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                         The "how to" Series




                         HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL




     +--------------------------------------------------------------+
     |                     The "how to" Series                      |
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     |                     I. HOW TO DEAL WITH                      |
     |                         YOUR BANKER                          |
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     |                       BY HENRY WARREN                        |
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     |                       _Third Edition._                       |
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     |                                                              |
     |                   V. HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL:                   |
     |                                                              |
     |                 A Practical Guide to the Art                 |
     |                         of Fiction.                          |
     |                                                              |
     |                 _Crown 8vo, Cloth, 3s. 6d._                  |
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     |                                                              |
     |                    VI. HOW TO INVEST AND                     |
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     |                       BY C. H. THORPE                        |
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     |                    LONDON: GRANT RICHARDS                    |
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                         The "how to" Series




                            HOW TO WRITE A
                                NOVEL

                     A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO THE ART
                              OF FICTION


                                LONDON
                            GRANT RICHARDS
               9 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
                                 1901




PREFACE


This little book is one which so well explains itself that no
introductory word is needed; and I only venture to intrude a sentence or
two here with a view to explain the style in which I have conveyed my
ideas. I desired to be plain and practical, and therefore chose the
direct and epistolary form as being most suitable for the purpose in
hand.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER I

  THE OBJECT IN VIEW
                                                             PAGE
  An Inevitable Comparison                                      3

  A Model Lesson in Novel-Writing                               5

  The Teachable and the Unteachable                             9


  CHAPTER II

  A GOOD STORY TO TELL

  Where do Novelists get their Stories from?                   12

  Is there a Deeper Question?                                  14

  What about the Newspapers?                                   17


  CHAPTER III

  HOW TO BEGIN

  Formation of the Plot                                        25

  The Agonies and Joys of "Plot-Construction"                  28

  Care in the Use of Actual Events                             31

  The Natural History of a Plot                                35

  Sir Walter Besant on the Evolution of a Plot                 40

  Plot-Formation in Earnest                                    43

  Characters first: Plot afterwards                            45

  The Natural Background                                       47


  CHAPTER IV

  CHARACTERS AND CHARACTERISATION

  The Chief Character                                          50

  How to Portray Character                                     52

  Methods of Characterisation                                  55

  The Trick of "Idiosyncrasies"                                58


  CHAPTER V

  STUDIES IN LITERARY TECHNIQUE

  Narrative Art                                                63

  Movement                                                     66

  Aids to Description: The Point of View                       67

  Selecting the Main Features                                  70

  Description by Suggestion                                    73

  Facts to Remember                                            75


  CHAPTER VI

  STUDIES IN LITERARY TECHNIQUE--CONTINUED

  Colour: Local and Otherwise                                  79

  What about Dialect?                                          84

  On Dialogue                                                  86

  Points in Conversation                                       91

  "Atmosphere"                                                 94


  CHAPTER VII

  PITFALLS

  Items of General Knowledge                                   96

  Specific Subjects                                            98

  Topography and Geography                                    100

  Scientific Facts                                            101

  Grammar                                                     103


  CHAPTER VIII

  THE SECRET OF STYLE

  Communicable Elements                                       105

  Incommunicable Elements                                     110


  CHAPTER IX

  HOW AUTHORS WORK

  Quick and Slow                                              116

  How many Words a Day?                                       119

  Charles Reade and Anthony Trollope                          122

  The Mission of Fancy                                        127

  Fancies of another Type                                     129

  Some of our Younger Writers: Mr Zangwill, Mr Coulson
      Kernahan, Mr Robert Barr, Mr H. G. Wells                132

  Curious Methods                                             134


  CHAPTER X

  IS THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF NOVELS EXHAUSTED?

