SOURCES ON E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM
In addition to those referred to in the text and in footnotes, the reader is urged to consult the full-page interview and account appearing in the Boston Evening Transcript for 8 March 1924 (“Oppenheim the Master Maker of Plots,” by James Walter Smith). This is by all odds the best and most interesting single article. It quotes Mr. Oppenheim’s amanuensis as saying that he dictates 5,000 words a day on good days and about 4,000 words on an average day—a phenomenal speed. “In summer he dictates out of doors and I take it down in my note-book. In winter, he dictates direct to the machine. He likes a low easy-chair while working. It’s amazing to me how sure he is in his dictation, and what a grip he has on his plots. Occasionally he has two or more stories moving at the same time, but no matter what the number of characters or of the places where the action occurs, he rarely becomes confused. When he is held up, sometimes by a trifling detail, or by the more important one of getting a character out of a difficulty, he simply says: ‘Three dots’ ... like that, and moves on. This may happen several times in the course of a sitting, and I usually can divine, as the story proceeds, when I’m going to hear that ‘three dots.’ When the dictation is finished, he goes out for a game of golf, perhaps. Then next day he takes up the typescript where the suspension points appear and unerringly fills in the bits which bothered him. This would be easy if the case were single, but where there are several ‘three dot’ cases it demands skill and concentration to get out of the bunker.”