FUNDAMENTALS OF
FICTION WRITING

By

ARTHUR SULLIVANT HOFFMAN

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1922
BY ARTHUR SULLIVANT HOFFMAN

Printed in the United States of America.

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH &. CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS.
BROOKLYN. N. Y.

To
JAMES H. GANNON
Whose Understanding Cooperation Has
Made the Application of These
Principles a Pleasant Task

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I  By Way of Introduction
II  A General Survey
III  Creating the Illusion
IV  Your Readers
V  Distractions
VI  Clearness
VII  Overstrain
VIII  Convincingness
IX  Holding the Reader
X  Pleasing the Reader
XI  Plot and Structure
XII  Character
XIII  Individuality vs. Technique
XIV  The Reader and His Imagination
XV  The Place of Action in Fiction
XVI  Adaptation of Style to Material
Appendix: Your Manuscripts and the Editors
Index

FUNDAMENTALS OF FICTION WRITING

CHAPTER I

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

Living in so complex a civilization, we generally fail to realize how complex have become our mental habits. We have come more and more to think upon complexities until, for the most part, the more elementary facts, processes and approaches are slighted or omitted as beneath the high development of our minds. However learned our thinking may be, its foundation must be elementary thinking, and, if elementary thinking is neglected because it seems too elementary for attention, the result is likely to be unsoundness of the whole structure because it has been erected on unsound foundation.

Add to faulty thinking habit the human tendency to accept as established what has been handed down to us by our thought predecessors, dead or contemporaneous. Progress can be made only to the extent this tendency is overcome by chance or guarded against. Guarding against it requires particularly the close scrutiny of elementals.

It is particularly unfortunate that, the specialists of course being the most complex thinkers of us all, we have allowed our habit of specialization to leave to them more and more the guidance of general thought, thus drifting further and further from elementary methods of thinking.

The more thoroughly you analyze modern thinking methods and their results, the more evident becomes the damage done.

Simplicity is the key, but, being rather proud of our complexity and advancement, we have become such strangers to simplicity that we even distrust it when we meet it. It is most pitiful of all that a mere outward show of complexity gains more respect than does a simple essential unadorned. Yet it is true. Almost automatically simplicity produces in us a reaction of contempt, a feeling that our highly developed minds have long ago passed on beyond such childish matters. We are too advanced to bother over the elementals and the result too often is much frantic "progress" along wrong paths.

In the course of my editorial work it impressed itself on me more and more that there was somewhere unsoundness in both the editorial basis of criticism and the writers' basis of creation. Being afflicted with the prevalent complex method of thought, it was only gradually that I came to suspect that the unsoundness traced back to some of the elementals all of us seemed to be taking for granted. My suspicions have grown the stronger during the years of "laboratory" work, at some points ripening into convictions, so that in this book intended to be of practical service to writers of magazine fiction they will inevitably show. They must, therefore, be labeled in advance as departures from the usual dicta laid down, so that the reader can make allowance accordingly.

While my personal history is unimportant, some of the details that may indicate, or that seem to have influenced, the theories developed have place in this book as guide-posts in valuing or discounting it.

It is, for example, only fair to make plain in advance that I am probably far less familiar with books on how to write fiction than are most beginners who may read this book, and probably know—or remember—less concerning the dicta of critics and other authorities on literature in general. On the other hand, in view of the probable reaction to some of my unacademic views, I claim the right to state that these views do not result from lack of academic training. Also a brief statement of my experience as editor and writer seems called for by way of warrant for my venturing to advance any theories at all.

I have been an editor more than twenty years, a magazine editor for nearly twenty, serving on seven widely different periodicals—general, specialized and fiction—Chautauquan, Smart Set, Watson's, Transatlantic Tales, Delineator, Romance, Adventure. At intervals during that time I have contributed fiction and articles to Everybody's, McClure's, Bookman, Country Life, Delineator, Smart Set and half a dozen others. Previous to this there were nearly three years as editor of a country weekly and two years of teaching English and literature in high school. I specialized in English at one university and added some graduate work in fiction writing at another.

As a child my home influence was decidedly literary, even to a point that might be designated "highbrow," with the natural flavoring of science rather to be expected in a house largely occupied by my grandfather's microscopes and shelves of specimens. In a word, my early training was decidedly academic, and as a "cub" I came to the magazine "game" spelling "literature" with a very large capital "L" and with more than the usual cub reverence for books and magazines and all that pertains thereto.

Like the majority of magazine editors, I found that my first task was to shove most of my academic training and point of view into the background, making of them an accessory rather than a guide, and adopting an altogether new scale of relative values. A few months accomplished the greater part of the change, but it required years to develop suspicion of that new and commonly accepted scale, to ripen the suspicion to conviction and to build up a third scale to take its place in my work.

Before entering the magazine field, I remember only one questioning of precepts and tenets. About 1900 I refused to read any more authors "for style," realizing I was against my will absorbing too many of their individualities, Stevenson's sentence-rhythm in particular imposing itself on my literary efforts to a decided degree. "Style is the man" seems to have been one of the textbook statements that sank in deepest, and it gave me courage to rebel against another of its kind.

In my college course three things stand out as strong in influence. All were encountered in work of the thesis class conducted by Professor Joseph Villiers Denney with a sound judgment and breadth of view that were bound to be stimulative and give permanent value. First, laboratory experiments upon the class itself showed us, to our great surprise, the tremendous degree of variation in individuals as to the quality and degree of their imagination-response to the printed or spoken word. I have met few writers or editors who had any conception of this variation or who had even given the matter a thought, yet it is of basic importance to both.

The second idea outstanding from my college course is the explanation of the psychological appeal of fiction given by George Henry Lewes to the effect that man finds enjoyment in fiction because by following the fortunes of the hero or identifying himself with him he can attain vicariously the perfections and successes he can not attain in real life. I have not seen it for twenty-four years and may have distorted it, but the idea as stated has been the one acted upon.

