CHAPTER XIII

INDIVIDUALITY VS. TECHNIQUE

Year after year editors sit at their desks and almost at a single glance reject anywhere from sixty to ninety per cent. of the manuscripts that come in, and, on the whole, they make few mistakes in so doing. Some of these summarily rejected ones are so illiterate that most freshmen in college would unhesitatingly turn them down, but on the majority is the damning and almost unmistakable brand of "no individuality"--merely another manuscript plodding blindly along in the machine-like effort to turn out by machine-like methods another one "like those they've read," another stilted, unnatural attempt at producing a life-like copy of a model denaturalized, by them or their teachers, into a mechanical and artificial collection of rags, bones and hanks of hair that has never known the breath of life.

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_Lack of Individuality_.--How can the editor tell at a glance? How in heaven's name can he help telling? He's read the same kind of thing--the same thing except for variations of theme and setting--thousands and thousands and thousands of times before until recognizing it at a glance is as easy as recognizing a trolley-car among other vehicles on his way to the office of mornings. The tracks are no plainer in one case than the other.

But maybe the author does better farther on in the story? Doubtless it has happened, but the instances constitute a negligible factor. That poor editor learned to hunt no farther only by hunting farther thousands of times, when he was new and optimistic, and finding nothing. He has learned that any writer fool enough to begin a story in so stupid a way is too much a fool all the way along to be worth listening to.

Disbelieve this ability, if you like, and let's pass on to the stories he does not discard at a glance. These he reads to varying extents, according to their ability to hold him as an editor--sometimes a cursory examination, sometimes solid parts here and there, sometimes straight through, sometimes only part {184} way. Many things, including mistaken judgment, can stop him, but oftenest of all I believe it is the story's lack of individuality. He finds he's read it too many times before and knows that his readers have.

The sameness may be in plot, theme, style, anything or all together, but it's the sameness that stops him and kills the story. As a reader, judge for yourself from the stories that get published, after editors have discarded all but enough to fill their space--all but one to five per cent. say, of the total submitted. Is there not sufficient sameness in even these? Then judge what the discarded ninety-five or ninety-nine per cent. must be, making any reasonable allowance you please for the fallibility of editors.

_Reasons for the Lack_.--Much of the lack of individuality in stories is due to lack of individuality in the writers. To what degree a person can develop his individuality I do not presume to say, but lack of real individuality in his stories is curable to exactly that degree and no more.

But many of the writers whose stories show none, have individuality. Why doesn't it show in their work? Because they have been {185} taught by present methods of teaching fiction to be artificial, not natural, or have themselves slavishly modeled themselves after some one else.

What chance has your individuality if you turn your back on it and resolutely try to copy another man's, or if you lose yourself in an endless maze of rules and regulations? Rules and regulations imposed, for the most part, by people equally lost in the maze.

No, you can't let your individuality run riot regardless of all rules, for some rules are laws of the human mind to which all of us are subject. But it does not follow that you must assassinate your individuality. It is your main asset. Without it, neither empty rules nor sound laws can build anything of themselves.

Technique? Of course you need technique, but if you make of it a golden calf and bow down in worship, you perish.

Get technique; don't let it get you. What technique should give you is tools, not rules. And not a monomaniac collector's collection of tools, collected for the sake of including all tools known to man, but only those tools so well mastered that they fit almost {186} automatically into your hand, carrying out smoothly the guiding impulse of your brain.

But you have to learn to use them before you can acquire such skill? Yes, but remember the purpose of your learning--and don't try to learn and use more tools than you can master. Remember that an augur is an augur--that it's not a demand upon you to bore a hole in something, but only a means of making a hole when one is needed. Because a hammer is for driving nails do you have to use it when you're modeling in clay?

I dare say it is bad taste for me to criticize other books on writing fiction and other methods of teaching fiction, but, pardon me, I don't give a damn. For years I've sat and watched teachers, poorly equipped for the task and perfectly equipped for their manner of handling it, blandly do their utmost to ruin a writer by holding before his wide eyes so many rules that he finds it difficult ever to see anything else. If among them are included some rules on preserving his individuality while he's following all the other rules, what can that mean to him? If his teachers perchance present technique as tools, not rules, they load so many of them upon his {187} trustful back that he can not walk, to say nothing of mastering the tools.

