Hints on Writing Short Stories by Charles Joseph Finger (1922)

Hints on Writing Short Stories

by Charles Joseph Finger

INTRODUCTION

In this I have not compiled a guide to rhetoric in the conventional style of the Correspondence Schools. My aim has been to convey to you a number of ideas. When you have received the book, there should remain, forever fixed in your mind, this:

Truth is the final test of merit in literature.

I.

ON CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOLS.

This, let me say, is my third attempt to write this booklet. Two drafts went into the waste basket. The truth is that I found them too stiff and formal, and in the doing of that which I wish to do, formality must be sedulously avoided, for, otherwise, we run on a rock and get nowhere. It seems to me that the best plan in telling you what I have to say will be one in which curtness and directness is observed, for very direct and brief I have always found those to have been who were instructors and not teachers. Not in long and labored discourses have I found valuable lessons, but rather in very sudden "Don'ts" and "Do's," in warnings and in checkings. Indeed, something of that would seem to be the natural way, especially if you consider how wonderfully children learn from children. Youngsters never lecture one another, yet they teach their fellows all manner of elaborate games with a few simple directions. On the other hand, not only teachers, but also parents, too often flounder in a mist of explanation and so fail to make anything clear. I know that in my own life almost everything that I have learned I seem to have acquired suddenly. In the midst of much struggle, a warning word, a caution shot from someone who knew did what tons and volumes of theoretical instruction had failed to do. There was swimming for instance. As a lad I had read books on the art, diligently going through arm and leg motions at night while balanced on a stool. I had memorized instructions and had filled my memory with facts as to swimming contests among the ancient Egyptians. Then, one day, floundering in a pool with a secret vision of a slow and painful death burdening me, an older lad shouted, "Push at the water with your feet — push hard," and lo! the trick was learned. It was much the same when I learned to ride a bicycle. I had made sudden swoops and turns, had borne down on rocks, and holes, and ruts, with strange accuracy. I had hit all that I tried to avoid. Then my brother yelled at me, ''Don't bear so heavy on the handle bars," and a great light dawned, for I saw that my misdirected energy had been my drawback. Then, too, when learning to shear sheep in South America. The sheep, the shears, the fleece, and I seemed to be dangerously mixed, and, while other men about me did their hundred and seventy ewes a day with ease, I sweated and groaned over twenty-five. But a wise old Irish shepherd who was watching me gave me a hint. As he walked away, he growled, "Keep the shears flat on the hide and take big bites." And again the curtain was lifted, so that that day I tallied my hundred and ten.

For these and other reasons I have always been suspicious of elaborate books of instructions, and also of professors, of correspondence schools, and of institutes purporting to teach this, that and the other: how to raise your salary: how to be prosperous: how to be a society success: how to acquire a mastery of the English langauge while shaving: how to develop the qualities of leadership and rule others: how to write short stories and become a successful author. And, indeed, talking with other men, I find that each holds that his own business, profession, or calling, most certainly cannot be taught by mail, nor acquired in such manner that the reader of a dozen or more mimeographed letters may hope to make a living by it. On this every man is emphatic. Nor scanning advertisements, lists of men wanted, do I see this: "graduates of correspondence schools preferred." Certainly, when I was an employer in the railroad business, I never employed a locomotive engineer on the strength of a diploma dated from Scranton, Pa. Nor have I met a banker, stone mason, professional hobo, concert pianist or a farm- hand who, good at his life's work, had clipped and mailed a coupon, received a hundred page book, and, from such humble beginnings achieved mastery of his chosen task. Further, being once idle and mischievous I made a list of names of several who offer to teach the Demostration art. These, in the course of time, I visited at "Department 1234," or at the Cicero Institute in Chicago, or wherever the office was located, but although I have reached the inner circles in giant corporations, in government houses, in banking institutions, I failed to pass the guardian stenographer and so reach the orator himself. Neither, on further investigation, could I find that Chauncey Depew, Ingersoll, Billy Sunday, Henry Ward Beecher, Herbert S. Bigelow or William Jennings Bryan ever took lessons in a correspondence school. Still pursuing my quest, I also made a list of names of those teaching the art of short story writing, whether they were hidden in the arcana of correspondence schools, taught in the marble halls of colleges or universities, or in the shacks of the Y. M. C. A., to find that those names did not appear as authors in the table of contents of well-known magazines, nor anywhere else where one might reasonably suppose that they would be eager to see their own names as practitioners of the art they professed to teach. Nor did it transpire that executives and those who have control of men, captains of industry or those who weld others to their own desires, college professors or bishops, had, before gaining their present eminence, risen up one dark morn in a dull December to make a test of their efficiency by answering for themselves a list of forty questions as propounded in the advertising section of some magazine, and, realizing their lack of Personality, had straightway enrolled themselves for a "correspondence course," in the course of time to receive a diploma and become a Gary, a Schwab, a Wanamaker, a Woodrow Wilson, a Harriman or a Lloyd George. No. No. Things do not come that way.

