Hapsburg Liebe: My general feeling as to the value of technique? One should study and cultivate it. I haven't been able to do it, so far.
Romaine H. Lowdermilk: Fortunately for fiction, technique can not ride it to death. Good fiction, especially adventure and humor, are to a certain extent immune from technique. Of course technique, properly applied, is necessary and used in every story whether knowingly or not. Still, it is nothing in itself, to my notion.
Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.: Technique is so often over-stressed that beginners are in danger of thinking manner comes first and forgetting matter entirely. Have something to say first; then try to say it. If you don't get it said, then go to a technician to find out what's wrong. So, little by little, you will get the technique, and in a way that it becomes a part of you. Like hydrogen in the air, technique can't be rated too highly, but taken alone it's dangerous—to the beginner. A natural born story teller intuitively tells his yarns without knowing a single rule of technique. But natural born or not, I'm in two minds if it would not be as advantageous for all beginners to tell stories a year or two before they tackle technique at all. Then, when they do, technique will help them, and may not hurt them at all.
Rose Macaulay: Technique means, to me, the whole art of writing, so of course I regard it as valuable to writers.
Crittenden Marriott: Wish I had it.
Homer I. McEldowney: Perhaps I overrate the importance of technique, but I believe that it is the fundamental factor in success. In my mind, it comes before plot. I have read a good many stories with next to no plot at all—but they were "put across," and I enjoyed them. And I have read half through more stories and chucked them aside—even though their plots might have been regular knockouts, had I stuck around to see.
Ray McGillivray: I believe technique strictly a minor consideration—after true interest and sympathy and punch are achieved. And of these, punch is most important. No one I know—and Rascoe, Mencken, Fanny Butcher and some others drop into this honored (?) class—so far has stopped to pick to pieces Growth of the Soil to find out whether or not it violates rules of novel technique. No boxer lately has made more than a four-round study of the question as to whether Mr. Dempsey utilizes crude or polished technique in his art. Champions, both. Both have the punch, and a thoroughgoing sincerity about landing it at precisely the right place. Technique, you say? Perhaps, but if so, technique is a quality inherent in worth and can not be achieved at all in a story which simply is written according to a ruled line drawn on graph paper. For my reading or my writing give me sincerity, sympathy and punch, and I'll let the French fiction fans worry about the mold into which any tale is cast.
Helen Topping Miller: As a teacher of technique, I realize the value of it to the beginner in arriving early at a certain mechanical facility in writing. Too devoted a study of methods, however, I think has a tendency to weaken the self-confidence of a writer and to hamper and stifle the imagination. I have never studied technique, except in teaching it to others. I had become a contributor to The Saturday Evening Post before I had ever studied the subject at all. My advice to beginners is to learn technique—and then forget it.
Thomas Samson Miller: It can be overdone, but Lord spare us the eeny meeny miney moists. Some stories read like Turkish prayer wheels. Conrad has an English that entrances, but has no idea at all of plot construction. Browning—Robert Browning—wrote the best short stories, in monologue. Fra Lippo Lippo, Andrea del Sarto, etc., are perfect short stories of the theme kind—theme and human interest.
Anne Shannon Monroe: There's a right way to do everything, and the wrong isn't worth doing. I believe in revising till you sweat blood—but I can't afford the time always to do it. One must live. When one realizes what it means to put a piece of matter before the eyes of the world—the typing, reading by editors, setting up, proof-reading—hammering and pounding a thing into a fixed place, it seems nothing short of criminal to do all this work—and make a place for a thing that has not reached its highest point of perfection—to materialize a lot of crudity. Every writer should go through the printing trades, know the publishing business from a to izzard,—and then I think he would feel more keenly the actual crime in putting out something that isn't worth all this putting into form and shape. Imagine setting up, in the composing room, all the mistakes of the careless writer—deliberately setting up mistakes! It's a fright!