HOW ONE THINKS OF A STORY

HOW ONE THINKS OF A STORY

IT sometimes happens that a woman who wishes to be kind to a poor author says to him : I can't imagine how you come to think of these things. ' The author's reply is generally feeble and embarrassed, and he does his best to change the topic of conversation. Afterwords he quotes what the lady said, with bitterness, and comments on the abject silliness of it.

The woman may be silly enough, but her implied question is not in the least silly. The real trouble is that the author cannot answer it.

The author comes to think of his stories because he has a certain type of mind, corn-

posed of contradictory elements. On the one side it is alert and observant : on the other it is dreamy and meditative. The former side detects and remembers every suggestion of a story coming within the author's experience : the other side takes a suggestion and watches and encourages the growth of it into a story.

What is meant by the suggestion of a story, and how does the alert side of the mind catch hold of it ?

Only those who can draw, or at any rate are studying drawing, really see the modeling of a face. Similarly, those who do not write stories do not see the suggestions of stories which nevertheless are presented to them every day. Sometimes it may be that the ordinary person, struck by the appearance of qome man, says that he looks as if he had a history. To the eyes of the man who is going to write stories, almost everybody seems to have a history, and suggests what the history might be. It by no means follows that what is suggested is in accordance with the facts, and it is extremely unlikely that it would be so.

But that does not matter in the very least. One has not got to put the truth down in one's story : one has got to give the appearance of truth by what one puts down in one's story.

The alert side of the author's mind is at work, catching and storing suggestions, during the whole time that the author is awake, and part of the time that he is asleep. This does not tire the author very much, because it is almost always involuntary and unconscious work. Alert to everything that serves the purpose of the imagination, he is often blind and deaf to what is of no use to it. One evening, perhaps, the author takes in to dinner a girl who interests him by her appearance, or by the quality of her voice. He does not stare at her curiously. With the conscious part of his mind he carries on conversation with her as well as he can—which in the case of most authors means very badly. All the time little detectives away at the back of his head are putting questions and finding answers to them. What was the girl doing that morning? What are the things she likes best ? How does she

seem when she is at home? What sort of future seems to fit her ? He does not know that these questions and answers are going on, but in them he has been catching a story-seed for future use. Perhaps he will discover it over his last cigarette that night. Perhaps he will discover it years afterward, for no apparent reason, when he is filling up an income tax return. Perhaps he will never discover it at all, and the seed will remain barren. Where so much is gathered, comparatively little can be used. Everywhere there is suggestion. A chance sentence overheard in the street, a picture at the Academy, a phrase in an advertisement, a cottage, a landscape —absolutely anything may be a suggestion. It is not wonderful to the author that he thinks of stories : it is wonderful to him that the other people do not.

The story-seed collected by the alert side of the mind is handed over to the meditative side, and then the conscious part of the work begins. One never quite knows how the plant will come up from the seed. The finished

story may seem to be absolutely remote from the suggestion which first started it, and have nothing whatever to do with it.

So far, I have tried to indicate the kind of mind to which stories come. The beginner may be conscious that he has a mind more or less of that type ; yet one morning he will sit down to write a story and will find nothing there. What is he to do ?

First and foremost, he must not worry about it. It is impossible to worry and to do story thinking at the same time. For some years I wrote a sketch story of about a thousand words every week for an illustrated paperwork which should have been easy enough. One day, however, I began to worry. I wondered what I should do if one week I found that I had got nothing—that I had come to the bottom of the bag. I wasted a whole morning in this silly way ; then I saw what an idiot I was, and wrote a story about an author who did come to the bottom of the bag. The

beginner is likely sometimes to start hunting for a story when he has already got one. He should make quite certain of this before he begins to hunt.

If it is clear to the beginner that he must hunt for his story, he should try first to put all ideas of plot out of his mind. Work always from character to plot, and never from plot to character. Do not try to think of a set of incidents. Concentrate yourself upon making a real person in your mind. If you can do that—if you can construct a live character— in nine cases out of ten that live character will make his own incidents fast enough. Where the plot is made first, the characters are always without conviction. We find them doing things quite obviously for the purposes of the story. Where the character is made first, he does what he naturally would do. To work from character to plot is not only the more artistic way, and therefore more satisfying to the writer, but with practice it becomes the easier way.

When the beginner has formed the habit of getting his work accepted by magazines, he will, when he tries to think of a story, keep

carefully in mind the limitations imposed upon him. It will make a great difference, for instance, whether he is writing a sketch of a thousand words, a short story of four or five thousand, or the long novel. One journal every week heads its short story ' A Novel in a Nutshell. ' This, of course, is the very last thing that a short story must be. It must be complete in itself. It must not consist of the dry bones of a longer story. Another limitation will also occur when the author is writing for the popular magazine. These magazines have adopted the principle that the pace of the fleet is the pace of the slowest ship, and nothing is allowed to appear in them which would be unfit reading for a pious child of fifteen. Authors are sometimes vexed with this limitation, which probably has a sound commercial basis, but if they choose to write for the popular magazines, they cannot disregard it. It is not particularly artistic to hit the target at which you are not aiming. Limitations which at first seem to cramp the author's choice will often afterwords come as a help to concentration, and save him from long mental rovings among the unsuitable.

A pump can sometimes be made to work by pouring water down it. Some writers, when they fail to write their story, sit down and read for a while, and then find that they can begin. It is a dangerous practice, and often produces a plentiful flow of very bad work. The beginner should avoid it.

If the difficulty of finding stories is a very frequent occurrence with you, it will be better, perhaps, to find some other occupation. If you can find the stories but cannot write them, that does not matter so much : you can learn how to write them.