Читать книгу The Technique of Fiction Writing - Robert Saunders Dowst - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Selection—Sincerity—Adventure—Common Problems of Life—Originality—Novelty and Worth—Three Elements of Fictional Literature—Interest—Elements of Interest.

Life is infinitely various, and the possibilities of the imagination are even more extensive; the writer of fiction has enough material at hand. His primary task, to pitch upon a theme, is almost wholly selective, unless he is cursed with a paucity of observation or barrenness of imagination, in which case he has mistaken his calling. And in this task of selection the writer must bear in mind several considerations, his own predilections, his own powers, the intrinsic worth of the idea, and—last but not least—the audience he is to address. The writer should give ear to his own personal likings because he will do better work when he has interest in the matter under his hands; he should consider his own powers lest he attempt too much; he must consider the intrinsic worth of his theme lest his work be essentially feeble; and he must ponder his audience that his work may not go for naught. As to this last, a word of advice may not be out of place. Though the average reader may have little power to express, he usually has a well developed power to appreciate, and there is no need to "write down" to him. Condescension on the part of the writer of fiction is less obtrusive than in more directly informative writing, but it is instantly perceived and resented when present. The best audience for the writer to imagine is simply the best audience, alive in sensibilities and intelligence.

Stories—and therefore potential stories—may be divided roughly into two classes, those meant frankly to entertain and those designed to perform a higher function in addition. The line between them is not hard and fast; the same basic idea will slip from one side to the other under different handling by different authors. But there is a real difference, and that difference is made by the presence or absence of sincerity in the writer. The complete and rounded story will interest, which is the element of bare matter, will be so perfectly told that its mere structure will give pleasure, which is the element of artistry, and will truly express some phase of life as the author sees it, which is the element of sincerity. Stories may possess all, some, or none of these elements, but no story which does not possess them all can be said to fulfil completely the ideals of the art of fiction. There is no abstract obligation to be sincere resting on a writer of fiction; he should be sincere because his work will gain in power. A reader will feel the presence or lack of the quality.

This does not mean that the writer of fiction should take himself and life too seriously, a fault of which George Eliot is perhaps an example. He should simply be true to his own artistic convictions. If he must write "pot-boilers" for a living, he should refuse to let the hours so spent dull his artistic sense. No taint attaches to writing an entertaining story for the money in it; the elder Dumas, for instance, was a far greater artist in letters than hosts of more sombre writers who preceded and have succeeded him. And the writer who has Dumas' intrinsic gaiety and verve may write adventure and write literature too.

Back of the possibility lies the fact that the more bizarre phases of life are somewhat accidental and not very inclusive. The writer who deals with them must draw on his imagination heavily, not only for initial conceptions but for details. Very possibly he may miss some of the warm verisimilitude that derives from writing of familiar things and constitutes the keystone of the fictional arch. The strange and striking may gain a reader's superficial interest very easily, but "easy come, easy go" and the story of deep-rooted appeal is the story that displays to a reader sharply individualized human beings meeting the daily problems that are our common human lot. These problems are not dull because they are common and universal; their universality is the source of their interest. The writer who can reduce a general problem of love, hate, or labor to specific terms of persons and events, and can invest the whole with that certain momentousness, as of life raised to a higher power, which is the hallmark of literature, fulfils the highest possibilities of the art, whether he be as realistic in method as Dostoievsky in "Crime and Punishment" or as romantic in spirit as Hawthorne in "The Scarlet Letter."

Perhaps all this is somewhat repellent. We are not all Hawthornes in embryo—worse luck!—and though a good many aspire to do something worth while in itself some day, another good many are more humble, and incline to view the editor's check as sufficient warranty of success. Such an attitude is much healthier than that of the persecuted genius who refuses to investigate present conditions in the public taste and to coax and take advantage of them. But it may be carried to extremes. I do not think that many deliberately write trash, but it is apparent that a good deal of trash is written through too sedulous imitation of the tone of current literature. There is a recognizable type of machine-made story used by all the all-fiction magazines, and so forth. Subject to correction, I believe that the greater part of this cut-and-dried product is owing less to editorial conservatism than to authorial diffidence toward truly original work. Work may be original in substance, method, and viewpoint without being obscene or even "frank." When they do leave trodden ways, too many young writers persist in opposing the justifiable editorial reluctance to print anything that might give offense in a magazine of general circulation. The sex relation is not the whole of life, and even the sex relation may be treated, without the conventional sugar coating, to give all essential facts and make all essential comments and not be forbidding. We have a great world spread before us, and there is more in it for telling than is already printed and on the newsstands. When looking for a story, the thing to do is to forget those that have been written, to forget everything except the spectacle of life.