Third, there was Spencer's economy as a basis of rhetorical theory. I remember nothing whatever about it except that he included economy of the reader's attention. To what extent this phase of his idea is responsible for my own theories I do not know. Memory tells me I recalled it only after working out my own, but it is reasonable to hold it a cause though an unrealized one.

Analytics of Literature, by L. A. Sherman, made a decided impression on me during college or in the years immediately following. Undoubtedly I gained much from it, but at present I am unable to state its content in any but the most vague way and can not detect any but academic influences from it, though in this I may be doing it serious injustice. De Quincey's On the Knocking at the Gate in "Macbeth" made vivid the use of relief scenes. From some book by Brander Matthews I learned that the short story should have only one point.

Five years after college I read Tolstoy's What Is Art? Read it with interest, resentment, bewilderment and enthusiasm. It was the first real blow to my unquestioning acceptance of all the usual canons of art. The impress was tremendous, but, quite in keeping with my miserable memory, the only definite, abiding impression I can identify is the emphasis laid on simplicity, with the corollary that creative work must reach peasant appreciation if it is to be classed as art. Years later I came to attach more and more importance to simplicity, arriving at that attitude by paths leading from practical experience—laboratory work, as it were, paths that to my vague recollection seem not at all those of his approach, but I can make no exact measure of the extent to which Tolstoy may have done my thinking for me or at least influenced it. Probably the influence is far greater than I realize.

In any case, the above are the total of the outside influences. It is, of course, impossible for any one to live in contact with his fellows in a world filled with type and opinions without absorbing ideas from others, but in the sense of influences sufficiently definite to make conscious impress I can add nothing to the above list. In nearly twenty years, if I have read any book or article dealing with the philosophy of literature I do not recall the title or the occasion. Five or six years ago I read a third or half of a book that taught the writing of fiction, but laid it down because it was too difficult for me to understand and seemed not in accordance with my own ideas. I have never read any other text on fiction writing, though I have spun the pages of a number of them to gain a general idea of methods and theories, finding only the usual ones.

This lack of reading authorities was at first due to lack of time, but for years I have carefully avoided the influence of others' theories to the best of my ability so that I should not be diverted or forestalled in an effort to work out my own. Naturally, most of the accepted theories and methods are current because they are sound, but there is a minority of cases in which a dissenting view seems warranted.

My warrant for dissent is that to a very great extent the main faults (other than those due to lack of natural ability) in the fiction submitted to magazines seem directly due to faults in accepted theories and methods. These faults in theory and teaching may be roughly summarized under two heads:

(1) Assigning to readers theoretical reactions based on traditional editorial and critical precepts instead of basing editorial precepts on actual reactions of readers. In particular, lack of emphasis upon preserving the illusion.

(2) Overwhelming writers with demands of technique and academics and thereby doing all possible to ruin individuality and real ability.

For getting data on the first of these points I have been exceptionally well situated. More than any other magazine on which I have served, more than the half dozen others under the same roofs, more, so far as I can judge, than any other magazine I know, Adventure gets definite, concrete response and criticism from its readers. So far as the male sex is concerned, probably no other magazine has a more generally representative audience, ranging through all classes from the highest to the lowest brows. The great number of letters and talks resulting from this keen personal interest of its readers in the making of the magazine has been invaluable in giving its editor, for more than ten years, the actual, specific reactions of readers, as opposed to the theoretical reactions that accepted editorial theories assign to them.

The overemphasis on technique and academics I consider the most harmful factor at work in the field of American fiction, from both the literary and the magazine point of view. I can claim no special equipment for speaking on this point other than a decidedly academic training followed by over twenty years of practical laboratory work, and arrival at conclusions by abandoning all accepted precepts and going back to the simple elementals.

The object of this book is not exploitation of theories but practical service to writers and would-be writers. It is aimed directly at the faults that are the chief causes of rejection of manuscripts by magazines and book houses. General theories are used chiefly to give foundation and perspective, so that a writer, knowing the general ends in view, may be enabled to solve intelligently and consistently even those problems in his work that can not be covered specifically by any "book of rules." It is a crying need that writers should learn to work less by rule of thumb and more from a general understanding of what fiction really is and of what determines its success. For twenty years I have watched the flow of manuscripts—more tens of thousands than I like to remember—and am year by year more convinced that more embryo writers of appreciable ability are ruined by an overdose of technique at the hands of their literary doctors or by slavish copying of the work of some "successful" writer than by any three other causes you please to name.

Technique, naturally, should be a means, not an end. In most of the teaching of the day so much emphasis is placed on it and such large quantities of it are shoved down the beginner's throat, before he has developed himself sufficiently to digest it instead of merely chew it, that in a majority of cases he loses himself and his talents in an empty struggle with formulas and formalities. He may learn to chew very well indeed, but the odds are that he isn't chewing anything and that he has starved himself to death. As a matter of fact, he has ceased to be himself.

Perhaps the reason for this overemphasis on technique is that those responsible for the books, classes and correspondence courses designed to help the budding fiction writers are, with very few exceptions, chiefly theorists with no great background of either actual editorial experience or an even fairly considerable accomplishment in writing fiction. Those who have both, even a moderate degree of both, are so very few that in number they constitute only a fraction of a per cent. of those at work in this field. The teachers of fiction, a good many of them, give extremely valuable service, but the majority of them either approached their work from abstract and academic beginnings or, having sold fiction themselves, built too much from their own experiences, knowing too little of the many different paths by which others must progress. Both groups seem to have been too much influenced by technique and academics in general.

The editors, too, for the same and other reasons, have contributed toward making technique too great a factor. It is physically impossible to give individual criticism to every manuscript that comes in, or, when given at all, to give it fully in all cases. Almost never are the reasons for an acceptance given and only in a general way at best. As a result, writers in their early formative stages are left in the dark unless they turn to the other teachers. Much of the criticism given by editors, too, is academic and centers on technique—because that kind of criticism is easier for us to give. Still again, we often mislead a writer by failing to distinguish carefully between the needs and likes of the particular magazine as opposed to those of magazines in general.

