T. S. Stribling: Without technique a writer is lost, but I think it should be subconscious, just as one's feeling for English rhythm and the picturesque effect of words is subconscious.
Booth Tarkington: The same as Tennyson's: "It's not what we say, but how we say it; but the fools don't know that."
W. C. Tuttle: I believe that technique is the greater part of a fiction story—and the hardest to master.
Lucille Van Slyke: If by technique you mean facility—I'd say it was immensely valuable to those who can grab it—I never could—writing gets harder and harder the older I get.
Atreus von Schrader: Technique is valuable in that it does away with hit-or-miss writing. The author who knows his technique will know when a story is a story, and why.
T. Von Ziekursch: I am hardly competent to judge.
Henry Kitchell Webster: If there is such a thing as a positive technique, I do not know it. I have been writing stories for the past quarter-century, and I don't know how to do it. I have learned, in that twenty-five years, an immense number of ways not to do it. I can sit all day rejecting seductive-looking devices as they occur to me,—sometimes because I can see just what the snare is that they are spreading for me; sometimes because nothing more than instinct bids me beware of them—and when a real, honest, eighteen-carat, sound-to-the-core story comes along I think I have learned to recognize it three times, perhaps, in five. What technique I have managed to acquire, then, after laborious years, is almost wholly negative, and I've learned to be thankful even for that.
G. A. Wells: Many writers (the majority of them it seems to me) get by without technique. That is, they are not consciously aware of the fact that they have technique. That is, in the highest form. Walpole, Galsworthy and perhaps Richard Washburn Child, are deliberate technologists. That is to say (as their work appears to me) they are purposely aware of the rules of writing during the entire process of writing. Technique shows in every line they set down. The contrary of this is what I mean when I say that most writers are unaware of the fact that they have technique. Galsworthy never forgets the rules. He would never wittingly express himself in a manner that did not conform with the highest form of technique. Gilbert Chesterton and, I think, H. G. Wells are of like caliber. I think the writer who leaves conscious consideration of technique out of the question predominates.
But there is this much about it—no writer can produce first-class work (literature as the term is strictly applied) until he has fully mastered technique. The better the architect the better the structure. The architect who does not understand wind pressures, tensile strengths, compression, torque, weight stress and the other values of construction can never design a perfect structure. The same way with a writer. A low grade of technique produces a low grade of literature. I rank technique very high. Possibly my respect for it comes of the lack.
William Wells: Oh, Lord!