Chester L. Saxby: I put too much store by it. I warm to a delicately sculptured story, a thing of shape and beauty apart from the plot. But I strive to break myself of this weakness. The true technique is directness almost crude, restraint of emotion, fullness of fact with scant explanation. "Look into your heart and write" is a mistake of which I'm the victim. Heart serving mind—that's writing. Jack London had the secret.
Barry Scobee: Technique is certainly necessary for any writer. It is the letter, and of course the letter of itself avails nothing. There must be the spirit. But the spirit must have technique. In my elementary work I learned something of technique. I am not aware any more of how much I do use, until, as on only two or three occasions, I have looked over a raw beginner's manuscript. But the book learning on fiction writing is a part of me despite my unawareness of it. And I learn more all the time, but I haven't studied short story writing in three or four years. But in my opinion technique is as essential in this as in any trade or profession.
R. T. M. Scott: I just looked up "technique" in four dictionaries:—Worcester's (1887), Collins' (not dated), Murray's (1908) and Hill's Vest Pocket French-English (1898). The word wasn't there. What does it mean?
Robert Simpson: Technique, to my mind, is of the first importance. True, a man may write a perfectly good story without an ounce of real dyed-in-the-wool technique in his system, but the same story, technically correct, would be a much bigger and better story in every way. No artist can possibly do justice to his art without a practical understanding of technique.
Arthur D. Howden Smith: I find myself constantly valuing it more and more.
Theodore Seixas Solomons: My feeling on technique is that, like those bodies of it, so to speak, which make up text works on the subject, it is "after the fact." Like grammar, they undertake to examine writing (speech) and tell us facts they ascertain about its structure. But the structure—the story, the English speech—antedates the analysis, having been formed unerringly in adjustment to the laws of receptivity and response in the auditor. Both grammar and expositions of literary technique have been too empirical to be of much assistance in guiding the formation of speech practises and fiction practises. Something more fundamentally psychological must be devised before either will be of much actual help.
Raymond S. Spears: Two things are indispensable in my stories: a certain group of data and a certain form of technique. Editors usually look for technique, and often don't know it when they see it; I refer, of course, to simple plot, (Aristotle's definition), requiring complex plot only. The truest, highest, broadest things I do are commonly simple plot, with beginning, continuity, end, but without complexity. Most editors say "Fine—but no plot!" of this type. So, to live, I have to complicate. Of course, technique is utterly indispensable though it may be unconscious.
Norman Springer: I think the writer must learn how to use "the tools of his trade." If he is to make the most of his material, he must study technique; or acquire it in some way, by absorption, or anyhow. From my own observation, I believe there is a danger in technique—it lies in worshiping it, in placing it before the story, in making the form assume more importance than the substance. The oldest error in the world, I suppose. Think of all the writers who are masters of technique, wonderful technicians of language, and who are empty, with nothing to say. They've lost their guts getting a style. Certainly a writer must acquire technique—just as a painter acquires skill with a brush, or a bricklayer with a trowel.
Julian Street: There must be technique, but technique is not so important as character or story. Joseph Conrad is a wretched technician, but is a big man with a big sense of character and story and a powerful picture-maker. But he is clearly always tangled up in method. His trick of having a man tell his story instead of telling it himself is a great error—an error into which the author of If Winter Comes fell, in that book, when he did not take the reader to the court-room for his "big scene" but had a character tell about it.
That is like the horse race that occurs "off stage" in the theater. The actors pretend to look through glasses and shout "Now they're at the quarter!"—"Salvatan wins!" But we—the audience—don't see the horses running. True, that method is sometimes inescapable, but Conrad could often avoid it, and Hutchinson could easily have avoided it in his delightful novel. If Winter Comes deserves its success, but it would have been a much finer book but for certain revelations of absolute ineptitude.