=Bill Adams=: I do not know what technique is. I have bronchial asthma.
=Samuel Hopkins Adams=: That it is one writer's meat and another
writer's poison.
=Paul L. Anderson=: An author can not have too fine a technique, any
more than a machinist can have too fine tools; technique is a tool, and
the better it is the better the work that can be done with it. But
either artist, author or mechanic can become so interested in his tools
that he over-elaborates his work--authors and artists do this more often
than machinists!
=William Ashley Anderson=: An author ought constantly to try to master
his technique in the hope of reaching a point where his ideas may be put
into form without hesitating or wasting effort over the means of
expression.
=H. C. Bailey=: I rate technique high but second to knowledge of men and
the world.
=Ralph Henry Barbour=: Technique is something you ought to have and not
be aware of the fact. When you know you have it you become a pest. It's
like happiness. Being happy is fine, but when you make a cult of it and
become "glad, glad, glad!" folks will run away from you. To the beginner
I'd say, "Don't worry." Write your story and let technique take care of
itself. Let it go hang, for that matter. Paraphrasing a chap who could
write pretty good fiction himself, "the story's the thing."
=Frederick Orin Bartlett=: Technique to be valuable should be
unconscious. The best way to get it is to be born with it. The next best
way is to absorb it through the work of those already masters of it. The
poorest way is to study it deliberately and practise it consciously.
=Nalbro Bartley=: It is essential and a most admirable thing to possess
it, but to my mind, technique can be dispensed with if one has to choose
between the red-blooded story and the purely mechanical perfection of
transcribing it.
=Konrad Bercovici=: A little technique does not hurt. It is like salt
and pepper in a dish, but who wants a dish of salt or a dish of pepper?
=Ferdinand Berthoud=: I don't quite understand. Do not feel enough of an
authority to have an opinion on the subject.
=H. H. Birney, Jr.=: Almost impossible to answer. Just what do you mean
by "technique"? Webster's definition, summarized, is "artistic
execution." Taking it as such, technique is almighty important. To sell,
a story must "read well." It must be smooth, finished, plot must be well
developed, interest sustained, etc. All of this can be classed as
literary technique.
=Farnham Bishop=: Technical training is good in so far that it teaches a
man to use the tools of his trade. But unless he was born to the trade,
he'll never master it. Creative ability is as the Creator is pleased to
bestow it. The very small quantity that I possess has been much more
helped than hindered by my teachers.
The more a man writes, the better his technique should become. To tell a
good tale plainly is better art and harder work than jig-sawing and
bedecking a poor little bungalow of an idea to make it look like a
palace.
=Algernon Blackwood=: I have never consciously studied technique. Up to
a point technique must be instinctive. But it can be over-stressed. It
can overlay an idea, especially a thin idea. Its value, of course, can
not be over estimated. It is essential. But no text-book has ever helped
me much.
=Max Bonter=: Wish I knew more about technique. Am trying to learn.
=Katharine Holland Brown=: Profoundly valuable--if the story _lives_,
too.
=F. R. Buckley=: Technique is essential: technicalities (as above) seem
to me murderous. Most important point of technique (to me) is
tempo--taking the two extremes of dull legato and fatiguing staccato and
hitting the exact point between them, using the exact combination of
them, you need to produce the particular effect you want. Never saw
anybody try to teach this. Doubt if it could be taught.
=Prosper Buranelli=: Technique is everything. A writer who can not write
is an illiterate. The trouble with letters in this country is that its
literary men are illiterates--I mean even fellows like Dreiser and
Sherwood Anderson.
=Thompson Burtis=: I am somewhat uncertain as to what technique means,
to be truthful. If it means skilful construction, well-turned phrases,
proper handling of suspense, etc., as my instinct leads me to believe, I
am strongly of the belief that it is very important. I read so many good
stories that interest me not at all--so many others which, boiled down,
have nothing much to them but which through the skill and facility of
the writer are charming and interesting to me. I have read stories where
the young fellow met the girl, they liked each other and got engaged,
which pleased. Others with colorful background, unusual characters and
rapid-fire events have been murdered for me because I sat back and
watched the green author botch them, annoy me with missed opportunities,
prick me with unfortunate phrasing, harass me with clumsy construction,
etc. There are a fluency, an inevitable, logical interest and a sense of
complete satisfaction in a sound, properly constructed, skilfully
written yarn told by a master of his craft which are unmistakable, I
believe. Tricks of the trade, many of which I see through, nevertheless
add life and personality to a story for me. Take Talbot Mundy and his
trenchant by-passages on everything in general. I enjoy them, and yet I
can see him sticking them in, sometimes. And I couldn't read a page
without knowing it was Mundy writing.
