The Technique of the Novel - A Handbook on the Craft of the Long Narrative

By Thomas H. Uzzell

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781447498933

Book preview

THE TECHNIQUE

OF THE NOVEL

A Handbook

ON THE CRAFT OF THE LONG NARRATIVE

by

THOMAS H. UZZELL

AUTHOR OF NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE, ETC.

Preface

THIS BOOK, LIKE my Narrative Technique, is an outgrowth of my teaching. The principles set forth in the earlier book will be found here restated and reinterpreted to encompass the problems of the longer tale. These principles were used in my seminar in novel writing at New York University, 1936–37, and have been used since by many other writers, both learners and established novelists. Criticism and suggestions from these workers have been helpful. This book says what these learning novelists wanted to hear, and I hope they and others will find it useful.

One of the greatest difficulties in writing a book of this kind is the temptation to write not of technique for writers but literary history, criticism, biography for the general reader. There are more readers than writers; the larger audience beckons; and besides, it is easier to trace tendencies, tell why you like or don’t like given books, or report what a noted author likes for breakfast and why he married twice, than it is to grasp the knowledge all good writers have of their craft, and find a way to express it.

I have tried to make this book practical. Into it I have put my experience in editing and publishing, my long service as literary agent, and my still longer adventure with innumerable learning writers, many of them novelists. It has benefited, I am sure, from my association with some of the country’s leading psychologists; my studies with them have given me the only possible means of penetrating some of the problems which for many critics and teachers are shrouded in mystery. I announced my Narrative Technique, devoted to the short story, as a course in literary psychology; this new work can be similarly described. I hope it will be inspiring; I have done my best to ground it on a sound esthetics free of cant, sentimentality, and any narrowing personal bias. It is not a classroom work or drill manual but rather a handbook on the art of writing novels. I think I know all the questions learning novelists ask. This book is composed of my answers. Those who do really read what I have written, who experiment with my suggestions, who persist and so discover for themselves how best to organize their energies for creative work, will understand my purpose.

Several chapters of this book were first printed in The English Journal, College English, The Prairie Schooner, The Author and Journalist, and the Writer’s Digest. To the editors of these publications I offer my appreciation of their co-operation.

I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the many students and writers who prompted me to attempt this book and who answered in detail my request for suggestions as to the specific topics it should deal with. Their criticism of manuscript chapters has also increased the practical value of the revised form in which these chapters are now offered. I wish to thank likewise the readers who gave expert assistance in handling the printer’s proofs.

I am indebted to Donald Leonard Gordon for his interested collaborative help with my third chapter.

An especial acknowledgement is due to my wife, Camelia Waite Uzzell, for her encouragement and skilled critical assistance in the writing and rewriting of these pages. Without her constant help this book would have been impossible.

—THOMAS H. UZZELL

Stillwater, Oklahoma

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

Long before the first edition of this book had been exhausted I was satisfied that it had met the need which led to my writing it. It has had good reviews; many letters from writers testified to its usefulness; and it has proved an effective supplement to my criticism of novel manuscripts. This book, as I expected, has not been a sensational best seller; yet the demand for it among novelists at work is steadily increasing. In order that I may supervise its distribution to those who need it I have taken it over from J. B. Lippincott Co., who originally published it, and now offer this second edition myself. By substituting strong paper for the original cover, I can place it before writers at half the former cost. I want those who need this book to own it. I have made no changes in the original text other than a few typographical corrections furnished by my correspondents whom I take this occasion to thank.

Experience with the book confirms my belief that the chapters are arranged in the order in which you, the writer, should read them. A word to the writer not experienced in using textbooks may be helpful. You may skip prefaces, if you wish, but you are earnestly requested not to jump the introduction. Most of you readers are in for a few shocks from my pages and the introduction will prepare you for the disturbance. Your attitude toward creative writing has been conditioned by reading and courses in literature which have taught you many misconceptions of the novelist’s craft. My introduction discusses these misconceptions.

Experience with this book, again, indicates that you should first of all read the first four chapters without a stop. If all is not clear, read them again. The bed-rock foundations beneath my method of clear thinking about the job of writing novels are found in these opening chapters. No novelist, reviewer or professor has questioned these foundations. You will find, I feel sure, if you read carefully, that I have grappled in a practical way with your own problems and shown the way to their ultimate solution. You will, like many others, find these chapters both challenging and enlightening. Give sharp, very sharp attention to pages 22 and 23! Simply to write what interests you most, without further thought, may cost you a year of wasted labor.

