Fiction Writers on Fiction Writing / Advice, opinions and a statement of their own working methods by more than one hundred authors

by Unknown

It is impossible to compute the degree to which their art suffers in consequence. It may be a great deal. It may, in some cases, be very little, for after all, being human beings, they must have some kind of subconscious understanding of the general fundamental nature and purpose of their tools. But certainly their art does suffer, in degree varying with the individual, as a result of their lack of definite, clear-cut, conscious understanding of both their tools and their process. For they are working blindly to this extent. If a writer adopts a piece of another man's technique or finds one for himself and if it proves to suit his case, there may be no loss in that transaction itself, but he has added nothing to his ability to select a next piece of technique with understanding discrimination.

Whatever the degree of damage to the experienced writer, the harm is tremendous in the case of the beginner or comparative beginner. He looks at the work of others and finds many tools; he turns to books, teachers and courses for specific instructions and has tools handed to him, generally by the clothes-basketful. Each is for a specific purpose and neither the tools nor the purposes are correlated in accordance with any fundamental principle. No one can tell the specific purpose of any tool of technique with sufficient fullness and discrimination to cover its use in all cases, and the poor beginner is given no fundamental understanding whereby he can make intelligent application as the varying cases arise in his work. The results, registered in the unceasing flow of manuscripts across the editorial desks of magazines and book houses, are pathetic. What would be the results in law or medicine or teaching if they were practised without conscious and very definite knowledge of the fundamental principles upon which their rules are based?

The present chief obstacle to successful teaching of the art of writing is lack of correlation of the rules of technique to fundamental basic principles. The rules of technique have no other purpose than to facilitate and perfect expression. There can be no test of the success of expression except the person to whom one expresses—the reader. Technique will remain a rather vague and chaotic matter, with a corresponding difficulty in learning it, until the reader-test is applied to its rules to prove their soundness and to refer them back to the fundamental principles which alone can give the writer an understanding that will enable him really to assimilate his technique and to apply and modify a rule to fit each one of the myriad cases that will arise.

The answers to the next question and to some later questions of the questionnaire will give further insight into the nature and practical use of technique.

QUESTION V

Have you had a classroom or correspondence course on writing fiction? Books on it? To what extent did this help in the elementary stages? Beyond the elementary stages?

Answers

Bill Adams: No course of any sort.

Samuel Hopkins Adams: No technical course of any kind. Such books as I have looked into only served to befog my mind.