ACCURACY OF COLOR

ACCURACY OF COLOR

ACCURACY OF COLOR

EXPLANATION of motive is necessary that we may understand

the reason for actions, but there can be no accurate motivation

unless the action is such as will be natural to the person performing it in the position in which he is placed. In simple phrase the local color should be correct.

2. Local color does not mean that a story gains in picturesque effect through the selection of unique scenes and locations. This is generally true, but it is not local color. The latter is more correctly the

harmony between environment and action. It is, in a sense, the working out of the Greek unity of time, place and action. In other words action must be suited to time and place. If your time is midnight and your place a desert, you naturally would not show a score of people in pajamas eating breakfast. It is possible that you may make, through ignorance, some similar mistake that will seem as glaring to others. Local color has also another phase. It means that a given character should act as such a character might be expected to act and not at variance with custom.

When Mrs. O'Grady hangs over her back fence to tell Mrs. Flynn that Rosie Connor is no better than she should be, taking a pair of shoes from Tim Murphy, the color is correct. It is natural that they should gossip over the back fence. But Mrs. Van der Veen, wife of the rich contractor, would not lean over her back fence to tell her affluent neighbor that Patricia Gotrocks lost fifteen hundred dollars at bridge the week before and is suspected of having paid it back with money she borrowed from Victor Van Tassel. Here the coloring would be incorrect and most persons would know it. Knowing it, they would feel the remainder of the story to be uninformed and therefore uninteresting. Persons are interested only when statements are made with authority. Show by the way your characters act that you do not know what you are talking about, and you will be voted a bore as well as a liar.

Knowledge is one of the first great requisites of storytelling of any sort, and more plays have been spoiled through false coloring than through any other one source. It may be but a single slight lapse from correctness, but let that lapse be observed and the entire story will lose interest, not completely, perhaps, but in some degree.

Probably not even the raw novice would show a bank president eating his lunch out of a tin pail balanced on a pile of greenbacks, but more than one has shown a scene in which the hero seeks to borrow money from a bank. He goes to the president, speaks, the president nods, calls a clerk and tells him to give the man five thousand dollars. Then the hero follows the clerk to the paying teller's window and receives the money without having signed a scrap of paper. The author never had to borrow money. He does not know how bank loans are negotiated, so be goes about the transaction in the way that seems good enough to him, but good to few others. It is not a very important matter in the story, but at once a majority of the persons in any audience realize that the author is unfamiliar with the life he seeks to write about, and therefore cannot have written a good story.

But it is not alone the novice writers who need to guard against errors. The more advanced workers are similarly careless. A man whose novels are printed both as serials and in cloth wrote a story in which a confession by wireless cleared a man about to be executed for murder. The wireless company took the telegram to the Governor, the latter telephoned the prison warden and the warden kicked the hero out of jail. The Governor did not investigate the message nor did

the warden require a signed release. The author needed his hero out of jail in a hurry and could not bother with legal formalities, so he ignored the color and spoiled his story.

If you write of the law courts be sure you know how they are conducted and do not use police court procedure for the Supreme Court nor the reverse. If court scenes are to be employed, ask some lawyer friend or visit a court of the proper sort. If you lay the scene in a physician's office, have your characters act as physician and patient would. Do not let the hero come to a strange physician for an examination, let the doctor tap him on the chest, pound him on the back and announce that he has but three weeks of life. Let him make the proper tests or prepare to do so and pronounce the verdict only after proper investigation.

It seems to be a strong temptation for city men to write of the country and the rural authors to write of the city. The reason for this is not far to seek. The city man invests the country with a certain halo of romance. To him it is the Land Desirable. Moreover he fails to see clearly the charm of the city. To an extent he is hampered by a too exact knowledge of facts. He writes of the country of his romance, and does not realize that his coloring is no more correct than the country boy's ideals of the city. The clever man writes of the city correctly but with a slight touch of idealism, if he is of the city, or of the country if his home is there, but he loses no opportunity to become intimately familiar with the other side that he may write with equal authority on both phases.

Generally the author differs from his fellows in that he is able to see the romantic and the ideal in what is commonplace to his fellows. That is why he is an author instead of a book-keeper or shoe clerk. He can see stories where others see only their daily tasks, but even he is apt to be hampered by a lack of perspective. He stands too close to his subject to see it clearly. The city man writes more interesting stories of the country than the rural writer (providing he really knows his subject through study) because he does not stand so close to his subject. You cannot stand six inches from a large picture and get with proper values all of the details of the subject. You must stand back. It is a general practice to recommend that the student write only of his own time and place, but this advice is not wholly good. It should be qualified. It is all well enough to say that the clown should not write of kings, but there is no reason why he should not, provided that he goes to the trouble of acquiring an intimate knowledge of the habits and personalities of kings.

He is best fitted for authorship who trains himself to acquire an almost limitless fund of knowledge of all sorts and conditions of men, their environments, their habits of speech and thought, their manners and customs and their appearance. The author should write only of that which he knows about, but the real author should and generally does know more than the daily life he leads.