Farnham Bishop: Wrote my first school "composition" at the age of ten, my last one at eighteen, all in the same school, under the same teachers, who encouraged creative work, criticized sanely, and banged English grammar into me in the good old-fashioned way. Wrote for and later edited the school paper. Also turned out a lot of wild kid stuff in collaboration with another chap, and illustrated by Dwight Franklin, for private circulation only.
My pal died just as we were about to enter Harvard together. His death, and a douse of purely negative and rather supercilious criticism from an overworked instructor in Freshman English took all the fun out of writing. By the time I began to find myself at Harvard, I was in the Law School. Failed there, swung over into the Graduate School, took English 5 under Dean Briggs, English 2 (Shakespeare) under Professor Kittredge, and a course on Milton under Professor Nielson—all three the livest of live wires. Worked my way through an extra year just to take Professor Baker's English 47—the course on playwriting.
The school and graduate school courses helped me much more than the undergraduate work in college, mainly, I think, because of the difference in the personality of the teachers. I learned much more from the men—the pick of the men—who taught me than I did from the textbooks.
Algernon Blackwood: No. I began writing at the age of thirty-six because I could not keep it back. I preferred an evening thus engaged to any pleasure, social, theatre, music or anything else. After a day of hard, uncongenial business, the imaginative release on paper was my real recreation.
Max Bonter: I have never read any literature on fiction writing.
Katharine Holland Brown: Some classroom work, which was very valuable in elementary work. And, too, the classroom insistence on system and unity and all the virtues has always been valuable—when it has been heeded.
F. R. Buckley: I once took half a course (at the age of eighteen)—in short story writing (at a university). I had already written and sold several yarns. That half-course killed me dead for five years. I was self-conscious, and instead of telling a story I was inclined to wonder whether the climacteric was all right, or if the anti-climax had been put out-of-doors for the night. I now avoid anybody who wants to talk nomenclature as being much more harmful than the devil, and inexpressibly worse company.
Prosper Buranelli: I read two books on short story writing. Got a couple of very elementary ideas. Got practical training writing Sunday stories under a discerning editor. That counted. If a plumber serves an apprenticeship to learn his trade—is a writer's craft any less exacting in the matter of skill?
Thompson Burtis: I have never had a course on writing fiction. I have read one book on it. All the help I ever got from it, as far as I can remember, is to have it impressed on my mind that a story must build up to a climax, which I believe I knew before. I had sold stories before I ever read the book. However, I believed it helped me a little at the start. Beyond the elementary stages, I can not see how it has helped me at all.
George M. A. Cain: Never took any such courses. Never learned anything from a book on the subject. I am strong for the idea of a correspondence school of writing, financed by publishers, free to pupils, handled by a man or men of real editorial experience or wide variety in authorship, ready and willing to be brutally frank with the hopeless, and capable of pointing out certain technical facts to those who can submit something of promise. Such a fact I am going to mention under XI. I do not see how any outside help can carry beyond the most elementary stages of actual writing for publication, unless it might be in the "trade journal" line of market information.