audience for a non-fiction book is its timeliness. Important, often
enough, in the case of particular novels, the matter of timeliness
is much more so with all other books soever. It cannot be overlooked
in autobiography; _The Education of Henry Adams_ attracted a great
host of readers in 1918 and 1919 because it became accessible to them
in 1918 and not in 1913 or 1929. In 1918 and 1919 the minds of men
were peculiarly troubled. Especially about education. H. G. Wells was
articulating the disastrous doubts that beset numbers of us, first,
in _Joan and Peter_, with its subtitle, _The Story of an Education_,
drawing up an indictment which, whatever its bias, distortion and
unfairness yet contained a lot of terrible truth; and then, in _The
Undying Fire_, dedicated “to all schoolmasters and schoolmistresses
and every teacher in the world,” returning to the subject, but this
time constructively. Yes, a large number of persons were thinking about
education in 1918-19, and the ironical attitude of Henry Adams toward
his own was of keenest interest to them.
13
We have discussed the internal factor which makes for a big sale in
books rather sketchily because, as a whole, book publishers can tell
it when they see it (all that is necessary) even though it may puzzle
authors who haven’t mastered it. So far as authors are concerned we
believe that this factor can, in many instances, be mastered. The
enterprise is not different from developing a retentive memory, or
skill over an audience in public speaking; but as with both these
achievements no short cut is really possible and advice and suggestion
(you can’t honestly call it instruction) can go but a little way. No
end of nonsense has been uttered on the subject of what it is in books
that makes them sell well, and nonsense will not cease to be uttered
about it while men write. What is of vastly more consequence than any
effort to exploit the internal factor in best sellers is the failure
to make every book published sell its best. If, in general, books sell
not more than one-quarter the number of copies they should sell, an
estimate to which we adhere, then the immediate and largest gain to
publishers, authors and public will be in securing 100 per cent. sales.
14
A word in closing about the familiar argument that the habits of our
people have changed, that they no longer have time to read books, that
motoring and movies have usurped the place of reading.
Intercommunication is not a luxury but a necessity. Transportation
is only a means of intercommunication. As the means of
intercommunication--books, newspapers, mail services, railroads,
aircraft, telephones, automobiles, motion pictures--multiply the use
of each and every one increases with one restriction: A new means of
intercommunication paralleling but greatly improving an existing means
will largely displace it--as railroads have largely superseded canals.
As a means of a particular and indispensable kind of intercommunication
nothing has yet appeared that parallels and at the same time decidedly
improves upon books. Newspapers and magazines do not and cannot, though
they most nearly offer the same service. You cannot go in your Ford
to hear from the lips of Mr. Tarkington his new novel and seeing it
on the screen isn’t the same thing as reading it--as we all know. And
until some inventor enables us to sit down with an author and get his
story whole, at our own convenience and related in his own words, by
some device much more attractive than reading a book,--why, until then
books will be bought and read in steadily increasing numbers. For with
its exercise the taste for intercommunication intensifies. To have been
somewhere is to want to read about it, to have read about a place
is to want to go there in innumerable instances. It is a superficial
view that sees in the spread of automobiles and motion pictures an
arrest of reading. As time goes on and more and more people read books,
both absolutely and relatively to the growth of populations, shall we
hear a wail that people’s habits have changed and that the spread of
book-reading has checked the spread of automobiling and lessened the
attendance at the picture shows? Possibly we shall hear that outcry but
we doubt it; nor does our doubt rest upon any feeling that books will
not be increasingly read.
WRITING A NOVEL
VIII
WRITING A NOVEL
There are at least as many ways of writing a novel as there are
novelists and doubtless there are more; for it is to be presumed that
every novelist varies somewhat in his methods of labor. The literature
on the business of novel-writing is not extensive. Some observations
and advice on the part of Mr. Arnold Bennett are, indeed, about all
the average reader encounters; we have forgotten whether they are
embedded in _The Truth About An Author_ or in that other masterpiece,
_How to Live on 2,400 Words a Day_. It may be remarked that there is
no difficulty in living on 2,400 words a day, none at all, where the
writer receives five cents a word or better.
