R. T. M. Scott: I usually let the story tell itself. Sometimes I map it out in advance but, if I follow the map, I have a devil of a time to sell the story. I write the story straightaway. The quicker I write the quicker it sells. When I begin I seldom have the slightest idea of the ending. I have almost come to the conclusion that it is better to write a new story than to revise—except when I receive an editorial request for certain changes.
Robert Simpson: Nowadays, when I am reasonably satisfied that I have a story to write, I try to map it out roughly before going ahead. As a rule, however, I have more trouble with the first paragraph than any other part of the story or book. For the greater part the story proper writes itself, and I write straight through from beginning to end, revising, chapter by chapter, as I go along. In some instances I have to go back and revise bits of the earlier chapters, nearly always with a view to boiling them down. Only the roughest conception of the ending is in mind when I begin, but I always have an eye on the possible climax at almost every paragraph. Revision is at once the curse and the blessing of my writing life. I don't like it, yet I get more satisfaction out of it than from any other angle of writing. In a recent story of mine a certain dramatic "moment" occupied nearly three pages. When I finished revising the "moment"—and it cost me a day and a half to do it—it looked more like a moment and consisted of just three lines. I can still exult over that little bit of revision; but I always begin the job by threatening to use an ax on the typewriter or murdering my family or something.
Arthur D. Howden Smith: Always map it out in advance, but sometimes alter plot as I go along. Always revise and finish a chapter definitely before I go to the next.
Theodore Seixas Solomons: I map it out in advance, mentally only; later recording the mentally conceived synopsis of plot and action development, or only recording a part. In respect to this main development—the general architecture of the fictional structure—this is prearranged, cold-bloodedly, though I am hot-blooded and interested enough and enjoy enough the coming to me of the lines of plot. But I record them mentally or on paper and thenceforward follow them cold-bloodedly. But the detail, the filling in, and sometimes much of the general action, especially in longer stories and novels, is a matter of creation and determination as I proceed with the writing. Sometimes I change considerably, but never radically, the structure lines at certain critical junctures in a long story. I write it straightaway, as a whole, unless I happen (rarely) to find my mind going ahead and interesting itself creatively in some important future part of the story, possibly my main, or a minor, crisis. Then I do not hesitate to skip ahead and write it while it's hot.
The end is not clearly in mind in these mental and written synopses (the latter, by the way, are usually brief; even for a novel, referring to plot and story movement alone, rarely exceed a thousand words). But the theme end always is. I know in the larger, better sense how my story is to end simply because it has formed itself to me from nearly the beginning of the plotting as a single entity—à la text work insistences. It can't change at the end organically without making of the whole a monstrosity.
Ordinarily I have a rotten memory, even for my own cogitations. But fictionally I possess a jewel. It works this way. I have Mr. Plot-germ—the odd character confronting some appropriate situation, or the situation or incidents without any special character, and I say to myself, now how shall I get the story out of this embryo that I know is in it? Then plot material is drawn into my mind from somewhere in the fancy and squared and fitted into and around my foundation and ascertained by my critical faculties to be appropriate or inappropriate, more or less. An idea comes and goes—useless. Another comes and looks propitious, but not unless something else, provisionally retained, can be modified to suit it. A lot of material comes on to the lot, one way, one time or another, and some is hustled off, some immediately purchased and marked, and some left to one side, or, tentatively permitted to stay where it may finally lodge, if other things fit into it, later. Now all this would be rather cumbersome, complicated, and altogether impossible to such a poor memory as mine if it were not for what seems to be my peculiar faculty for retaining a grasp of what I have conceived directly in proportion to its degree of promise of utility. My memory doesn't let go of any plot or incident—nor of any detail matter, either—that is cognized as utilizable, in other words, that is either outright purchased and designed surely for use, or that has been tentatively held, in the thought that before I get my problem worked out these, or some of them, may be the very things needed in the structure. Though I make notes, more or less, as I say, I find I seldom have to refer to them. I always do as a precaution, but it almost invariably transpires that I have forgotten nothing.
In this preconstruction of a model for the story that is to be written I concern myself, however, only with essentials. I do not inhibit the flow into my mind of little bits of almost-text—detail, expressions, description and the like. I receive these as a listener might, approvingly or disapprovingly, and I usually retain them (but not so surely as true plot material). But my main creative business, which is the only thing I attempt to spur, is in finding, out of the trial suggestions of my fancy, the right main timbers for the structure that satisfies the possibilities of the foundation plot-germ, grown now into something like a theme or fiction thesis. Thus the ghost of the story is born, the better part of it, the complete theme and spirit of it. Then I'm ready to write it—when I feel like it, which is usually soon after the conception, though I can go weeks or months without losing anything of what I have prefigured. The discarded material has mostly vanished, to be recalled with difficulty or not at all. The material that had been more promising, and yet discarded, remains, in proportion to the degree of suitability it had shown. The really suitable—and adopted—remains forever clear in my mind. Seemingly, with the recognition by my critical or creative judgment of that suitability, I have, as it were, nailed them into the structure, and thenceforward they remain, visually almost! Therefore I can not forget them, for I can almost see them.
As to revision, it is a process that takes usually twice the time that the original consumed, and, in the case of a short story, probably three times.
Raymond S. Spears: I have written half a million words to get eighty thousand words completed. Revision is generally according to my wife's ideas, or, if I don't agree at first, we work over till both are satisfied.
I have written a seventy-thousand-word serial without knowing what the next paragraph would contain till more than half-way through. This, I know, is wretched and time-wasting practise—but once in a dozen times this method brings my best stories.