Part 11

Dare to be a Daniel Carson Goodman. Write That Novel. Don’t procrastinate, don’t temporize. Do It Now, reserving all rights of translation of words into action in all countries, including the Scandinavian. Full detailed instructions as to the actual writing follow.

13

You may not have noticed it, but even so successful a novelist as Robert W. Chambers is careful to respect the three unities that Aristotle (wasn’t it?) prescribed and the Greeks took always into account. Not in a single one of his fifty novels does the popular Mr. Chambers disregard the three Greek unities. Invariably he looks out for the time, the place and the girl.

If Aristotle recommended it and Robert W. Chambers sticks to it, perhaps you, about to write your first novel, had better attend to it also.

Now, to work! About a title. Better have one, even if it’s only provisional, before you begin to write. If you can, get the real, right title at the outset. Sometimes having it will help you through--not to speak of such cases as Eleanor Hallowell Abbott’s. The author of _Molly Make-Believe_, _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_ and _Old-Dad_ gets her real, right title and then the story mushrooms out of it, like a house afire. Ourselves, we are personally the same. We have three corking titles for as many novels. One is written. The other two we haven’t to worry about. They have only to live up to their titles, which may be difficult for them but will make it easy for ourselves. We have a Standard. Everything that lives up to the promise of our superlative title goes in, everything that is alien to it or unworthy of it, stays out. This, we may add parenthetically, was the original motive in instituting titles of nobility. A man was made a Baron. Very well, it was expected that he would conform his character and conduct accordingly. Things suitable to a Baron he would thenceforth be and do, things unbefitting his new, exalted station he would kindly omit.... It works better with books than with people, so cheer up. Your novel will come out more satisfactorily than you think.

Which brings us to the matter of the ending. Should it be happy or otherwise? More words have been wasted on this subject than on any other aspect of fictioneering. You must understand from the very first that you, personally, have nothing whatever to say about the ending of your story. That will be decided by the people of your tale and the events among which they live. In other words, the preponderant force in determining the ending is--inevitability.

Most people misunderstand inevitability. Others merely worry about it, as if it were to-morrow’s weather. Shall we take an umbrella, they ask anxiously, lest it rain inevitably? Or will the inevitable come off hot, so that an overcoat will be a nuisance? Nobody knows, not even the weather forecaster in Washington. If there were a corresponding official whose duty it would be to forecast with equal inaccuracy the endings of novels life would go on much the same. Readers would still worry about the last page because they would know that the official prediction would be wrong at least half the time. If the Ending Forecaster prophesied: “Lovers meet happily on page 378; villain probably killed in train accident” we would go drearily forward confident that page 378 would disclose the heroine, under a lowering sky, clasped in the villain’s arms while the hero lay prone under a stalled Rolls-Royce, trying to find out why the carburetor didn’t carburete.

Inevitability is not the same as heredity. Heredity can be rigorously controlled--novelists are the real eugenists--but inevitability is like natural selection or the origin of species or mutations or O. Henry: It is the unexpected that happens. Environment has little in common with inevitability. In the pages of any competent novelist the girl in the slums will sooner or later disclose her possession of the most unlikely traits. Her bravery, her innocence will become even more manifest than her beauty. The young feller from Fifth avenue, whose earliest environment included orange spoons and Etruscan pottery, will turn out to be a lowdown brute. Environment is what we want it to be, inevitability is what we are.

You think, of course, that you can pre-determine the outcome of this story you are going to write. Yes, you can! You can no more pre-determine the ending than you can pre-determine the girl your son will marry. It’s exactly like that. For you must come face to face, before you have written 50 pages of your book, with an appalling and inspiring Fact. You might as well face it here.

14

The position of the novelist engaged in writing a novel can only be indicated by a shocking exaggeration which is this: He is not much better than a medium in a trance.

Now of course such a statement calls for the most exact explanation. Nobody can give it. Such a statement calls for indisputable evidence. None exists. Such a statement, unexplained and unsupported by testimony, is a gross and unscientific assumption not even worthy to be damned by being called a hypothesis. You said it. Nevertheless, the thing’s so.

We, personally, having written a novel--or maybe two--know what we are talking about. The immense and permanent curiosity of people all over the planet who read books at all fixes itself upon the question, in respect of the novelist: “_How_ does he write?” As Mary S. Watts remarks, that is the one thing no novelist can tell you. He doesn’t know himself. But though it is the one thing the novelist can’t tell you it is not one of those things that, in the words of Artemus Ward, no feller kin find out. Any one can find out by writing a novel.

And to write one you need little beyond a few personalities firmly in mind, a typewriter and lots of white paper. An outline is superfluous and sometimes harmful. Put a sheet of paper in the machine and write the title, in capital letters. Below, write: “By Theophrastus Such,” or whatever you happen unfortunately to be called or elect, in bad taste, to call yourself. Begin.

You will have the first few pages, the opening scene, possibly the first chapter, fairly in mind; you may have mental notes on one or two things your people will say. Beyond that you have only the haziest idea of what it will all be about. Write.

As you write it will come to you. Somehow. What do you care how? Let the psychologists stew over that.