But there we go, talking about money, a shameful subject that
has only a backstairs relation to Art. Let us ascend the
front staircase together, first. Let us enter the parlor of
Beauty-Is-Truth-Truth-Beauty, which, the poet assured us, is all
we know or need to know. Let us seat ourselves in lovely æsthetic
surroundings. If later we have to go out the back way maybe we can
accomplish it unobserved.
There are only three motives for writing a novel. The first is to
satisfy the writer’s self, the second is to please or instruct other
persons, the third is to earn money. We will consider these motives in
order.
2
The best novels are written from a blending of all three motives. But
it is doubtful if a good novel has ever been written in which the
desire to satisfy some instinct in himself was not present in the
writer’s purpose.
Just what this instinct is can’t so easily be answered. Without
doubt the greatest part of it is the instinct of paternity. Into the
physiological aspects of the subject we shall not enter, though they
are supported by a considerable body of evidence. The longing to
father--or mother--certain fictitious characters is not often to be
denied. Sometimes the story as a story, as an entity, is the beloved
child of its author. Did not Dickens father Little Nell? How, do you
suppose, Barrie has thought of himself in relation to some of his
youngsters? Any one who has read _Lore of Proserpine_ not only believes
in fairies but understands the soul of Maurice Hewlett. The relation of
the creator of a story to his persons is not necessarily parental. It
is always intensely human.
O. Henry was variously a Big Brother (before the Big Brothers had been
thought of), a father, an uncle, a friend, a distant cousin, a mere
acquaintance, a sworn enemy of his people. It has to be so. For the
writer lives among the people he creates. The cap of Fortunatus makes
him invisible to them but he is always there--not to interfere with
them nor to shape their destinies but to watch them come together or
fly apart, to hear what they say, to guess what they think (from what
they say and from the way they behave), to worry over them, applaud
them, frown; but forever as a recorder.
3
None of the author’s troubles must appear in the finished record.
Still wearing Fortunatus’s cap he is required to be as invisible to
the reader as to the people he describes. There are exceptions to this
rule. Dickens was the most notable. Many readers prefer to have a tale
told them by a narrator frankly prejudiced in favor of some of the
characters and against others. Many--but not a majority.
In the best novel that Booth Tarkington has so far written, _The
Flirt_, the dominating figure is a heartless young woman to whom the
reader continuously itches to administer prussic acid in a fatal
dose. But Mr. Tarkington does not scald Cora Madison with boiling
invective nor blister her with hot irony. He relates her doings in the
main almost dispassionately; and set forth thus nakedly they are more
damnable than any amount of sound and fury could make them appear to
be. Mr. Tarkington does not wave the prussic acid bottle, though here
and there, distilled through his narrative and perceptible more in the
things he selects to tell about than in his manner of telling them, the
reader is conscious of a faint odor of almond blossoms, signifying that
the author has uncorked the acid bottle--perhaps that his restraint in
not emptying it may be the more emphasized.
May we set things down a little at random? Then let us seize this
moment to point out to the intending novel writer some omissions in
_The Flirt_. Our pupil will, when he comes to write his novel, be
certain to think of the “strong scenes.” He will be painfully eager
to get them down. It is these scenes that will “grip” the reader and
assure his book of a sale of 100,000 copies.
Battle, murder and sudden death are generally held to be the very meat
of a strong scene. But when the drunkard Ray Vilas, Cora Madison’s
discarded lover, shoots down Valentine Corliss and then kills himself,
Mr. Tarkington does not fill pages with it. He takes scarce fifteen
lines--perhaps a little over 100 words--to tell of the double slaying.
Nor does he relate what Ray Vilas and Cora said to each other in that
last interview which immediately preceded the crime. “Probably,” says
Mr. Tarkington, “Cora told him the truth, all of it; though of course
she seldom told quite the truth about anything in which she herself was
concerned”--or words to that effect.
Where oh where is the strong scene? Ah, one man’s strength is
another’s weakness. _The Flirt_ is full of strong scenes but they are
infrequently the scenes which the intending novel writer, reviewing his
tale before setting to work, would select as the most promising.
4
Besides the instinct of paternity--or perhaps in place of it--the
novelist may feel an instinct to build something, or to paint a
beautiful picture, or mold a lovely figure. This yearning of the
artist, so-called, is sometimes denoted by the word “self-expression,”
a misnomer, if it be not a euphemism, for the longing to fatherhood.