Whatever the reasons for the exaggerated part technique plays in American fiction, it is the chief hope of this little book that it may to some degree counteract this curse of formula and encourage beginners to more direct effort for individuality and a more natural expression of it.

Perhaps this is not a book at all, but merely a collection of talks. Certainly there is little attempt at carefully unified structure. Its writing must be done at odd moments, for I am still in editorial harness. Also it will be done only in such moments and manner as make the writing of it a pleasure rather than a task.

I use the pronoun "I" without stint or apology, for that is the natural method to follow when one person speaks to another and, while I object strenuously to an author's obtrusion of himself into his fiction, the first personal pronoun in books of exposition is often of distinct advantage in precision as well as in ease and clearness.

Finally, this book is not meant for geniuses. They should by all means march their own paths, finding or making their own methods, each to his taste. Though this is a book of suggestions, not of rules, the genius does not need it. But wait,—alas! half my possible readers are gone from me at the ending of that last sentence, self-dismissed as indubitable geniuses. I'd forgotten that the writing world is composed chiefly of geniuses, most of them indubitable and—self-dismissed.

But you—I think you'd better read on until you find stronger reason to turn away, for, to be friendly frank, the odds are so very heavily against your being a genius. As for me, I don't even know more than three or four geniuses at the very most and you can be entirely at your ease in my quite ordinary society.

CHAPTER II

A GENERAL SURVEY

Let us take a general survey of what is to follow, beginning with fundamentals.

The Art Process.—The art process of fiction involves three elements—the Material, the Artist and the Reader. So far as my experience and observation go, the Reader is not regarded as a part of the art process and in both theory and practise fails to get anything approaching due consideration. For that reason his part in the art process will receive full treatment in this book, while Material and Artist, being already amply covered in thousands of texts, will receive more cursory treatment. The reader can, nevertheless, be made a complete basis of both rhetorical and fictional theory. Almost any important element can, for that matter; it is merely a matter of choosing the point from which you shall look at the circle. The reader's having been hitherto slighted in this respect is alone sufficient reason to choose him if for no other purpose than that of viewing the art process from a new angle and thereby getting a more balanced concept of it. Personally, I believe the reader's angle the correct one, being the final step, the test of the other two.

Philosophers will at once quarrel with both my theory and my terminology. If they will confine their quarreling to the field of philosophy, they may settle the issue as they please. Must a genius think only, or at all, of his readers when he sits down to write? Probably not, but this book is not written for geniuses, who need no rules or guidance or at least think they do not. Certainly either genius or plain human will fall into ruin if he thinks overmuch on rules and regulations of any kind when he should be giving himself up to creating. But I've noticed that even geniuses generally revise their work after its first launching in ink. Why?

Must art be seen or heard by others before it can be art? Naturally I realize that the Venus de Milo was a work of art before it was dug up, but what of that? It was only a potential work of art from any practical point of view and of no good to any one until brought where material and the artist's work on the material could continue and complete the process by creating in human beings the thoughts and emotions they strove to express. In that word "express," by the way, lies the whole divergence of theory. Theories have made it practically subjective only, ignoring its objective side—the recipient. Can you, outside the most abstract abstractions of philosophy, express anything without expressing it to some one? If you think you can, how are you going to be sure that you have expressed it? Who is to be the judge on this point? You, the artist, alone? Perhaps the philosophers can show me my position is untenable, but they can't show me one single fiction editor in all the world who wouldn't throw up his hands in despair at the very idea of letting every "artist" be the judge as to whether he had expressed what he thought he had expressed. Even non-editors, who haven't been tortured by the mistaken idea of "artists" that they have succeeded in expression, would be more than slow to admit the artists themselves as competent judges or to abide by the artists' judgments.

Consigning abstraction to the background, you are a fool if you put into material what no one else can get out of it. And I'd say that you were not a genius, the two terms not being mutually exclusive, for a genius—at least all whom the world has been able to discover—does not fail to convey his message to at least a few.

To how many people and to what grades of intelligence must the artist convey his message in order to prove himself an artist? I do not know. Neither, I think, does anybody else. There seems almost equal disagreement as to the character and quality of the message to be conveyed. But I can see no doubt that some message must be conveyed to somebody and it would seem that the greater and better the message and the more the recipients, the more successful is the work of art.

On the practical basis that the would-be fictionist wishes to sell his fiction to the magazine or book houses, it follows naturally that as a first step his success will be measured by the number of people to whom he is able to convey his message, the thought and feeling he desires to express. After reaching them, it of course becomes a question of the quality of his message, but that quality can be known only by those readers reached by it. It becomes a question, also, of the degree to which he reaches them.

But first, and most of all, he must reach them.

Clearness.—It follows that the prime essential is clearness. If they are to get his message at all, they must be able to understand what he says. If they are to get it fully, he must express exactly what he means and do so in such manner that they will understand it exactly as he means it. This may seem too elementary for consideration. It isn't. The theory is readily admitted but not sufficiently practised. The guiltiest are often the most unconscious of their guilt, for it is a common serious failing of writers to believe that because they have made things plain to themselves they have made them plain to others.

Clearness is not merely a question of unambiguous sentences, though the majority of writers do not successfully mount even that simple hurdle. Clearness includes supplying all necessary details, suppressing the unnecessary ones, giving to each the proportionate emphasis you wish the reader to give to it and seeing to it that his response is exact, and so shaping your presentation of the story that the reader must follow the exact path you have mapped out for him.

Other Essentials.—A valuable accessory in attaining clearness is simplicity. But most writers abhor simplicity, apparently because being simple seems to them to ruin their chance of being "literary."

Clearness, simplicity, force, but the last two of this old triology of the rhetorics are really included under clearness in its full meaning. So, too, perhaps, are unity and structure. In any case, all are necessary in getting the writer's message to his readers.

