Which brings us to the matter of the ending. Should it be happy or otherwise? More words have been wasted on this subject than on any other aspect of fictioneering. You must understand from the very first that you, personally, have nothing whatever to say about the ending of your story. That will be decided by the people of your tale and the events among which they live. In other words, the preponderant force in determining the ending is—inevitability.
Most people misunderstand inevitability. Others merely worry about it, as if it were to-morrow’s weather. Shall we take an umbrella, they ask anxiously, lest it rain inevitably? Or will the inevitable come off hot, so that an overcoat will be a nuisance? Nobody knows, not even the weather forecaster in Washington. If there were a corresponding official whose duty it would be to forecast with equal inaccuracy the endings of novels life would go on much the same. Readers would still worry about the last page because they would know that the official prediction would be wrong at least half the time. If the Ending Forecaster prophesied: “Lovers meet happily on page 378; villain probably killed in train accident” we would go drearily forward confident that page 378 would disclose the heroine, under a lowering sky, clasped in the villain’s arms while the hero lay prone under a stalled Rolls-Royce, trying to find out why the carburetor didn’t carburete.
Inevitability is not the same as heredity. Heredity can be rigorously controlled—novelists are the real eugenists—but inevitability is like natural selection or the origin of species or mutations or O. Henry: It is the unexpected that happens. Environment has little in common with inevitability. In the pages of any competent novelist the girl in the slums will sooner or later disclose her possession of the most unlikely traits. Her bravery, her innocence will become even more manifest than her beauty. The young feller from Fifth avenue, whose earliest environment included orange spoons and Etruscan pottery, will turn out to be a lowdown brute. Environment is what we want it to be, inevitability is what we are.
You think, of course, that you can pre-determine the outcome of this story you are going to write. Yes, you can! You can no more pre-determine the ending than you can pre-determine the girl your son will marry. It’s exactly like that. For you must come face to face, before you have written 50 pages of your book, with an appalling and inspiring Fact. You might as well face it here.
14
The position of the novelist engaged in writing a novel can only be indicated by a shocking exaggeration which is this: He is not much better than a medium in a trance.
Now of course such a statement calls for the most exact explanation. Nobody can give it. Such a statement calls for indisputable evidence. None exists. Such a statement, unexplained and unsupported by testimony, is a gross and unscientific assumption not even worthy to be damned by being called a hypothesis. You said it. Nevertheless, the thing’s so.
We, personally, having written a novel—or maybe two—know what we are talking about. The immense and permanent curiosity of people all over the planet who read books at all fixes itself upon the question, in respect of the novelist: “How does he write?” As Mary S. Watts remarks, that is the one thing no novelist can tell you. He doesn’t know himself. But though it is the one thing the novelist can’t tell you it is not one of those things that, in the words of Artemus Ward, no feller kin find out. Any one can find out by writing a novel.
And to write one you need little beyond a few personalities firmly in mind, a typewriter and lots of white paper. An outline is superfluous and sometimes harmful. Put a sheet of paper in the machine and write the title, in capital letters. Below, write: “By Theophrastus Such,” or whatever you happen unfortunately to be called or elect, in bad taste, to call yourself. Begin.
You will have the first few pages, the opening scene, possibly the first chapter, fairly in mind; you may have mental notes on one or two things your people will say. Beyond that you have only the haziest idea of what it will all be about. Write.