Why write fiction?

Why write fiction?

Why write fiction?

This question may seem impertinent, at the beginning of a book which will be read chiefly by persons who have resolved to write fiction. But it is not. It leads us into a problem that must be squarely faced and cleanly solved by each man for himself, before he enters seriously upon literary work. That problem has to do with the purposesof such an undertaking.

Purposes shape one's conduct in literature no less than in war, love, and politics. Whether the author knows it or not, every plot he invents and every turn he gives to its telling are qualified by the usehe hopes to make of the finished product. It matters not whether he writes according to some editor's order or to establisha creed or simply to delight himself; the influence of the aim is ever present, subtle and pervasive. So deep is it that many a story theme takes on a very different form with each new purpose of the writer's. Again, some themes and modes of treatment are wonderfully adapted to certain ends and impossible for others. Thus, the severe and swift art of which Maupassant was so fond is peculiarly the weapon of a writer who is more interested in conveying animpression than in interpreting human

nature or affairs. Other technical devices have their own exclusive utility, which we shall inspect in other chapters. Hardly any material of fiction or any narrative principle can be employed without regard to the aim of the particular piece of writing attempted.

If this is true, it must be evident that whoever writes fiction aimlessly, never surveying the various advantages of the work nor choosing one advantage as the end to be sought, foredooms himself to much grief. He may win out, in the long run; but his victory will be dearly won. He will probably spend years writing for the public stories which please only himself, and he may wreck his natural style by trying to make it serve an end which it cannot attain. This becomes clear the moment we consider the legitimate purposes of writing fiction.

2. The four ends of writing fiction. There are four obvious rational desires which might, singly or collectively, urge a man to compose a story. First, he might wish for the private gratification of expressing his own fancies. Secondly, he might hope to acquire, through practice, an intimate knowledge of literary values which would heighten his appreciation of books and men. In the third place, he might seek a livelihood by entertaining a large circle of readers. Or, finally, he might aspire to expose some sham, to crush some public infamy, to raise some all but forgotten ideal, or otherwise to better the world. Private pleasure, self-culture, profit, and social service; these are the prospects which may allure. And now a word about each.

a. Writing for pleasure. People differ astonishingly in the immediate satisfaction they gain from imagina ive writing. Many who are gifted compose without joy or even with antipathy; and many who are not sweep into raptures at every inconsequential motion of their mediocre wits. It is important to observe this fact here, because

of the prevalent instinctive superstition that whoever has a strong impulse to write and finds much pleasure in yielding to it is endowed with those talents which publishers are eager to engage. That this is a superstition and nothing more, every experienced writer and critic knows. There is only the most tenuous connection between the market value of a tale and the fun one gets from producing it.

Consider two opposite modern instances, Edna Ferber and Gellet Burgess. If newspaper interviews are to be trusted, Miss Ferber drags herself gloomily to her faithful typewriter, for the composing of an Emma McChesney story. Nevertheless, her output is the very highest grade of ephemeral writing, immensely popular and correspondingly profitable. How different Burgess and his Lady Mechanic, In the confessional introduction to this weird volume, he admits that he is out for a lark and that he is having a glorious time compiling these Precious Episodes in the Life of a Naughty Nonpareille. You can fairly hear him chuckling behind every sentence. But what is the material outcome of this hilarity? 'Helter-skelter rigmarole, ' Burgess calls the book; and nobody will challenge the opinion. It reeks with jests comprehensible only to the few who happen to have thought about some things precisely as the author has. Its satire is such as can be sensed from only one point of view, and this point of view cannot be attained save by following Burgess through life and seeing the world through Burgess' eyes. If you have done this, you may scream over some chapters of Lady Mechanic. If you haven't, you will fling the book into the waste basket before you have finished the first page.

Now, the moral of this contrast is clear. Story writing may serve as a merely private entertainment, almost as private as the child's game of making faces at himself in a

mirror. If you write only for this purpose, do not expect the world to enjoy your inventions. Probably it will not; and the chances of its doing so dwindle in the same measure that your personal experiences, temperament, and interests deviate from those of the ordinary man. Whether it is worthwhile to write stories that no public will read is a question which each man must answer for himself. It lies beyond the jurisdiction of critic and editor. That not a few persons do write—and write well—in secret, neither hoping nor wishing to reach a public, is pretty certain. I know two such authors in New York City; they have produced stories worthy of the best magazines, but they will not sell them. They write tales as they play the piano, 'just for fun. ' Being rich, they are not tempted by the market's rewards. Being cultured, the alleged fame of the fictionist does not dazzle them. And I doubt not that there are many °the. s like them.

