by Frank Norris
Some of this, one chooses to believe, has already been implanted. In all the parade of the new little tin-gods some may be discovered that are not tin, but sterling. Of all the fads, the most legitimate, the most abiding, the most inherent — so it would appear — is the “Nature” revival. Indeed, it is not fair to call it a fad at all. For it is a return to the primitive, sane life of the country, and the natural thing by its very character cannot be artificial, cannot be a “fad.” The writers who have followed where Mr. Thompson Seton blazed the way are so numerous and so well known that it is almost superfluous in this place to catalogue or criticize them. But it is significant of the strength of this movement that such an outdoor book as “Bob, Son of Battle,” was unsuccessful in England, and only attained its merited popularity when published here in America. We claimed the “good gray dog” as our own from the very first, recognizing that the dog has no nationality, being indeed a citizen of the whole world. The flowers in “Elizabeth’s German Garden” — also world citizens — we promptly transplanted to our own soil. Mr. Mowbray, with his mingling of fact and fiction, made his country home for the benefit — I have no doubt — of hundreds who have actually worked out the idea suggested in his pages. The butterfly books, the garden books, the flower books, expensive as they are, have been in as much demand as some very popular novels. Mr. Dugmore astonished and delighted a surprisingly large public with his marvelous life-photographs of birds, while even President Roosevelt himself deemed Mr. Wallihan’s “Photographs of Big Game” of so much importance and value that he wrote the introductory notice to that excellent volume.
It is hardly possible to pick up a magazine now that does not contain the story of some animal hero. Time was when we relegated this sort to the juvenile periodicals. But now we cannot get too much of it. Wolves, rabbits, hounds, foxes, the birds, even the reptilia, all are dramatized, all figure in their little rôles. Tobo and the Sand-hill Stag parade upon the same pages as Mr. Christie’s debutantes and Mr. Smedley’s business men, and, if you please, have their love affairs and business in precisely the same spirit. All this cannot but be significant, and, let us be assured, significant of good. The New England school for too long dominated the entire range of American fiction — limiting it, specializing it, polishing, refining and embellishing it, narrowing it down to a veritable cult, a thing to be safeguarded by the elect, the few, the aristocracy. It is small wonder that the reaction came when and as it did; small wonder that the wearied public, roused at length, smashed its idols with such vehemence; small wonder that, declaring its independence and finding itself suddenly untrammeled and unguided, it flew off “mobishly” toward false gods, good only because they were new.
All this is small wonder. The great wonder is this return to nature, this unerring groping backward toward the fundamentals, in order to take a renewed grip upon life. If you care to see a proof of how vital it is, how valuable, look into some of the magazines of the seventies and eighties. It is astonishing to consider that we ever found an interest in them. The effect is like entering a darkened room. And not only the magazines, but the entire literature of the years before the nineties is shadowed and oppressed with the bugbear of “literature.” Outdoor life was a thing apart from our reading. Even the tales and serials whose mise en scene was in the country had no breath of the country in them. The “ literature “ in them suffocated the life, and the humans with their everlasting consciences, their heated and artificial activities, filled all the horizon, admitting the larks and the robins only as accessories; considering the foxes, the deer and the rabbits only as creatures to be killed, to be pursued, to be exterminated. But Mr. Seton and his school, and the Mowbrays, and the Ollivants, the Dugmores and the Wallihans opened a door, opened a window, and mere literature has had to give place to life. The sun has come in and the great -winds, and the smell of the baking alkali on the Arizona deserts and the reek of the tar-weed on the Colorado slopes; and nature has ceased to exist as a classification of science, has ceased to be mis-understood as an aggregate of botany, zoology, geology and the like, and has become a thing intimate and familiar and rejuvenating.
There is no doubt that the estate of American letters is experiencing a renaissance. Formality, the old idols, the demi-gorgons and autocrats no longer hold an absolute authority. A multitude of false gods are clamouring for recognition, shouldering one another about to make room for their altars, soliciting incense as if it were patronage. No doubt these “draw many after them,” but the “nature revival” has brought the galvanizing, vital element into this tumult of little inkling sham divinities and has shown that life is better than “literature,” even if the “literature” be of human beings and the life be that of a faithful dog.
Vitality is the thing, after all. Dress the human puppet never so gaily, bedeck it never so brilliantly, pipe before it never so cunningly, and, fashioned in the image of God though it be, just so long as it is a puppet and not a person, just so long the great heart of the people will turn from it, in weariness and disgust, to find its interest in the fidelity of the sheep-dog of the North o’ England, the intelligence of a prairie wolf of Colorado, or the death-fight of a bull moose in the timberlands of Ontario.
