FICTION WRITERS ON FICTION WRITING

Printed in the United States of America

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

This book is dedicated to the one hundred and sixteen authors who wrote it and to every author who may profit from their writing.

Authors Whose Replies to the Questionnaire Make Up the Body of This Book:

Bill Adams
Samuel Hopkins Adams
Paul L. Anderson
William Ashley Anderson
H. C. Bailey
Edwin Balmer
Ralph Henry Barbour
Frederick Orin Bartlett
Nalbro Bartley
Konrad Bercovici
Ferdinand Berthoud
H. H. Birney, Jr.
Farnham Bishop
Algernon Blackwood
Max Bonter
Katharine Holland Brown
F. R. Buckley
Prosper Buranelli
Thompson Burtis
George M. A. Cain
Robert V. Carr
George L. Catton
Robert W. Chambers
Roy P. Churchill
Carl Clausen
Courtney Ryley Cooper
Arthur Crabb
Mary Stewart Cutting
Elmer Davis
William Harper Dean
Harris Dickson
Captain Dingle
Louis Dodge
Phyllis Duganne
J. Allan Dunn
Walter A. Dyer
Walter Prichard Eaton
Charles Victor Fischer
E. O. Foster
Arthur O. Friel
J. U. Giesy
George Gilbert
Kenneth Gilbert
Louise Closser Hale
Holworthy Hall
Richard Matthews Hallet
William H. Hamby
A. Judson Hanna
Joseph Mills Hanson
E. E. Harriman
Nevil G. Henshaw
Joseph Hergesheimer
Robert Hichens
R. de S. Horn
Clyde B. Hough
Emerson Hough
A. S. M. Hutchinson
Inez Haynes Irwin
Will Irwin
Charles Tenney Jackson
Frederick J. Jackson
Mary Johnston
John Joseph
Lloyd Kohler
Harold Lamb
Sinclair Lewis
Hapsburg Liebe
Romaine H. Lowdermilk
Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.
Rose Macaulay
Crittenden Marriott
Homer I. McEldowney
Ray McGillivray
Helen Topping Miller
Thomas Samson Miller
Anne Shannon Monroe
L. M. Montgomery
Frederick Moore
Talbot Mundy
Kathleen Norris
Anne O'Hagan
Grant Overton
Sir Gilbert Parker
Hugh Pendexter
Clay Perry
Michael J. Phillips
Walter B. Pitkin
E. S. Pladwell
Lucia Mead Priest
Eugene Manlove Rhodes
Frank C. Robertson
Ruth Sawyer
Chester L. Saxby
Barry Scobee
R. T. M. Scott
Robert Simpson
Arthur D. Howden Smith
Theodore Seixas Solomons
Raymond S. Spears
Norman Springer
Julian Street
T. S. Stribling
Booth Tarkington
W. C. Tuttle
Lucille Van Slyke
Atreus von Schrader
T. Von Ziekursch
Henry Kitchell Webster
G. A. Wells
William Wells
Ben Ames Williams
Honore Willsie
H. C. Witwer
William Almon Wolff
Edgar Young

FICTION WRITERS ON FICTION WRITING

FICTION WRITERS
ON FICTION WRITING

HOW THIS BOOK CAME INTO BEING

Since this book is not only written for the most part by others than myself and since, for a second reason, its coming into being is the result of an accident, not of any inspiration on my part, there is no reason why I should not state frankly my opinion of its practical value and exceptional interest.

The mere statement of that value is its own proof:—There have been hosts of books, classes and correspondence courses claiming to teach the writing of fiction, but in all but a handful of cases these teachers have been eminently unqualified for the work. The majority have no sound right to speak at all, lacking sufficient accomplishment or even experience of their own and showing in their attempt the lack of ability as critic or teacher often evidenced by those who are themselves unable to create. Of the remainder a very few have proved any considerable ability as creators of fiction and these, as a group, are inclined to proceed on the dangerous principle that what is good for one case, their own, is therefore good for all other cases. Another few, with some editorial experience (though generally almost none) and, therefore, at least some understanding of the general field, are mostly barren of accomplishment as creators and so unable to enter satisfactorily into the inner problems of those who do create. Still another few, while versed in the academic requirements of literature are unfamiliar with both the actual magazine and book field and the actual work of creating. All of them are sadly handicapped in their undertaking by an obsession for reducing the art of writing to a performance almost altogether governed by general formulas and ironclad rules for universal application.

But here is a book written not by an author of negligible standing, an editor who can not create, a college professor speaking from the outside, or any other theorist whatsoever, but by the successful writers themselves, each telling in detail his own processes of creation. No one else in the world can bring us so quickly to the real heart of the matter or come so close to speaking the final word. While the words of any one of them are of value, the contrasted and collective cases of one hundred and sixteen of them are beyond estimate of value. For either the beginner or the established writer. Even for each of these one hundred and sixteen themselves.

As to the accident that brought the book into being, my own justification for venturing to act as collector and summarizer, and the reason for choice of the particular lines of investigation:

Having been a magazine editor for twenty years (Adventure, Romance, Delineator, Smart Set, Transatlantic Tales, Watson's, Chautauquan), I had become more and more rebellious against present methods of teaching fiction writing, for year by year their fruits poured across my desk by the thousands—stories often technically correct but machine-like, artificial, lacking in real individuality. American fiction as a whole is characterized by this result of the curse of formula and, until that curse is removed, American fiction can never attain the place to which native ability entitles it.

Many who attempt to write can never succeed. Some succeed despite all obstacles. But in between are a great number with varying degree of ability, many of them appearing in books or magazines, some of them attaining a fair degree of real success, some of them failing of print, but no one of them who could not do far better if he would shake himself free from the influence of machine-like methods and give opportunity to whatever of individuality may lie within him. A long procession of possibilities unrealized, regrettable because of the loss to American fiction, pathetic if one looks behind the manuscripts at vain struggles and hopes unfulfilled.

The only chance for remedy seemed a direct attack upon the school of formula and rule itself, followed by whatever could be done in a constructive way. A lone editor could accomplish little by himself, but he could accomplish even less than that if he didn't try. He was not the only editor grumbling over the situation and among experienced writers were many in agreement as to the evils of too much formula; perhaps, once the challenge were definitely made—

As equipment, besides editorial experience, I had been "a contributor of fiction to our leading magazines" sufficiently to appreciate creative problems from the other side of the editorial desk, and at two universities and elsewhere had absorbed sufficient of the academic for foundation and background. There had been, too, sufficient rebellion against general editorial precepts and precedents to keep me from falling so deep into the editorial rut that I couldn't at least see over the edges. Most of all, I was sick and tired of seeing the formula-worshippers doing all they could to increase the flood of fiction that, however perfect by formula and however skilfully polished, is inevitably and forever hack.

So I wrote a book in protest and in the hope that it might to some degree serve those who were willing to turn from formalism to individual expression if only they could find some small guide-posts along the way. In Fundamentals of Fiction Writing I tried to give them, instead of rules, an understanding of the facts of human nature upon which art and its rules must be based, so that they might see their own way and walk upon their own feet. To drive home the point it was necessary to show them beyond chance of doubt that rules applied without understanding were unsafe guides. The simplest and most effective way of proving this was to show them that the writers who had actually succeeded did not blindly follow general rules but chose among them each according to his own needs and bent, and that what was one writer's meat was another writer's poison.

So, to prove that rules must be subject to individuality, I sent out a questionnaire to writers, planning to use the answers as an appendix to Fundamentals. Some questions were added to gather further data on facts of human nature, and still others were suggested by writers (William Ashley Anderson and L. Patrick Greene) with whom I consulted, answers to these last questions being sought as data of interest to writers in general.

The answerers, of course, had not seen my book, though the body of it was already in the publisher's hands, and in the questionnaire I took pains that there should be no hint of any points I hoped to see established. While the effort to keep the wording of the questions from tending in any way against entirely uninfluenced answers made some of them less definite and more banal than I should have liked, there was more than compensation in the resulting wealth of data that had not been even hoped for.

When the answers began coming in, it became at once apparent that here was material far too valuable to be tucked away in the appendix of any book. The questionnaire had gone to only those writers who had contributed to my own magazine, Adventure, some of them beginners, some of them established writers appearing in all our magazines and between book-covers. It was then sent to a general list of authors and their answers were added to those first received.

The result is a broadly representative list of authors almost perfect for the purpose. It includes the tyro and the writer of life-long experience, those little known along with our best and our most popular. There are those who write avowedly for money returns alone; those who make literary excellence their single goal. They come to authorship by various roads from all walks in life, from England as well as America. They run the whole gamut of difference in schooling, method, aim, ability, experience and success.

The value of their symposium to the beginner is beyond easy calculation. If there is an experienced writer who can not find profit as well as interest in these ideas and methods of his fellow craftsmen, considered both individually and collectively, I can not at the moment guess his identity. If other editors can learn from it as much as I have, they will find it difficult to name any other one thing from which they have learned so much of value in so short a time. If literary critics will bring to it a consideration of fundamentals and of facts, that their general type is none too prone to exercise, there will be a gain both to them and to the standards of criticism and valuation they so largely control. To readers of fiction it is the opening up of a fascinating world hitherto seen only in detached glimpses. And if the average writer of text-books or teacher of class expounding the art of writing fiction will let go of formulas and theories handed to him by others and consider the actual laboratory facts of what he is trying to teach, the gain to American fiction will be tremendous.

If my summaries and discussions of the answers group by group leave much to be desired, I plead the difficulty of exactness in dealing with matters of infinite variations and subtle shadings, the impossibility of covering even sketchily all the points that arise, the limitation imposed on entirely free discussion of material furnished one through courtesy and good will, and the fact that in any case my comments are of extremely minor importance in comparison with the answers themselves.

The answers have in most cases been given in full. What cutting was necessary in places has been done, I think, with as little bias as is shown in the questions. Where specific teachers, books, authors and so on were mentioned, there have been some omissions, nearly always of those unfavorably mentioned. If specific instances seem ill-chosen for either cutting or exceptions, I can plead only good intent and the best judgment I could summon. I have been editing copy for more than twenty years and have found few cases offering greater difficulties to consistency and intelligent handling. The specific difficulty mentioned is, naturally, far from being the only one.

My sincere thanks go to the authors whose kindness furnished the material for this book. While some of them were personal friends or acquaintances, there were others upon whom I had no shadow of claim and who responded only through an innate spirit of helpfulness—helpfulness not just to the asker but to the host of aspiring writers who they knew would profit from the information experienced writers could give. My thanks, too, for the good will of those authors who were prevented from answering by circumstances beyond their control. I have dealt with writers most of my life and, as in any other group of people, there are disagreeable, trying, ridiculous and even criminal exceptions, but as a whole I have found them very kindly, human folk. Perhaps it is because the material of their life-work is human nature, or because their natural bent is such as to make them choose that life-work. It would, I think, be a vastly kinder, gentler world if all who live in it were equally ready with the helping and friendly hand.

QUESTIONNAIRE

Answers to Which Constitute the Body of This Book

I. What is the genesis of a story with you—does it grow from an incident, a character, a trait of character, a situation, setting, a title, or what? That is, what do you mean by an idea for a story?

II. Do you map it out in advance, or do you start with, say, a character or situation, and let the story tell itself as you write? Do you write it in pieces to be joined together, or straightaway as a whole? Is the ending clearly in mind when you begin? To what extent do you revise?

III. When you read a story to what extent does your imagination reproduce the story-world of the author—do you actually see in your imagination all the characters, action and setting just as if you were looking at an actual scene? Do you actually hear all sounds described, mentioned and inferred, just as if they were real sounds? Do you taste the flavors in a story, so really that your mouth literally waters to a pleasant one? How real does your imagination make the smells in a story you read? Does your imagination reproduce the sense of touch—of rough or smooth contact, hard or gentle impact or pressure, etc.? Does your imagination make you feel actual physical pain corresponding, though in a slighter degree, to pain presented in a story? Of course you get an intelligent idea from any such mention, but in which of the above cases does your imagination produce the same results on your senses as do the actual stimuli themselves?

If you can really "see things with your eyes shut," what limitations? Are the pictures you see colored or more in black and white? Are details distinct or blurred?

If you studied geometry, did it give you more trouble than other mathematics?

Is your response limited to the exact degree to which the author describes and makes vivid, or will the mere concept set you to reproducing just as vividly?

Do you have stock pictures for, say, a village church or a cowboy, or does each case produce its individual vision?

Is there any difference in behavior of your imagination when you are reading stories and when writing them?

Have you ever considered these matters as "tools of your trade"? If so, to what extent and how do you use them?

IV. When you write do you center your mind on the story itself or do you constantly have your readers in mind? In revising?

V. Have you had a class-room or correspondence course on writing fiction? Books on it? To what extent did this help in the elementary stages? Beyond the elementary stages?

VI. How much of your craft have you learned from reading current authors? The classics?

VII. What is your general feeling on the value of technique?

VIII. What is most interesting and important to you in your writing—plot, structure, style, material, setting, character, color, etc.?

IX. What are two or three of the most valuable suggestions you could give to a beginner? To a practised writer?

X. What is the elemental hold of fiction on the human mind?

XI. Do you prefer writing in the first person or the third? Why?

XII. Do you lose ideas because your imagination travels faster than your means of recording? Which affords least check—pencil, typewriter or stenographer?

QUESTION I

What is the genesis of a story with you—does it grow from an incident, a character, a trait of character, a situation, setting, a title, or what? That is, what do you mean by an idea for a story?

Answers

Bill Adams: Usually three words with a bit of a slideway to them, thus, "There was once a ship"—or "The sun of morning shone upon the water"—

I don't know how it grows, or whether it grows—it sort of occurs, as it were.

Samuel Hopkins Adams: Genesis—usually from an incident, sometimes from a single phrase which illuminates a character; never from a title. In my entire experience I have found so-called "true stories" available only once or twice, and then in greatly modified form. Life is dramatic, but it isn't fictional until interpreted and arranged by the fictional mind.

Paul L. Anderson: The genesis of a story with me may be any of the things you mention, or something else, entirely different; a newspaper item, a picture, a story some one else has told (I mean I get a suggestion from another yarn, not that I take some one else's story and tell it as my own). For example, the genesis of one prehistoric animal story, was a picture in Henry Fairfield Osborn's book, The Origin and Evolution of Life; of another, a group in the American Museum of Natural History; of one story, the fact that a man will do more and suffer more for his loved ones than for himself. The genesis of the best story, by far, that I ever wrote, which has been consistently rejected by magazine after magazine because it is too gruesome, was this: lying in bed one morning, on the borderland of waking, I dreamed I heard some one say these words: "Far above us in the darkness I heard a trap-door shut with a clang." The memory of those words carried over into waking, and the story grew from that. The genesis of another yarn was a trip I once made in my flivver, which involved crossing a railroad track laid along a side-hill. Etc., etc. "All's fish that comes to the net."

William Ashley Anderson: No definite principle can be laid down as to the inspiration of a story. It may be based on an actual occurrence; a striking tradition; a strange custom. Or an argument may suggest a point to be proved by a story. An extraordinary character, an unusual scene, an atmosphere even (fog, storm, scorching heat). I think one of the basic principles is the desire to tell something unusual about things that are commonplace, or to tell something commonplace about things that are extraordinary.

H. C. Bailey: Nearly always in my mind a story begins with a character or characters. This holds good though the main interest of the story may be incident or the surprise of its plot. Making the story is with me the process of providing these people with things to do and say which will express them. I never began with a title (they are my plague), or a setting. Once or twice with a situation. Occasionally with a sentence which came into my mind from heaven knows where.

Edwin Balmer: The genesis of a story is decided, I think, by the writer's age and experience. As a story is usually the writer's reaction to that which at the time is of most interest to him, it used to be that a story started with me with a situation. I started writing when I was eighteen when I was in college, and I then caught at a situation which established suspense. That struck me as the best start for a story. Gradually, situation became less the whole thing and a definite increase in concern for the characters came. I never started with a title, but sometimes with a setting, or rather, a setting creating a situation—such as the Alps suggesting a mountain-climbing story. Now though I never really start with a character, the situation does not mean much to me until it has a character in it.

Ralph Henry Barbour: An idea for a story is anything upon which a story may be built, and story ideas come from as many sources as do ideas of any other sort. The inspiration that provides the idea may be generated by an incident, a person, a situation, a locality, even, I think, by a condition of mind, or by two or more of these in combination. To me a title does not very often suggest an idea for a story; it merely suggests the idea to write a story; there's a difference! In my case the genesis of a story is more frequently a situation. After that a character, an incident, a locality, in the order given.

Frederick Orin Bartlett: A story may grow from any of the sources you suggest—even from that mysterious "or what?" Something serves as a spark to fire the dry kindling of your imagination. The two essentials are that the spark shall be hot enough and that you shall have kindling.

Nalbro Bartley: It, the genesis of a story, could spring from any of the suggested things—an idea for a story to my mind suggests a theme such as capital versus labor, love versus money, etc.

Konrad Bercovici: I will be hanged if I know what the genesis of a story is. I only know I do not sleep well a few nights before I write one. And after a headache or two a story comes. As a boy, it broke my heart never to be able to see the actual breaking through of a plant. I always found it broken through in the morning,—if you get what I mean.

And then pictures begin to rise before me. Pictures of things I have seen and others that I wanted to see. And then the men and women in my stories walk through those pictures and stay where they like and see what they want and I stand by and watch them and agree most of the time with each one of them and sometimes say what I would say under similar circumstances. But, like "Mr. Saber" of If Winter Comes, I can see his point of view. When the whole thing has come to an end in my mind, I sit down and write.

Ferdinand Berthoud: I usually pick on an incident from some actual happening to myself or to one of my old-time friends. Then tack on other incidents of which I have heard. Once or twice a story has come from a peculiar expression or the manner or speaking of some man I have known. Or some man's way of looking at life.

H. H. Birney, Jr.: Ideas. Some situation or idea possessing possible dramatic value will come to me; I will lie awake the best part of a night or two nights thinking it over, and put it on paper the next day. Sometimes the whole story seems to unfold itself instantaneously before me; again I will work it out detail after detail mentally. Some ideas for stories have come from remarks of friends, from some anecdote, or an experience that was personal and of which the dramatic value was unrecognized at the time.

Farnham Bishop: The wedding of a newly-discovered fact to something already in mind, followed by the swift begetting, birth and growth of a story. Example: "Carranza to Blockade Mazatlan. Mexican Navy to be sent through Panama Canal, against Stronghold of Revolution" (newspaper head-line, sometime in summer of 1920). That, plus British naval officer's book (which I had recently read) containing description of the Scooter or C. M. B., developed within ten minutes into fairly complete mental outline of The Rest Cure.

Algernon Blackwood: The genesis of a story with me is invariably—an emotion, caused in my particular case by something in nature rather than in human nature: a scrap of color in the sky, a flower, a sound of wind or water; briefly, an emotion produced by beauty.

Max Bonter: Anything that stirs my emotions is likely to furnish the idea for a story. It may be an incident, a character, a trait of character, a situation, a setting, a title. It may be any one of them, a combination of several of them, or all of them. An idea embodying all of them, of course, would really be more than an idea; it would be practically the story itself—either a true story in which I had figured, or one that I had heard related—and would require at my hands little else besides an amalgamation of the attributes specified.

Pure fiction, in my case, seems to have its inception in a contrast, or in a sudden break of continuity—something irregular or freakish that draws a quick focus of the mental faculties and demands of them why, how? My mind immediately struggles to paint the significance of the contrast, or to splice the broken threads of circumstance into a tissue of normality. In other words, it is my mind's tendency to give balance to unbalanced or opposing conditions or things.

For example: In a quiet little community of soft-spoken, well-civilized males I find an old barbarian—the boss stevedore of a freight dock—who chews, swears, drinks, and lives with a common-law wife. Their little household is practically in a state of ostracism. My emotions are aroused; my sympathies enlisted in an endeavor to place in a better light this old pariah whose chief fault seems to be the carelessness wherewith he persists in being human. I bring the opposing standards together and after the clash the stevedore's chief detractor—a prominent church-goer—is found to be a sly old rake; whereas the dockman's tough hide covers a heart that had kept him true even to an unsanctified union.

That is what I would call an "idea" for a story. Around it I would build plot, detail, incident, characterization, etc.

Katharine Holland Brown: Once in a long while a story begins as a situation: as a tangle, a conflict, to be unwound, fought out. But almost always the story arrives as a whole—without any planning whatever, the story is suddenly there, a big blurry mass of pictures and incidents and action, that must be splattered down in black and white as fast as you can possibly write. It goes racing by like a runaway movie film and the best you can do is to snatch at the most significant moments, before they escape. Therefore the idea for a story is not an idea; it is the story itself. (With a serial, which must have a succession of ascending climaxes, a rough outline is made and followed, after the big scenes and the principal action are jotted down.)

F. R. Buckley: The genesis of a story with me is likely to be anything. Occasionally a character; more often a title; more often still, a good basic situation, up to and from which the story can lead; most frequently, an ending. Story I liked best, Archangel in Steel, deduced from setting and period: Florence, XVI century; connoted an age of plotting and intrigue; since plots were villainous, hero must be anti-plotter. History supplied the conspiracies; the story consisted of the hero's counter-actions.

Prosper Buranelli: My first idea is always an incident or a situation, sometimes several to be combined. Or a generic situation in some phase of life—such as an opera singer's being at the mercy of the orchestra conductor.

Thompson Burtis: I have had stories come to me as a result of all the things mentioned in your question, except a title. And I'm about to try to construct a story around a title. The most usual starting-points for stories with me are either incidents or characters. In a large percentage of cases I start with an incident and then work my main character into it with regard to his particular traits.

George M. A. Cain: A story almost always takes its genesis with me from a situation, sometimes suggested by an incident, character, trait, setting, title, anything. Unless any other feature can shape itself readily into a situation for me, there is no story. But the situation may not mean the beginning of the story as told. I may write the whole story to get that situation.

Robert V. Carr: The question involves, at least to my understanding, chemistry, heredity, environment, psychological wounds, tricks of memory, and a thousand and one mysteries. No doubt there will be writers who will cleverly announce that they know exactly where they secure their ideas, but it is beyond me. The writers of motion-picture scenarios should be able to tell you in a few words where they get their ideas. For my part I do not know the true genesis of any idea.

George L. Catton: A story with me may grow from, to begin with, the merest trifle. Sometimes I start with a character only; other times perhaps it is a title, or a peculiar characteristic of a character, a situation or a setting. But the big start for me, the start I always try to get, is a theme. It's a poor story I'll write if I can't put down the title before I write a word. I never wrote a story yet that didn't have a theme, and I never will. A story without a theme is a story without a soul, and is just about as much use as a man in the same predicament. An idea for a story with me, then, is a theme.

Robert W. Chambers: From an incident.

Roy P. Churchill: Most of my story ideas come from what I call a "condition" for want of better expression. That is, affairs of life in a certain setting, with certain characters, assume a "condition" which makes for the unusual.

Carl Clausen: An idea for a story always means to me an incident.

Courtney Ryley Cooper: A story always starts with me at the finish—I write the rest of my story to a climax. In other words, I get the big punch of a story, and build up the rest of the structure to fit it. In a mystery story, I always get the explanation of a thing, then fit my incidents to this.

Arthur Crabb: It seems to me that a story may grow from an incident or a character, or even a trait of character or situation, which it seems to me are other ways of saying the first two.

Mary Stewart Cutting: The genesis of a story with me usually grows from some small incident or the reverse of the incident. But in an autobiographical story the character is the main theme.

Elmer Davis: The genesis of a story, with me, is a situation—invariably the same. I see financial obligations falling due. My salary is fixed; my credit distended to the bursting point. No way to meet the bills but by writing fiction.... Whereupon I grab anything that looks as if it might start a story; usually a character in a situation.

William Harper Dean: The genesis of a story with me sometimes is a single word, the title, which strikes the motif of the story; sometimes a character, sometimes a situation, or a setting. But most frequently the beginning is the climax, from which I work backward through the middle and to the beginning.

Harris Dickson: Any of these, or a combination. More usually, perhaps, it is a story, or an incident that I hear or see. For instance, The Trapping of Judge Pinkham, in The Saturday Evening Post, is approximately true, and happened not long ago at the very place described. Real incidents, however, generally begin "up in the air" and end the same way. Better beginnings and climaxes must be worked out.

It is quite rare with me that I deliberately devise a story out of the whole cloth.

I live in the South. It is a country that has attracted the attention of much enthusiastic ignorance on the part of philanthropists, and many attacks. Sometimes I do a story for the purpose of showing some particular phase of life that is not understood at the North, and try to make it so convincing as to silence these long-distance reformers who haven't an idea as to how we live, and why. For this purpose I believe temperately-stated truth, rubbed in with humor, is the most effective vehicle.

Captain Dingle: In general my story comes from a vision of a character and a situation. Sometimes only the situation. Then I make a character to fit it—usually out of material I know.

Louis Dodge: With me, the genesis of a story is usually a character, perhaps coupled with a characteristic action. I like to imagine what the logical destiny of that character would be. And so I try to work it out.

Phyllis Duganne: Ideas for short stories usually come to me through something I actually see or hear about; sometimes a person is interesting or romantic enough so that I begin to make up things that might happen to him—and discover I have a plot on my hands. Or sometimes a situation is a good beginning or ending for a story, and I try to evolve the rest. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't—I suppose every one has loads of fascinating situations that he can not quite whip about into story form. Sometimes it is just a romantic spot—a house that should have a story about it. And once in a great while I just discover myself with a perfectly formed story on my hands, not there one minute and utterly there the next. That's real magic—and doesn't happen so often as I wish it did.

J. Allan Dunn: It varies. I am, of course, deliberately setting aside such stories as are suggested by the needs of editors, expressed by themselves. But I think the genesis of many stories is hard to trace. They are evolved in the brain cortex by that comprehensive and all too liberal phrase "subconsciousness." I mean by that process that every writer is perforce somewhat of a dramatist, somewhat of an artist, and that his mind, inclined and, later, trained to observe, does this continually until an idea is born. Not necessarily, not probably is this idea complete. Occasionally a short story that works out delightfully is thus conceived and will project itself into the conscious mind upon the proper stimulus—perhaps after a walk or during it, perhaps while hearing music.

Sometimes I read a story that a man has written down as news, the skeleton of a yarn that needs flesh about it, a heart and soul added.

Very often I endeavor to work out some particular trait or character, with its weakness and strength. Sometimes a character I know suggests the story. But I believe the genesis is born very much as is the theme of a musician, the desire of an artist to portray a certain mood or key, the inspiration of a poet.

I believe that the story-teller's profession is one of the most ancient. I believe it may well have antedated the artist—as animated in the cave-carver or the painter of skins. That it may have prefaced the musician in the drum-beater or the blower of a conch. I think there was always a tale-teller about the fires of the wildest, earliest tribes, one who stimulated their imaginations, touched their pride, bolstered their bravery. There are such to-day in almost every wild tribe that I have met. And, as the modern musician, the modern artist, have evoluted from their primitive forebears, so I think that the spark, the flicker of story-telling, has come down in the cell together with the ear for music, the eye for color and proportion. Add to that your technique—use of action, color, suspense, opposing forces, laughter, tears, tragedy and the results of experience and observation—and your story appears.

I do not mean to say we are all genuises but that the story-teller, as the poet, is made, that the impulse is engendered with his ego.

Walter A. Dyer: Formerly I used to try to manufacture a plot as the starting point for a story, but always found it very difficult, my mind usually being ready to stop with a situation. Sometimes such a situation would make a story, sometimes it wouldn't. I have found it comparatively easy to get color into the settings and to do the thing up in some sort of style, but my mind isn't inventive in the field of complete and more or less intricate plots. Of late I have had better success in beginning with character. And I have heard that others have reached the same conclusion. First visualize a real person or persons, with distinctive and out-of-the-ordinary characteristics (consistent and plausible, of course), and get them to function like human beings. Then throw them into the situations and settings that come easiest and see what will happen. Sometimes a real story grows out of it, and when it does it is likely to be a better story than one in which lay figures are fitted into a ready-made plot. This, however, does not apply to the requirements of all editors.

Walter Prichard Eaton: A story comes in a dozen different ways. Sometimes a title waits two years or more for a plot to plot it. Sometimes a character comes and grows. Sometimes a situation. I find I am most successful when it is a character, however, which comes first, and dictates the rest. The hardest unit is to start with a general thesis (problem) and then get a plot and people to seem natural.

Charles Victor Fischer: I am writing a story that has to do with Little Rock, Arkansas. Sitting at the eats this evening (two hours ago), I had Little Rock buzzing round in my up-stairs. My sister spoke of an old black mule she'd seen during the afternoon; how sorry she was for the poor animal—skin and bone were the only things he didn't have anything "else but." On top of that my father pipes up about a diamond ring theft.

See the point? I'm thinking about Little Rock. (I was there about two years ago, shortly after I came out of the Navy.) And whenever I think of Little Rock I think of coons. The mule—the diamond ring. And all of a sudden I had a story.

E. O. Foster: The genesis of a story with me generally grows from an incident which I have observed, around which I weave a plot taking the characters from people whom I have known.

Arthur O. Friel: It differs. It may be any one of these things. Sometimes hits me suddenly, like an electric spark forming contact, and the wheels begin to buzz. If I keep them buzzing, I have a story.

J. U. Giesy: Genesis with me is generally either from an incident heard or read, or from a title which suggests a parallel or divergent train of thought.

George Gilbert: All depends upon the story; some grow out of single incidents or characters; some out of several.

Kenneth Gilbert: My stories seem to spring from three sources: (1) A strange and interesting fact or incident that apparently has never been touched upon. One story had its genesis in a piece of newspaper miscellany, which stated that Marconi was experimenting with wireless apparatus that would keep out eavesdroppers. That was new, so far as fiction was concerned. Using it as the basis of a plot, I wove around it color from my own store of wireless knowledge, decided on the title, and proceeded to transcribe it. (2) An interesting character. One of my animal stories illustrates this point. It was about a raccoon, which I selected because he is a highly interesting animal; very intelligent, and with traits that approach the human at times. Moreover, he had not been "written out," as would seem to be the case of the dog. I had written stories about nearly all of the menagerie except procyon lotors; therefore, why not a 'coon story? The setting I supplied from life; the incident from study and experience, and the "atmosphere"—a vital component of an animal story—took care of itself. (3) A title. A snappy title always suggests a story, and while I have utilized this method several times, I prefer a plot germ in other form.

Holworthy Hall: To date I have written perhaps two hundred short stories. The basic ideas arrived approximately as follows: From titles, not over ten—notably The Six Best Cellars, Henry of Navarre, Ohio, You Get What You Want, etc. From a situation, at least one hundred and fifty. From characters or traits of character, the balance. Incidentally I have never yet written a story in which the basic idea was not fundamentally serious and a part of my personal philosophy; nor would I have any interest in writing a story in which the basic idea did not seem to see or partake of a certain universality of thought or conduct.

R. M. Hallet: As to (I) I think the characters and the action reciprocally contribute to the growth of the story. Hardly anything but action will really illustrate character, it seems to me. The further you develop the characters, the better glimpses you get of the plot; and if you have an idea for a plot, that will usually thicken character for you. As to which comes first, it's probably the old problem of the hen and the egg. Either might, logically.

William H. Hamby: There is no rule with me. Sometimes I start a story with a character, and, all things considered, that makes the best story. Sometimes the plot comes first; again a situation or an incident will start the mind to weaving a story. The series of stories, The Adventures of a Misfit, which one of my friends assures me were the worst stories I ever wrote, was suggested merely by a name. Red Foam, which other of my friends claim is the best story I have written so far, was written from a motif—I had a strong feeling that I wanted to visualize that frothy shallowness of judgment which is so easily mislead by a little palaver.

Joseph Mills Hanson: The genesis with me is usually an incident, situation or setting. I always have in mind a lot of provocative events in the history of the Northwest or elsewhere, and hang my stories on to them. I try to make my characters appropriate to the time, the place, the atmosphere, the special problem that has to be solved.

E. E. Harriman: I usually think of an incident, a situation, and roll it over like a snowball until it accumulates enough to make it a story.

Nevil G. Henshaw: I've no fixed rule, although, in a long piece of work, I try to present a certain section with its corresponding inhabitants and industries. With short stories I either work from a single plot idea, or propound a certain phase of human character and set out to prove it by means of the story—(as in Madame Justice I endeavored to give certain conditions under which a mother would kill her well-beloved son).

Joseph Hergesheimer: It grows from the emotion caused by a place or an individual.

Robert Hichens: Usually some big situation arising from the clash of two characters.

