INDIVIDUALITY VS. TECHNIQUE
Year after year editors sit at their desks and almost at a single
glance reject anywhere from sixty to ninety per cent. of the
manuscripts that come in, and, on the whole, they make few mistakes
in so doing. Some of these summarily rejected ones are so illiterate
that most freshmen in college would unhesitatingly turn them down,
but on the majority is the damning and almost unmistakable brand of
"no individuality"--merely another manuscript plodding blindly along
in the machine-like effort to turn out by machine-like methods
another one "like those they've read," another stilted, unnatural
attempt at producing a life-like copy of a model denaturalized, by
them or their teachers, into a mechanical and artificial collection
of rags, bones and hanks of hair that has never known the breath of
life.
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_Lack of Individuality_.--How can the editor tell at a glance? How
in heaven's name can he help telling? He's read the same kind of
thing--the same thing except for variations of theme and
setting--thousands and thousands and thousands of times before until
recognizing it at a glance is as easy as recognizing a trolley-car
among other vehicles on his way to the office of mornings. The
tracks are no plainer in one case than the other.
But maybe the author does better farther on in the story? Doubtless
it has happened, but the instances constitute a negligible factor.
That poor editor learned to hunt no farther only by hunting farther
thousands of times, when he was new and optimistic, and finding
nothing. He has learned that any writer fool enough to begin a story
in so stupid a way is too much a fool all the way along to be worth
listening to.
Disbelieve this ability, if you like, and let's pass on to the
stories he does not discard at a glance. These he reads to varying
extents, according to their ability to hold him as an
editor--sometimes a cursory examination, sometimes solid parts here
and there, sometimes straight through, sometimes only part {184} way.
Many things, including mistaken judgment, can stop him, but oftenest
of all I believe it is the story's lack of individuality. He finds
he's read it too many times before and knows that his readers have.
The sameness may be in plot, theme, style, anything or all together,
but it's the sameness that stops him and kills the story. As a
reader, judge for yourself from the stories that get published, after
editors have discarded all but enough to fill their space--all but
one to five per cent. say, of the total submitted. Is there not
sufficient sameness in even these? Then judge what the discarded
ninety-five or ninety-nine per cent. must be, making any reasonable
allowance you please for the fallibility of editors.
_Reasons for the Lack_.--Much of the lack of individuality in stories
is due to lack of individuality in the writers. To what degree a
person can develop his individuality I do not presume to say, but
lack of real individuality in his stories is curable to exactly that
degree and no more.
But many of the writers whose stories show none, have individuality.
Why doesn't it show in their work? Because they have been {185}
taught by present methods of teaching fiction to be artificial, not
natural, or have themselves slavishly modeled themselves after some
one else.
What chance has your individuality if you turn your back on it and
resolutely try to copy another man's, or if you lose yourself in an
endless maze of rules and regulations? Rules and regulations
imposed, for the most part, by people equally lost in the maze.
No, you can't let your individuality run riot regardless of all
rules, for some rules are laws of the human mind to which all of us
are subject. But it does not follow that you must assassinate your
individuality. It is your main asset. Without it, neither empty
rules nor sound laws can build anything of themselves.
Technique? Of course you need technique, but if you make of it a
golden calf and bow down in worship, you perish.
Get technique; don't let it get you. What technique should give you
is tools, not rules. And not a monomaniac collector's collection of
tools, collected for the sake of including all tools known to man,
but only those tools so well mastered that they fit almost {186}
automatically into your hand, carrying out smoothly the guiding
impulse of your brain.
But you have to learn to use them before you can acquire such skill?
Yes, but remember the purpose of your learning--and don't try to
learn and use more tools than you can master. Remember that an augur
is an augur--that it's not a demand upon you to bore a hole in
something, but only a means of making a hole when one is needed.
Because a hammer is for driving nails do you have to use it when
you're modeling in clay?
I dare say it is bad taste for me to criticize other books on writing
fiction and other methods of teaching fiction, but, pardon me, I
don't give a damn. For years I've sat and watched teachers, poorly
equipped for the task and perfectly equipped for their manner of
handling it, blandly do their utmost to ruin a writer by holding
before his wide eyes so many rules that he finds it difficult ever to
see anything else. If among them are included some rules on
preserving his individuality while he's following all the other
rules, what can that mean to him? If his teachers perchance present
technique as tools, not rules, they load so many of them upon his
{187} trustful back that he can not walk, to say nothing of mastering
the tools.
