Ruth Sawyer: Neither.
Chester L. Saxby: I have read books on writing, but I found all of them vague and general or else too elementary. I have had a fair education in English, and I have the rudiments of an imagination for the English to work upon. The link between is for the most part a judgment of values (such as it is) gleaned in the college of hard knocks and nine danged slaving years of schooling in that institution, slaving and heart-rupture. But in beginning, books on writing and even courses certainly have their value. I've had the correspondence drill—with editors who've stood me up and knocked me down. But that's rough on the editors, if everybody does it.
Barry Scobee: Before I was twenty, or about that time, I took a course in short-story writing and newspaper also. Don't remember what school of correspondence. I may have acquired a few basic principles; it probably did me some good. I never had classroom instruction in writing. I have studied a dozen books on the subject of fiction writing. At first, for a year or two, I struggled along without even knowing there was such a thing as books on the subject, or without ever talking to a single person in the world who knew the first thing about writing. Then The Editor began to help me, and various books, especially on plot and, I think, Price on the Drama. These were a tremendous help to me in the preliminary stages. A fuller answer will be found under VII.
R. T. M. Scott: I have never taken a course of any kind in fiction writing. I have breezed through a few books on short stories but I have never studied them. Most of the stories which I have sold have violated the rules laid down in these books. I am still in the elementary stage, however, and perhaps, some day, I shall be able to stick to the rules and still sell the stories.
Robert Simpson: I have had no classroom or correspondence course. Neither, as it happens, have I ever read any books on writing fiction. This was more a matter of chance than anything else. I've learned most of what I know of the technique of story writing from writing "bad ones" and finding out why they were bad; from the good advice of an editor or two, and from simple, cold-blooded analysis of my own and other men's work. This is a long and tedious process, but it has the advantage of being thorough if one is built for it. If I may say so, the method of study is largely up to the make-up of the individual, but, in agreement with a certain advertisement, "there are no short-cuts to quality."
Arthur D. Howden Smith: No.
Theodore Seixas Solomons: I never had a course. I have studied, or rather carefully read, one or two books on writing, and numerous articles. I think that the idea of unity has been the main derivative to me. The rest I usually saw to be true enough, almost axiomatically, from general considerations of art, but I do not think they helped—probably more because I did not actually study such writings than because they are incapable of lending real help. I do not see how a proper study of them in connection with exercise in writing can fail to be beneficial. Yet such works, for the most part, are analyses of the reasons for things which must be understood instinctively and by experience, and then acquired, before the reasons make such appeal.
Raymond S. Spears: No literary course except reading, deliberately undertaken for certain purpose, as reading Ruskin to learn how to describe.
I've read and tried to profit by practical books, handbooks, books on authorship, writers' biographies, etc. But I find my own view-point and methods are nowhere described or much helped by experience of others.
Norman Springer: No. I once tried a university extension course in play writing. It was silly. Of course, I read all the books I could find on the subject of story writing. They didn't help much. They told me something about the mechanics of a story (though even this information was usually buried beneath mountains of pompous academic phraseology), but they never gave me a clue to the solution of the more important question that worries the beginner—"How can I infuse spirit into the story; how can I make it live?" This questionnaire is really the first attempt I have encountered to get behind the mechanics.