Shall I sound hopelessly elementary and banal when I say that, to register his message in full force, the author must enlist his reader's sympathies? Yet the majority of those who attempt fiction either give this necessity no thought or are unbelievably crude and stupid, not only missing chance after chance to secure this sympathy, but continually and needlessly alienating it. I do not use "sympathy" in its sugary sense, but shall attempt no exact definition in this chapter of preliminary survey.

As essentials for the securing of the reader's sympathies may be included unity and structure—in some of their phases more properly included here than under clearness.

Also, he must economize his reader—carefully regulate demands on attention, thought and feelings according to a human being's normal ability to respond as well as according to the varying needs of different parts of the tale.

The Illusion.—Lastly, to convey his message fully, he must impose and preserve the illusion of his story. In this are really included all the necessities named, even clearness. And, I think, all necessities that can be named. This, it may be said, is fiction—the imposing and preserving of an illusion. I make it the basis of this book because it offers what seems at present the angle of approach most needed in teaching the successful writing of stories, in correcting the faults most common and most fatal, and in providing writers with a consistent and comprehensive theory that they can apply to their needs and problems as these arise.

Itself a return to the solid foundation of underlying elementals, it has the very practical merit of compelling writers to make the elementals the constant test of their work. Necessarily involving a constant and careful consideration of the reader, it seems the best remedy for the greatest weakness in fiction writing—the tendency to limit the art process to the second of its three steps, Material, Artist and Reader. If the third step can be helped to its due share of attention, the first step can wait its turn, at least so far as the successful writing of magazine and ordinary book fiction is concerned.

Do I then mean that the prime object of fiction is the imposing of an illusion? That here lies the test of fiction? That no fiction is written or read or valued except for its success in creating an illusion? The imposing of an illusion is the object and test of fiction as fiction. Fiction serves many purposes. It may teach something, show something, what you please. But for these things it is only a vehicle, and the test of it as a vehicle lies in its success at imposing an illusion.

As to whether my theory of fiction is "new" and "revolutionary" I can offer only that it was new to my experience and revolutionary only in that, in the actual editorial work of helping writers develop their abilities for fiction, it has seemed to effect results that no other theory was able to effect. I might add, also, that the fiction department of a Coast University, having come across some of my correspondence with contributors, wrote me that the fully developed principle of preserving the illusion had not, to their knowledge, been elsewhere advanced, that they had adopted it as a regular part of their course, and that it had satisfactorily stood the test of several years. On the other hand I have learned, even since the actual writing of this book was begun, that for several years Doctor Dorothy Scarborough has taught this principle to her classes in short-story writing in Columbia University.

As to the newness of dividing the art process into the three steps of Material, Artist, Reader, I can not say. So far as I know, it is my own idea, the joining together of two lines of thought on which I had been working. On the other hand, I should be amazed if others had not previously advanced the same theory.

Literature vs. Magazine Fiction.—What distinction do I make between literature and magazine fiction? In fundamentals, none. Only a small percentage of magazine fiction is literature in the distinctive sense of that term. That so little of it is literature is partly due to the arbitrary and entirely non-literary restrictions imposed by the magazines with their various aims as to types of audience. Some will not accept unhappy endings, some bar sex questions, some use no stories of foreign lands, some demand action, some permit no mention of drink or tobacco, some will have no "problems," some require a breezy, sophisticated style, some must have this, some abhor that. Most writers must sell what they write or stop writing through lack of means or lack of tenacity. Naturally they generally strive to make their goods acceptable to the market, writing with a careful eye on the likes and dislikes of the magazines and all the more harassed and limited because what is one magazine's meat is another magazine's poison.

Some, like Sinclair Lewis, Talbot Mundy and others, fully realizing the situation and keeping their heads, write what they know will sell, write it as well as they can under the limitations, and keep on writing it until they have attained sufficient standing and financial foundation—and sufficient mastery—to write what they wish and in the way they wish. But the vast majority become permanent slaves in the galley where they must serve their apprenticeship, perhaps growing very skilful in handling one oar among the many oars but hopelessly unable to paddle their own canoe.

If money success is essential or preferred, by all means draw a sharp distinction between literature and magazine fiction and, unless you are quite sure your talents are considerable, confine yourself to the latter. On the other hand, granted sufficient ability, aiming at the former may very well carry you further in every way. If what you wish is, regardless of worldly success, to write the best that in you lies, forget everything else, including the restrictions of the magazines.

Another cause of the scarcity of literature in magazine fiction is that writers, editors and readers become obsessed with fads, generally of a superficial nature, as to style, or treatment, or types of material. Underneath this is a more fundamental cause—the habit of imitation. O. Henry wrote and died and even yet the mails are full of manuscripts from writers who are trying to write O. Henry stories—and can't, for the simple and everlasting reason that no one of them is O. Henry. Every John Smith of them would do better work if he wrote John Smith stories, but lots of them are still selling O. Henry stories because editors too are still under the O. Henry spell or know that many of their readers are. Kipling, Doyle, James and other famous authors have each their army of imitators, many a sheep-like soldier serving in several armies at once.

Nor do the imitators always aim so nigh. Any writer popular in the magazines, no matter how ephemeral his vogue, serves them almost equally well. The lowest depths are reached when the model is no one in particular but merely a composite of all that is most hack and usual on the printed page.

Not long ago there arose again the fad of beginning a story with a paragraph of philosophy. It has spread like a disease and, I think, is one. There were—or are—the era of glittering sophistication in style, the Dolly Dialogues and Prisoner of Zenda eras, doublet and hose, business, sex, Stevensonian rhythm, and so on.

But all these fads and other limitations serve only to lower the proportion of literature in magazine fiction. Neither they nor anything else creates any fundamental difference between the two. Both are fiction, both subject to the laws of fiction. And even that magazine fiction beyond the pale of literature is aimed, somehow, at the reader and is to be judged on that basis.