The essence of their damage lies in two things:
First, the rules they pour forth so endlessly they themselves got
from some one else and accept them chiefly for that reason. Ask them
the why of each of their rules and there is likely to be a
considerable hiatus between their last book and the next.
Too often they seem to have been merely perpetuating an hereditary
collection of rules for the sake of preserving the collection as an
entity in itself, forgetting that some of the rules might be unsound
and neglecting--if they ever thought about them--to give their
students the foundations in human nature upon which the sound ones
must rest.
Second, the whole tendency of such teaching is to make the learner
look at other writers instead of within himself, to absorb other
people's style and methods instead of developing his own, to copy
rather than to think things out for himself, to be artificial rather
than natural, cramped rather than free, to waste his time on details
instead of giving it to vital things.
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I should venture no such strong condemnation if I did not feel that I
am merely voicing the opinion of most editors--of the men and women
who are in best position to note the devastating effects upon
to-day's fiction. And I am, of course, speaking of the books and
teaching methods as a class. There are exceptions, naturally--though
one writer, for example, tells me he has read between forty and fifty
books on fiction writing, finding only one of them worth while--and
practically all such books can be of use, sometimes of very great
use, to the raw beginner. So can a rhetoric or a common English
grammar.
In the light of results, the fundamental point these books most fail
to make is that most of their contents should be read--not memorized
or swallowed--for stimulus and suggestion only, and that the student
must see to it that no rules turn him aside from his main business of
developing and using his own individuality.
I am painfully aware that in this book I, too, have given rules as
rules, but I have tried to give the foundations of a sufficient
number of them to lead the student into the habit of looking for
foundations himself and working {189} out his own destiny. For the
foundations I ask consideration, for my rules none at all except as
danger-signs erected from twenty years' experience to point out the
errors most common in actual practise.
I am still more keenly aware that in many instances I fail to meet
possible objections and justified exceptions. Often it is because I
fail to think of them at the time or never thought of them, but often
it is because there is a limit to available space and because too
many aspects and too much detail breed confusion. Literature is the
communication, between human beings, of human nature and human
experience. Who can give complete rules for a process and content so
infinitely various? Bear in mind first, last and always, that this
book does not attempt to be a complete treatise on writing fiction.
Its purpose is to emphasize those points and points of view that,
from years of examining the actual manuscripts submitted to
magazines, seem most to need emphasis, and, second, to raise against
the present fashion in teaching methods a small flag of revolt under
which I believe most editors and most discriminating readers will be
content to stand, no matter {190} how great may be their disagreement
with me on specific points.
_Unfamiliarity with Things Taught_.--Last week I borrowed three books
on the writing of fiction and ran through their pages. One was by a
university professor who gave a most interesting picture of the
editorial world, of its offices, their occupants, customs, rules,
policies, points of view. The title-page stated that he had formerly
been with a publishing house--probably for the sake of the
experience, during a summer vacation. I became fascinated, almost
wishing I could live in that world myself. I never have.
I realize that, for those entirely unfamiliar with the inside of the
editorial world, his picture of it was sufficiently near the truth to
be of decided practical value. Yet his almost glib generalities and
his choices for particularization made me shudder for the
misapprehensions that might arise from them. He was like the
European traveler who spends a month or two in the United States and
then describes and explains it to the world. Any conscientious
editor of long experience would, I think, hesitate before attempting
to present in a chapter or two of a text-book for earnest {191}
students a complete and final exposition of the editorial field. It
is too complex, too various, too changeable.
And if these teachers venture to expound so much and so finally from
so small a knowledge of what may be called the mere machinery of the
editorial world, it seems logical to conclude that they may have
equally insufficient basis when they attempt to explain what kind of
fiction the editors want and how to manufacture it.
_Evils of Models and Examples_.--But what struck me most forcibly in
those three books was the vast amount of space given to models and
examples. Stories were constantly being laid upon the operating
table, in whole or part, and dissected and analyzed. The pages were
strewn with dismembered parts, ticketed and labeled, to be sure, and
filed in most orderly fashion, but the panorama as a whole was enough
to ruin a writer forever if it did not drive him mad. Oh yes, I know
we must take a clock apart before we can learn how to make a clock,
but an artist should live in a studio, not an operating-room. The
use of examples and models is a valuable adjunct of teaching, but it
is not teaching. As far as {192} I can learn from cursory glances
from time to time, through inquiry and through noting results in
submitted manuscripts, dissected models and examples form the
backbone of teaching method. Use them, by all means, but only
sufficiently to show the student how to do his own analyzing when he
feels the need. And teach him general principles to make him keen to
the need when it is there. Teach _him_ to work; don't litter his
mind with the work you've done on a third person's work.