=George M. A. Cain=: In that attitude, technique has become so much a
habit of feeling that I can not tell where it begins or leaves off in my
own construction of a story. Where I consciously resort to technical
tricks of writing, such as deliberately arranged shifts from one to
another view-point for the sustaining of suspense, I am always hampered
with a sense of cheapening the work by the introduction of a mechanical
device.
=Robert V. Carr=: I am insensible to technique. I know what the
dictionary says about it, but the dictionary is full of words. A lot of
things that many discuss glibly are just words to me.
=George L. Catton=: Am in doubt of your use of the word. My dictionary
says: "manner of artistic performance," which would be, in this case,
style. And in this age of a used up supply of plots and themes and
characters and incidents, style must be about everything. An author's
personality is the only new thing possible to-day in fiction.
=Robert W. Chambers=: It is an essential part of all creative work.
=Roy P. Churchill=: Frankly, technique is something I have never seen a
synonym for. It is evasive. Perhaps you might say that technique is the
life of the story. Without it a story is dead. With it alive. And there
are a great many kinds of life. Some pleasant and some ugly. Some
appealing to one person and some to another. For me this thing called
technique must be in a yarn to make it live, and the more of it the
stronger. That's why just polish isn't technique.
=Carl Clausen=: If over-emphasized, it kills the spontaneity of the
story.
=Courtney Ryley Cooper=: Technique is excellent, but it is like the
frosting on pie. Sometimes we would like to scrape it aside and find
something REAL underneath.
=Arthur Crabb=: I think it is at least one of the most important things
in writing. Some genius may get along without it, some isolated
individual may evade the issue for a while, but not for long.
=Mary Stewart Cutting=: I think technique has great value.
=Elmer Davis=: It can be overdone, but most of us are in no danger.
=William Harper Dean=: I feel that technique is the leaven in a
story--you can ruin the possibilities in a situation in its development
if your technique is poor. Illogical sequence in the development, the
stressing of minor situations, the slighting of the weightier ones, the
faltering in the forward march to the climax--these things mean poor
technique and a poor story.
=Harris Dickson=: Technique, it would seem to me, is the handling of a
story in harmony with its matter. Naturally the method of handling a
detective story is different from that of a treatise on esoteric
Buddhism. A negro story violates every known rule of white technique to
follow a rambling and garrulous illogical method of its own--which
becomes logical when applied to our brother in black, for that is the
process of the African mind. He's a curiously devious oriental.
=Captain Dingle=: I don't understand exactly what this question means.
In fact, except in the matter of plot, I scarcely know what "technique"
means. As for plot, I believe that far more stress is put upon this as
an essential than any audience or readers demand.
=Louis Dodge=: As for technique, I like the technique of Jack Dempsey,
who hits first and hardest. I don't mean that he hasn't any technique: I
mean simply that he is Jack Dempsey.
=Phyllis Duganne=: My general feeling is that technique saves time and
labor--and that you get it only through much previous time and labor.
=J. Allan Dunn=: The value of technique in story writing is, I think, in
exactly the same ratio as technique is to the painter, the singer, the
musician, the sculptor, the architect. It is more elusive in writing,
but it must be acquired. The world is full of chaps who mistook an ear
for music, an eye for color, a faculty for mimicry and a desire to write
as a token of genius that would flow like buttermilk out of a jug.
Technique constitutes the difference between the amateur and the
professional in every profession.
=Walter A. Dyer=: If I did not still retain a belief in the value of
technique I should be in despair.
=Walter Prichard Eaton=: Without technique not one in a hundred can get
by--and the one exception who does will be found to have created a new
technique!
=E. O. Foster=: My training in newspaper writing is that technique is a
most valuable asset. With the proper technique a man can make even an
ordinary newspaper story interesting.
=Arthur O. Friel=: A minor consideration. Subordinate to the actual
story. A "tool" only.