There is just as much “self-expression” in the paternity of a boy or a
girl as in the creation of a book, a picture or a building. The child,
in any case, has innumerable other ancestors; you are not the first to
have written such a book or painted such a picture.
How about the second motive in novel-writing, the desire to please or
instruct others? The only safe generalization about it seems to be
this: A novel written exclusively from this motive will be a bad novel.
A novel is not, above everything, a didactic enterprise. Yet even
those enterprises of the human race which are in their essence purely
didactic, designed “to warn, to comfort, to command,” such as sermons
and lessons in school, seldom achieve their greatest possible effect if
instruction or improvement be the preacher’s or teacher’s unadorned and
unconcealed and only purpose.
Take a school lesson. Teachers who get the best results are invariably
found to have added some element besides bare instruction to their
work. Sometimes they have made the lesson entertaining; sometimes they
have exercised that imponderable thing we call “personal magnetism”;
sometimes they have supplied an incentive to learn that didn’t exist in
the lesson itself.
Take a sermon. If the auditor does not feel the presence in it of
something besides the mere intelligence the words convey the sermon
leaves the auditor cold.
Pure intellect is not a force in human affairs. Bach wrote music with a
very high intellectual content but the small leaven of sublime melody
is present in his work that lasts through the centuries. Shakespeare
and Beethoven employed intellect and emotionalism in the proportion
of fifty-fifty. Sir Joshua Reynolds mixed his paint “with brains,
sir”; but the significant thing is that Sir Joshua did not use only
gray matter on his palette. Those who economize on emotionalism in
one direction usually make up for it, not always consciously, in
another. Joseph Hergesheimer, writing _Java Head_, is very sparing
in the emotionalism bound up with action and decidedly lavish in the
emotionalism inseparable from sensuous coloring and “atmosphere.”
No, a novel written wholly to instruct will never do; but neither
will a novel written entirely to please, to give æsthetic or sensuous
enjoyment to the reader. Such a novel is like a portion of a fine
French sauce--with nothing to spread it on. It is honey without a crust
to dip.
5
Writing a novel purely to make money has a tainted air, thanks to
the long vogue of a false tradition. If so, _The Vicar of Wakefield_
ought to be banished from public libraries; for Goldsmith needed the
money and made no bones about saying so. The facts are, of course,
unascertainable; but we would be willing to wager, were there any way
of deciding the bet, that more novels of the first rank have been
written either solely or preponderantly to earn money than for any
other reason whatever.
It isn’t writing for the sake of the money that determines the merit of
the result; _that_ is settled by two other factors, the author’s skill
and the author’s conscience. And the word “skill” here necessarily
includes each and every endowment the writer possesses as well as such
proficiency as he may have acquired.
Suppose A. and B. both to have material for a first-rate novel. Both
are equally skilled in novel writing. Both are equally conscientious.
A. writes his novel for his own satisfaction and to please and instruct
others. He is careful and honest about it. He delights in it. B. writes
his novel purely to make a few thousand dollars. He is, naturally,
careful and honest in doing the job; and he probably takes such
pleasure in it as a man may take in doing well anything he can do well,
from laying a sewer to flying an airplane. We submit that B.’s may
easily be the better novel. It is true that B. is under a pressure that
A. does not know and that B.’s work may be affected in ways of which he
is not directly aware by the necessity to sell his finished product.
But most of the best work in the world is done under some compulsion or
other; and it is the sum of human experience that the compulsion to do
work which will find favor in the eyes of the worker’s fellows is the
healthfullest compulsion of them all. Certainly it is more healthful
than the compulsion merely to please yourself. And if B. is under a
pressure A.’s danger lies precisely in the fact that he is not under a
pressure, or under too slight a pressure. It is a tenable hypothesis
that Flaubert would have been a better novelist if he had had to make
a living by his pen. Some indirect evidence on the point may possibly
be found in the careers of certain writers whose first books were the
product of a need to buy bread and butter; and whose later books were
the product of no need at all--nor met any.
So much for motives in novel-writing. You should write (1) because you
need the money, (2) to satisfy your own instincts, and (3) to please
and, perchance, instruct other persons.
Take a week or two to get your motives in order and then, and not until
then, read what follows, which has to do with how you are presently to
proceed about the business of writing your novel.