THE MECHANICS OF FICTION
We approach a delicate subject. And if the manner of approach is too serious it will be very like the forty thousand men of the King of France who marched terribly and with banners to the top of the hill with the meager achievement of simply getting there. Of all the arts, as one has previously observed, that of novel-writing is the least mechanical. Perhaps, after all, rightly so; still it is hard to escape some formality, some forms. There must always be chapter divisions, also a beginning and an end, which implies a middle, continuity, which implies movement, which in turn implies a greater speed or less, an accelerated, retarded or broken action; and before the scoffer is well aware he is admitting a multitude of set forms. No one who sets a thing in motion but keeps an eye and a hand upon its speed. No one who constructs but keeps watch upon the building, strengthening here, lightening there, here at the foundations cautious and conservative, there at the cornice fantastic and daring. In all human occupations, trades, arts or business, science, morals or religion, there exists, way at the bottom, a homogeneity and a certain family likeness, so that, quite possibly after all, the discussion of the importance of the mechanics of fiction may be something more than mere speculative sophistry.
A novel addresses itself primarily to a reader, and it has been so indisputably established that the reader’s time and effort of attention must be economized that the fact need not be mentioned in this place — it would not economize the reader’s time nor effort of attention.
Remains then the means to be considered, or in other words, How best to tell your story.
It depends naturally upon the nature of the story. The formula which would apply to one would not be appropriate for another. That is very true, but at the same time it is hard to get away from that thing in any novel which, let us call, the pivotal event. All good novels have one. It is the peg upon which the fabric of the thing hangs, the nucleus around which the shifting drifts and currents must — suddenly — coagulate, the sudden releasing of the brake to permit for one instant the entire machinery to labour, full steam, ahead. Up to that point the action must lead; from it, it must decline.
But — and here one holds at least one mechanical problem — the approach, the leading up to this pivotal event must be infinitely slower than the decline. For the reader’s interest in the story centres around it, and once it is disposed of attention is apt to dwindle very rapidly — and thus back we go again to the economy proposition.
It is the slow approach, however, that tells. The unskilled, impatient of the tedium of meticulous elaboration, will rush at it in a furious gallop of short chapters and hurried episodes, so that he may come the sooner to the purple prose declamation and drama that he is sure he can handle with such tremendous effect.
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�� Not so the masters. Watch them during the first third — say — of their novels. Nothing happens — or at least so you fancy. People come and go, plans are described, localities, neighbourhoods; an incident crops up just for a second for which you can see no reason, a note sounds that is puzzlingly inappropriate. The novel continues. There seems to be no progress; again that perplexing note, but a little less perplexing. By now we are well into the story. There are no more new people, but the old ones come back again and again, and yet again; you remember them now after they are off the stage; you are more intimate with the two main characters. Then comes a series of pretty incidents in which these two are prominent. The action still lags, but little by little you are getting more and more acquainted with these principal actors. Then perhaps comes the first acceleration of movement. The approach begins-ever so little-to rise, and that same note which seemed at first so out of tune sounds again and this time drops into place in the progression, beautifully harmonious, correlating the whole gamut. By now all the people are “on”; by now all the groundwork is prepared. You know the localities so well that you could find your way about among them in the dark; hero and heroine are intimate acquaintances.
Now the action begins to increase in speed.
The complication suddenly tightens; all along the line there runs a sudden alert. An episode far back there in the first chapter, an episode with its appropriate group of characters, is brought forward and, coming suddenly to the front, collides with the main line of development and sends it off upon an entirely unlooked for tangent. Another episode of the second chapter — let us suppose — all at once makes common cause with a more recent incident, and the two produce a wholly unlooked-for counterinfluence which swerves the main theme in still another direction, and all this time the action is speeding faster and faster, the complication tightening and straining to the breaking point, and then at last a “motif” that has been in preparation ever since the first paragraph of the first chapter of the novel suddenly comes to a head, and in a twinkling the complication is solved with all the violence of an explosion, and the catastrophe, the climax, the pivotal event fairly leaps from the pages with a rush of action that leaves you stunned, breathless and overwhelmed with the sheer power of its presentation. And there is a master-work of fiction.
Reading, as the uninitiated do, without an eye to the mechanics, without a consciousness of the wires and wheels and cogs and springs of the affair, it seems inexplicable that these great scenes of fiction — short as they are — some of them less than a thousand words in length — should produce so tremendous an effect by such few words, such simple language; and that sorely overtaxed word, “genius,” is made to do duty as the explanation. But the genius is rare that in one thousand simple words, taken by themselves, could achieve the effect — for instance — of the fight aboard The Flying Scud in Stevenson’s “Wrecker.” Taken by itself, the scene is hardly important except from the point of view of style and felicity of expression. It is the context of the story that makes it so tremendous, and because Osborne and Stevenson prepared for that very scene from the novel’s initial chapter.
And it seems as if there in a phrase one could resume the whole system of fiction-mechanics — preparations of effect.
The unskilled will invariably attempt to atone for lack of such painstaking preparation for their “Grande Scenes” by hysteria, and by exclamation in presenting the catastrophe. They declaim, they shout, stamp, shake their fists and flood the page with sonorous adjectives, call upon heaven and upon God. They summon to their aid every broken-down device to rouse the flaccid interest of the reader, and conclusively, irretrievably and ignominiously fail. It is too late for heroic effort then, and the reader, uninterested in the character, unfamiliar with the locale, unattracted by any charm of “atmosphere,” lays down the book unperturbed and forgets it before dinner.