They, in all probability, will figure out that the story has already completely formed itself, in all its essentials and in many details, in your subconscious mind, the lowermost cellar of your uninteresting personality where moth and rust do not corrupt, whatever harm they may do higher up, and where the cobwebs lie even more thickly than in your alleged brain. As you write, and as the result of the mere act of writing, the story, lying dormant in your subcellar, slowly shakes a leg, quivers, stretches, extends itself to its full length, yawns, rises with sundry anatomical contortions and advancing crosses the threshold of your subconsciousness into the well-dusted and cleaned basement of your consciousness whence it is but a step to full daylight and the shadow of printed black characters upon a to-and-fro travelling page.

In other words, you are an automaton; and to be an automaton in this world of exuberant originality is a blissful thing.

Your brain is not engaged at all. This is why writing fiction actually rests the brain. It is why those who are suffering from brain-fag find recreation and enjoyment, health and mental strength in writing a short story or a novel. The short story is a two weeks’ vacation for the tired mind. Writing a novel is a month, with full pay. It is true that readers are rather prone to resent the widespread habit of novelists recuperating and recovering their mental faculties at their readers’ expense. This resentment is without any justification in fact, since for every novelist who recovers from brain-fag by writing a work of fiction there are thousands of readers who restore their exhausted intellects with a complete rest by reading the aforesaid work of fiction.

Of course the subconscious cellar theory of novel-writing is not final and authoritative. There is at least one other tenable explanation of how novels are written, and we proceed to give it.

This is that the story is projected through the personality of the writer who is, in all respects, no more than a mechanism and whose rôle may be accurately compared to that of a telephone transmitter in a talk over the wire.

This theory has the important virtue of explaining convincingly all the worst novels, as well as all the best. For a telephone transmitter is not responsible for what is spoken into it or for what it transmits. It is not to blame for some very silly conversations. It has no merit because it forwards some very wise words. Similarly, if the novelist is merely a transmitter, a peculiarly delicate and sensitive medium for conveying what is said and done somewhere else, perhaps on some other plane by some other variety of mortals, the novelist is in no wise to blame for the performances or utterances of his characters, or clients as they ought, in this view, to be called; the same novelist might, and probably would, be the means of transmitting the news of splendid deeds and the superb utterances of glorious people, composing one story, and the inanities, verbal or otherwise, of a lot of fourth dimensional Greenwich Villagers, constituting another and infinitely inferior story.... To be sure this explanation, which relieves the novelist of almost all responsibility for his novels, ought also to take from him all the credit for good work. If he is a painfully conscientious mortal he may grieve for years over this; but if his first or his second or his third book sells 100,000 copies he will probably be willing, in the words of the poet, to take the cash and let the credit go. Very greedy men invariably insist on not merely taking the cash but claiming the credit as well; saintly men clutch at the credit and instruct their publishers that all author’s royalties are to be made over to the Fund for Heating the Igloos of Aged and Helpless Eskimos. But the funny thing about the whole business is that the world, which habitually withholds credit where credit is due, at other times insists on bestowing credit anyway. There have been whole human philosophies based upon the principle of Renunciation and even whole novels, such as those of Henry James. But it doesn’t work. Renounce, if you like, all credit for the books which bear your name on the title-page. The world will weave its laurel wreath and crown you with bays just the same. Men have become baldheaded in a single night in the effort to avoid unmerited honor and by noon the next day have looked as if they were bacchantes or at least hardy perennials, so thick have been the vine leaves in their hair, or rather on the site of it.... Which takes us away from our subject. Where were we? Oh, yes, about writing your novel....

As soon as you have done two or three days’ stint on the book--you ought to plan to write so many words a day or a week, and it’s no matter that you don’t know what they will be--as soon as you’ve got a fairish start you will find that you have several persons in your story who are, to all intents and purposes, as much alive as yourself and considerably more self-willed. They will promptly take the story in their hands and you will have nothing to do in the remaining 50,000 words or more but to set down what happens. The extreme physical fatigue consequent upon writing so many words is all you have to guard against. Play golf or tennis, if you can, so as to offset this physical fatigue by the physical rest and intellectual exercise they respectively afford. Auction bridge in the evenings, or, as Frank M. O’Brien says, reading De Morgan and listening to the phonograph, will give you the emotional outlet you seek.

15

No doubt many who have read the foregoing will turn up their noses at the well-meant advice it contains, considering that we have largely jested on a serious subject. We take this occasion to declare most earnestly, at the conclusion of our remarks, that we have seldom been so serious in our life. Such occasional levities as we have allowed ourselves to indulge in have been plain and obvious, and of no more importance in the general scheme of what we have been discussing than the story of the Irishman with which the gifted after-dinner speaker circumspectly introduces his most burning thoughts.

We mean what we have said. Writing a novel is one of the most rounded forms of self-education. It is one of the most honorable too, since, unlike the holder of public office, the person who is getting the education does not do so at the public expense. We have regard, naturally, to the mere act of _writing_ the novel. If afterward it finds a publisher and less probably a public--that has nothing to do with the author, whose self-culture, intensive, satisfying and wholesome, has been completed before that time.

Whether a novelist deserves any credit for the novel he writes is a question, but he will get the credit for it anyway and nothing matters where so wonderful an experience is to be gained. Next to being hypnotized, there is nothing like it; and it has the great advantage that you know what you are doing whereas the hypnotic subject does not. No preparation is necessary or even desirable since, even in so specific a detail as the outline of the story the people of your narrative take things entirely in their own hands and reduce the outline to the now well-known status of a scrap of paper.... We talk of “advice” in writing a novel. The best advice is not to take any.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.