WRITING A NOVEL
by Grant M. Overton
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[174] 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.
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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[175] 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.
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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[176] 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[177] 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.
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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.
[178]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[179] 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.
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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[180] 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[181] 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.
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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[182] 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[183] 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.
[184]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?...[185] 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.
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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[186] 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[187] 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.
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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[188] 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[189] 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?
The answer is that in his main narrative Mr. Hergesheimer has set before us Gerrit Ammidon, a fellow so quixotic that he marries twice out of sheer chivalry. He has drawn for us the fantastic scroll of such a man, a sea-shape not to be matched on shore. Well, then, down in the corner, he must inscribe for us another contrasting, balancing, compensating, miniatured scroll—a land-shape in the person of Roger Brevard who is so unquixotic as to offset Gerrit Ammidon completely. Gerrit Ammidon will marry twice for incredible reasons and Roger Brevard will not even marry once for the most compelling of reasons—love. The beautiful melody proclaimed by the violins is brutally parodied by the tubas.
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Is it all right thus? It is not all right thus and it never can be so long as life remains the unpatterned[190] thing we discern it to be. If life were completely patterned it would most certainly not be worth living. When we say that life is unpatterned we mean, of course, that we cannot read all its patterns (we like to assume that all patterns are there, because it comforts us to think of a fundamental Order and Symmetry).
But so long as life is largely unpatterned, or so long as we cannot discern all its patterns, life is eager, interesting, surprising and altogether distracting and lovely however bewildering and distressing, too. Different people take the unreadable differently. Some, like Thomas Hardy, take it in defiant bitterness of spirit; some, like Joseph Conrad, take it in profound faith and wonder. Hardy sees the disorder that he cannot fathom; Conrad admires the design that he can only incompletely trace. To Hardy the world is a place where—
To Conrad the world is a place where men may continually make the glorious and heartening discovery that a solidarity exists among them; that they are united by a bond as unbreakable as it is mysterious.
And to others, as regrettably to Mr. Hergesheimer writing Java Head, the world is a place[191] where it is momentarily sufficient to trace casual symmetries without thought of their relation to an ineluctable whole.
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What, then, is the novelist to do? Is it not obvious that he must not busy himself too carefully with the business of patterning the things he has to tell? For the moment he has traced everything out nicely and beautifully he may know for a surety that he has cut himself off from the larger design of Life. He has got his little corner of the Oriental rug all mapped out with the greatest exactitude. But he has lost touch with the bigger intricacy beyond his corner. It is a prayer rug. He had better kneel down and pray.
Now there are novels in which no pattern at all is traced; and these are as bad as those which minutely map a mere corner. These are meaningless and confused stories in which nobody can discern any cause or effect, any order or law, any symmetry or proportion or expressed idea. These are the novels which have been justified as a “slice of life” and which have brought into undeserved disrepute the frequently painstaking manner of their telling. The trouble is seldom primarily, as so many people think, with the material but with its presentation. You may take almost any material you like and so present it as to make it mean[192] something; and you may also take almost any material you like and so present it as to make it mean nothing to anybody. A heap of bricks is meaningless; but the same bricks are intelligible expressed as a building of whatever sort, or merely as a sidewalk with zigzags, perhaps, of a varicolor.
The point we would make—and we might as well try to drive it home without further ineffectual attempts at illustration—is that you must do some patterning with your material, whether bricks for a building or lives for a story; but if you pattern too preciously your building will be contemptible and your story without a soul. In your building you must not be so decided as to leave no play for another’s imagination, contemplating the structure. In your narrative you must not be so dogmatic about two and two adding to four as to leave no room for a wild speculation that perhaps they came to five. For it is not the certainty that two and two have always made four but the possibility that some day they may make five that makes life worth living—and guessing about on the printed page.
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Perhaps the most serious consequence of writing a novel is the revelation of yourself it inevitably entails.
