On the art of writing fiction

by Unknown

The main thing

The art of writing fiction has of late years been made the subject of innumerable articles by persons most, if not quite all, of whom are doubtless competent and well-informed; and it seems to be pretty generally agreed upon between them, as a nice, definite sort of dogma to start with, that “the main thing is to have a story to tell.” Possibly that may be the main thing: possibly also the main thing—if, indeed, there be one where several things are indispensable—may be, not that the writer should have a story to tell, but that he should be able to tell it. To tell it, that is, after a fashion which shall move, interest or amuse the great novel-reading public, which, patient and tolerant though it may be—patient and tolerant as some of us must needs acknowledge, with a due sense of contrite gratitude, though it is—nevertheless demands something more than a bald narration of supposed events.

The beginner

The beginner, therefore (for it is only to beginners that the present dogmatiser has the effrontery to address himself), will do well to bear in mind that it is not enough to be equipped with an admirable plot, nor even to have clearly realised in his or her inner consciousness the circumstances and personages involved therein: both have to be made real to the reader; both, moreover, have to be so treated of as, in one way or another, to tickle the reader’s mental palate. This is much the same as saying that the beginner, in order to be a successful beginner, has to acquire a style. Not necessarily, it must be owned, a correct style; still at least a distinctive one. Otherwise he cannot hope to make his audience see people and things as he sees them.

Acquiring a style

But why talk about “acquiring” a style? Does not every human being already possess a style?—dormant, no doubt, yet plainly perceptible in his accustomed turns of speech and methods of expressing himself. And can he do better than utilise this when he sits down with pen and paper to write his story? Perhaps he might do rather better; but there is no need to raise the point at the outset, because the beginner who essays, without preparation or apprenticeship, to tell his story in his own way will very soon discover that that is precisely what he cannot do. The words, somehow, will not come; or, if they do, they come in a manner palpably and grotesquely inadequate; the sentences are clumsy, tautological, badly rounded and jar upon the ear; the effect produced is very far from being the effect contemplated. The tyro, in short, finds out to his sorrow that writing is not in the least the same thing as talking, and that even so modest an achievement as the production of a novel is, after all, an art, the inexorable requirements of which do not greatly differ from those claimed by other arts.

Writing an Art to be learnt

And, indeed, why should they? Nobody would ever dream that they did, were it not that the literary art has no schools, colleges, paid professors, no system of salutary checks to intervene between the student and his public. To one who is conscious of ability it seems so simple to seize a pen and go ahead! In a certain country-house there was a Scotch cook whose scones were beyond all praise. Implored by a Southern lady to reveal the secret of her unvarying success, she replied, after long consideration, “Aweel, mem, ye just take your girdle, ye see, and—and make a scone.” Quite so: you just take pen and paper and—and write a novel. No directions could be more beautifully succinct; but, unfortunately, it is almost as difficult for a writer who has reached a point of moderate proficiency in his calling to say how this is to be done as it was for the cook to explain how scones ought to be made. He may, however, be bold enough to affirm that the thing cannot be done off-hand—that the knack of manipulating language has to be mastered, just as that of swimming, riding, shooting and playing cricket has to be mastered, and that preliminary failures are more or less a matter of course. Swimming is very easy; yet if you take a boy by the scruff of his neck and fling him into deep water, nothing can be more certain than that he will flounder, struggle desperately for a few seconds and then sink like a stone. Probably there are but a very few people who cannot learn to swim; there are many who cannot learn to shoot or ride; it seems doubtful whether an equal number cannot—if only they will condescend to take the necessary pains—learn how to write.

But the trouble is that plenty of men and women who cannot really do these things nevertheless do them after a fashion. Have not the lives of most of us been placed in jeopardy through the erratic performances of some worthy gentleman who is fond of shooting, but who is obviously unfit to be trusted with a gun? Is there an M.F.H. in England whose soul is not vexed every year by the hopeless, good-humoured, dangerous incapacity of certain members of the hunt? Every now and again one sees a steeplechase won by a horse who has carried off the victory in spite of his well-meaning rider; and in like manner it would be an easy, though an ungracious, task to name authors whose books have commanded a prodigious sale without being, in the true sense of the word, books at all.

Pleasing the public