_What is most interesting and important to you in your
writing--plot, structure, style, material, setting, character,
color, etc.?_
In going over the answers to various parts of this questionnaire there
has again and again risen the speculation as to what would be the effect
upon literary criticism in general, particularly professional literary
criticism, if such facts as are here presented direct from the actual
desks of the writers themselves were read and seriously studied by the
critics. And applied not only to the writings of the authors here
speaking, but to fiction in general. To how much more just assessment
would it lead, to how much more real an understanding of actual and
comparative values, to how much clearer a grasp of fundamentals?
There are good critics, to be sure, some very good, but many very bad
ones. Professional literary criticism in America, including both the
smallest local mediums and those of most repute, is, generally speaking,
perfunctory, superficial, casual, over-sophisticated, sub-understanding,
hereditary, hack, and a long list of other uncomplimentary adjectives.
Perhaps the gravest indictment is that of being hereditary, for this is
more or less the root fault. Critics, however inhuman their victims may
consider them, are entirely human and therefore subject to the human
failing of accepting the dicta of the past, not as merely the best the
past has been able to hand on to the present, but as the final word that
neither the present nor the future can improve upon and that neither
should dare to question. If the past itself had acted wholly on this
theory a century or five centuries ago, its bequest to the present would
be lacking in a century or five centuries of accomplishment and
progress.
The development of this speculation has little place here and less in
connection with this question than with those concerning the
imagination, but it has clamored for a hearing all through the compiling
of this book. So now it's had it.
Reader as well as writer will find interest in the preferences shown in
the following answers. To know a writer's "taking off place" is
illuminating in any appreciation or understanding of his work. To
writers there is here again further proof of the futility of general
rules, and from the actual experiences of a hundred writers it is
impossible that a beginner or even a writer of experience should not
glean information that otherwise would come only through time, work and
experiment.