Part 9

The second reason was allied to the first; the story would “set every reader thinking how _he_ would spend the money.” And the third: it was a Cinderella story, giving the reader “the joy of watching a girl who has never been fairly treated come out on top in spite of all odds.” This is a powerful appeal to the modified instinct of self-preservation. The fourth reason--“the scene is laid in a little village and the whole book is a gem of country life and shrewd Yankee philosophy”--answers to the social hunger in the human heart. Fifth: “A charming love theme with a happy ending.” Sixth: “The story teaches an unobtrusive lesson ... that happiness must come from within, and that money cannot buy it.” To go behind such reasons is, for most minds, not to clarify but to confuse. Folks feel these things and care nothing about the source of the river of feeling.

11

With the non-fictional book the internal factor making for large sales is as diverse as the kinds of non-fictional volumes. A textbook on a hitherto untreated subject of sudden interest to many thousands of readers has every prospect of a large sale; but this is not the kind of internal factor that a publisher is likely to err in judging! Any alert business man acquiring correct information will profit by such an opportunity.

But there is a book called _In Tune with the Infinite_, the work of a man named Ralph Waldo Trine, which has sold, at this writing, some 530,000 copies, having been translated into eighteen languages. A man has been discovered sitting on the banks of the Yukon reading it; it has been observed in shops and little railway stations in Burmah and Ceylon. This is what is called, not at all badly, an “inspirational book.” Don’t you think a publisher might well have erred in judging that manuscript?

Mr. Trine’s booklet, _The Greatest Thing Ever Known_, has sold 160,000 copies; his book _What All the World’s A-Seeking_, is in its 138,000th. It will not do to overlook the attractiveness of these titles. What, most people will want to know, is “the greatest thing ever known”? And it is human to suppose that what you are seeking is what all the world is after, and to want to read a book that holds out an implied promise to help you get it.

The tremendous internal factor of these books of Mr. Trine’s is that they articulate simple (but often beautiful) ideas that lie in the minds of hundreds of thousands of men and women, ideas unformulated and by the hundred thousand unutterable. For any man who can say the thing that is everywhere felt, the audience is limitless.

In autobiography a truly big sale is not possible unless the narrative has the fundamental qualities we have designated as necessary in the fictional best seller. All the popular autobiographies are stories that appeal powerfully to our instinctive desires and this is the fact with such diverse revelations as those of Benjamin Franklin and Benvenuto Cellini, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Henry Adams. The sum of the instinctive desires is always overwhelmingly in favor of normal human existences. For this reason the predetermined audience of Mr. Tarkington’s _Conquest of Canaan_ is many times greater than that of Mr. Dreiser’s _Sister Carrie_. A moment’s reflection will show that this is inevitable, since these instinctive desires of ours are so many resistless forces exerted simultaneously on us and combining, in a period of years, to make a single resultant force impelling us to lead normal, sane, “healthy” and wholesome lives. On such lives, lived by the vast majority of men and women everywhere, the security of every form of human society depends; indeed, the continued existence of man on the face of the earth is dependent upon them.

You may say that Rousseau, Cellini, Marie Bashkirtseff, even Franklin and Henry Adams, led existences far from normal. The answer is that we accept the stories of their lives in fact where we (or most of us) would never accept them in fiction. We know that these lives were lived; and the very circumstance that they were abnormal lives makes us more eager to know about and understand them. What most of us care for most is such a recital as Hamlin Garland’s _A Son of the Middle Border_. The secret of the influence of the life of Abraham Lincoln upon the American mind and the secret of the appeal made by Theodore Roosevelt, the man, to his countrymen in general during his lifetime is actually one and the same--the triumph of normal lives, lived normally, lived up to the hilt, and overshadowing almost everything else contemporary with them. Such men vindicate common lives, however humbly lived. We see, as in an apocalyptic vision, what any one of us may become; and in so far as any one of us has become so great we all of us share in his greatness.

12

But perhaps the greatest element in predetermining the possible audience for a non-fiction book is its timeliness. Important, often enough, in the case of particular novels, the matter of timeliness is much more so with all other books soever. It cannot be overlooked in autobiography; _The Education of Henry Adams_ attracted a great host of readers in 1918 and 1919 because it became accessible to them in 1918 and not in 1913 or 1929. In 1918 and 1919 the minds of men were peculiarly troubled. Especially about education. H. G. Wells was articulating the disastrous doubts that beset numbers of us, first, in _Joan and Peter_, with its subtitle, _The Story of an Education_, drawing up an indictment which, whatever its bias, distortion and unfairness yet contained a lot of terrible truth; and then, in _The Undying Fire_, dedicated “to all schoolmasters and schoolmistresses and every teacher in the world,” returning to the subject, but this time constructively. Yes, a large number of persons were thinking about education in 1918-19, and the ironical attitude of Henry Adams toward his own was of keenest interest to them.