The mechanical method of teaching is perfectly adapted to those
students who by no possibility can be anything but mechanical
writers, working by rule of thumb, building a structure by foot-rule
and pouring in its contents from a graduated beaker. But is
producing such writers worth while or even justifiable? Even if your
purpose is the broader, industrial one of adding to the general
earning capacity of the nation? Of course, if you are merely writing
a text-book that will sell--
It is upon the writers who are not doomed by their own limitations to
be merely mechanics that the curse of mechanical teaching {193}
falls. The genius and the really strong individualist will escape,
but what of him with moderate or even considerable gifts? He goes
into the bed of Procrustes. He is lopped here, stretched there; he
is badgered and blinded with examples and precedents, kept from
natural development and natural expression by the study of rules for
growth and by listening to other people express themselves, prevented
from being himself and giving rein to his own individuality by the
constant study of individualities not his own. If only you could sit
for a year at some editorial desk and see these poor maimed fellows
come in endless line with their pathetic, lifeless wares! Well-made
stories, so much so that they are almost exactly like all other
well-made stories, but in them here and there a still unsmothered
spark that might have been a flame. And after the procession has
filed up to you for a while it is not the properly built stories they
lay on your desk that you see, but those countless other stories that
will never be laid on any desk. It is like looking out over the
world of children who can never be born, the better children, the
dream children, who could make the world so much {194} better if only
they were here. If you could sit for a year at some editorial desk,
you would join with me in saying, "Damn such teaching methods!"
_Individuality and Naturalness First_.--You who are learning to
write--and writers are always learning if they are worthy of their
name--put this little rule at the head of all your list of rules and
let no rule that follows seem to you one-half so well worth clinging
to: EXPRESS YOUR NATURAL SELF NATURALLY.
Believe me, it is worth clinging to, even at the cost of aches and
bruises. As for all the other rules, accept only those grounded
solidly in human nature and take for your guides, not the rules, but
their foundations. If you find yourself drifting into the stilted
dialect so many feel must be assumed on entering the printed page,
tear up what you have written and say your say in your own words.
Maybe the result will be sad indeed; there are always many things to
learn. But in your learning you will find no secret of technique, no
trick of the trade, that is not second in importance to the prime
necessity of developing and expressing your own individuality. If
they hold before your eyes some story by De Maupassant, Stevenson,
Kipling, O. Henry, {195} look by all means and study what you see,
but be sure that your strongest reaction is, "Yes, these are deft
uses of tools, masterly handlings of thought, and I will be awake to
similar opportunities in my own work, _but_ the fact remains that
what I have seen is only De Maupassant using his tools, Stevenson
using his, and the others each his own. I am not De Maupassant or
Stevenson or Kipling or O. Henry or anybody else except myself. I
can't possibly ever be any of them, and if I try to be any of them I
can't be even myself. Perhaps their tools and devices are not the
ones best adapted to my case, though they may prove valuable. Now
I'll go back to _my_ work."
And if they ask you to look at many other workmen, refuse utterly.
Do your own looking. You probably know far better than they what it
is you need to look for; if you don't know where to look for it, then
ask. You'll probably be looking enough without any one's driving you
to it. And, always, when you look, carry away with you only what you
can absorb. Undigested food of this kind will kill you.
_Being "Literary."_--Don't try to be "literary" until you know what
being "literary" {196} really means. Most writers do not know. I'm
not sure that I know, but certainly I know a few things it is and a
few things it is not.
It is not being queer for the sake of queerness. It is not using
large and learned words. It is not getting as far away as possible
from the language of life. It is not thinking, feeling or talking
artificially instead of naturally. It is not the copying of others.
It is not either wallowing in strong emotions or daintily avoiding
them.
It is telling things as you see or feel them. It is using the words
that accomplish this with least lost motion, words so natural and
familiar you are _sure_ they are exact to the case. It is the
preserving, developing and expressing of _your own_ individuality.
Style? Be yourself and your style will be born of itself. Be
anything else and, instead of style, you will attain only an
acrobatic performance. There are enough acrobats already, and enough
people who are not themselves.
I should like to add, with some bitterness, that a knowledge of plain
English grammar, even for writers who consider themselves "arrived,"
is an almost necessary step toward being "literary."
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