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?”