13

We have discussed the internal factor which makes for a big sale in books rather sketchily because, as a whole, book publishers can tell it when they see it (all that is necessary) even though it may puzzle authors who haven’t mastered it. So far as authors are concerned we believe that this factor can, in many instances, be mastered. The enterprise is not different from developing a retentive memory, or skill over an audience in public speaking; but as with both these achievements no short cut is really possible and advice and suggestion (you can’t honestly call it instruction) can go but a little way. No end of nonsense has been uttered on the subject of what it is in books that makes them sell well, and nonsense will not cease to be uttered about it while men write. What is of vastly more consequence than any effort to exploit the internal factor in best sellers is the failure to make every book published sell its best. If, in general, books sell not more than one-quarter the number of copies they should sell, an estimate to which we adhere, then the immediate and largest gain to publishers, authors and public will be in securing 100 per cent. sales.

14

A word in closing about the familiar argument that the habits of our people have changed, that they no longer have time to read books, that motoring and movies have usurped the place of reading.

Intercommunication is not a luxury but a necessity. Transportation is only a means of intercommunication. As the means of intercommunication--books, newspapers, mail services, railroads, aircraft, telephones, automobiles, motion pictures--multiply the use of each and every one increases with one restriction: A new means of intercommunication paralleling but greatly improving an existing means will largely displace it--as railroads have largely superseded canals.

As a means of a particular and indispensable kind of intercommunication nothing has yet appeared that parallels and at the same time decidedly improves upon books. Newspapers and magazines do not and cannot, though they most nearly offer the same service. You cannot go in your Ford to hear from the lips of Mr. Tarkington his new novel and seeing it on the screen isn’t the same thing as reading it--as we all know. And until some inventor enables us to sit down with an author and get his story whole, at our own convenience and related in his own words, by some device much more attractive than reading a book,--why, until then books will be bought and read in steadily increasing numbers. For with its exercise the taste for intercommunication intensifies. To have been somewhere is to want to read about it, to have read about a place is to want to go there in innumerable instances. It is a superficial view that sees in the spread of automobiles and motion pictures an arrest of reading. As time goes on and more and more people read books, both absolutely and relatively to the growth of populations, shall we hear a wail that people’s habits have changed and that the spread of book-reading has checked the spread of automobiling and lessened the attendance at the picture shows? Possibly we shall hear that outcry but we doubt it; nor does our doubt rest upon any feeling that books will not be increasingly read.

WRITING A NOVEL

VIII

WRITING A NOVEL

There are at least as many ways of writing a novel as there are novelists and doubtless there are more; for it is to be presumed that every novelist varies somewhat in his methods of labor. The literature on the business of novel-writing is not extensive. Some observations and advice on the part of Mr. Arnold Bennett are, indeed, about all the average reader encounters; we have forgotten whether they are embedded in _The Truth About An Author_ or in that other masterpiece, _How to Live on 2,400 Words a Day_. It may be remarked that there is no difficulty in living on 2,400 words a day, none at all, where the writer receives five cents a word or better.

But there we go, talking about money, a shameful subject that has only a backstairs relation to Art. Let us ascend the front staircase together, first. Let us enter the parlor of Beauty-Is-Truth-Truth-Beauty, which, the poet assured us, is all we know or need to know. Let us seat ourselves in lovely æsthetic surroundings. If later we have to go out the back way maybe we can accomplish it unobserved.

There are only three motives for writing a novel. The first is to satisfy the writer’s self, the second is to please or instruct other persons, the third is to earn money. We will consider these motives in order.

2

The best novels are written from a blending of all three motives. But it is doubtful if a good novel has ever been written in which the desire to satisfy some instinct in himself was not present in the writer’s purpose.

Just what this instinct is can’t so easily be answered. Without doubt the greatest part of it is the instinct of paternity. Into the physiological aspects of the subject we shall not enter, though they are supported by a considerable body of evidence. The longing to father--or mother--certain fictitious characters is not often to be denied. Sometimes the story as a story, as an entity, is the beloved child of its author. Did not Dickens father Little Nell? How, do you suppose, Barrie has thought of himself in relation to some of his youngsters? Any one who has read _Lore of Proserpine_ not only believes in fairies but understands the soul of Maurice Hewlett. The relation of the creator of a story to his persons is not necessarily parental. It is always intensely human.

O. Henry was variously a Big Brother (before the Big Brothers had been thought of), a father, an uncle, a friend, a distant cousin, a mere acquaintance, a sworn enemy of his people. It has to be so. For the writer lives among the people he creates. The cap of Fortunatus makes him invisible to them but he is always there--not to interfere with them nor to shape their destinies but to watch them come together or fly apart, to hear what they say, to guess what they think (from what they say and from the way they behave), to worry over them, applaud them, frown; but forever as a recorder.

