Imaginative writing; an illustrated course for students

Front matter

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT or o

AN ILLUSTRATED COURSE FOR STUDENTS

ADELE BILDERSEE, A.M.

Preface

The aim of this book is to guide students in learning how to write. During twenty years, more or less, of experience, the teacher who writes the book has learned at least this: that the art of writing cannot be taught; it can only be learned. The part the teacher can play in this process is that of guide and adviser — collaborator, if need be. Accordingly the book has its center, not in the subject matter to be taught, but in the students to be reached. Its plan may sometimes seem not logical because it frankly aspires to be peda¬ gogical. It presents not the results of investigations that have been conducted by the teacher, but problems to be solved by the students together with the teacher. It attempts a statement, not of all the information that can be gathered concerning description and narra¬ tion, but of such material as is immediately helpful to the student in encouraging in him an interest in writing as a means of expressing what he has to communicate, in arousing in him a determination to write as well as he can, and in leading him in his efforts to master the technical difficulties of writing.

To achieve this purpose, teacher and students consult practiced craftsmen of the art. They do not ask these masters to discourse upon their methods; they study the finished handiwork as young painters study the canvases of their masters. They do this in a spirit of inquiry too humble to draw upon themselves the rebuke: “You would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me*from my lowest note to the top of my compass.” They know that there is about the art of writing only a minimum that they can thus learn. That minimum it is their aim to learn; and the aim of a book like this is to help them to learn it by arranging the steps of their approach to the mystery, by assist-

IX

X

PREFACE ing them in their endeavor to gain from their acquaintance with the work of the masters all that is in it for them, and by leading them to apply to their own experience in their own way the methods they have seen the masters apply to their experience in their way.

ADELE BILDERSEE

New York,

Contents

I. The Way to Learn to Write . i

Writing an art attainable by all. Writing an art difficult for all. Description as a field of writing.

II. The Materials of Description. 9

Chapter I The Way To Learn To Write

What is in the mind of the college student as he faces his instructor in a class in English composition? What especially is his attitude toward his task of writing? The teacher’s desk is usually a barrier past which few candid expressions travel from students to faculty. Yet if the teacher has ears to hear he will have caught murmurs. An occasional student may have confided in him over a paper profusely marked with red or blue.

An attainable art. — These confidences often take the form of a despairing “I never could write. There’s no use in my try¬ ing.” Are there really people who never can write? Is it true for any one that there is no use in trying? Here is the testimony of George Herbert Palmer. 1 What Professor Palmer said in encouragement to an audience of workingmen with little leisure for writing must be doubly reassuring to a class of college stu¬ dents:

No human employment is more free and calculable than the winning of language. Undoubtedly there are natural aptitudes for it, as there are for farming, seamanship, or being a good husband. But nowhere is straight work more effective. Persistence, care, dis¬ criminating observation, ingenuity, refusal to lose heart, traits which in every other occupation tend toward excellence, — tend toward it here with special security.

1 Self-Cultivation in English , George Herbert Palmer. Houghton Mifflin.

A difficult art. — Almost always, too, the student who begins by saying, “I never could write,’ 7 will continue, “Look at so-and-so. I’m sure that he dashes off his papers the morning they’re due, and he gets an A every time. And I work for hours on mine — and see the result! ” Again listen to Professor Palmer:

But the very fact that literary endowment is immediately rec¬ ognized and eagerly envied has induced a strange illusion in regard to it. It is supposed to be something mysterious, innate in him who possesses it, and quite out of the reach of him who has it not. The very contrary is the fact.

Lafcadio Hearn, 1 talking to students in Japan, warned them against the “foolish belief that great work, or even worthy work, can be done without pains — without very great pains. . . . Above all things,” he insisted, “do not imagine that any good work can be done without immense pains.”

No man can produce real literature at one writing. I know that there are a great many stories about famous men sitting down to write a wonderful book at one effort, and never even correcting the manuscript afterwards. But I must tell you that the consensus of literary experience declares nearly all these stories to be palpable lies. To produce even a single sentence of good literature requires that the text be written at least three times. But for one who is beginning, three times three were not too much. . . . And you will find that to reproduce the real thought faithfully in words will require a great deal of time. I am quite sure that few of you will try to do work in this way in the beginning; you will try every other way first, and have many disappointments. Only painful experience can assure you of the necessity of doing this. For literature more than for any other art, the all-necessary thing is patience.

In an amusing article in the American Magazine Irvin S. Oobb 2 tells how he “dashes off” his stories:

1 Talks to Writers, Lafcadio Hearn, edited by lohn Erskine. Dodd, Mead.

2 “How to Begin at the Top and Work Down,” Irvin S. Cobb. American Magazine, August, 1925.

THE WAY TO LEARN TO WRITE

You should see me some morning when I’m in the mood for dashing off the stuff. There I sit, dashing it off at the rate of about an inch and a half an hour, and using drops of sweat for punctuations. I’m the same sort of impetuous dasher that the Muir Glacier is. And so is every other writer I know who is getting by with it. They say Thackeray worked three weeks once over a single paragraph, and then threw it away and started in all over again. What ails the rest of us is that we work long hours over those paragraphs, and then haven’t sense enough to throw them away. We leave them in. . . .