CHAPTER III

CREATING THE ILLUSION

By creating the illusion I mean making the reader forget the world he really lives in and carrying him into the world of the story, either identifying himself with one of the characters or looking on and listening entirely absorbed in what he sees and hears. The illusion is wholly successful, fully effective, only if the reader is made to live altogether in the story world. He must forget that he is a reader, that he holds a book or magazine in his hands, that the story is merely a story instead of actual happening. He must forget that there is such a thing as an author; he must forget the method and manner of telling in the telling itself. He must live the story.

The Illusion and Its Hold.—Naturally perfection of illusion is not generally attained, and naturally what holds some readers in thrall may not hold others. The more sophisticated the reader, the more difficult, other things being equal, to make him lose himself utterly in the story. Probably, too, the more fiction one has read, the less readily is one swept away into the story's spell. The same obstructions hold in any art, or in eating or any other pleasure. The penalty of sophistication in anything is further removal from the direct, elemental appeal. The penalty of satiety and overuse is a dulling of response. But these facts do not alter the matter of what the appeal is.

But do not the sophisticated get more out of fiction—out of the "highbrow" fiction they tend toward—than do the unsophisticated out of the same fiction? Get more what? More of the finer shadings undoubtedly, but less of the elemental appeal. And is it really fiction they are reading or something else mixed with fiction, and is it from fiction or other things they draw pleasure or edification? Their attitude is at least partly that of a critic rather than a recipient; their interest in "What is happening" is at least partly distracted to "how it is written." From fiction itself, from fiction as fiction, the unsophisticated, granting them understanding of the words they read, in most cases get a greater intensity of appeal than do the others. Understand, I am speaking not of general sophistication but of sophistication in fiction.

Fiction a Vehicle.—As you run over in your mind various writers of acknowledged rank you may feel that, in face of that rank, illusion is an unsound basis of test and comparison. The stumbling-block is that much of what we call fiction is not pure fiction but a hybrid, a cross, a half-breed or even a quadroon—fiction plus an essay, treatise, study, sermon, analysis, philosophy, satire, propaganda, a performance in technique, an exhibition of style, what you will. It is often the other element or elements, or the combination of elements, that appeals and that gives rank and value. There is no reason why writings should not be read and written for the sake of these other elements or of the combinations, but such writings are not pure fiction.

In such cases fiction is used not for itself alone but as a vehicle for something else. The wagon and its load may be more pleasing and valuable than the wagon alone, but only the wagon is fiction and therefore it is with the wagon alone that we are now concerned. No matter how good the load may be, you can not carry it unless you can build and drive a good wagon. Probably the majority of writers will profit most by giving their whole attention to the wagon, partly because they haven't a sufficiently valuable load to put in it and partly because they need their undivided effort to make the wagon fit to carry anything. Certainly it is sound for ninety-odd per cent. of fiction writers to master their vehicle before they attempt hauling messages and information in it.

This book deals with straight fiction only. Straight fiction may of course include analysis, philosophy, technique, information and all the other things for which it is so often made the vehicle, but if it is to remain straight fiction, these must be really integral and necessary parts of it—analysis of or by the characters themselves, the information inherent in the material, the technique necessary for presentation, the philosophy of a character, locality or nation. Having sufficiently mastered straight fiction, a writer is infinitely more likely to be successful in registering on his readers whatever it is he may wish to convey through fiction as a vehicle. His message may be so interesting or important that people will seize upon it eagerly, no matter how crude or weak the fiction-vehicle may be, but it would reach them all the more strongly if the vehicle were a competent carrier.

Illusion the Essence of Fiction.—The very essence of straight fiction is the creation and maintenance of an illusion. That this truth has been so largely lost sight of is due largely to the frequent mixture of fiction with other things, so that the mixture, instead of fiction itself, has tended to become the model and standard. If American writers are to make more rapid progress toward real success, they would do well to segregate fiction and study it for itself alone.

Illusion Easily Shattered.—Successful illusion depends on an infinite variety of things, is as sensitive to breakage as is a bubble and, once broken, though it can be again created, its strength is irremediably impaired. A writer of any merit can impose his illusion, yet often he does so apparently through instinct only, without evidence of carefully considered knowledge and intent. Certainly it is maddeningly common to see him again and again destroy his illusion, if only temporarily, with some "little" flaw that would almost unconsciously be avoided if he had clear conception of the fundamental importance of perfect and uninterrupted illusion.

The importance of maintenance of illusion can not be too much stressed. As a reader can you keep yourself within the spell of a story you are reading if you are subject to constant physical interruptions—conversation directed at you, people coming in and going out, loud and sudden noises? No more can a reader keep himself within the spell of a story if he is subject to constant interruptions from within the story itself. How can a story maintain its spell over you if you are again and again reminded by its text that it is, after all, only a story, somebody's words typed on the pages of a magazine you bought at the corner stand?

Costliness of Breaking the Illusion.—Each such interruption or reminder does its share in wrecking the illusion, each compels the story to begin over again in the business of making you forget your world in its world, each leaves the remainder of the illusion the weaker. Even a single one in a story works very appreciable damage to the illusion as a whole, lessens the net result of the story's impact upon readers. Instead of the story's registering one hundred per cent. of its value, it is, as a result of a single break in its illusion, likely to register, not ninety-eight or ninety-five per cent., but eighty-five or seventy or sixty per cent. There can, of course, be no exact measure of the loss in the story's effectiveness, of the amount of failure in the third step of the art process, but very surely this loss is almost universally underestimated or altogether ignored.

Whatever the value of your story as fiction, you can not afford to have its one hundred per cent. reduced even five per cent. in its register upon your reader, and the instant you remind him that he is still merely himself in his same old world—or, even worse, make him momentarily a critic instead of a reader—you seriously damage the illusion and lessen your story's effect. The break may occupy only a fraction of a second's time, the reader, after a few paragraphs may forget all about the break, may even be wholly unconscious at the time of its effect upon him, but the harm has been done nevertheless. It can be no comfort to the writer that the reader doesn't know why the story failed to register its full strength; the important point is that it did fail.