  The Question Stated                                         138

  "Change" not "Exhaustion"                                   142

  Why we talk about Exhaustion                                145


  CHAPTER XI

  THE NOVEL _v._ THE SHORT STORY

  Practise the Short Story                                    154

  Short Story Writers on their Art                            159


  CHAPTER XII

  SUCCESS: AND SOME OF ITS MINOR CONDITIONS

  The Truth about Success                                     164

  Minor Conditions of Success                                 169


  APPENDIX I

  THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION. By Edgar Allan Poe           175


  APPENDIX II

  BOOKS WORTH READING                                         201


  APPENDIX III

  MAGAZINE ARTICLE ON WRITING FICTION                         205




HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL




CHAPTER I

THE OBJECT IN VIEW


I am setting myself a task which some people would call very ambitious;
others would call it by a name not quite so polite; and a considerable
number would say it was positively absurd, accompanying their criticism
with derisive laughter. Having discussed the possibility of teaching the
art of writing fiction with a good many different kinds of people, I
know quite intimately the opinions which are likely to be expressed
about this little book; and although I do not intend to burden the
reader with an account of their respective merits, I do intend to make
my own position as clear as possible. First of all, I will examine the
results of a recent symposium on the general question.[1:A] When asked
as to the practicability of a School of Fiction, Messrs Robert Barr, G.
Manville Fenn, M. Betham Edwards, Arthur Morrison, G. B. Burgin, C. J.
C. Hyne, and "Mr" John Oliver Hobbes declared against it; Miss Mary L.
Pendered and Miss Clementina Black--with certain reservations--spoke in
favour of such an institution. True, these names do not include all
representatives of the high places in Fiction, but they are quite
respectable enough for my purpose. It will be seen that the vote is
adverse to the object I have in view. Why? Well, here are a few reasons.
Mr Morrison affirms that writing as a trade is far too pleasant an idea;
John Oliver Hobbes is of opinion that it is impossible to teach anyone
how to produce a work of imagination; and Mr G. B. Burgin asserts that
genius is its own teacher--a remark characterised by unwitting modesty.
Now, with the spirit of these convictions I am not disposed to quarrel.
This is an age which imagines that everything can be crammed into the
limits of an academical curriculum; and there are actually some people
who would not hesitate to endow a chair of "Ideas and Imagination." We
need to be reminded occasionally that there are incommunicable elements
in all art.


An Inevitable Comparison

But the question arises: If there be an art of literature, why cannot
its principles be taught and practised as well as those of any other
art? We have schools of Painting, Sculpture, and Music--why not a school
of Fiction? Let it be supposed that a would-be artist has conceived a
brilliant idea which he is anxious to embody in literature or put on a
canvas. In order to do so, he must observe certain well-established
rules which we may call the grammar of art: for just as in literature a
man may express beautiful ideas in ungrammatical language, and without
any sense of relationship or development, so may the same ideas be put
in a picture, and yet the art be of the crudest. Now, in what way will
our would-be artist become acquainted with those rules? The answer is
simple. If his genius had been of the first order he would have known
them intuitively: the society of men and women, of great books and fine
pictures, would have provided sufficient stimuli to bring forth the best
productions of his mind. Thus Shakespeare was never taught the
principles of dramatic art; Bach had an instinctive appreciation of the
laws of harmony; and Turner had the same insight into laws of painting.
These were artists of the front rank: they simply looked--and
understood.

But if his powers belonged to the order which is called _talent_, he
would have to do one of two things: either stumble upon these rules one
by one and learn them by experience--or be taught them in their true
order by others, in which case an Institute of Literary Art would
already exist in an embryonic stage. Why should it not be developed into
a matured school? Is it that the dignity of genius forbids it, or that
pupilage is half a disgrace? True genius never shuns the marks of the
learner. Even Shakespeare grew in the understanding of art and in his
power of handling its elements. Professor Dowden says: "In the 'Two
Gentlemen of Verona,' Porteus, the fickle, is set over against
Valentine the faithful; Sylvia, the bright and intellectual, is set over
against Julia, the ardent and tender; Launce, the humorist, is set over
against Speed, the wit. This indicates a certain want of confidence on
the part of the poet; he fears the weight of too much liberty. He cannot
yet feel that his structure is secure without a mechanism to support the
structure. He endeavours to attain unity of effect less by the
inspiration of a common life than by the disposition of parts. In the
early plays structure determines function; in the later plays
organisation is preceded by life."[5:A]