R. de S. Horn: The genesis of a story with me is generally an incident, a situation, or a character or trait of character, with the incident predominant. I have some settings tucked away in my note-book, but I expect they will be used only when I've got a situation, character or incident idea to go with them. The title is the last thing I write usually, and it generally comes hardest. However sometimes I stumble on it in the middle of the story. Every idea that suggests a story possibility I immediately enter in my note-book.

Clyde B. Hough: My story ideas generally grow out of a phrase or a sentence and this phrase or sentence most often takes its place in the story, either as the core, the hinging base or the climax. This sort of plot germ is generated in various ways. Sometimes by a scene, sometimes by a spoken word and sometimes by a man's action.

Emerson Hough: Some big motive or period. Not a Peeping Tom incident.

A. S. M. Hutchinson: Character entirely.

Inez Haynes Irwin: It is very difficult for me to tell you what I mean by the idea for a story. There is so much to say that I would like to answer this question in a book. That idea may come from anywhere or grow from anything. It may be as you suggest "an incident, a character, a trait of character, a situation, a setting, a title." It may come through a conversation, by analogy, out of the very air itself. In my experience a single scene has suddenly amplified to a whole story, a whole novel has suddenly diminished to a story. Parts of stories, quite disconnected, have suddenly sprung together and made one complete story. I have had the experience of having two or three stories develop in successive instants from a single germ; sometimes I have waited years before writing because I could not decide which one of them was the best. Mere ideas that I have carried in my mind for years have suddenly developed into stories. Mere phrases and titles have spawned stories. Interiors, empty houses, geographical situations have exploded stories. Stories, full grown, have sprung without any warning into my consciousness; and apparently with no spiritual or psychological raison d'etre. I have even had stories, all complete, hurtle out at me from life itself. Reading the stories of other authors sometimes brings stories into my mind; their first paragraphs are occasionally exceedingly stimulating. Certain ideas have always been highly stimulating to me—uninhabited islands, ghosts, fourth dimension, murder, they have engendered numberless stories. In brief stories come in every way and through every medium. Everything on earth, under the earth and above the earth is fish to the creative artist's net.

I would like to illustrate every one of the above statements but it would make the answer to your first question interminable.

Will Irwin: The genesis of a story is with me usually a situation. To give an example from a piece of fiction which I have recently finished, a friend with much experience of the underworld mentioned in conversation a case where a convict just released struck his girl who was waiting for him at the door of the prison. Speculation on what circumstances might lead to such an act gave me my story. Sometimes, however, the story grows from contemplation of an interesting character and speculation as to what he would do if placed in unusual or dramatic circumstances.

Charles Tenney Jackson: The genesis of a story with me is more likely to spring from a single incident, a situation—perhaps even a phrase—one might say, a mental gleam that seems unique—and then appears to gather to itself the characters which lead on to a plot that slowly evolves. But always the urge of it is the first suggestion.

Frederick J. Jackson: With me stories grow from incidents, characters, situations, settings and titles.

Give me a good title: I don't ask more. For example, six years ago, in New York, one popped into my mind from a clear sky. Down she went in my note-book. Last spring I felt the urge to work. Not an idea in the world. Out came the old note-book. I thought about it for a day, then batted out the story that the title suggested. The title and nothing more to start things moving.

For one story—the skipper who could always cross Humboldt Bar when other master mariners were helplessly bar-bound.

Give me a good parody or take-off on a well-known phrase or quotation and I seem to ask nothing more.

The first story of one series evolved from the character I conceived. The genesis of one story was a vivid picture that occurred to me of an outlaw coming over a hill to the cemetery outside a western town and finding four fresh graves. Three of them were occupied, the fourth empty, significantly so, since the other three were filled by the outlaw's pals on their last raid. A pleasing picture, and I made it more so by placing three sticks of wood at the heads of the filled graves, pieces split from a wooden box. The sticks were upright in the fresh earth. The top of each stick had a slit in it, and into each slit was placed an epitaph. The three epitaphs were the knaves of hearts, diamonds and clubs. In town the outlaw learns that the sheriff is carrying the knave of spades and an earnest intention to place it at the head of the fourth grave. This much just came to me. The rest of the story is a matter of mechanics.

Setting? The origin of the idea for one tale was a matter of setting, the kelp-beds along the coast south of Cape Mendocino. Small vessels—fishing-boats—sometimes put into the kelp for shelter from high seas and gales. The heavy kelp has much the effect of oil on breaking seas. With this in mind, the story was a matter of mechanics. A steamer leaving Eureka for San Francisco, a run of twenty hours, and then disappearing for eleven days, given up for lost. She had lost her propeller, her deckload, her boats and all loose deck-gear. All this came ashore north of Cape Mendocino—sure sign she had gone down, with a southwest gale raging. But her skipper had managed to get her into the kelp—he knew the kelp—and there piled all his cargo forward until the propeller shaft was above water. He shipped a new propeller right there in the open sea. The vessel lay against a background of cliff, the country back of it is deserted, isolated; steamers passing there were at least fifteen miles out to sea to get around Blunt's Reef; there was no wireless aboard. Therefore she remained undiscovered, given up for lost, until one morning, battered, smashed, burning her lumber cargo for fuel, she limped into San Francisco Bay.

Fine! An editor wanted a series about the character—the nervy, never-at-a-loss young skipper. The skipper was pure accident. I had given no thought at all to characterization. The story, the situations, his grasping a slim chance for life when his older officers could see no chance at all, were what I thought made the story. But upon close analysis it was he who made the story.

In the story I had unconsciously used the same combination of characters as in another series—the young sea captain, the ship owner and his daughter.

More stories wanted. Not an idea in the world. But a lot of promised money will make ideas come. I squared off at the Underwood and started in with the ship owner.

Conjured up a pleasing picture of him seated in his private office with wrath oozing from every one of his pores. What will make a ship owner mad? Loss of money was the answer. How could he lose money? By one of his steamers being bar-bound. So the largest steamer of the fleet is bar-bound in Gray's Harbor—has been for three weeks. Empty, she went over the bar all right. With a couple of million feet of lumber aboard she couldn't get out. "Martin" to the rescue. He gets her over the bar—all this is deliberately manufactured with not a single idea one paragraph ahead of my fingers on the keys. Then, with the steamer at sea, ideas come galloping. It is very seldom that I start a yarn with not even a title to work on, not an idea in the world as to what is going to happen. But I finished up with a real story which brought a bigger check than any I had received up to that time for any story.

The third of the series came easier. In The Saturday Evening Post I read a story by Byron Morgan called The Elephant Parade, a tale of motor-trucks. Into my mind popped the idea of using caterpillar tractors in a sea story. By this time I had "Martin" firmly in hand, well-trained. The fourth story went over nicely. But in the fifth one I made the mistake of bringing some war stuff in. Editor said nix. I got disgusted with "Martin" right there and left him flat.

Now in your question you have omitted the word "theme," which might be included. For instance one was the growth of something that can not be called a definite idea. It was hazy, vague, when I started it. All I had in mind was the traits of blondes (feminine) as I have known them, especially movie blondes. My working title on the story was The Cussedness of Blondes. I changed that to Press Agents' Paradise, and wound up with A Million Dollars' Worth. The working title changed as I got into the thing and began to see sunshine ahead. The only thing I had in mind with which to end the story was a beautiful double-cross on the part of the blonde girl. I ended it that way. I had many a laugh at the situations I had conjured up and slapped into the story. Laughing at my own stuff. Read it and weep.

Mary Johnston: Sometimes one, sometimes another. But usually a character or a situation, or an idea that seems to have ethical or evolutionary value. To see the idea for a story means to see the story.

John Joseph: The genesis of a story? The idea for a "red-blooded" story comes from my own experience. That is, things I have actually seen. Such stories are, as a matter of fact, fictionized facts. Some stories are based on a peculiarity of human nature. That is, they arise from a study of human nature.

Lloyd Kohler: Of course, the idea for a story may spring from almost anything. With me, however, the idea for the story usually springs from an incident in actual life. Quite often, too, the story grows from a very brief newspaper article. Incidents from my own life and the sharp brief stories of the daily press have furnished all the ideas for my stuff.

Harold Lamb: The genesis of a story is most often some happening that comes into the fancy, followed by the impulse to draw character in connection with that happening.

Sinclair Lewis: Varies. Usually from a character.

Hapsburg Liebe: My best stories grow from a character; then a situation to fit in with the character. I have had most of my failures, I think, from inventing a situation and sticking doll-like characters in it.

Romaine H. Lowdermilk: With me, the good stories originate around a character. As the characters are supposed to seem real and be interesting to the reader I feel that they, as the actors, are more vital than their doings. When I have my characters in mind I choose one upon whom to center interest and one for humor unless I can combine the two. Around this character (or characters) I work out action that I think true to their natures and the setting to which they are native. It takes considerable thought to think up a series of incidents leading to some definite end or some theme, but then that's the writer's business. He's got it to do! Given a character you can make yourself acquainted with, you can write a story around him, and the more commonplace the character the more likely you are to hit on a story that reads true to life among a majority of readers. Sometimes I write from situation, setting or incident, but usually go back to the beginning and find the character who, when properly used, seems to work out most of the story himself. The title is my stumbling-block. I never find a title until after the story is done, and then only after great effort and generally at the suggestion of some of my family who act as "critics" on the completed work.

Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.: The genesis of a story, with me, may be any bit of mental detritus lodged in the flow of thought long enough to collect about it enough flotsam to round into a missile to throw at an editor. The "bit" may be any of those you have listed, but I like best an idea, or a theme. Given an idea, I like to try to translate it into life—i. e., fiction. Ideas, though, are scarce. But whatever the story germ is, it has to bite hard, else the story is not likely to be much.

Rose Macaulay: I usually start from some idea I have in my head about the world or life or people and illustrate it with the particular plot and character that seem to suit it.

Crittenden Marriott: The climax; I always start with it—and write up to it. I begin anywhere, and half the time I have to begin again and perhaps again till I find a beginning that lets the story run smoothly. I keep the false beginnings and work some of them into the story.

Homer I. McEldowney: The idea of a story with me has been of varied origin—a name, a situation, a character, or a plot. I have only written four yarns thus far, and I have used four different methods. Perhaps the next will be still different. And I wonder, when the various methods have been exhausted, if I'll be, too—at the end of my rope!

Ray McGillivray: Two people at cross-purposes, two or more opposed forces, or a person and a conflicting force, usually give a yarn of mine initial impulse—at least of consideration. I sketch a plan or synopsis, then dictate it straight through from beginning to end. My steno hands me a result which—because of her garbling, my smoke-clouded diction and incomplete ideas—resembles a finished story somewhat less than a plate of steak and Idaho baked potatoes with pan gravy resembles a fat man. I chew away at the script, and return to the girl a mess of pages upon which there is more pencilling than ink. Being human and slightly myopic, she does not turn out a final draft—yet. The third typing finishes a script, though—unless it be part of a novel, or an editor asks rewriting done. Given the right sort of quarrel, dilemma or unconscious conflict between interesting persons or forces, however, I believe that setting, incidents of development, and atmosphere traipse right into the yarn without being paged.

Helen Topping Miller: My stories usually begin with titles. Often I carry a title in my mind for years before I am able to find the story to go with it. Occasionally I begin a story with only a character, but I must have my title before I can write. Having got my characters I devise the "conflict" which is to develop those characters, and then build the plot around that.

Thomas Samson Miller: There are stories which have their genesis in an author's rage at an inhumanity or injustice. We writers all start out being missionaries, I think, and only slack up when we discover that readers delighted in the jam—the story—and missed the pill. I have to be moved by a strong desire to expose some wrong to get across a really strong story. But my commercial success (if I may claim success) falls along adventure stories for young men and boys. In such stories incident is of the first importance. The incident has to dovetail into a plot, all the action flowing to a logical climax. The second importance is a hero—a manufactured hero, whose best traits only are shown, for character is complex—the admirable traits always associated with less admirable.

Anne Shannon Monroe: I believe a story almost always grows with me from a character; a certain kind of a person who always gets into trouble—or out—because he does certain sorts of things.

L. M. Montgomery: The genesis of my stories is very varied. Sometimes the character suggests the story. For instance, in my first book, Anne of Green Gables, the whole story was modeled around the character of "Anne" and arranged to suit her. Most of my books are similar in origin. The characters seem to grow in my mind, much after the oft-quoted "Topsy" manner, and when they are fully incubated I arrange a setting for them, choosing incidents and surroundings which will harmonize with and develop them.

With short stories it is different. There I generally start with an idea—some incident which I elaborate and invent characters to suit, thus reversing the process I employ in book-writing. A very small germ will sometimes blossom out quite amazingly. One of my most successful short stories owed its origin to the fact that one day I heard a lady—a refined person usually of irreproachable language—use a point-blank "cuss-word" in a moment of great provocation. Again, the fact that I heard of a man forbidding his son to play the violin because he thought it was wicked furnished the idea for the best short story I ever wrote.

Frederick Moore: The genesis of a story with me may be any of the things mentioned, but generally I find it is some incident upon which a plot may be built. And frequently the plot in its final form has no bearing whatever on the original incident which gave birth to the plot.

Talbot Mundy: With me, the genesis of a story is too often the need for money; or at any rate, the need for money generally has too much to do with it. I disagree totally from the accepted theory that it does a writer good to be "hard up." It is true that I wrote some of my best stories when I was frightfully "broke"—The Soul of a Regiment for instance; but the idea of selling that story never entered into the conception or construction of it; had nothing to do with it, in fact. It was an idea and an incident that took hold of me and thrilled me while I wrote it. It was based on a tale that my father told me one Sunday morning at breakfast when I was about eight years old. He told it to me all wrong, but contrived to put across the spirit of the thing, and it seems that that part stuck.

Ideas, I am afraid, are no good unless pinned down in the very beginning to a character and one main incident. I can live in a world of ideas; in fact, I generally do, dreaming along without much reference to "hard" facts. I see pretty clearly the necessity to make ideas concrete by turning them into persons, things and incidents. A plot is otherwise a mere conundrum without much interest to the reader, however appealing to the writer it may be. Thus, an idea for a story (in my case) may be an incident, a trait of character, a situation, setting, title or almost anything; and the temptation, which I fall for much too often, is to go dancing along with the idea, letting it will-o'-the-wisp me all over the place. Whereas the true process is to pin that idea down and make it so concrete that the reader doesn't recognize it as an idea, but does recognize a sort of familiar friend—concrete as a sidewalk. This is a counsel of perfection; but it's the nearest I can get, after a dozen years of trying, to an answer to your question. Be concrete. Get away from the abstract by making it concrete. With that proviso, anything whatever is an idea for a story.

Kathleen Norris: The genesis of a story with me is usually a situation; the feeling that such and such a relationship between persons of such and such ideals or ideas would make for human interest. A servant girl who holds a baby above a flood all night—a boy who hates his father's second wife, etc., etc.

Anne O'Hagan: The stories that I have taken the most pleasure in writing and that have seemed to me the most successful have grown out of speculation upon a character in a situation. If I may use an illustration, Wings of Healing, a short serial published last year in McCall's, grew out of speculation upon a character, proud, resentful, out-of-joint with the world, returned to the environment which had embittered her, brought back face to face with all that she thought she most hated in the world. Of course, being a professional writer I have written many stories without any such genesis, stories based on an incident or even a setting. But with me, this is not my serious method of trying to write a good story.

Grant Overton: With me, a story may begin with a background, an incident, a character, a situation or a title. My idea of a story is simply something arising in the first place from any one of these sources. I should not say that a trait of character was sufficient for me in the beginning. My first novel arose from a particular background; my second novel was originated by an unusual situation, which I heard of; my third novel (in point of writing) was suggested by a place; my fourth novel arose from a character, Walt Whitman. The only two short stories I ever did that are of any account whatever, were both inspired by houses with "atmosphere."

Sir Gilbert Parker: Character always.

Hugh Pendexter: Dramatic situation. A flashlight picture of a climax with no explanation. Then technique of going back and building up to it.

Clay Perry: To me it has been a character, a situation, an incident, a title, striking enough to set imagination at work.

Michael J. Phillips: Out of nowhere at all an idea comes into my head. It may consist of a novel association of two apparently unrelated ideas; it may be a picturesque phrase or it may be an out-of-the-ordinary incident. I think to myself: "That might make a story."

Immediately the other side of me pops its head out and says: "You poor boob, there's nothing in that at all but grief and hard work and disappointment. There isn't a story there and if there is, you can't write it. That isn't your style at all, so forget it."

Consciously I forget it. But the next day as I am walking to the office—most ideas come while I am hiking,—the first half of my mind says apologetically: "Of course we know that was a fool idea we had yesterday and there's nothing to it and we can't do anything with it, and we don't intend to, but—If it was any good and we expected to use it and if we had enough talent to make a readable story out of it, here is a little incident which would tag along with it."

Then the germ and the incident are rudely thrust back into limbo. This sort of thing happens for about three or four days, the story taking form until I know the story and the finish and most of the incidents before I consciously accept it and start to polish it off in my mind. The story is complete, or practically so, before I set it down on paper.

The only story which didn't come to me that way hit me all of a heap and convinced both sides of my mind at once, taking the citadel by storm. It was the real, authoritative goods, and I knew it, and glowed over it. I have rewritten it twice, and it's still unsold. While others, which were dragged on to my door-step by my unwilling brain working under compulsion, but which I wrote more or less easily, with my tongue in my cheek, have been pronounced good by hard-headed gents who pay money for fiction.

Walter B. Pitkin: A story may grow from anything with me. Most commonly, though, from a big critical situation, then from a setting (atmosphere); less often from a character trait; and still less from a complete character in real life.

The four best stories I have written, judging quality exclusively by the approval of editors and readers, grew out of a combination of an idea and an odd situation.

A story idea sometimes starts with a title; but I find that the title never carries me very far, though it may start something going.

E. S. Pladwell: I can not answer. Sometimes it just grows out of random thoughts. Again, it comes from stories I have heard, or personal experiences. An idea for a story grows out of a setting, a character and a climax. The three combined make the finished job.

Lucia Mead Priest: I should say that the genesis of what stories I have written have never been twice alike.

A situation, a phase of character, a setting, some other fellow's adventure or one of my own, have furnished the kernel around which the matter has concreted.

Now and then it has meant immediate germination but more often the corm has been tucked away on a mental shelf to ripen or desiccate.

I do not know whether that is the usual process of a mentality or the working of an irregular one.

Eugene Manlove Rhodes: How would a given character react to a given situation? Answer is a story. Character, situation.

Frank C. Robertson: The world is full of interesting situations and unusual characters. I think I always carry around some of these somewhere in the back of my head. Every once in a while one of the unusual characters will accidentally get into one of these interesting situations and the story begins to crawl. These two, character and situation, always seem to come simultaneously and demand to be written about.

Ruth Sawyer: Generally from an incident or character. Primarily it is the human appeal which decides.

Chester L. Saxby: A story with me grows out of any kind of seed, but most frequently from an incident or a situation. The character is essentially a part of that incident. The character is the shaper of the idea in my mind; without him and apart from him it does not exist. But the dramatic possibility of the idea is the thing.

Barry Scobee: It may be any one of these, or from an idea that pops into my mind as I read or watch a movie, but mostly the genesis starts with a situation or a condition. By situation I mean, of course, the position a character is in. By condition I mean a dramatic, novel, puzzling or pathetic theme or phase of life, somebody or group of somebodies. To illustrate, the remote, isolated big-ranch people of southwest Texas. They are in a condition from which rises the dramatic or novel. After all is said, an idea for a story, with me, is a situation—even if it be the mental situation brought about by a man's own state of mind. It is that more than character or the other things.

R. T. M. Scott: To some extent the genesis of a story comes to me from all the things which you mention. More particularly it comes to me from a character or a title. All my "Smith" stories are from character with the exception of the first of the series. One came from the title out of the "nowhere." There is one source, however, which you have not mentioned and which has had significant results for me. I refer to dreams. If I can get to my typewriter before the atmosphere of a dream has vanished the story is sold. A case of this kind occurred with Such Bluff as Dreams Are Made Of, the first of the "Smith" series. I crawled out of bed to my typewriter and wrote the thing straightaway without an alteration. It sold at once and, as soon as it appeared in print, Cassel's Magazine of London wanted it and I was asked to cable my reply. I dreamed both of the dreams described in this story. Selling dreams is clear profit.

Robert Simpson: The idea for a story has, with me, no specific method of birth. It may be derived from any of the sources you refer to, or it may, as sometimes happens, spring out of nowhere, practically complete from introduction to climax. Most frequently, however, and particularly with short stories, I merely sit down and write. A sentence of some sort finds its way on to the paper, then another and another, and ultimately a story begins to take shape. A number of these "germ sentences" may have to be removed from the finished product, but most of them remain. When I have evolved a story idea by this method, I go just so far and no farther until I have decided on a climax. If I can't create a climax that satisfies me, I allow the idea to rest for a while, and usually, when I am not consciously thinking about it at all, a fitting climax comes along and the story is written. With book-length stuff, however, I generally begin with four things—a character who sounds a decided key-note, the setting, and, however vaguely, a conception of the beginning and the end. Until I have these ingredients fairly well fixed in my mind, I don't attempt to "write them into existence." Generally speaking, the principal character is suggested to me first by name. I can't write about anybody whose name doesn't "fit."

Arthur D. Howden Smith: Sometimes a situation; sometimes a character or group of characters.

Theodore Seixas Solomons: "Story germ," though a trite expression, hits it with me as to what a yarn grows from. But it may be a situation or a very odd trait of character in what would otherwise be a not uncommon situation. Sometimes an incident, if it seems a germinal one; rarely or never a setting or title.

Raymond S. Spears: Generally speaking, I have a personal interest in some subject or other. I begin to collect information about it, as pearls, trapping, Mississippi River, shanty-boaters, etc. Perhaps a news clipping starts me off, or a book, or a fiction story. After a while, perhaps I have a hundred, a thousand clippings, books, etc. Then I go to the scene; thus I went to Muscatine, Iowa, on a motorcycle to spend half a day in a button factory, and a few days around that button-making town, buttons and pearls going together! Then I went on into the Bad Lands of western South Dakota, and spent a month on the prairies in homestead country. Later I rolled thousands of miles in homestead countries, to get "the big viewpoint."

Sometimes the story comes ready made in the material. Sometimes it comes divested of environment—atmosphere—and I have to dress it up in a desert, then a river, then a green timber environment, or facts, to find which fits. Often a story idea appears as a character of certain tendencies, and this character I bring up by hand, sometimes for years.

I gather my material of all kinds, and each group of material has characters, plots, ideas, themes, etc., wandering and wallowing around in the wilderness, and gradually a group of all sorts of things that go to make up a story is precipitated by conditions, and if I'm in too much of a hurry, I write too soon; the way through is invisible, and I run into a blind cañon.

Norman Springer: In all of these ways, incident, title, etc., but most often (say four times out of five) I visualize a character, and the story grows about him. (This character, by the way, is never dragged out of real life, and I don't try to make him a type. He is—at least while the yarn is in the making—a distinct individual, with individual characteristics. Though I do find that, as the story progresses, he acquires little habits of mind and manner of people I know or have known. If I don't guard against it, the character in the last story is likely to carry over and intrude his personality into the next story, where he isn't wanted.)

The genesis of the story is something like this: I think of the character. I try him in this situation and that. Perhaps he fits, and the plot grows naturally to its completion. Perhaps he doesn't fit, or the material is only half a story—then I shove the whole matter into the back of my mind. Weeks or months later additional situations, or maybe new incidents, occur to mind. Out trots the character from his seclusion, bringing his story with him.

Stories that come via the title route are nearly always of the "fate" variety.

If the plot is imagined first, and then the characters, I find that the latter are likely to be wooden and lifeless, and the story very hard to write.

Julian Street: Sometimes a situation. Practically always, however, the situation grows out of character. Never a title. That's always cheap, I think. The more I work and (I hope) ripen, the more I believe that the basis of most good stories is character. Character makes plot.

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.

T. Von Ziekursch: Genesis of a story.—I have little idea where the ideas for stories come from. They merely seem to be dreams in which the characters become clearer and clearer until I live through the incident with them in an existence that is very real. I always have regrets when a story is finished; then the characters seem to fade out like old friends, gradually becoming hazier until they are lost. In my animal stories I believe incidents that I have seen and animals that I have studied form the stem about which I build the branchings. Perhaps the same thing occurs with the human characters.

Henry Kitchell Webster: My theory of the genesis of a story is a dynamic one. The motive power behind any story is furnished by the setting up in some life, or group of lives, of a condition of strain or disequilibrium, and the story itself is the sequence of events by which equilibrium is sought to be established. I never started a story from a title, but I fancy I have started at least once from each of the other items of your list.

G. A. Wells: Story ideas occur to me in flashes. As a rule it is no more than an idea, very brief and not, in most cases, sharply drawn. Most ideas come to me while reading the work of others, whether of fiction or fact, and it may be peculiar that the idea as it occurs is never similar to the story or article as a whole or any part of it that I chance to be reading at the time. To name a case in point, I distinctly remember that the idea for one story came to me while reading the third book of Dryden's translation of Virgil's Æneid. The idea hit me so hard that I dropped everything else and began the story at once. I don't attempt to explain it. I have never deliberately set about to invent a story idea. That is beyond my mental capacity. Ideas occur to me unwilled or not at all. But, given the idea, I will with confidence contract to work it out in any manner suggested.

William Wells: Anything gives me the idea for a story; my head is full of them all the time.

Ben Ames Williams: It is quite impossible to answer generally any such question as this. Some of my stories grow out of incidents observed or imagined; some are transcribed almost literally from experiences related to me; some grow up around a character, or an apt title, or a trait of character; some are built up as a play is built up, to put forward a definite dramatic situation; some put in the form of fiction a philosophic or religious idea which has appealed to me; some are merely whimsical studies in contrast. The only general statement I can make is that George Polti's book on dramatic situations has been of great help to me, not so much in suggesting stories as in assisting me to see more clearly what effect I want to produce.

Honore Willsie: I always start with some bit of human philosophy that I want to get over.

H. C. Witwer: I'm afraid I must answer this one rather generally. That is, I mean the genesis of a story with me grows from not one, but all the elements you mention, viz., character, situation, setting, title. Sometimes I hit upon a good title and write around that; sometimes I spend days on the proper title after the yarn is finished. A chance remark of an individual, quaint, funny, philosophic, etc., may furnish a story and so with the other ingredients above. I would say, though, that the majority of times the first thing I get to work on is a situation. Next title. After that, I go to it!

William Almon Wolff: If I go back I can find that stories have grown out of all the things you mention. But the actual making of the story never begins until one or more persons are in my mind. I have to deal with people, and the real planning and building of the story nearly always begins with speculation as to what this person or that would do in a certain situation. Here is a concrete example:

My friend, Robert Rudd Whiting, gave me, years ago, this, as an idea for a story. Repairs to a post road in Connecticut made him, for several days, take a detour; a little, lonely sort of road. And he used to pass an old house, where two old ladies sat, looking out eagerly at all the bustling life that had so suddenly come along their road.

Bob had tried to write the story, and failed. The idea fascinated me, too. My notion was to try to work something out and do it with Bob—I know, of course, that, if only he kept on, he could do the story, and do it better than I could ever hope to do it. But the war came along, and it took Bob. He was killed in action as truly as any man who died in France, although the records don't show that. So I felt that I was doubly obliged to write that story. But it eluded me until, at last, I saw in my mind exactly the right man, troubled, oppressed, sick of heart and mind and body, lured from the great road, with its rushing motors, by the peace of the little road.

From that moment I was on the way to doing the story. What ailed that man? What had gone wrong? What would he find when he came to the house and the two old ladies? And wouldn't the little road, in the end, if he followed it so far as it went, take him back, refreshed and strengthened, to the road and the life he had abandoned?

Edgar Young: A story usually starts, in my case, with an idea—some truth that I wish to prove, some fact that I wish to demonstrate, or some effect I wish to show. This, to my estimation, is what a story writer means when he speaks of "an idea" for a story.

Summary

Answering, 113. By a rough system of tabulating, allowing two points for a subject when it is usually or always the genesis of a story, and one point when it is sometimes or rarely the genesis, we get the following general view:

Character, 73; character and action, 4; character and situation, 10; situation, 73; incident, 69; titles, 19; setting, 19; purpose, 14; phrase, 11; "just born," 5; emotion, 4; miscellaneous, 26; varying as to genesis, 57; don't know, 4.

The miscellaneous include such as: contrast, condition of mind, problem, motive, period, tales, a name, a view of life, news, period.

These statistics from the data given can serve merely to give a general survey and to indicate, at least approximately, the relative frequency of use. That character, situation and incident should head the list was rather to be expected, though hardly in that order. That titles should rank next seems surprising.

The interest in these data is chiefly for the beginner. Probably the best place to get an idea for a story is wherever you can get it and be satisfied with it, but this data may show the beginner sources not previously considered. Perhaps the best service to him is the demonstration that creative minds do not all work alike and that general rules are to be regarded with suspicion until found really applicable to the particular case.

Aside from service, these data may be of some passing interest to writers, critics and editors in general.

QUESTION II

Do you map it out in advance, or do you start with, say, a character or situation, and let the story tell itself as you write? Do you write it in pieces to be joined together, or straightaway as a whole? Is the ending clearly in mind when you begin?To what extent do you revise?

Answers

Bill Adams: It writes itself—nothing to do with me. I never read stories—or very, very, very rarely. Most stories, though not quite so poisonous as my own, are indigestible. Never have the slightest idea what the end, and rarely what the next paragraph will be. Revise a great deal afterward, in small ways.

Samuel Hopkins Adams: As a rule the story is pretty well worked out in advance; always in the case of a novel. It does happen, however, that a character upon which a story is built will take the bit in his or her teeth and run away with the whole show—even to the extent of ditching it! I have had a short story turn out disconcertingly different from my original intention because one of the characters got out of control. After I write passages, particularly bits of dialogue before going at the story as a whole, I always revise and rewrite; sometimes I wholly recast a story.

Paul L. Anderson: A story is mapped out in advance, often to the very language, the actual words to be put down on paper. Revision is chiefly a matter of improving the wording, though it sometimes takes the form of shifting the action around; sometimes even of rebuilding the whole yarn, from start to finish.

William Ashley Anderson: No, I don't deliberately map out a story; though, generally, the theme of the story is in mind when I start, and the chief problem is to hit on the best point of departure. The ending is not clearly in mind when I start, though I am inclined to think that, as a rule, this is a distinct defect, because without an ending clearly in mind a story must start off without limits and the author can have no measure by which to judge the value of his characters. This applies particularly to the short story. In longer stories the characters must develop logically; and there should be no limits whatever for a novel.

My usual method is to write a story as the ideas present themselves or the characters move in their relation to the general theme. Then I rewrite, pruning freely. After that I often rewrite again.

On the other hand I have written very clear, sharp stories at one writing; and very vague stories after several rewritings.

But I firmly believe that no story is so good that it won't be improved by a second writing; and there are innumerable evidences in literature to sustain this.

Often a story changes while I am writing it. Starting with a vague idea, a strong idea may suddenly obtrude itself. Many times the "kick" in a story has come into mind when the story was already half done.

Thackeray noted the fact that when a man starts to set his ideas on paper he is surprised at how much more he knows than he thought he knew. This, I think, is characteristic of an experienced writer, while the opposite holds true of a novice.

H. C. Bailey: I always plan the whole thing before I begin to write, in considerable detail; every chapter of a book, every phase of a short story and often the key phrases of dialogue and narrative are in my private synopsis. But I hardly ever find that it all goes according to plan. Characters won't do as they are told. They turn out to be different from what I had imagined. Minor people become important. And so the characters work out their plots sometimes in ways of their own. I always work straight on from beginning to end. Once the manuscript is finished I only revise details, but the writing itself is a process of revision and rewriting page by page and line by line.

Edwin Balmer: Sometimes I map out the whole story in advance and I usually try to, but I think the best stories are those where I have merely started with a general idea and with a fairly definite conception of the outcome and then have followed the "hunches" which seemed of themselves to work through the story. I usually write straightaway as a whole until about two-thirds through a short story, when I fully revise at least once and then write to the end.