6
It is settled that you are going to write a novel. You have examined
your motive and found it pure and worthy of you. Comes now the great
question of how to set about the business.
At this point let no one rise up and “point out” that Arnold Bennett
has told how. Arnold Bennett has told how to do everything--how to
live on twenty-four hours a day (but not how to enjoy it), how to write
books, how to acquire culture, how to be yourself and manage yourself
(in the unfortunate event that you cannot be someone else or have no
one, like a wife, to manage you), how to do everything, indeed, except
rise up and call Arnold Bennett blessed.
The trouble with Mr. Bennett’s directions is--they won’t work.
Mr. Bennett tells you to write like everything and get as much of your
novel done as possible before the Era of Discouragement sets in. Then,
no matter how great your Moment of Depression, you will be able to
stand beside the table, fondly stroking a pile of pages a foot high,
and reassure yourself, saying: “Well, but here, at least, is so much
done. No! I cannot take my hand from the plough now! No! I must Go On.
I must complete my destiny.” (One’s novel is always one’s Destiny of
the moment.)
It sounds well, but the truth is that when you strike the Writer’s
Doldrums the sight of all that completed manuscript only enrages you to
the last degree. You are embittered by the spectacle of so much effort
wasted. You feel like tearing it up or flinging it in the wastebasket.
If you are a Rudyard Kipling or an Edna Ferber, you do that thing. And
your wife or your mother carefully retrieves your _Recessional_ or
your _Dawn O’Hara_ and sends it to the publisher who brings it out,
regardless of expense, and sells a large number of copies--to the
booksellers, anyway.
Mr. Bennett also tells you how to plan the long, slow culminant
movement of your novel; how to walk in the park and compose those neat
little climaxes which should so desirably terminate each chapter; how
to---- But what’s the use? Let us illustrate with a fable.
Once an American, meeting Mr. Bennett in London, saluted him, jocularly
(he meant it jocularly) with the American Indian word of greeting:
“How?”
Mr. Bennett immediately began to tell him how and the American never
got away until George H. Doran, the publisher, who was standing near
by, exclaimed:
“That’s enough, Enoch, for a dollar volume!”
(Mr. Doran, knowing Bennett well, calls him by his first name, a
circumstance that should be pointed out to G. K. Chesterton, who would
evolve a touching paradox about the familiarity of the unfamiliar.)
That will do for Arnold. If we mention Arnold again it must distinctly
be understood that we have reference to some other Arnold--Benedict
Arnold or Matthew Arnold or Dorothy Arnold or Arnold Daly.
Well, to get back (in order to get forward), you are about beginning
your novel (nice locution, “about beginning”) and are naturally taking
all the advice you can get, if it doesn’t cost prohibitively, and this
we are about to give doesn’t.
The first thing for you to do is not, necessarily, to decide on the
subject of your novel.
It is not absolutely indispensable to select the subject of a novel
before beginning to write it. Many authors prefer to write a third
or a half of the novel before definitely committing themselves to a
particular theme. For example, take _The Roll Call_, by Arnold--it
must have been Arnold Constable, or perhaps it was Matthew. _The Roll
Call_ is a very striking illustration of the point we would make.
Somewhere along toward the end of _The Roll Call_ the author decided
that the subject of the novel should be the war and its effect on the
son of Hilda Lessways by her bigamous first husband--or, he wasn’t
exactly her husband, being a bigamist, but we will let it go at that.
Now Hilda Lessways was, or became, the wife of Edwin Clayhanger;
and George Cannon, Clayhanger’s--would you say, stepson? Hilda’s
son, anyway--George Cannon, the son of a gun--oh, pardon, the son
of Bigamist Cannon--the stepson of, or son of the wife of, Edwin
Clayhanger of the Five Towns--George Cannon.... Where were we?...
Hilda Lessways Clayhanger, the--well, wife--of Bigamist Cannon....
The relationships in this novel are very confusing, like the novel and
the subject of it, but if you can read the book you will see that it
illustrates our point perfectly.
7
Well, go ahead and write. Don’t worry about the subject. You know how
it is, a person often can’t see the forest for the trees. When you’re
writing 70,000 words or maybe a few more you can’t expect to see your
way out of ’em very easily. When you are out of the trees you can look
back and see the forest. And when you are out of the woods of words you
can glance over ’em and find out what they were all about.
