=Anne O'Hagan=: The usual one--know enough about your story, your
characters, their lives and experiences, to be in a way possessed by
them when you are working with them. Otherwise you can't write with any
profit.
Do things not connected with the business of writing now and then--study
unrelated topics, travel, farm, get into movements, etc., etc., not for
the purpose of getting material but for the purpose of getting
_fertilizers_; as the good agriculturist plows, cultivates and seeds a
field every now and then, not in order to reap a crop, but in order to
plow under his crop for the enrichment of his soil.
=Grant Overton=: There is no suggestion of a concrete sort that one can
make which will be of any value to a beginner--that is, a general
suggestion. He must work it all out for himself. He will get it with all
his intellectual five or six or seven senses from reading and from
following writers and other people in general. The work of synthesis is
his job. The creative emergence is his genius if he has it. A practised
writer is not in need of suggestions, or, if he is, they have nothing to
do with his actual writing but with his qualities as a man and a
thinker, his general outlook upon life, his philosophy, etc.
=Sir Gilbert Parker=: None.
=Hugh Pendexter=: To the beginner: write what you know. Be interesting.
To the practised writer: have nothing happen beyond the plane of human
possibilities. It is better to keep to the plane of probabilities. Truth
may take such grotesque shapes as to surpass the wildest fiction, but
fiction should always be truthful.
=Clay Perry=: To a beginner I would say: get into a writing game,
newspaper work, if possible, and you will soon find out whether you
really want to write as a career. Use raw life as a study. Mix with the
common herd and get to know them. Be of the people and you will be for
the people and they will be for you; it will reflect in your work.
To a practised writer: Keep close to the source, human nature. Don't go
away and hide for long periods at a time. Try to turn out in each
successive story something better than the last. Let each one be your
current masterpiece.
=Walter B. Pitkin=: I can not give two or three suggestions to a
beginner, for every beginner is an individual, having his own
peculiarities of interest, perception, bent and instinctive
expressiveness. All I can say is that all beginners, irrespective of
individual differences, must achieve three things: insight into and
enthusiasm over some aspect of life that is capable of being dramatized
or similarly portrayed in narrative; secondly, a sense of effective
presentation, be it of drama or character or what not; and, lastly, some
kind of original touch, which obviously can not be defined except in
some useless negative way. Each of these three achievements involves
both native ability and training. The training need not come from
schools or teachers; it may come from the worker's own resolve to
observe, analyze and practise. Ability alone gets only a little way.
Training alone gets nowhere. A word on the second achievement mentioned.
Effective presentation involves much more than a command of English. It
involves, over and above that, skill in selecting episodes, angles of
approach, phases of character and action which stress the significant in
your story and blur or wholly remove the trivial and irrelevant. In this
department of your work, nothing succeeds so well as patience, elaborate
observation and practise in "thumb-nail sketches" and persistent
revision.
=E. S. Pladwell=: There is only one valuable suggestion: Know your own
story. Know where it is going to end. If the climax is clear any road
can lead to the climax. I never had trouble except when I ignored that
rule. If one knows the climax there need be no rambling to get there.
Give me a snappy climax and I can build any story to it.
=Lucia Mead Priest=: I do not feel competent to suggest in this, but I
will venture to state what I feel is a sad lack in our current
literature--it is a loss in moral values.
Why has the story of A. S. M. Hutchinson swept the English reading
people off its feet? Because he has given us something for which we were
hungry--a decent, whole-souled, high thinking man. "Mark Sabre" is not
impossible, nor a namby-pamby. He is real. The fact that the world has
responded is reassuring. We are not dead to honor or clean thinking
after all.
For one, I am deadly weary of flaunting naked bodies and the coarse
souls that meet us on every printed page.
Let us turn the leaf. Let us, every last man of us, get down into
himself, into his decencies, and turn his pen their way.
He will reap his _reward_, I believe. Ask the publishers about _If
Winter Comes_.
=Eugene Manlove Rhodes=: Never read book reviews or "literary"
magazines--books about books.
=Frank C. Robertson=: To the beginner, and I would not presume to advise
any other kind, I would say that, if there is the innate ability to
write, adherence to three simple rules should bring success. Think,
Work, Revise. But above all _think_. And realize right at the beginning
that bluffs won't work. Don't pretend to be a writer until you are one.
The instant you stop to pose you lose some of the momentum that is
carrying you along toward success. The woods are so full of posers that
there is no longer any distinction even in being a good one.