Ralph Henry Barbour: I do not "map out" a story in advance. I might fare better if I did so. I don't know, and I probably never shall know since it is something I am apparently incapable of doing. My start is made with a situation or with certain characters. Sometimes with even less. Whatever the start is, the characters at once take matters into their own hands, and while I may sometimes use a feebly restraining rein they generally end by taking the bits into their teeth. The end is clearly in my mind when I begin. That is, to return to metaphor, the goal is known to me. What isn't known is the road that is to lead to the goal, nor what is to happen on the way. Infrequently I find that I have arrived at a destination other than the one toward which I started. But that occurs only infrequently for the reason that, given my characters, I can usually tell how they are going to behave; or, rather, where, having behaved—or misbehaved—they are going to fetch up. From this it may be gathered that I let the story tell itself to a great extent. I do not write a story in pieces, but take it as it comes. I revise very little. Almost not at all. Perhaps my stuff would be better if I revised more. But I don't like revising. Something is going to be lost when that is begun. It is better, I think, to revise before you write.

Frederick Orin Bartlett: I never map out anything. For me nothing is more dangerous. My story as a whole is clearly in mind, but the details work themselves out as I write. That is true of my ending; I must know, of course, in a general way where I am going or I have no story, but that is as far as I commit myself except very rarely when the last sentence bobs into my head all made. Even then I may not know the preceding sentence or paragraph.

Nalbro Bartley: I write a story straightaway as a whole—the ending clearly in mind when I start. I always have it mapped in advance—and then, having started, I let the characters take the action in their own hands while I keep the characters in mine. It is like building a house with a plan—so many rooms, porches, etc.,—and letting the people who are to live in it furnish it as they please and live their own life as a family unit.

Ferdinand Berthoud: I map the story out wholly in my mind—practically see it finished as an artist sees a picture—before I begin to write. However, one or other of my characters is often likely to say some fool thing I hadn't previously thought of and slightly to change the trend of the yarn.

In writing I do the first two or three thousand words, then go for a long walk next morning and think up the exact wording of the next slab of misery. All I have to do then is practically to copy the stuff down.

Yes, I have the ending and the exact last words before I do a thing. Am ashamed to say I revise very little. Always keep my finished typed copy just two or three pages behind the original draft.

H. H. Birney, Jr.: Story is loosely mapped out in advance and written straight through—frequently at a single sitting. I do very little revision—little compared to what I understand some authors do. At times I will type a copy, single-space and carelessly, from my original pen and ink draft, do some revision as I proceed, and then prepare my final, double-spaced copy from this.

Farnham Bishop: Many of my stories start with things, rather than human beings: out-of-the-way ships, guns, primitive locomotives, what not. But as Kipling points out:

"Things never yet created things,
Once, on a time, there was a man."

Therefore I must create the man who creates or uses the thing. Also his opponent or opponents, and the other people who more or less "go with the situation." Try to humanize every one of them, even if he only walks on to speak a line or carry a spear.

My usual written outline is a neatly typed list of all names of people, ships and places. Make this before I begin writing the story, to avoid being held up later. Spend a great deal of time trying to pick effective names. Finding the right one helps me visualize the character. Pick them out of the phone book, old histories, etc.

Almost invariably have the ending in mind before I begin. In fact, often begin by setting aside a strong ending and then work up to it. Brodeur and I wrote our first story about the fall of Knossos. All we did was to fake up a plausible explanation of why the durned place fell. As for revision, I write the whole yarn, read it, pencil it full of corrections, and then type a fair copy with carbon, revising it again in the process.

Algernon Blackwood: An emotion produces its own setting, usually bringing with it a character who shall interpret it. The emotion dramatizes itself. The end alone is clearly in my mind. I never begin to write until this is so. Then I write fragments, scenes, fragments of the psychology, fitting them in later. Occasionally, however, when the emotion is strong, the story writes itself straightaway. Revision is endless. Often the story, when finished, is put aside and forgotten. The revision that comes weeks later, on reading over the tale as though it had been written by some one else, is the most helpful of all.

Max Bonter: Formerly I used to sit down and begin writing at random, letting the story tell itself as I wrote. I have at last decided that it is a most pernicious practise. If, when I begin writing, I haven't a fairly clear idea of what I am going to write, how can I bestow on each phase or angle of my subject an appropriate measure of importance? How can I obey the law of proportion?

The result of such procedure was nearly always a lopsided story. As a theme gradually developed under my hand and neared its objective, I discovered that the text was full of clots and excrescences that had no part in the climax and had to be cut out. My straightaway rush therefore availed me little, because it was succeeded by hash, slash and revision. It was too much like stumbling into a story.

Mathematics being the foundation of everything, including chemistry, which is Life, and correspondingly of creativeness, which is a phase of life, should, it seems to me, enter directly into the building of a story. It is a vast field for an untechnical brain like mine to browse in, but I hope to get something out of it before I quit. In the meantime I am striving to organize a simple but effective scheme of work, somewhat as follows:

1. Be sure an idea is worth developing, from a "human interest" standpoint.

2. Develop the climax first.

3. Start off the characters like a bunch of obstacle racers and bring them to the climax as quickly, but as logically, as possible.

4. Write tersely at first, expanding where advisable—rather than write voluminously and chop out.

5. Write nothing that won't put at least a grain of weight into the final wallop.

Katharine Holland Brown: The story tells itself as it is being written: or rather, it is fairly visible as a whole before I begin to write at all. The climax and ending are usually written first. The rest is written down in very concise fragments, just as these fragments present themselves. The story isn't written consecutively the first time. Only the high lights. Then, of course, it has to be rewritten, sometimes three or four times; sometimes only once.

F. R. Buckley: I combine mapping ahead and letting a character move the story. Method depends on mode of conception (see above). Roughly speaking, the average story is planned thus—I conceive either the beginning, the middle, or the end, to start with. If the end, then I work backward and decide what shall be the high spot of the middle: and, from that, backward and figure out just where and with what attention-gripping incident I can start the story. These three high points established, I take the main character and start him from the beginning toward the middle. He decides very largely how he gets there—his character does, I mean. And when he's reached the middle, I start him off again in the general direction of the end. I always have these three high points established before I begin. I write straightforward; revise little, except for redundancies and literals, except in the case of long stories and complicated shorts. Then I go very carefully over the thing for errors of fact or probability: e. g., I examine each situation to see whether it could have been resolved in any simpler way than I have resolved it; whether I have made my characters make a wide detour when they could, and would, have cut across lots, as it were. Since, however, the character of the hero or principal character dictates the minutiæ of action, I rarely (have never done so yet) find a mistake of this kind. This is the great advantage of having a strong character to dictate action, of course.

Prosper Buranelli: I have everything but small details in my mind when I begin writing.

Thompson Burtis: My stories are all mapped out in advance—the exact ending is in sight. Even some of the dialogue is in mind when I start. I write straightaway as a whole. I revise very little. Most rewritten pages are the result of my believing that the original page, after the inked-in corrections, was too messy. Due to the completeness with which I have blocked out the story in advance, there is no necessity for me to do any important revision. I may occasionally overlook some important point in the story and have to put it in, but in no case have I ever made a radical change in a character or description after the first draft. What you get from me is the story as I originally wrote it, with perhaps one or two pages rewritten to make them neater.

George M. A. Cain: Advance mapping with me is of the vaguest character. Everything shapes itself toward or from the situation originally conceived. I write straightaway, but very rarely without a clear notion of a possible ending, having found that to do otherwise is to introduce useless or troublesome incidents and make heavy revisions necessary. My greatest difficulty is in getting a story started to suit me. Here is done almost all my revising, and I frequently write a dozen beginnings before suiting myself. Once started, I write straight on, unless I find, in the development of my hitherto vague ideas of the plot, that I can get my results better by change. In that case, I simply chuck out whatever I wish to replace, or insert the needed new incident. I have rarely found that I improved a story by revising it as a whole. Unless I am trying to please a new editor by nice copy, I usually submit the first and only complete draught of the story, with an occasional alteration of a word in pencil. Typing is the bane of my existence.

Robert V. Carr: Blind groper. Feeling my way through a strange country.

George L. Catton: It all depends on the length whether I map it out first or not. If it is one of those little fellows, the ones that I am best at, the story is all "there" waiting to be written down, start—finish. If it is a long one I let it write itself. That is, I get the best start I can think of and go ahead. Then when I reach the right starting-place I begin all over again. Occasionally, in a long story, the ending, in a general and vague way, may be in sight, but it very seldom ends as I planned at the start—something better turns up before I get to the end. I write it straightaway as a whole, go back often and make revisions, and often rewrite the whole thing after it is all finished.

Robert W. Chambers: Map it out in advance. Write it straightaway as a whole. Ending clearly in mind from the start. Revise murderously.

Roy P. Churchill: I have a working plan to begin with, end in view, characters named, setting selected; then write straight along as a whole. Often the working plan is radically changed, but never abandoned completely. The plan is not detailed painstakingly, but left open on purpose to change as the feel of the story develops. Revision with me is a second writing of the story, nothing less. This is where I proportion the coloring of the story and get the tones blended.

Carl Clausen: I always have the ending in mind. I write slowly, revise very little.

Courtney Ryley Cooper: My story is as clear as a bell before I ever start to write, characters outlined, action ready, ending clear and often I write the finish of my story first. I revise very little—when I have to revise I am worried to death about the yarn as I feel there is something fundamentally wrong about it that I can't put my finger on. My story is usually written in my head before I ever touch a finger to the typewriter. I often will spend six months framing a story. The actual writing of it is the smallest part of the job.

Arthur Crabb: I certainly do map out in advance. No hard and fast rules can be laid down. It is undoubtedly true that every writer may do one thing with one story and one with another. I think that most of mine are thought out completely before I start; any changes after the first draft are minor.

Mary Stewart Cutting: I do map it out in advance but not in detail. I write it straightaway as a whole. The middle part of a story is the least definite and has to be worked out. The ending is so clearly in mind when I begin that I have to write the last sentence of the story. A story, to me, is like a musical theme. It has to end on the same keynote on which it was begun. But if my mind vividly depicts some part of the story not in the proper sequence, I write it out in full as I see it and interpolate it where it belongs. I revise after the first writing, I revise before the final typewriting—mostly as regards minor sentences. But sometimes after it has gone to typewriter my mind will see where sentences should be inserted, usually to make the action clearer.

Elmer Davis: If I mapped it out in advance, I would sell more. Starting (usually) with a character in a situation, I map out six or eight chapters. By that time old Native Indolence is getting in its heavy work; the ideas are coming hard, bright thoughts and lines for the early chapters slip away while I am trying to think out and diagram the catastrophe; so I fall to writing, always easier than thinking. Write till I get stuck; then sit down and think some more; which of course usually entails considerable revision of the earlier chapters. Not much of the latter part.

William Harper Dean: Most frequently I have the ending in mind and work definitely to develop plot sequence which will enable me logically and directly to reach that end. I do not map out—such a practise would throw too many restrictions about the sweep of my imagination; I want full elasticity to that. Revise? Ah, there's the whole story! I revise and rebuild, strengthening here, eliminating there. Recently I started out with an idea for a short story and when I finished revising and rebuilding I had written a serial which sold at once for a most satisfactory price.

Harris Dickson: After I get some crude idea of a story I put down on a big sheet everything I can think of, generally without logical arrangement. This may be developed in a sort of scenario form. From this No. 2 sheet I begin to write, in longhand, in shorthand or a combination. You will note that sheets 1, 2 and 3 show progressive stages of the same material. The value of the big sheet, to me, lies in the fact that I can visualize an entire story at one glance, without having to search through a mass of tiny scraps. And it is so easy to rewrite in one column while looking at the other.

When I get my material pretty well in hand it is dictated to a dictaphone, from which the typist gives it back, with lines far apart and a wide margin. This is then scratched up, rearranged, and redictated.

Frequently a story pretty well tells itself, and sometimes the ending is clearly in mind. Sometimes not. Sometimes one kind makes the better yarn, sometimes the other. I've done a good story in three days, and struggled for three months over a bad one.

Captain Dingle: The story is pictured as a whole, with one ending clearly in view before a word is written. I do not—can not—plan a story or map it out; it has to write itself or it fails; and sometimes the ending I saw first has to give place to one more fitting to the developed story. I do not revise, except to correct noted errors of spelling and grammar (which are apt to slip anyhow, since I know damn little about 'em). Whenever I have revised a story it has proved a failure. The stuff, such as it is, must come spontaneously.

Louis Dodge: In the main I see my story to the end before I write it—or at least I try to do this. But largely I let the development—the secondary episodes—suggest themselves, or grow, as they will. I go straight through with a manuscript, and then I revise and revise and revise. I mean I write it entirely two or three or more times. This, perhaps, shows a lack of clear-mindedness, or of definite theories; but it is the best I can do.

Phyllis Duganne: I used to let stories tell themselves as I wrote them, but I've come to the conclusion that it saves more time to sit down with a pencil and paper and make a row of nice neat Roman numerals and letters and letters in parentheses, and make a diagram of the plot. That's mainly because, once I start writing, I can write on and on without getting anywhere in my story, and wasting loads of time and good paper. I write it as a whole with the general idea of the ending clearly in mind; I never know precisely where or how the tale will end. Sometimes I think I do, but the characters are likely to be ornery and not do at all what I wanted them to do. And if I make them follow a rigid plan, the story doesn't sound true. Revising depends. Sometimes hardly at all; sometimes I find that I have gone off on a tangent and have to cut out pages. Most frequently I find that I have to go through a story, individualizing and characterizing my people more. I know what they are like, but frequently I find on reading the story that I have kept most of my knowledge to myself.

J. Allan Dunn: Here is a hard question, how does the story grow? When it comes into your mind it has various stages of completion. Preferably I would let my story tell itself. No matter how carefully I may have outlined, gone over and over each next chapter, the thing amplifies when one sits down at the typewriter. The characters change, the situations demand things not thought of, you see a better way, the yeast ferments and rises unevenly. Seldom is my ending clearly in mind. An editor desiring certain breaks for serial publication will cause me to plan more carefully. Sometimes certain parts of a story obtrude themselves but not to such an extent with me as to make me break the straightaway development of the tale in due order. I may reach them with delight, look forward to them, find them in the forefront of my mind whenever I think of the yarn outside of working hours.

And what are working hours? You carry your story as a cow packs its cud. At least, I do. And I go over and over and over it, consciously and subconsciously. I take my next chapter to bed with me and automatically employ every spare minute, on the street even, to revolving the next phase of the plot. Sometimes details will blur, but the main plot extends itself far ahead. I like to try to plan a story with a purpose, but I decidedly prefer to try so to create my characters that they are alive and have certain wills of their own. As a rule I revise once—direct on the typed copy. And most of the errors are in typing. If I polish too much I am apt to overdo it, I find.

Walter A. Dyer: Partly answered above. I find it necessary to have some fairly clear conception of the destination of my story movement, or I find I have gone off at half-cock and the result is disappointing. The details, as a rule, come as I write. I try to have a telling ending in mind. Then I write the thing straight through and try to brace up the weak spots in revision. I sometimes have to change important portions of the story to get it right, but usually it is a matter of polishing. Each story seems to present its own particular problem as to the matter of revision. I have no rule.

Walter Prichard Eaton: I always like to know, before I write, around just where I am going and coming out. It is almost essential to me. Otherwise I would write far too much. Often the story in detail, sometimes in actual plot, etc., changes itself as I go along. Then I have to stop and look ahead and see a new finish.

E. O. Foster: Owing to newspaper training, I mull over a story in my mind until I have it fairly complete before I begin to write. Then I write the story with the beginning of the plot and ending clearly in my mind, after which by means of "inserts" and "adds" I enlarge it.

Arthur O. Friel: I let the story tell itself. Straightaway as a whole. Ending not clearly in mind. Revise comparatively little. Sometimes I rewrite a section, but usually not. My main revision is with the idea of compression and compactness.

In writing, I don't lay out my story and get it all nicely framed up before starting to write. I start with a general idea which comes to me from God-knows-where, and soon I'm marching along with my characters without any very clear idea of where we're all going to wind up. We get into swamps and cut our way through the bush and clamber up on to a hill and maybe find something on the other side; one thing leads to another, and eventually we make a good finish. Then we review our course, see where we went up a box-canyon which got us nowhere, and delete that place from the record of our trip; that's our "revision."

This, of course, is all wrong from the view-point of folks who love to systematize everything; but it's my way of traveling through a story, and I get there just the same. I have tried, on a number of occasions in the past, to make my characters and events fit a more-or-less definite idea of mine as to what they were to do, but it didn't work; they just took matters into their own hands and did all kinds of things I never meant them to, and all I could do was to trail along; and, darn 'em, they made a far better yarn of it than I'd ever have made if I'd clubbed them into submission. So now I've learned to let them do as they will, after I've brought them together in a certain place and started them on their way.

J. U. Giesy: Taking the germ, the "seed" of mental possibilities, I, as it were, plant it and proceed to cultivate it many times for months, letting it grow subconsciously, save for intervals when I water it by objective examination and conscious reviewing. In this way I "rough it in"—gain a general outline of the plot and action from first to last, with the ending always indicated at least. I then write it, filling in details on the main framework as I go along.

George Gilbert: Never map out, unless a little on novelettes and serials. Ending always in view. Never revise plot; sometimes revise diction materially, always some.

Kenneth Gilbert: All the mapping in advance is done in my mind, and I write the story straightaway. Of course, the tale develops and fills out as I write. I write carefully, and I find that I have but little revising to do; usually none at all. Newspaper training, whereby the first draft must be the last, may account for this care in preparing the manuscript. I always have a good general idea of the ending in my mind before I begin, and I have never been able to understand how others can go along without knowing what the next paragraph will be, unless they are willing to rewrite the story several times. I have always proceeded on the assumption that a good short story is "a dramatic tale objectively told." How may it be "objectively told" without the object in mind?

Holworthy Hall: I plan a story in advance only in so far as the development of the main situation is concerned. The ending, however, must be clearly in mind. I usually take as much time to write the first two paragraphs as to write all the rest of the first draft. Ordinarily I complete a first draft in a day or two—and a revision in ten days; but the time taken in revision is generally for style, and not for treatment. That is because, in the first draft, the sequence must be right, or I make it right before going ahead. I ought to say here that by a "day" I mean a working day of ten to sixteen hours.

Richard Matthews Hallet: I have to have a pretty definite scheme, a sequence of events with a denouement very clearly in mind, before doing much writing. This probably comes from being a cripple in the art. Scott certainly didn't. He wrote The Bride of Lammermoor when he was so nearly out of his head with pain that when the proofs came in he read them, he asserts, as if they were the work of another hand altogether. William de Morgan, to give a late instance, said he let the story drip off his pen-point. If I did this, it would drool, not drip.

I revise a great deal, three or four times, often, of next door to complete rewriting. Too much probably. Take a warning from Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece.

William H. Hamby: If the story is based on character, I let it work itself out. If it is to be a plot story made up largely of action, I outline it ahead.

Joseph Mills Hanson: I usually map a story in advance and write it straightaway as a whole, but revise it a great deal after finishing and on reading it over, chiefly to improve the style and polish it up. I have the ending pretty well in mind at the start, though it often changes considerably in detail by the time I reach it.

E. E. Harriman: I start my central character out and make him live the story. Follow him all the way through and get so darned anxious about him that I can hardly knock off work to eat. The end is oftenest clearly defined before I begin, but at times turns out differently, as the gaul-darned central figure takes the story out of my hands and does as he pleases. I revise from one to four times.

Nevil G. Henshaw: I generally have the story pretty well in mind before I start it, and write it straight through to the preconceived climax. Details, of course, shift about throughout, often changing the story materially, but usually the ending is clearly in my mind. I make one draft in ink very slowly and carefully, correcting as I go, and then do the final revising when typing on a visible machine. I always cut, but seldom if ever add.

Joseph Hergesheimer: It is planned wholly emotionally and partly in detail, and written straightaway. I revise interminably.

Robert Hichens: I do not map a book out in advance, except to some extent in my head. I have the end in my mind when I begin. This, I consider, is essential. I write straight on from the beginning to the end. Naturally I have to revise some passages. I usually write slowly and carefully and try to set down my exact meaning as I write, therefore I do not have to revise very much.

R. de S. Horn: I invariably map my story out in advance, although I don't always go to the trouble of writing out the plot diagramatically. Generally I have had the story in the back of my head for weeks or months. It starts with the story germ, and at odd times I find myself thinking about it unconsciously. Ideas, incidents and complications begin to collect around it and before I know it almost I feel that I have got a complete story. Then I sit down and write it at a single sitting if possible, without trying to exercise any great amount of word selection or any other consideration of technique. What I'm after in this first script is to get my story or rather expanded plot down on paper where I can look it over. I write in longhand and don't worry about fine considerations of sentence or paragraph structure. The ending is always in my mind before I begin, though I frequently change it before I am through with the final draft. But at any rate I have an ending which at that time seems to me to be the desirable ending. I find that in this first draft I usually write about three thousand or four thousand words.

Then I revise—and revise—and revise. I study my characters, dialogues, incidents, everything, with a view toward the demands of unity and consistency and, most of all, dramatic effect. I type my second draft because I find it necessary to be able to read exactly at the same rate as the reader if I am going to get my reader's impressions and reactions. I finish one revision, type it and start another one. My story mounts up to six, seven, nine thousand words. I sail into it, looking for non-essentials. I cut it down to five thousand or so. Then in my final drafts I bring it to the proper length; it is always easier to write in than to cut out. My revisions number as high as a dozen sometimes. In fact the enthusiasm with which I started the first draft has greatly abated before I finish and I grow very tired of the thing; so much so that I sometimes set the thing away to cool before making my final draft. But I believe that it is this cold critical attitude toward the end that really does more for the story than anything else. In other words I believe that the story-writing ability is mainly the ability to recognize some germ as having the story possibility, then the imagination to expand it, and lastly the will to work at it until it is improved to the readable state. Germ recognition ten per cent., imagination ten per cent. and hard work eighty per cent.

Clyde B. Hough: I do map out my stories ahead. One of the first things that I must have after the plot germ has reached maturity is the climax. After that, and of second importance only, is the title. All that I need to know then is the high lights, the points along the way on which the story makes its various turns. Then I sit down and write the beginning, say the first typewritten page, three or four times. Next I dictate straightaway from the title to the climax, creating the minor situations and the action as I go. Thus you see the ending is clearly in mind when I begin. "To what extent do I revise?" Always twice. Mostly three times and often four. The first revision is devoted strictly to cutting, compressing.

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."

I never write a story in pieces to be joined together. Always straightaway. Make one continuous first draft—slow work at times—and then copy it over. Typing over my original draft is about the total extent of my revision, except for a word here and there.

About the ending clearly in mind. I wrote about a dozen stories—most of them had the same plot—the old "perfect crime" that proves decidedly imperfect—and in every one of these I always had the ending clearly in mind. That's all I had to work on. I'd build up a story to fit the climax. A different method here from that which I usually employ.

Mary Johnston: I usually see it in advance, see the whole more or less completely. I do not mean, of course, in full detail. Usually it is written straight through from beginning to end. The type of ending is in mind from the first. Not necessarily the detail. In revision I excise a good deal.

John Joseph: The story begins always with a character; then a plot is conceived to "fit" that character. After the main plot is outlined (always mentally) situations or episodes, and dialogue to fit, are studied out in the rough. The typewriter now comes into play and the story is written "straightaway," with the ending always in sight. It runs to five thousand words perhaps. Frequently I roll the paper back and write between the lines. I pay some attention to phraseology, but am not particular. At page ten, perhaps, an idea comes which belongs on page five, so I turn back and jot it down between the lines with a pencil. When the first draft is finished there are always several pages that are a perfect mess of scribbling between the lines, so I rewrite these pages and renumber on through to the end. I have then perhaps a six-thousand-word story. I begin then at page one and rewrite the entire story, paying pretty careful attention to the phrasing. This copy will be nearly as badly scribbled and double-lined as the first, so it has all to be written again. This time very careful attention is paid to phrasing. Certain episodes may be rewritten many times, independently. (A recent page was written fifteen times—and then it didn't suit me.) With the third draft the story is complete except for a more careful typing and an occasional minor change.

Lloyd Kohler: Until recently I always mapped a piece, as a carpenter puts up a house. Then, when I was sure that I had the whole story well in mind, the actual writing was begun. This, in my mind, is the only reasonable way for the beginner to proceed, who has his hands full without worrying along as to how it will all end. It should be understood that I only plan the main trend of the story—the situations—in advance; the smaller details, most of the conversation, etc., must be left for the actual writing of the story. The reason for this is easily seen: If everything, even the smaller details, were figured out in advance the result would likely be a fearfully dull story—Heaven knows it's hard enough to keep a breath of real life in them, anyway.

But although I'm strong for mapping a story out in advance, I'll confess that there are even drawbacks to this method. The writer who said that he wrote the first word of a story and trusted to the Lord for the next withheld, consciously or not, the real reason for his use of this method. The reason, or at least one of the reasons, was that the fellow who writes half or two-thirds of a story without knowing what the end will be has at least the big advantage that he can be assured his interest in his story is not going to flag before it is finished. And as long as the writer's first enthusiasm in a story can be kept fresh and vigorous, the story will not likely be dull. I want to admit, right here, that regardless of the good points, the author who is bold enough to follow this method is flirting with danger.

I always start at the beginning of a story and plug away until the last word is written. May the Lord help me if I ever attempt to write a story in pieces to be finally joined together—it's hard enough to keep something akin to artistic proportion without doing the thing up in bits and then splicing the pieces.

Now the ending of the story is different. Although I know, generally speaking, how the story is going to end before it is ever begun, I rarely know just exactly what the ending is going to be until it is reached. That sounds like a paradox, but it isn't, and I know you'll understand what I'm getting at.

I don't do a great deal of revising—even though I am well aware that I am far from being a master hand at fiction writing. I believe that there is a danger of revising being carried so far as to take the life out of a story. Personally, I'd much rather see a few grammatical mistakes than a dreadfully dull story.

Harold Lamb: Usually the story is thought out fully in advance (and as often changed from beginning to end in the telling). The telling of it is straightaway, with an ending tucked away somewhere in the back of the brain.

As to revision, very, very little, except of wording and often an accident altered after story is finished.

Sinclair Lewis: Map it out in advance. Straightaway as a whole. I revise enormously—five or six times with great care.

Hapsburg Liebe: I try to map it out in advance, but I never write it as it has been mapped out, unless I'm working to one of those darned mechanical things called a surprise climax—and even then I often have to change everything but the climax. Usually I begin to write when I have my situation. When I've finished this, the rest is apt to come naturally. A lot of my stories have fallen flat at the end, however, with this method. But if I mull the story over in my head too long before I begin to write it, it dies. How much do I revise? In the case of any of my best stories, I know the thing by memory when it is finished. I revise that much—over and over and over. I've wondered if I wasn't in too big a hurry in the first writing; it sets, perhaps, like cement.

Romaine H. Lowdermilk: I map out in advance. The ending is in sight. But...! The map constantly changes as I go along. The ending advances or retreats or dissolves and changes completely as new angles creep in. But I must have the map and the definite goal before I start. I can, and sometimes do, "let the story tell itself as I write," but the result is appalling. I must set a goal and make each paragraph and each incident carry the action along toward that definite end. I do, sometimes, write the last two pages, and a few pages here and there in the body, or work out a choice incident, or one that presents the most difficulties in the way of brief expression, before beginning. It is like collecting material. I get it together and fit it in where it seems best suited. Anyway, when I get the whole thing down on paper, all jumbled as it may be, I rewrite—on the typewriter—trying to use my brain as I go along, and then view the result. Usually I mark, cut and interline every page, using a system of proof-reading all my own, then—rewrite. I do this three or four times. Then comes the final draft. How careful I am to get this exactly right! No erasures, no vague sentences, no misspelling, no "wrong" words. Then, when it is done I read it over. Alas! There is a mistake on every page and gross writing everywhere. I check, mark and interline that lovely last copy until it looks like all the rest. Then I flop the carbon copy over and make a new draft using the backs of the second sheets for the carbon so as to preserve both versions in case an editor suggests changes. And I usually find the first version the better! Upon reading this final and hard-boiled edition I am no better satisfied with it than with any of the others and could go on cutting and revising forever, but I call it quits and lay it in the laps of the gods of the editorial offices. Most of my stories so far have been sent back for some change before final acceptance. I certainly do appreciate that and I take great pleasure in the revising. For then, and then only, do I know how the story is striking the editors and, when I know that, I can revise like a bear-cat. At last I am on solid ground, whereas before I have been groping on quicksand. I like to revise and when I know exactly what an editor wants I have always been able to deliver the goods. It is not only inspirational, but I work with a surety I do not feel when fighting along with the preliminaries.

Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.: Lord, yes—I have to map it out in advance. Then there's a rough draft. This may be pretty fully written out in parts, and other parts be sketchy, which have to be filled out later. There may be pieces—merely notes—which are later joined into the whole. The ending is nearly always in my mind when I begin—at least some ending, though this may be later changed as the actual writing develops the story. I revise and revise and revise.

Rose Macaulay: I map it roughly out in advance, altering as I go along.

Crittenden Marriot: I revise as I write; that is, I go back from any place and rework till I catch up again. Finally, I go over the whole thing once, have it typed and go over it again.

Homer I. McEldowney: I map out my story before I actually begin writing—doping out a skeleton, complete, and with the conclusion determined. Then when I write, I write it as a whole. My revision is of diction and mechanical make-up, not plot.

Ray McGillivray: With slight modifications—usually the requirements of taste or demand of the market I wish to please—I have the struggle, main developing incidents, plan for character portrayal, and the climax in mind—or in a note-book—before I begin. A few times I have started with a situation and handful of characters, giving both factors free rein in naming their own destiny. Invariably such a story shoots off at a tangent—and is laid to rest, after much travel, in an old steamer trunk, my potter's field for rejects.

Helen Topping Miller: My stories work themselves out. Sometimes I know what the denouement is to be, oftener it works itself out very differently from what I had intended. I write the story as a whole, and very seldom revise my original version very much.

Anne Shannon Monroe: The story is pretty well in my mind from beginning to end before I begin to write it, but it always follows out little by-paths in coming to its end, of which I had no knowledge: I am as interested as any reader could be to see how it is going to work its way through. I follow the story, try to keep up with it, but never dictate to it, never interfere. After it's well started my hands are off. I revise four and five times,—sometimes more: the longer I write, the more I revise.

L. M. Montgomery: I map everything out in advance. When I have developed plot, characters and incidents in my mind I write out a "skeleton" of the story or book. In the case of a book, I divide it into so many "sections"—usually eight or nine—representing the outstanding periods in the story. In each section I write down what characters are necessary, what they do, what their setting is, and quite a bit of what they say. When the skeleton is complete I begin the actual writing, and so thoroughly have I become saturated with the story during the making of the skeleton that I feel as if I were merely describing and setting down something that I have actually seen happening, and the clothing of the dry bones with flesh goes on rapidly and easily. This does not, however, prevent changes taking place as I write. Sometimes an incident I had thought was going to be very minor assumes major proportions or vice versa. Sometimes, too, characters grow or dwindle contrary to my first intentions. But on the whole I follow my plan pretty closely and the ending is very often written out quite fully in the last "section" before a single word of the first chapter is written. I revise very extensively and the "notes" with which my completed manuscript is peppered are surely and swiftly bringing down my typist's gray hairs with sorrow to the grave. But these revisions deal only with descriptions and conversation. Characters, plot and incidents are never changed.

Frederick Moore: I map it out in advance, but I rarely follow the first planning. However, the ending is most vital—and it is only now and then that I use the end I started with; for instance, I once plotted a short story which I expected would not run more than three thousand words—and wound up with a novel a year later which totaled one hundred thousand words. I revise to the extent that I feel a story is never done. I had eight drafts of the novel referred to above by the time I thought it fit to submit to an editor. Six drafts on a short story gets the job into workmanlike condition—but the editor sees only the few pages of complete story.

Talbot Mundy: I hardly ever map out in advance. My right hand hardly ever knows what the left is doing. But I'm not convinced that this is good. Just as an artist usually maps out his canvas in advance, without actually seeing the finished picture, so I believe that it will usually pay the writer to fix at least certain definite landmarks for his guidance.

Order is heaven's first law.

I write the story straightaway as a whole. The end is never in view (or almost never) when I first begin. But I am beginning to believe that (for me at any rate) that is an important formula—Visualize the end of the story first. It is certainly a prime essential of drama to provide a clear view of the main character just at the close; and I think that principle underlies story-writing. The writer should have in mind throughout a clear view of his main character as he will be at the story's end. The point had not occurred to me until I commenced this answer; but the more I study it the more strongly it convinces. That, and be concrete all through the piece.

Kathleen Norris: I map it out completely in advance, even to the words, and write it almost as rapidly as I could read it. My hard work is done while walking alone, or while playing patience, over which game the whole story unrolls in orderly sequence, as a rule. But frequently after beginning a story I find a better way to do it, and I have destroyed as much as sixty thousand words and then gone back to my solitaire and planned it afresh.