From all of which, you can see that I do not believe that much good can be done in the way of teaching by mail, nor even by book. Nor can you, I hold, by reading* an analysis of a short story or a novel, write one. You can no more do that than you can, after dissecting a human Corpse, construct a man. True, you may, with some advantage read the things other men have done, but it does not therefore follow that you yourself can do them, even though you have the desire and the will. For instance, I am a very poor mechanic. To handle machinery is a thing distasteful to me. I might read twenty-four books on the method of adjusting a timer on an automobile, but, when my own timer gets out of order I am dumfounded, nor will all my theoretical knowledge stand me in stead. My son, on the other hand, who has never read a book on the mechanism of an auto- mobile, actually rejoices when the car stalls. The light of joy is in his eye and he leaps from the seat and goes to work with enthusiasm, pooh-poohing such things as I tell him from my corner in the car as the result of my reading. He is contemptuous of authority and is all for independent verification.

Why then, in the face of all this, do I write this booklet? For, admittedly, I cannot teach you to write a short story although I have written dozens of them.

Here is the answer. If you have both the ability and the desire to write, I can tell you of some pitfalls to be avoided and can give you a hint or two. I can also give you the result of my own experience, and that is about all. It may result in something, and again it may not. Certainly during the past year, I have had the pleasure of seeing three young writers get their work in print as a result of same such advice as I propose to write here. But I shall not, I promise you, pad the book, nor copy out stories written by masters in the art, in the approved way of the correspondence- schools and the ''institutes." That would sadly waste both your time and mine. So, to work.

II.

THE KEY NOTE.

In the first place, there must be Sincerity. Without that nothing can be done. Sincere work will be good work, and sincere work will be original work. With sincerity, you will have honesty and simplicity, both of which are cardinal virtues in the literary man. Also, with sincerity there will be courage. You know, as well as I know, that when you meet an in- sincere man, you detect him at once. Were you ever deceived, for instance, by the rounded periods of some political rhetorician? Perhaps for a moment you may have been carried away in spite of your better sense, but, certainly, the effect was not lasting. Examining yourself, you will certainly remember that before you could persuade others, you had to be thoroughly convinced of the essential right of the thing itself. In the same fashion then, you must be persuaded of the truth of that which you wish to be accepted when writing. I do not speak of controversial matters. I write of fiction. You must have so thoroughly identified yourself with your characters that they are as living creatures to you. Then only shall they be living characters to your readers. If you have read the Pickwick Papers and have learned to know and love Samuel Pickwick, you will know exactly what I mean. In that character, the young Charles Dickens lost himself. In creating Mr. Pickwick he was entirely sincere. He watched the character grow from a somewhat simple-minded old gentleman to a lovable, jolly fellow to meet whom you would walk half round the world. Pick- wick was real to Dickens; therefore he is real to us. Observe this too; he had his faults. Mr. Pickwick would not have been considered rna good or a moral character to many of the “unco guid” of today. He often drank too much. Had there been nation wide prohibition in England in his day, he would certainly have drunk home brew with Ben Allen and Bob Sawyer exactly as he went to prison for conscience sake. He and his companions enjoyed the pleasures of the table too well for latter day tastes. He was obstinate on occasion, just as I am obstinate. Had Dickens been insincere, he might have been tempted to sponge out the bad spots in his character. But then he would have given us something that was not a man. The truth is that we want something of the sensuous and the gross in those about us. None of us want to live with angels and saints. So we reject instinctively as impossible and unpleasant, those perfect, etherealized creations some times found in stories — those returns all compounded of nobility, courage, beauty, generosity and wisdom which insincere writers try to foist upon us. They do not ring true. We detect their hollowness just as we detect the hollowness of the flamboyant boastings of the political orator.

Indeed, to a reading man, the creations of the imagination of sincere writers are much more real than the famous characters of history. At least they are so to me. I read of a Washington with all his ugly spots carefully painted out; of a Napoleon carefully deified; of a Garfield carefully haloed; and I mentally reject them as impossible. On the other hand, I become acquainted with a Captain Costigan, a Becky Sharp, a Jack Falstaff, an Uncle Tolty, a Tom Jones, a Martin Wade, a Peter Whiffle, an Ann Veronica' and they enter into my life. I know them utterly. I meet their twins in life. This woman has the green eyes of Becky. That man has his aspirations, leads a life that he knows to be a wrong way but still leads it, exactly as did Tom Jones. Or I recall a foolish fellow whose interest in life led him into all sorts of odd corners and am immediately reminded of Peter Whiffle, But I never meet a man who reminds me of Napoleon or of Washington, because there are no such men. In other words, the sane fiction writer has been sincere — the historian has been insincere. In the effort to give a mere man a heritage of honorable fame, the historian created something infamous, something inhuman.

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