Short Story-Writing: An Art or a Trade?

by N. Bryllion Fagin

There is more than a modicum of depression, then, in a contemplative sweep of the literary product we are instrumental in creating. Even the most complacent members in my profession must find it so. For one thing, the very lack of variety in the finished product we so painstakingly cultivate must occasionally become irksome, if nothing more serious. Analyzing stories by a hundred different writers, both successful and would-be, and all of these stories with one puny soul must in the end become a very tiresome routine indeed.

It is true that we are not masters of the situation. Who are we to set up standards and direct the footsteps of the young toward them? We are but the interpreters of existing standards and the formulators and expositors of ways that lead to the meeting of the exaction imposed by them. But if an uneasy thought sometimes, at dusk, buzzes into our incautious ear that the existing standards lead to unregenerate mediocrity, should we not pause and ask if perpetuating these standards is for the good of our souls or even for the work we love (and a great many of us really do love our work!)? Perhaps a revision of our texts—if not a bonfire—might result in fewer stories but more inspiring ones. Perhaps the demolition of magazine standards might result in the birth of literary standards. As it is, should we not face the truth that all the masters that have ever manipulated pen or typewriter have disregarded our standards and set up new ones of their own? They may not have gone to the extent of a Kipling who wrote to a beginner that “No man’s advice is the least benefit in our business, and I am a very busy man. Keep on trying until you either fail or succeed.” They all have looked for and accepted intelligent advice of one kind or another—from eminent contemporaries and from those that had preceded them. But they have not slavishly copied and imitated. They have not felt that any advice had the power of divine commandment. No real artist could be expected to create anything in the environment of the rubrics and inhibitions with which we have surrounded him.

All the blame that can be heaped upon the public and our magazine editors does not absolve the literary clergy from the share of harm they have contributed to the existing state of the American short story. The cheapest form of advertising and the most erudite and conscientious of our textbooks combine in the creation of a peculiar psychology that a story is some concoction that any one might learn to make up by mere exertion. Here is a typical advertisement appearing on the back page of a current magazine:

HOW I MADE $350.00 ON ONE SHORT STORY And How I Learned To Write, In Only a Few Evenings, Stories That Actually Sell Themselves.

Then follows a full-page testimony of some one who has made a great success of story-writing by spending the small sum of $5 on the course advertised. The course itself was prepared by a leading professor in a leading eastern university and whose name is well-known in the literary world. And almost every important textbook on the subject abounds in statements such as the following taken from one of the most intelligent works: “the events which go to make up a fictional plot are artificially arranged so as to bring about a particular result,”[29] besprinkled with numerous analogies to the various trades and professions and how long it takes for the average apprentice to become an accomplished artizan. The psychology of tricks and twists and points is foisted upon the writer, the reader, the editor. By constant repetition we ourselves begin to acquire it, if we had it not when we started....

And yet this short volume is not wholly pessimistic. I would not want to leave that impression. For as already stated there have always been writers with a real touch of divine afflatus who have never paid any attention either to our psychology or to our tricks, or to our inhibitions. “Every fine artist in American fiction will be seen to have discarded both the technical and moral pattern of the magazine tradition and to have developed one of his own.”[30] And the number of these heretics is growing—much faster than some of us are aware. They suffer obscurity and often poverty as all great heretics always have suffered, but they have the fortitude of their calling. Let us listen to the confession of one of them:

“... However, you know that the short-story form has become among us very much what I call corrupt. Publishers of short stories sought what they called the story with a kick in it. Plots for short stories were found and about these plots our writers sought to hang a semblance of reality to life. The plot, however, being uppermost in the writers’ minds, what we got was a snappy, entertaining, artificial thing, forgotten completely an hour after it was read.

“Perhaps because of a native laziness, I found myself unable to think up plots. To try to do so bored me unspeakably. On the other hand, there were all about me human beings living their lives and in the process of doing so creating drama....

“I have tried to clutch at it and reproduce in writing some of that drama....”[31]

When the problem involved is what to tell, the sharpening of the faculty of seeing what is worth while, the problem of how to tell becomes of secondary importance. In fact the same literary heretic believes that “An impulse needs but be strong enough to break through the lack of technical training ... technical training might well destroy the impulse....”[32]