In the choice of matter the two main considerations are novelty and worth. Freshness in substance or form will go far to stimulate the writer and to sell the result of his labor, and essential worth is inspiring. No man finds pleasure in trivial and useless labor, but all normal men find pleasure and exhilaration in labor that is worth while. The writer who has worthy matter beneath his hands, and who knows it, will remain keyed to the requisite pitch during the labor of composition. Numbers have testified that the truest joy of authorship is found in conceiving and elaborating a tale before setting pen to paper, and time spent in estimating an idea and exhausting its possibilities and deficiencies before writing is necessary to make certain that the idea is worth while. Moreover, it is necessary that the writer know precisely what his idea is in order to develop it properly by excising the superfluous and emphasizing the significant. Conscious artistry is impossible unless the author knows definitely what he is striving to express.

The writer of fiction should bear in mind the three elements of the story that is literature, and should ask himself whether his projected tale is interesting, whether it is capable of being cast in literary form, and whether it is worth while. If the idea meets all these requirements, any failure in the completed work will be due to defective execution, not to deficiency in the conception. If the idea fails to meet the test as to form and worth, it may yet be worth while to write the story, for it may sell; if the idea is not interesting, it should be rejected without remorse. The first and highest function of a story is to interest and entertain; indeed, artistic form is but a means to that end, as is essential worth; and the dull, uninteresting story—a contradiction in terms—is the most woebegone literary failure under the stars.

The writer who allows any discussion of the art of fiction or the content of fiction to cloud for him the basic fact that fiction must be interesting is on the highroad to failure. It would be better for him had he never opened a book, except of frank adventure. Nine tenths of the ponderous and silly comment on fiction past and fiction present is written by critics and professors who first kick up a great dust over a work in order to display their insight in seeing through it, and nine tenths of that nine tenths—written purely from a reader's and not from a writer's standpoint—consists in appraising character by conventional ethical standards and in attributing to the writer whose work is under examination intentions and philosophies of which he never dreamed. It is at once very dull and very amusing, but the young writer whose eagerness for all information about his craft leads him to take such matter too seriously is in grave danger.

The writer of good fiction and the reader of good fiction are alike in that they both realize that the chief end of fiction is to entertain and interest, that perfection of form is desirable simply because it heightens the illusion of a story, and that worth of matter is necessary if the story is to be true literature because the cultured mind cannot find interest in the trivial. Culture has been finely defined as "the quality of a mind instinct with purpose, conscious of a tendency and direction in human affairs, able and industrious in distinguishing the great from the trivial." If this definition is valid—it bears its credentials on its face—great fiction may be defined as fiction which interests the cultured mind. The quality of arousing interest is the criterion and determinant, and implies perfection of form and essential worth of substance. The writer of fiction must never lose sight of the fact, nor of the resulting necessity that all his work be interesting. The fortunate thing is that fiction deals with so universal a thing as life; it need not repel the ignorant and uneducated in order to attract the abler mind.

The twin elements of fictional interest are the story and its people, and here becomes apparent the essential weakness of the story of mere incident. It cannot evoke interest as deep as that called forth by the story having closer relation to character. The range of character required by the story of incident is narrow; there are a thousand pregnant human qualities which the story of incident cannot first develop by action and then utilize to hold a reader's interest, but which the writer of the more leisurely and inclusive tale of everyday life can common can be truly vivified only by showing the person in acts displaying his essential traits, and the less dependence the action of a story has upon character, the less real to a reader will be the persons involved. The story of complication of incident, of mere structural ingenuity of plot, is superficially interesting, but it lacks the deeper appeal of the story which develops its people adequately. At any rate, it is true that a reader can love or hate characters, beside being interested in them; he can only be interested in an event. The people of a story are not to be neglected as sources of interest. They are harder to display than mere events, but they are infinitely more compelling. A bare series of events may interest, but the interest and appeal of what happens will be doubled if the observer is a friend of the persons affected, that is, if he knows them. The same is true in the case of a story. Its reader stands in the position of observer of events and people. The only trouble is that some stories have little action significant in relation to character, and when that is the case the writer loses one means to make his people real for a reader. The point to remember in searching for an interesting story is that the people are as influential an element as the events.