Anne O'Hagan: I map it out more or less before I begin to write. Not on paper, but in my mind. That is, I have a pretty clearly defined notion of what I believe the outcome of the experiences they will undergo will have upon my chief characters. I never write a story in pieces to be joined together, although once or twice, when I have laid aside a story because it wouldn't live at all, I have found after a time that I needed either an introductory chapter or an interjected one to make my characters real. I do a good deal of revision, more in verbal detail than in arrangement.

Grant Overton: I do not map the story out in advance. I let it tell itself as I write it. I write it, beginning at the beginning and work it out to the end. The end may not be at all in mind when I begin. I do all my work, practically, on the first draft and revise only once and then very lightly. I aim to get it right the first time, even if that means going slowly.

Sir Gilbert Parker: Character, then plot, then as a whole, and the end is always in my mind from the first. Constant revision.

Hugh Pendexter: Often; but never follow the outlined plot, as it is impossible for me to vision what will emanate from the result of the first dialogue or incident. In book-lengths I have my background thoroughly in mind, decide on the time of the story and have for stimulus of the action something pivotal in the history of our country. I write, say, fifty thousand words, then rewrite to eliminate and interpolate according to the need of late developments; then finish in one or two installments, and rewrite. The ending usually is the moment when the accumulation of conditional causes causes the hinge to turn, in other words, the big climax. Revise very little. The story unfolds in clear-cut pictures that are as real to me as if I were seeing the incidents take place. Therefore, aside from correcting mechanical errors, it has to go as written.

Clay Perry: In general I make an effort to map out the story so that it has at least one big incident, one big character, and usually begin to write to see what will happen to them. I write it straightaway. Sometimes the ending is clearly in mind, sometimes not; if the characters develop strongly, often they furnish the ending, even when I have one in mind, and often different from the one I had in mind. I revise always, once, sometimes twice, and have revised four and five times.

Michael J. Phillips: I find I have answered most of this in the above. I can't start with a character or a situation and wander. I have to see it through, except that perhaps in a long story the characters rather take the bits in their teeth and give me a ride. New incidents are interjected that way in a long story; in a short one, almost never.

I revise like this. I write the story without searching too closely for the right word or phrase, preferring to go over it afterward and correct and fit and cut. I read the whole thing in the rough draft, then revise carefully. Then write for the editor, and revise that somewhat, occasionally to the extent of rewriting a page or two. Usually, rewriting is cold potatoes to me—that is, after the story is finished and ready and has been turned down, and some one, an editor or other, suggests I do something to it. I haven't any luck with rewriting. I want to go on with something else. That is a closed incident, more or less, like a yesterday's newspaper story. I note that a good many unsuccessful writers carefully write one thing, and then agonize over it, polishing and shining it and changing it and anxiously trying to reach and satisfy all objections, possible and impossible.

Thus they waste a lot of time, use up a lot of creative faculty on a dead horse, and get nowhere in the end. I feel that there was a good idea in the story, but I can evolve as good a one or better to-morrow; and if I can't, I have no place in the writing game. Ideas are the bricks with which we build. If you have but one idea, or one idea a year, we won't get many houses constructed.

I don't write in pieces to be joined together. I start and go right through to the finish. I know the opening sentence, perhaps the whole opening paragraph almost word for word, and the closing paragraph before I touch the typewriter.

Walter B. Pitkin: I have to map a story well in advance—though some of the minor details shape themselves as I sketch in the first draft. I have never written in pieces and joined these together. And I simply can not imagine how anybody can pick up a pen and start writing without knowing where he is headed. (I know a few authors who do this though.)

I revise every story at least twice, clean through. And I deliberately avoid trying to make my first draft a piece of good writing. I treat a first draft precisely as a painter treats his canvas and his subject-matter at the first blocking in; it is nothing but a rough shaping-up of the major features. All the minor details are ignored for the sake of the deeper structure.

I see the main ending pretty clearly when I start.

E. S. Pladwell: Always mapped out in advance. Mentally, not on paper. Sometimes I drive for a hundred miles, thinking as the motor purrs. I write a story on the accordeon system—write everything in sequence and then condense. The ending must be clearly in mind. This is my one rule. If I know where I am going, it makes little difference what road I take.

Lucia Mead Priest: There is no hard and fast method of working for me. I should judge by this last winter's action that my mind does a vast amount of milling before my thoughts are concrete enough for a writing-pad. Usually I draft, sketchily. I have a skeleton plan of what I hope to do.

I live much in what I am trying to create. A thought—an action, a phrase or a word will pop out at me and I write it down. But as a rule I write the story straightaway as a whole even though I make patchwork of it later.

Eugene Manlove Rhodes: Map it out in advance. Either in pieces or straightaway. Ending clearly in mind from the start. Revise endlessly.

Frank C. Robertson: Having the genesis of the story as above, I usually map out the rest of it in my mind in a general way, leading characters, an inciting motive, a crisis and a climax. I may do this in ten minutes or I may stew over it for that many days; then I begin to write it out as completely as I can. I never attempt to block out a story in outline on paper. This, I read, is all wrong; but if I make a skeleton draft of a story, a skeleton it remains until the end. It seems to tie me down, and the story lacks the buoyancy that comes from spontaneous thinking as I go along, with the characters living their own lives, so to speak. I know my characters and my setting, so I have no fear of the story becoming inconsistent. However, the ending is usually in my mind when I start and the characters go logically to it. When the first draft is finished I let it cool off while I write something else, and then I go over it again, pruning and padding as the case demands and changing the structure when needed. The more I write the more I find that it pays to revise, and now a story usually gets three or four rewritings. Before I began to sell any it only got one.

Ruth Sawyer: My stories are pretty well mapped out before I start writing. But there is always a time in the process of writing when the character or plot, whichever dominates, gets a firmer control of the story than I do; and for this reason the story is quite likely to end differently than I originally intended.

Chester L. Saxby: I used to write on little definite plot and seek the development as I went. That, I have come to find, is a poor way to get results and usually makes for wandering and uncertainty in the writing. One does not hold a reader's mind by maundering. The blind can't lead the blind. One does not even tell a story that way, but rather potters. I get the plot idea strongly in mind and lay in the detail that will give the most vivid feeling of the point that otherwise will be merely seen, not felt at all. That's character stuff. I do not outline; I can not hold myself down to that. Often the story takes a turn of its own, but I believe that changed plot development is in my mind, too, or it would not come out. I revise very little. It is hard for me to revise on my own criticism. An editor is indispensable for that purpose. He can actually jerk you out of a warped perspective into which you've hypnotised yourself past comprehending.

Barry Scobee: Really, no. I must have the ending, the climax, the conclusion—usually one and the same thing, with me—clearly in mind before I start to write. Once or twice I have written the last page of my story before any other part.

I get an idea, a situation or condition and look it over or let it browse in my mind a month or a year, or three years, and when I wish to use it I figure out what the logical, or illogical, ending would naturally be, and that is my situation. I must have it before I begin to write. I must know what my destination is before I start on the journey, but I do not need to know what all I shall see on the trip. That develops as I write.

Having the conclusion in mind, I write the title—and seldom change it afterward—then begin on my story. I have written the first three or four hundred words of stories as many as fifteen times, and usually three or four times. By then I am launched and I go ahead rapidly—one thousand eight hundred words in four hours or so. Sometimes I get checked up. It is because interest is lagging, due to my getting in stuff that doesn't properly support that conclusion I have in mind, or something of that sort. Then I go back to the point where it seems to have got started wrong and write, and write, perhaps, until I get on the right track again. It may be that the mistake is because I am getting out of character, or dwelling too long on an insignificant phase. Anyhow, I am developing a hunch as to when the story interest is beginning to lag.

Then when I have written through—the copy pencilled and scribbled until I can scarcely read it myself—I clean copy. There I exercise great care, then send it to the editors. The revising and plot arrangement and the like are all accomplished in that first slow-going piece of work. In clean copying I do just what is signified—clean up the manuscript.

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.

Norman Springer: I always map the story out in advance and write straightaway from beginning to a definite ending. Sometimes, though, when half-way through the yarn, a new complication, or a better ending is thought of and the whole story is changed. But there is always a definite end in view.

Revision. I hate it, and do it—sometimes. Not nearly to the extent that I should. I write very slowly and previse. That is, I carefully think over each situation and think out each paragraph before I write it down.

Julian Street: I map it out. Talk it out, and make notes on outline. The more sharply I have it outlined in my mind, the less trouble I am likely to have in execution. Revision, with me, consists chiefly in polishing, eliminating awkwardness of phrase, undesirable repetitions of the same word, and cutting.

T. S. Stribling: No, I don't exactly map it out, "I" don't seem to have much to do with it. I simply sit around and presently an incident will bob up, or a character or a scene or a bit of scenery and, if the thing strikes me as funny or pathetic or containing human interest, I sort of accept it mentally. If I am afraid of losing it I make a note of it—and I usually do lose the note, but not the incident. Then I stick about and wait for more characters, more incidents, more of everything.

All this time I have a theme I want all these incidents and characters to illustrate, and naturally I want all my bits arranged in a climax. And the things apparently arrange themselves. I am sure none of my readers can ever be so surprised at what turns up in my stories as I myself. It is so much more exciting than reading a novel that I almost never read one.

No, the ending is not clearly in mind. I have a vague notion of what I want—I know the mood I want to leave my reader in and usually when I get him in that mood I just quit writing.

I write every story three times, once with a pencil, twice with a typewriter. My pencil draft doesn't make any sense at all, my first typed copy is the story roughly told with endless unnecessary ramifications, my third copy I send to the editors.

Booth Tarkington: The answer differs with every story.

W. C. Tuttle: I have never mapped out a story in my life.

I do not bother about plots nor situations. A typewriter and some paper seem to be all I require, and I let the story tell itself. When my lead character gets bothersome enough to worry me I know he is ready to tell me the story.

Lucille Van Slyke: I start with character every time on a story, but I never let the story tell itself. Nor do I ever write in pieces, as you call it, on a short story. In working in book-length or serial-length things I work in chapter lengths at a time. Ending is so clearly in mind when I begin to write that it sometimes very much hampers me; I have a petulant feeling that I wish I didn't know so positively how it ends. I mean that I resent having to build up a plausible reason for an ending that is so clear for me that it's inevitable whether logical or not! I revise much too much—short stories I write not less than four and sometimes as many as twenty times. And every time I am less satisfied. Always find myself wishing I could give my situation or plot to somebody who knew how to write—the idealized story of my beginning seems so many miles ahead of what I can get on paper.

Atreus von Schrader: I have found by cruel experience that unless I have my entire story clearly in mind I am apt to make a mess of it; chiefly because some character in the yarn picks it up and runs away with it. I write what amounts to a very rough copy of the whole piece, from which I rewrite the finished copy. I have heard of many writers who never revise, their tales springing full-fledged and polished from their minds. Can this, if true, be explained as resulting from an unusually clear connection between their conscious and subconscious mentalities?

T. Von Ziekursch: I simply can not map out a story in advance. The whole thing seems to start in a haze and work nearer until it bursts out full and ready. I can not write them fast enough, it is always so clear. In four or five hours a five-thousand-word story is written. Only once has it been necessary to revise anything other than the punctuation, and that story was a failure.

Henry Kitchell Webster: I must see my objective, in general terms, before I can begin a story, but I am careful not to commit myself to any predetermined mechanical devices. These must spring, seriatim, out of the situations which the characters themselves create. I am obliged, sometimes, to do a great deal of revising with an ax, but I don't do much of it with the smaller implements.

G. A. Wells: My chief pleasure is walking. I find greater satisfaction in taking the roads and paths as I come to them than in having previously fixed upon a route and destination. The same way with a story. I let it choose its own route, though I do dictate the general direction. I think most stories tell themselves anyhow. If the characters and situations do not occur logically, automatically, the writer should not force them. At least not too much. It is one of the rules of mechanics never to try to force a nut on a bolt. It strips the threads. Forcing characters and events in a story strips it of spontaneity. When I read a good story I am satisfied that the writer merely recorded what happened instead of making things happen himself.

Unless one has a good memory, however, it is a good rule in the longer stretches to have some plan of work. At least the principal characters and the events should be set down on paper. New ideas are occurring and being incorporated all the time during building. While writing a long story—fifty thousand words or more, say—if new characters and incidents don't pop up it is a sure sign that the story is not moving properly.

At present I have on hand six stories that I have been writing over a period of about three years. They run from fifty to eighty thousand words. They are all complete in the first draft, though none of them has ever been submitted for the reason that I am not satisfied with them yet. One of these stories in particular was planned carefully from start to finish and a detailed synopsis made. When I had written about thirty thousand words of it an eccentric old gentleman popped in and demanded a part. And the funny part of it is that he "belongs." I don't understand how I planned the story without him in the beginning.

Therefore I would say that it is essential that a plot be kept elastic. It should be like a pot of vegetable soup simmering on the back of the stove—one never knows when one may find an extra potato or a lump of meat to add.

Generally I write straightaway from start to finish, though there are exceptions. More often than not the end of a story is vague when I begin. I would rather have it so and let the story work itself out to arrive in a neighborhood near that which was vaguely conceived. I began a story only last night and have no idea what it's to be. My imagination pictured a cowboy riding into a small town, whistling. He came to that town for a purpose, but he hasn't told me yet what it is. I am letting him go his own gait and he is.

Revision never hurt a story. "Revise, revise, revise" is one of the best rules ever offered writers. I don't follow it as I should because I haven't the patience for it. I nearly always revise twice from the first draft, however, and at times as much as eight revisions follow the first draft. I have a story in my desk that must have been revised at least fifty times. The first draft ran about ten thousand words. It now stands at about thirty-five hundred words. This story is not intended for sale, though I may eventually sell it if I can. I am writing it simply for my own pleasure and practise in revision. I hope to bring it down to two thousand words. The work I have put in on it has done me good.

I once tried an experiment. I took my time and wrote the first draft of a story in manuscript. It sold the first time out. I have tried to duplicate that performance several times since and failed each time.

William Wells: I have a very good idea of what the outline and main incidents of the story are to be before I set down a word and write the climax first, then build up to it. I sketch out scenes and incidents in skeleton form, but in no regular order, then arrange them to make a connected whole, start at the beginning and write the story, filling in and rounding out as I go along.

Most of the story comes to me as I write. That is, when I sit down I haven't the slightest idea of just what words I shall use or of many of the scenes or incidents; they just appear. And I revise to beat the band, two or three times.

Ben Ames Williams: Save in one or two rare cases, I have always outlined my stories in advance. The exceptions were novelettes in which I knew in a general way what I wanted to do—a trend of character—and let this trend develop as I went along. I write from the beginning to the end. The end is usually as clearly in mind as though it were already written, before I begin to write. I revise until I can no longer discover ways to improve the story.

Honore Willsie: I block the whole story out to the end before I begin the actual writing. Then I write it straight through, long hand, let it rest for a while, write it through long hand again and turn it over to a stenographer. I do very little revising. The story is too clearly planned before I begin to need much of that.

H. C. Witwer: I always map a story out very carefully in advance, having all my ingredients well in hand. I never let the story "write itself." I write it straightaway, as a whole, with the climax always in mind when I start. Revise once. Revising being cutting anywhere from two thousand to five thousand words out of what must be a short story, i. e., five to six thousand words. That's my greatest trouble, cutting 'em. When I first began to write fiction in 1915 I had a great deal of difficulty stretching a story out to four thousand words. Now my first draft will run anywhere from ten thousand to twelve thousand words!

William Almon Wolff: To some extent I map out a story—sometimes. I can't follow a rigidly prepared scenario, though; all sorts of things happen, in the writing, to upset such plans as I do have. I write a story whole, always.

As to revision my method is, I suppose, wasteful and inefficient, but I have no choice. I really can't separate first writing and revision, because they go on together. I begin by writing as if there were to be no revision—good paper, carbon, everything. Understand—I know I'm going to revise, but if I admit that, if I try to economize by using cheap paper, or to save the trouble of making a carbon, I can't write a line. Well, I go on until I say to myself—"This won't do!" Then I start over—usually from the beginning. I may have done two or six or a dozen pages; it doesn't matter. And I may do that twenty times.

As a result what is, technically, my first draft, is a pretty thoroughly revised story. As a rule all except the last page or two will have been written from three to six or seven times. And then, very often, I rewrite the whole story, from the start, although some pages won't be changed at all and on some there will be only a few trivial changes.

Edgar Young: Map it out ahead, seeing the climax very clearly, although many details that come up now and then make changes necessary and often help and sometimes cause a man to quit a story.

Summary

Of 110 answering there are 51 who map out a story in advance—2 of these very carefully, 5 somewhat, 1 generally, 1 a little, the remainder habitually. Those mapping out only in general number 32, while 46 let the story tell itself, a few of the latter being included also among the 32. Who is sufficiently rash to venture a general rule on the subject? Each mind must find its own best method and only experience can be the teacher.

There are 10 who write a story a piece here and a piece there, one of them writing two-thirds and then revising; 51 write straightaway, 3 of these qualifying with "usually" and 2 with "sometimes."

Having the end clearly in mind when they begin, 60, 3 qualifying with "usually," 3 with "in general," 5 with "sometimes," 1 with "fairly definitely."

As to extent of revision 84 answer. Omitting those mentioning the number of revisions, the remainder may be classed: much revision, 21; some, 10; little, 9; very little, 19; none, 1. The record where number of revisions is specifically given runs somewhat as follows: 0 to 2 times (1); 1 time (3); 1 to 2 (1); 1 to 4 (2); 1 to 5 (1); 2 times (1); 2 or more (2); 2 to 3 (1); 2 to 4 (1); 2 to 8 (11); 3 times (1); 3 to 4 (2); 3 to 15 (1); 4 to 5 (1); 4 to 20 (1); 5 to 6 (1); 6 to 8 (1); up to 12 times (1).

All the way from none to much, from 0 to 20 or possibly more. There can be no rule. There are some who ruin their work if they give it more than a revision for details; some whose first draft is too crude to serve as more than foundation for the completed structure. There is only one sound teacher in each case—experience.

QUESTION III

1. When you read a story to what extent does your imagination reproduce the story-world of the author—do you actually see in your imagination all the characters, action and setting just as if you were looking at an actual scene? Do you actually hear all sounds described, mentioned and inferred, just as if they were real sounds? Do you taste the flavors in a story, so really that your mouth literally waters to a pleasant one? How real does your imagination make the smells in a story you read? Does your imagination reproduce the sense of touch—of rough or smooth contact, hard or gentle impact or pressure, etc.? Does your imagination make you feel actual physical pain corresponding, though in a slighter degree, to pain presented in a story? Of course you get an intelligent idea from any such mention, but in which of the above cases does your imagination produce the same results on your senses as do the actual stimuli themselves?

2. If you can really "see things with your eyes shut," what limitations? Are the pictures you see colored or more in black and white? Are details distinct or blurred?

3. If you studied solid geometry, did it give you more trouble than other mathematics?

4. Is your response limited to the exact degree to which the author describes and makes vivid, or will the mere concept set you to reproducing just as vividly?

5. Do you have stock pictures for, say, a village church or a cowboy, or does each case produce its individual vision?

6. Is there any difference in behavior of your imagination when you are reading stories and when writing them?

7. Have you ever considered these matters as "tools of your trade"? If so, to what extent and how do you use them?

This question received in the questionnaire as much space as all the other questions combined because it was designed to open up a field that is practically new ground. When a student under Professor J. V. Denney at Ohio State University twenty-five years ago, our class was much surprised to learn that people vary tremendously in their ability to respond to the descriptions or imagery of an author. I, as an example, had taken it for granted that everybody saw, in his imagination, everything mentioned in a story, was much surprised to learn that some saw little or nothing and still more surprised to learn that some people had a similar ability, almost entirely lacking in myself, to hear, taste and smell as vividly as I saw. In the years that followed I questioned a great many writers and found that practically none of them was aware of this difference and that none at all had considered it a matter that might have decided bearing upon their own writing—their effort to convey to the reader what was present in their own consciousness.

Until the subject was brought up in a book of my own a year ago I had chanced never to see it mentioned in print or hear it referred to again by an author, editor or anybody else, yet during twenty years as an editor case after case has arisen in which ignorance of this simple phenomenon has proved a serious stumbling-block to a writer's progress. An author, for example, with vivid powers of imaginative visualization deems it a waste of words to describe what he believes every one will, on the mere mention, see as vividly and fully as he himself does, and as a result his stories when they reach his readers are not at all what he thought they were. To many his story-world is a mere land of ghosts moving in fog, without detail, color, individuality or reality. Another writer, himself lacking visual imagination, in the effort to put on paper a story-world capable of giving him a sense of reality uses so many brush-strokes that a large part of his readers, needing only a suggestion, are bored and read no more. A third writer, his own imagination insensitive to appeals to the senses of hearing, taste and smell, makes no such appeals in his writing and thereby fails to approximate full response from many readers. Another, with an imagination particularly sensitive to sound stimuli, gives to a story the appeal strongest to himself, neglects visual and other appeals and bores part of his audience with appeals that can not reach them while he gives to others not enough stimuli to keep them interested.

What, then, should be the general rule of procedure? There can't be any, but since readers vary so radically and fundamentally in ability to respond to sense appeals, any author, new or established, who in ignorance of this fact attempts to reach them on the theory that the responses of all of them are identical with his own is going to fall far short of his potential success as a writer. The following answers from more than a hundred writers will show that most of them are working without knowledge of this basic variation in imagination response of readers.

The part of the questionnaire bearing on imagination was designed to bring out (1) the differences of readers in natural ability to respond, (2) the resultant differences in effect upon readers of the presence, degree or absence of certain sets of stimuli in a story—in other words, the extent to which a story is dependent for success upon the use of such stimuli, (3) a general idea of the relative importance of stimuli to the various senses, (4) the extent to which the imagination differences were recognized by writers and allowed for in their work, and (5) since there seemed no available data on any part of the subject, the securing of any chance information that might shed new light.

As elsewhere in the questionnaire the desire to make the questions entirely unprejudiced in form, so that they would in no way tend to shape answers toward what I wished to see established, made them less definite and direct than they could have been made at the time—and very much less than they could be made now that the answers have shown the infinity of variations in imagination responses, the many interesting points not systematically brought out or previously considered, and the great difficulty, for any one analyzing his reactions for the first time, in giving clear-cut answers. The answerers, remember, received only the bare questions without even a hint of the explanation and purpose as fully stated here. With such explanation the questions probably seem sufficiently definite. They did to the several authors and editors to whom I turned for aid in compiling them. But the answers will show how much more definiteness would be needed for absolutely definite results.

More definite results should be secured from a questionnaire framed for that purpose. But the following answers, partly because of the very fact of comparative indefiniteness in the questions, are so richly suggestive, so stimulating and illuminating in a hundred ways, that their value transcends any mere tabulation of specific results. Also, for all practical purposes, they give sufficiently definite data for satisfactory conclusions on the points aimed at.

It is to be noted that in all but the last two questions on imagination the authors were being asked as to their reactions, not as writers, but as readers only, though in some cases this distinction has not been maintained.

The first two questions may be considered as one. The third, as to solid geometry, was partly to ascertain whether those lacking visual imagination encountered unusual difficulty in a study demanding ability to imagine a third dimension in a figure drawn in only two dimensions; partly, I confess, as a check on some who might, in all good faith, analyze their abilities incorrectly; partly to show the importance of securing proper imagination stimuli in order to get complete understanding.

Indeed, the answers to these questions on visual imagination, no matter who gives them, are bound to be incorrect in a very appreciable number of cases. Surely of all subjects the imagination is one of those that least lend themselves to hard and fast analysis and iron-clad definition. Also there can be no fixed standard or basis of comparison. Add to these difficulties the similar ones connected with the various sense impressions. No group of answers, however truthful in intent, could be expected to provide absolutely reliable data, yet very practical results can be obtained and writers, as a class dealing particularly with the imagination, are unusually equipped to furnish valuable analyses. If some of those who answer have failed entirely to grasp some of the essential distinctions, others have been unfailingly clear-sighted and have given all that could be asked in the way of nicety of analysis.

For example, some of them, like Theodore S. Solomons, draw the most important distinction much more satisfactorily than I was able to do in my questionnaire even after years of considering the general subject, and the reader is referred to them if my statement of this distinction is not sufficiently clear.

The chief stumbling-block to any one attempting to answer the first two questions is the demand to draw a definite line between an actual sense impression through the imagination and a mere intellectual concept of that sense impression. It is not so easy and simple as it may seem. For example, if I may illustrate from my own case, I find that my imagination gives me very good visual impressions but none at all from the other senses. I can, with eyes shut or open, look at any thing, person or place I have seen and again see in my imagination any part or detail that I am capable of remembering intellectually in any way—can even see what I have never seen with my eyes, though of course no one can imagine anything that is not built of parts familiar to him through some kind of actual experience. But do I see things as clearly as if they were before my physical eye? It is easy to answer either yes or no, with long arguments to support either side. If imagination gives me blurred pictures, I can focus on any part of them and make it so clear it almost hurts, yet the fact remains that most of the picture is blurred. On the other hand, that is exactly the case with the physical eye. But isn't the field of exact vision smaller in one case than in the other? And so on endlessly.

But to bring out the main distinction, consider my case as to the other senses. At the mention of the luscious taste of a pear I at once get a highly individualized memory of the pear taste with no possible chance of confusing it with the taste of anything else. It may make me long for a pear. I can see a pear, the teeth biting into it, the juice gushing from the broken, tooth-marked flesh, and I think of the pleasure that taste brings. But I can not taste the pear. Not to even the faintest degree. I can almost feel its contact to my fingers, teeth, tongue, mouth, even the contact of the extracted juice—so much so that I'm tempted to say I have a little touch-imagination. But I can not taste that pear.

I am equally negative as to smells. I am so sensitive to contact that I almost shrink from the imagined grating of a rough surface over my clothes. But I can not really feel that grating. For touch, smell and taste I have only intellectual concepts. (Yet with me these actual senses themselves are all rather more than normally acute.) But I can undoubtedly see things through the eyes of my imagination. As to hearing, frankly I am unable to answer. I can not persuade myself I really hear sounds with my imagination, yet I can imagine to myself any tune I know, note for note. Probably I have an abortive sound-imagination that could be developed to an easily recognizable degree by practise and concentration.

You will get from the above at least a general idea of the necessary distinction—a far better idea than my bare questions could give to those who answered them. You will get, also, an idea of the difficulty in giving definite answers. Analyze your own imagination responses, refusing to be satisfied with snap judgments. Try out some of your friends. And bear this distinction in mind when reading and weighing the answers that follow. Incidentally, please extend to me a little sympathy over my task of trying to classify and tabulate the data from these answers and remember that any such tabulation must be more or less arbitrary. If you doubt it, try to tabulate them!

Another distinction that some answerers failed to make (and thereby added to the scope and value of our data) is that between sense impressions and emotions. Just as one can hear a real sound without emotion, so can one hear an imaginary sound without emotion, or feel emotion in either case. Nor, of course, is emotion dependent upon any sense impression, since a thought, idea or bare concept can bring it into being. The data on emotion is of decided interest, but is to be considered quite apart from sense impressions through the imagination, though an investigation as to the effect of one upon the other might prove worth while.

The fourth question concerns the actual effect on the reader of the kind of sense stimuli the author puts into his writing, or of the absence of stimuli. Here a distinction must be very carefully drawn in considering the answers. The real point is not whether an author in general or a story as a whole interests or fails to interest, but whether, all other factors aside, the descriptions (of places, things, people, etc.,)—the stimuli to sensory imagination—interest and why.

The fifth question on the imagination (as to stock pictures instead of individualized ones) is of comparatively little importance, except as it shows that some readers will resort to stock pictures if the author fails to paint individualized pictures that interest them.

The sixth question proves of minor importance and the seventh will be taken up after the answers.

As many of the answers would lose in value if their continuity were broken, there has been no attempt to separate them into the seven divisions. Each of the seven, however, has been separately tabulated, though any tabulation of them must to some degree be arbitrary.

Answers

Bill Adams: Yes—imagination's the whole thing. I hear the sounds, feel the roughness (ice on the ropes). I shudder when it's cold and sweat when it's hot; if the story runs as it should.

The pictures are colored in my mind as the actual coloring would be. Gray in the sky—dull waters; red in the west—crimson on the wave-tops—the sails reflecting the lights of each.

Don't talk to me about geometry or math—damnable things, all.

Haven't any stock pictures—the world too big and numerous. Everything keeps hopping right along.

My trade is not writing stories as yet. Therefore I've no tools for that trade (stories).

Samuel Hopkins Adams: The people, if they are well presented, I see definitely; they move and breathe and change expression. Upon considering your question, I find that I do not hear them as plainly and definitely as I see them. Although I have an unusually acute sense of smell—perhaps because I am not a smoker—I do not react particularly to odor-motifs in fiction; nor to taste. I certainly do not feel physical pain reactions, nor am I specially sensitive to imaginary contacts.

As for setting I occasionally find myself helping out my author by imparting into his story some actual scene, more or less vividly recalled. If I do undertake to create a mise en scène out of his material, I am likely to find upon examination that it is a memory-picture of some half forgotten place.

Such pictures as I see are of full form and hue; people more vividly featured than places.

Solid geometry was not worse than other forms of mathematical martyrdom.

If I understood this question, the mere concept will often give me enough to go on; but I might work out a picture totally different from the author's intent. The risk is his, if he will supply only frame-work!

No stock pictures. My gallery is more productive than that.

No! let 'em go as far as they like.

Of course. There is also a difference between being favored and perspiring!

Here you have rung in a change of venue. You have been asking about reactions to other people's writings; abruptly you demand details as to one's own artisanship. Anything is a tool of my trade which I find suitable to my purposes, and I will use it fully or in outline as fits the special situation.

Paul L. Anderson: It depends on how well the author has done his work. If he has done it well, I live the story I'm reading; if not, I don't finish the story. I do not see details clearly; the vision is broad, and I do not feel physical pain—the pain I feel is sympathetic. The pictures I see are in black and white, this fact, together with the breadth of vision, being traceable to the fact that for many years I worked at pictorial photography, where the effort was to see things broadly, without niggling detail, and to see them without color.

Trigonometry, analytic geometry, and solid geometry were my favorite forms of mathematics; probably because more concrete than algebra, calculus, and analytic mechanics.

I have a stock picture for a barroom and gambling hall, and curiously enough it doesn't in the least resemble any barroom I ever was in, though I have a secondary stock picture of one which does. No other stock pictures.

The imagination is more vivid in writing than in reading; I live the story with more force.

Sure they're tools of the trade. How can you make another man see a thing if you don't see it yourself?

William Ashley Anderson: This depends entirely upon the power of the author to make vivid the scenes and actions he describes. In direct proportion to the genius of the author do I feel the force of his impressions.

The aim of writing—as of all art—is to reproduce and idealize nature. Its aim, therefore, is to make everything seem real. It approaches reality, but it can never attain reality, because it is all illusion. It stirs the senses, therefore, as illusion stirs the senses, and has the power to make things as clear and vivid as in dreams—but never as sharp and poignant as in reality. The impress of nature is direct. The impress of literature is by means of metaphor. For its effect, metaphor must depend upon awakening the memory. For this reason, a sensitive, imaginative, experienced person appreciates best the works of higher genius which employ a greater variety of metaphor than mediocre works.

It is beyond the power of art to describe a new color—though it might not be beyond the power of the optic nerve to receive the impression of a new color if it actually appeared before the eye.

It is beyond the power of an author to describe a flavor which no one has ever tasted, and which has no resemblance whatever to any known flavor—though such a flavor is possible, and the tongue would recognize it as new. This is evident by the fact that from childhood on many foods come to us as distinctly new and strange in flavor. It is beyond the power of the written word in itself to satisfy lust; but the desire for lust is so easily aroused that the poorest kind of writer can easily excite the dullest imagination.

It is beyond the power of print to start a vibration that will beat against the ear-drum—and it is hopeless for a writer to attempt to describe a sound which has no effect upon the human ear; but a great composer can create harmonies in his head without even humming, and can record them accurately upon paper with a pencil without a sound being heard. So can an author, by the use of words, arouse memory. It is equally beyond the power of words to describe a wholly unfamiliar odor; though smell is probably the strongest of all senses, and has probably the greatest power to awaken memory.

Memory, however, is so important an element in an understanding of literature that by exciting a recollection of things (through the employment of familiar metaphor) a fine author can make me feel a reaction in all the senses. I can "hear," "taste," "feel," "see," "smell" the things he describes to such an extent that I can close my eyes and imagine music or the sounds of wild beasts; my appetite is stimulated (though never appeased! for here the actual craving of the body is stronger than any illusion—though description may inspire a disgust for food); I mentally recoil from an unpleasant sensation; I can visualize scenes—though not, I am sure, exactly as the author intends them to be described; and I can imagine odors, if the metaphors are clear.