A Model Lesson in Novel-Writing

When certain grumpy folk ask: "How do you propose to draw up your
lessons on 'The way to find Local Colour'; 'Plotting'; 'How to manage a
Love-Scene,' and so forth?" it is expected that a writer like myself
will be greatly disconcerted. Not at all. It so happens that a
distinguished critic, now deceased, once delivered himself on the
possibility of teaching literary art, and I propose to quote a paragraph
or two from his article. "The morning finds the master in his working
arm-chair; and seated about the room which is generally the study, but
is now the studio, are some half-dozen pupils. The subject for the hour
is narrative-construction, and the master holds in his hand a small MS.
which, as he slowly reads it aloud, proves to be a somewhat elaborate
synopsis of the story of one of his own published or projected novels.
The reading over, students are free to state objections, or to ask
questions. One remarks that the _denouement_ is brought about by a mere
accident, and therefore seems to lack the inevitableness which, the
master has always taught, is essential to organic unity. The criticism
is recognised as intelligent, but the master shows that the accident has
not the purely fortuitous character which renders it obnoxious to the
general objection. While it is technically an accident, it is in reality
hardly accidental, but an occurrence which fits naturally into an
opening provided by a given set of circumstances, the circumstances
having been brought about by a course of action which is vitally
characteristic of the person whose fate is involved. Then the master
himself will ask a question. 'The students,' he says, 'will have noticed
that a character who takes no important part in the action until the
story is more than half told, makes an insignificant and unnoticeable
appearance in a very early chapter, where he seems a purposeless and
irrelevant intrusion.' They have paper before them, and he gives them
twenty minutes in which to state their opinion as to whether this
premature appearance is, or is not, justified by the canons of narrative
art, giving, of course, the reasons upon which that opinion has been
formed. The papers are handed in to be reported upon next morning, and
the lesson is at an end."[7:A]

This is James Ashcroft Noble's idea of handling a theme in fiction; one
of a large and varied number. To me it is a feasible plan emanating from
a man who was the sanest of literary advisers. If it be objected that Mr
Noble was only a critic and not a novelist, perhaps a word from Sir
Walter Besant may add the needful element of authority. "I can conceive
of a lecturer dissecting a work, or a series of works, showing how the
thing sprang first from a central figure in a central group; how there
arose about this group, scenery, the setting of the fable; how the
atmosphere became presently charged with the presence of mankind, other
characters attaching themselves to the group; how situations, scenes,
conversations, led up little by little to the full development of this
central idea. I can also conceive of a School of Fiction in which the
students should be made to practise observation, description, dialogue,
and dramatic effects. The student, in fact, would be taught how to use
his tools." A reading-class for the artistic study of great writers
could not be other than helpful. One lesson might be devoted to the way
in which the best authors foreshadowed crises and important turns in
events. An example may be found in "Julius Caesar," where, in the second
scene, the soothsayer says:

     "Beware the Ides of March!"

--a solitary voice in strange contrast with those by whom he is
surrounded, and preparing us for the dark deed upon which the play is
based. Or the text-book might be a modern novel--Hardy's "Well-Beloved"
for instance--a work full of delicate literary craftsmanship. The storm
which overtook Pierston and Miss Bencomb is prepared for--first by the
conversation of two men who pass them on the road, and one of whom
casually remarks that the weather seems likely to change; then Pierston
himself observes "the evening--louring"; finally, and most suddenly, the
rain descends in perfect fury.