b. Writing for self-culture. I suppose no oody save a handful of literary critics deliberately writes fiction in order to acquire fresh insight into the thoughts of great writers, their style, and the technique of the art. In our schools and colleges almost every other literary form is extensively practiced, but especially by the essay. Students are requested to write essays and essays essays on Burke, essays on In Memoriam, essays on The Right and The Wrong, essays on Wagner's leitmotive, essays on Kipling's Things as They Are, and Heaven knows what else. Now, I doubt whether such a program cultivates selfexpression and critical sensitivity as well as half the amount of drill in imaginative narrative would. It is notorious that the essay is one of the most difficult of all enterprises with the pen; some would say the stubbornest. There are more excellent fictionists than moderately competent essayists, and over against every five master

novelists stands not more than one master of the essay. .

This is no accident; it is due chiefly to the intrinsic realism and philosophical bias of the essay. The fabric of every essay must be fact. Its author must have something to say about some state of affairs in the world. He may have misunderstood these affairs, or he may be grossly prejudiced toward them, or he may perceive them in a commonplace way; but he cannot write effectively unless he holds a clear opinion about them and can defend it with arguments. This is an inflexible rule, applying not only to the smooth solemnities of a Macaulay but also to the genial essay, which Dr. Crothers has lately revived with such success. Even in its most whimsical flights, the essayist's pen is ever pressing hard against Circumstance. It is Circumstance and nothing else that provokes him to write, and it is about Circumstance that he speaks.

The unfitness of essay writing as a means to acquiring skill in self-expression now appears. No man can write well on matters about which he has no sharp opinion. Hence it is that the essay is exclusively the instrument of a mature mind (mature at least with respect to the particular subject matter). But the undergraduate—and the learner generally—is not mature. He studies composition to attain maturity. And his embarrassment as an essayist is mightily aggravated by the fact that it is much harder to discourse lucidly on things today than in earlier generations. The world about which he must say something is immeasurably more complicated and vaster than the toy cosmos which Addison and Lamb knew. Things are now hopelessly entangled with one another. One could scarcely discourse on Roast Pig at this hour, without commenting learnedly upon carbohydrates, trichinosis, and the Meat Trust. Worse yet, the old ideals of life are all under suspicion, and the new are as vague as images on ruffled water; so that the young

writer has no philosophy, no point of view—or else— worse luck!—he has one shamelessly stolen from an

tiquity and badly damaged in transit.

In view of all this, the learner would advance much more swiftly, were he to describe only those affairs and people which he knows absolutely. In doing that, he

would at least begin at the right place. But with what is he so marvelously intimate? Only with events which

he has witnessed or conjured up in his own imagination. Only with the appearance and flow of them, be it added, and not with their import. Let him describe them as he witnesses them, interpreting them not at all. Let him

report, but not explain. Then he will be at his best. '

I shall venture to say, then, that, from the points of view of educator and learner, this, the most neglected

purpose, is the most important one. Writing fiction for the sake of the skill and the knowledge it brings would probably improve almost every educated man and

'It is idle to urge, against this opinion, that college fiction is immature. This oft-repeated censure is usually founded upon two unfair comparisons; first, the comparison of undergraduate works with those of veteran authors; and, secondly, a comparison of what the undergraduate has to say with what he has learned. The former contrast is foolish. The latter rests upon the mistaken assumption that the quantity of a person's information is a just measure of the number and vigor of the opinions he ought to have. So far is this notion removed from the truth that the opposite is often correct: the greater the massof facts that are being crammed into one's head, the fewer one's thoughts, during the cramming. Undergraduate essays ought to be inferior, on the whole. As for fiction, the equitable critic will set the learner's narratives over against his essays. And he will discover the conspicuous superiority of the former. In freshness, ease, sincerity and finish, the stories appearing in the undergraduate' magazines of the leading American colleges assuredly outrank the essays. This becomes doubly significant when we recall that their authors have been drilled in the composing of essays, but little or not at all in story writing.

woman. It would give new insight into literary structure. This, to be sure, is the least of its benefits; but it is not to be despised. To read a novel with new eyes; to perceive in a story something more than off-hand chatter, — surely this power is worth many times the efforts its acquisition will cost. But the advantage does not end here. With it come a quickened sense of artistic values, a more supple style, and an enlivening of the imagination. This last is, by all odds, the supreme gain. Imagination is the first and indispensable activity of thought, be it scientific or practical or artistic. While it lacks the dignity which the reasoning power enjoys in common repute, it really stands not a degree below the latter. In the affairs of life it stands one in good stead more frequently than the sterner intellectual skill does. Assign to almost any task requiring thought an imaginative man with scant logic and an unimaginative logician; nine times out of ten the former will handle it more successfully. And any psychologist can tell you why. Would it not seem wise then to train young men and women in the exercise of fancy?