It is as difficult to describe the exact limitations of visualization as it is to find a standard by which to measure all painting. Some stories bring out a single striking point which is very vivid, with a background obscure and dim; others have an equally strong central idea, with every detail worked out in exquisite particular; others are a confused hodge-podge, vague, unreal, unsatisfactory.

Both plane and solid geometry were the clearest branches of mathematics to me. The others were disproportionately difficult.

Reading stories written by others often suggests stories or reminiscences of my own; but in these cases I think the authorship is defective, because with a really great writer I get "lost" in the book.

I have no stock pictures.

There is a distinct difference between reading and writing. The difference is comparable with attending a well-acted drama and playing in a keenly contested ballgame. In the case of the former you know perfectly well the events will sweep along to a logical or at least ordained conclusion without arousing any very violent feelings in your own heart; but in the latter case you are taking part in and helping to shape a drama whose limitations are only roughly cast, and whose events are actually unknown up to the very moment they happen.

I have never given these things much thought in connection with my own writing.

H. C. Bailey: I should say that while the vividness with which my mind realizes a story I read varies very greatly, the purely physical sensations are limited. Horror, for instance, the "blood runs cold" feeling, I get. I see many scenes clearly and hear some sounds, like the rattle of the arrows in the Odyssey. But I don't remember my mouth watering over any feast in fiction, though I enjoy them, or actually smelling physical scents. A general feeling of physical pleasure, excitement or disgust I know.

My imagination is more interested in the physical facts of the stories I write than of those I read. I have often found myself cutting out stuff about the sensations of my characters because it seemed too intimate or too trivial for outsiders. I certainly see things which are not actual both when consciously working at them and when I am not. In color and in action—salient features if I look for them. This applies to both reading and writing.

If I see an imaginary thing at all it is individual. I have always tried to give a story a sensuous appeal—I mean to make the story suggest to the reader what it is suggesting to the physical senses of the characters.

Solid geometry and all mathematics are a mystery to me.

The artistic quality of an author's work is not always the cause of a vivid reproduction of his scenes in my mind, though of course it is potent.

I would rather not be told too much.

Edwin Balmer: I certainly follow with senses acute the sensations in any story I read where I can feel that the author himself felt his story. The mental type of story makes no such impression on me, nor does the machine-made rot which is altogether too common. I believe that a writer can not make others really feel unless he himself actually feels when writing.

I can see colors as well as black and white, and details when I am thinking about them.

I studied solid geometry and liked it and therefore had no trouble at all with it.

I have no stock pictures. I like to have a writer suggest graphically as Kipling always did, but God spare me from the tiresome minutiæ of the ultra realists.

Yes.

Ralph Henry Barbour: Whether I visualize a story while reading it depends entirely on the skill of the author. Generally, I do. If I don't, I am likely not to like the story, and to stop reading it. Probably there are exceptions to this. I am trying to say that whether I react to a writer's description of scenes, sounds, flavors, odors and so on depends on how skilfully the writer presents them to me. Perhaps that is begging the question, but what else can I say? Certainly I have read stories in which I have been constantly at the elbow of the character, have heard what he heard, saw what he saw, smelled what he smelled, felt joy or pain with him. Equally certainly I have utterly missed doing any of these things in reading other stories. I can not make any distinction between the effect on my imagination of action, scene, sound, flavor, odor, touch. There may exist a distinction, but if so I am not aware of it.

I am very susceptible to color, yet I think that the pictures I get from reading are black and white; certainly in very low tones. I would say I see details distinctly.

I can not recall having more trouble with solid geometry than with other mathematics. I believe I found more appeal there.

My response is limited to the degree in which an author describes, yes; or, rather, to the degree to which he succeeds in describing. A mere concept will, of course, set me to reproducing, but I won't get as far. If the author tells me it's a rainy day, I can picture a rainy day. But I'm not going to bother to see the reflected light in the pools or the glints on varnished surfaces or the gray mists in the woods. If he's satisfied, I am, and I go ahead. I had rather, though, have him make it a rainy day to remember instead of just one of a thousand. Of course a writer can overdo description, but just as certainly he can underdo it. Something should be left to the reader's imagination, but not everything. One writer tells us "It was raining." Another tells us "It was raining softly, insistently. In the Park the naked trees were clothed in a pearl-gray mist. A hurrying cab gave back the white light from its dripping varnished roof as from burnished silver." And so on. From the first description I get the picture of a rainy day; from the last, a description of that particular rainy day. The first makes no appeal to my powers of imagination. The second does. From the second I can go ahead and see a hundred other details that the author doesn't mention. Not only can, but do. He's given me the stimulus. This seems to contradict my opening statement in this paragraph, and I'll change it. Thus: My response is limited to the degree to which an author provides stimuli.

As a reader I do not use stock pictures.

I do not resent having many images formed for me. I can not possibly know so well as the author what he wishes me to see.

Yes, there is a difference in the behavior of my imagination when writing and when reading. In reading my imagination sort of loafs on the job. It sits back and says, "Let the other fellow do it. I'll help, of course, but this isn't my job." In writing it gets infernally busy and digs into details in a way that's positively annoying and wearying.

I don't think I have ever "considered these matters as 'tools of my trade.'" Of course they must be. I mean by that that no writer can write fiction without making an appeal to one or more of the five senses. Being conscious of it is different. I am not. (The query presents an idea. Why not go in for "olfactory fiction"? Specialize on stories concerned almost entirely with smells? I have made a note of that.)

Frederick Orin Bartlett: When I read a good story by some one else, I do not read it—I live it. When I see things with my eyes shut I see them as distinctly as when my eyes are open. In both cases they are sometimes distinct and sometimes blurred, depending a good deal upon my interest. A feature of my own particular way of thinking which has always interested me is my ability in a story to recall vividly a great many details of scenes I thought I had forgotten. In other words my subjective memory is more reliable and of better capacity than my objective memory.

I don't remember anything at all about my troubles with solid geometry. I have a notion they were just average.

I respond to an author with all he gives me and all I have myself.

I recognize considerable variation in the architecture of my village churches but my cowboys are a good deal alike.

I resent nothing an author may do except to be dull.

When I write I leave out a great deal more than I do when I read.

I do not consciously use any tools when I write. I depend upon a sense of form partly instinctive and partly cultivated—that and the emotions.

Nalbro Bartley: I seldom read fiction because I always see the machinery of it (or think I do). But when I read history, I let my imagination vividly picture every incident and struggle. I often feel the actual pain or mental suffering described.

I see mental pictures in their actual colors—with very clear-cut details.

Solid geometry and trigonometry both helped me as a fiction writer—I was hopeless with algebra or arithmetic. I can't explain the former unless it was a sort of mathematical phantasy—anyway, it taught me to construct. I never have "stock pictures" for scenes—each one has some minute difference as the case may warrant.

Yes, I think every reader likes to have "tribute" paid to his imagination—he likes to have the author paint a vivid outline but not crowd it with unnecessary detail.

When I read a story, which is seldom, it is usually a classic or a well-established piece of fiction and I think I am reading it because of its excellent technique and very little because of imaginative pleasure. When I write stories I have the unbounded egotism of the creative mind—my people and their troubles and triumphs are so real and so very acute that I am on mental tiptoes until they are out of the depths and on to the heights!

No.

Konrad Bercovici: I am hard put to answer. The more I write the less I read. I find it interferes with my work. Reading a story carefully takes out of me quite as much as if I were to write a story. And except in rare cases I have not found any story worth while enough to allow it to do that to me. It is all a question of intensity, I suppose, but my ears actually do ache after a concert. Not because my ears are too weak, but because I listen with such intensity. I read in the same way as I listen to music. I never studied solid geometry or other mathematics. I have no stock pictures for anything. I would become crazy if I did because I hate to see the same thing twice. My imagination never behaves properly either when reading or writing a story. I suppose if the imagination were an independent individual and it actually acted instead of imagined, it would be kept in prison for the rest of its natural life!

Tools of trade? My God, I have never considered them such. I consider myself as belonging to the minstrel class, born about five hundred to six hundred years too late. Otherwise I should enjoy nothing better than traveling from market-place to market-place and telling stories to the assembled peasantry or at some inn. All story-tellers,—as a matter of fact, all artists, are modern minstrels. Just born to amuse the people who toil and work.

Ferdinand Berthoud: I read so little of other men's work that it is hard to say. I suppose I do see the actual happenings and actors, and not the printed words as printed words.

Of course in my own writing I live the story and am actually a part of it. Live in another world as I write it. In each of my small few stories so far I am in either a large or small part one of the actors. I see myself and see and hear the other men—always personal friends or men I have lived with and quarreled with. I see the grass waving, can hear the horses' footfalls and smell the sweet clear air. The peculiar scentless smell of the open African veldt is always there. I feel so much a part of the thing that when I finish my stint and come back to myself and look at the walls of the room where I write I am in a state of semi-collapse.

No, I don't feel the actual pain in other men's stories or my own, but more than once in describing scenes of torture the impressions have been so vivid that they've turned my stomach and I've had to lie down for half an hour or so to get right again. I've seen the "remains" after torture, so perhaps that accounts for it.

The pictures I see are in their natural colors. Details distinct and solid—not flat as in a moving picture. What I mean to say is that they are firm and rounded, like a picture by Millet.

No, I have no stock pictures of cowboys and such things, particularly village churches. In the course of years of wandering I've seen so many places that no one is ever uppermost in my mind.

No, there is no difference in behavior of my imagination when reading and writing stories, because I don't read them. Don't read a story a month, and never read a novel. Only read trade, finance, astronomy, travel, research and such stuff.

Incidentally I am continually having a very curious experience. Time and again I read books in my sleep—books I have never before seen. They are always old books, printed a hundred years or more ago, I should say. I go through page after page of them and they're wonderful stuff—stuff that I'd almost give my very soul to be able to write—but try as I will when I wake I can't remember a single word of them. Yet the dream comes again and again, and always a different book.

H. H. Birney, Jr.: I have read so much and so omnivorously all my life that I can not say I "lose myself" in any work of fiction to the extent that a description of the agonies of a man dying of thirst would send me hunting for a pitcher of ice-water. I am much more likely to be emotionally stirred in reading an account that I know is true than by some work of fiction. For instance, I feel no shame in admitting that I broke down and cried like a baby in reading the account of Scott's tragical expedition to the Antarctic—their final defeat by the cold when only eleven miles from a cache of food, and the heroic self-sacrifice of the doctor. In reading fiction I am constantly making comparisons. Should I read of thirst I compare the written sensations with my recollection of my own when I went fifty-two hours without water in northern Arizona. Does Friel write of the Amazon jungle I make mental comparisons between his account and Algot Lange's or others I have read. Am constantly seeking for conviction that the author "knows what he's talking about." That's why I await so eagerly a yarn by Thompson Burtis or Talbot Mundy. They know! React to a greater extent to descriptions of scenery—desert, mountain or river—than to descriptions which cater to the senses, taste, smell, etc. Have smelt some ungodly stinks and eaten most unholy messes in my time—the kind that can't be written about! Find a keener emotional reaction in sorrow or pathos than in "love scenes." Have been in love myself and never missed a meal, but—I stuck to the end with my best friend when he went over the Pass with meningitis, and then had to tell his folks about it when they got there an hour too late.

Solid gave me more trouble than plane geometry, but I always was a dumbbell at all mathematics. Can understand your question, however. Intelligent reading, or writing, is in many ways a third- if not a fourth-dimensional business.

No. I strive to make each case a distinct, separate, individual entity. I have known mighty few "types" of particular occupations or pursuits.

I read largely for recreation and, lately, to get ideas as to style. Main factor of my imagination when writing is impatience. Do not write with particular swiftness and usually know just what I want to say long before my pen gets there. Once I start I want to get it over with. Creation is to me a task, not a joy. I take my pleasure in the finished product.

As tools? Not as much as I should, but I'm getting to use them more and more. Remember, I am one of the "youngest of the entered apprentices."

Farnham Bishop: Depends entirely on how well the author makes his mind meet mine. Most of 'em never make me see anything but the printed page. Too much description blinds my mental eyes every time. Suggested or connoted scenes and actors, sketched in with a line or two, are much more plain.

See better than I hear—taste too darned well if I'm hungry and broke when somebody describes a good camp dinner, for instance. Smells? Most odors are nothing but empty names to me, for in real life it takes a healthy onion or a whole garden of roses to rouse my olfactory nerves. (Probably that's why I've never felt any desire to smoke). Feel what I've felt in reality, when a happy bit of description brings it back; too vivid descriptions of suffering make me wince.

Mostly black and white, sometimes crudely colored. Vary from mere suggestive blobs to—say, once when I was a kid, I "saw" an extra illustration for a story in St. Nicholas, that Reginald Birch might have drawn, and it puzzled me no end when I failed to find that one among the others that he did draw, when I reread the yarn. But I've never reached that particular height since then.

Plane geometry was as far as I ever traveled along that trail.

A good concept or connotation starts my imagination hitting on all eight.

Usually, the stock picture, formed in early life, pops up and has to be modified. When somebody says "soldier," I see a clean-shaven young man in Civil War blue, with the little forage-cap that our army wore until 1898. Then I have to shift his costume and make-up to suit the story, but I can't get away from the impression made on my infant mind back in the eighteen-nineties.

The difference between work and play. Have to force the darned thing when I'm writing, but she rambles gay and care-free when I'm reading.

Consider these things "tools of my trade"? I do and I've tried herein to explain how I try to use them.

Algernon Blackwood: The visualization of a story I read depends entirely on its degree of actuality according to the evocative power of the writer. I prefer a suggestion that enables me to form my own pictures of scenes and characters described, rather than to have these formed for me in detail by the author. A description of house or room or garden I invariably skip. With his first vital adjective the scene flashes into my mind. His subsequent detail bores me.

Max Bonter: An author can make me see his story-world with a vividness strictly in proportion to the degree of his skill. My senses register sound, smell, flavor, touch, etc.,—although less acutely than in the world of actuality.

As an example of vividness, let me cite Henry Leverage's The Shell-back. I could almost swear that I got a whiff of "Old Marlin's" unwashed hide; I saw the slime in his eyes and the kinks in his matted old beard. I would not consider these allusions disgusting. The author dispassionately sketches a piece of humanity—that's all. It's truth—and my heart rather warms to "Old Marlin" on account of it.

I can see plenty of color with my eyes shut, although the details of the pictures are not perfectly distinct.

When I studied mathematics my brain was not sufficiently mature or systematic to grasp all the fundamentals of any branch. I had not much success with geometry.

My response to an author's description is usually limited to his degree of vividness; although it often happens that a theme or a situation, per se, so interests me that I leave the author's world and reproduce one of my own.

Shame on the pen-prostituting varlet who uses stock pictures for his scenes and characters! I would almost as lief see an author plagiarize. What imagination, what regard for the ethics of his craft must a man have who sells his wares over and over again? Can art be as lazy, as unscrupulous as that? To my mind, if a writer be not indefatigable in his distinctions, discriminations and demarcations, he is not sincere—if he be not sincere, he is not an artist. He reminds me of the barroom cripple who fares forth to his station on the street corner with half a dozen lead pencils to sell; who returns to the saloon with his pocket full of pennies, but his stock of pencils still intact. These may be harsh words, but—must the dollar taint everything in this world?

Writing and reading affect my imagination in two distinct ways.

When I begin reading, my faculties are relaxed and receptive; my muscular system is in repose. My eyes flash the printed symbols to my brain; my brain translates them and projects them kaleidoscopically upon the screen of my imagination. The pictures immediately generate enthusiasm or otherwise. If they generate enthusiasm my faculties prime themselves and become more acute; my muscular system acquires a certain tension. My brain is receiving food, stimulant—in other words I'm "being entertained." If the pictures generate no enthusiasm, however—if they evoke only a yawn—my faculties remain torpid. My brain is neither being fed nor entertained nor stimulated. In other words, I'm "being bored."

Thus the function, or behavior, of my reading imagination would seem to be largely passive—merely displaying the author's pictures and leaving their value to be passed upon by my reason.

The function, or behavior, of my writing imagination, is vastly different. Before I can start, it must initiate a fund of enthusiasm of its own. This enthusiasm must be sufficiently keen to tune up my faculties and make them aggressive and openly demonstrative. This enthusiasm must stiffen my backbone and give tension to my muscles. I must be thoroughly alert to capture and express every passing thought and idea. In other words, I must "feel in the humor to write."

My imagination must still take the initiative. It must proceed to throw picture after picture upon its screen—not merely drawing them according to well-defined descriptions as in the case of my reading self—but initiating them for my creative self, being guided in the task only by a hint, a haunting fancy, a lurking impression of the long ago. Reason—the critic—stands constantly beside imagination and ruthlessly picks flaws in its pictures, rejecting many as unnatural, uninteresting, overdrawn, etc. Such pictures as are passed by the critic are then translated by brain into words that rush out of my finger tips to the keyboard of the typewriter. That is about as near as I can get to it.

At any rate my writing imagination must be enthusiastic, stubborn, tireless, inventive and wholly active in its function.

I am just beginning to consider these matters as tools of my trade; hope to be able to use them more skilfully by and by.

Katharine Holland Brown: The keenest impressions, from reading stories, are gained from sight and touch and sense of smell. Sense of touch, perhaps strongest. No appeal to the senses in my case is as strong as that declared to exist by many people.

Can not really "see with my eyes shut" with the vividness that many writers describe. Instead, I get a mass-impression instead of one in detail.

Undoubtedly the requirement of solid geometry, by universities, was sponsored by Torquemada.

Detailed description is not essential. If the story is vivid, the locale shapes itself without effort.

No stock pictures. Each new story has its own images.

One of the great charms of certain authors lies in their lapidary-accuracy of detail. So, in case of the real artist, there is no question of "too many images." I can not answer the next inquiry—have never analyzed so far. Nor have I considered any of these matters as "tools of the trade."

F. R. Buckley: This is a very big question: I can't answer it more exactly than by saying that when I read or write I have a subliminal self which feels, tastes and smells, so that I get the effect of stimuli quite vividly without any semblance of reaction on the actual physical senses. This is extremely difficult to explain. I might say that when there is a smell or a sight or a sound before me, either in my writing or some one else's, I rather know it, than feel it. It is rather as though (I am now thinking of a revolver-shot in a small room) the essence of the roar, denatured of the qualities which appeal to the physical ear, had been poured into my consciousness by some other channel. Until I started to answer this questionnaire I should have said I heard the crash; of course, I don't; I don't even—I think—imagine it. Yet the effect of it certainly impinges on me; an exciting passage of action will even speed up my heart, and fast action will make me work the keys of the typewriter faster. Normally one doesn't keep tab of reactions, but it seems to me I've caught myself grinning with pain when somebody was getting hurt. But the speeding-up and the grin are not, I think, direct action—such as I should experience from actually going through the action or watching it with my eyes. I think they are the manifestations of the imagined action's impact on the subconscious, duplicate me, whose sole business it is to receive them. And this duplicate self's control of my own person is only partial; which is why my mouth doesn't actually water when my hero eats lemons.

I can see pictures with my eyes shut; in full color but they are still pictures—not movies. I can't shut my eyes and see action; but before describing it I can close them and see the picture of its effect; see the man who's just been shot and how he lies and how his garments hang and where his hands are and how his feet look. I have actually seen a good many men after violent deaths. This may help. And I can see every detail of the man who fired the shot—his attitude, what he's doing with the revolver now he's fired; also, I can see the room and feel it. You know that there is a distinct feel about a room when something abnormal's happening. A pretty gilt clock you've always liked will look entirely different—tawdry, pitiful, cold-hearted, if a dead man's lying in front of the fireplace. I get all this, and I couldn't write if I didn't.

As for solid geometry, ALL mathematics were abomination and to pick on solid geometry would be invidious.

I haven't any stock pictures at all. In reading, if the author doesn't give me a picture, I use Shakespearean scenery—blank space with "This is a Church" written on it. Writing, I invent quite definite and different "sets" and so on, for each story.

Big difference between imagination reading and writing. Very, very rarely does reading speed heart-beat and so on; writing, comparatively frequently.

Prosper Buranelli: The chief pleasure I get from a story is an intellectual gratification, the perception of some irony, the astonishment which comes from some development, unusual with respect to current ideas, but reasonable when submitted to clear thinking. A good story to my mind is a piece of thinking, of rational building up. I see in Anatole France's Procurator of Judea a rigorous deduction of what could have happened under the circumstances. The seeming truth of the colors and sounds of the setting has for its purpose the heightening of the plausibility with which the close is reasoned out. It is much like the paleontologist who builds the idea of an animal by reasoning on a couple of bones and a set of tracks in prehistoric mud. I am never absorbed, save by the author's ideation.

I can see things with my eyes shut, but don't, often. I have an "ear mind." I hear things. My imaginings take place in words or in music. In adolescence I saw things, but not now. Solid geometry and spherical trigonometry trouble me. I have enough trouble constructing, in phantasy, in two dimensions.

If the concepts are disposed in provocative arrangement, I can supply the vestments, at least such as I need. But the fuller and more persuasive the coloring, the more powerful the logic of the concepts. If an author places a civilized man among cannibals and carries him through well analyzed mental processes to cannibalism, it will be all the more plausible if he complete his reasoning with fully colored and convincing pictures.

Any story which either gives or suggests stock pictures, such as cowboys or village churches, save in most acrid mockery, is to my mind immeasurably rotten.

In the best stories, I think, reading one and writing one would be much alike. Reading a beautifully reasoned story would be much like writing a beautifully reasoned story. If you watch a very well played game of chess, it is like playing along with the player. It is something like playing the game yourself. You know what is in the player's head, why he makes a move. With bad players playing, it is merely a spectacle. You can't tell what they are about most of the time and, when you can, you are entirely out of sympathy with the rational processes, which, you understand, are contemptible.

Tools of trade, presumably text-books and other forms of instruction, I have found, are useful, but only if they give you bases upon which to erect further meditations of your own.

Thompson Burtis: My imagination causes me to react to all the stimuli you mention if the writer has any vividness at all about his writing. I taste the flavors, sniff the odors, feel pain, etc. I will except none of the cases mentioned. Perhaps my reaction to the description of good or bad food is the strongest. I can get hungry at the mention of a delightful meal, and mentally nauseated, so to speak, at a description of bad food on shipboard or something like that.

In the pictures I see with my eyes shut most details are blurred. Most often the pictures are black and white, but in especially vivid cases, such as a tropic night or something of that sort, my mental pictures are in color. The limitations are usually in the case of scenes with which I am totally unfamiliar, and because of the number of unfamiliar details mentioned I am often totally at sea in an attempt to visualize a scene or a happening.

Yes, solid geometry did.

My response is not limited to the exact degree of the author's vividness, but it is affected by his descriptive power. A mere concept will make me see something, but not as much as a good description would.

Each case produces its own picture.

No difference.

Yes. I have made an effort—am making, I hope, a constantly more persistent effort—to use them in this way: by striving through proper word selection, even if it be only one adjective, to make every noun, so to speak, in my stories, mean something. I am trying to make the most minor of my characters have a scraggly moustache, a hump on his back, or some tiny detail which will set him apart in the reader's mind and make him distinctive. In the same manner, food, a room, a scene, a tool—I am trying to incorporate some brief, flash-like description which will make that thing vivid and give it individuality. The more I write the more I am growing able to look at my writing as a trade or craft and comprehend the mechanics of it, and that attitude, I believe, will constantly tend to make a writer consider the tiny details and put them in with deliberation rather than inspiration as the stimulus.

George M. A. Cain: In reading a story, I think my imagination aims to reproduce the picture naturally attaching to it. To what degree this is clear in detail or color depends entirely on the interest evoked by the story. Often the images are so real as to produce physical reactions. I have grown actually ill over a description of some repulsive disease. But I can not say that any mere suggestion of pain in any form has induced an actual like pain in, e. g., some given part of my body. The distress of imagining pain with me is entirely mental, capable of reacting in physical lassitude, inducing nausea only as it becomes repulsive in its manifestations to other senses than feeling. Suppurations are really the only things which I can not imagine without the physical reactions becoming local in my stomach. As for tastes and smells, these have few keenly attractive reactions with me in actual life, and I am affected by imaginations of them only adversely. I can read the Cardinal's Snuff-box without sneezing. But I am pretty apt to reach for my pipe, if I read much about smoking.

Solid and plane geometry were the only mathematics I ever found so absolutely easy that a glance was sufficient for almost any proposition.

I think response is more or less determined by the degree to which the author dwells on description. As a matter of fact, in answering this and the following question, I would say that it is my opinion that we all form our pictures from things we have actually seen. Stage settings, drawings, faces—I believe we conjure entirely from memory. If the author goes into details, we correct our memory pictures to make them correspond with his stage directions. This I have sometimes found capable of actual interference with really writing. In one or two instances I have had so vivid a picture in my mind of the relative positions of certain actors or furnishings, when, say, a character had to use his right hand in the action, and could not have done so in the picture—that I have had to stop and draw diagrams to straighten things out and be sure of avoiding what some reader might instantly see as impossible.

I rather think the images I create in my own writing are clearer to my mind. I have to stay with them longer. Some months ago my wife asked me in startled tones what was the matter with my face. I had to admit that I was just up from writing of the appearance of an insane man in a cabin door and was unconsciously trying to look like him in my efforts to chalk off his most noticeable features for the readers' benefit.

I have considered these things as trade tools only to the extent of being careful to have very clear images before me in writing. Sometimes I have found them almost a disadvantage. My own picture was so clear, I took for granted the reader's seeing what I saw, without my telling him what he could not guess.

Robert V. Carr: Paragraph III is another set of questions involving, to my limited comprehension, heredity, environment, physical condition, psychological wounds, racial memories and the power of intelligence far beyond that possessed by my little finite mind. Who can tell where matter merges into spirit? Who can tell where the imagination of the writer leaves off and the imagination of the reader begins? When I think of the Infinite, I think only of a word. Wise cuckoos, ready to be interned in some asylum, assert that they can imagine the Infinite. What man can imagine a million objects? It is an unusual man who can imagine ten thousand. It makes me hunt for comparisons to imagine a thousand. I have to remember how my regiment looked in line, or its length in a column of fours. What man, then, can imagine thought? He can babble words, he can mumble words, but, after all, he can not imagine thought. He can shovel a lecture on Divine Intelligence into a set of open-billed morons, but, when he is through and has drained the pitcher of water, hasn't he merely put in an evening shoveling words?

Stock pictures? How do I know that my ideas are not all stock ideas? How does any writer know but what his dearest thoughts—thoughts he fondly fancied were his own little, bright-eyed children—may have been fathered by some tribal psychological wound? His most cherished idea may be the offspring of some hereditary weakness. He may write sex poetry because his grandfather was a roué. His little ideas he considers so wonderfully original, may be little stock ideas born of racial stock ideas, family stock ideas, environment stock ideas. The heavy-domed scientists claim the Anglo-Saxon habit of meat-eating has produced a certain set of stock ideas. I consider myself merely a human animal who, when he bumps into something he can not comprehend, gives it an impressive name and lets a gaudy word stand for the gap in his intelligence. There are men who have a ready answer for every question; Congress and the asylums are full of them.

Difference in imagination when reading and when writing? Involving, so far as I can see, heredity, racial memories, acquired physical weaknesses, mental quirks, tricks of egotism, and a multitude of mysteries I have never been able to solve. I give this up with scarcely a struggle.

George L. Catton: Yes; if the characters are distinctly drawn and the setting correctly planned and the action natural under the circumstances, I can see it as fast as I can read it. If it is not, I skip over what I can't see immediately as not worth wasting time over. And I might just mention, by the way, to a student of such things as characters, action and setting, some of the characters and setting and action in fiction are so impossible as to be ludicrous. No, I can't say that I can become so immersed in the atmosphere of a story that I can "hear" and "smell" and "feel" and "taste" with the characters in the story; that is, the characters in a story that I am reading. But with the characters in a story that I am writing—well, that is something else again. If I want to I can weep with my characters and laugh with them and run the whole gamut of the human emotions with them, but that is something I seldom allow myself. I go too far then, with the emotions of my characters.

Yes, I can really see things with my eyes shut, or open, in the dark or in the daylight. And there are no limitations whatever. Green grass is green, a pine tree is a darker green, and a forest lake is yet a darker shade. Colors, and black and white, reproduce themselves in their natural shade when I am picturing in my mind's eye a scene to be put down in words on paper. Also the characteristics of a character. I can see a broken nose just as plainly as a straight one, and a hare-lip as plainly as a cupid's bow. Details stand out as distinctly, or even more so, than the whole. Continuity writing for the movies is, to me, one of the easiest and most fascinating tasks I ever tackled.

Never had an opportunity to study any other geometry or mathematics.

If the author of a story I am reading fails to picture a scene or character or bit of action so that it can be understood and "seen" as fast as I can read his picture, I supply what is lacking myself to make it up and save time. In fact, in lots of cases I find that the pictures the author drew were never needed at all, as far as I was concerned; certain things will happen under certain circumstances, inevitably, and the ground under a knot of pine trees will be bare of grass without any one telling me that.

Never have stock pictures. Each setting is built up to conform to the necessities of the action and the characters and the theme. Stock pictures and characters, etc., savor too much of a manufactured article and kill the personality of a story.

Only in one thing is there any difference in the behavior of my imagination when reading or writing a story. If I am reading a story by another author my imagination pictures for me only what is absolutely necessary to make the story interesting. If I am writing a story my imagination brings me a thousand pictures, incidents, etc., to choose from. Or, to put it another way, in reading a story my imagination is localized to the restrictions of the story; while if I am writing my imagination knows no boundaries.

Yes, I have long considered these matters as tools of my trade; so long in fact that a consideration of them now is unnecessary. In fact, to think of them now when working on a story is to restrict their working.

Robert W. Chambers: It depends on the story. No limitations to "seeing." Colors. Distinct. All mathematics annoy me. Response depends upon the author. No stock pictures. Do not resent many images if they are well done. Difference when reading and writing? Of course. As tools? Have given it no thought.

Roy P. Churchill: I have never thought of this before, but believe that in my own case my responses through the senses are governed by what I have actually done myself. For instance, I know how a six-inch gun sounds, the noise of the shell, the impact of the explosion. I can see the splash at the target, follow the birdlike flight of the shell, smell the powder, taste the smoke. For I have done these things, experienced them, and when they are in a story my senses respond. Yet I have not been a jockey in a horse race. I can't get near as vividly the feel of the saddle, the smell of sweating horses, hear the shouts of the crowd, the taste of churned dust on the track. So in a story the writer's experiences must be real, it seems to me, to give anything like a second-hand impression on the senses of the reader. Yet I do enjoy prize-fight stories, and never did them, love horse-race stories and never rode in a race. It must be that the authors of such stories had a very, very clear picture to give it to me at all.

In stories of places I have not seen, telling of experiences I have not gone through, imagination fits in somewhat blurred details, but often more enjoyably than stories of things I already knew. For instance, I have confused ideas of just what passes are made in a duel in The Three Musketeers, but it does not detract from the charm of the story.

I have no stock pictures of scenes, rather try to make them fit what the characters need.

My imagination works more freely in reading stories than in writing them.

Carl Clausen: I feel all of these things if the story is done well enough. Actual colors, I think. Always distinct. Did not study geometry to any extent. Limited to the author's description. No stock pictures so far as I am conscious. Difference when reading and writing? Can't answer this. Don't know for sure. I write by "ear." If these are tools, I don't know it.

Courtney Ryley Cooper: Unless I can see the story clearly and know the characters, the thing falls short with me. I feel that there is something either wrong with the author or myself.

Black and white.

Never got as far as solid geometry. Arithmetic was bad enough!

I reproduce myself and often "help" the author. If I don't like his setting, I make one of my own and go merrily on.

Individual.

I don't like description that is too minute. I feel like a kindergarten pupil.

A great deal. In writing, I am so terribly concentrated that I actually see nothing. Everything seems to be working out from my subconscious brain, whatever that is.

No.

Arthur Crabb: This is a bit too highbrow for me. It seems to me that a great many writers try to make an undue appeal to the senses and too little to the common sense of the reader. For instance, if a tale is laid at the seashore I am not particularly interested in having the writer explain to me that the air is salt and the sea is green and the sand is white, and so on. What I am interested in is knowing what the character thinks of it, that is, if the heroine has lived all her life at the seashore, the salt air and the green sea and the white sand probably do not interest her any more than the back of the brick building I see out of my office window interests me. If the heroine comes from an inland farm then the effect of the sea on her is decidedly different. The same thing in general applies to all the rest of human emotions. The idea of making a little shop girl, of no antecedents, go through the range of emotions that would put a prima donna to shame, is, it seems to me, unnecessary and undesirable. I recently started a story in which the author plastered on so many colors my only impression was a kaleidoscopic paint shop. The characters in the story never saw any of the colors at all.

