In the following each writer naturally answers according to his own particular definition of technique, only a small minority expressing any doubts as to its exact meaning, but the general conception is sufficiently common to all for the purposes of our questionnaire:
Answers
Bill Adams: I do not know what technique is. I have bronchial asthma.
Samuel Hopkins Adams: That it is one writer's meat and another writer's poison.
Paul L. Anderson: An author can not have too fine a technique, any more than a machinist can have too fine tools; technique is a tool, and the better it is the better the work that can be done with it. But either artist, author or mechanic can become so interested in his tools that he over-elaborates his work—authors and artists do this more often than machinists!
William Ashley Anderson: An author ought constantly to try to master his technique in the hope of reaching a point where his ideas may be put into form without hesitating or wasting effort over the means of expression.
H. C. Bailey: I rate technique high but second to knowledge of men and the world.
Ralph Henry Barbour: Technique is something you ought to have and not be aware of the fact. When you know you have it you become a pest. It's like happiness. Being happy is fine, but when you make a cult of it and become "glad, glad, glad!" folks will run away from you. To the beginner I'd say, "Don't worry." Write your story and let technique take care of itself. Let it go hang, for that matter. Paraphrasing a chap who could write pretty good fiction himself, "the story's the thing."
Frederick Orin Bartlett: Technique to be valuable should be unconscious. The best way to get it is to be born with it. The next best way is to absorb it through the work of those already masters of it. The poorest way is to study it deliberately and practise it consciously.
Nalbro Bartley: It is essential and a most admirable thing to possess it, but to my mind, technique can be dispensed with if one has to choose between the red-blooded story and the purely mechanical perfection of transcribing it.