=J. U. Giesy=: I admire a good technique--just as I admire any finished
work by a finished workman. I would not however damn a virile and
entertaining bit of plot or narrative because of faulty technique unless
hopelessly defective, I think.
=George Gilbert=: Technique is merely a means to an end. Many of the
world's biggest stories are weak in technique, but go big because of
their theme.
=Kenneth Gilbert=: I have a high regard for technique. Nothing disgusts
me more than serious technical flaws, yet I try to be temperate about it
because I realize that I may be more alert for such faults than is the
average reader. I firmly believe that unless technique can be supplanted
by really worth-while originality, it should always be observed in a
general way, at least.
=Holworthy Hall=: You might as well ask my general feeling on the
subject of "technique" in art or music. Technique constitutes the only
difference between what is good and what is bad. But if you ask me what
technique is--I should have to write you a book about it, because the
expression itself is a paradox.
=Richard Matthews Hallet=: I am a little suspicious of the word
"technique" as applied to writing. Fiction has two parts, form and
essence, or matter. Technique, I take it, runs to the form and governs
the method of presentation. If the matter is there, it will carry nearly
any natural kind of presentation with it. Technique is too liable to be
synonymous for complexity and subtlety. Technique ruined Henry James.
Few candid people will say that his later work is even half as good as
the simpler _Roderick Hudson_. The earlier stuff of Conrad and Kipling
is better than the later, for the same reason. The fact is that
generally speaking, animal spirits and a living zest in the things of
this earth are a big element in fiction, and as a man's senses dull and
his experiences get more commonplace, his matter crumbles through his
fingers, and then he resorts to technique to cloud the issue, much as a
cuttle-fish squirts ink.
A little technique is as good as a lot.
=William H. Hamby=: I don't think much about it. I do not believe a
writer who is a clear thinker and has mastered the rudiments of
expression need spend much time thinking of his style.
=A. Judson Hanna=: Technique, if striking enough, seems to give a writer
a strong, but temporary, vogue. For instance, the technique of O. Henry
and Ring Lardner and George Ade. The only striking technique I recall at
the moment which, I believe, will become classic, is the technique of
Kipling.
=Joseph Mills Hanson=: Good technique undoubtedly will help a mediocre
story to "get across"; but if a story is inherently unique and forceful,
it will get across whether it is technically excellent or not.
=E. E. Harriman=: I feel that too much emphasis is placed upon technique
by many, to the exclusion of clearness and simplicity. Yet a certain
amount is essential.
=Nevil G. Henshaw=: To my mind technique is invaluable. It will save a
poor story when nothing else will.
=Joseph Hergesheimer=: Naturally, one must write well.
=Robert Hichens=: I do not believe in writing at haphazard. The best
writers take infinite pains. Joseph Conrad and George Moore are examples
of this. Guy de Maupassant, one, I think, of the most perfect story
tellers who ever lived, was trained by Flaubert in the art of writing.
Young writers should not hurry or think that anything will do. I believe
in writing with enthusiasm and then considering the result with critical
coldness.
=R. de S. Horn=: Technique is a word that always brings Stevenson
promptly to my mind. Because technique is the part of the art that comes
from long and careful study and practise alone, and Stevenson is the
shining light along these lines. He set out deliberately to be an author
and put weary years in at the task before he ever tried to capitalize
it. But look what a master he became. Technique is the polish on both
the diamond and the paste jewel. It enhances the real thing and makes
the imitation salable. A story may sell that is naturally strong in
itself even though it be weak in technique; but this is no argument for
neglecting technique. Just think how much more wonderful it would have
been with the extra luster added. And this much is certain: no master of
any art ever lived who had not added to his natural gifts the added
technique acquired by long practise and study.
=Clyde B. Hough=: In my opinion technique is second only to plot.
=Emerson Hough=: More thought and less technique would be better for the
country.
=A. S. M. Hutchinson=: I never think about it.
=Inez Haynes Irwin=: This is a very difficult question to answer.
Technique is highly valuable of course--necessary. Some writers give one
the impression that they have more technique than matter. As between the
two, I would rather have a great deal to say, even if I said it
awkwardly, than nothing to say even if I said it exquisitely. I suppose
the perfection for which most writers aim is fullness and originality of
matter, plus a beautiful technique.