I, like every other human being, can see things with my eyes shut, if I get what you mean. I can make imaginary characters act and picture imaginary scenes in complete detail. That, it seems to me, is absolutely necessary if one is to write at all.

I studied mathematics two or three years beyond calculus. Naturally solid geometry gave me more trouble than plane geometry or trigonometry. It is a far more complex proposition. I think the two are comparable to learning to ride a bicycle and learning to walk on a slack wire. Incidentally I think there is a catch in this question, but I am dodging it.

It depends on the author. Without checking myself up by compiling statistics I think the really great authors cut out what you call vivid description. Do you realize that the probability is that nothing in this world exists at all except in an individual's inner consciousness? The reader can not be, certainly ought not to be, particularly interested in some writer's own picture of something or other except as his characters are affected.

I certainly do not have stock pictures of anything.

I do resent.

My answer as to difference when reading and writing is "of course." My idea of a story is people; the description, plot, etc., are the frame of the picture. I am for instance not so much interested in who committed a murder as why the murderer did it.

My general answer is, no.

Mary Stewart Cutting: It entirely depends on the power with which the story is written. As a rule, my imagination does not produce the same results on my senses as do the actual stimuli themselves. But, on the other hand, if I may give an instance from Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams, the dinner party given by Alice to her apparent suitors is so vivid to me in every detail that I can never get over the feeling of being actually there in the heat and the murkiness and the smell of the brussels-sprouts.

There are no limitations to the pictures seen with your eyes shut. I think we have stock pictures in our minds, unless they are described.

There is a great difference in the behavior of my imagination when reading them and when writing them. One has to use continued effort to keep the proper proportions in one's imagination. When you are reading stories it is simply a relaxation.

Everything is a tool of one's trade.

Elmer Davis: Depends on how good an author he is. As a matter of fact, my senses respond in detail much less than I had imagined till I tried it with your questions in mind. Usually I have a mere intellectual response to sensory images in a story, though on occasions, with especially good writers or in stories of unusual interest, I feel them. E. g. I get no feeling of smooth contact or gentle pressure from Cytherea or The Sheik, though those stories are full of this item. But I do from certain poets—Catullus, Donne, author of the Song of Songs which is Solomon's. A. Dumas and your Mr. Gordon Young can generally give me an impression of rough contact or hard impact. I taste food described in a story when I am hungry. But in the main my senses don't respond—sight and hearing come across more often than the others.

I assimilate the scene described to the nearest like it that I have known—very generally, of course, and following the author's descriptions in principal details.

I believe I incline to see them in black and white except when other colors are mentioned. Details blurry unless set down. (Note for argument. Yet I much prefer stories which leave details to my own imagination in the main. The curse of Hergesheimer is his overloading with minutiæ of interior decorating. The great value of most Oriental stuff, notably the Arabian Nights and Herodotus, is their use of stock phrases "fair as a moon on the fourteenth night," etc., which let you make your own picture.)

No more trouble.

Largely answered above. The creation of atmosphere and suggestion is of course a delicate business, as you know. When it is done right I much prefer the suggestive concept.

Stock pictures drawn from recollections of childhood (mainly) for most things. Country church, barnyard, I have from the age of three. With variations, of course, to fit the particular case. Most images fall into certain types based roughly on things I have seen.

Yes, I do resent, as said above.

Works better and more freely when I am writing them.

No, haven't used them as tools, but, believe me, I will hereafter.

My wife, just reading McTeague, calls my attention to Frank Norris's overdeveloped tendency to use the olfactory image. For example, he pictures the beginning of marital disillusionment by "McTeague's" consciousness of the smell of his wife's hair-brush. Maybe I have the details wrong, but anyway "McT." on entering the bedroom is conscious of the smell of the hair-brush where one of our modern heroes would smell the fragrant powder on her palpitant flesh, etc. Also in a mob scene in The Octopus, where some thousands of the Californian peasantry get together to hunt jackrabbits on a hot summer day, Norris speaks of the "strong ammoniacal odor." Now I think the average reader doesn't feel with his nose unless the author, as in these cases, deliberately calls his attention. That is, if you write "a sweating crowd" most of us would think of the glistening brow rather than the animal odor.

Probably that was in the ordinary practise, the naturalist school, but there seems to be evidence that Norris ran more naturally to the smell-image than most of them.

William Harper Dean: When I read a story I must live through it with the characters. If this is impossible I will not stay with it. If I can not suffer and rejoice with the characters, laugh with them, hate with them, the story lacks the power to produce that reaction in me which my own stories must produce in me. If the style grates or lumbers along I become disgusted—the fine charm is lacking.

Yes, I see things with my eyes shut—place my characters in a situation, then stand off, as it were, and watch them react, then record what they do and say. I can't ram words down their throats, neither can I drag them about like dummies and think they are acting.

Solid geometry to me was always more immediately assimilated in its logic than analytical geometry or calculus. The former made pictures, the latter nebulous nothings.

An author who can, like Knut Hamsun, write one line describing a situation, then pass on to the next stage of plot development, gives me that delightful privilege of placing my own interpretation to the line and, in my mind, reading several chapters while I let my eyes follow into his next paragraph. And that's writing. Not everybody can do it, for not every author is a writer. The reader deserves latitude for exercising his interpretative powers—if an author sets about to argue out every situation down to the orthodox Quod erat demonstrandum, he not only clutters up the story with words but he cheats the reader and the reader resents it. I might go a step beyond and say he is casting reflections upon the reader's intelligence.

I have no stock pictures for any setting or any character. I construct them as I need them from life. I always can produce a prototype for anything I use, for I don't attempt to write about any setting or any character with which I have never made contact. It's no trouble to scent out inventions in a story; they grate and make the story squeak and clank. I am running a series of stories in The Ladies' Home Journal built around a boy character of the twelve-year age. He is my own son. Where he plays, I know every nook and cranny of that great woodland park, I know the code of ethics held by his clan, I know how his mind reacts under certain stimuli. When I need a character like the ogre which every boy his age has, I find him in the neighborhood, or, failing, go back and resurrect one which I knew in my boyhood.

No, when I read a story, my imagination works in the same channels followed as when I write one.

I do not consider these things "tools of the trade"; subconsciously I use them as such, but I try to divorce from creative writing any and all "rules," "tools" and "formula." Good writing is nothing more than good thinking—if we thought by rule and formula, what a world this would be!

Harris Dickson: These things depend, I believe, upon the skill of the writer and perhaps as much upon the reader's present mood. Sometimes and in some stories, all the incidents, settings, characters, smells, sounds and sights are just as clear as if I were actually present. Sometimes I do not get them at all. For instance, many years after I still feel the gruesome atmosphere that Conan Doyle created in his Hound of the Baskervilles, remember passages from The Lord of the Isles, and smell the deep dark medieval woods in The Forest Lovers. Books with me are like people—some I see once and remember always; some I see every day and fail to register them at all.

I shouldn't know solid geometry if I saw it coming down the big road with a bell on it.

I am not conscious of having stock pictures in mind; the end of Loch Katrine (Lady of the Lake) is very different from Lake Geneva (Prisoner of Chillon). And the battle of Waterloo (Vanity Fair) does not resemble the battle of Omdurman (With Kitchener to Khartoum).

I don't know whether too many pictures should be given a reader. The writer should, in this day and time, remember that "The tale's the thing." And pictures of setting, etc., perform precisely the same function as sets in a drama. Sometimes a too-elaborate setting detracts from and holds up a story—as in a very gorgeous recent film of Nazimova, called The Red Lantern, the perfection of the actress herself was largely obscured by distracting scenery. To my mind the art is just as bad if you have too much of this—perhaps worse—as it is if you have too little.

To me there is much difference between reading and writing; in reading I must follow what is told me; in writing, what imagination I have roams on a loose halter.

Sure, some of these matters are tools of the trade, a trade that in many respects is just as mechanical as carpentering—secure foundations, body of edifice, and climax roof.

Captain Dingle: Depends of course on the artistry of the author in that particular story. Some stories read to me like the monotonous dirge of a praying revivalist's convert. But when the story is well written and is a story after mine own heart, I can generally see, taste, smell, feel with the author, though I never recall feeling physical pain. Of the senses, I think sense of smell gets to me most vividly. (No, that isn't any wallop at anybody's stuff. My own stinks sometimes.)

I have to "see" my own work, though not necessarily with eyes shut. When I visualize a story it is like seeing a fleet of ships coming out of a fog. When the fog clears, the bell rings for "Full Ahead."

I never had a chance to study anything deeply. To pass any of my nautical exams I was simply crammed with rules and never learned the roots. So far as I remember, of any studies I suffered at school, what we called plain ordinary "sums" gave me as hard a hammering as anything. I never could learn to do more than add and subtract and blunder through division. Salt hoss and hardtack and rope-ends constituted my curriculum after the age of fourteen and a half.

Sometimes an author's mere phrase will give me a clear picture, but not often. I can't recall a writer of recent date who can do that for me.

I have a fresh vision, usually, for each picture I form myself, except where I am using a character or a scene over and over again, as in a series. I mean, I don't see any building as a mere pattern, nor any man as a type altogether.

Oh, yes! My own imagination works like a pre-war non-union artisan when I am writing: smoothly, without strikes, and never kicking at a bit of overtime. When reading, unless the stuff grips extra hard, the imagination is like one of the post-war scum who never work except to fight up to the pay window, then strike till next pay-day.

No, I don't think so. Perhaps I ought.

Louis Dodge: When I read a story I consider it an excellent or a poor story just in proportion as I see it and realize it—and all the characters—clearly, as if I were participating in it. I like swift strokes which make things vivid and real. For example, in The Master of Ballantrae, Stevenson, wishing to indicate the deterioration of a man's character, pictures him as he walks with his little son. "Mackellar" is speaking: "It was pretty to see the pair returning, full of briers, and the father as flushed and sometimes as bemuddied as the child; for they were equal sharers in all sorts of boyish entertainment, digging in the beach, damming of streams, and what not; and I have seen them gaze through a fence at cattle with the same childish contemplation." That last phrase (the italics are mine)—does it leave anything invisible? The real masters do make me see colors and smell odors and feel beaten down by forces. When I was a boy I took the writer's word for it; but now he has to show me. That, perhaps, is the test of a "rattling" story—that it shows us instead of telling us.

I can see things clearly with my eyes shut, but only the major colors appear; the blue of the sea and sky, the red and black of fire and smoke, the green of grass. When I see human faces I see only expressions. I can now see the face of "Barnaby Rudge's" mother, with the expression of mysterious and hidden terror in it.

Solid geometry was easier to me than plane geometry—perhaps because it came afterward, perhaps because the additional dimension made the thing more tangible.

I don't like stock figures; yet I confess that when I think of school-masters I think of dear old Professor Lane of Quitman College, a bent old man with calm dark eyes and a meek manner and an iron-gray mustache; and when I think of western sheriffs I always think of Bob Dowe of Maverick County, Texas, who spoke softly and "went and got 'em." I try not to use stock figures.

I would rather write stories than read them. Making a story is my own adventure; reading one is following another man.

I don't like to think of "the tools of my trade." I think Dickens' best book is The Pickwick Papers—a book in which the author plainly didn't know where he was going or what he was going to do. The greatest books are formless: Les Miserables, Jean Christophe. Perhaps little folk ought to have tools and think about them. The result may be a good job, but never, I think, a great story: and I like to hitch my poor wagon to a star.

Phyllis Duganne: Depends on the author whether I visualize his story-world or not. Some writers can make me see and believe people and places and action that I'd be inclined not to believe—and some writers can make a perfectly ordinary living-room scene look more like a cardboard set than a house. Same with sounds and tastes and smells and touches and feelings. I think that in the average short story I find the people more real than the settings and action. And it depends a great deal, too, on my mood. If I'm interested in the story as a piece of work—the sort of job I'm doing myself—it's more an interesting laying of words end-to-end to make a piece of fiction that's convincing and readable than anything else. But if I'm not thinking of the story as work—but just as a tale—I can be righteously indignant with the villain and thrilled with the hero.

There aren't any limitations to "seeing things with my eyes shut"—if the writer can make me see them. A writer I like and enjoy—and I like a good many—can make me see things and people and places quite as though I were there; every detail and color and sound and smell and noise as distinct as though it were before me.

I didn't study solid geometry, but I'm sure it wouldn't have given me as much trouble as plain every-day arithmetic. Nothing could have.

Again it depends on the author. I think that usually my response is more than the exact description of the author.

I think I haven't any stock pictures; perhaps I have for a cowboy.

If images really are formed, I don't resent it. But when a writer tries so hard that he merely spoils the image I've already formed without giving me anything else, I do.

Stories that I write are more vivid to me than the average story I read. But I think that must always be true; it's the thing that makes me feel my limitations most: that people and places can be so vivid and real to me and that I can't make them so vivid and real to other people. Edna Ferber in her Old Man Minick made the old man as real as any one I've ever seen or imagined or written about—but I suppose he is much more real to her—and probably different—than he is to me.

Yes, I've considered these things as "tools of my trade." A story isn't much good unless it's real to the reader, and reality comes through making a person forget it's a story and actually see and hear and feel.

J. Allan Dunn: All emotions come to us through the senses. And the sense of sight is the key to memory. As smell is akin to taste, so that one may barely distinguish, I think it is hard to say how the memory of what one sees may stimulate the other senses. I can see plainly many of the characters of other authors, they are as distinct as if I had met them. I recognize them partly by the masonry of our craft. So too I can see the setting if I stop to connect up. But I think it is largely the difference between being able to think in a foreign language when we read it, or to pause—however connectedly—and translate. I can force my reading mind to translate more vividly for me if I want it to. Color I can see best. Vaguely I can taste. Sense of rough or smooth contact, no. Nor of pain. But I can get exhilarated by the pleasure of the characters, depressed by their sorrow, react to bravery, patriotism, sacrifice, sorrow. My lachrymal glands will work, my emotions are on the qui vive, but the sense impressions are in the main hazy.

I can see things with my eyes shut without a question. I can conjure up places I have seen or that are well described. I can see color, I can see details, if I stop to think. Don't believe I can read and do it nearly as vividly, unless experience of my own is coincident.

I had no trouble with solid geometry. I got my mathematical degree at Oxford.

An author will stimulate me far beyond the exact degree of description.

I try to avoid all stock pictures as I would the plague. I conjure up an individual vision. I endeavor to see plainly every character and every bit of scenery I use. Often the characters and scenes are taken entire from life. It is my general plan to write of no phases of life, no places, that I have not known at first hand.

My imagination is highly stimulated when writing stories that I start upon with special enthusiasm, but the work of a fine craftsman urges me to better effort for myself and gives me enormous satisfaction.

I don't know how far I use such matters as tools of my trade. Certainly the ability to conjure up my scenes and characters is most essential. I am afraid of plagiarism. I acknowledge the reaction to write something in the style or upon the lines of an author I admire and I have to fight it.

Walter A. Dyer: In reading I visualize, particularly the setting. Atmosphere in a story always appeals to me. Thus I see the town of Middlemarch as a real place, and Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native is very vivid to me, while the salient points of the characters have faded. I react to sound, taste and smell less readily. Tenseness of dramatic passages I feel physically, but not pain very acutely. Stories by Conrad have left me physically weary as though I had taken part in the action, but not every author affects me in this way.

I believe I visualize color as well as outline, and motion is included, even the passing of wind, in the picture. I always found solid geometry easy. I do not have stock pictures. Probably I am a bit sophisticated and react to the suggestiveness of so-called literary description more than the average.

My mind works much the same way when I am writing. I believe I succeed in getting atmosphere into my stories, but I do not find it has the most telling element in making them salable.

I might add that in reading I am not so much carried away by pure action as by vividness of detail and the dramatic element that is psychological. Beyond that, humor in presentation and color in description appeal to me. Stevenson, for example, and to a large extent Kipling and Hardy, combine these to my liking.

Walter Prichard Eaton: I certainly see in imagination, as clearly as in reality, when my mind is concentrated. I couldn't write anything if I didn't see as I wrote. A person without strong visual imagination may be a great philosopher, but he can never enter fiction.

I never studied solid geometry. Plane was the only mathematics I ever could do, though!

I have, as a reader, stock pictures only for stock stories. If a writer can not compel an individual image in me, I throw away his manuscript.

I resent description that is a mass of detail, when my picture is formed at a sentence. Most American magazine writers sin this way. I skip the second half of nearly all their description. The French never sin this way. They select few, but the salient details.

Of course one's imagination differs in the acts of reading and creating—i. e. the process of employment differs. In reading it is passive and follows a lead, in creating, it is active. That is why it is more fun to create—and why it tires you quicker. The imagination itself is the same in the two processes, but in the second it has a sense of freedom. Artists have initiative of imagination.

I don't know what you mean by considering these matters as tools of your trade. I have had always an interest in psychology, especially the psychology of esthetics. But it never occurred to me that anybody could possibly write creative literature without the ability to reassemble sensory impressions and hold them steadily by the power of the imagination. If I hadn't possessed to some extent this power, I should never have tried to write. The stronger one has it, the more inevitably he becomes an artist.

E. O. Foster: Having been a copy reader I am afraid that when I read a story I do not allow my imagination the play it should have and I fear that this probably reacts in my own composition. For me to get the full benefit of a story it must be off the ordinary track, for instance—F. St. Mars' stories of animal life appeal to me. I could see and sense the different animals in their habitat. Talbot Mundy's stuff appeals to me but in a different way. I think it is by association, for I have lived a great deal of my life in foreign countries.

I can not see things with my eyes shut, but if I concentrate my memory will bring back details I can write down. For instance in one of my stories I spoke about an "obscene lizard." This particular lizard, a "Gecko," was perched on top of a broken bamboo a short distance in front of one of our trenches in Manila. He was making the night hideous. I threw a club at him just as he started his "yammer." The club hit the bamboo and he went sailing into the air to land ultimately on the ground. I can feel as plainly to-day as I could then my astonishment when, with the sound of his impact, came the "you-you-y-o-u," with which he always ended his call. You could not page him.

Scenery to me comes back in its color, as do paintings, but a house—even the house in which I was born and reared—does not seem to me to have color.

I have not studied solid geometry, therefore I can not answer this question.

My response is not limited to the exact degree to which the author's description makes vivid, for I frequently find myself trying to add to an author's conception.

I think possibly that when I visualize a church it is possibly the little one in which I first attended divine service, but I have seen so many cowboys and so many soldiers that I imagine each case produces individual vision. I have not been inside many churches lately.

There is a decided difference in the behavior of my imagination when I am reading a story and when I am writing one. Nor have I considered these methods as tools of my trade.

Arthur O. Friel: My imagination does not reproduce any of these sense impressions, or pain. If the writer has made these things vivid they register strongly, but I do not actually see, hear and smell them as in real life. Didn't study geometry. Am limited virtually, though not actually, to the writer's portrayal. No stock pictures. Reading vs. writing? Yes. When writing a story I live it. Have not considered these as tools of my trade.

J. U. Giesy: Personally in reading a story my imagination reproduces the scene of the author only as tinctured by my own characteristic bent, I suspect. I actually see the characters and settings—I mentally appreciate the sounds, flavors, tastes, smells and tactile impressions described, but wholly in a comparative rather than any other sense. The pain sense in a physical way, I can not say I have ever felt—on a mental plane, as applying to pathos, grief, etc., I have always been keenly responsive. In writing I have at times laughed heartily at some humorous situation or wept at the emotion I sought to convey by the situation and cause for grief expressed.

In "seeing things with my eyes shut" I believe that the pictures take on the mentally pre-recorded tints resulting from past experiences of life. Details with me are exceedingly distinct—a setting or locale is as clearly apprehended as though it for the moment was actually existent in a physical state.

Geometry never troubled me. It probably would now as I haven't tried to demonstrate a theorem for years.

I am very apt to carry on the author's concept along my own lines—or to diverge from it at times to an entirely different result.

I have no stock pictures in the sense you mean. Each setting grows as applying to the story in hand. At the same time there is no doubt that each is in a sense the result of past knowledge of such settings, many of them having come down from childhood, and each being modified for the case in hand to suit.

I read in a more or less passive state, trying to get the meat of the author's thought. I write in a state of tense concentration trying to force my thought on the reader. The processes are very different I think.

I fear I have never thought of this as fully as I have since the question was asked by you. As you know, my writing is an avocation and pleasure—a relaxation from a professional life.

George Gilbert: If the story is good, I live it as I read; if it is without appeal to me enough to compel me to live it, I throw it aside. In regard to seeing "things with your eyes shut," this question evades a square answer, for who can analyze the limitations of his own imagination, when he must use it for the analysis? Who else can do it for him? The imagination, in its workings, is the one power that is inalienable, non-delegateable. Do I "have stock pictures for church, cowboy," etc.? I hope not. Reading vs. writing? No one can tell; certainly I can't. Tools? No; not; none. If an author kept all that in mind, he'd write, not stories, but a text-book on them.

Kenneth Gilbert: To a great degree I have spoiled myself as a reader; in other words, I have for years taught myself to be always looking for the mechanics of a story. I ask myself: Why did the author do this? And I am not satisfied until the question is answered. Occasionally, however, I read a story that by its smoothness and charm stirs my admiration and imagination, and I find myself being carried along, reacting the same as the average reader, in just the way the author wished. Then indeed do I hear the sounds described and taste the flavors of the story. Imagination does not reproduce smells very markedly, but the sense of touch is very real. Physical pain is felt; more keenly when sympathies are deeply stirred. A poignant sense of sympathy is the keenest emotion I feel, it seems to me. In addition I would say that clever dialogue in dialect, such as a negro—if he is funny—is most realistic. I can hear the words spoken.

I "see things with my eyes shut," but sketchily, only the high lights being visible, therefore the details, unless I focus my attention on them, are blurred. In colors.

Solid geometry proved far more interesting than arithmetic, which was very distasteful to me.

I have stock pictures, unless the author has troubled to depict objects otherwise. I prefer to see them through his eyes rather than resort to my familiar scenes.

Decidedly there is a difference in the behavior of my imagination when I am writing, as compared to reading, stories. Reading a story never keys me up until I am oblivious to all but my immediate surroundings, while I fairly live a dramatic scene in my own story.

I consider these matters "tools of the trade." For example, I try to test impartially my own description, to see if I have gone far enough, or too far. If I feel that it is graphic enough for the reader to "get" its highlights, his own imagination will supply the rest. (I'm taking Kipling's word for that, and I think it is correct, as I have proved it to my own satisfaction by questioning discerning friends who read my stories.) A sentence which carries imaginative stimuli, and therefore a flavor, is one of my constant aims.

Louise Closser Hale: I know that good reading makes good writing, develops style, polishes our sentences and gives us an unconscious measure for us to go by. I know that I have often written down a word and, after writing it, realize that I had no clear idea what that word meant, but upon digging at my dictionary I have found it to be absolutely the word for the definition of my thought. That comes from good reading. How beautiful it is that, like acting, we can learn and enjoy at the same time! Is there any difference in the workings of my imagination when I am reading and when I am writing? Well, I generally read authors who write better than I do and my imagination makes pictures of every situation of their story. But I resent any great description of the characters. I can make my own pictures; and I am impatient when I myself am writing if there seems any compelling necessity for going into the delineation of features and coloring and what they wear. The reader can make my people look just the way he wants to. I don't care—it's enough to be read. I might say more than that. As Kate Douglas Wiggin said once to me, teasingly: "I've bought your last book. I don't suppose you care whether I have read it or not." Perhaps it is just enough to be bought.

Holworthy Hall: Unfortunately, when I read a contemporary story I am always seeing the machinery, especially if I know the author personally. If, however, I read the work of an author unknown to me personally or an author no longer living or a so-called "classic," I am much more subject to my own imagination. It is only once in a hundred instances that any writer can make me forget the methods by which he has attempted to produce his effect. When this happens, I know that I have read something genuine. Nevertheless, even if a story is bad and even if the wheels creak, I am very receptive of any appeal to any specific sense, primarily the visual sense.

With "my eyes shut" I have no limitations in color or in detail.

I took honors in solid geometry.

Generally I am offended by a wealth of description and detail which prevents me from independent thinking; I much prefer to receive a vivid suggestion and to be allowed to ferment it myself.

As a reader I have no "stock pictures." I put it up to the author to show me what he has; if he fails to convince me, I walk out. I decline to substitute my own conceptions for those which he impliedly guaranteed to provide me.

Next question answered already—above.

Obviously, after what I have already said, there is all the difference in the world between the state of my imagination when I read and when I write.

Never. If I had, I should be too self-conscious to write.

Richard Matthews Hallet: The trend of the questions on imagination seems to be to discover what type of imagination mine is, auditory, visual or motor. These I believe are the psychological divisions. I think mine is auditory. I get things I hear better than things I see. A word or two may mean more to me than a whole landscape. Words collect values round themselves in some queer way and they provide you with an imaginary world not so sharp as the real one—that is my case at least—but to which my emotional reaction is vastly keener. I wonder if the imaginations of most writing men are not chiefly auditory, with a good infusion of the motor type where there is a knack of swift flowing narrative. Certainly the chief preoccupation of the writer is with words and not things. Does he have the same grasp of detail as the practical-minded man? I doubt it, even where his writing is all made up of detail. He husbands the details he does grasp, that is all. They are precious and astonishing to him for the very reason that he is weak on that side. Lafcadio Hearn's writing is a gorgeous mass of color and of sensuous appreciation; yet the man was half blind, I believe. His sight was certainly defective. This may have helped him. Beethoven's symphonies were none the worse for their composer being deaf. Obstacles may be the very things that compel genius to extend itself.

Mathematics hits me on my blind side entirely.

I do not resent having images formed for me, I demand it. I dislike sketchy writing. I'm not speaking of the enormous suggestiveness which words of course have in themselves, but of a habit of leaving the reader to fill in the picture. If most stories were of the Lady or the Tiger type, they would fall flat, in my opinion. A story, to ring the bull's eye, should be self-contained.

As to behavior of my imagination when reading and when writing, it differs as the behavior of a man loafing differs from that of a man slaving under the lash. This is a large difference. I don't write easily; not apparently because I like it. And yet any other job would certainly suit me less. So where are we?

William H. Hamby: It all depends on the writer. If he has seen what he is describing and does it interestingly and convincingly I see it too. If he doesn't—I skip to the next story. I do not bring up in my mind sounds described in a story nearly so vividly as I do tastes or smell. The description of an odor comes very vividly to me. I do not feel physical pain as I read of it—with the exception of cold or fatigue. I have a very vivid sense of touch and any mention of coldness, smoothness or the like is felt as I read.

I see things with my eyes shut and I often see them in colors. At times they are misty and again I see the picture in very vivid details.

Solid geometry was very easy for me. I started in solid geometry before I had studied plane geometry and demonstrated every proposition in the text.

I usually see most vividly that which is merely suggested or very briefly described. A detailed description kills the picture with me.

I have no stock pictures. If a picture comes at all, it is a new one.

Naturally one's imagination works more definitely when he is writing than when reading. In order to write at all one must bring his mind into a state of intense activity. But he can read almost passively—often passing over long stretches merely to get to what he hopes is coming.

No, I never have.

Joseph Mills Hanson: When I read a story I see everything vividly, provided it interests me; characters, action and setting. I do not hear sounds; merely realize them. Yes, I believe I do taste flavors. Not much doing on smells. Sense of touch also rather somnolent (hope I'm not getting atrophied!). But I do feel actual, physical pain, if it is feelingly depicted.

Often "see things with my eyes shut"; it comes naturally. Things seem in natural colors and distinct.

Thank goodness, I never studied solid geometry. Algebra was bad enough. However, I liked plane geometry better than other mathematics—which isn't saying much.

If I become absorbed in a story, my imagination runs away ahead of the author; though not always, of course, nor often, to his conclusions.

I usually get different pictures for every church or cowboy, or dog or barnyard, or anything else.

There is, I believe, a difference in the conduct of my imagination when reading or writing a story. It acts more slowly, perhaps less logically, when writing; I have to ponder situations a good deal before deciding and going ahead.

Yes, I have thought of them as tools of my trade. The sub-divisions have not occurred to me in that light.

E. E. Harriman: In reading a story I see every, smallest detail and if the author is chary of descriptions I fill in unconsciously. One reason why I am at times short on descriptions—I see it so plainly myself that I am liable to forget that others can not. My imagination carries me into a field of action so completely that I am often under a strain that tires me out. I have, in writing a gunfight scene, jumped nearly out of my chair when a neighbor slammed a board down on another one. I am often so affected by pathos of my own composition that I have to pause and assure myself that it is fiction, before I can finish. In reading Payson Terhune's dog story in the last Ladies' Home Journal last night I got so worked up that I wanted to hammer hell out of that speed maniac who killed the dog. I feel, see, hear, smell, anything vividly represented by a good writer.

Seeing in the dark—the colorings are there, to the last gradation. Every detail is clear cut and distinct. I can see things I saw fifty years ago, in just that way. As I think of my dog that died forty-two years ago, I can see the shadings that ran down from his reddish back to his light yellow belly. I can see the color and expression of his eyes and the way he would cock his head on one side when listening to me.

Never studied solid geometry, though I made the drawings in the University of Minnesota. Enjoyed them immensely and took a high mark.

If a writer hints at anything, my mind pictures it instantly. If his description is stopped shy of completion, I finish it.

I have no stock pictures, though my memory is full of scenes. Any style or kind is built up instantly by a phrase or sentence.

I think that there is a marked difference in imaginative vision when writing or reading. In reading I feel that I am looking at a photograph or watching action by others. In writing I feel that I am in the scene—a part of it—helping in the action.

I use these "tools of my trade" daily. Often I start with a man or boy as my central character. Before long he gets into a scrape. At once I become that character and have to live the situation in order to learn what he would or could do to get out of a fix.

Nevil G. Henshaw: This is rather hard to answer, but in reading a book or story that I'm genuinely interested in I react far beyond the written page in all the senses you enumerate. I imagine I feel most the emotions of the characters, fear, hate, desire, pain, etc. Also taste hits me hard. Smell not so much. Sound still less. Touch last of all. A scene well done I see perfectly and I delight in the little touches that make real and set off the whole, trifles like a puddle in a road, a rock on a hillside, an odd piece of furniture or ornament in a room.

In writing unless I can see what I'm writing about I can't get it on paper. The picture is perfectly clear to the last detail no matter how fanciful. This applies to any picture I try to conjure up. I see the colors also.

Being a dub at all mathematics, I never studied geometry.

If an author gives me a good hint I can generally go beyond it.

I've no stock pictures, especially in my own work. A place will give me an idea even quicker than a person. But then I've always thought that there was a great deal in that ancient expression "Ain't nature grand."

There is, of course, a big difference though it's hard to explain. Perhaps I can get at it best by saying that writing is work, reading play.

These matters are most certainly tools of the trade, and I use them all I can.

Joseph Hergesheimer: My reaction to a story is partly to the fineness of its writing and partly to the depth of its humanity—its pity and understanding. I see no mental pictures—again all this is simply the emotion of recognition. Solid geometry? I have never studied anything. Stock pictures or individual vision? If it isn't the latter it's nothing! Resent too many images? This is not clear. "Behavior of the imagination" escapes me. Tools of trade? This, too, is complicated. I think I am centered on the main thing, and the rest follow subconsciously.

Robert Hichens: I can not answer this.

R. de S. Horn: I certainly consider these matters as tools of the trade. Perhaps this comes from the peculiar situation I find myself in; viz., having to write or do nothing. I had always liked to write; did a lot of it at the Naval Academy and afterward as a side line mostly for the pure fun of it. But when I was smashed up and rendered unfit for most occupations I took to writing with deliberate intent to make it my one profession. Writing is in mind at all times, whatever I do, wherever I go. And with such in view I try to make everything useful and subservient to the end in view.

I find that my imagination is quite vivid, and it immediately interests itself in every story I read. I smell smells, see sights, hear sounds, taste tastes and feel emotions provided the author himself has done so and thus has handed them on to me. In other words I quite enter into the atmosphere of the stories I read. More than this, I sometimes find myself seized with a new solution to the story and thinking it out to see if possibly the story wouldn't have been better that way. Generally the pictures I see in my imagination are black and white; silhouettes, you might say, though I still see the colors. The idea is that it is the outlines that strike me most forcibly, sort of like cardboard outlines of mountains, for instance, that show the bold characteristics rather than the tiny details. By focussing I am able to bring out the details better, however, after a bit. But the first impression is usually silhouette-like.

