Emerson Hough: I see it clear in advance and revise but little.
A. S. M. Hutchinson: I start with the character, and he or she, and the friends they assemble, do the rest.
Straightaway from the first word to the last.
What I would call the ultimate goal is, when I start, at the end of a long passage. It is the characters' business (they having suggested it) somehow to get there.
My second novel I rewrote almost entirely. Normally, I revise scarcely at all.
Inez Haynes Irwin: I map out a story as carefully as possible in advance. The beginning and ending and the thread of the psychological development are ordinarily perfectly clear when I start. It is the middle or developing portion which is most difficult for me to write. It is difficult because it is always vague in my mind. I work my stories out on paper and make several versions. I write my first ten pages three or four times and the whole story at least twice before it goes to the stenographer.
Will Irwin: I can not begin writing on a story until I see its framework pretty clearly in mind. Getting that framework ready involves several days of beating my brains in agony. Recently I have found it helpful to try to write out from time to time a synopsis. Especially must I see the end—know toward what I am working. The incidents which develop the situation, I invent as I write. Usually, I begin at the beginning and write straight through. However, I sometimes find after a few days that I have begun in the wrong place. That happened to my latest story. Having finished a scene with which I intended originally to lead off, I realized that I had begun too far along in the action. Getting in the background of previous events made the writing awkward, clogged the action. I went back therefore and began with a previous event. Then I patched these two fragments together, and proceeded to the next scene. As concerns the main structure and method of a story, usually I revise very little. When the first draft is finished, I spend two or three days in "tightening up" the English and enriching the conversations and descriptions. I am impatient of rewriting—probably a lingering trace of old newspaper habits. However, I am married to a fiction writer, who reads my first drafts. Quoting "Merton of the Movies," "she is more than a wife, she is a pal and, I may add, my severest critic." Once or twice, when I have told my story awkwardly, she has sent me back to my desk to write it all over again from another angle of approach.
Charles Tenney Jackson: As for "mapping out a story in advance," that is done as far as may be. A very good thing, indeed, but not indispensable. Very often the ending is not in sight. And I revise but little. I start a story with a lead pencil, write a few hundred words, and invariably turn to the typewriter to go on with it. That first hurried dig may be ignored entirely thereafter, but the thread of this beginning is in my mind all through. Very often I set down the incidents, numbering them in order as they seem to fit in, and this stamps the scheme in mind for work, although I rarely turn to it. In fact, the yarn goes on to succeeding impressions, keeping always the first idea that was its genesis.
Frederick J. Jackson: Do I map it out in advance? Often. Just as often I don't. If I map out a story in advance, have a regular skeleton laid out, the story is apt to be stilted. I'd rather have just a hazy idea of what I'm leading up to, or, better still, a definite climax, nothing more.
When I can just ramble on and write snappy stuff that interests myself it will be a good yarn. If it interests me, it will interest the editor. I'm rather cold-blooded about my own stuff. I have a jaundiced eye when I look at it. I like a story about a character like "Mr. Conway."