=Will Irwin=: Naturally an author, like a painter, must have technique.
The best of thought and feeling must remain private thought and feeling
unless the writer learns how to put it into a form which is pleasing and
convincing to the reader. Naturally, too, technique may be overdone; and
it can not conceal barrenness of thought imagination and feeling.
=Charles Tenney Jackson=: As to your question on technique, I assure
you, in reading, it is everything to me. I will lose interest in any
tale at once when I see it is not well written. Plots seem so dolefully
commonplace, they are all ragged to tatters; and if an author can not
present his stuff with some attempt, at least, to distinction, to
personality, I can't go him much. The setting, the color, the style and
material are more than plot, which will wander away into unrealities and
commonplaceness in no time if not worked upon by sincere discrimination.
A plot is no more than a dead dog which a good taxidermist can make to
stand up stuffed so artfully that you believe it might wag its tail. If
you can get it to bark--good! You're a genius, but after all the bark
and not the dog is the important thing, and the art of it.
=Frederick J. Jackson=: I don't know. I have known brainier men than I
hope to be fail dismally when tackling the fiction game because they had
stuffed themselves so full of technique that it stuck out all over their
stuff. University fiction course professors hold technique up as a sort
of bogy. They overemphasize its importance, in my estimation. The word
itself scares many beginners. Why don't the profs come down out of the
clouds and use a simpler word, namely, mechanics? I look upon a story as
a matter of mechanics. Certain set elements make a story. Conjunction of
these elements, plastered up with new stuff, or a new way of portraying
them, makes a salable story. I have made speeches before journalism
classes, classes in short story writing, one of them the extension
course of the University of California. I quoted to this effect: "A
story is never so dead as when buried in words." I emphasized it. I
scandalized several admirers of certain well known writers, one
sonorous, heavy, wordy gentleman in particular when his name was
mentioned, by stating frankly that even while I envied his vocabulary,
his characterization, his color, I always passed up his stuff because it
wandered too far afield, because he lacked plot, or because the plot was
submerged so deep in words that I could not pump it out. A story with me
is a matter of mechanics, but I do my best to eliminate visible traces,
and above all to make the story human.
=Mary Johnston=: It has great value, but content comes first.
=John Joseph=: Generally speaking I divide all stories into two classes.
One class I call a painting, the other a mechanical drawing. The
painting will _live_ and be read from generation to generation. The
other will be read and thrown aside and forgotten. You can't lay off a
painting with compass and try-square. For that reason the more rules a
writer is compelled to keep his eye on, the less able he will be to
express the thing he wants to express, the less chance he will have to
achieve that elusive, intangible, subtle something that distinguishes
the story that is a painting from the one that is merely a mechanical
drawing.
One of the greatest afflictions of mankind is his tendency to jump to
conclusions, and to _assume_ something to be true when he does not, as a
matter of fact, know whether it is true or not. Theorizing is perhaps
the principal avocation of mankind, and to the chronic theorizer facts
mean nothing. Add to this the curse of precedent and the getting into
ruts which is often miscalled "policy," and you have the cause of half
the failures in every walk of life. Too, independent thinking is the
rarest of all achievements. All of which means that in my opinion the
editor who will get out in the highways and byways and find out who is
reading magazines and why they read a particular magazine will get the
surprise of his life.
I have had this writing bug in my bonnet ever since I was a kid. Never
till lately have I had time, or tried to write for publication, but I
have made a very careful study of _readers_ during all these years. I am
quite certain that I have quizzed at least five thousand persons as to
their likes and dislikes in the matter of fiction, always with the view
to some day having a try at it myself.
I think that the value of "structure" or "technique" is vastly overrated
by the editor generally. That is, if he is trying to please the _largest
possible number of readers_. Of course if he is merely trying to get out
a perfect magazine, from a literary standpoint, that is a different
matter. The reader--the general reader--cares not a whoop about these
things. He demands just _one thing_ in his fiction, and _no more_: The
story must _absorb_ him, and that's all there is to it.
=Lloyd Kohler=: A knowledge of technique is essential.
=Harold Lamb=: Technique? It must be all-important, but if you think
about it too much, you are apt to make a mess of things.
=Sinclair Lewis=: I don't know what this question means.
