Charles Tenney Jackson: As to your question on technique, I assure you, in reading, it is everything to me. I will lose interest in any tale at once when I see it is not well written. Plots seem so dolefully commonplace, they are all ragged to tatters; and if an author can not present his stuff with some attempt, at least, to distinction, to personality, I can't go him much. The setting, the color, the style and material are more than plot, which will wander away into unrealities and commonplaceness in no time if not worked upon by sincere discrimination. A plot is no more than a dead dog which a good taxidermist can make to stand up stuffed so artfully that you believe it might wag its tail. If you can get it to bark—good! You're a genius, but after all the bark and not the dog is the important thing, and the art of it.
Frederick J. Jackson: I don't know. I have known brainier men than I hope to be fail dismally when tackling the fiction game because they had stuffed themselves so full of technique that it stuck out all over their stuff. University fiction course professors hold technique up as a sort of bogy. They overemphasize its importance, in my estimation. The word itself scares many beginners. Why don't the profs come down out of the clouds and use a simpler word, namely, mechanics? I look upon a story as a matter of mechanics. Certain set elements make a story. Conjunction of these elements, plastered up with new stuff, or a new way of portraying them, makes a salable story. I have made speeches before journalism classes, classes in short story writing, one of them the extension course of the University of California. I quoted to this effect: "A story is never so dead as when buried in words." I emphasized it. I scandalized several admirers of certain well known writers, one sonorous, heavy, wordy gentleman in particular when his name was mentioned, by stating frankly that even while I envied his vocabulary, his characterization, his color, I always passed up his stuff because it wandered too far afield, because he lacked plot, or because the plot was submerged so deep in words that I could not pump it out. A story with me is a matter of mechanics, but I do my best to eliminate visible traces, and above all to make the story human.
Mary Johnston: It has great value, but content comes first.
John Joseph: Generally speaking I divide all stories into two classes. One class I call a painting, the other a mechanical drawing. The painting will live and be read from generation to generation. The other will be read and thrown aside and forgotten. You can't lay off a painting with compass and try-square. For that reason the more rules a writer is compelled to keep his eye on, the less able he will be to express the thing he wants to express, the less chance he will have to achieve that elusive, intangible, subtle something that distinguishes the story that is a painting from the one that is merely a mechanical drawing.
One of the greatest afflictions of mankind is his tendency to jump to conclusions, and to assume something to be true when he does not, as a matter of fact, know whether it is true or not. Theorizing is perhaps the principal avocation of mankind, and to the chronic theorizer facts mean nothing. Add to this the curse of precedent and the getting into ruts which is often miscalled "policy," and you have the cause of half the failures in every walk of life. Too, independent thinking is the rarest of all achievements. All of which means that in my opinion the editor who will get out in the highways and byways and find out who is reading magazines and why they read a particular magazine will get the surprise of his life.
I have had this writing bug in my bonnet ever since I was a kid. Never till lately have I had time, or tried to write for publication, but I have made a very careful study of readers during all these years. I am quite certain that I have quizzed at least five thousand persons as to their likes and dislikes in the matter of fiction, always with the view to some day having a try at it myself.
I think that the value of "structure" or "technique" is vastly overrated by the editor generally. That is, if he is trying to please the largest possible number of readers. Of course if he is merely trying to get out a perfect magazine, from a literary standpoint, that is a different matter. The reader—the general reader—cares not a whoop about these things. He demands just one thing in his fiction, and no more: The story must absorb him, and that's all there is to it.
Lloyd Kohler: A knowledge of technique is essential.
Harold Lamb: Technique? It must be all-important, but if you think about it too much, you are apt to make a mess of things.
Sinclair Lewis: I don't know what this question means.