The modern writer

by Sherwood Anderson

The commercialization of the art follows as a perfectly natural result.

The popular writer is then just the man of talent who is willing to sell his talent to the business man who publishes the magazine or to the book publisher after large sales and the more talented he is the better he gets paid. There is a job to be done and he does it, keeping his eye always on the main chance, that is to say on the great unthinking buying public. His position is pretty secure. In America we are in the habit of thinking of the thing that succeeds as good, and therefore the man whose books sell by the hundreds of thousands is looked up to with respect. If success is the standard of measurement how can we do anything else?

It happens, however, that the arts are not democratic, never have been, and probably never will be. There is a nigger in the woodpile. The ordinary standards of measurement do not quite work. We all have a vague feeling there is something very much wrong. There is.

Let us look at the situation a moment. If you are a man conducting a magazine that has a circulation of hundreds of thousands, or if you are a movie magnate owning a business in which there is a huge initial investment, you have to be pretty careful about treading on toes, do you not? Your readers or patrons must not be offended or driven away. You are appealing, must of necessity appeal, to a large number of people, and among any large number of people there will be Catholics, Protestants, Christian Scientists, believers in the Garden of Eden, Darwinians, suburban housewives in large numbers, puritans, moralists, all kinds of people with all kinds of notions of the good and bad.

Very well then—if you are a writer intent on catching and holding the fancy of the crowd you have got to have a technique. You have got to become the artful dodger, have got to invent or learn the trick of creating in the mind of your audience the sensations of terror, delight, amusement, suspense, without in any way actually touching the reality of lives.

At the county fairs back in Ohio when I was a boy there used to be a kind of faker who went about with a machine. Into this machine he put a pound of sugar and started it going. It whirled about with great rapidity and produced a kind of cloud-like candy concoction that looked tremendously inviting. A pound of sugar would make a bushel of the stuff, but when you had bought a bag of it and put a whole handful into your mouth it melted away to nothing.

That is in reality the effect desired in the manufacture of any popular art. It is the effect produced in reality by all the successful men, by the realists who pretend to give you photographic reproductions of life itself, by the respectable fine writers of the more conservative magazines and publishing houses, as well as the men who fill the pages of the cheap adventure magazines, the men called by the newspaper fraternity “the bunk shooters.” You must seem to give a lot while really giving nothing. No one must be hurt. No one must be offended. No one must be made to think or feel. Keep it up and you will get rich.

To actually touch people’s lives is the unforgivable sin. Both thinking and feeling are dangerous exercises, and besides people do not like them.

You have got to get a special technique but if you are a writer and can do it successfully you will be mighty well paid. Why, there are any number of writers in America who receive from two to three or even five thousand dollars for single short stories and if they are lucky and also sell movie rights they often get two or three times that much. Writers of the popular sort often make incomes of bankers or brokers, live during the summer in villas in Maine or in the California Carmel Highlands, drive expensive motor cars, own yachts and have a simply splendid time apparently and never during a long lifetime make a single contribution to the art of writing or write anything that a living soul would ever think of reading after the writer has died or his temporary vogue has passed.

I hope you understand, however, that all this has nothing at all to do with the art of writing, that is to say in any sense in which real writers of the world, men who have cared something about their craft have always thought of it. These men have no more to do with the art of writing than the average American movie star has to do with the art of acting or the men who make the girls’ heads you see on the covers of our American magazines have to do with the art of painting. It is all a kind of special thing. You live in San Francisco and write dialect stories concerning an imaginary kind of people who live in a Dutch settlement in the Pennsylvania hills, or you live in a New York hotel and write stories about cowboys or heroic lumberjacks. It is totally unnecessary to know life, and in fact it will be better for you to let life alone. Life, you see, is a complex delicate thing. Anything may happen in life. We all know that. People hardly ever do as we think they should. There are no plot short stories in life. All the clever tricks by which effects are to be got on the printed page are in reality a selling out of ourselves. If it is your purpose to live in a pasteboard world you have got to avoid storms. There is always that huge, comfortable, self-satisfied American audience made up of all kinds of people with little prejudices, hates and fears that must not be offended. To know men and women, to be in the least sympathetic with them in their actual trials and struggles is a handicap. If it is your desire to be that kind of a writer, to grow rich and be successful by writing and if you have a natural talent that can be made to serve your purpose, stay just as far away as possible from any real thinking or feeling about actual men and women. Stay in the pasteboard world. Believe in your heroic cowboys and lumberjacks. Go to the movies all you can. Read the magazines. Go to the short story schools and learn the bag of tricks. Spend your time thinking up plots for stories and never by any chance let the plots grow naturally out of the lives and the hopes, joys and the sufferings of the people you are writing about. That is the road to success.