=Hapsburg Liebe=: My general feeling as to the value of technique? One
should study and cultivate it. I haven't been able to do it, so far.
=Romaine H. Lowdermilk=: Fortunately for fiction, technique can not ride
it to death. Good fiction, especially adventure and humor, are to a
certain extent immune from technique. Of course technique, properly
applied, is necessary and used in every story whether knowingly or not.
Still, it is nothing in itself, to my notion.
=Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.=: Technique is so often over-stressed that
beginners are in danger of thinking manner comes first and forgetting
matter entirely. Have something to say first; then try to say it. If you
don't get it said, then go to a technician to find out what's wrong. So,
little by little, you will get the technique, and in a way that it
becomes a part of you. Like hydrogen in the air, technique can't be
rated too highly, but taken alone it's dangerous--to the beginner. A
natural born story teller intuitively tells his yarns without knowing a
single rule of technique. But natural born or not, I'm in two minds if
it would not be as advantageous for all beginners to tell stories a year
or two before they tackle technique at all. Then, when they do,
technique will help them, and may not hurt them at all.
=Rose Macaulay=: Technique means, to me, the whole art of writing, so of
course I regard it as valuable to writers.
=Crittenden Marriott=: Wish I had it.
=Homer I. McEldowney=: Perhaps I overrate the importance of technique,
but I believe that it is the fundamental factor in success. In my mind,
it comes before plot. I have read a good many stories with next to no
plot at all--but they were "put across," and I enjoyed them. And I have
read half through more stories and chucked them aside--even though their
plots might have been regular knockouts, had I stuck around to see.
=Ray McGillivray=: I believe technique strictly a minor
consideration--after true interest and sympathy and punch are achieved.
And of these, punch is most important. No one I know--and Rascoe,
Mencken, Fanny Butcher and some others drop into this honored (?)
class--so far has stopped to pick to pieces _Growth of the Soil_ to find
out whether or not it violates rules of novel technique. No boxer lately
has made more than a four-round study of the question as to whether Mr.
Dempsey utilizes crude or polished technique in his art. Champions,
both. Both have the punch, and a thoroughgoing sincerity about landing
it at precisely the right place. Technique, you say? Perhaps, but if so,
technique is a quality inherent in worth and can not be achieved at all
in a story which simply is written according to a ruled line drawn on
graph paper. For my reading or my writing give me sincerity, sympathy
and punch, and I'll let the French fiction fans worry about the mold
into which any tale is cast.
=Helen Topping Miller=: As a teacher of technique, I realize the value
of it to the beginner in arriving early at a certain mechanical facility
in writing. Too devoted a study of methods, however, I think has a
tendency to weaken the self-confidence of a writer and to hamper and
stifle the imagination. I have never studied technique, except in
teaching it to others. I had become a contributor to _The Saturday
Evening Post_ before I had ever studied the subject at all. My advice to
beginners is to learn technique--and then forget it.
=Thomas Samson Miller=: It can be overdone, but Lord spare us the eeny
meeny miney moists. Some stories read like Turkish prayer wheels. Conrad
has an English that entrances, but has no idea at all of plot
construction. Browning--Robert Browning--wrote the best short stories,
in monologue. _Fra Lippo Lippo_, _Andrea del Sarto_, etc., are perfect
short stories of the _theme_ kind--theme and human interest.
=Anne Shannon Monroe=: There's a right way to do everything, and the
wrong isn't worth doing. I believe in revising till you sweat blood--but
I can't afford the time always to do it. One must live. When one
realizes what it means to put a piece of matter before the eyes of the
world--the typing, reading by editors, setting up,
proof-reading--hammering and pounding a thing into a fixed place, it
seems nothing short of criminal to do all this work--and make a place
for a thing that has not reached its highest point of perfection--to
materialize a lot of crudity. Every writer should go through the
printing trades, know the publishing business from a to izzard,--and
then I think he would feel more keenly the actual crime in putting out
something that isn't worth all this putting into form and shape. Imagine
setting up, in the composing room, all the mistakes of the careless
writer--deliberately setting up mistakes! It's a fright!
=L. M. Montgomery=: I feel that its value is great up to a certain
point. But when you become conscious of a writer's technique that writer
has reached the point of danger. When you find yourself getting more
pleasure from the way a writer says a thing than from the thing itself,
that writer has committed a grave error and one that lessens greatly the
value of his story. Carried too far, technique becomes as annoying as
mannerisms.