Some breaks in the illusion accomplish even more harm than letting the reader escape from the story's spell, since it is always so easily possible to lose a reader's sympathies or, worse, let him fall into a critical attitude, or, worst of all, cause him irritation or arouse his hostility. If, in reaching the reader, a story loses part of its value by merely letting him get from under its spell, the loss is still greater if it loses his sympathies, for even when he is again brought under its spell he can not possibly be so wholly given over to it as he was before. If you have made of him a critic—well, how much sympathy has a critic? If you have irritated him, naturally your chances of pleasing him are sadly diminished, since you must overcome a heavy handicap before you can even begin to do so. And if you have made him your enemy, you may as well bid farewell to any chance of your story's success. No matter how good the first two steps of that story's art process—Material, Writer—if the third step—Reader—can not be taken, then nothing has been completed except an unrealized potentiality.

Need of Emphasizing the Illusion.—And yet, when it comes to the actual writing of fiction these practical, common-sense, vital facts are unrecognized or forgotten to an almost unbelievable degree. Day after day the magazine offices are rejecting manuscripts that would have been accepted but for the failure of illusion. Generally the editor calls it "unconvincingness." Year after year class-room and text-book go on teaching plot, style, characterization that go for naught if they are unable to register upon the reader. Year after year writers, oppressed with rules and abstractions, laboriously build pieces of machinery and expect readers to take these obvious, clanking collections of bolts, girders, wheels and cogs for something that is alive. Why not? They've been taught to consider only the making of a perfect machine according to formula. They find the magazines heavily laden with machines and are the more convinced that machinery is the ultimate attainment. Little teaching do they get that helps them put the breath of life into their stories or gives them the habit of seeing also from the reader's point of view! They "try it on their friends"—God save the mark!—their friends respond or pretend to and the problem of the reader, if it arose at all, is satisfactorily settled for all time.

But mustn't they be taught plot, etc.? Of course. But plot, etc., are merely tools. A man may be passing skilful in the handling of chisel and mallet yet fail dismally as a sculptor. Plot, etc., are necessary, but they must be taught, not as abstractions, but as reasoned and reasonable outgrowths of something more vital than they.

Individuality Crushed by Rules.—Some writers escape from the net or are too big to be caught in it. These are in a painful minority. The tragedy is in the host of those who had sufficient talent and individuality for a moderate success but never attain it because their talent is diverted to formulas and their individuality crushed by academics.

Those who escape do so generally through either disgust or despair. They sweep the rules away or turn their backs upon them and—go ahead on their own. One advantage gained thereby is instant, inevitable, automatic, for they have made an all-important step forward—being no longer ridden and haunted by formulas and rules, the writer at last has a chance to live the illusion of his own story and therefore a far better chance of making the reader live it.

The following is part of a letter from a writer who appears in The Saturday Evening Post, McClure's and other magazines of that grade. Years ago he used to send me well-made but colorless and formal stories. During some of the years between he had done no writing. Then he sent me one of the new kind. Amazed at the remarkable improvement in his work, I asked him what had happened. In his reply the omitted name is that of a magazine:

In those days I was rigidly following the rules of what I call the —— school of the American short story.

—— stories and the stories of the school which it dominated, were all like Fords. They were of limited horsepower, neat, trim and shiny, taking up very little road space, structurally correct and all following the blueprint without the slightest deviation. There weren't any big powerful Cadillacs zipping along, or any dirty, greasy trucks hauling huge burdens and disturbing and upsetting the normal run of things. It was an endless highway just jammed with Fords.

The —— story, from a standpoint of construction, was astonishingly well done. It had a beginning, a middle and an end, but few intestines anywhere along the route. The workmanship was wonderful. It was astonishing how many people there were who could write such beautiful English. There was one punch, one climax, which was very carefully led up to, and that was all.

Well, I tried to follow the rules as apparently laid down. I agonized over each word and sentence to get 'em just exactly right. I have sat at my typewriter for an hour to get just the few syllables that their standards seemed to demand.

The Hades of it was that the reader was being cheated all the time. He got a lot of very fine writing, but not much story. It was like sitting down to a dinner where the appointments were perfect, the water clear and ice-cold, the napery thick, the glassware thin, flowers on the table, an orchestra, perfect service, and not enough food for a canary-bird. In other words, a race of bird-shot stylists was being propagated who could write beautifully about an ant-hill but hadn't the equipment to do anything for a mountain.

I trailed along because I didn't know any better and because I hadn't been waked up and shaken down. I had lived, but I had not assimilated and correlated my experiences.

Now his present method, and if your nose is inclined to turn up at his idea of style, before you let it, make very sure that he hasn't taken the one sure road to the only kind of style worth any one's having. And note carefully what he says about the outside of the motor-car:

I try to give the reader a lot for his money. I don't try to do any fine writing. Only one of a million of us can be a polished stylist. I'm not that one, but I think I can evolve a story and tell it. So there is no more agonizing about the style. I try not to make the outside of the motor-car which bears my people all gold and shiny and flower-decked so that the countryside will look at the car, and not at those it contains. I just try to make it a good, suitable, unobtrusive vehicle which will start and get to the journey's end without any tire trouble or backfires. I try to imagine real people—very often they are friends and acquaintances whose mental reactions I have noted under circumstances similar to those described in the yarn. And I try to visualize every important scene before I set it down. That is, I shut my eyes and see the people as though I were looking at a scene from a play.

And it's just a joy, under those conditions, to write. To go to my machine with the keenest anticipation. It is the finest sort of an adventure to translate a good story and send it on its way. I write much more easily and I think less artificially than in those days of deadly correctness—and dullness.