=Ruth Sawyer=: For a beginner I should say write simply, write of the
best and the most inspirational things and people that you know. Test
the value of what you do by the quality of human appeal that is in it
and remember that the finest and most lasting influences in any art are
those that build toward something and not those that pull down. To the
practised writer I have nothing to offer. He knows what he wants to do
and how he wants to do it better than I can tell him.
=Chester L. Saxby=: To a beginner: Read! Read! Read! Anything,
everything--and discuss it. Nobody can tell a beginner what to write or
how to write--in the way of style or type of story, I mean. Let him go,
and then be fair enough to his future to find fault. Of course, a
beginner should seek the society of a practised writer, and a practised
writer should seek the society of the beginner. The beginner needs
insight into methods, and the practised writer, God wot, gets as jaded
and blasé and scrawny as anything if he doesn't forever look behind him.
To the practised writer: Quit thinking of the reading public. Be
inspired once more. Look _back_.
=Barry Scobee=: For the beginner: Know you _want_ to and _will_ write.
Then learn technique. Then get something out of your _own_ experience to
write about--in other words, have something to write about. Don't
flounder as I did because I had nothing to write about. As soon as I
found something to write about I began to sell. By something to write
about I mean something you love, understand, are sincere about.
Advice, hints to the practised writer? Nothing doing! I'll try to
listen, though.
One more thought here: It seems to me, after all, that sincerity is the
great need and essential of the writer. I saw in the _Metropolitan_ five
or six years ago that of two thousand stories submitted not one seemed
to be sincere. (That may not have been the precise statement, but it is
the impression I got then.) And the statement set me to thinking, and
has kept me at it now and then ever since. Sincerity! The editors of
---- sent a story back to me recently. It wasn't sincere writing and I
knew it. There's no use; I can't bluff or four-flush or give short
measure in my fiction and get away with it.
=R. T. M. Scott=: My best advice to a beginner is to write one hundred
stories. I would not advise a practised writer. He would not be a
practised writer if he accepted any advice that did not come from within
himself.
=Robert Simpson=: To a beginner I should say above all things, write
incessantly, write simply, and revise without end. Learn to appreciate
the true value of criticism. All criticism is good, however incompetent
or unjust some of it may be, if only because it expresses a point of
view. Study the stories of the recognized masters, then those of the
rank and file, and finally the clumsy tricks of other beginners. Lots of
beginners have ideas and tricks of writing that are worth knowing and
mastering and applying to your own particular style. Finally, always
remember that in a story, no matter what its class or nature, three
things are absolutely essential. These three are interest, suspense and
climax--the beginning, the middle and the end. I won't split straws
about the possible overlapping of interest and suspense, because I don't
allow myself to become confused about their meanings. In beginning a
story one must write with a view to taking hold of the reader's
interest. As the story progresses it must develop suspense to retain
that interest more firmly, and, when the climax is reached, one must be
sure that it _satisfies_ that interest. Of these three the climax is the
most important, largely because it is the final impression the reader
has of the story. He takes that final impression away with him. What
went before is more or less of a blur, and no matter how brilliantly the
climax may have been led up to, if it does not satisfy the interest of
the reader, his impression of the story is going to be flat and
unprofitable. Therefore, _try to get the climax first_.
To the practised writer I should say--practise some more. Simplify. Make
one word grow where a dozen grew before. There is no graduation day in
the school of writing. Do not be tempted by success into the worship of
false gods. Keep your work clean and honest and remember that it is your
public's only conception of _you_. The man who doesn't put all of the
God that is in him into the stuff he writes isn't an author at all. He's
only a parasitic imitation. And he who does--well, he doesn't have to be
reminded that it is a long and dusty road to the Throne.
=Arthur D. Howden Smith=: Simplicity of language. Simplicity of plot.
Clear-cut characterization. They apply to new and experienced writers.
=Theodore Seixas Solomons=: On plot, or the "story" factors, I would
tell a beginner to be sure it's a story. If, boiled down to a few
sentences, it interests a person, particularly a young person, and
elicits, naturally, the remark or the question "Now what do you think of
that!" it will mean it has that beginning and end and curve between
which distinguishes it from a mere piece of life or a mere tale, or a
mere unorganized, disunified thing which, no matter what skill may be
used in the handling of it, can never be a story. Next I would tell him
to beware of excerpts from life, so-called "true stories," as he would
avoid rattlesnakes. Finally, that as to the language content of his
story, his expression, to begin with _natural_ expression, to write as
he would write in a letter to a pal, and learn dignity and "style,"
gradually, by a series of modifications and buildings upon that natural
speech of his. As to grammar and rhetoric, they will give him little
trouble if he builds up from his own speech. By this means he will
always remain clear and always retain his own individuality; he will
avoid imitation and avoid "fine" writing. As to all the
rest--everything--as to technique, I would tell him constantly and
always to consider himself as a reader and not as a writer, and rigidly
adhere to all his prejudices and whims _as a reader_, while learning to
become a writer. That's all. To a practised writer I'd merely omit that
middle advice about working up a style from his common speech in writing
letters or talking, for the practised writer has gone beyond the
possibility of doing that. But the rest of my advice to the beginner I
would repeat to the practised writer, for depend upon it, whatever his
faults are, they may be corrected by following that advice. I wish
somebody was around me to make _me_ do it!