Against this suggestion arises the cry that such a course leads to frivolity and flightiness. Matter-of-fact folks will assure you that people are full enough of fancies, without any encouragement from academic authorities. They will prove that only demonstrated truths enter into a sound education. But both of these propositions are fatally wrong. The first rests upon a subtle equivocation in the word ' fancy ', which is identified with 'imagination' and then lends its invidious connotation to the latter term. In this sense, `imagining' comes to mean idle dreaming or, worse yet, wild belief. Now, beyond doubt, there is altogether too much of that abroad. But it is not genuine imagining. On the contrary, it is unimaginativeness. Sometimes we call it stupidity. Some

times it is superstition. Sometimes it is gullibility.

Sometimes it is 'the artistic temperament'. But always it is one and only one thing at bottom; to wit, the absence of quick, variegated, appropriate, connected imagery. The man in whom such imagery wells up richly is the sane man, the well-balanced thinker. It supplies him with doubts, cautions, and leads. And these are the very

things which the unbalanced thinker and the 'artistic temperament' lack.

In one of the soundest of his queer essays Chesterton makes an observation which bears upon this matter.

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being. It is healthful to every sane man to utter the art within him; it is essential to every sane man to get rid of the art within him at all costs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, very great artists are able to be ordinary men—men like Shakespeare or Browning. . ..

It need hardly be said that this is the real explanation of the thing which has puzzled so many dilettante critics, the problem of the extreme ordinariness of the behavior of so many great geniuses. . . . Their behavior was so ordinary that it was not recorded. . . . The modern artistic temperament cannot understand how a man who could write such lyrics as Shakespeare wrote could be as keen as Shakespeare was on business transactions in a little town in Warwickshire. '

How is it that amateurs lack this power to express the art that is in them? Have they no ideas? Indeed, they

have them aplenty; they can state them readily as pure propositions, but not in full artistic narrative. Are they

ignorant of words? Rarely. Can they not reason? Well enough for the purposes of art. Where then can their difficulty lie, if not in the paucity or sluggishness of their imagination? It must be that they sit hour after hour, waiting for the right word to pop up, as poor Flaubert did. And to catch up the loose threads of a plot, they have to weave and unravel almost as long as Penelope did.

The very same thing might be said of the superstitious man, the mystic and the dupe. It is the unimaginative savage who confuses his dreams with realities. It is the dull Bedouin who thinks the stalking pillar of sand that marches in the desert whirlwind is a living jinn. And it is the thick-witted peasant who believes in ghosts and patriotism and politician's promises. In the arsenal of such minds there is neither powder nor shot with which to combat any idea. They cannot see why the dead may not return in dreams, or why a thing that moves without visible impetus is not alive, or why an alderman who gives Christmas turkeys to the poor and takes off hishat to the Stars and Stripes is not a high-minded statesman.

This defect is, in large measure, an evil endowment. So too is a copious fancy a gift from some good fairy. Nevertheless, deliberate training can improve the weaker and release fresh energies of the stronger imagination. This is why the writing of fiction for self-culture is the most important of the four purposes we are here discussing.

c. Writing for profit. This is the commonest, the most obvious, and the most speculative of the four aims. Unlike the two purposes just considered, it imposes a variety of restrictions which some authors find exceedingly irksome and others do not. These restrictions are vital to commercial success and difficult to define. Many experienced editors are unable to phrase them intelligibly. The writer who senses them and reckons with them successfully will make money, which is a desirable thing. But, if he remains blind to them, nothing short of genius

will save him What the restrictions are will be later discussed. At presentI wish only to insist upon the much 'challenged fact that writing for profit is a distinct ideal,

not at all incidental to some other supposedly finer

one. It sets its own course and encounters its own problems.

d. Writing for social service. Concerning the propriety of this aim artists differ irreconcilably. Some of

them insist that the only legitimate aim of painting or singing or writing is to delight somebody. Others say

that the highest art is glorified preaching, and that the beauties of it are only means to the finer moral end.

This latter position has been brilliantly defended by the versatile Chesterton, whom we may again quote.