The next four chapters provide what is, or may be, a course of study which will immediately suggest ways of applying the principles set forth to the work in hand. This task will be made easier by writing out a summary of procedures somewhat like that which I have provided on pages 193 and 194. Once this is done you should review the plan for your novel in accordance with these procedures. At this stage you will find the key to my method most explicitely stated on pages 94 through 101. These pages should be thoroughly mastered and understood. And please observe that this method is not a set of rules or a way to mechanical perfection or an arbitrary way of thinking which I invented: it is rather a presentation of the problems all novelists face and a simple dialectic, a discipline, by which those problems can be effectively solved. With a given effect and given materials in hand the devices for exploitation, the only such devices, are also given and you may proceed to employ them.

The last four chapters need not be studied with the same care. They are more for ready reference. If you are at work on a popular novel, for example, chapter nine contains practical suggestions. If you find your ambition equal to a more literary, a more solid, work, a careful reading of chapter ten is indicated. Chapter eleven on viewpoint should quickly set you straight if this technical detail has not been settled from the beginning.

As for the final chapter on modernism—take it easy on this one! It is a condensation of what might easily have been another book. Take it with you to a good library. Explore for yourself the assertions of this chapter in which limited space I was able only to offer hints. The selection of novels which will profit you most to read will be made easier by consulting the two lists of novels for study found in the appendix. It goes without saying that I am always interested to hear from writers who are using this book.

Finally, a note on morale. Taking a chance on a pony at the races or in a game of cards may be justified but playing your luck with a novel is more serious, since you risk loss of time which is more valuable than money, and you may confirm yourself in the habit of failure. It is better to be wise than lucky; luck teaches nothing. The causes of an event are more interesting than the event itself. This book deals with causes. Things do not happen in this world; they are brought about. Nothing succeeds like earned success, for it will succeed again. And so—may we all meet in the bookstore window!

—THOMAS H. UZZELL.

Stillwater, Oklahoma

January, 1950

NOTE TO TEACHERS OF LITERATURE

The value of this book as collateral reading in courses in literature, especially those on the novel, will be obvious to most teachers. The capacity to appreciate any art depends upon an understanding of the technique of that art and the specific dexterities involved in its exercise. Most books on literary appreciation are devoted solely to reader enjoyment of the finished product, while most books addressed to the writers of novels and dealing with the craft of fiction as such are content to set down work-rules and accounts of individual practices, without relating the creative act to the reader’s esthetic response. In The Technique Of The Novel the student reader of novels will find, I think, a description of those springs and mechanisms of the art which will both surprise and enlighten him. The more he learns about the novelist’s calculated attack upon his sensibilities as a reader, the deeper will be his own understanding and his admiration for the skill displayed. Art is a human activity and only those who realize this are able to enjoy art as communication. In this book the novelist is shown at work.

CONTENTS

Introduction. The Meaning of Fictional Technique

1. The Good Subject

2. The Internal Demand: Temperament

3. The External Demand: Markets

4. The Principles of Unity

5. The Problem of Length

6. The First Step: Classification

7. Character Portrayal Fundamentals

8. The Principles of Drama

9. Hero and Villain Stories

10. The Novel of Significance

11. Viewpoint in Fiction

12. Modern Innovations

Appendix

Novels for Study

Common Errors in Plotting

The Theories of James, Wharton, and Glasgow

Index

THE TECHNIQUE

OF THE NOVEL

Introduction

THE MEANING OF FICTIONAL TECHNIQUE

Art is long and dogma fleeting.

—J. H. STELLWAGEN (American Annual of Photography, 1940).

A TEACHER OFFERING a new book on the technique of the art of music, painting, or, say, typography, would feel no need of apology. Everybody knows that these arts, in fact all arts, have a technique which must be learned before the art can be successfully practiced. In a new work on the technique of the novel, however, the author must take space to say that fiction does really have a technique, and, although he is sorry he has to mention it, it must be learned. Anyone could write a novel, says Sidney Quarles in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point but Huxley makes Quarles in every way a fatuous and foolish performer in the art of writing.

Since the medium of fiction is language and anyone can use it, skill is not easily identified, the stages in learning are obscured, and teachers of the subject operate under suspicion. All theories are gray, and only the tree of life is green, wrote Goethe, who gave the world many sound theories about art. Until a generation or so ago no godless investigator had invaded the sanctity of the inspirational theory of fiction. Literary people today will agree that fiction has a technique but insist that it need not be studied and certainly shouldn’t be taught. Candid shoptalk by established novelists, for publication at least, is very rare.

