AND IF YOU DO--
Something in the misty sunshine this morning made you restless. Vague
longings, born of springtime mystery, stirred your blood, quickened the
imagination. Roads that never were, and mayhap never will be, beckoned
you with their sinuous curves and graceful shade trees toward velvety
fields beyond the city's skyline. The sweet fragrance of blossoming
orchards tingled in your nostrils and thrilled you with wanderlust.
Haunting melodies quavered in your ears. Your old briar pipe never
tasted so sweet before. Adventure never seemed so imminent. A golden
day. What will you do with it?
You could write to-day, but if you did, you know you could support no
patience for prosy facts, statistics and photographs. Whatever urge you
feel appears to be toward verse or fiction. Well, why not? Try it! You
never know what you might do in writing until you dare.
Verse is largely its own reward.
Fiction, when it turns out successfully, fetches a double reward. It
pays both in personal satisfaction, as a form of creative art, and also
as a marketable commodity, which always is in great demand, and which
can be cashed in to meet house rent and grocers' bills.
It is not within the scope of this little book--nor of its author's
abilities--to attempt a discussion of fiction methods. Too many other
writers, better qualified to speak, have dealt with fiction in scores of
worth while volumes. Too many successful story tellers have related
their experiences and treated, with authority, of the short story, the
novelette and the long novel.
The purpose here can be only to urge that an attempt to write fiction is
a logical step ahead for any scribbler who has won a moderate degree of
success in selling newspaper copy and magazine articles. The eye that
can perceive the dramatic and put it into non-fiction, the heart that
knows human interest, the understanding that can tell a symbol, the
artist-instinct that can catch characteristic colors, scents and sounds,
all should aid a skilled writer of articles to turn his energies, with
some hope of achievement, toward producing fiction. The hand that can
fashion a really vivid article holds out promise of being able to
compose a convincing short story, if grit and ambition help push the
pen.
The temptation to dogmatize here is strong, for the witness can testify
that he has seen enviable success crown many a fiction writer who,
apparently, possessed small native talent for story telling, and who won
his laurels through sheer pluck and persistence. One of these pluggers
declares he blesses the rejection slip because it "eliminates so many
quitters."
But of course it would be absurd to believe that any one with unlimited
courage and elbow grease could win at fiction, lacking all aptitude for
it. Just as there are photographers who can snap pictures for twenty
years without producing a single happy composition (except by accident),
and reporters who never develop a "nose for news," there are story
writers who can master all the mechanics of tale-telling, through sheer
drudgery, and yet continually fail to catch fiction's spark of life.
They fail, and shall always fail. Yet it is better to have strived and
failed, than never to have tried at all.
Why? For the good of their artists' consciences, in the first place.
And, in the second, because no writer can earnestly struggle with words
without learning something about them to his trade advantage.
A confession may be in order: your deponent testifies freely, knowing
that anything he may say may be used against him, that for years he has
been a tireless producer of unsuccessful fiction, yet he views his
series of rebuffs in this medium calmly and even somewhat humorously.
For, by trade, he is a writer of articles, and he earnestly believes
that the mental exercise of attempting to produce fiction acts as a
healthy influence upon a non-fictionist's style. It stimulates the
torpid imagination. It quickens the eye for the vivid touches, the
picturesque and the dramatic. It is a groping toward art.
"Art," writes one who knows, "is a mistress so beautiful, so high, so
noble, that no phrases can fitly characterize her, no service can be
wholly worthy of her."
Perhaps such art as goes into the average magazine article is not likely
to merit much high-sounding praise. In our familiar shop talk we are
prone to laugh about it. But even the most commercial-minded of our
brotherhood cherishes deep in his heart a craftsman's pride in work well
done. So your deponent testifies in his own defense that his copybook
exercises in fiction, half of which end in the wastebasket, seem well
worth the pains that they cost, so long as they help keep alive in his
non-fiction bread-winners a hankering after (if not a flavor of)
literary art.
And now must he apologize further for using a word upon which writers in
these confessedly commercial days appear to have set a _taboo_? Then a
passage from "The Study of Literature" (Arlo Bates) may serve for the
apology:
"Life is full of disappointment, and pain, and bitterness, and that
sense of futility in which all of these evils are summed up; and yet
were there no other alleviation, he who knows and truly loves literature
finds here a sufficient reason to be glad he lives. Science may show a
man how to live; art makes living worth his while. Existence to-day
without literature would be a failure and a despair; and if we cannot
satisfactorily define our art, we at least are aware how it enriches and
ennobles the life of every human being who comes within the sphere of
its gracious influence."
So, we repeat: for the good of the artist's self-respect as well as for
his craftsmanship it is worth while to attempt fiction. If only as a
tonic! If only to jog himself out of a rut of habit!
If he succeeds with fiction he has bright hopes of winning much larger
financial rewards for his labor than he is likely to gain by writing
articles. Non-fiction rarely brings in more than one return upon the
investment, but a good short story or novel may fetch several. First,
his yarn sells to the magazine. Then it may be re-sold ("second serial
rights") to the newspapers. Finally, it may fetch the largest cash
return of all by being marketed to a motion picture corporation as the
plot for a scenario. In some instances even this does not exhaust all
the possibilities, for if British magazines and bookmen are interested
in the tale, the "English rights" of publication may add another payment
to the total.
Not all of the features of this picture, however, should be painted in
rose-colors. A disconcerting and persistent rumor has it that what once
was a by-product of fiction--the sale of "movie rights"--is now
threatening to run off with the entire production. The side show, we are
warned, is shaping the policy of the main tent. Which is to say that
novelists and magazine fiction writers are accused of becoming more
concerned about how their stories will film than about how the
manuscripts will grade as pieces of literature. To get a yarn into print
is still worth while because this enhances its value in the eyes of the
producers of motion pictures. But the author's real goal is "no longer
good writing, so much as remunerative picture possibilities."
We set this down not because we believe it true of the majority of our
brother craftsmen, but because evidences of such influences are
undeniably present, and do not appear to have done the art of writing
fiction any appreciable benefit. If your trade is non-fiction, and you
turn to fiction to improve your art rather than your bank account, good
counsel will admonish you not to aim at any other mark than the best
that you can produce in the way of literary art. For there lies the
deepest satisfaction a writer can ever secure--"art makes living worth
his while."