Now of all, or nearly all, the able modern writers whom I have briefly studied in this book this is especially and pleasingly true, that they do each of them have a constructive and affirmative view, and that they do take it seriously and ask us to take it seriously. . . . In the fin de siecle atmosphere Everyone was crying out that literature should be free from all causes and ethical creeds. Art was to produce only exquisite workmanship, and itwas especially the note of those days to demand brilliant plays and brilliant short stories. And when they got them, they got them from a couple of moralists. The best short stories were written by a man trying to preach Imperialism. The best plays were written by a man trying to preach Socialism. All the art of the artists looked tiny and tedious beside the art which was a by-product of propaganda.

The reason, indeed, is very simple. A man cannot bewise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy toproduce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it When we

want any art tolerably brisk and bold, we have to go to the doctrinaires'

This is a happy exaggeration, which Chesterton would have some trouble in defending. Not every 'tolerably brisk and bold' work of art has come from a doctrinaire. Macbethis surely as 'brisk and bold' as any of Mr. Shaw's polemical plays; but Shakespeare never tried to preach. Indeed, Tolstoi, Shaw, and others would have us believe that he never had an idea of his own, nor so much as agenuine, gripping conviction on any subject whatever. And all of Professor Moulton's ingenious attempts to discover in his plays a complete and lofty philosophy are but so much straw against the fire of Tolstoi's attack. Again, Poe's tales certainly ward off slumber as well as Chesterton's stories about Father Brown; yet Poe had no propaganda, and precious little moral earnestness. And so we might prolong the list of glittering exceptions.

Nevertheless, the greater truth is on Chesterton's side. More than ever before, fiction today is the moralist's weapon. More than ever before, preachers of every stripe, from Kipling to Henry Van Dyke, use it successfully. And this advance is due in no slight degree to the clearing up of fictional technique since Poe and Maupassant. It is not so very long ago that didactic novels and stories were insufferable. The moral sat behind. you and whispered noisily into your ear, while you strove to follow the players and the play. This was quite the style in eighteenth-century writings, especially the French; and it was taken up by Maria Edgeworth, in whose hands it became ludicrous. As late as 1880, American magazines were still publishing stuff rankly reminiscent of that manner. But now it survives nowhere in liters

ture; to find it you must turn to Sunday School weeklies and theLadies' Home Journal. Writers have outgrown it, and so has the cultured public. Curiously enough, though, its disappearance has not decreased the preacher's opportunities. Rather has it widened them. It has done so, however, by increasing the technical difficulties. No longer may he insert a moral disquisition in the midst of a love scene. He must write straight drama, weaving his thesis into it so deftly that he inseminates your mind without your knowing it. If he cannot accomplish this, he fails altogether. But if he can, even imperfectly, his influence will exceed by a hundred-fold that of the old-school author-preacher.

No, the preacher's opportunities have not lessened. But the number of preachers who can seize them has. Many a high school graduate of the rising generation could grind out stories of the Maria Edgeworth stamp, but only a skilled and facile mind could produce a fictionsermon which a good modern magazine would publish. And this brings us to a moral which will soon be dinned tediously into the learner's ears: if your purpose in writing fiction is this one, you must master the art. For the didactic story, more than any other, must sustain its dramatic interests perfectly. Ordinary art conceals itself; but the sermon-story must hide not only its art but also its moral. It calls for double magic.

3. The relative difficulty of these aims. The order in which we have discussed these four purposes is the order of their ease. To write merely for one's own pleasure is very simple. You may give yourself free rein. No style is too exotic, no character too weird, no plot too improbable, no theme too abstruse or too trivial to employ, if you like it. Many become impossible, however, as soon as you set out to write for self-culture. A thorough knowledge of good art is not to be achieved unless

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must choose from among these four purposes. And you must bear in mind, from first to last, that each of them sets up a distinct enterprise whose standards, methods, and limitations must be studied apart from those of the other three. Also you must know that, while the enterprises are not incompatible, success in one does not necessarily entail success in another.

4. Shall it be the novel or the short story? Suppose you have resolved to write fiction. The question then arises: which of the two leading prose forms shall you employ?

(For reasons soon to be shown, we need not consider the minor forms, such as the novelette, the tale, the fable, etc. ) Now, the answer can be deduced from the purpose you have chosen.

If you write for pleasure, choose whichever form you like.

If you write for self-culture, choose the short story.

If you write for profit, choose the short story, at least until your skill and reputation are established.

If you write for reform, choose only the novel.

This rule is perfectly obvious.

