Why Authors Go Wrong, and Other Explanations

by Grant M. Overton

This is the reason why every one should write a novel. There is only one thing comparable with it as a means of self-immolation. That, of course, is tenure of public office. And as there are not nearly enough public offices to serve the need of individual discipline, novelizing should be encouraged, fomented—we had almost said, made compulsory. Compulsion, however, defeats its own ends. Let us elect to public offices, as we would choose to fill scholarships, those who cannot, through some misfortune, write novels; and let us induce all the other people in the world that we can to put pen to paper—not that they may enrich the world with immortal stories, not that they may make money, become famous or come to know themselves, but solely that we may know them for what they are.

If Albert Burleson had been induced to write a novel would we have made him a Congressman and would President Wilson have made him Postmaster-General? If William, sometime of Germany, had written a novel would the Germans have acquiesced in his theory of Divine Right? Georges Clemenceau wrote novels and was chosen of the people to lead them. Hall Caine and Marie Corelli and Rider Haggard and Arnold Bennett have written novels which enable us to gauge them pretty accurately—and not one of them has yet been invited to help run the League of Nations. The reason is simple: We know them too well.

All privacy is scandalous. Thomas Dixon says: “It is positively immoral that the world should run on without knowing the depths to which I can sink. I must write The Way of a Man and make the world properly contemptuous of me.” Zona Gale reflects to herself: “After all, with nothing but these few romances and these Friendship Village stories, people have no true insight into my real tastes, affinities, predilections, qualities of mind. I will write about a fruit and pickle salesman, an ineffectual sort of person who becomes, almost involuntarily, a paperhanger. That will give them the idea of me they lack.”

William Allen White, without consciously thinking anything of the kind, is dimly aware that people generally have a right to know him as a big-hearted man who makes some mistakes but whose sympathy is with the individual man and woman and whose passion is for social progress. The best way to make people generally acquainted with William Allen White is to write a novel—say, In The Heart of a Fool, which they will read.... The best way to get to know anybody is to get him to talking about somebody else. Talk about one’s self is a little too self-conscious.

And there you have it! It is exactly because such a writer as H. G. Wells is in reality pretty nearly always talking about himself that we find it so difficult to appraise him rightly on the basis of his novels. Self-consciousness is never absent from a Wells book. It is this acute self-consciousness that makes so much of Henry James valueless to the great majority of readers. They cannot get past it, or behind it. The great test fails. Mr. James is dead, and the only way left to get at the truth of Mr. Wells will be to make him Chancellor of the Exchequer or, in a socialized British republic, Secretary of Un-War....

Dare to be a Daniel Carson Goodman. Write That Novel. Don’t procrastinate, don’t temporize. Do It Now, reserving all rights of translation of words into action in all countries, including the Scandinavian. Full detailed instructions as to the actual writing follow.

13

You may not have noticed it, but even so successful a novelist as Robert W. Chambers is careful to respect the three unities that Aristotle (wasn’t it?) prescribed and the Greeks took always into account. Not in a single one of his fifty novels does the popular Mr. Chambers disregard the three Greek unities. Invariably he looks out for the time, the place and the girl.

If Aristotle recommended it and Robert W. Chambers sticks to it, perhaps you, about to write your first novel, had better attend to it also.

Now, to work! About a title. Better have one, even if it’s only provisional, before you begin to write. If you can, get the real, right title at the outset. Sometimes having it will help you through—not to speak of such cases as Eleanor Hallowell Abbott’s. The author of Molly Make-Believe, The Sick-a-Bed Lady and Old-Dad gets her real, right title and then the story mushrooms out of it, like a house afire. Ourselves, we are personally the same. We have three corking titles for as many novels. One is written. The other two we haven’t to worry about. They have only to live up to their titles, which may be difficult for them but will make it easy for ourselves. We have a Standard. Everything that lives up to the promise of our superlative title goes in, everything that is alien to it or unworthy of it, stays out. This, we may add parenthetically, was the original motive in instituting titles of nobility. A man was made a Baron. Very well, it was expected that he would conform his character and conduct accordingly. Things suitable to a Baron he would thenceforth be and do, things unbefitting his new, exalted station he would kindly omit.... It works better with books than with people, so cheer up. Your novel will come out more satisfactorily than you think.