3

None of the author’s troubles must appear in the finished record. Still wearing Fortunatus’s cap he is required to be as invisible to the reader as to the people he describes. There are exceptions to this rule. Dickens was the most notable. Many readers prefer to have a tale told them by a narrator frankly prejudiced in favor of some of the characters and against others. Many--but not a majority.

In the best novel that Booth Tarkington has so far written, _The Flirt_, the dominating figure is a heartless young woman to whom the reader continuously itches to administer prussic acid in a fatal dose. But Mr. Tarkington does not scald Cora Madison with boiling invective nor blister her with hot irony. He relates her doings in the main almost dispassionately; and set forth thus nakedly they are more damnable than any amount of sound and fury could make them appear to be. Mr. Tarkington does not wave the prussic acid bottle, though here and there, distilled through his narrative and perceptible more in the things he selects to tell about than in his manner of telling them, the reader is conscious of a faint odor of almond blossoms, signifying that the author has uncorked the acid bottle--perhaps that his restraint in not emptying it may be the more emphasized.

May we set things down a little at random? Then let us seize this moment to point out to the intending novel writer some omissions in _The Flirt_. Our pupil will, when he comes to write his novel, be certain to think of the “strong scenes.” He will be painfully eager to get them down. It is these scenes that will “grip” the reader and assure his book of a sale of 100,000 copies.

Battle, murder and sudden death are generally held to be the very meat of a strong scene. But when the drunkard Ray Vilas, Cora Madison’s discarded lover, shoots down Valentine Corliss and then kills himself, Mr. Tarkington does not fill pages with it. He takes scarce fifteen lines--perhaps a little over 100 words--to tell of the double slaying. Nor does he relate what Ray Vilas and Cora said to each other in that last interview which immediately preceded the crime. “Probably,” says Mr. Tarkington, “Cora told him the truth, all of it; though of course she seldom told quite the truth about anything in which she herself was concerned”--or words to that effect.

Where oh where is the strong scene? Ah, one man’s strength is another’s weakness. _The Flirt_ is full of strong scenes but they are infrequently the scenes which the intending novel writer, reviewing his tale before setting to work, would select as the most promising.

4

Besides the instinct of paternity--or perhaps in place of it--the novelist may feel an instinct to build something, or to paint a beautiful picture, or mold a lovely figure. This yearning of the artist, so-called, is sometimes denoted by the word “self-expression,” a misnomer, if it be not a euphemism, for the longing to fatherhood. There is just as much “self-expression” in the paternity of a boy or a girl as in the creation of a book, a picture or a building. The child, in any case, has innumerable other ancestors; you are not the first to have written such a book or painted such a picture.

How about the second motive in novel-writing, the desire to please or instruct others? The only safe generalization about it seems to be this: A novel written exclusively from this motive will be a bad novel. A novel is not, above everything, a didactic enterprise. Yet even those enterprises of the human race which are in their essence purely didactic, designed “to warn, to comfort, to command,” such as sermons and lessons in school, seldom achieve their greatest possible effect if instruction or improvement be the preacher’s or teacher’s unadorned and unconcealed and only purpose.

Take a school lesson. Teachers who get the best results are invariably found to have added some element besides bare instruction to their work. Sometimes they have made the lesson entertaining; sometimes they have exercised that imponderable thing we call “personal magnetism”; sometimes they have supplied an incentive to learn that didn’t exist in the lesson itself.

Take a sermon. If the auditor does not feel the presence in it of something besides the mere intelligence the words convey the sermon leaves the auditor cold.

Pure intellect is not a force in human affairs. Bach wrote music with a very high intellectual content but the small leaven of sublime melody is present in his work that lasts through the centuries. Shakespeare and Beethoven employed intellect and emotionalism in the proportion of fifty-fifty. Sir Joshua Reynolds mixed his paint “with brains, sir”; but the significant thing is that Sir Joshua did not use only gray matter on his palette. Those who economize on emotionalism in one direction usually make up for it, not always consciously, in another. Joseph Hergesheimer, writing _Java Head_, is very sparing in the emotionalism bound up with action and decidedly lavish in the emotionalism inseparable from sensuous coloring and “atmosphere.”

No, a novel written wholly to instruct will never do; but neither will a novel written entirely to please, to give æsthetic or sensuous enjoyment to the reader. Such a novel is like a portion of a fine French sauce--with nothing to spread it on. It is honey without a crust to dip.

