When I read stories my imagination sinks into a profound stupor. Everything seems too dull and tame; when I write, everything picks up, life grows gay again, and I have the deuce of a good time.
No, I don't consider them "tools of my trade." I don't consider I have a trade nor any tools. The first novel I ever wrote was because I couldn't find a novel that I enjoyed reading; the last one I write will be written for the same reason.
Booth Tarkington: I shall have to leave these answers pretty indefinite. The answer to each differs with every story. As a reader every one, I imagine, has, when a village church is mentioned, the image of some village church he has seen—or I should say, more probably, that is, a thin haze of a fragment of some village church.
An author forming too many images of course fatigues the reader.
W. C. Tuttle: I have always been afraid of paying too much attention to other authors' work, for fear that I might absorb some of their traits. A few years ago I was a newspaper cartoonist and I have often found myself unconsciously using another artist's technique. It was not because I desired to do this, but because I admired his style. Perhaps we are all copyists, as far as that is concerned, and I believe it would be easy to adopt some favorite author's style of writing.
There are certain kinds of stories which lure me on to long periods of reading. Give me a tale of the days of old, with plumed knights, stage-coaches drifting over muddy roads, tavern brawls, etc., and I'm useless until the end of the story. I can fairly smell the tap-room, hear the rattle of dice and the clash of swords. It is more like a moving picture than a tale of fiction.
I often envy the writers of these tales. To me this is "real" fiction. My mind sometimes flashes back to the author and I wonder if he enjoyed the writing as I did the reading.
I think that in many cases I improve upon the author's description. If it is a coach team I can see in a flash just the size and color of the horses, the general appearance of the coach, the contour of the road. It appears like a moving picture, if you know what I mean. Such detail as the jolting of the coach, the creaking of harness; little details that no author would stop to describe, I see and hear them in my own story, but would never think to burden the reader with such small detail. Yet, I wonder if it isn't the little detail that makes a good story.
Somehow I always draw a mental picture of the author at work on that certain story, and I wonder if he planned it all out before putting it on paper. Did he know what the ending would be? Where and how did he get the idea in the first place?
It appears to me that an author must see things in color, with detail clear, in order to convince the reader. A blurred image will not reproduce clear. I have managed to cover a bad piece of drawing with technique, but I have never seen a bad piece of writing that could be concealed in a mass of words. When my mental picture becomes foggy I quit writing until it clears. At times I have two or more stories under way, and when one gets blurred I take another. I have never found them all out of focus, and it has saved me hours of waste time.