Hapsburg Liebe: I dickered a little (dabbled, rather) with some so-called story doctors along at the beginning. I don't believe it helped much. I've always had to do things my own way (very likely it's usually the wrong way).
Romaine H. Lowdermilk: I don't know whether to be sorry or glad to admit I have had no special training. I suppose I am still in the elementary stage to a certain extent. I have purchased some books on story writing and the like and have long taken the —— [magazine] but can sum the results as more inspirational than anything else. I have learned more about the actual wants of editors from chance notes they have sent with rejected or semi-accepted manuscripts. The actual building of the story is more common sense than anything else and I have done what I have done by plain "bare-handed writing." Still, there is something wrong with this system, I know, for my best stories—those that appeal most to me and the ones I put the most into—have been rejected everywhere. Why is that? To me they are far better than many I have sold, still they don't suit any editor. The story is surely there and possibly if the editors knew how I love to revise they would mention what seemed the matter. Still, they haven't the time and don't care that much, I suppose. Possibly a professional critic could spot the trouble, but I doubt it. I haven't tried it. But I suppose each writer has the same trouble.
Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.: Outside of college rhetoric, I've had no instruction in fiction writing beyond the helpful letters of editors. Nor books, until after I had been writing for years. I can see that the books would have been a great help, possibly, had I had them in the elementary stages. But I was abroad and didn't happen to know about them.
Rose Macaulay: Never had them.
Crittenden Marriott: No to everything. Twelve years' newspaper work all over the world before I tried fiction.
Homer I. McEldowney: I have had a couple of courses in the short story, under a mighty fine scout—Doc Weirick, one of the best in the English department here at Illinois—a good-natured, long suffering, able critic, and a fertile source of interesting information. I've got a lot out of the past year of hobnobbing with him. The course helped considerably, first, because it made us get down with nose to the key-board and knock out words, great stacks of them; and second, because there was a good man in charge, with ready and worth-while criticism of yarns submitted, and a real knowledge of what to read in the course. We "learned the way to promotion and pay," as Kipling has it, not fundamentally from the pages of a book, but from writing.
Ray McGillivray: I took aboard huge hunks of literary fodder in college, going the pace that killed—originality—through every course, from Old English to a postgrad with Barrett Wendell. Then, after applying this undigested knowledge to such pursuits as manual labor at Sears, Roebuck's, mixing ruby champagne cocktails at Mouquin's, and cutting up a cadaver at Medical School (ugh!), I reached, by devious byways of labor and loafing, a post as sub-sub-editor on one of the most unconventional national-circulation magazines in the world. I had contributed a few personal narrative articles, and needed a job.... The editor, a spunky Irishman (gosh, come to think of it, I believe he claimed to be English!) jumped all over my "lit'ry allusions." He appeared abruptly before me one day, thrust two photos under my nose, and bade me assimilate an eyeful. I obeyed. One picture showed a Japanese trench outside Port Arthur. Headless bodies, detached limbs and blobs of entrails were festooned about the broken entanglements. It was brutal, terrible, but it depicted war and death. The second photo also dealt with death, but differently. Six men were carrying a draped coffin, in which rested a man who in his lifetime had won a way into the heart of a nation. There was nothing in the picture save the varied expressions of restrained, sincere sorrow on the faces of the dead man's six friends.
"This trench picture," quoth my boss, "is Journalism. This other is Art. Now, to hell with Art!" By that he meant that henceforth I was to tie a jingling can to my Aristophanes, my Tacitus—yea, even my Bullfinch and my finchless Bull. And I did. You never would have suspected how many miles of galley-proof a Socrates-Six could cover with five cylinders stripped out of the chassis!
Helen Topping Miller: I had been selling short stories for about twelve years before I read any books on the subject. I have never found a book from which I felt that I received any material benefit. Many books have inspired me—but none of them ever helped me in the actual work of writing.
Thomas Samson Miller: Never had a lesson of any kind from any one in story writing. Don't believe in them. One's got to learn how to write by writing; to learn what not to do and what to do by experience. My only study was to take a short story that appealed to me in a magazine and live with it; cut out all other reading. Analyzed its plot, its characterization. Wrote out every word written in it about a certain character to see just how the author got the character across. Wrote the story from memory. Read it so far, put it down, then tried to write the rest out of my head.