which I wish to do, formality
must be sedulously avoided, for, otherwise, we run on a rock and get
nowhere. It seems to me that the best plan in telling you what I have
to say will be one in which curtness and directness is observed, for
very direct and brief I have always found those to have been who were
instructors and not teachers. Not in long and labored discourses have
I found valuable lessons, but rather in very sudden “Don’ts” and
“Do’s,” in warnings and in checkings. Indeed, something of that would
seem to be the natural way, especially if you consider how wonderfully
children learn from children. Youngsters never lecture one another,
yet they teach their fellows all manner of elaborate games with a few
simple directions. On the other hand, not only teachers, but also
parents, too often flounder in a mist of explanation and so fail to
make anything clear. I know that in my own life almost everything that
I have learned I seem to have acquired suddenly. In the midst of much
struggle, a warning word, a caution shot from someone who knew did
what tons and volumes of theoretical instruction had failed to do.
There was swimming for instance. As a lad I had read books on the art,
diligently going through arm and leg motions at night while balanced
on a stool. I had memorized instructions and had filled my memory with
facts as to swimming contests among the ancient Egyptians. Then, one
day, floundering in a pool with a secret vision of a slow and painful
death burdening me, an older lad shouted, “Push at the water with your
feet--push hard,” and lo! the trick was learned. It was much the same
when I learned to ride a bicycle. I had made sudden swoops and turns,
had borne down on rocks, and holes, and ruts, with strange accuracy.
I had hit all that I tried to avoid. Then my brother yelled at me,
“Don’t bear so heavy on the handle bars,” and a great light dawned,
for I saw that my misdirected energy had been my drawback. Then, too,
when learning to shear sheep in South America. The sheep, the shears,
the fleece, and I seemed to be dangerously mixed, and, while other men
about me did their hundred and seventy ewes a day with ease, I sweated
and groaned over twenty-five. But a wise old Irish shepherd who was
watching me gave me a hint. As he walked away, he growled, “Keep the
shears flat on the hide and take big bites.” And again the curtain was
lifted, so that that day I tallied my hundred and ten.
For these and other reasons I have always been suspicious of elaborate
books of instructions, and also of professors, of correspondence
schools, and of institutes purporting to teach this, that and the
other: how to raise your salary: how to be prosperous: how to be a
society success: how to acquire a mastery of the English language
while shaving: how to develop the qualities of leadership and rule
others: how to write short stories and become a successful author. And,
indeed, talking with other men, I find that each holds that his own
business, profession, or calling, most certainly cannot be taught by
mail, nor acquired in such manner that the reader of a dozen or more
mimeographed letters may hope to make a living by it. On this every man
is emphatic. Nor scanning advertisements, lists of men wanted, do I
see this: “graduates of correspondence schools preferred.” Certainly,
when I was an employer in the railroad business, I never employed a
locomotive engineer on the strength of a diploma dated from Scranton,
Pa. Nor have I met a banker, stone mason, professional hobo, concert
pianist or a farm-hand who, good at his life’s work, had clipped and
mailed a coupon, received a hundred page book, and, from such humble
beginnings achieved mastery of his chosen task. Further, being once
idle and mischievous I made a list of names of several who offer to
teach the Demosthenian art. These, in the course of time, I visited at
“Department 1234,” or at the Cicero Institute in Chicago, or wherever
the office was located, but although I have reached the inner circles
in giant corporations, in government houses, in banking institutions,
I failed to pass the guardian stenographer and so reach the orator
himself. Neither, on further investigation, could I find that Chauncey
Depew, Ingersoll, Billy Sunday, Henry Ward Beecher, Herbert S. Bigelow
or William Jennings Bryan ever took lessons in a correspondence school.
Still pursuing my quest, I also made a list of names of those teaching
the art of short story writing, whether they were hidden in the arcana
of correspondence schools, taught in the marble halls of colleges or
universities, or in the shacks of the Y. M. C. A., to find that those
names did not appear as authors in the table of contents of well-known
magazines, nor anywhere else where one might reasonably suppose that
they would be eager to see their own names as practitioners of the
art they professed to teach. Nor did it transpire that executives
and those who have control of men, captains of industry or those who
weld others to their own desires, college professors or bishops, had,
before gaining their present eminence, risen up one dark morn in a
dull December to make a test of their efficiency by answering for
themselves a list of forty questions as propounded in the advertising
section of some magazine, and, realizing their lack of Personality,
had straightway enrolled themselves for a “correspondence course,” in
the course of time to receive a diploma and become a Gary, a Schwab,
a Wanamaker, a Woodrow Wilson, a Harriman or a Lloyd George. No. No.
Things do not come that way.
From all of which, you can see that I do not believe that much good
can be done in the way of teaching by mail, nor even by book. Nor can
you, I hold, by reading an analysis of a short story or a novel, write
one. You can no more do that than you can, after dissecting a human
corpse, construct a man. True, you may, with some advantage read the
things other men have done, but it does not therefore follow that you
yourself can do them, even though you have the desire and the will. For
instance, I am a very poor mechanic. To handle machinery is a thing
distasteful to me. I might read twenty-four books on the method of
adjusting a timer on an automobile, but, when my own timer gets out of
order I am dumbfounded, nor will all my theoretical knowledge stand me
in stead. My son, on the other hand, who has never read a book on the
mechanism of an automobile, actually rejoices when the car stalls. The
light of joy is in his eye and he leaps from the seat and goes to work
with enthusiasm, pooh-poohing such things as I tell him from my corner
in the car as the result of my reading. He is contemptuous of authority
and is all for independent verification.
Why then, in the face of all this, do I write this booklet? For,
admittedly, I cannot teach you to write a short story although I have
written dozens of them.
Here is the answer. If you have both the ability and the desire to
write, I can tell you of some pitfalls to be avoided and can give you
a hint or two. I can also give you the result of my own experience,
and that is about all. It may result in something, and again it may
not. Certainly during the past year, I have had the pleasure of seeing
three young writers get their work in print as a result of some such
advice as I propose to write here. But I shall not, I promise you, pad
the book, nor copy out stories written by masters in the art, in the
approved way of the correspondence schools and the “institutes.” That
would sadly waste both your time and mine. So, to work.