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paralleling but greatly improving an existing means will largely displace it—as railroads have largely superseded canals.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.