Solid geometry and spherical trigonometry did give me considerably more trouble than the plane branches of mathematics. However by the time I had finished calculus and a few more like that I seemed to have acquired the knack of it.

The author's words frequently set my imagination off in its own and sometimes quite different channels.

I don't believe I have stock pictures. It seems to me that every story should have its own distinctive characters and settings. However I have not written sufficiently to say for certain that I don't use them unconsciously.

I think my imagination works differently when writing than when reading. In the first case I direct it myself and deliberately put it to work in most cases after the story actually begins to take form. But when reading it works purely subconsciously.

Clyde B. Hough: The mere printed word does not and never can present the picture in the fulness of its maturity. The best that the printed word can hope to do is to suggest graphically, so graphically that the imagination of the dullest reader will experience no difficulty in rounding out the picture, in clothing it with all the splendor, emotion, etc., that the author has suggested. It is my belief that any author's success will be measured according to the extent that he succeeds in achieving this goal.

When I read other men's stories, or to be accurate I should say when I study other men's stories, I see their characters. I am enthralled by their action which expresses their sensations. My subconscious mind is aware of the tastes, the flavors and the smells or anything else that goes to round out a given setting, but I do not physically experience these things. My imagination does not reproduce the sense of touch, nor does it cause me to feel pain. I account for this by the fact that all the rounding out of the story, as a reader supplying what the author suggests, is left to my subconscious mind, because my conscious mind is solely occupied with studying the story from the craftsman's standpoint. To put the whole matter in a nut shell, I do not read for entertainment, but solely to study the other fellow's craftsmanship in order that I myself may acquire more craft.

Yes, I can "see things with my eyes shut" and the limitations are, allowing for the ratio of imagination, in proportion to the number and variety, or the sum total of all the actual concrete things I have ever seen. These pictures and objects in my mind automatically take on the color that is appropriate to themselves. The details are not distinct unless I make a special effort in concentration. But by an effort of the will I can generally straighten out the kinks.

I have not studied any form of higher mathematics.

I do not think that I elaborate on other men's work in a creative sense, although many stories have started me thinking on certain lines which ultimately rewarded me with a plot germ. But in all such cases I have been extremely alert to avoid allowing any similarity between such a story and the other author's story which fathered the embryo thought.

I do not believe that I have stock pictures for either pirates, preachers or church steeples. I make this statement because I am never surprised at meeting people differently garbed or at seeing things differently shaped from what I have been accustomed to see them.

When I am reading, my imagination works, I believe, just about as much as the suspense, thrill, emotion, etc., recorded in what I'm reading requires—no more than that. But when I'm writing my imagination is brought under the pressure of my will and driven to its uttermost capacity—with the guiding hand of judgment at the reins always of course.

Some of the phases of the writing craft thus far touched upon I have considered and used consciously. Some I have missed automatically.

This laboratory test will be of inestimable worth to any author.

Emerson Hough: I have no mental contortions. My mouth never waters. Just see the pictures clear, as nearly as I can tell. Geometry? You are getting too deep. All mathematics troubled me plenty. As to response, I don't savvy this. No, I don't think any writer has stock pictures who has resources of his own. I don't resent; sometimes I don't read. Reading vs. writing? I'll say there is! Tools? I never throw fits. I am a very plain, ordinary person.

A. S. M. Hutchinson: When reading a story my imagination is entirely and most vividly with the persons of the story. When one of them is about to become the victim of a misunderstanding I find myself simply longing that he will somehow escape it, and this never mind whether the story is good, bad or indifferent.

Limitations depend entirely on the extent to which my interest is aroused.

No, far less trouble from solid geometry.

Response depends entirely on how much the thing described, well or ill, interests me.

Each its own picture.

Not a bit, unless I resent them as images. But suggestion, leaving me to do the rest, is what I most enjoy.

I do not know.

As tools? No.

Inez Haynes Irwin: I would say yes to all these questions. I enjoy fiction intensely. All my life I have been the easy prey of fiction writers. Allowing that sometimes the mind gets fatigued and ceases to register impressions (although I do not remember ever to have had this experience) I would say that I saw, heard, tasted, smelled and felt all the things the author wanted me to see, hear, taste, smell and feel. I do seem in imagination actually to feel physical pain when the author wishes me to do so. Recently while suffering from an attack of grippe I had to stop reading a novel, Dorothy Speare's Dancers in the Dark, because the opening chapters described the fatigue of a group of girls who had danced all night. Their fatigue added so much to my weakness that I could not go on with the story. I remember once reading an essay by John Burroughs on The Apple. When I had finished it, I had to go out and buy an apple to eat, although ordinarily I don't care for apples.

I am particularly susceptible to color in writing; and I find that I enjoy particularly the work of those writers who have studied art or have been artists. Du Maurier's books were a great joy to me and if Hergesheimer had nothing else to interest me, I think I should read him for the wonderful color arrangements in his descriptions. Java Head is remarkable in this respect. Robert Chambers has some of this color quality too; so, of course, to an extraordinary degree, has Conrad.

The pictures I see in my imagination are always colored as the author directs me to color them.

I do not think details are blurred in my imagined version of the author's picture—except when I have read too hurriedly or skipped.

I have studied arithmetic, algebra, plane geometry and solid geometry. The higher the mathematics the better I liked it. I was exceptionally stupid in arithmetic but I enjoyed plane and solid geometry enormously. It appealed to my imagination.

I am not quite sure that I understand what this question means. Of course highly imaginative writers—especially if they have the great technical gift of connotative writing—can start your imagination with a broken phrase, can keep it working long after their words have stopped. It is as though they left echoes in one's mind. I think H. G. Wells makes this magic in my mind more often than any other writer that I know. Although I am half inclined to say that Henry James—who can also involve me in a maze of obscurity—is his equal if not his superior in this respect.

I am sure that each case produces its individual vision.

I don't remember ever formulating this while reading; but of course I realize that an author may have a too explicit style.

As to reading vs. writing. I think not, because it has never occurred to me that there could be any such difference.

In writing description, I always do try to appeal to the five senses of my reader. Perhaps this is so because in the writing courses which I took at Radcliffe College the instructors impressed it on us to do that.

Will Irwin: Answering generally the complex questions under the head: In reading writers who are "my men," as Stevenson, Wells, Anatole France, I find myself seeing the scenes in my imagination. The fight in David Balfour, the meeting of "Pontius Pilate" and "Laelius Lamia" in Le Procurateur de Judée, are to me as though I had witnessed them. I hear the sounds, but I can not say with truth that I taste the flavors or experience the smells. That doubtless is a matter of individual peculiarity. I have almost no sense of smell. On the other hand, I often see the colors most vividly. That again comes from individual peculiarity—I take the greatest delight in color. In a treatise on dreams which I have read recently the author says that dreams are like photographs; that they have no color, only one low tone and white. If that is so, I must be a freak. I am always dreaming in colors—as a few nights ago of seeing a procession in russet brown carrying rose-colored banners. Sometimes my imagination, in reading, reproduces the sense of touch, and occasionally the sense of pain. When I "see things with my eyes shut," I think the image is usually blurred and lacking in detail except for one central figure. But I do usually see such pictures in colors. I perceive what you are driving at in your question about solid geometry. I run true to form. Other mathematics did not interest me. I loathed arithmetic and algebra and I quit trigonometry from absolute boredom. But I was a sharp at geometry, both plane and solid.

I think that the mere concept of an author whom I recognize as one of my men will often set me to imagining things beyond those which he has described. By the same token I am sometimes bored by over-detailed description. I can not say, however, that I have stock pictures for persons and things which come within the limits of my experience. I do, however, for categories of persons and things which I have not seen—as a cavalier, a Zulu chief or a king on his throne. The visual faculty of my mind works in the same manner when I am reading a story as when I am writing one. In both cases I have a succession of color-pictures.

Certainly I use these things as tools of my trade—especially the picture faculty. One analytical passage in Barrett Wendell's treatise on Shakespeare has been very useful to me. He shows that Shakespeare's magic consists largely in creating a succession of haunting pictures in the mind. Since I absorbed that principle I have analyzed other magic styles and found this their secret. I have tried to follow in my poor way. I also try to use the tactile style. As it is a thing generally beyond me, I avoid dragging in the sense of smell. I do use sounds a great deal, however.

Charles Tenney Jackson: As to reading a story my imagination goes more to an author's pictures than his plot. I am rather coldly critical about plots and most of them show their ragged spots to me, lapses, improbabilities and negligences. But I like to have the chap show me a setting that seems real. If it's the sea islands, I want their colorful warmth; the Yukon, I want its snows and grim menace to the human actors. People are so much alike that a story does not move me because a writer attempts to show me their differences in different settings. My idea is that human nature reacts exactly the same everywhere. In other words, answering query III if an author gives me a hurricane I want that vivid, smashing, either by description or suggestion, and I don't give a durn who lives through it to rescue the girl. I know to start with that she'll be pulled out. There are certain banal things in either reading or writing fiction that you can't get away from; so I slide past 'em to see how the minor keys can be played.

Frederick J. Jackson: When I read a story I live it, that is, if the author has a sureness of touch with his characters and action that is convincing to me. Some authors I can not read at all. I won't read them. It's a waste of time. They don't get over with me. What I consider a perfect story is one in which the author can make me suffer with his characters, laugh with them, play with them, make my eye look through the sights of an aimed rifle, let my finger be on the trigger.

To the things I "see with my eyes shut" there are few limitations, the pictures are colored, real, the details are distinct.

My response is not limited to the degree with which the author describes and makes vivid. A mere hint suffices to draw a really definite picture in my mind. If the author doesn't spoil my own picture with too damned many cloying details I'm better satisfied. I dislike wading through paragraph after paragraph of detailed description, unless an accurate picture is necessary in order to give a complete understanding of certain action or certain moves made by a character.

I carry that dislike for detailed description into my own work. If I use more than one sentence of description I wince. I like to convey a picture, a real picture in as few words as possible. I like to put action into my description, into my picture of a setting.

I never have stock pictures. A village church? Immediately before my mind passes a parade of all the village churches I have ever seen, in villages or movie lots.

My dislike for description applies to characters as well as scenery. A hint here and there, characterization—things that will make each reader furnish the details he likes best. I might have described them in detail—mere words to tell how they appear in my picture. Really now, when you read about characters, doesn't your mind supply a picture of the physical man? A man to your liking, unhampered by clogging, useless words? Didn't characterization do that? If you have a leaning toward dark heroes, you conceive him to be dark. If to your mind a guy with red hair is the real Peruvian gooseberry as the main character, red headed he'll be in your mental picture. Etc., etc.

Is there any difference in behavior of your imagination when you are reading stories and when writing them? I live with my characters both in reading and writing, but oh! what a difference. In writing, I have to work out the problems; in reading, the problems have been worked out by the author. It's traveling with a sled, but one is going up-hill and the other down-grade.

Mary Johnston: Impossible to answer this fully. Sometimes there is a high degree of reality, at other times less. Depends upon the amount of energy that is functioning, energy and attention.

Yes, it is possible to see things with your eyes shut. I see them colored, in the round, and at times in motion. Not always in minute detail. Often only a general impression.

No more trouble from solid geometry.

As to response, if you have the concept, you can produce the appropriate phenomena. Individual pictures usually. Sometimes a composite or an idealization.

Prefer things to be suggested rather than minutely described.

Probably a difference as to reading and writing.

They are tools of life—therefore of one's work also.

John Joseph: If it is a really good story my imagination reacts to all the emotions and sensations mentioned except "physical pain." Very few stories belong to this class, however.

The author's "pictures" (in good stories) are reproduced in every detail, and distinctly. My mental pictures often go far beyond anything the author has actually described. I have no "stock" pictures; every "cowboy" and "village church" differs from all the others.

There is little difference in "behavior of imagination" whether reading or writing. I think that all these points are valuable to the writer.

Lloyd Kohler: In reading a story I am very apt to puzzle out in my own mind the outcome of the story long before the end is reached. Often the author's ending of the story, however, is radically different from what my own imagination had planned. Sometimes I can't overcome the idea that my own solution would have bettered the story; at other times I can easily see that the author's solution was vastly superior to my own.

In writing a story, or planning a story to write, my imagination generally runs—well, we'll say "wild." For instance: I may carefully plan a certain climax—and then find when the story is finally written that the first climax has been substituted for a more fitting one which flew into my mind during the last stages of the writing.

I don't want to commit myself on this question—I can't even agree with myself regarding the different angles of it. But I will say that when reading a story generally I do see in my imagination the characters, action and setting, though perhaps not so clearly as if looking at the actual scene. The vividness of the picture, of course, depends upon the clearness and vividness of the author. It depends also on just how familiar I am with the picture presented by the author.

The pictures described by an author which "I see with my eyes shut" are more in black and white. The details are very apt to be indistinct.

Plane geometry was exceedingly easy for me, but with another restless spirit I put to sea, consequently I can't say how I would have fared with the solid variety.

My response is not necessarily limited to the exact degree to which the author describes. It depends on how familiar I am with that which the author attempts to make vivid. The very thought of some things would set me to producing as vividly, perhaps, even more vividly, than the author himself. On the other hand, if the description were unfamiliar the response would likely be limited.

I don't believe that I have stock pictures for anything. If I have, some bit of description is bound to stick to me that will allow the thing to be individualized. Two cowboys are no more apt to be alike than two business men.

Harold Lamb: Yes, the imagination reproduces the story-world completely. Although not so fully with sounds as with sight, touch, smell. Perhaps the fact that I am nearly half deaf may have something to do with this.

About sensations it is hard to find the right word. Of course reading of a slashed finger does not give a resultant pain in any finger. It may give, however, a vivid mental image of pain in some finger. This is apt to be more annoying and enduring than a thumb actually cut by a knife.

The strength of the imagery is, logically, in proportion to the skill of the writer in creating his story-world. Reading Knut Hamsun's Hunger caused a more active mind distress than Les Miserables. Les Miserables was worse (that is, stronger) than Quo Vadis. By this last I do not mean to raise the standard of Scandinavia over Poland. Knut Hamsun's tale was fashioned to reproduce the imagery of hunger completely, and it was marvelously done. As compared with the actual sensation it was more painful. I mean retrospectfully painful. At certain times I have been rather hungry. But a full meal always banished the distress. No after-impress of pain remained. But, walking the streets of Copenhagen in the person of Knut Hamsun's young man, I never had any satisfaction from gorging after starving. He—I—always threw up.

So with other sensations. But the most vivid sensations received from the printed word are those that have been experienced in life. Such as pain from frostbite, suffocation under water, drowsiness.

As to limitations of imagination, I do not know of any. Images are distinct. Colored as in the story. When color is lacking, I seem to supply it. Brown, green, gray are always present. (An artist explains that these are the neutral tints.) White, blue and red come into place as described, but less often volunteer. Black, yellow and purple almost never volunteer and when the printed word summons are sketched hastily.

Poor in all mathematics, least deficient in plane and solid geometry.

Seem to reproduce more in imagination than the author sets forth and have always thought that most readers did likewise. I find that continually I am snubbed back by a fresh word as to setting in the course of a story.

No stock pictures.

As to reading vs. writing, the cart before the horse, and behind.

Tools of trade? I have not puzzled about the psychology of a reader.

Sinclair Lewis: My imagination reproduces thus occasionally. In colors, details distinct. Less trouble with solid geometry. A mere concept will set me to reproducing just as vividly. No stock pictures. Do not resent abundant images. Imagination is more active in writing than in reading.

Hapsburg Liebe: If a story really interests me, I feel everything, see everything, clearly. Reading of a man on a desert makes me thirsty. Writing of the same thing makes me thirsty. I cuss, cry and fight with the hero.

I did not study geometry. Never could study anything much.

If I read "He found himself in a dense woodland," my imagination makes the rest; I see pines, oaks, etc., as well as the woods. I think most other readers are like this; that's why they don't like detail.

Unless I'm careful, I have stock pictures for such things as logging-camps, etc. Often I catch myself and make myself see it differently, make the creek run the other way, and so on—and it's harder than you'd think. The last camp I worked in (there was a sawmill in connection) is always coming back to me, and I've had a devil of a time putting a thicket of laurel where the mill stood. This sounds crazy, but I'm trying to answer your questions.

There is little, if any, difference in my behavior when reading stories and writing them. I get "all het up" in either case, if there's any reason for it.

"Tools of the trade?" I forget everything like that when at work, I regret to say, though sometimes I take pains to see how some real author has got his effects.

Romaine H. Lowdermilk: I actually imagine—envisage—everything that goes on. If the writer has told it at all clearly I see and hear everything. I smell or taste nothing—my imagination does not go so far. I feel no pain nor sense of touch except in very familiar things like bitter cold, tropical heat, ropes, gun-shot in the leg and the like. The scenes I see are all in "black and white" much like the illustrations in magazines, or rather more like a memory of an actual happening. I see bright sunlights and deep shades, but seldom see colors even though the heroine wears a yellow waist. The main details are distinct, the rest merely passing impressions. Sometimes an especially vivid story brings out a lasting remembrance and I have it as almost an actual happening.

Solid geometry gave me no more trouble than any of my mathematics, but, at that, it is a terrible arraignment to numbers.

My response is generally limited to just about what the author describes. Naturally I do not know what is coming and so do not give much room to imaginings. The only thing that peeves me is to go through a lot of fine description only to find that it had nothing whatever to do with the progress of the story; was just slung there by the author for the sake of more words, words, words! But description in line with the action, or used to bring out the story more clearly, is a delight.

I have stock pictures only for that with which I am not familiar, like the interior of a submarine. All sub-sea stories to me might well be written around the same old boat, as that is the boat I see. But cowboys, cattle, people, village churches or vaudeville theaters all are individual. Sometimes even I find a writer who seems to know his subject well enough to give me a description exactly fitting some place I know. Then I read him with great interest. In my own writing I have an individual in mind whether I write a description or not. I never write of things I must needs use a "stock" illustration for—only of course as for brief mention. If my hero had once been caught undersea in a submarine I might mention that incident, but to write a story about it—never.

Which brings me to my own imagination when writing. Indeed there is a great difference! When I write I see everything. I see all my characters in their widely separated haunts, and right in the "center" so to speak is a bright spot like a spot-light and seemingly my characters come out of the semi-darkness and enter that light for the moment of their action. It is somewhat like rehearsing a play, only far more vivid to me, for the scene is constantly changing; instead of the scene changing under the spotlight, the light moves over the story-stage and spots first one location and then another. I have difficulty sometimes deciding which characters to put on or to deal with next and sometimes withdraw one who has done much and fire him completely. Then, too, when I hit certain scenes I have so many thoughts and things crowd so swiftly I whack away, hitting any old letter and spacing weirdly for the sake of speed. In some scenes I weep. If I try to stifle my emotion my thoughts falter. Often in the reading I wonder what there was to sniffle over when I wrote, but sometimes the best part of the story is right there. Often I soberly type off something that makes me laugh, real sudden humor, when I come to read it. Often it is something I didn't realize was funny when I put it down. Usually, like the sob-stuff, it requires considerable revision to make it presentable. I am glad I can feel the emotions so strongly and hope it will stay with me. I consider it a valuable "tool" and try not to abuse it.

Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.: Writing stories keeps my imagination alert. Reading stories, the keeping of my imagination alert depends on the stimuli—the art of the author. In one case the imagination is in harness; in the other it is loose in a pasture, and may be asleep.

A story has to be pretty vivid to react on my physical senses. Zola's novels, for example.

I rarely visualize, see with my eyes shut, except by conscious effort or intention. Then I can, easily.

Solid and spherical geometry gave me less trouble than algebra. I had to think hard to work out some of the original problems, though, but it was a satisfying experience.

The mere concept is sufficient for a vivid impression, but provided it impinges on something in my emotional make-up that is already susceptible or sensitive. For instance, the thought of a keen knife drawn across the palm of the hand—you don't have to go any farther; you don't have to describe it. But something else you might, and even then it might leave me cold. I think the personal equation figures in here tremendously.

No, I don't think I have stock pictures, not as a rule, unless some particular thing in my experience has made a deep impression. If you say cathedral, I'm likely to see the one at Cologne, while I wouldn't think of Notre Dame at all. The latter is sui generis—not a cathedral. It's Notre Dame. Say Notre Dame and I get it.

Rose Macaulay: Depends entirely on how well and forcibly the story is written. Most stories convey no impression of any kind to me. My imagination pictures are just like what I see with my eyes open, I think. No solid geometry. My response limited by the author. Having stock pictures depends on the description. Resentment as to images depends on whether described well or tediously. A great deal of difference when reading and writing. As to tools, don't quite follow this question.

Crittenden Marriott: I taste through imagination to some extent. As to pain presented in fiction, I "choke up" on some stories—Mrs. Abbott's for instance. Can see images with eyes either open or shut. Details blurred. Solid geometry easier. Response limited by the author. I don't describe much, except when I am trying to please the women with meteorologic disquisitions; then I sling words. As to tools, no.

Homer I. McEldowney: It depends more or less upon the ability of the author, I should say. I have a pretty fair imagination and if the writer gives me half a chance, I believe that I see just about what he saw—or sets down in print. That, I think, applies quite as truly to taste, sound and smell, as to sight. I've read yarns that gave me an odd tightening through the chest and which, if they didn't actually "raise my hair on end," did produce a fine stand of "goose flesh" at the back of my neck. I've caught myself with the palms of my hands moist and cold. If these are sound indications of inner turmoil, then I'm getting all the kick there is in a yarn—with no transformer reducing the voltage.

Nope, solid geometry didn't give me any more trouble than other mathematics—and a damned sight less than a five-hour course in algebra that I just plugged through with a weak-kneed D!

I don't believe in stock pictures. I haven't them, and hope I'm never turning out stuff at such a rate that I actually have to employ them. I get a lot of fun out of my characters and scenes. To me they have individuality. I have never tried it, but I suspect that my use of a stock picture or character would result in a lightly veneered but wooden yarn.

I believe that for the most part I really get into the stories I write rather more deeply than into those I read,—with some exceptions, perhaps.

Ray McGillivray: To some degree imagination supplies an adumbrance of all the sensations you mention. With me auditory imagery is strongest. Anything appealing through any sense to my notion of the dramatic, curious or interesting I remember in fairly accurate (often exaggerated, I'll admit) detail. Solid geometry was my shark subject in mathematics. Calculus was where I resigned.

My greatest handicap to pleasure in reading fiction lies in the fact that unless characters are (1) left automatons, or (2) portrayed vividly like Hamsun's "Isak," Hardy's "Tess," or Stribling's "Birdsong,"—my concepts and the author's get to quarreling from the drop of the hat. Stating it briefly, my favorite authors are Hamsun, Turgenieff, Dickens and Nick Carter. In dime novels I write my own story as I read.

Stock types of characters hang on a writer only when he is trying to vivify a setting or situation with which he is not thoroughly familiar—or when he never has taken the pains to look closely at people in the endeavor to form constructive estimates of them. Of course weariness of body and mind, too—but then the chap behind the pencil or Chatterbox No. 5 is not a writer but merely a dumb Will-To-Work.

The only difference in the way imagination works when reading and writing—so far as I know—lies in the fact that in reading every ascending step in the flight of story development opens a whole new gamut of conjecture, questioning and hope; in writing the imagination has to cross and recross, mount and descend the same space too often for any such tremendous scope. I verily believe a wide-awake writer of adventure fiction actually reads three novels every time he completes the perusal of seventy thousand words of an interesting story written by some one else. Vice versa, he crosses his own steps three times or more—three hundred might be a better figure—on his own pièce de resistance.

Helen Topping Miller: Reading is to me a sort of orgy of the imagination. I see, feel, hear, smell and experience every sensation written into the story—more keenly, I think sometimes, than the author who writes it. Naturally, I supply my own pictures for the setting—if a writer describes a country road I see—not his road, but the roads I knew as a child back in rural Michigan. I do not know whether I "see things with my eyes shut" or not. I know that when any idea is presented my imagination gives one leap and is gone. I live, walk, see, feel and hear the scene, experience the emotions of the characters, sense everything distinctly. There is no blurring, rather the impression is painfully keen.

Mathematics were an abomination to me. I scrambled through them as easily as possible and forgot them with cheerful alacrity.

I certainly consider my ability to experience every sensation imaginatively as my most important tool. It seems to me the most valuable and essential factor in trying to write fiction—the thing the canny Irishman called the "ability to get inside other people's skins."

Thomas Samson Miller: Imagination and visualization: I feel location—the very hue of the sky, feel of the air, the scents and sounds of nature. I am less vivid on human actions and sayings. I am not so closely in sympathy with human beings as with nature. It is my greatest drawback in fiction writing.

I do not carry mental "stock pictures"; that would be reducing novelizing to bookkeeping. Certain authors do it, just as the same keep to one successful form of story and repeat, even in time-worn phraseology, so that one finds "Of a sudden" five to ten times in a single short story.

Behavior of imagination in reading and writing stories: The stories I read are so utterly beyond my art that there is no comparison. In writing the imagination is intense; one lives in the story, which one can not do in another story, any more than a violinist can reach the depths and heights of feeling of the composers whose composition he plays. No reader gets out of a story a tenth part of the feeling and visualization the author puts into it, or, perhaps, thought he put into it.

Anne Shannon Monroe: If the story I am reading "gets" me at all, I swing full into it, become absorbed and follow breathlessly through; if it doesn't "get" me, I don't go on.... I see the characters, the place—it is all as if it had been an actual experience. Sounds, tastes, odors,—it's all real in my mind, if the writer has made it real on paper.... I think the atmosphere of the story gets into my sense more keenly than anything else,—the feeling of it—beauty of scene if beauty is created on the page—as in Hudson's writing.

Pictures I see in imagination are as they are pictured by the creator of them: the intense glare of a desert under sun—it's blinding just to think about: the deep rich purple-green of heavy old forests—it's almost suffocating: some writers make me feel these things just as if I had seen them.

All mathematics were impossible to me, solid geometry no more so than that whole idiocy, from the multiplication table up.

If the presentation is true, the mere concept starts my mind off on jaunts of its own.

I do not have stock pictures; each character, scene, place is new, fresh—a creation.

I do resent too many images. I could not wade through all of Main Street: while Lulu Bett was a delight.

Difference in behavior of imagination when reading or writing stories? Well, in one way, no: if my imagination is not fired, I do not read and neither do I write. Often when I start to read a story it suggests one of my own, and I am off on my own adventure, instead of following the one the author has put before me. But if he has put it so as to catch my interest, I follow him with the same enthusiasm with which I write.

L. M. Montgomery: Yes, when I read a story I see everything, exactly as if I were looking at an actual scene. I hear the sounds and smell the odors. When I read Pickwick Papers I have to make many an extra sneak to the pantry, so hungry do I become through reading of the bacon and eggs and milk punch in which the characters so frequently revel. I never feel physical pain when I read a story, no matter how intense the suffering described may be. But I feel mental pain so keenly that sometimes I can hardly bear to continue reading. Yet I do not dislike this sensation. On the contrary I like it. If I can have a jolly good howl several times in a book I am its friend for life. Yet, in every-day existence, I am the reverse of a tearful or sentimental person. No book do I love as I love David Copperfield. Yet during my many re-readings I must have wept literal quarts over David's boyish tribulations. And ghost stories that make me grow actually cold with fear are such as my soul loveth.

I can "see things," with eyes shut or open, colors and all. Sometimes I see them mentally—that is, I realize that they are produced subjectively and are under the control of my will. But very often, when imagination has been specially stimulated, I seem really to see them objectively. In this case, however, I never see landscapes or anything but faces—and generally grotesque or comical faces. I never see a beautiful face. They crowd on my sight in a mob, flashing up for a second, then instantly filled by others. I always enjoy this "seeing things" immensely, but I can not do it at will.

The very name of geometry was a nightmare to me. I decline to discuss the horrible subject at all. Yet I loved algebra and had a mild affection for arithmetic. These things are predestinated.

I have no "stock pictures" as a reader. I generally see things pretty much as the writer describes them—though certainly not as the "movie" people seem to see them! This is especially true of places and things. But very few writers have the power to make me visualize their characters, even where they describe them minutely. Illustrations generally make matters worse. I detest illustrations in a story. It is only when there is some peculiarly striking and restrained bit of description attached to a character that I can see it. For example: when R. L. Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll says that there was something incredibly evil about "Hyde"—I am not quoting his exact words—I can see "Hyde" as clearly as I ever saw anything in my life. As a rule, I think the ability to describe characters so that readers may see them as clearly as they see their settings is a very rare gift among writers.

Yes, as a reader I do resent having too many images formed for me. I don't want too much description of anything or too many details in any description.

When I read a story, I see people doing things in a certain setting; when I write a story I am the people myself and live their experiences.

Frederick Moore: My imagination reproduces the story-world of the author to the extent that the author has given me pictures or has suggested them to me. I actually—mentally—see and hear all given to me in the story. I can not say I smell or taste, except the reference is to something already in my memory. For instance, if an author refers to the smell of a whaling-ship, or a bilge-water forecastle, I smell it in memory—that is, I know it. But I doubt if I could create the smell that might be referred to in filling a helium-gas balloon, because that is beyond my ken. If it should smell like, say, rotten oranges, I might get a reaction that would be fairly accurate. I can not say that I feel pain presented in a story in any degree. The strength of the suggestion on my imagination depends largely on the skill of the writer in transmitting his idea to me. Of course, I suffer more mental pain in seeing a cat injured than I do in reading of how several men were killed. In the latter case shock is missing, yet I have seen more men killed than I have cats hurt. There is a difference in the behavior of imagination when reading and when writing—while reading, my imagination is being spoon-fed; in writing, it is on "high," climbing a hill and watching the road carefully. And there is a difference in concentration, for in writing I am emptying my subconscious reservoir, while in reading I am refilling it. After finishing a story, I find that a lapse of time is necessary to allow the subconscious (or what I presume to be the subconscious) to refill. I couldn't write stories on an eight-hour basis—if I wanted to.

I really see things with my eyes shut, in the colors which I may desire to give them. Details are distinct if I care to turn the "spot-light" on them, so to speak—in other words, to the point on which I want to concentrate for description. The detail I am working on is distinct, but if I want to hold the image long enough for extended use I do not attempt to hold it steadily. I find that impossible. But I can make the image repeat itself without limit. I doubt if anybody can hold an image, even of something that has just been looked at, longer than a very small fraction of a second. And by this I don't mean a succession of "flashes" but a fixed image.

Solid geometry gave me less trouble than other mathematics, because I could visualize it better. However, I have been able to copy from mental images of a problem I have seen written out, or printed on a page, a problem required in an examination. That is, I have found it easier to recall that problem as I saw it in figures, and copy it, than I have to attack the problem and work it to the required answer. I presume everybody else can do the same. In examinations in artillery I have been able to recall images of cross-sections so readily as to be able to reproduce them in rough sketches or to give the required description. But if the question related to something that I had heard in a lecture, I might well miss the question entirely. I show very poor results in written examinations relating to book matter—unless the questions relate to pages with such type arrangement or sub-heads that I can recall the entire page mentally and pick out of the image what I want. I may know a thing very well practically, and not be able to pass as high in it, as something I have acquired wholly from a book. I believe text-books on all subjects should be more visual.

The response of my imagination in some cases is dependent on the skill at description of the writer, especially in things or scenes with which I am not familiar. But a mere concept will set me reproducing if the matter deals with something with which I am familiar. By this I do not mean to say that my imagination will not work except with things with which I am familiar—I am referring to degree of response.

No, I do not have stock pictures for anything. I may think first of some picture in memory, and from that basis create the character, the place and the events. However, imagination probably requires something in the nature of a "feeder." What the imagination of a person blind from birth does would be most interesting. If a person had been blind up to, say, twenty and then recovered sight, it should be interesting to know what kind of mental picture he had had of, for instance, a full-rigged ship.

I have considered all these matters as tools of my trade. Without them, I doubt if it is possible to have the trade.

Talbot Mundy: If I pick up a book, say, on India, and provided the book is sufficiently well written not to "get my goat," I am in India instantly. I see, smell, hear and taste India. Sometimes I almost touch it. The same with any other country or place. India merely serves as an illustration. I have to be brought back to my surroundings with a wrench.

Sound is perhaps the least real of the sensations. I get the effect of the sound without the sound itself. The louder the sound, the less real, I rather think. For instance, if a gun goes off I don't jump out of my skin, and I don't think I hear the report—or, if so, I rather see than hear it. Colors are absolutely real, although rather more beautiful than in actual experience.