=Frederick Moore=: There isn't any authorship without technique. It may
be natural, that is, unconscious--but it must be there. The title of a
story is part of the technique.
=Talbot Mundy=: Its importance can hardly be exaggerated, although I
have ignored it consistently and without excuse. Technique is as
important to the writer as it is to a swordsman or a boxer or a
diplomat, but it is rarely to be found in hand-books. It varies
limitlessly with the individual.
Certainly the knowledge of how other men achieved particular effects can
do no harm.
But to make technique anything more than a means to an end would be
fatal.
=Kathleen Norris=: That technique is merely interpreted personality, and
personality is the most fascinating thing in the world.
=Anne O'Hagan=: I feel that the value of technique is enormous.
=Grant Overton=: I do not think the value of technique can be
exaggerated, but I know of no method of directly acquiring it.
=Sir Gilbert Parker=: Vastly important, but the story is everything.
=Hugh Pendexter=: This query is blind (for me).
=Clay Perry=: I believe that technique is something that comes
absolutely last in the consideration of creating a story.
=Michael J. Phillips=: I have to be restrained when technique is
mentioned. Any person who deliberately strives to say things in fiction
in an impressive manner, to roll out sonorous sentences and use nice,
long, mouth-filling words, is either a wonderful stylist or an ass. If
he is a wonderful stylist, well and good; his stuff will be worth
reading for the gorgeous riot of word-pictures on which one may feast
his inner vision. If the writer is not a wonderful stylist, he is an
ass. Also a hypocrite, intellectually speaking, because he is trying to
be what he is not. He is trying to set himself up as a magnificent
fellow who is to the manner born and tosses big words about in the air
as a juggler does oranges.
To me ideal technique is the manner of writing which best expresses the
character, personality and flavor of the person who is writing while at
the same time it permits him to tell his story in the clearest, simplest
and most understandable manner. Any pretentious style says: "I'm a devil
of a fellow, but my story may be rotten." Simple, natural expression
says: "Here's my story, told as best I can tell it."
=Walter B. Pitkin=: My early classical training, especially my long
study of Aristotle, gave me an insight into the fundamental worth of
technique and, I think, enabled me, fairly early, to distinguish between
technique and the humbug recipe-formula stuff which half of the college
teachers and the correspondence quacks peddle. Technique in the Greek
sense is the basis of all good art, even the most lyrical. For all great
art is communicative in some degree; and technique is the science of
effective communication. No more, no less.
=E. S. Pladwell=: I know nothing of technique except in a general and
hazy way. Technique to me means three words: Tell the story.
=Lucia Mead Priest=: I should think technique is as essential to the
writer as the foundation of a house is to a builder. As I think of it,
the art of the writer is like the history of Italy's painters. Her old
masters had great stories to tell but they were minus technique. They
had no perspective, no anatomy. Hampered by these limitations, there
came a day when their intelligence was aroused.
Every man was so interested in the new things he was learning--the
technique, he entirely forgot his _story_. Then came the giants, they
whose hearts were full of grand themes, whose minds and hands were
trained to the doing. Unhampered by the machinery of their art, they
gave forth masterly interpretations of great stories. This is, I think,
the evolution of the individual worker, whatever the craft. Most
particularly is this true of the writer's.
=Eugene Manlove Rhodes=: Nothing worth while without endless labor.
=Frank C. Robertson=: My feeling in regard to technique is that it is
something that must be mastered before any real success can be achieved.
But I feel that a writer should to a certain degree master a technique
that is peculiar to his own personality. That is why I am skeptical
about a too rigid adherence to the rules laid down in the text-books.
The first consideration, in my estimation, is to write the story, then
smooth it over with the shining gloss of technique. Then you will have
used no more technique than is necessary; but try writing the story
according to the rules and it is liable to be cramped and artificial.
=Ruth Sawyer=: I think there always must be technique. It is something
that must be mastered in the beginning and then allowed to drop into the
subconscious mind and stay there. I can not imagine a good story being
written by any author who is conscious of his technique.
