T. S. Stribling: I have derived stories from incidents, characters, tales told me by traveling companions, but my longer and more serious stories are nearly always something rather larger than a "setting"; I would say a social condition. I like to select a people whose form of life has the possibility of great drama. Then I enjoy studying that people, seeing how they live, get as nearly at their psychology as I can—customs, habits. Then I take their country and pick out spots where I will have a scenic background that best suits the mood of the story I propose to write.
For example just at this moment I am interested in Venezuela. I lived down there a year, I learned enough Spanish to talk and read intelligibly, and I expect to read Venezuelan books, histories, etc., for about three years more before I do a novel I have in mind on the country. Naturally, this sort of work must be planned for years in advance, and usually while I am working up a big story, I can get a bunch of smaller ones on the same theme. Otherwise I would starve between drinks.
Booth Tarkington: I shall have to leave this pretty indefinite. The answer differs with every story.
W. C. Tuttle: Usually the title is the last thing to be printed on my manuscript, and I pride myself on the fact that I have only had one title changed in seven or eight years of writing.
It may sound queer to you, but it is a fact that a certain character bothers me until I write a story around that character. Crazy, eh? Still it is a fact. Somehow I can see and feel that personality and a strong urge comes to me to put him in print. The strange part of it is that I worry about that mythical character until I put him on paper.
Lucille Van Slyke: Story genesis with me is usually some very insignificant object that I see in a half-light—or blurred—or far off when I am not thinking about writing at all.
Example: Listening to a second-rate opera company give Lohengrin my eyes note very idly that one fat chorus lady has very shabby black street shoes. My eyes travel—her face is deadly serious. Somewhere the back of my brain clicks off a story somebody told me about Henrietta Crossman's early struggles—how she nursed her infant son between acts while she played "Rosalind"—on the way out of the theater I hear a laughing feminine voice say "Chiffon is warmer and stronger than you think—" These things I scribbled in my plot-book when I reached home. But it was at least two years before I wrote the story these things suggested—but the impetus was undoubtedly a pair of shabby shoes—and the story was about a fragile, gay little chorus lady, the very antithesis of the fat lady with the shoes. (Nor were shoes ever mentioned in that story!)
Example: I pass a brownstone house, very swanky one. On the basement window-sill is a battered tin luncheon-tray with a soiled napkin, a wilted salad and some scraggly bits of lamb. I am on my way for a holiday, in an I-shall-never-write-again mood. But the little old nervous ganglia that serve as brains begin "What a rotten lunch—must have been for the dressmaker—and maybe the dressmaker was a dear—a princess in disguise effect"—and I find myself humming an old hymn, Oh, happy day—"Felicia Day would be a good name," saith my tune. So I jot it down in the back of my commutation-book and forget it. It's three years later that I write a book around that luncheon tray.
The funny part of all this is that I didn't know until your letter arrived that in almost every instance of either short story, serial or book I saw a definite object in the beginning. I tried to bunk myself into believing that I didn't, that a person or a character did it or a plot, but it's a thing—usually in half-light—so I see it rather blurry. Why?
Atreus von Schrader: A story may grow from anything; an incident, a character or trait, a setting, a title, a situation. It is my own experience that more stories develop from situations than any other course. I wonder if this would be true of a writer of character stories? By "situation" I mean a preconceived inter-relation of the dramatis personæ.