This is a very difficult question to answer, however. The world of imagination and ideas seems to me to be a separate world in which we experience all the sensations above referred to, but experience them differently. The sting—the element of personal suffering—to use the Christian formula, the cross—seems to be missing in this world of imagination; so that, although the cross and its consequences—a strong smell and its discomfort, pain and its distress—may all be present in the story, they are seen objectively and have practically no physical reaction except that of conscious pleasure.

On the other hand, ideas, emotions, contrasts between right and wrong do have a pronounced physical effect. I frequently sweat or grow angry or get prodigiously excited while reading—but always because of an idea that is concretely presented.

Perhaps I can put it best this way: Suppose that we torture the heroine. The most blood-curdling description of her agonies would probably excite my curiosity and might perhaps tickle a sadistic vein, but would certainly not cause me physical distress nor even mental disturbance. But the question whether she shall be tortured or not—the right and the wrong of it—the low-down arguments used on the one side, the high standards raised on the other, would arouse me almost to frenzy, and the blood would go coursing through my veins twice as fast as usual.

I don't have to shut my eyes to "see things." I see them more easily with eyes wide open. Possibly because I am short-sighted, the imaginary things that I see in that way are often more "real" than the real world. The pictures are invariably colored. Never black and white.

My response is not limited by any means to the degree in which the author describes and makes vivid. As often as not, too much description has the reverse effect.

I never studied solid geometry.

I think that in most instances vision is individual and new; but I rather suspect that things I have seen at different times and in different places form the store from which I draw apparently fresh illustrations as required. This, however, is another very hard question to answer correctly and really could not be answered without keeping tabs on one's self for a month or two.

Reading is better fun than writing. Therefore, when reading, the imagination is less rebellious and does its work more swiftly and easily. Otherwise I think there is little if any difference.

Kathleen Norris: I can't say that I ever get an actual sense emotion from what I write, that is, in taste or smell, but I have felt my mood very definitely affected by the experiences my characters are experiencing, and I frequently confuse them with real persons for an hour or two, and will find myself saying at lunch, (say) "Oh, a woman told me this morning ..." forgetting that the woman is of my own creating.

One would see things in this way pretty much as one would remember a meeting with somebody close and vital, or anticipating such a meeting. It would be natural to imagine the room, the sunshine, the gowns, etc., etc.

I never even finished grammar school.

No, it seems to me the only books worth while (that is, in the sense of popular fiction, etc.,) are the books that stimulate fresh imaginings of one's own.

I hate to read a book that does not produce an individual vision and so add to one's stock, as it were. The chief delight of reading seems to me exploratory.

On the contrary, a writer who can form images is a great writer. But having images distorted or ill-formed is merely tiresome, and annoys one with a sense of wasting time.

Yes, all the difference between eating a meal and cooking it. (Incidentally I would always prefer the cooking.)

My brother-in-law, Frank Norris, once said that when he really wished carefully to depict a scene, he appealed to each of the five senses in turn; and to a greater or lesser degree I don't think any picture can be painted without one or more of these "tools."

Anne O'Hagan: It seems to me that the only possible answer to this question is: "It depends upon the genius of the author." There are villages in England I could find my way about in, there are drawing-rooms in which I perfectly see the furnishings, because of Jane Austen and Thackeray. I have grown hungry reading Dickens' meals. I suffered utter fatigue, misery and coldness crawling back to the farm with "Hetty" in Adam Bede; and I think I had something the same actual feeling of physical exhaustion in reading the Italian home scenes in The Lost Girl. But for the most part the impressions are impressions only, not experiences.

Pictures are colored when I actually have them, and details distinct.

All mathematics gave me trouble, but I think that the climax of despair was reached in calculus instead of solid geometry.

Response follows vivid suggestion as well as detailed description—when there is response.

I suppose that if the author of the village church or the cowboy did not cause me to see a definite creation, I have a property-room church or cowboy which my imagination would fit into the story. But I think with a little help I am able to construct a new one for the story in question.

Probably yes. That is, I should be bored by not being allowed to use my own imagination a little.

Yes. Only the masters of literature can absorb my mind with their characters, create a world which takes the place of the actual one for the time being; but when I am writing (with most pleasure and most of the feeling of creation, I mean—most successfully) I can be absorbed in my characters and can live in their world without for a moment believing that I am a master of literature. I mean by this that I know from my own experience how much real creation is involved in the production of that which is not great or fiction.

No.

Grant Overton: I often see the people, the action and above all the setting. I do not know that I hear the sounds or taste the flavors or smell the smells or feel any impacts. I do feel what the people of the story feel, at least in the more emotional moments. I have suffered exquisite pangs along with my characters, have been thrilled with them, have despaired with them. To me fiction is merely a form of communicating feeling.

I do not see things with my eyes shut but with them open. I seldom notice details. What I see I can not describe, except as an effect. That is why I can not write descriptions full of physical detail.

Plane geometry is the only mathematical subject that gave me trouble. I don't think I ever studied solid geometry, but I undoubtedly passed an examination in it.

My response is wholly determined by the emotional content of the narrative and the emotional activity of the characters though conditioned by the skill of the author in verbal presentation.

I should probably image the village church from one I had seen. I should have no picture of the cowboy unless emotionally I found myself akin to him.

I do not mind how many images are formed for me but I resent nothing but images. I want, above all, to feel something.

Yes, my imagination when writing and when reading is totally different, but I do not know whether I can say how. In writing my imagination labors often painfully. In reading—but I suppose it is the difference between listening to music and playing some instrument yourself.

I can not answer as to tools. The five senses mean little to me when it comes to writing or reading. I should say that the appeal was to my intellectual senses if there is such a thing.

Sir Gilbert Parker: Everything is seen clearly. Better at geometry than anything else. Each case has its own vision. Do not resent multiplicity of images. It is the duty of the author to command my vision.

Hugh Pendexter: I get all the drama very clearly or else I quit. I must have the geography of the story in mind and often post myself on the locale with use of a map. I respond thoroughly to the comedy or tragedy of a story and read myself into it. I react more quickly to pathos than to the infliction of physical pain. Torture of a victim does not torture me. A child saving pennies to buy a garish, impossible tie for his old grandfather probably would bring tears. If a road or river is pictured, I must see it as though walking over or along it. I do not believe my imagination goes much beyond what the writer supplies, as then it becomes my story and not his and I can finish it without bothering to finish the book.

I really see things with my eyes open. The details are as distinct as any my physical vision can reveal. They are not outlines, nor black and white studies, but as they actually would exist as to form and color. I see most clearly those scenes I write about.

Mathematics never intrigued me. My recollection of solid geometry is that it was to me the delirium tremens of plane geometry. My two sons find mathematics absorbing. I abhor mathematics.

As to degree of my response, that is explained above.

Much difference. When writing a story my imagination supplies a wealth of detail that does not appear in the yarn. If I have to supply overmuch for the other fellow's yarn, I quit, as noted above.

The next query is rather blind to me. My best "tool of trade" is my immediate vision of what I wish to put into type.

Clay Perry: I visualize very much; in reading a story as well as in writing it. A story in which I am unable to visualize clearly annoys me. I want to go around the corners and see what the author sees. I suspect that an author who does not furnish the locale, color and plan which will enable me to see his story is careless. This goes for the characters, double. They should be seen clearly, I believe.

Sounds, I "hear," also, in the inner ear and taste the flavors with the tongue of imagination and sometimes my mouth waters to a pleasant flavor well pictured. To smells, being supersensitive anyway, the reaction is strong. To touch the reaction is not so strong, except in rare instances, mostly unpleasant suggestions, pain. I feel the pain if in sympathy with the character who suffers it, more than otherwise.

"Seeing things with my eyes shut" amounts to re-creation, through the stimuli of description, of a more or less familiar scene; or at least with a familiar scene the nucleus of the image built upon the stimuli. Details are distinct if description is vivid and, again, if the stimuli call up something which I have actually seen or experienced in the past that is akin to the scene or incident described.

Solid geometry gave me less trouble than any other mathematics and Lord knows the others gave me trouble!

I believe the concept stimulates me to imaging "what lies over the hill" in many cases, the "behind the scenes," perhaps because of a habit in my own writing of trying to set a stage "solid," not with mere "drops."

Stock pictures for stock "sets"? For a village church—a composite picture of the several dozen I had to attend when a boy, none of them the same exactly. For a cowboy, different stock pictures in different context. I think this depends largely on the manner and setting in which the object of character is first introduced.

Yes, there is a difference in the behavior of my imagination when I am reading stories and when writing them. In reading, one has only to accept the author's concept; in writing, one has to consider and reject several and decide upon one. (There is, however, in reading, the tendency to look behind the scenes, which is perhaps a fainter manifestation of the selective impulse or artistic judgment habitual in the creation of a picture myself.)

I have thought of my reading constantly in connection with my writing. If a book or story is good, I get a stimulation from it, perhaps an inspiration, which, mingled with the profusion of other impulses and ideas, emerges, some time, as a part, or a tendency, in my own work. More often, however, I am astonished, when well started on a story of my own or when completing it, to run across another with a curious similarity of thought or philosophy—or perhaps, a contradictory philosophy in similar setting.

Michael J. Phillips: I try hard to visualize in important scenes. If I get stuck in a description I stop and visualize—hard. I don't see all the characters, but only the principal ones. I don't imagine the sounds unless I want to conjure up the effect of a sudden, alarming sound, like a shot, on the man or woman who hears it.

I do not taste the flavor of a story. I do not get rough or smooth contact nor physical pain. Rarely a story moves me to laughing aloud, and equally rarely, say twice a year in each case, does a story bring tears. My response to a good story—and it must be good—is the prickle down your back when he really puts it over. This may be at the finish or when one of the characters does an admirable or a clever thing in a way wholly admirable and noteworthy, and what is done is described by a master. Too much sophistication to get the kick that once I did, I suppose. A duel of words between two men in a love story over the girl, a battle of wits in which breeding and good sportsmanship are displayed, will produce the prickle down my spinal column quicker than exciting physical action.

I can not see the scenes with my eyes shut readily. It is only by effort, and they are in black and white. I can not visualize the faces of all my friends and relatives. The degree of nearness and dearness does not enter into visualization at all. Some strangers impress themselves on my mental retina, and I can not recall by shutting my eyes how some relative, perhaps in the next room, looks. I have a lot of fun visualizing a horse race with the jockeys wearing different colored jackets. This I use in the rare attempts I make to get to sleep when I do not fall instantly asleep on going to bed. I can't make it stick much. The colors get all mixed up. I have to keep telling myself which color my favorite wears.

I went to high school only a month or two in the second year, then quit to paint little white coffins in a casket factory, so you see solid geometry is a sealed book to me. Algebra was bone labor to me, but I was quite proud of myself when I solved a problem, and in some degree it was an attraction on that account.

I think I prefer the author not to clutter the picture with too many words. I don't want too much detail painted in, but I do want him to make his primary and essential characters and objects plain and clear. If it's a man and a horse, I don't want any impressionistic or cubist daubs that leave me in doubt whether it's a monkey and a rhinoceros. If he'll just show me plainly it's a man and a horse, I'll dress them up to suit myself. He makes me tired when he goes meticulously into detail, unless he's an artist—and they are damn few.

Each case produces its individual vision, I think.

To me, the reading of stories and the writing of them are not related at all. In reading, the imagination wanders where it wills; in writing, it is an imagination harnessed and doing its work.

They are tools of the trade and I use them steadily, though perhaps not so much as I should.

Walter B. Pitkin: I see colors and details pretty well with my eyes shut. Since I turned forty this function has noticeably weakened. When in my twenties and early thirties I could look at a piece of white paper and see, in faint, swimmy colors projected on it, the things I was imagining. My capacity to visualize has been unusually intense, as psychological tests have repeatedly shown. At the end of a day's work I can see the minutest details of the objects I have dealt with; the grain in the wood of my desk, the shadows on my office floor, the colors and forms in the street. I can see these at night just before going to sleep; and I used to get myself to sleep by watching the parade of visions!

All mathematics was extremely difficult for me in school, but chiefly because I had poor teachers. Geometry still is almost a black art to me, although higher mathematics is fairly easy.

My response to what I read is uncomfortably excessive. In handling the manuscripts of other writers I am constantly seeing more in the scenes than the writers themselves saw; and they have often told me this.

I have no stock visions of types. But I do tend to reproduce a series of real persons or objects from my experience, when I read about a similar one.

I do not resent the presence of many images and pictures in a story.

My imagination behaves very differently when reading from its manner when writing. But I confess that I can not adequately describe the difference. So much can be said of it. When I read I "follow the leader" and do not run off into my own channels; but when I am writing my fancy runs wild and I think of the most preposterous and remote things which—as later analysis often shows—have indirect and obscure connections with the idea I am working over. When reading I am passive, more or less; when writing, I am active. There is a curious difference, over and above this, in the nature of my emotional responses; and this rather stumps me to set down on paper. It seems as if I give deeper and surer emotional reactions to the content of what I read than I do to what I am fancying when in the midst of writing. I find that calculating and constructing makes me deliberate and a degree cool toward the subject-matter. This is the result of deliberate intellectualizing, of course.

I have always considered the functions of imagination as the basic "tools of the trade."

E. S. Pladwell: This question is too broad. It is all according to the author. Some can make me see, feel, taste, smell. Others merely glue my attention to the action. Others bore me. Under some authors I will say that I see the people and action, subconsciously, not as in real life.

My response is with one kind of author limited to the exact degree that he describes things, while with others I am able to wander all over. A concrete example: Kipling in a few lines can intimate things which will make me lay down the book and think. O. Henry, on the other hand, keeps one so busy keeping up with his sparkling action that there is no time for another thought. Kipling's mere concept, or hint, can produce unlimited mental pictures; but O. Henry has to draw them line for line. I believe that the concept or hint is best.

I never studied solid geometry, being fired from college just in time to avoid it. All mathematics bore me; and yet I can draw a ship or a city in perfect proportion and perspective. I suppose it's instinct or something.

Have no stock pictures for church or cowboy. Each individual case is interesting in itself.

Imagination to me is clearer when reading than writing. When reading I can sit back and let things flow by in easy sequence. When writing I must labor, taking various imaginings as a bricklayer picks up bricks, and then selecting those which are useful and rejecting those which are not. When I get a new idea my imagination is vivid; but in writing it I fade the picture, for my mind is occupied with means for putting the picture over, rather than the picture itself. The picture is still there; but it is subordinated.

Lucia Mead Priest: If a writer is master of his craft he can do what he will with my imagination. My senses are alert, particularly those of sight, taste, smell.

Oh, yes, my mouth waters. Dickens used to make me hungry till I sampled his edibles. "'am and weal pie" is a sordid delusion, a menu snare.

This is guess-work, but I should say I do respond to the various stimuli to the senses. Not in the same measure to all. When I read the death of "Nancy Sikes" I see her in the ghastly light of a London morning, see the grimy curtain with "Bill," and the horror under it, but I feel no quiver of flesh when he beats down the upturned face. I respond to mental hurts not to physical—not as physical.

When impressed I find I carry a mental pain—even for years.

It depends entirely on the author's designs on me. If he paints his sunset clearly, I see it in color.

I think I must see details, for descriptions, bits of books, here and there, stand out from the main story often. I fancy the color of them is ephemeral.

I have no remembrance of any thing in mathematics from the multiplication table to trigonometry that didn't spellTrouble for me with a monster T.

My response to an author who interests me is evidently helpful. I have found, often, that in rereading something I have liked I have built on many additions, colored it with my imagining.

Sorry, but I'm afraid my "stock room" is bare. Maybe I would find Owen Wister's or a stage cowboy in it, never having seen a live one.

My pictures come from original locations—geography I have covered myself.

No great difference in the working of the imagination between writing and reading. If so, one of degree. By the looks of my hair, when "genius" (?) has burned, I should judge I may get greater emotional depths when creating.

Eugene Manlove Rhodes: Visual imagination, yes. Hearing, no. Taste, smell, touch, pain, thirty to fifty per cent. Colors: distinct. No solid geometry. Concept is as good as three volumes—better; want to roll my own. No stock pictures. Reading vs. writing, no difference. As to tools, yes.

Frank C. Robertson: My imagination reproduces the story-world of an author, though with limitations. That is, I see a story-world when reading but I frequently realize later that it is not just the same as the author's. This, of course, is not the fault of the author, but comes from my own peculiar reactions. For instance: the author says "the lion roared." I don't hear the roar, I see a lion open his mouth in the motions of roaring. He says: "the gurgling brook." I don't hear it gurgle—I see it cascading over stones and know that it is gurgling. But if he forces me to it like "out in the darkness there sounded a strange, droning noise," I actually hear a strange, droning noise. In lesser measure this holds true with all the senses. The author speaks of his starving hero eating luscious fried bananas. I can see those bananas and my mouth waters, but to save my life I can not taste them. My sense of sight predominates. But where acute physical pain or mental agony is described I think I actually feel. At every blow of the lash my flesh shrinks and my nerves recoil. And I am as easily moved to tears as the veriest schoolgirl—which is why I write he-man stuff. Cold, callous and indifferent.

The mental pictures that I see are usually clear-cut and the coloring very much as I see the same objects in real life.

My response is not limited to the exact degree to which the author describes. I frequently seize upon a mere impression left by the author and from it build up a whole chain of pictures. I find this a decided handicap in my own writing for I am prone to leave a mere impression of the setting, and the scenes which are so clear to me are blurred in the mind of the reader. In rewriting I find that I always have to make the setting and atmosphere more vivid. In these mental pictures each case, or object, has a distinct individuality.

My imagination is never so active when reading a story as when writing it. In reading I am content to float along with the author, analyzing what has gone before rather than probing continually into the future as I do when writing.

To the extent that structure, appeal and atmosphere are necessary to the story I have considered these things as "tools of the trade." Just recently I have begun to realize the value of appealing to all of the reader's senses to get him more fully into the spirit of the story.

Ruth Sawyer: If a story is strongly and convincingly written I generally see characters and action developing with the same degree of reality that one sees a motion picture. Sounds, flavors, smells—in fact all sense perceptions become extremely acute. I should say the relationship to the actual stimuli is comparable with a vivid dream.

I rarely see color. For the most part things are black and white but with sharp detail.

I studied solid geometry and flunked it. The only examination in mathematics I ever flunked.

A suggestive concept will start me picturing endless detail provided the suggestion is true to type and locality.

No, I do not have stock pictures for village churches.

I think that depends largely on the condition of mind when one takes up a story. I find if I am tired I want the work of detail picturing done for me provided it is not overdone to the point of weariness. Also I think if one is generally familiar with the atmosphere the writer is creating that one enjoys filling in a large part of the picture with one's own imagination.

Yes. I should say when I read stories my imagination was passive and receptive; that when I wrote stories it was active and creative.

Not consciously.

Chester L. Saxby: In reading, my imagination functions in exactly the same manner as in writing. I write as I read, trying for the story-world, trying for reality. I think this explains why with me the atmosphere is the biggest thing, sometimes too big, bigger than the story. I write as if I were reading, not creating. I have that feeling.

Barry Scobee: I believe my imagination reproduces the story in almost minute detail, if it is interesting. I am a slow reader, the slowest I know, too unutterably slow ever to sit in on the newspaper copy desk. I've tried it to my sorrow.

I will see the scenes minutely—the details of the grove or lot or room or barn—the vast expanse of desert or prairie or sea or mountains. I will see the out-of-doors or the things with which I am familiar. I will see all this without effort. But as to hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, I will not catch them nearly so minutely or accurately, unless the author is impressing them with emphasis. If they are impressed emphatically, I take them in fairly well.

As to whether the story-pictures in my mind are black and white—shadowy—or colored, well, it depends on what the author says or whether I have seen places similar to what is being described.

I prefer to read, and write, where there is a splash and promise of color and description so that I can form my own pictures or let my reader do it for himself. A "big man with uncombed hair and in his sock feet" is likely to be better than a detailed description. It lets the imagination of the reader work, which is one of the technicalities the author should take advantage of. However, sometimes the dramatic can be enhanced by minute description. If I have seen something close to what the author describes or hints at I can see it in all its color.

Solid geometry, as I recollect—I am nearly thirty-seven—gave me just the same trouble as all other mathematics, which was trouble indeed, from addition to trigonometry.

It may be clear in the foregoing that a hint from the writer sets me to reproducing, if the description is anything at all within the compass of my experience or previous reading and comprehension.

I do not have a single stock picture in mind, so far as I am aware of now.

When I write my imagination behaves differently from when I read—it goes more slowly, because I must ponder and weigh and try out. But otherwise it brings in the material with clarity, if I have my mind well on what I am doing.

As tools of your trade? I don't quite savvy. All the thousands of quirks of technique, all the tricks of the trade, certainly are "tools of the trade." (And it's funny I can't think of a blooming one right now with which to illustrate.)

R. T. M. Scott: When I read a story my imagination reproduces the story-world of the author very vividly. If it does not, the story does not interest me and I pass on to the next. I do not hear sounds in connection with a story which I am reading except upon rare occasions. Taste, on the other hand, is very acute. Smells, too, are acute although not quite so acute as tastes. The sense of touch is not so pronounced, though I feel it to a certain extent. I feel no actual pain corresponding to the physical pain described in the story. In the case of taste my imagination produces the same result upon my sense as does the actual stimulus itself. (If the above proves me to be weak-minded or a degenerate please give me a chance to argue the matter with the fellow who says so.)

Limitations with the "eyes shut" need not exist. Pictures may be colored, in black and white, blurred or distinct. You are the master or a child wandering in fairy land. It rests with you if you will but practise regularly for short intervals of time. Five minutes every day at the same hour will be sufficient for a starter. Seat yourself in a chair with your back to the door and with your eyes closed. Imagine yourself rising from the chair and walking around behind your back toward the door. See the door and feel the knob so vividly that you have forgotten that you are sitting in the chair. Open the door and pass out, closing it behind you. Enter the room again and look at the back of your own head as you sit in the chair. Open the door and pass out, closing it behind you. Enter the room again and look at the back of your own head as you sit in the chair. Sounds silly, but try it once a day for six months. If you have made no progress in three weeks, give it up. If you do make progress, however, you will reach marvels at the end of half a year or earlier. There will be no limits and you will be able to visit any place that you ever heard of or never heard of as you please to be the master or the child. London or Cairo, the center of the earth or the opposite side of the moon await you while something unconscious sits in your chair with its back to the door. Proof? There is no proof for the man of science such as the counting of beans in a closed box. The reason for proof is doubt and, with doubt, the trick vanishes.

Solid geometry gave me more trouble than other mathematics. You can't prove me a maniac on this, however, for I fooled away my time at the commencement of the study and a weak foundation may have been to blame.

I am not quite sure that I "get" your next question. Perhaps I can not answer definitely. Sometimes I follow the author pretty closely and sometimes I leave the author in my lap while something sits in the chair with its back to the door.

I have no stock pictures. Each case produces its own vision.

In reading stories my imagination usually follows. In writing a story it leads or is led. You will say that, if it is led, it follows. Yes, but not in the same way. In reading it follows the plot. In writing it follows something altogether apart from the story and the result of that following is the story. What is this something which the imagination follows—which leads the imagination? It is, I think, that which makes us think at certain times when our thoughts are not lazily centered upon heat and cold or food and drink—the cravings and sensations of the body. There is something beyond all selfish desires and emotions and that something should be master of our thoughts if we are to function to the best advantage. If there is nothing on the other side of the grave, then all these ideas are nonsense. If we do continue to "live" after death, however, then that permanent self is not likely to be born at death. It is much more probable that we have it now or even that we may have had it for millions of years—perhaps always. If such should be the case it might well be that thought or imagination is sometimes influenced by the contact of our work-a-day mind with that real self which never dies and which may be a vast store-house of knowledge and high ideals.

I have considered these matters as "tools of my trade" and I try, very falteringly, to use them. The best theory upon which to work is, to my mind, the theory of reincarnation. Perhaps, however, that must be proved by each man for himself. I have studied it and I do believe that it gives results.

Robert Simpson: When I read a story and can't see the whole business—people, places, things—I don't go on reading. It is at once a lifeless thing—inchoate—a blur. I don't try to see and feel and taste and smell and so forth, if the story is getting over to me. If I don't experience these sensations in a greater or lesser degree, it is possible, of course, that I may have dyspepsia, but it is more likely that the story has a flat tire.

The pictures I see "with my eyes shut" are generally only half formed. The people are real and distinct enough—too distinct, I think, because I am tempted, in writing about them, to mark every trivial expression. Their positions in the pictures are most exact. But the furnishings or surrounding buildings or landscapes are not very clear, unless a chair or a house or a tree or several or all of these are absolutely necessary to the story. The whole scene, in other words, I see clearly. The details are blurred until they become specific. Then they stick out like a sore finger. The pictures are black and white for the most part. Red, yellow and green I can also see with fair distinctness. The finer shades are blurred. They fade in and fade out in an unsettled kind of way, as if I were having a hard time holding them there.

I never studied geometry or mathematics and I'm not going to. I was supposed to study them, but all I ever got out of them was a headache.

When the author of a story has set his stage, I generally see the setting in my own way. Most folks, I think, are guilty of this crime against the author's good intentions; particularly artists.

I have no stock pictures of anything I am reading or writing. Some scenes and things are more or less built to a pattern, but I like to "see" them differently whether they are or not.

When I am reading my imagination is naturally to a large extent subservient to the dictates of the printed page. I can make my own pictures out of the author's words, but I have to keep my imagination within bounds or I'd lose track of "what came next." When I'm writing, I'm the boss. I can go where I please and do what I please. It's a different thing and a different sensation. The first is a receptive mood that may kind o' tug on the reins, but always goes docilely or cheerfully on; the other is a creative one that gropes hopefully through a maze of plot and counterplot, scenes, people who are never where they ought to be when one wants them, and, finally and tediously and most importantly, technique.

I have always considered vizualization as the most valuable tool of my trade. Without it I couldn't write a line. This will indicate how much I use it.

Arthur D. Howden Smith: When I am working at my best I live the story literally. Color and distinctness depend on my physical condition, I think—mental states of the moment have something to do with it. As to solid geometry, don't know what you mean—it never meant anything to me.

Response is up to the author. The question of stock pictures is up to the author. Reading vs. writing—you bet. As to tools, it would take a book to tell you, principally because my reactions are different at different times.

Theodore Seixas Solomons: I am a visualizer in writing and reading. Psychologically there is little difference with me in the two processes, except that in reading I visualize little besides what the author describes, while in writing I visualize all the attacks I make in the creation besides the one that stands—is adopted. That is, at every point where I hesitate between proposed actions, before I adopt one of them, I visualize each as I think of it. Conceiving it in fancy being itself a visualizing process.

I do not hear, smell or taste anything. I can see their action, as they talk, see their lips move, if there is any point in the manner of enunciation—but no sounds. The bear meat may be frying, but I do not hear it hiss or get mentally the aroma. Nor do I get the sense of touch. In fine, beyond visualization of the main picture and its immediate surroundings from point to point in the narrative—my own or that which I read—my mental activities are conceptual only and never sensory. But I do feel. My mind flames to sympathetic feeling. I have a weak replica of all the emotions appropriate to the course of the story. This is far stronger, usually, in writing my own stuff than in reading the fiction of others. I do not attribute this to any superiority of fancy in myself, but only to the fact that the act of imagination may be so much more complete when exercised in the creation of my own fiction than when stimulated by the fiction of another that it moves me correspondingly more. When my story is down the stimuli are, of course, no more numerous for the other person than another writer's have been to me in his story, but in the process of writing that which forms the text of my story I have lived through so very much more concerning the people in it than I have selected to be written that I am beset emotionally and mentally with many times as many effects—and am affected proportionally.

To sum up my answer to this question—when I have pictured physically the scene and people, either in writing or reading, it is my intellect alone that works as to what takes place in the sense world among them. Just as in a cinema we imagine by the action of the mind alone sounds, touches, smells, so my stories (and those I read) are cinemas in which I imagine, mentally only, the rest of the action. The mental physical picture—if you get me—is data enough, stimulation enough to suggest to my mind all other sense perceptions in their effects. That is, if I see the bear-meat frying, I can readily supply smells and touches and sounds without experiencing any imagined sense impressions of smells, touches or sounds.

I see things as well with my eyes open, if moving objects do not sidetrack my attention, as with them shut. In fact, I can not plot or write without seeing things, any more than I can describe the route to my place in the mountains without visualizing it as I describe. I see things in their natural colors. Necessary details are distinct. The picture, however, is hazy "off the main trail." That is, my visualizing apparatus is economical—or penurious—enough to refuse to draw and color in areas beyond the main trend of the story I'm conceiving or writing.

Solid geometry was pretty easy to me, because of my ready concrete visualization.

I go beyond the description of the author in some cases. For instance, in Mr. Dunn's castaway story of the eight or ten men I took his description of the island as he gave it from time to time and filled in a lot of details. And I imagined quite a little action besides that which he narrated. I never changed his descriptions, I merely filled them out.

I have not exactly stock pictures, but if I am called on imaginatively to see a village church or a cowboy I am likely to revert visually to some particular church or particular man that has made a great impression on me. But with the stimulus of the slightest description that doesn't fit, my mind facilely makes the necessary modification.

Tools? No. I just "write" as I tend to and can.

Raymond S. Spears: Some of my characters are as real, and even more real, than most people I know. They are usually distinct personalities that I know better than living people. In writing them I am often quite unable to give them the bitterness of experiences I have in mind because I hate to abuse them so! That's a fact, too, and has spoiled some of my—to me—most interesting ideas and stories. My feeling toward my characters does not include physical pain, for I can cut or shoot a hero without compunction, but I hate to embarrass a man or woman, probably because I am rather sensitive myself.

I hear the music I write about better than I hear the reality; thus the lapping of wavelets along the hull of a shanty-boat, the ringing of a bell or gobble of a turkey in a fog is more audible in my imagination than in fact—for I am hard of hearing. But I have heard these things at some time or other, and the memory is direct, whether hearing, seeing, smelling, etc.

What I see is environment I actually know, which I have seen and studied. I see characters in action. Sometimes I go myself through a whole story, as one of the characters; then go back and put down the imaginary episodes with myself as one or other of the characters, but usually a minor or spectator character. I read others' fiction nearly as I form my own.

I never studied solid geometry. Poor health kept me out of school, so I had only two years and a half in a grammar school, after brief period in a country district school. I had, however, a great working library for a boy, in my father's collection, to which advantage I later added a four-years course as Sun reporter in New York, and wide-range reading. But I do not recall that I ever read anything or studied anything the need of which I did not acutely feel. Thus in reading fiction it satisfies some longing as for experience, information, a view-point, etc. I can overlook errors of statement obviously outside a writer's own knowledge or experience, if he puts in good things within the scope of his own data.

In writing, details come into focus if I look at them. That is, if I describe a trapper's cabin, if it is of logs I see the moss chinking and the spruce, balsam or other "banking up." I ask the equivalent of this accuracy of knowledge in what I read and take delight, for instance, in the minute knowledge of equipment displayed by Pendexter or the desert flora by Harriman or Tuttle's fine cowboy exaggeration and faithfulness to a habit or frame of mind.

My stock in trade is a vast junk yard, properties more varied than a motion-picture lot's, and I seldom see the same thing twice. If I read, for example, a Western, I may know its exact location (as I do my own story-atmospheres). In that case I see as I remember, and if I don't remember very well, I get out a map, note-books, etc., and find out what's wrong. I read stories for amusement and information, and often I write stories to give information—hoping to amuse as well.

Norman Springer: It depends on the story and the author.

In a romantic story I'm always chiefly interested in the characters. In a realistic story I am often more interested in the setting, or background, than in the characters.

Sounds, smells, feels, pictures—if the tale is artfully written, these are quite real, though, of course, in a subdued or diluted sense. Suggestion makes these things more real than elaborate description.

Pain, I think, is usually met by the reader with feelings of anger and pity.

Suggestions of smells are, I think, most vivid to me.

If I visualize a picture, it is in color. The distinctness of details depends on the intensity of the scene, or my interest in it. Characters are usually distinct; scenery blurred.

No geometry.

The response, I think, is often killed by too much description. Suggestion, particularly sensory suggestion, does the work best with me—and I think with most people. If the author outlines the picture and sets my five senses—or any of them—to work, I get a much more vivid and "real" impression than if he spent pages in meticulous description.

If the characters are alive and the setting interesting, the mental pictures of a story are individual. Otherwise, I suppose they are stock pictures.

A great deal of difference. In reading I can allow my imagination free play. In writing I must discipline it, keep it within the bounds of the story. I find it hard to do.

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