Because of this I do not hesitate to indict the entire present system of teaching the writing of fiction. That system, common to practically all colleges, correspondence courses, special teachers and books dealing with the subject, consists of seizing the beginner or comparative beginner, leading him to the dining-table and forcing down his throat at one sitting more food than he can digest in ten weeks.
Naturally, acute and often chronic indigestion results. In a few months or a year they feed him more technique than he will be able to digest in five years, if ever. The result is an appalling injury to his creative possibilities—an injury from which in the large majority of cases there is never a complete recovery and too often never even a partial one. The workman is crushed by his tools. Individuality is killed or aborted by the mere means for its expression. Sometimes they talk to him about "preserving his individuality," but they kill it just the same.
I do not base my charge on a theory. For more than a score of years as editor on half a dozen fiction magazines I've had the results of this teaching thrust under my eyes in an unending flow of its results—stories often perfect as to the formal rules of technique, but all merely mechanical constructions without a breath of life. As one writer has expressed it, these stories are an endless procession of Fords, each complete in all its parts, well built according to a plan, but all of them only collections of machinery and all exactly alike. No individuality, no expression of anything not expressed a million times before, no art. Just mechanics.
The cause is evident—more technique gobbled down than can be assimilated, so many tools piled on that individuality is crushed beneath the load. If proof is needed it can be found by applying the remedy. When one of these crushed, aborted writers discovers the seeming cause or has it shown to him, casts overboard all his hampering technique and creates freely, the results prove the diagnosis correct.
He can not afford permanently to abandon technique or the acquisition of technique, any more than a man can afford permanently to give up eating, but he can give up biting off more than he can digest.
Omitting from consideration writers who lack sufficient ability ever to succeed, most writers who fail do so because they write under a strain, artificially, mechanically. They write this way because, from instructions or from fiction itself, they have taken on more technique than they can digest or master. Self-expression becomes impossible. Individuality itself is stunted, buried alive or killed outright.
Experienced writers too often suffer from the same trouble. How many writers can you recognize from their stories if their names are covered up? So pronounced an individuality in their work may not be considered a necessity of good art, but, to present the situation more liberally, do you not find the book and magazine fiction of to-day for the most part very much cut from the same monotonous pattern or half-dozen patterns? Give to all writers the same material and plot and the resulting stories will for the most part be so much alike that any one of them would serve fairly well for all. Only the minority will turn out stories with real individuality.
A distinction should be drawn, of course, between really individualized creations and stories individualized only by mannerisms or affectations of style, which may or may not be really individual but are only surface phenomena. American present-day fiction reeks with these surface tricks—to the detriment of real art and of appreciation of real art.
One very particularly marked tendency toward degeneracy in our literature is the growing tendency to decorate a story with purely surface cleverness. Instead of expressing his material in the language that best conveys its meaning and spirit, a writer pretty well lets his real material shift for itself and seeks for language that in itself will allure and charm the reader. To him style means only an opportunity for parading his ability for quaint or taking phrase, glittering aphorism, cynical superiority, general sophistication. All these are useful tools if used in proper place, but writers of this type use them without discrimination. The result is a paste jewel that pleases many readers, but the result is nothing that even approximates literature. Ignore this glittering tinsel and look beneath. Generally you will find no characterization, no real portrayal of life, no anything that makes real literature. Sometimes a plot and often a situation, but the rest is emptiness. Often the glitter is a true product of individuality, but the individuality isn't worth putting on paper as literature. These writers should be essayists, not fictionists. As fictionists they are only vaudeville artists. Yet they are a real menace to American literature, for they appear regularly in most of our best magazines and between covers issued from our best book houses.
Of this last type one good thing can be said—they are not suffering from too much real technique.