[193]We are not thinking, principally, of the discovery you will make of the size of your own soul. We have in mind the laying bare of yourself to others.
Of course you do reveal yourself to yourself when you write a book to reveal others to others. It has been supposed that a man cannot say or do a thing which does not expose his nature. This is nonsense; you do not expose your nature every time you take the subway, though a trip therein may very well be an index to your manners. The fact remains that no man ever made a book or a play or a song or a poem, with any command of the technique of his work, without in some measure giving himself away. Where this is not enough of an inducement some other, such as a tin whistle with every bound copy, is offered; no small addition as it enables the reviewer to declare, hand on heart, that “this story is not to be whistled down the wind.” Some have doubted Bernard Shaw’s Irishism, which seems the queerer as nearly everything he has written has carried a shillelagh concealed between the covers. Recently Frank K. Reilly of Chicago gave away one-cent pieces to advertise a book called Penny of Top Hill Trail. He might be said, and in fact he hereby is said, thus to have coppered his risk in publishing it.... All of which is likely to be mistaken for jesting. Let us therefore jest that we may be taken with utmost seriousness.
[194]The revelation of yourself to yourself, which the mere act of writing a novel brings to pass, may naturally be either pleasant or unpleasant. Very likely it is unpleasant in a majority of instances, a condition which need not necessarily reflect upon our poor human nature. If we did not aspire so high for ourselves we should not suffer such awful disappointments on finding out where we actually get off. The only moral, if there is one, lies in our ridiculous aim. Imagine the sickening of heart with which Oscar Wilde contemplated himself after completing The Picture of Dorian Grey! And imagine the lift it must have given him to look within himself as he worked at The Ballad of Reading Gaol! The circumstances of life and even the actual conduct of a man are not necessarily here or there—or anywhere at all—in this intimate contemplation. There is one mirror before which we never pose. God made man in His own image. God made His own image and put it in every man.
It is there! Nothing in life transcends the wonder of the moment when, each for himself, we make this discovery. Then comes the struggle to remold ourselves nearer to our heart’s desire. It succeeds or it doesn’t; perhaps it succeeds only slightly; anyway we try for it. The sleeper, twisting and turning, dreaming and struggling, is the perfect likeness of ourselves in the waking hours of our whole earthly existence. Because they have[195] seen this some have thought life no better than a nightmare. Voltaire suggested that the earth and all that dwelt thereon was only the bad dream of a god on some other planet. We would point out the bright side of this possibility: It presupposes the existence somewhere of a mince pie so delicious and so powerful as to evoke the likenesses of Cæsar and Samuel Gompers, giraffes, Mr. Taft, violets, Mr. Roosevelt, Piotr Ilitch Tchaikovski, Billy Sunday, Wu-Ting Fang, Helen of Troy and Mother Jones, groundhogs, H. G. Wells; perhaps Bolshevism is the last writhe. Mince pie, unwisely eaten instead of the dietetic nectar and ambrosia, may well explain the whole confused universe. And you and I—we can create another universe, equally exciting, by eating mince pie to-night!... You see there is a bright side to everything, for the mince pie is undoubtedly of a heavenly flavor.
We were saying, when sidetracked by the necessity of explaining the universe, that the self-revelation which writing a book entails is in most cases depressing, but not by any means always so. Boswell was not much of a man judged by the standards of his own day or ours, either one, yet Boswell knew himself better than he knew Dr. Johnson by the time he had finished his life of the Doctor. It must have bucked him up immensely to know that he was at least big enough himself to measure a bigger man up and down, in and out, criss-cross[196] and sideways, setting down the complicated result without any error that the human intelligence can detect. It must have appeased the ironical soul of Henry Adams to realise that he was one of the very few men who had never fooled himself about himself, and that evidence of his phenomenal achievement in the shape of the book The Education of Henry Adams, would survive him after his death—or at least, after the difficulties of communicating with those on earth had noticeably increased (we make this wise modification lest someone match Sir Oliver Lodge’s Raymond, or Life After Death with a volume called Henry, or Re-Education After Death).