5

Writing a novel purely to make money has a tainted air, thanks to the long vogue of a false tradition. If so, _The Vicar of Wakefield_ ought to be banished from public libraries; for Goldsmith needed the money and made no bones about saying so. The facts are, of course, unascertainable; but we would be willing to wager, were there any way of deciding the bet, that more novels of the first rank have been written either solely or preponderantly to earn money than for any other reason whatever.

It isn’t writing for the sake of the money that determines the merit of the result; _that_ is settled by two other factors, the author’s skill and the author’s conscience. And the word “skill” here necessarily includes each and every endowment the writer possesses as well as such proficiency as he may have acquired.

Suppose A. and B. both to have material for a first-rate novel. Both are equally skilled in novel writing. Both are equally conscientious. A. writes his novel for his own satisfaction and to please and instruct others. He is careful and honest about it. He delights in it. B. writes his novel purely to make a few thousand dollars. He is, naturally, careful and honest in doing the job; and he probably takes such pleasure in it as a man may take in doing well anything he can do well, from laying a sewer to flying an airplane. We submit that B.’s may easily be the better novel. It is true that B. is under a pressure that A. does not know and that B.’s work may be affected in ways of which he is not directly aware by the necessity to sell his finished product. But most of the best work in the world is done under some compulsion or other; and it is the sum of human experience that the compulsion to do work which will find favor in the eyes of the worker’s fellows is the healthfullest compulsion of them all. Certainly it is more healthful than the compulsion merely to please yourself. And if B. is under a pressure A.’s danger lies precisely in the fact that he is not under a pressure, or under too slight a pressure. It is a tenable hypothesis that Flaubert would have been a better novelist if he had had to make a living by his pen. Some indirect evidence on the point may possibly be found in the careers of certain writers whose first books were the product of a need to buy bread and butter; and whose later books were the product of no need at all--nor met any.

So much for motives in novel-writing. You should write (1) because you need the money, (2) to satisfy your own instincts, and (3) to please and, perchance, instruct other persons.

Take a week or two to get your motives in order and then, and not until then, read what follows, which has to do with how you are presently to proceed about the business of writing your novel.

6

It is settled that you are going to write a novel. You have examined your motive and found it pure and worthy of you. Comes now the great question of how to set about the business.

At this point let no one rise up and “point out” that Arnold Bennett has told how. Arnold Bennett has told how to do everything--how to live on twenty-four hours a day (but not how to enjoy it), how to write books, how to acquire culture, how to be yourself and manage yourself (in the unfortunate event that you cannot be someone else or have no one, like a wife, to manage you), how to do everything, indeed, except rise up and call Arnold Bennett blessed.

The trouble with Mr. Bennett’s directions is--they won’t work.

Mr. Bennett tells you to write like everything and get as much of your novel done as possible before the Era of Discouragement sets in. Then, no matter how great your Moment of Depression, you will be able to stand beside the table, fondly stroking a pile of pages a foot high, and reassure yourself, saying: “Well, but here, at least, is so much done. No! I cannot take my hand from the plough now! No! I must Go On. I must complete my destiny.” (One’s novel is always one’s Destiny of the moment.)

It sounds well, but the truth is that when you strike the Writer’s Doldrums the sight of all that completed manuscript only enrages you to the last degree. You are embittered by the spectacle of so much effort wasted. You feel like tearing it up or flinging it in the wastebasket. If you are a Rudyard Kipling or an Edna Ferber, you do that thing. And your wife or your mother carefully retrieves your _Recessional_ or your _Dawn O’Hara_ and sends it to the publisher who brings it out, regardless of expense, and sells a large number of copies--to the booksellers, anyway.

Mr. Bennett also tells you how to plan the long, slow culminant movement of your novel; how to walk in the park and compose those neat little climaxes which should so desirably terminate each chapter; how to---- But what’s the use? Let us illustrate with a fable.

Once an American, meeting Mr. Bennett in London, saluted him, jocularly (he meant it jocularly) with the American Indian word of greeting: “How?”

Mr. Bennett immediately began to tell him how and the American never got away until George H. Doran, the publisher, who was standing near by, exclaimed:

“That’s enough, Enoch, for a dollar volume!”

(Mr. Doran, knowing Bennett well, calls him by his first name, a circumstance that should be pointed out to G. K. Chesterton, who would evolve a touching paradox about the familiarity of the unfamiliar.)

That will do for Arnold. If we mention Arnold again it must distinctly be understood that we have reference to some other Arnold--Benedict Arnold or Matthew Arnold or Dorothy Arnold or Arnold Daly.

Well, to get back (in order to get forward), you are about beginning your novel (nice locution, “about beginning”) and are naturally taking all the advice you can get, if it doesn’t cost prohibitively, and this we are about to give doesn’t.

The first thing for you to do is not, necessarily, to decide on the subject of your novel.