_When you write do you center your mind on the story itself or
do you constantly have your readers in mind? In revising?_
"Thinking of the reader" is a phrase subject to many interpretations and
there is no doubt that the answers to the question containing it are not
based upon a common understanding of its exact meaning. To have given
it, in the questionnaire, any definite one of its several
interpretations would have limited the answers in scope and robbed them
of much of the valuable suggestiveness and information they contain. And
by this more comprehensive approach we shall come to a clearer
understanding of that vague thing called "technique."
Perhaps the interpretation most commonly made was: "Have you cheapened
your work by allowing a consideration of popularity to set aside what
you knew your art demanded?" If we take the more usual phrase, "Do you
write down to your readers?" or, "Do you write for money or for art?"
the reaction, in perhaps most cases, to this interpretation of the
question would be, "No, I do not consider the reader when writing," and
many of the negative answers given are undoubtedly the expressions of
this natural reaction, given without further analysis.
On the other hand some writers do write for money, primarily for money,
and quite honestly say so.
With a discretion born of experience I promptly avoid any opinion on the
broad subject of whether what they write is therefore a calamity to Art,
and retire hurriedly on the fact that said writers do do it. As a class,
their reply to Question IV is more likely to be a Yes than a No.
But remember that so far as we are here concerned with them, both those
writers who do and who do not write primarily for money, all write for
publication involving at least the expectation of money. That is no
reason for a cry of hypocrisy against those who claim not to write for
money; there is an entirely justifiable line between writing primarily
for money and writing one's best and then getting what one can for that
best. In the case, also, of those who admit writing primarily for money,
a similar distinction can be drawn; in the long run there is no surer
way of making money than by doing one's best and plenty of writers
recognize this fact. There are also those, dependent on their pens for
daily living, who make a deliberate but temporary business of quantity
and popularity as the only possible way to reach a position where they
can write without regard for these factors. Some of our acknowledged
best reached their goal by this path and would answer our question Yes
or No according to the time of its asking.
There are those, too, who write primarily for fame, or for mere
popularity, and to whom money may be an entirely negligible
consideration. These, writing for a consideration other than art itself,
may be, for all purposes of this book, classified along with those who
write for money. And there are those who write for no consideration
except self-expression or the "joy of the working," acknowledging no
object except art alone.
The fact remains that all of our answerers alike are having their work
published, whatever motives may be involved. Before they put a word on
paper they know the story is meant for publication. They know it from
the first inkling of the idea that is to give it birth. They know that
it will fail of publication unless in creating it they make it such that
readers (editors) will be not only reached by its expression but
favorably reached and that publication chances for later stories will be
endangered or impaired if in the present one their expression fails to
reach favorably the general reading public. Some of them are dependent
on publication success for their living; some are not; some are more
interested in the creating than in its results; some are not. But all of
them alike do publish. In saying that they never think of the reader,
then, some of them must mean only that they do not think of him during
the actual process of putting the story together on paper.
Otherwise they must maintain that when weighing the value of an idea or
a bit of material for use in fiction they never consider whether that
idea or material would be liked by the reading public or whether it
might be of such nature that no magazine would publish it. If they do so
maintain, either they should be able to support their claim, at least in
part, by having for exhibit a very goodly number of unsalable stories
that in their judgment are fully as good as the published ones, or else
they must be recognized as individuals whose points of view, reactions
and methods happen to be so identical with those of the reading public
or of part of it that without thought, guidance or effort their stories
invariably find public favor.
There are, beyond doubt, writers who write equally good but
unpublishable stories, but I imagine most of them would tell us that
said stories are unpublished solely because editors are lacking in
discriminating judgment or have prostituted Art to Business, and that
few of these writers would claim, however rigidly they had held to Art
alone, that they had not written the great majority of these stories
with the intention or hope of publication. There are, beyond doubt, also
writers who at least approximate in themselves a fortunate reflection of
the reading public's likes and dislikes. This identity of point of view
and interest is either a happy accident involving no credit to them as
craftsmen--it may be even a misfortune from the point of view of art, or
else it has been attained unconsciously yet by a very definite pursuit
of technique. This last point, however, is best left for discussion
until after the answers to Question IV.
But if some of the answers were negative because the answerers were
considering only the time of actual drafting, not the preparatory work
or even the revision, there are still distinctions that must be applied,
still further obstacles to accepting negative answers as final, and
these too must be left until the end of the chapter.
If my question had carried with it all these analyses and distinctions
there is, I think, little doubt that many who answered "no" would have
answered "yes." As one writer puts it, "The distinction between thinking
of a story and thinking of a reader is difficult. I suppose my mind is
chiefly concerned with making the words express what is real in my
imagination--but that implies considering a reader." There is extremely
good reason to weigh these various distinctions before reading the
answers given and before concluding--or believing these writers
conclude--that the reader can or should be excluded from the artist's
mind.
Are the answers, then, valueless? So far as the face value of the
question is concerned, partly so. But the insight into various actual
working methods is extremely valuable, and the answers to that undefined
query, not in their mere yes or no but in their fullness and taken as a
whole, open an unequaled path to an understanding of the nature, purpose
and use of _technique_, a thing that even the dictionary defines
haltingly and that among writers, editors and critics is only a term as
vague as it is much used.
Before turning to the answers it must be noted that through a clerical
error the words "In revising" appeared in only half the copies of the
questionnaire that were sent out.