It must have sent a thrill of pleasure through the by no means insensitive frame of Joseph Conrad when he discovered, on completing Nostromo, that he had a profounder insight into the economic bases of modern social and political affairs than nine-tenths of the professional economists and sociologists—plus a knowledge of the human heart that they have never dreamed worth while. For Conrad saw clearly, and so saw simply; the “silver of the mine” of this, his greatest story, was, it is true, an incorruptible metal, but it could and did alter the corruptible nature of man—and would continue to do so through generation after generation long after his Mediterranean sailor-hero had become dust.
[197]Even in the case of the humble and unknown writer whose completed manuscript, after many tedious journeys, comes home to him at last, to be re-read regretfully but with an undying belief not so much in the work itself as in what it was meant to express and so evidently failed to—even in his case the great consolation is the attestation of a creed. Very bad men have died, as does the artist in Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, voicing with clarity and beauty the belief in which they think they have lived or ought to have lived; but a piece of work is always an actual living of some part of the creed that is in you. It may be a failure but it has, with all its faults, a gallant quality, the quality of the deed done, which men have always admired, and because of which they have invented those things we call words to embody their praise.
But what of the consequences of revealing yourself to others? Writing a novel will surely mean that you will incur them. We must speak of them briefly; and then we may get on to the thing for which you are doubtless waiting with terrible patience—the way to write the novel itself. Never fear! If you will but endure steadfastly you shall Know All.
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“Certainly, publish everything,” commented the New York Times editorially upon a proposal to[198] give out earnings, or some other detail, of private businesses. “All privacy is scandalous,” added the newspaper. In this satirical utterance lies the ultimate justification for writing a novel.
All privacy is scandalous. If you don’t believe it, read some of the prose of James Joyce. A Portrait of The Artist As a Young Man will do for a starter. Ulysses is a follow-up. H. G. Wells likes the first, while deploring so much sewerage in the open street. You see, nothing but a sincere conviction concerning the wickedness of leaving anything at all unmentioned in public could justify such narratives as Mr. Joyce’s.
In a less repulsive sense, the scandal of privacy is what underlies any novel of what we generally call the “realistic” sort. Mr. Dreiser, for instance, thinks it scandalous that we should not know and publicly proclaim the true nature of such men as Hurstwood in his Sister Carrie. Mr. Hardy thinks it scandalous that the world should not publicly acknowledge the purity of Tess Durbeyfield and therefore he gives us a book in which she is, as the subtitle says, “faithfully presented.” Gene Stratton-Porter thinks it scandalous not to tell the truth about such a boy as Freckles. The much-experienced Mr. Tarkington, stirred to his marrow by what seems almost a world conspiracy to condone the insufferable conceit of the George Amberson Minafers among us, writes The Magnificent[199] Ambersons to make us confess how we hate ’em—and how our instinctive faith in them is vindicated at last.
Every novelist who gains a public of any size or permanence deliberately, and even joyfully, faces the consequences of the revelation of himself to some thousands of his fellow-creatures. We don’t mean that he always delineates himself in the person of a character, or several characters, in his stories. He may do that, of course, but the self-exposure is generally much more merciless. The novelist can withhold from the character which, more or less, stands for himself his baser qualities. What he cannot withhold from the reader is his own mind’s limitations.
A novel is bounded by the author’s horizons. If a man can see only so far and only so deep his book will show it. If he cannot look abroad, but can perceive nothing beyond the nose on his face, that fact will be fully apparent to his co-spectators who turn the pages of his story. If he can see only certain colors those who look on with him will be aware of his defect. Above all, if he can see persons as all bad or all good, all black or all white, he will be hanged in effigy along with the puppets he has put on paper.