There are thousands of other cases—proved, not yet proved or never to be proved—of writers whose individuality has been crushed out or whose success has been prevented or delayed by the present academic and unhuman methods of teaching the writing of fiction, by forgetting the illusion and the reader for the sake of the means of securing them. Here is an example so extreme that it must in fairness to other teachers of fiction be labeled as the last word in formula. It is, nevertheless, only the usual method fully and relentlessly developed. It is taken word for word from the teacher's printed statement of his "mathematical rule" for plot:

If the thread A, or viewpoint character, figures with the thread B in an opening incident of numerical order "n" there must follow rapidly after the opening of the story an incident n-plus-1 involving threads A and C, an incident n-plus-2 involving threads A and D, an incident n-plus-3 involving threads A and E, and so on, up to perhaps at least n-plus-4 or n-plus-5; and furthermore, n must produce n-plus-1, n-plus-2 must be the result of n-plus-1, n-plus-3 must be the result of n-plus-2, and so on.

That formula is, I dare say, sound and, if sound, undoubtedly useful. The teacher sells his own stories regularly to magazines and, as he is an apparently successful teacher, probably numerous pupils of his are doing the same. (It is stated that his output for the last five years was about one million words, with sales of about ninety-six per cent.) Yet I think you will agree that his formula leaves something to be desired.

If I have talked overlong of Reader and Illusion in their general aspect it is because I have found that, while some writers grasp the idea at once, a minority seem incapable of seeing any possibility of difference between what a writer intends the reader to get and what the reader really does get, incapable of believing that they have not expressed in full and with perfect exactness all that they saw and know and felt when writing, and incapable of conceiving any reader who would not be spell-bound by their stories and in full sympathy with every shading and inflection whether real, imagined or flatly reversed in expression.

The interrupters and destroyers of illusion are almost infinite in variety and number. The means of avoiding them, indeed, constitute a complete set of working rules for the writing of fiction—better still, a basis from which a writer can draw his own rules to meet all occasions as they arise. They may be very roughly divided into classes, the small, cruder interruptions that are comparatively detached and temporary and the more fundamental, organic and permanent ones. Most of the latter being treated, though from a different point of view, by the usual textbook, the smaller ones are in greater need of consideration and will be taken up first.

It is understood, however, that definite classification is not attempted and that the division into sub-groups is for convenience only. An item in one group may belong equally in several others and will often be treated under more than one.

CHAPTER IV

YOUR READERS

Readers of course vary in susceptibility to the illusion of fiction—vary in concentration, reading method, background of culture and of experience in life, familiarity with the ways and habits of fiction, critical attitude, imagination, particularly strength and quality of imaginative imagery, and in everything else that makes up mentality and individuality. Must the writer satisfy and hold all these from one extreme to the other? Yes, if he is to do perfect fiction. Possibly perfect fiction exists, but fortunately readers can be more or less divided into classes or types, each class capable of being very roughly characterized as a unit. The more classes reached and satisfied by a story, the better the story.

Be Clear as to Your Audience.—The fiction author can follow one of three courses:

(1) He can "just write," disregarding the question of who his readers may be and trusting that his style and methods may happen to be such as will win him an audience. This is an admirable method provided it chances to succeed. If it doesn't, he will have to abandon it for one of the others.

(2) Choose a particular class for his audience and aim directly at them. Naturally he will have to study his audience very carefully and know them rather thoroughly if he is to succeed. Limiting his audience, he limits the scope and therefore the degree of his success; a story satisfying the highest class can not be so good as if it satisfied both the highest and the next highest class or several other classes. It is entirely possible to do both, as Shakespeare and others have proved.

(3) Aim to reach as many classes as possible. Here, too, he must study and know his audience. Obviously it is a higher aim than the second, demanding more of the author. Having a larger audience to draw on, it is likely to attain greater success as measured by number of readers, though it is always a nice problem to decide in a given case whether more readers can be secured by playing for your share of the majority, against all competitors, or by concentrating on a minority, against fewer competitors.

Considering carefully these three courses, it is necessary first to know your audience and keep them very definitely in mind, unless you are willing to write wholly from the subjective point of view and go it blind as to your audience, taking the extremely long chance that your substance and style may happen to satisfy a sufficient number of readers. It generally doesn't. Second, it is advisable to reach as many classes of readers as possible. Your task, then, is to know and to consider constantly as many classes of readers as you can. And knowing them means much more than having a general knowledge of their tastes.

Fundamental Reactions Universal.—Some will straightway object, "But I prefer to write for only the highest class of readers." It is their right to do so, and their choice may be a wise one. But I maintain two points. First, it is not the highest aim. Second, the writer who prefers this aim is probably most likely of all to fail to know his audience. The mistake to which he is peculiarly liable is that of forgetting that the highest class is not a thing apart but merely all the other classes plus something more. His tendency is to believe that they have passed on beyond all the tastes and reactions of the other classes far more than they really have. Most of all, he is likely to credit them with having risen above the cruder, more fundamental tastes and reactions of the other classes. They haven't. They have merely piled upon the fundamental reactions a larger collection of refined—and often artificial—reactions than have the others. The fundamental reactions may become somewhat blurred and aborted, are certainly less consciously active and generally less active in fact, but they are still there and still operative and sometimes in full strength. That is as true as any general rule that can be laid down concerning the human mind and too much emphasis can not be placed on it.

The Target.—To reach any audience perfectly you must reach them at all points, satisfying all demands, overcoming all their inherent obstacles, allowing for the varying equipment ranging from the lowest to the highest among them—equipment of background, imagination, concentration, general intelligence and so on. And on each point you must reach those most gifted in it, most difficult to satisfy in that respect. It is not enough to satisfy those with little cultural background; your story must stand the test of those who have the most. It must reach not only those who set particular store by the delicate shadings, but those who demand a definite story interest. On any point you must aim to reach the individuals who are most difficult to reach on that point. In no other way can you hope to reach all.