=Raymond S. Spears=: Work on a newspaper, and learn how to gather facts.
Formulate a habit of recognizing literary technique--as sentence
structure, paragraphic, chapter, etc. And weigh everything in a scales
that shows habit of mind regarding moral rectitude or obliquity. I think
every writer owes it to the public to use his talents, say for an
average of one hour a day, in unselfish public service. For clean
politics, help along education, drive out criminal practises, as sale of
narcotics, contract swindling, etc. This is just a notion.
=Norman Springer=: For a beginner: Learn to take criticism. Even if it
hurts. Especially if it hurts. That's the kind that helps. Don't waste
your time inventing fancy plots--they've all been done before. Don't
take your ideas of life from the movies. And beware of the inspirational
story, that one that comes rushing full clad out of your mind and just
dribbles from your finger-tips. Every writer gets these stories
occasionally; they are never as good as you imagine them to be, they
always need careful revision, and--this is important--it is this sort of
story that sometimes turns out to be an unconscious plagiarism. So don't
be too proud of the "easy to write" story.
The practised writer: Well, I don't know. I'm not practised enough
myself. But judging from observation, the chief danger to the practised,
and successful, writer lies in the fact that he may catch egotitis.
=Julian Street=: The beginner should read good stuff, but should not
imitate. He should study life around him, not life out of books. At
least he should not write out of what he has read, but out of his
experience.
The experienced writer frequently needs cutting.
=T. S. Stribling=: Beginners should study the dictionary, look up at
least five thousand synonyms for the verb "say," talk to everybody, love
thieves, oil stock salesmen and book agents as well as he does the cook,
the banker and the home-run slugger on his home-town team; read
everybody's stuff and resolve to do better; look at sunsets and
flappers, listen to sermons for amusement and go to the vaudeville for
thoughts of depth and gravity.
Have no advice for professional writers--their habits are fixed.
=Booth Tarkington=: I don't know how to make a suggestion to a beginner
without knowing that beginner; same applies to a practised writer.
=W. C. Tuttle=: Giving advice to beginners is like trying to teach a
novice to shoot. You can hand 'em the gun, point out the target and
explain about notching the sights. A typewriter for a gun, paper for
ammunition and the editor for the target. Seriously, I should tell them
to write only of things of which they "know." Do not copy any one, try
to stick to their own vocabulary, and be human. After they grow past
writing only of things they know, perhaps they might expand. I never
have.
=Lucille Van Slyke=: I'd say to a beginner--"Don't do it! Not unless you
just can't help yourself, not unless you can't stop yourself!" And I'd
say to a practised writer, "Stop, unless you can keep singing, 'I, too,
have lived in Arcady and have never forgotten the way back!'"
Incidentally, the way I wedged in might interest a very beginning
writer. My first paid job at writing was book reviewing. I was less than
twenty and utterly unqualified for such a task, but it was the only job
I could get. It was probably hard on the chaps whose books I reviewed,
but very good for me. I did it for about a year and in that time began
to understand that the wretched books in the lot by unknowns (why any
publisher risked time on them I couldn't see) were by persons who knew
nothing about what they were writing. So I registered a vow within me
that I would never insult any editor by sending him anything that I
wasn't as sure as I could possibly be contained all that I could find
out about its subject. That a beginning writer better tackle children
because it was the only age she could possibly have anything like a
perspective for. That everybody else had done American children so well
that I'd better tackle foreign ones. I had just pulled through a
classical course at college and decided I'd like to try Greek children.