This is the reason why every one should write a novel. There is only one thing comparable with it as a means of self-immolation. That, of course,[200] is tenure of public office. And as there are not nearly enough public offices to serve the need of individual discipline, novelizing should be encouraged, fomented—we had almost said, made compulsory. Compulsion, however, defeats its own ends. Let us elect to public offices, as we would choose to fill scholarships, those who cannot, through some misfortune, write novels; and let us induce all the other people in the world that we can to put pen to paper—not that they may enrich the world with immortal stories, not that they may make money, become famous or come to know themselves, but solely that we may know them for what they are.
If Albert Burleson had been induced to write a novel would we have made him a Congressman and would President Wilson have made him Postmaster-General? If William, sometime of Germany, had written a novel would the Germans have acquiesced in his theory of Divine Right? Georges Clemenceau wrote novels and was chosen of the people to lead them. Hall Caine and Marie Corelli and Rider Haggard and Arnold Bennett have written novels which enable us to gauge them pretty accurately—and not one of them has yet been invited to help run the League of Nations. The reason is simple: We know them too well.
All privacy is scandalous. Thomas Dixon says: “It is positively immoral that the world should[201] run on without knowing the depths to which I can sink. I must write The Way of a Man and make the world properly contemptuous of me.” Zona Gale reflects to herself: “After all, with nothing but these few romances and these Friendship Village stories, people have no true insight into my real tastes, affinities, predilections, qualities of mind. I will write about a fruit and pickle salesman, an ineffectual sort of person who becomes, almost involuntarily, a paperhanger. That will give them the idea of me they lack.”
William Allen White, without consciously thinking anything of the kind, is dimly aware that people generally have a right to know him as a big-hearted man who makes some mistakes but whose sympathy is with the individual man and woman and whose passion is for social progress. The best way to make people generally acquainted with William Allen White is to write a novel—say, In The Heart of a Fool, which they will read.... The best way to get to know anybody is to get him to talking about somebody else. Talk about one’s self is a little too self-conscious.
And there you have it! It is exactly because such a writer as H. G. Wells is in reality pretty nearly always talking about himself that we find it so difficult to appraise him rightly on the basis of his novels. Self-consciousness is never absent from a Wells book. It is this acute self-consciousness[202] that makes so much of Henry James valueless to the great majority of readers. They cannot get past it, or behind it. The great test fails. Mr. James is dead, and the only way left to get at the truth of Mr. Wells will be to make him Chancellor of the Exchequer or, in a socialized British republic, Secretary of Un-War....
Dare to be a Daniel Carson Goodman. Write That Novel. Don’t procrastinate, don’t temporize. Do It Now, reserving all rights of translation of words into action in all countries, including the Scandinavian. Full detailed instructions as to the actual writing follow.
13
You may not have noticed it, but even so successful a novelist as Robert W. Chambers is careful to respect the three unities that Aristotle (wasn’t it?) prescribed and the Greeks took always into account. Not in a single one of his fifty novels does the popular Mr. Chambers disregard the three Greek unities. Invariably he looks out for the time, the place and the girl.
If Aristotle recommended it and Robert W. Chambers sticks to it, perhaps you, about to write your first novel, had better attend to it also.
Now, to work! About a title. Better have one, even if it’s only provisional, before you begin to[203] write. If you can, get the real, right title at the outset. Sometimes having it will help you through—not to speak of such cases as Eleanor Hallowell Abbott’s. The author of Molly Make-Believe, The Sick-a-Bed Lady and Old-Dad gets her real, right title and then the story mushrooms out of it, like a house afire. Ourselves, we are personally the same. We have three corking titles for as many novels. One is written. The other two we haven’t to worry about. They have only to live up to their titles, which may be difficult for them but will make it easy for ourselves. We have a Standard. Everything that lives up to the promise of our superlative title goes in, everything that is alien to it or unworthy of it, stays out. This, we may add parenthetically, was the original motive in instituting titles of nobility. A man was made a Baron. Very well, it was expected that he would conform his character and conduct accordingly. Things suitable to a Baron he would thenceforth be and do, things unbefitting his new, exalted station he would kindly omit.... It works better with books than with people, so cheer up. Your novel will come out more satisfactorily than you think.