=Chester L. Saxby=: I put too much store by it. I warm to a delicately
sculptured story, a thing of shape and beauty apart from the plot. But I
strive to break myself of this weakness. The true technique is
directness almost crude, restraint of emotion, fullness of fact with
scant explanation. "Look into your heart and write" is a mistake of
which I'm the victim. Heart serving mind--that's writing. Jack London
had the secret.
=Barry Scobee=: Technique is certainly necessary for any writer. It is
the letter, and of course the letter of itself avails nothing. There
must be the spirit. But the spirit must have technique. In my elementary
work I learned something of technique. I am not aware any more of how
much I do use, until, as on only two or three occasions, I have looked
over a raw beginner's manuscript. But the book learning on fiction
writing is a part of me despite my unawareness of it. And I learn more
all the time, but I haven't studied short story writing in three or four
years. But in my opinion technique is as essential in this as in any
trade or profession.
=R. T. M. Scott=: I just looked up "technique" in four
dictionaries:--Worcester's (1887), Collins' (not dated), Murray's (1908)
and Hill's Vest Pocket French-English (1898). The word wasn't there.
What does it mean?
=Robert Simpson=: Technique, to my mind, is of the first importance.
True, a man may write a perfectly good story without an ounce of real
dyed-in-the-wool technique in his system, but the same story,
technically correct, would be a much bigger and better story in every
way. No artist can possibly do justice to his art without a practical
understanding of technique.
=Arthur D. Howden Smith=: I find myself constantly valuing it more and
more.
=Theodore Seixas Solomons=: My feeling on technique is that, like those
bodies of it, so to speak, which make up text works on the subject, it
is "after the fact." Like grammar, they undertake to examine writing
(speech) and tell us facts they ascertain about its structure. But the
structure--the story, the English speech--antedates the analysis, having
been formed unerringly in adjustment to the laws of receptivity and
response in the auditor. Both grammar and expositions of literary
technique have been too empirical to be of much assistance in guiding
the formation of speech practises and fiction practises. Something more
fundamentally psychological must be devised before either will be of
much actual help.
=Raymond S. Spears=: Two things are indispensable in my stories: a
certain group of data and a certain form of technique. Editors usually
look for technique, and often don't know it when they see it; I refer,
of course, to _simple plot_, (Aristotle's definition), requiring
_complex plot only_. The truest, highest, broadest things I do are
commonly _simple plot_, with beginning, continuity, end, but without
complexity. Most editors say "Fine--but no plot!" of this type. So, to
live, I have to complicate. Of course, technique is utterly
indispensable though it may be unconscious.
=Norman Springer=: I think the writer must learn how to use "the tools
of his trade." If he is to make the most of his material, he must study
technique; or acquire it in some way, by absorption, or anyhow. From my
own observation, I believe there is a danger in technique--it lies in
worshiping it, in placing it before the story, in making the form assume
more importance than the substance. The oldest error in the world, I
suppose. Think of all the writers who are masters of technique,
wonderful technicians of language, and who are empty, with nothing to
say. They've lost their guts getting a style. Certainly a writer must
acquire technique--just as a painter acquires skill with a brush, or a
bricklayer with a trowel.
=Julian Street=: There must be technique, but technique is not so
important as character or story. Joseph Conrad is a wretched technician,
but is a big _man_ with a big sense of character and story and a
powerful picture-maker. But he is clearly always tangled up in _method_.
His trick of having a man tell his story instead of telling it himself
is a great error--an error into which the author of _If Winter Comes_
fell, in that book, when he did not take the reader to the court-room
for his "big scene" but had a character tell about it.
That is like the horse race that occurs "off stage" in the theater. The
actors pretend to look through glasses and shout "Now they're at the
quarter!"--"Salvatan wins!" But we--the audience--don't see the horses
running. True, that method is sometimes inescapable, but Conrad could
often avoid it, and Hutchinson could easily have avoided it in his
delightful novel. _If Winter Comes_ deserves its success, but it would
have been a much finer book but for certain revelations of absolute
ineptitude.
=T. S. Stribling=: Without technique a writer is lost, but I think it
should be subconscious, just as one's feeling for English rhythm and the
picturesque effect of words is subconscious.
=Booth Tarkington=: The same as Tennyson's: "It's not what we say, but
_how_ we say it; but the fools don't know that."
=W. C. Tuttle=: I believe that technique is the greater part of a
fiction story--and the hardest to master.