A belief often heard in the writing and publishing world is that musical composition and painting require a certain amount of instruction but writing doesn’t. In support of this contention we are told about novels and plays by rank amateurs which scoop the professional every year. I have investigated some of these scoops and I find that their authors are never rank amateurs. When Rose Franken Meloney’s play, Another Language, several years ago, swept into a big Broadway success, the reviews spoke of it as her first play, of her as a beginner, and with dismay announced that the play was written in three days. Thus was the American passion for heroes, the miraculous success, the magic process, satisfied. Mrs. Meloney told me, however, that she had prepared herself for play and novel writing by ten years of systematic discipline, and Another Language was not her first play.

The trial-and-error or go-it-alone method of learning is generally recommended by those who themselves learned in this way. Its chief merit is that the sensitive scribe can learn without knowing it. Geniuses, we are told, manage to get along without instruction. Geniuses! Why must every writer be a genius? A hundred thirty million people seem able to produce about one every generation. And I don’t believe that even genius succeeds without teachers. The only writers who need no instruction are in Hollywood studios. They have reduced plot-making to one rule: Begin with an earthquake and work up to a climax.

Proponents of the divine ordination of authors commonly cite the Brontë sisters as instances. One day, they say, the three sisters sat down at a table and wrote off three masterpieces. Setting aside the facts that Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor, was a flop, that Anne’s Agnes Grey was another, and that Emily’s famous Wuthering Heights, notable as it was, disturbs readers to this day by its clumsy arrangement of plot, we learn from the documentary study of the lives of the three sisters, The Three Sisters of Haworth, by Emilie and Georges Romieu, that Charlotte and Emily were instructed long and patiently in writing by M. Constantin Heger, head of the school in Brussels that they attended. M. Heger, we are told, was not satisfied just to teach the sisters grammar. He supervised all their work, formed their style, initiated them into all the mysteries of the novel art, implanted in them a taste for order and proportion, taught them to prefer a quiet harmonious simplicity to the overemphasis and redundance to which they were at first given. Like Dante on seeing the master Brunetto, write the Romieus, the sisters might have exclaimed: ‘there is he who showed us how one attains immortality!’

How often we see the first-class journalists who have run short of adventures for fact books, turn abruptly to fiction and toss off a novel, generally autobiographical, which promptly fails. Even more often we hear of a startling success by a young writer (anyone can think of a dozen without effort) which lands him in the headlines, leads everyone to expect a brilliant writing career, but which quickly fades. Another novel, less his own personal life, appears; and bookstore window dressers do their sympathetic best to make it another success, but it doesn’t pay out. Perhaps in time a third novel appears, still promoted on the réclame from the first success; again slow business. Our author is now remembered for his one lucky book. His publishers meanwhile have lost weight and income and the columns of the book reviewers now condescend to be for him a school in fiction writing. They tell him his faults. He reads their words (I have seen him do this, literally holding back tears); he doesn’t get it. The reviewers speak truth but their talk is for readers not writers; our one-book author has had no training whatever in grasping reader responses and relating them to causes on the printed page. His plight is often pathetic. If he is to be saved, the wonders of art must be supplemented by the wonders of craft—and it may be too late.

There is possibly one fate worse than not arriving at all, and that is arriving too soon. Writes Clifton Fadiman:

Writers respect Maugham because he respects his own craft. He has actually spent years of his life studying it. How many American novelists, now in their twenties or early thirties, have considered it necessary to spend several hours a day doing what Maugham did—analyzing model prose writers, charting his limitations, working out a style that would correspond both to what he was as a person and what he wanted to be as a writer. . . . He has attained [his literary virtues] by diligence, patience, and the subordination of his ego to his craft.¹

Learning novelists should read the good novels of others but not merely, as Hemingway has said, to learn what you have to beat (he sounds like a prize fighter), but to capture method, sound practices, ideals. They should learn to read analytically. Comparison of one novel with another is literary criticism. Placing an author’s work against his age is literary history. Examination of an author’s achievement in the light of his purpose is a study of means more than ends; it discloses the principles of technique, and fosters a dialect in which they may be discussed.

