For writers in general there can be no such thing as too much technique, provided it is really assimilated. Nor can there be anything more harmful than a stomachful of technique undigested.
QUESTION VIII
What is most interesting and important to you in your writing—plot, structure, style, material, setting, character, color, etc.?
In going over the answers to various parts of this questionnaire there has again and again risen the speculation as to what would be the effect upon literary criticism in general, particularly professional literary criticism, if such facts as are here presented direct from the actual desks of the writers themselves were read and seriously studied by the critics. And applied not only to the writings of the authors here speaking, but to fiction in general. To how much more just assessment would it lead, to how much more real an understanding of actual and comparative values, to how much clearer a grasp of fundamentals?
There are good critics, to be sure, some very good, but many very bad ones. Professional literary criticism in America, including both the smallest local mediums and those of most repute, is, generally speaking, perfunctory, superficial, casual, over-sophisticated, sub-understanding, hereditary, hack, and a long list of other uncomplimentary adjectives. Perhaps the gravest indictment is that of being hereditary, for this is more or less the root fault. Critics, however inhuman their victims may consider them, are entirely human and therefore subject to the human failing of accepting the dicta of the past, not as merely the best the past has been able to hand on to the present, but as the final word that neither the present nor the future can improve upon and that neither should dare to question. If the past itself had acted wholly on this theory a century or five centuries ago, its bequest to the present would be lacking in a century or five centuries of accomplishment and progress.
The development of this speculation has little place here and less in connection with this question than with those concerning the imagination, but it has clamored for a hearing all through the compiling of this book. So now it's had it.
Reader as well as writer will find interest in the preferences shown in the following answers. To know a writer's "taking off place" is illuminating in any appreciation or understanding of his work. To writers there is here again further proof of the futility of general rules, and from the actual experiences of a hundred writers it is impossible that a beginner or even a writer of experience should not glean information that otherwise would come only through time, work and experiment.
Answers
Bill Adams: Character and color, (when I've got 'em I say, "Hang you, Jack—I'm all right.")