The Teachable and the Unteachable

I hope my position is now beginning to be tolerably clear to the reader.
I address myself to the man or woman of talent--those people who have
writing ability, but who need instruction in the manipulation of
characters, the formation of plots, and a host of other points with
which I shall deal hereafter. As to what is teachable, and not
teachable, in writing novels, perhaps I may be permitted to use a close
analogy. Style, _per se_, is absolutely unteachable simply because it is
the man himself; you cannot teach _personality_. Can Dickens, Thackeray,
and George Meredith be reduced to an academic schedule? Never. Every
soul of man is an individual entity and cannot be reproduced. But
although style is incommunicable, the writing of easy, graceful English
can be taught in any class-room--that is to say, the structure of
sentences and paragraphs, the logical sequence of thought, and the
secret of forceful expression are capable of exact scientific treatment.

In like manner, although no school could turn out novelists to order--a
supply of Stevensons annually, and a brace of Hardys every two
years--there is yet enough common material in all art-work to be mapped
out in a course of lessons. I shall show that the two great requisites
of novel-writing are (1) a good story to tell, and (2) ability to tell
it effectively. Briefly stated, my position is this: no teaching can
produce "good stories to tell," but it can increase the power of "the
telling," and change it from crude and ineffective methods to those
which reach the apex of developed art. Of course there are dangers to
be avoided, and the chief of them is that mechanical correctness, "so
praiseworthy and so intolerable," as Lowell says in his essay on
Lessing. But this need not be an insurmountable difficulty. A truly
educated man never labours to speak correctly; being educated,
grammatical language follows as a necessary consequence. The same is
true of the artist: when he has learned the secrets of literature, he
puts away all thoughts of rule and law--nay, in time, his very ideas
assume artistic form.


FOOTNOTES:

[1:A] _The New Century Review_, vol. i.

[5:A] "Shakespeare: His Mind and Art," p. 61.

[7:A] Article in _The New Age_.




CHAPTER II

A GOOD STORY TO TELL


Where do Novelists get their Stories from?

I said a moment ago that no teaching could impart a story. If you cannot
invent one for yourself, by observation of life and sympathetic insight
into human nature, you may depend upon it that you are not called to be
a writer of novels. Then where, it may be asked, do novelists get their
stories? Well, they hardly know themselves; they say the ideas "come."
For instance, here is the way Mr Baring Gould describes the advent of
"Mehalah." "One day in Essex, a friend, a captain in the coastguard,
invited me to accompany him on a cruise among the creeks in the estuary
of the Maldon river--the Blackwater. I went out, and we spent the day
running among mud flats and low holms, covered with coarse grass and
wild lavender, and startling wild-fowl. We stopped at a ruined farm
built on arches above this marsh to eat some lunch; no glass was in the
windows, and the raw wind howled in and swept around us. That night I
was laid up with a heavy cold. I tossed in bed and was in the marshes in
imagination, listening to the wind and the lap of the tide; and
'Mehalah' naturally rose out of it all, a tragic gloomy tale."[13:A]

Exactly. "Mehalah" _rose_; that is enough! If ideas, plots of stories,
and new groupings of character do not "rise" in _your_ mind, it is
simply because you lack the power to originate them spontaneously. Take
the somewhat fabulous story of Newton and the apple. Many a man before
Sir Isaac had seen an apple fall, but not one of them used that
observation as he did. In the same way there are scores of men who have
the same experiences and live the same kind of life, but it occurs to
only one among their number to gather up these experiences into an
interesting narrative. Why should it "occur" to one and not the others?
Because the one has literary gifts and literary impetus, and the
others--haven't.


Is there a Deeper Question?

Having dealt with that side of the subject, I should like to say that
all novelists have their own methods of obtaining raw material for
stories. By raw material I mean those facts of life which give birth to
narrative ideas. It is said of Thomas Hardy that he never rides in an
omnibus or railway carriage without mentally inventing the history of
every traveller. One has to beware of fables in writing of such men, but
I have no reason to doubt the statement just made. I do not make it with
the intention of advocating anybody to go and do likewise, but as