Sir Gilbert Parker: None.
Hugh Pendexter: To the beginner: write what you know. Be interesting. To the practised writer: have nothing happen beyond the plane of human possibilities. It is better to keep to the plane of probabilities. Truth may take such grotesque shapes as to surpass the wildest fiction, but fiction should always be truthful.
Clay Perry: To a beginner I would say: get into a writing game, newspaper work, if possible, and you will soon find out whether you really want to write as a career. Use raw life as a study. Mix with the common herd and get to know them. Be of the people and you will be for the people and they will be for you; it will reflect in your work.
To a practised writer: Keep close to the source, human nature. Don't go away and hide for long periods at a time. Try to turn out in each successive story something better than the last. Let each one be your current masterpiece.
Walter B. Pitkin: I can not give two or three suggestions to a beginner, for every beginner is an individual, having his own peculiarities of interest, perception, bent and instinctive expressiveness. All I can say is that all beginners, irrespective of individual differences, must achieve three things: insight into and enthusiasm over some aspect of life that is capable of being dramatized or similarly portrayed in narrative; secondly, a sense of effective presentation, be it of drama or character or what not; and, lastly, some kind of original touch, which obviously can not be defined except in some useless negative way. Each of these three achievements involves both native ability and training. The training need not come from schools or teachers; it may come from the worker's own resolve to observe, analyze and practise. Ability alone gets only a little way. Training alone gets nowhere. A word on the second achievement mentioned. Effective presentation involves much more than a command of English. It involves, over and above that, skill in selecting episodes, angles of approach, phases of character and action which stress the significant in your story and blur or wholly remove the trivial and irrelevant. In this department of your work, nothing succeeds so well as patience, elaborate observation and practise in "thumb-nail sketches" and persistent revision.
E. S. Pladwell: There is only one valuable suggestion: Know your own story. Know where it is going to end. If the climax is clear any road can lead to the climax. I never had trouble except when I ignored that rule. If one knows the climax there need be no rambling to get there. Give me a snappy climax and I can build any story to it.
Lucia Mead Priest: I do not feel competent to suggest in this, but I will venture to state what I feel is a sad lack in our current literature—it is a loss in moral values.
Why has the story of A. S. M. Hutchinson swept the English reading people off its feet? Because he has given us something for which we were hungry—a decent, whole-souled, high thinking man. "Mark Sabre" is not impossible, nor a namby-pamby. He is real. The fact that the world has responded is reassuring. We are not dead to honor or clean thinking after all.
For one, I am deadly weary of flaunting naked bodies and the coarse souls that meet us on every printed page.
Let us turn the leaf. Let us, every last man of us, get down into himself, into his decencies, and turn his pen their way.