The essence of their damage lies in two things:

First, the rules they pour forth so endlessly they themselves got from some one else and accept them chiefly for that reason. Ask them the why of each of their rules and there is likely to be a considerable hiatus between their last book and the next.

Too often they seem to have been merely perpetuating an hereditary collection of rules for the sake of preserving the collection as an entity in itself, forgetting that some of the rules might be unsound and neglecting--if they ever thought about them--to give their students the foundations in human nature upon which the sound ones must rest.

Second, the whole tendency of such teaching is to make the learner look at other writers instead of within himself, to absorb other people's style and methods instead of developing his own, to copy rather than to think things out for himself, to be artificial rather than natural, cramped rather than free, to waste his time on details instead of giving it to vital things.

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I should venture no such strong condemnation if I did not feel that I am merely voicing the opinion of most editors--of the men and women who are in best position to note the devastating effects upon to-day's fiction. And I am, of course, speaking of the books and teaching methods as a class. There are exceptions, naturally--though one writer, for example, tells me he has read between forty and fifty books on fiction writing, finding only one of them worth while--and practically all such books can be of use, sometimes of very great use, to the raw beginner. So can a rhetoric or a common English grammar.

In the light of results, the fundamental point these books most fail to make is that most of their contents should be read--not memorized or swallowed--for stimulus and suggestion only, and that the student must see to it that no rules turn him aside from his main business of developing and using his own individuality.

I am painfully aware that in this book I, too, have given rules as rules, but I have tried to give the foundations of a sufficient number of them to lead the student into the habit of looking for foundations himself and working {189} out his own destiny. For the foundations I ask consideration, for my rules none at all except as danger-signs erected from twenty years' experience to point out the errors most common in actual practise.

I am still more keenly aware that in many instances I fail to meet possible objections and justified exceptions. Often it is because I fail to think of them at the time or never thought of them, but often it is because there is a limit to available space and because too many aspects and too much detail breed confusion. Literature is the communication, between human beings, of human nature and human experience. Who can give complete rules for a process and content so infinitely various? Bear in mind first, last and always, that this book does not attempt to be a complete treatise on writing fiction. Its purpose is to emphasize those points and points of view that, from years of examining the actual manuscripts submitted to magazines, seem most to need emphasis, and, second, to raise against the present fashion in teaching methods a small flag of revolt under which I believe most editors and most discriminating readers will be content to stand, no matter {190} how great may be their disagreement with me on specific points.

_Unfamiliarity with Things Taught_.--Last week I borrowed three books on the writing of fiction and ran through their pages. One was by a university professor who gave a most interesting picture of the editorial world, of its offices, their occupants, customs, rules, policies, points of view. The title-page stated that he had formerly been with a publishing house--probably for the sake of the experience, during a summer vacation. I became fascinated, almost wishing I could live in that world myself. I never have.

I realize that, for those entirely unfamiliar with the inside of the editorial world, his picture of it was sufficiently near the truth to be of decided practical value. Yet his almost glib generalities and his choices for particularization made me shudder for the misapprehensions that might arise from them. He was like the European traveler who spends a month or two in the United States and then describes and explains it to the world. Any conscientious editor of long experience would, I think, hesitate before attempting to present in a chapter or two of a text-book for earnest {191} students a complete and final exposition of the editorial field. It is too complex, too various, too changeable.

And if these teachers venture to expound so much and so finally from so small a knowledge of what may be called the mere machinery of the editorial world, it seems logical to conclude that they may have equally insufficient basis when they attempt to explain what kind of fiction the editors want and how to manufacture it.

_Evils of Models and Examples_.--But what struck me most forcibly in those three books was the vast amount of space given to models and examples. Stories were constantly being laid upon the operating table, in whole or part, and dissected and analyzed. The pages were strewn with dismembered parts, ticketed and labeled, to be sure, and filed in most orderly fashion, but the panorama as a whole was enough to ruin a writer forever if it did not drive him mad. Oh yes, I know we must take a clock apart before we can learn how to make a clock, but an artist should live in a studio, not an operating-room. The use of examples and models is a valuable adjunct of teaching, but it is not teaching. As far as {192} I can learn from cursory glances from time to time, through inquiry and through noting results in submitted manuscripts, dissected models and examples form the backbone of teaching method. Use them, by all means, but only sufficiently to show the student how to do his own analyzing when he feels the need. And teach him general principles to make him keen to the need when it is there. Teach _him_ to work; don't litter his mind with the work you've done on a third person's work.