However, the 80,000 words have to be written, and it is up to you,
somehow or other, to set down the 90,000 parts of speech in a row. Now
100,000 words cannot be written without taking thought. Any one who has
actually inscribed 120,000 words knows that. Any one who has written
the 150,000 words necessary to make a good-sized novel (though William
Allen White wouldn’t call _that_ good measure) understands the terrible
difficulties that confront a mortal when he sits down to enter upon the
task of authorship, the task of putting on paper the 200,000 mono- or
polysyllables that shall hold the reader breathless to the end, if only
from the difficulty of pronouncing some of them.
Where to start? For those who are not yet equipped with self-starters
we here set down a few really first-class openings for either the
spring or fall novel trade:
“Marinda was frightened. When she was frightened her eyes changed
color. They were dark now, and glittering restlessly like the sea
when the wind hauls northwest. Jack Hathaway, unfamiliar with weather
signs, took no heed of the impending squall. He laughed recklessly,
dangerously....” (Story of youth and struggle.)
“The peasant combed the lice from his beard, spat and said, grumbling:
‘Send us ploughs that we may till the soil and save Russia.... Send us
ploughs.’” (Realistic story of Russia.)
“Darkness, suave, dense, enfolding, lay over the soft loam of the
fields. The girl, moving silently across the field, felt the mystery
of the dark; the scent of the soil and the caress of the night alike
enchanted her. Hidden in the folds of her dress, clutched tightly in
her fingers, was the ribbon he had given her. With a quick indrawing
of her breath she paused, and, screened by the utter blackness that
enveloped her, pressed it to her lips....” (Story of the countryside.
Simple, trusting innocence. Lots of atmosphere. After crossing the
field the girl strikes across Haunted Heath, a description of which
fills the second chapter.)
All these are pretty safe bets, if you’re terribly hard up. Think them
over. Practice them daily for a few weeks.
8
Now that you have some idea about writing a novel it may be as well for
you to consider the consequences before proceeding to the irrevocable
act.
One of the consequences will certainly be the discovery of many
things in the completed manuscript that you never intended. This is
no frivolous allusion to the typographical errors you will find--for
a typewriter is as capable of spoonerisms as the human tongue. We
have reference to things that you did not consciously put into your
narrative.
And first let it be said that many things that seem to you unconscious
in the work of skilled writers are deliberate art (as the phrase goes).
The trouble is that the deliberation usually spoils the art. An example
must be had and we will take it in a novel by the gifted American,
Joseph Hergesheimer. Before proceeding further with this Manual for
Beginners read _Java Head_ if you can; if not, never mind.
Now in _Java Head_ the purpose of Mr. Hergesheimer was, aside from
the evocation of a beautiful bit of a vanished past, the delineation
of several persons of whom one represented the East destroyed in the
West and another the West destroyed in the East. Edward Dunsack, back
in Salem, Massachusetts, the victim of the opium habit, represented
the West destroyed in the East; the Chinese wife of Gerrit Ammidon
represented the East destroyed in the West. Mr. Hergesheimer took an
artist’s pride in the fact that the double destruction was accomplished
with what seemed to him the greatest possible economy of means; almost
the only external agency employed, he pointed out, was opium. Very
well; this is æstheticism, pure and not so simple as it looks. It is a
Pattern. It is a musical phrase or theme presented as a certain flight
of notes in the treble, repeated or echoed and inverted in the bass. It
is a curve on one side of a staircase balanced by a curve on the other.
It is a thing of symmetry and grace and it is the expression, perfect
in its way, of an idea. Kipling expressed very much the same idea when
he told us that East is East and West is West and never the twain shall
meet. Mr. Hergesheimer amplifies and extends. If the two are brought in
contact each is fatal to the other. Is that all?
It is not all, it is the mere beginning. When you examine _Java Head_
with the Pattern in mind you immediately discover that the Pattern
is carried out in bewildering detail. Everything is symmetrically
arranged. For instance, many a reader must have been puzzled and
bewildered by the heartbreaking episode at the close of the novel in
which Roger Brevard denies the delightful girl Sidsall Ammidon. The
affair bears no relation to the currents of the tale; it is just a
little eddy to one side; it is unnecessarily cruel and wounding to our
sensibilities. Why have it at all?