The relation of plots to life and the proper function of plot in a genuine work of fictional art should be understood. Is it true that artificiality enters into a novel with plot inventions? Is it true that the more ambitious the novelist the less he should be concerned with plot? Are plots, and technique too, merely necessary evils?² That artificial plots, plot action which either is inconsistent with the characters or reveals no character at all—wild melodrama, say—should be avoided we can easily agree. The need obviously is for plot action which isn’t artificial, melodrama which isn’t wild. What are the principles by which this need can be met?

The principle which I emphasize most in the chapters of this book is that right and wrong, lifelikeness and artificiality, may be determined by selecting incidents appropriate to the creative purpose, the effect, the novelist seeks to produce upon the reader. In the failure to consider effect as well as material, to grasp one’s own purpose as well as one grasps the truth about things observed, we hit upon the cause of ninety per cent of all the confusion, the sentimentalisms, the lazy half-truths, which afflict both writers and critics when they touch this question of plot.³ Subject matter, human conduct, objective reality, is easy to lay hold of; you merely write down what you see; but purpose, the creative intent, is less easily possessed. How much easier to tell what the other fellow is up to than to sit down and examine your own soul! Ask the learning novelist, as I have hundreds of times, to state briefly his subject and his intent with it and you’ll see what I mean. He will confuse them, oppose one to the other, and, unless you stand by to save him, he will dispose of the stubborn problem of clarifying his intended effect, of understanding himself, by simply tossing it out the window. He is weak in what the French writer, P. G. Konody, called la recherche des intentions. This central task of the true artist he abandons as too difficult and thereafter espouses the truth to life theory of fiction to excuse his lame inventions.

At this point a word on my reader’s morale may not be out of place. Most books on the writing of novels tend to glamorize the art. Their authors cheerfully, doubtless sincerely, meet halfway their prospective readers’ belief that the art of the novel, since it merely concerns telling a long story, can’t be very difficult. Everyone has at least one good novel in him. Such books, with a flourish of modesty, often counsel the writer not to pay too much attention to books on the rules of writing, including this one. They are sometimes entertaining; they may lead to the reading of good novels; they promote confidence and industry. If the attempted novel does not sell, the disappointed writer has only to blame his talents or luck. His textbook guide has not directed his attention to himself as a personality, his knowledge of life, his courage, his ability to learn, his capacities apart from his talents. He has escaped the terrors of self-examination, the labor of probing beneath formulas for ideals and principles. He reads in his book that some famous author wrote five novels before having one accepted and, without having learned anything, he begins another.

This book will not let the novice off so easily. It may provide a few awful moments but it will guide him along a pathway of progressive mastery. It will challenge him. He will rejoice, as he understands better the ideals and principles here set forth, that he is improving himself as he improves his art. He will discover how close is the technique of fiction to the technique of living, and if he persist with enough patience, he will in time find himself increasingly absorbed with the meaning of life. When that day comes he will graduate from all his teachers and textbooks. The days of discipline will have ended and his hour of creation will be at hand.

The reluctance of successful authors to talk shop seriously for the benefit of novices of the craft is not displayed by artists in other mediums. We have recently had illuminating discussions from Maxwell Anderson, the playwright; Roy Harris, the composer; and Rhys Carpenter, the critic and archeologist.⁴

Mr. Anderson tells us that some of his first plays were successful, some failures, and that the whole business was an exasperating puzzle. He concluded that the successes were accidents. For a time he hoped he was developing an intuition which would guide him, but it proved to be an unreliable guide. He needed a compass—or a pole star—or some theory of what the theater was about, and one by one he unearthed for himself the rules of playwriting which could not be broken, and by and by some of them began to look like essentials. He sets down quite categorically the most important of these essentials, though I am sure they fall far short of including all that Mr. Anderson has learned about the art of playwriting.

Mr. Harris’ treatment of the composer’s creative processes is more comprehensive. To establish my point, I need only quote: Whatever his spontaneous musical ideas may be, he must become aware of them and their characteristics. He must find ways and means of formulating.

Mr. Carpenter’s contribution on the creative process might well serve as a testament for all artists. He makes a distinction between style and manner as applied to painting and sculpture but I see no reason why they may not be applied also to novel writing. Style is the inherited traditions of an art, formulated through the centuries (it takes five hundred years for a civilization to produce a realistically illusionary painting or statue!); it transcends the individual and is all that structure and articulation by which a painted picture or a carved marble becomes emotionally intelligible. Manner, says Mr. Carpenter, includes what is peculiar to the work of an artist as an individual. To acquire a technical competence is to acquire a manner. Technique is thus identified with the artist’s self; it is the artistic personality. It begins with submission to the contemporary trend, may later revolt against it, and in time attain originality by contributing something to the style or trend of the age. And thus, says Mr. Carpenter, it is possible for these coldly academic matters of technique to convert themselves into flaming emotional resources by which craftsmen are transmuted into master artists.

