completely formed itself, in all its essentials and in many details,
in your subconscious mind, the lowermost cellar of your uninteresting
personality where moth and rust do not corrupt, whatever harm they
may do higher up, and where the cobwebs lie even more thickly than in
your alleged brain. As you write, and as the result of the mere act
of writing, the story, lying dormant in your subcellar, slowly shakes
a leg, quivers, stretches, extends itself to its full length, yawns,
rises with sundry anatomical contortions and advancing crosses the
threshold of your subconsciousness into the well-dusted and cleaned
basement of your consciousness whence it is but a step to full daylight
and the shadow of printed black characters upon a to-and-fro travelling
page.
In other words, you are an automaton; and to be an automaton in this
world of exuberant originality is a blissful thing.
Your brain is not engaged at all. This is why writing fiction actually
rests the brain. It is why those who are suffering from brain-fag
find recreation and enjoyment, health and mental strength in writing
a short story or a novel. The short story is a two weeks’ vacation
for the tired mind. Writing a novel is a month, with full pay. It is
true that readers are rather prone to resent the widespread habit of
novelists recuperating and recovering their mental faculties at their
readers’ expense. This resentment is without any justification in fact,
since for every novelist who recovers from brain-fag by writing a work
of fiction there are thousands of readers who restore their exhausted
intellects with a complete rest by reading the aforesaid work of
fiction.
Of course the subconscious cellar theory of novel-writing is not final
and authoritative. There is at least one other tenable explanation of
how novels are written, and we proceed to give it.
This is that the story is projected through the personality of the
writer who is, in all respects, no more than a mechanism and whose rôle
may be accurately compared to that of a telephone transmitter in a talk
over the wire.
This theory has the important virtue of explaining convincingly all the
worst novels, as well as all the best. For a telephone transmitter is
not responsible for what is spoken into it or for what it transmits.
It is not to blame for some very silly conversations. It has no merit
because it forwards some very wise words. Similarly, if the novelist is
merely a transmitter, a peculiarly delicate and sensitive medium for
conveying what is said and done somewhere else, perhaps on some other
plane by some other variety of mortals, the novelist is in no wise to
blame for the performances or utterances of his characters, or clients
as they ought, in this view, to be called; the same novelist might, and
probably would, be the means of transmitting the news of splendid deeds
and the superb utterances of glorious people, composing one story, and
the inanities, verbal or otherwise, of a lot of fourth dimensional
Greenwich Villagers, constituting another and infinitely inferior
story.... To be sure this explanation, which relieves the novelist
of almost all responsibility for his novels, ought also to take from
him all the credit for good work. If he is a painfully conscientious
mortal he may grieve for years over this; but if his first or his
second or his third book sells 100,000 copies he will probably be
willing, in the words of the poet, to take the cash and let the credit
go. Very greedy men invariably insist on not merely taking the cash
but claiming the credit as well; saintly men clutch at the credit and
instruct their publishers that all author’s royalties are to be made
over to the Fund for Heating the Igloos of Aged and Helpless Eskimos.
But the funny thing about the whole business is that the world, which
habitually withholds credit where credit is due, at other times insists
on bestowing credit anyway. There have been whole human philosophies
based upon the principle of Renunciation and even whole novels, such
as those of Henry James. But it doesn’t work. Renounce, if you like,
all credit for the books which bear your name on the title-page. The
world will weave its laurel wreath and crown you with bays just the
same. Men have become baldheaded in a single night in the effort to
avoid unmerited honor and by noon the next day have looked as if they
were bacchantes or at least hardy perennials, so thick have been the
vine leaves in their hair, or rather on the site of it.... Which takes
us away from our subject. Where were we? Oh, yes, about writing your
novel....
As soon as you have done two or three days’ stint on the book--you
ought to plan to write so many words a day or a week, and it’s no
matter that you don’t know what they will be--as soon as you’ve got
a fairish start you will find that you have several persons in your
story who are, to all intents and purposes, as much alive as yourself
and considerably more self-willed. They will promptly take the story
in their hands and you will have nothing to do in the remaining 50,000
words or more but to set down what happens. The extreme physical
fatigue consequent upon writing so many words is all you have to
guard against. Play golf or tennis, if you can, so as to offset this
physical fatigue by the physical rest and intellectual exercise they
respectively afford. Auction bridge in the evenings, or, as Frank M.
O’Brien says, reading De Morgan and listening to the phonograph, will
give you the emotional outlet you seek.
15
No doubt many who have read the foregoing will turn up their noses at
the well-meant advice it contains, considering that we have largely
jested on a serious subject. We take this occasion to declare most
earnestly, at the conclusion of our remarks, that we have seldom been
so serious in our life. Such occasional levities as we have allowed
ourselves to indulge in have been plain and obvious, and of no more
importance in the general scheme of what we have been discussing than
the story of the Irishman with which the gifted after-dinner speaker
circumspectly introduces his most burning thoughts.
We mean what we have said. Writing a novel is one of the most rounded
forms of self-education. It is one of the most honorable too, since,
unlike the holder of public office, the person who is getting the
education does not do so at the public expense. We have regard,
naturally, to the mere act of _writing_ the novel. If afterward it
finds a publisher and less probably a public--that has nothing to
do with the author, whose self-culture, intensive, satisfying and
wholesome, has been completed before that time.
Whether a novelist deserves any credit for the novel he writes is a
question, but he will get the credit for it anyway and nothing matters
where so wonderful an experience is to be gained. Next to being
hypnotized, there is nothing like it; and it has the great advantage
that you know what you are doing whereas the hypnotic subject does
not. No preparation is necessary or even desirable since, even in
so specific a detail as the outline of the story the people of your
narrative take things entirely in their own hands and reduce the
outline to the now well-known status of a scrap of paper.... We talk of
“advice” in writing a novel. The best advice is not to take any.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.