The mechanical method of teaching is perfectly adapted to those students who by no possibility can be anything but mechanical writers, working by rule of thumb, building a structure by foot-rule and pouring in its contents from a graduated beaker. But is producing such writers worth while or even justifiable? Even if your purpose is the broader, industrial one of adding to the general earning capacity of the nation? Of course, if you are merely writing a text-book that will sell--

It is upon the writers who are not doomed by their own limitations to be merely mechanics that the curse of mechanical teaching {193} falls. The genius and the really strong individualist will escape, but what of him with moderate or even considerable gifts? He goes into the bed of Procrustes. He is lopped here, stretched there; he is badgered and blinded with examples and precedents, kept from natural development and natural expression by the study of rules for growth and by listening to other people express themselves, prevented from being himself and giving rein to his own individuality by the constant study of individualities not his own. If only you could sit for a year at some editorial desk and see these poor maimed fellows come in endless line with their pathetic, lifeless wares! Well-made stories, so much so that they are almost exactly like all other well-made stories, but in them here and there a still unsmothered spark that might have been a flame. And after the procession has filed up to you for a while it is not the properly built stories they lay on your desk that you see, but those countless other stories that will never be laid on any desk. It is like looking out over the world of children who can never be born, the better children, the dream children, who could make the world so much {194} better if only they were here. If you could sit for a year at some editorial desk, you would join with me in saying, "Damn such teaching methods!"

_Individuality and Naturalness First_.--You who are learning to write--and writers are always learning if they are worthy of their name--put this little rule at the head of all your list of rules and let no rule that follows seem to you one-half so well worth clinging to: EXPRESS YOUR NATURAL SELF NATURALLY.

Believe me, it is worth clinging to, even at the cost of aches and bruises. As for all the other rules, accept only those grounded solidly in human nature and take for your guides, not the rules, but their foundations. If you find yourself drifting into the stilted dialect so many feel must be assumed on entering the printed page, tear up what you have written and say your say in your own words. Maybe the result will be sad indeed; there are always many things to learn. But in your learning you will find no secret of technique, no trick of the trade, that is not second in importance to the prime necessity of developing and expressing your own individuality. If they hold before your eyes some story by De Maupassant, Stevenson, Kipling, O. Henry, {195} look by all means and study what you see, but be sure that your strongest reaction is, "Yes, these are deft uses of tools, masterly handlings of thought, and I will be awake to similar opportunities in my own work, _but_ the fact remains that what I have seen is only De Maupassant using his tools, Stevenson using his, and the others each his own. I am not De Maupassant or Stevenson or Kipling or O. Henry or anybody else except myself. I can't possibly ever be any of them, and if I try to be any of them I can't be even myself. Perhaps their tools and devices are not the ones best adapted to my case, though they may prove valuable. Now I'll go back to _my_ work."

And if they ask you to look at many other workmen, refuse utterly. Do your own looking. You probably know far better than they what it is you need to look for; if you don't know where to look for it, then ask. You'll probably be looking enough without any one's driving you to it. And, always, when you look, carry away with you only what you can absorb. Undigested food of this kind will kill you.

_Being "Literary."_--Don't try to be "literary" until you know what being "literary" {196} really means. Most writers do not know. I'm not sure that I know, but certainly I know a few things it is and a few things it is not.

It is not being queer for the sake of queerness. It is not using large and learned words. It is not getting as far away as possible from the language of life. It is not thinking, feeling or talking artificially instead of naturally. It is not the copying of others. It is not either wallowing in strong emotions or daintily avoiding them.

It is telling things as you see or feel them. It is using the words that accomplish this with least lost motion, words so natural and familiar you are _sure_ they are exact to the case. It is the preserving, developing and expressing of _your own_ individuality.

Style? Be yourself and your style will be born of itself. Be anything else and, instead of style, you will attain only an acrobatic performance. There are enough acrobats already, and enough people who are not themselves.

I should like to add, with some bitterness, that a knowledge of plain English grammar, even for writers who consider themselves "arrived," is an almost necessary step toward being "literary."

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