Which brings us to the matter of the ending. Should it be happy or otherwise? More words have been wasted on this subject than on any other aspect of fictioneering. You must understand from the very first that you, personally, have nothing[204] whatever to say about the ending of your story. That will be decided by the people of your tale and the events among which they live. In other words, the preponderant force in determining the ending is—inevitability.
Most people misunderstand inevitability. Others merely worry about it, as if it were to-morrow’s weather. Shall we take an umbrella, they ask anxiously, lest it rain inevitably? Or will the inevitable come off hot, so that an overcoat will be a nuisance? Nobody knows, not even the weather forecaster in Washington. If there were a corresponding official whose duty it would be to forecast with equal inaccuracy the endings of novels life would go on much the same. Readers would still worry about the last page because they would know that the official prediction would be wrong at least half the time. If the Ending Forecaster prophesied: “Lovers meet happily on page 378; villain probably killed in train accident” we would go drearily forward confident that page 378 would disclose the heroine, under a lowering sky, clasped in the villain’s arms while the hero lay prone under a stalled Rolls-Royce, trying to find out why the carburetor didn’t carburete.
Inevitability is not the same as heredity. Heredity can be rigorously controlled—novelists are the real eugenists—but inevitability is like natural selection or the origin of species or mutations or O.[205] Henry: It is the unexpected that happens. Environment has little in common with inevitability. In the pages of any competent novelist the girl in the slums will sooner or later disclose her possession of the most unlikely traits. Her bravery, her innocence will become even more manifest than her beauty. The young feller from Fifth avenue, whose earliest environment included orange spoons and Etruscan pottery, will turn out to be a lowdown brute. Environment is what we want it to be, inevitability is what we are.
You think, of course, that you can pre-determine the outcome of this story you are going to write. Yes, you can! You can no more pre-determine the ending than you can pre-determine the girl your son will marry. It’s exactly like that. For you must come face to face, before you have written 50 pages of your book, with an appalling and inspiring Fact. You might as well face it here.
14
The position of the novelist engaged in writing a novel can only be indicated by a shocking exaggeration which is this: He is not much better than a medium in a trance.
Now of course such a statement calls for the most exact explanation. Nobody can give it. Such a statement calls for indisputable evidence. None exists.[206] Such a statement, unexplained and unsupported by testimony, is a gross and unscientific assumption not even worthy to be damned by being called a hypothesis. You said it. Nevertheless, the thing’s so.
We, personally, having written a novel—or maybe two—know what we are talking about. The immense and permanent curiosity of people all over the planet who read books at all fixes itself upon the question, in respect of the novelist: “How does he write?” As Mary S. Watts remarks, that is the one thing no novelist can tell you. He doesn’t know himself. But though it is the one thing the novelist can’t tell you it is not one of those things that, in the words of Artemus Ward, no feller kin find out. Any one can find out by writing a novel.
And to write one you need little beyond a few personalities firmly in mind, a typewriter and lots of white paper. An outline is superfluous and sometimes harmful. Put a sheet of paper in the machine and write the title, in capital letters. Below, write: “By Theophrastus Such,” or whatever you happen unfortunately to be called or elect, in bad taste, to call yourself. Begin.
You will have the first few pages, the opening scene, possibly the first chapter, fairly in mind; you may have mental notes on one or two things your[207] people will say. Beyond that you have only the haziest idea of what it will all be about. Write.
As you write it will come to you. Somehow. What do you care how? Let the psychologists stew over that.
They, in all probability, will figure out that the story has already 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[208] 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[209] 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[210] 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[211] 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[212] 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.
Excepted from Why Authors Go Wrong, and Other Explanations by Grant M. Overton
