The Craftsmanship of Writing (Golden Deer Classics)

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Preface

The present volume is the outgrowth of a course in essay writing, offered two years ago in connection with the University Extension work of Columbia University. It embodies in part what the author then undertook to teach his students, supplemented by what the students quite unconsciously taught the author. There was a class which, taken collectively, offered much diversity of scholarship, a wide range of preparation for writing. Yet one and all of them presented practically the same sort of problem; one and all said in effect: I have had such and such training; I have worked hard and willingly; yet my manuscripts do not sell. What is the matter with my preparation? What books should I read? What course should I take? And in a wider way, these are the questions that are to-day being asked throughout the length and breadth of this continent. Now the purpose of this volume is to answer these questions, by pointing out that the fault is primarily with the would-be authors themselves, and not with their preparation. The best teaching they can anywhere receive is at most a makeshift, a mere starting point; they must learn to rely upon themselves, and the earlier the better. The most that this book or any other can do is to guide them away from certain wrong paths and toward certain right ones ; they must cultivate self-criticism, industry, the art of taking infinite pains, the habit of looking upon to-day's failures as the stepping stones toward to-morrow's success. The laurels of authorship are worth the winning largely because there is no primrose path leading to them. 

 New York: April 13, 1911.

The Inborn Talent

It is always helpful, in writings possessing even the mildest of text-book flavour, for author and reader to start with a clear mutual understanding of scope and purpose. The best way in which to forestall that aggrieved sense which a student often feels of having derived no profit from a certain book or article or lecture course, is to say frankly, at the outset: Here, in brief, is what we intend to do. If your individual case falls outside these limits, you will waste your time, since it belongs upon the list of what we have no intention of doing.

In the present volume of papers on The Craftsmanship of Writing, the best and quickest way to reach this helpful understanding is to explain what first suggested them, and what results it is hoped that they will achieve. There has probably never been a time when so large a number of men and women, of all sorts and conditions, have yielded to the lure of authorship—and the elemental, naive and random questions that they often ask shows that there has never been a time when so many were in need of a word of friendly guidance. And this is precisely what the present volume claims to give. It does not pretend to point a royal road to literature—to furnish a new philosopher's stone for transmuting ordinary citizens into famous poets and novelists. It has no ambition to create new authors—since authors worthy of the name are born, not made nor to compete with the efforts of our college English Departments, our summer lecture courses, our correspondence schools and literary agencies—for we have a surfeit of these already. The aim of The Craftsmanship of Writing is nothing more pretentious than to help would-be writers to reach a somewhat saner, more logical understanding of the real nature of the profession they are entering upon, both on its technical and its artistic side; to discount its delays and disappointments; and above all, to learn to help themselves by intelligent self-criticism. For it is a somewhat curious fact that there is no other line of intellectual work in which a man or a woman may remain, through months and years, so fundamentally ignorant of his or her real worth.

Now the reason why a struggling author may waste years of misdirected effort, without knowing just how good or bad his productions really are, is not difficult to explain. The sources of any workman's knowledge of his worth are practically only three in number: the market value of his ware; his own self-criticism, and the opinions of others. Now it is a common experience among young authors to find through weary months that their wares apparently have no market value at all—this does away with the first source of knowledge. Secondly, the ability to criticise one's self in a detached, impartial way is one of the rarest of human faculties—and not a bit less rare in authors than in other people. Yet, unfortunately, it is upon his own judgment that every young writer must very largely depend. For there is probably no other craft or employment in which it is so difficult to obtain a really authoritative opinion—for the excellent reason that in no other craft or employment is there such a lack of any general requirement, any standard of apprenticeship. Indeed, it is often as hard to guess the potential powers of a beginner in letters as to predict how a raw recruit is likely to conduct himself under fire. Let us, therefore, take up separately these two questions: First, the various kinds of critical opinion a young author is able to obtain upon his writings; secondly, the nature and degree of systematic training it is possible for him to acquire.