For the writer desiring to understand literary values intimately, the short story affords opportunities vastly richer than those of the novel. And the reasons are three: (1) The student can experiment more rapidly with the short story, because of its brevity. He can write twenty stories in the time required for one novel. This repetition of the entire technique hastens learning. (2) The short story contains every artistic device employed in the novel, except high complication (such as subplots). Hence, in mastering story technique, the student masters the virtues of the novel. (3) The finer types of story demand many artistic qualities which the novel does not. These qualities derive chiefly from the formal restrictions that are placed upon the theme, the length, and the intricacy of the story. Brander Matthews has pointed out some requirements and effects peculiar to the highest, most difficult of short story forms, namely the pure dramatic story. What he has to say about them holds of the commoner story forms much less rigorously, but broadly enough to illustrate our present point.

First, as to the theme:

The Short-story, far more than the Novel even, demands asubject. The Shortstory is nothing if there is no story totell;—one might almost say that a Short

story is nothing if it has no plot, — except. that "plot" may suggest to some readers a complication and an elaboration which are not really needful.

Second, as to the structure:

The Short-story fulfils the three false unities of the French classic drama: it shows one action, in one place, on one day. A Short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation.

Third, as to the artistic skill required:

No one has ever succeeded as a writer of Short-stories who had not ingenuity, originality, and compression; and most of those who have succeeded in this line had also the touch of fantasy. But there are not a few successful novelists lacking, not only in fantasy and compression, but also in ingenuity and originality; they had other qualities, no doubt, but these they had not. If an example must be given, the name of Anthony Trollope will occur to all. Fantasy was a thing he abhorred; compression he knew not; and originality and ingenuity can be conceded to him only by a strong stretch of the ordinary meaning of the words. Other qualities he had in plenty, but not these. And, not having them, he was not a writer of Short-stories. Judging from his essay on Hawthorne, one may even go so far as to say that Trollope did not know a good Short-story when he saw it. '

The short story is indeed 'a high and difficult depart

ment of fiction. ' And, as Canby says, 'In its capacity for perfection of structure, for nice discrimination in means

and for a satisfying exposition of the full power of words, it is much superior to the novel, and can rank only below the poem. ' It will teach the student much more than

the novel can about the deep virtues of restraint, clarity, directness and action. Indeed, it has come to be

recognized as the natural approach to the novelist's craft. And history confirms this judgment, for nearly all great fictionists since the mid-nineteenth century have begun as story writers.

The short story can be turned to profit much more promptly and surely than the novel. A person who can write at all can finish a score of stories in the time required for one novel, and the chances of selling half of the twenty are much better than those of selling the novel. Furthermore, the stories will be paid for upon acceptance, or soon afterward; whereas the returns from the novel will come mostly in the form of royalties spread over a period of years. Finally, the story market is better than the novel market. Ten mediocre tales will yield more than one fair novel (unless the latter is sold first to a magazine for serial publication). And five good stories will pay more than a novel of fairly high merit may be expected to.

Brunetiêre has laid his finger upon a peculiarity of the short story which unfits it for sermonizing. He says —and correctly—that it does not deal with social problems. Its canvas is too small; or, to change the figure, it moves so rapidly that it touches only the high spots. But every problem. worth preaching about must sound the deeps. It is a problem because there are two or more sides to it, because it demands hard thinking, and because many people have not thought it out. Now the author who wishes to persuade his readers, say, that socialism is the wisest course, or that divorce should be unrestricted, must develop his entire argument in dramatic form. But for this the short story has no space. At best, it can give a picture which will suggest the author's view. Van Dyke's recent HalfTold Tale entitled Stronghold'does this very prettily. It deals with the most intricate

and obscure of questions, the question as to the wisdom of social violence. It moves you, it rings true, yet it does not quite convince; and no fiction short of a thick book could, having that problem to wrestle with. Just because the short story presents no more than one little scene, one idea, one pro orcontra, it is an ill weapon for a man with a mission, which calls into play the heavy artillery of argument and longdrawn-out history.

5. The purpose of this book. Those students who write for culture should do so with the highest ideals of fictional art before them; and those who write for profit should know, in addition, all the tricks of the trade. Therefore this volume falls into two parts. Its first and more important aim is to describe the perfect story and the devices for attaining perfection. In arraying these I am well aware that not one student in a thousand can manage all of them. Even a master often fails with some. But they are, none the less, the ideals and guiding principles. In the short second half of the book the commercial aspect of authorship is considered. There we shall take exception to some of those artistic laws, but only because the reading public is less interested in perfect art than in simple entertainment. In recognizing this fact, we do not fall into any contradiction. Nor do we alter the ideals of fiction. We only admit the indisputable fact that purposes shape ideals, and that the purpose of the artist is not identical with the purpose of the entertainer. All pure art is entertaining, but not all entertaining is pure art. The demands of entertainment are broader and looser than those of flawless fiction.