Where is the fault? Is it not in defective machinery? The analogies are multitudinous. The liner with hastily constructed boilers will flounder when she comes to essay the storm; and no stoking however vigorous, no oiling however eager, if delayed till then, will avail to aid her to ride through successfully. It is not the time to strengthen a wall when the hurricane threatens; prop and stay will not brace it then. Then the thing that tells is the plodding, slow, patient, brick-by-brick work, that only half shows down there at the foot half-hidden in the grass, obscure, unnoted. No genius is necessary for this sort of work, only great patience and a willingness to plod, for the time being.
No one is expected to strike off the whole novel in one continued fine frenzy of inspiration. As well expect the stone-mason to plant his wall in a single day. Nor is it possible to lay down any rule of thumb, any hard-and-fast schedule in the matter of novel writing. But no work is so ephemeral, so delicate, so — in a word — artistic that it cannot be improved by systematizing.
There is at least one indisputably good manner in which the unskilled may order his work — besides the one of preparation already mentioned. He may consider each chapter as a unit, distinct, separate, having a definite beginning, rise, height and end, the action continuous, containing no break in time, the locality unchanged throughout — no shifting of the scene to another environment. Each chapter thus treated is a little work in itself, and the great story of the whole novel is told thus as it were in a series of pictures, the author supplying information as to what has intervened between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next by suggestion or by actual resume. As often as not the reader himself can fill up the gap by the context.
This may be over-artificial, and it is conceivable that there are times when it is necessary to throw artificiality to the winds. But it is the method that many of the greatest fiction writers have employed, and even a defective system is — at any rate, in fiction — better than none.
FICTION WRITING AS A BUSINESS
THE exaggerated and exalted ideas of the unenlightened upon this subject are, I have found, beyond all reason and beyond all belief. The superstition that with the publication of the first book comes fame and affluence is as firmly rooted as that other delusion which asks us to suppose that “a picture in the Paris Salon” is the certificate of success, ultimate, final, definite.
One knows, of course, that very naturally the “Eben Holden” and “David Harum” and “Richard Carvel” fellows make fortunes, and that these are out of the discussion; but also one chooses to assume that the average, honest, middle-class author supports himself and even a family by the sale of his novels — lives on his royalties.
Royalties! Why in the name of heaven were they called that, those microscopic sums that too, too often are less royal than beggarly? It has a fine sound — royalty. — It fills the mouth. It can be said with an air — royalty. But there are plenty of these same royalties that will not pay the typewriter’s bill.
Take an average case. No, that will not do, either, for the average published novel — I say it with my right hand raised — is, irretrievably, hopelessly and conclusively, a financial failure.
Take, then, an unusually lucky instance, literally a novel whose success is extraordinary, a novel which has sold 2,500 copies. I repeat that this is an extraordinary success. Not one book out of fifteen will do as well. But let us consider it. The author has worked upon it for — at the very least — three months. It is published. Twenty-five hundred copies are sold. Then the sale stops. And by the word stop one means cessation in the completest sense of the word. There are people — I know plenty of them — who suppose that when a book is spoken of as having stopped selling, a generality is intended, that merely a falling off of the initial demand has occurred. Error. When a book — a novel — stops selling, it stops with the definiteness of an engine when the fire goes out. It stops with a suddenness that is appalling, and thereafter not a copy, not one single, solitary copy is sold. And do not for an instant suppose that ever after the interest may be revived. A dead book can no more be resuscitated than a dead dog.
The extraordinary, the marvelous has been achieved. What does the author get out of it? A royalty of ten per cent. Two hundred and fifty dollars for three months’ hard work. Roughly, less than $20 a week, a little more than $2.50 a day. An expert carpenter will easily make twice that, and the carpenter has infinitely the best of it in that he can keep the work up year in and year out, where the novelist must wait for a new idea, and the novel writer must then jockey and maneuver for publication. Two novels a year is about as much as the writer can turn out and yet keep a marketable standard. Even admitting that both the novels sell 2,500 copies, there is only $500 of profit. In the same time the carpenter has made his $1,800, nearly four times as much. One may well ask the question: Is fiction writing a money-making profession?
The astonishing thing about the affair is that a novel may make a veritable stir, almost a sensation, and yet fail to sell very largely.
There is so-and-so’s book. Everywhere you go you hear about it. Your friends have read it. It is in demand at the libraries. You don’t pick up a paper that does not contain a review of the story in question. It is in the “Book of the Month” column. It is even, even — the pinnacle of achievement — in that shining roster, the list of best sellers of the week.
Why, of course the author is growing rich! Ah, at last he has arrived! No doubt he will build a country house out of his royalties. Lucky fellow; one envies him.