But first let us ask one more preliminary detail: where does the raw recruit in the army of authorship mainly come from? In other trades and professions there is some sort of selective barrier: a college degree, a regent's certificate, a Civil Service examination, a Union Membership, some sort of initial guarantee of fitness. Then, too, in many cases, there is the prohibitive question of expense. It costs both time and money to become a lawyer or physician—even to go upon the stage means nowadays a year or two in a dramatic school, if one does not want to start with a handicap. In contrast writing seems so simple; pen and ink, a pad of paper, a table in a quiet corner—these to the uninitiated seem to be the net amount of required capital. Frank Norris, in a burst of rather curious optimism, once wrote, The would-be novel writer may determine between breakfast and dinner to essay the plunge, buy (for a few cents) ink and paper between dinner and supper, and have the novel under way before bedtime. How much of an outlay does his first marketable novel represent? Practically nothing. Mr. Norris seems for the moment to have forgotten that his own first marketable novel, McTeague (although published subsequently to Moran of the Lady Letty), represented careful labour scattered over a period of four years, and that a portion of it at least necessitated quite literally a further delay than that of ink and paper, being submitted in part fulfillment of the requirements of a course at Harvard University. La Bruyère came considerably nearer the truth when he cynically wrote, from a different angle:

A man starts upon a sudden, takes Pen, Ink and Paper, and without ever having had a thought of it before, resolves within himself to write a Book; he has no Talent at writing, but he wants fifty Guineas.

Now, as in every other attempt to obtain a high rate of interest upon a small investment, the results are extremely precarious. The difference in this particular case of the beginner in literature is that the fault lies less with the investment than with the investor. Out of a hundred beginners, taken at random, no two have had the same sort or degree of training, the same advantages of worldly knowledge, the same allotment of that special fitness which it is convenient to speak of as the Inborn Talent. And it would be most extraordinary if all of them, or any considerable portion of them should have. The field is open to all comers, without prejudice of colour, sex or age. And so we find competing side by side, the university man, with half a dozen letters after his name; the young woman from some Western farm, who thinks herself a second Mrs. Browning; the underpaid teacher, the starveling minister, the physician with a dwindling practice, who seek to eke out a meagre income with an occasional magazine article; the society woman and the man of leisure whose whim it is to see themselves in print; the suffragette, the sweet girl graduate, the whole motley host that, rightly or wrongly, believe themselves to have the Inborn Talent. Now, if these new writers seek advice—and sooner or later they practically all of them do—from whom can they seek it? What avenues are open to them?

Some writers, of course, are more fortunately placed than others, in this respect; but in practice it will be found that the usual sources of criticism, whether favourable or hostile, narrow down to four:⁠I. The biassed opinions of interested friends;⁠II. The bought opinions of professional advisers;⁠III. The rejections or acceptances of editors, either with or without comment;⁠IV. The published criticisms in the review departments of newspapers and magazines. Now, as already said, there is a certain degree of luck in all four of these sources of criticism. Thus, to take them up in order, the opinions of the first class may not always be biassed. A young author may have the good luck to number among his friends or relatives one or more authors of big accomplishment and fine discernment who may serve the place of literary godfather, and who in rare and wonderful instances, such as that of Flaubert and Maupassant, actualise that ideal form of apprenticeship which all the arts enjoy save only that of letters. Again, it sometimes happens that a beginner is fortunate enough to choose for his adviser a professional reader whose horizon happens to be wider than that of the mere market value of literary ware, and whose suggestions stimulate the growth of his mentality as well as of his bank account. And then again, there are editors, who, in spite of the burden they carry, are not always too busy to send, with a rejected manuscript, a line or two of welcome advice to a young author whom they see to be stumbling needlessly—or a few words of equally valued praise to the beginner whose first work shows, through all its crudeness, the unmistakable gleam of the Inborn Talent. And as to the fourth class, that of the professional critic, there are a good many successful authors who freely admit the debt they owe to him for many a frank word of praise or censure in earlier years. Indeed, this last source of outside help ought to be the most disinterested and the most useful of them all. That it is not, is due to two simple and rather obvious facts: first, that it cannot possibly reach the novice in letters until he begins to get his writings into print; secondly, that the rank and file of reviewers think it their duty to speak to the readers of books rather than to the writers of them—to tell the general public why they ought to like or dislike a certain volume, instead of telling the author in what particulars his work was good and in what others it might have been better.

I believe, says Sir Walter Besant, in his Autobiography, that one can count on ten fingers the few critics whose judgments are lessons of instruction to writers as well as readers.

It is this dearth of real enlightenment that makes so many first attempts—whether poetry or prose, essays, stories or special articles—sheer guess-work, gropings in the dark. Hundreds of first manuscripts, and second and third manuscripts, too, are written with tremulous hopes and fears, absurdly overvalued one moment and blackly despaired of