=Lucille Van Slyke=: If by technique you mean facility--I'd say it was
immensely valuable to those who can grab it--I never could--writing gets
harder and harder the older I get.
=Atreus von Schrader=: Technique is valuable in that it does away with
hit-or-miss writing. The author who knows his technique will know when a
story is a story, and why.
=T. Von Ziekursch=: I am hardly competent to judge.
=Henry Kitchell Webster=: If there is such a thing as a positive
technique, I do not know it. I have been writing stories for the past
quarter-century, and I don't know how to do it. I have learned, in that
twenty-five years, an immense number of ways not to do it. I can sit all
day rejecting seductive-looking devices as they occur to me,--sometimes
because I can see just what the snare is that they are spreading for me;
sometimes because nothing more than instinct bids me beware of them--and
when a real, honest, eighteen-carat, sound-to-the-core story comes along
I think I have learned to recognize it three times, perhaps, in five.
What technique I have managed to acquire, then, after laborious years,
is almost wholly negative, and I've learned to be thankful even for
that.
=G. A. Wells=: Many writers (the majority of them it seems to me) get by
without technique. That is, they are not consciously aware of the fact
that they have technique. That is, in the highest form. Walpole,
Galsworthy and perhaps Richard Washburn Child, are deliberate
technologists. That is to say (as their work appears to me) they are
purposely aware of the rules of writing during the entire process of
writing. Technique shows in every line they set down. The contrary of
this is what I mean when I say that most writers are unaware of the fact
that they have technique. Galsworthy never forgets the rules. He would
never wittingly express himself in a manner that did not conform with
the highest form of technique. Gilbert Chesterton and, I think, H. G.
Wells are of like caliber. I think the writer who leaves conscious
consideration of technique out of the question predominates.
But there is this much about it--no writer can produce first-class work
(literature as the term is strictly applied) until he has fully mastered
technique. The better the architect the better the structure. The
architect who does not understand wind pressures, tensile strengths,
compression, torque, weight stress and the other values of construction
can never design a perfect structure. The same way with a writer. A low
grade of technique produces a low grade of literature. I rank technique
very high. Possibly my respect for it comes of the lack.
=William Wells=: Oh, Lord!
=Ben Ames Williams=: I rate technique highly. It seems to me a
generalization from which there are few exceptions that with perfect
technique any subject-matter can be transformed into a classic tale. My
note-books are almost as full of articles of faith in my technical creed
as they are of incident or description for later use in stories.
The most important single element of technique seems to me to be the
introduction at every opportunity of commonplace details of daily life.
To tell your reader that your characters get up at seven fifteen, take a
shower, a shave, sing while they shave, put on their shoes, go down to
breakfast.... These things lend, I think, a similitude of life to a
story which can be had in no other way. It is the ability to do this in
the highest degree, I think, which makes Tarkington's work so fine. If
your hero and heroine wash dishes together, tell how they do it; hot
water, soap-shaker, dry cloths. The reader will nod and say: "Exactly;
I've done that myself. This fellow knows what he's writing about." And
believe whatever else you have to tell.
=Honore Willsie=: I think technique is as valuable to the author as to
the musician. It is to the story what the steel structure is to the
sky-scraper.
=H. C. Witwer=: My feeling on technique is that it must obviously be
present in some degree in all well-told stories, or let us say, in all
stories acceptable to the better magazines. But _I_ could not teach it
and I doubt if it can be successfully taught. How many _famous_ writers
are graduates of such a course?
=William Almon Wolff=: The important thing to keep in mind about
technique, it seems to me, is that it is a means to an end. Too many
people think of it as an end in itself, which it can not be. These are
the people who say that a writer who has broken their rules has not
technique, or a bad technique. Rot! His technique is right if he has
accomplished his purpose, which is to tell his story clearly and
convincingly. What does it matter how he tells it? Technique is
essential, indispensable--but its test must be a pragmatic one.
I think the reason for most failures though, is not technical but
this--that the writer has nothing to tell. I remember what Freeman
Tilden once told me:
"Very often I think a story is frightfully difficult, in a technical
sense. I can't seem to get it done. And then I find out that the trouble
is that I haven't a story--never did have one."
=Edgar Young=: In the widest meaning of the word technique is of great
value.