Ben Ames Williams: I rate technique highly. It seems to me a generalization from which there are few exceptions that with perfect technique any subject-matter can be transformed into a classic tale. My note-books are almost as full of articles of faith in my technical creed as they are of incident or description for later use in stories.
The most important single element of technique seems to me to be the introduction at every opportunity of commonplace details of daily life. To tell your reader that your characters get up at seven fifteen, take a shower, a shave, sing while they shave, put on their shoes, go down to breakfast.... These things lend, I think, a similitude of life to a story which can be had in no other way. It is the ability to do this in the highest degree, I think, which makes Tarkington's work so fine. If your hero and heroine wash dishes together, tell how they do it; hot water, soap-shaker, dry cloths. The reader will nod and say: "Exactly; I've done that myself. This fellow knows what he's writing about." And believe whatever else you have to tell.
Honore Willsie: I think technique is as valuable to the author as to the musician. It is to the story what the steel structure is to the sky-scraper.
H. C. Witwer: My feeling on technique is that it must obviously be present in some degree in all well-told stories, or let us say, in all stories acceptable to the better magazines. But I could not teach it and I doubt if it can be successfully taught. How many famous writers are graduates of such a course?
William Almon Wolff: The important thing to keep in mind about technique, it seems to me, is that it is a means to an end. Too many people think of it as an end in itself, which it can not be. These are the people who say that a writer who has broken their rules has not technique, or a bad technique. Rot! His technique is right if he has accomplished his purpose, which is to tell his story clearly and convincingly. What does it matter how he tells it? Technique is essential, indispensable—but its test must be a pragmatic one.
I think the reason for most failures though, is not technical but this—that the writer has nothing to tell. I remember what Freeman Tilden once told me:
"Very often I think a story is frightfully difficult, in a technical sense. I can't seem to get it done. And then I find out that the trouble is that I haven't a story—never did have one."
Edgar Young: In the widest meaning of the word technique is of great value.
Summary
Tabulating the above, out of 112 answerers we find 40 attaching extreme importance to technique, 45 taking a sort of middle ground, and 21 assigning it little or no importance. To the last may be added 3 who don't know the exact nature of technique but indicate that they assign slight value to it. Unclassified, 1; venturing no opinion, 2. To say that technique is not important in writing is to say that it is not important to know how. One can not write fiction at all without knowing how, without technique. Do 21 of our writers therefore not know how and do 45 of them consider not knowing how to be not extremely important? No, and as a matter of fact investigation would probably show that some of the 21 possess more technique than do some of the 40 who attach most importance to it.