I couldn't go to Greece, so I prowled about New York trying to find a
Greek colony. Stumbled on a Syrian one. Fell head over heels in love
with 'em. Pretty nearly lived with 'em for three years. Spent all the
time I could in the Oriental room at the library, dragging out all the
history and legend and poetry, good, bad or indifferent, that I could
corral. Spent another year struggling with dialect and pondering over
whether I'd dare risk it--or risk reproducing the effect I wanted
without it. In all it was nearly four years before I had a single story
on paper--and it took me about two years to write just fifteen
stories--all of which were sold. Then I stopped quick while the stopping
was good, because I didn't want to get into a rut. _This can be of no
possible use to any writer with genius or talent_ but it might help a
person like myself who had nothing to begin with but an inclination to
write. And it was a way into finding out that I could earn money while I
was learning to write--I mean trying to learn to write! (Again I realize
that it was a _thing_ that started the first story--a queer-shaped loaf
of bread in a Syrian baker's shop--the kind of bread that is sold to be
used at the party given when a little Syrian cuts his first tooth.)
=Atreus von Schrader=: To the beginner; don't write a story unless you
know and understand both your characters and your setting. To a
practised writer; find a group of characters and stick to them. This
makes for better writing and for cumulative value until, as is almost
invariably the case, the thing is overdone.
=T. Von Ziekursch=: To spin the tale in such a way that the reader must
live through it.
=Henry Kitchell Webster=: The best advice I have to give a beginner is
that he write, and keep on writing; that, when he has told his story, he
despatch it to an editor, or a series of editors, and forget it, telling
a new story, if he has a new one to tell, instead of trying to improve
an old one.
=G. A. Wells=: The advice to the beginner to condense is important. Most
stories printed will stand pruning, many of them to a considerable
extent. I would also impress upon the tyro the absolute necessity of
work. _Work!_ He can't observe union hours. Twelve hours a day is about
right; fifteen if possible. Read anything and everything. One class of
literature is likely to make a parrot of him.
Only those who have the grace to see good in a rejection slip belong in
the game. The beginner must make up his mind that possibly (very likely)
he will have to struggle years before he breaks through. Far too many
aspiring young men and women go into the game of authorship with a
guess-I'll-write-a-story-and-sell-it-for-a-thousand-dollars spirit.
First stories do get across now and then, but they are the exceptions
and not the rule. I sold my first story six years after I began to
write, and in the meantime accumulated a bale of rejection slips. I am
still at it.
Most aspirants quit cold after a few rejections. They haven't the guts
(pardon) to stick it out. There are a number of would-be authors in this
town. One by one they crop up, bloom a while in the sun of anticipation,
then the vitriol of disappointment withers them and they fade again into
the soulless clerks and truck drivers of yore. Too much stress can not
be placed upon persistence. Persistence alone may mean the difference
between success and failure.
I would advise the practised writer to turn out less and better work. He
should forget money and write for the sake of art. He should not depend
too much upon past performances, for even laurel withers. Most important
of all, he should quit while the quitting is good, and not go on and on
until his work shows that he has lost his grip. Mark Twain went too far.
London also. ----'s later stuff is insipid. ---- is beginning her second
childhood in authorship. ---- used to write good stories. It is perhaps
a blessing that O. Henry died before he ruined himself with "serious
stuff." I admit that later work has a finish, a polish that early work
lacks; but very seldom does later work show the fire, the vigor, the
enthusiasm, the freshness that early work does. So it is a good idea for
the practised writer not to make a marathon of what should be no more
than a dash.
=William Wells=: Oh, Lord!
=Honore Willsie=: Study story structure every day. Use a dictionary and
thesaurus constantly. Practise the forming of sentences and paragraphs
as constantly as you would practise scales were you a musician. I have
no suggestions for the practised writer.
=H. C. Witwer=: To a beginner I would suggest a thorough reading of the
popular magazines, a shot at the newspaper game if possible, plenty of
clean white paper, a typewriter, and a resolution to take punishment in
the form of hard work and rejections. The first time an editor says or
writes, "... but your work interests me, and I would like to have a talk
with you," all will be forgotten! To a practised writer I would say
this--apologizing for what might be thought patronization--don't forget
they are coming up from the depths every year, just as you came up.
Editors, as a whole, crave "discoveries," new names, fresh viewpoints,
etc. Don't think of attempting to rest on past laurels. Don't keep a
once popular character too long before your readers, work harder now
than you did before you landed. Look around you, the biggest "names" are
the biggest producers, year after year. You're a writer--all right,
_write_.
=William Almon Wolff=: For the beginner: Be sure you have something to
say. Retain a single point of view in a short story. Know--and make
clear--exactly why people do what they do, and see to it that they never
do anything simply to help the plot along.
Who am I to suggest things to the practised writer? But those three
things, and, especially, the third, are pretty good things for any one
to keep in mind, I should say.
=Edgar Young=: Write what you know about; do not take other men's
underlying ideas and try to make a story from them, for the result will
be weaker than the original; do not lose faith in your own values of
your work.