The qualities of form are embedded inextricably in subject matter and flow from individualized treatment in expression. Plot, shape, design, plan, on the other hand, is composed of those elements of form which have existence apart from substance and are subject to isolation and definition. Form is of the spirit, design of substance. Design (plot) has a double meaning: it is a means to a realization of form and at the same time it is pattern in the sense that it identifies shapes that may be found in more than one work of art. Design when skillfully managed realizes, fulfills, rather than destroys, the demands of form. This fusion of plot and form is thus expressed by John Dewey: Only when the constituent parts of a whole have the unique end of contributing to the consummation of a conscious experience, do design and shape lose superimposed character and become form.⁵

My chapters necessarily deal with invention rather than with imagination. Invention is a rearrangement of existing things, while imagination gives existing things new qualities. Invention puts a man on a horse but imagination joins man and horse into a centaur. Invention is sorting out; selecting; combining objects, people and things; together with prescriptions for new qualities to be given the object in the full treatment or writing. Inventions managed to these ends exhibit certain uniform principles of vast value to the novelist. I have described them in the following chapters and summarized them on page 193.

The method I propose will, I think, be clear to anyone who reads all I have written. Methods may vary and all be useful. The only uniqueness I feel I can claim for this job is that it is throughout directed to the writer rather than to the reader and that it moves from inwardness to technique rather than the reverse and thus prevents technique from becoming formula. I do not attempt to teach what can’t be taught or what isn’t worth learning. Writers who skim through these pages looking for recipes for best seller commercial novels may be disappointed, although I have stated clearly enough, I think, here and there in these pages, the factors that make for commercial success. Such prescriptions, however, may be compounded more profitably for the short story than for the novel and for reasons which I have included in my third chapter. Most novelists, I believe, will prosper only if they attempt the best of which they are capable. This book is devoted to the best.

Napoleon on being asked what his system was for winning battles answered: I had a method not a system. In my own method will be found no astounding discoveries. Plato⁶ two thousand years ago defined technique as the affairs of craftsmanship (ta pragmata technica), that body of knowledge, that skill, which comes into play when an artist finds himself with materials and a purpose. Technique, he made clear, cannot be removed from any act of creation involving material and purpose. It seems to me evident enough that technique, if it is to mean anything at all, cannot be restricted to the fabricating of plots which are believed to be necessary evils. Plot means design, and technique, as a way to design, is a very vital part of the whole act of creation. Technique is at work in all that happens from the moment of the first inspiration to the completion of the design, and indeed is involved in the actual writing insofar as the writing is a fulfillment of the design.

That there is something in every real work of art which can’t be explained is assumed. It is granted that the writer conceals within himself feelings, visions, which no plot outline can express; but it is equally certain that with the right plot outline before him a writer will find it far easier to express the indefinable. Fictional technique in this sense is not a set of rules or a profanation of the divine fire or a barnacle of formula on the literary ship. Fiction involves, among other things, invention, or plot, and a good plot is one so perfectly suitable to the author’s purpose that it doesn’t show. Technique is a way to lucidity. It is a study of the thinking processes of the writer, which of course explains its unpopularity. The reward is ability to think clearly although inspired.

¹ Reading I’ve Liked. Quoted by permission of Simon and Schuster, Inc., p. 170.

² According to Aristotle the plot or fable of a dramatic work is its most important element. The fable, then, is the principal part—the soul, as it were—of tragedy. And he tells us further that adventurers in tragic writing are sooner able to arrive at excellence in the language and the manners than in this construction of a plot. (Quotations from Poetics [Everyman’s Library, No. 901].)

³ See pages 67 and 98.

⁴ From The Bases of Artistic Creation by Maxwell Anderson, Roy Harris, and Rhys Carpenter, copyright 1942 by The Trustees of Rutgers College in New Jersey and published by the Rutgers University Press.

⁵ The Natural History of Form, Art As Experience (Quoted by permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1934), chap. 7.