It is not easy to do. In fact, it isn't done. But it must be the target aimed at. It is not easy to reach both the person who reads word for word, extracting the full flavor of each, and also the person who skips sentences, paragraphs and pages in mad pursuit of "what happens"; nor him who at a word or two from you reconstructs a whole scene in his mind's eye, and him whose imagination can vision for him only what you describe in detail. Yet, if you are to attain the degree of success possible to you, you must aim to satisfy in each such dilemma the extreme that for you is most difficult.

Study Human Beings.—First, last and all the time, success means study of the reader. That means study of human beings, not merely of opinions of them or of effects secured or apparently secured on them by other writers. The opinions may be mistaken; the effects may be there, but you and the other writers may fail to assign to them the proper causes. Strangely enough, the causes most often overlooked are the elemental tastes and reactions common to all normal humans. It is more "literary," and more convenient, to study lists of "best sellers," to read critical reviews and academic essays, to be given rules and standards by some one else—who got them from reviews, essays and "best sellers." But it is human beings who are your readers. Get your data at first hand.

CHAPTER V

DISTRACTIONS

To hold a reader in the illusion of a story it is of course necessary to hold his attention, not merely in a general way, but entirely and without break, interruption or hindrance. He must live wholly and every instant in the story world—must never be recalled for even the fraction of a second to the real world he lives in.

In writing any story there are a thousand chances of breaking the illusion by some little touch. Most of these are almost automatically avoided even by writers of small ability. Otherwise there would be no fiction. The point is that what are usually a very small minority are not avoided by most writers. The result is that editors are likely to reject the story because it does not "hold the interest," is not "convincing" or "lacks punch." Their finding is probably just, though they may not have analyzed for causes, and the writer is not enlightened or even convinced of the finding.

Disproportionate Damage from Distractions.—Failing to avoid even an extreme minority of the chances for breaking the illusion is enough to injure the story very seriously. You can't afford to let your reader escape from the story's spell, slip back into the world he really lives in, even momentarily. For you have to waste at least a little of the story's potential force in getting him back again, which means that you can never get him back quite so fully as you had him before. You may even not get him back at all. You can't afford to have him become even momentarily a critic, for you must waste at least a little of the story's potential appeal in order to change him back from the critical attitude to sympathy and absorption. You can't afford to let his attention wander off to side-issues, for the story has to stop working at being a story in order to get him back on the main line and it needs every atom of its strength for the main job.

We recently published one of the best stories Adventure ever printed, a combination of simple narrative appeal and of literary excellence of the first water. It is bringing us many letters of appreciation. To-day I read a long letter from one reader who had found in that story nothing, either good or bad, except that there was an indirect inconsistency as to one character's exact age. That was what you might call the net result of that story on a reader. All the strength and merit of an otherwise splendid story completely wrecked for a reader by that one trifling point! Undoubtedly others detected the same inconsistency but suffered less acutely or did not register their "kick." But in each case the appeal of the story lost strength out of all proportion to the size of the detail involved.

It is a typical, not an exceptional, case, except for the unusual merit of the story ruined. Thousands of letters like that come in from readers, often many on the same tiny slip or discrepancy. To those readers the story in question left as its chief impress upon them a violence—at one tiny point—to their knowledge of fact or sense of consistency. In each case how many other such readers are there who do not write us?

Other thousands of readers protest over such slips, such distractions from the illusion, but are not so completely swamped by them that they fail to consider the merits of the story as a whole. But, even with them, how big looms the tiny flaw in proportion to the whole! In each case how many other such readers are there who do not write in?

How to Use Your Friends.—No point that may distract a reader can be so small that it is not serious. You can not measure the harm done; in one case there may be no harm, in another a little, in another a great deal. But if writers who have their friends "criticize" their stories would ask these friends to give less attention to "literary" points and take careful note of every little thing that in any way attracted attention to itself or sent the mind wandering off to things outside the story, they would get some invaluable pointers—of the only kind that the usual friend is really capable of giving. If some day the colleges make systematic laboratory tests along these lines they should get data as surprising as they would be useful.

Unusual Words.—Consider how tiny a thing is capable of pricking the bubble of illusion, of jerking the reader for a brief instant back into his real world so that he must be drawn again into the fiction spell. If in reading a story you come upon some such word as "pringle," "anodic," "calipash," "mansuetude," "spiracle," "frigorific," "cambist," "gibbous," "ortelic" you probably find it unfamiliar and, if so, of course know that you do. Therein lies the breaking of the illusion. However brief the total time occupied by your reaction to the word, however slightly you may seem to have paused over it, you paused and you paused over it—gave attention to it, not to the story. You had to remember yourself, your own knowledge and experience. Quite possibly you also considered the author's contrasting knowledge and experience, and the author is not the story. Possibly you tried to figure out the meaning of the word from its derivation or the context, or dredged your own memory for it, making your pause over it still longer. Perhaps your pause totaled only a few seconds or a fraction of one second, but—the illusion was broken and had to be rebuilt.

Far less unusual words than those cited will be unfamiliar to part of most audiences.

Would one such word do very serious damage? Very unlikely. But it would do some, and even a small damage is to be avoided if possible. Would four such words? There can of course be no definite measurement, but one thing is sure—four would do far more than four times as much damage as one. The effects are cumulative, following a kind of geometrical progression. And no one knows when a serious breaking-point may be reached.

Is a writer never to use a "big word"? Not if it's too big for his audience. In the mouth of a character he may put any word he pleases, provided it is used for sound purposes of characterization or for some other specific demand of the story itself, but not for the mere telling of the story. He might, for example, wish to impress a learned or scientific atmosphere. In this case, too, there is the saving fact that the reader need not know the meaning of these words, and knows that he need not, just as he would know he need not if he were actually living in the scene. He does not feel challenged by them. "Big words" may be justified in scores of typical instances, but there is no instance in which it does not pay to consider whether the damage may not outweigh the gain.

Even an unusual word whose meaning is at once apparent to any one, like "cat-silent," should be carefully weighed as to advantages vs. disadvantages before it is used. And only in the rarest instances can there be justification for using such a word more than once in the same story, lest the recurrence added to the unusualness make a double distraction.