⁶ Literary people when they feel the need of classical authority for critical principles refer more commonly to Aristotle than to Plato. In the former’s Poetics will indeed be found statements of principles concerning creative writing which are unalterably true, such as the test of probability rather than possibility for truth, the unifying effect of the dominating purpose, the importance of portraying character through action rather than by exposition, and the nature of the ironic incident; but in these same amazingly prescient pages will be found prescriptions far too rigid to be applicable to all creative writing. Although Aristotle laid the foundation for criticism and our understanding of the art of creative writing, his Poetics and Rhetoric cannot serve as convenient handbooks for today’s students of that art. His principles of universal applicability are not easily identified. Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, stated the principle by which all such truths may be identified. This principle I have quoted in my text above. With it as my guide I have, I believe, been able to formulate those generalizations which are always true and which have therefore nothing to do with formulas and rules.

Chapter 1

THE GOOD SUBJECT

The greatest boon man has is the privilege of self-expression.

—SAMUEL JOHNSON.

THE FIRST REQUIREMENT for a good novel is a good subject. On this we can all agree, I feel sure. Many writers will go further and assert that this is all you need: if it’s a good subject it will interest others, and all the writer needs, once he faces his typewriter, will be the force of his urge to expression to find the right form; thus his technique will be sound, and he need read no book on how to get the thing done. There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, wrote Kipling, and every single one of them is right.

This is all true enough, and you will often find writers turning off novels with what seems to be just such freedom and nonchalance. Such writers almost seem to be the bird on the bough singing rapturously in the morning sunshine; they will even tell you at times of being gripped by their characters who dash ahead doing things all by themselves, determining the course of the story, and leaving their excited creator somewhere in the rear striving to keep up. Great God, these writers sing, my novel flows! They type day and night. They almost forget to eat and sleep; they live in the pages piling up rapidly beside the smoldering pipe or pot of black coffee. It is ecstasy; it is tremendous. The writer has found a good subject; that is all that is necessary; don’t disturb the works with worries about technique.

Well, we won’t bother him; whatever the outcome, it is an invaluable experience; and let us hope that the finished work will bring publishers and Hollywood agents crowding to his doorstep. The truth is, however, that thousands of novels are written annually in much this bird-on-a-bough manner to end in the trunk in the attic. Possibly second, third, novels follow them there. In time, if publishers and agents remain indifferent, the bursts of creation slow down; worries invade the morning song in the sun; self-criticism begins; and questions, baffling, inevitable questions of ways and means are faced at last.

The first of these questions (if the novelist be intelligent and destined to succeed) concerns the subject of a good novel. Were the subjects being treated really good after all? The answer will probably be that they were good in some respects but not in others. They were easy to write; they interested the writer himself; they were, let us say, good bird songs. The performer had written simply what interested him for his own amazement, as Ed Wynn put it. Hadn’t he read somewhere advice by a famous novelist that that was all that is necessary; just write what interests you? Perhaps the famous novelist was wrong.

The novelist was wrong. The good subject for a novel need not interest the writer at all (as he interprets interest); he may cordially hate it; the novel itself may be a labored response to that hate. The novelist who has begun to think will discover that a good subject is, first, one that the writer himself understands and, second, one that will interest others. Here is where the novelists, performing in happy, innocent unconsciousness, fail. They don’t really know what they are writing about; and they ignore reader interest.

A good subject for a novel satisfies a double ideal: it is vitally related to your own experiences (the internal ideal) and it has publishable value (the external ideal). The first of these ideals is the more important. No good novel can issue from a writer who doesn’t know what he is talking about. It is conceivable that a writer might, if he threw together best seller ingredients, produce a commercially very valuable property and have no realistic understanding of his subject. The more your purpose is commercial, the more important are the external tests. The inner urge to expression is, however, the more difficult to understand and, when fully developed, includes the external. We begin with it.

1. THE INTERNAL DEMAND

The story you most want to write is not necessarily the one you will handle best. Many a time I have heard writers brought up in small towns of the Middle West say, after living a year or so in New York, that they wanted to write stories or a novel about life in New York. When I suggested instead the people of their home towns, they were eloquent in their distaste for the life from which they had escaped; it bored them; they wanted to forget it. They admitted that they had exhaustive knowledge of the people at home and had hardly learned their way around yet in the metropolis, but stubbornly they insisted that they wanted to write about the big city. I argued that good novels flowed from full knowledge rather than from mere romantic interests and dreams. The answer to this was: "But what can anyone say about such dull places? My answer was: You might explain why you find them