... I learned the rudiments of my trade by main strength and awkwardness. Also by serving a twenty-year apprenticeship of training in newspaper shops. Also by continually polishing my work and swearing at it and perspiring over it, and frequently almost expiring over it, in an effort to make the present bit of handicraft better stuff than the one before it was.

If the power to write should ever be “something mysterious, innate in him who possesses it,” it should surely be so with the poet. But Miss Amy Lowell, herself no inconsiderable practi¬ tioner, has said that “the poet must learn his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the cabinet¬ maker.” In her life of Keats 1 she reminds us:

Keats corrected and corrected. All good poets correct. . . . His early drafts are full of alterations done in the very heat of com¬ position. . . .

. . . The first draft of the Eve of St. Agnes , in my collection, is so altered and rewritten as to be almost unreadable. . . .

And why should this not be true of writing? Is it not true of every other art? Is it not true of every form of skill in whatever field it is displayed?

Paderewsky himself is chained to the keyboard. The Morphys of chess keep in form and study new problems, I believe. And the Hoppes of b illi ards and Ty Cobbs of baseball were not altogether born so. 2

1 John Keats , Amy Lowell. Houghton Mifflin.

2 The Genius of Style , W. C. Brownell. Scribner.

Perhaps the most eloquent and convincing words that can be quoted to dispel forever this “strange illusion” that writing is easy for the elect and impossible for all else are to be found in the opening pages of Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay, “A College Magazine.” 1 Although we may not care to follow in detail the method suggested by Stevenson, his remarks are so helpful in determining our attitude toward writing that I am giving them almost in full:

All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or com¬ memorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself. De¬ scription was the principal field of my exercise; for to any one with senses there is always something worth describing, and town and country are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also; often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations from memory.

This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and the right word. . . . And regarded as training, it had one grave defect; for it set me no standard of achievement. So there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret

1 Memories and Portraits , Robert Louis Stevenson. Scribner.

THE WAY TO LEARN TO WRITE labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particu¬ larly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction, and in the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann. I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called The Vanity of Morals: it was to have had a second part, The Vanity of Knowledge; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the names were apt; but the second part was never attempted, and the first part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghost¬ like, from its ashes) no less than three times: first in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a pass¬ ing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne.

. . . Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of the Book of Snobs. So I might go on for ever, through all my abortive novels, and down to my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they were not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas, but have met with resurrections: one, strangely bettered by another hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors; the other, originally known as Semiramis: a Tragedy , I have observed on bookstalls under the alias of Prince Otto. But enough has been said to show by what arts of impersonation, and in what purely ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on paper.

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats’s; it was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out: But this is not the way to be original! It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can be none more original than Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have tried in his time to imitate the other. . . . Nor is there anything here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should long have practised the literary scales; and it is only after years of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow limits of a man’s ability) able to do it.

“That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write.” There is no one who can write without the “straight work,” the “per¬ sistence, care, discriminating observation, ingenuity, refusal to lose heart” of Professor Palmer; none who can write without having practiced the “literary scales” of Stevenson.

Description as a field of writing. — “Description was the principal field of my exercise,” says Stevenson; “for to any one with senses there is always something worth describing, and town and country are but one continuous subject.” But, you may ask, is description worth such painstaking endeavor as we are called upon to give? Is it not a rather unimportant kind of writing, a sort of handmaid serving other forms of writing in essay or story? Does it satisfy any real need of our mind? We can appreciate the necessity for the rigorous training in logical reasoning and clear, cogent expression that we get through a course in expository writing. But why description?

The answer may well come to us again from those who have the authority to speak. Carlyle writes in “The Hero as Poet”:

For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of doing it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could not have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type

THE WAY TO LEARN TO WRITE of it, unless he had, what we may call, sympathised with it — had sympathy in him to bestow on objects. He must have been sincere about it too; sincere and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the likeness of any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay, about all objects.

Training, then, in giving the “likeness of any object” may save us from being “men without worth,” dwelling in “vague out¬ wardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay, about all objects.”

Browning has a word to add to Carlyle’s. He is speaking literally, in his poem “Fra Lippo Lippi,” of the painter with pallette and brush, but what he says is equally true of the painter with words:

. . . You’ve seen the world — The beauty and the wonder and the power,

The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades,

Changes, surprises, — and God made it all!

— For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no,

For this fair town’s face, yonder river’s line,

The mountain round it and the sky above,

Much more the figures of man, woman, child,

These are the frame to? What’s it all about?

To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon,

Wondered at? oh, this last of course! — you say.

But why not do as well as say, — paint these Just as they are, careless what comes of it?

God’s works — paint any one, and count it crime To let a truth slip. Don’t object, “His works Are here already; nature is complete:

Suppose you reproduce her — (which you can’t)

There’s no advantage! you must beat her, then.”

For, don’t you mark? we’re made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

And so they are better, painted —• better to us,

Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;

God uses us to help each other so,

Lending our minds out.

And Shelley, in A Defence of Poetry , says in prose of poetry what Browning has just said in verse of painting. We may apply this too, as we did the other, to prose description:

It purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.

Browning’s painter thinks of the work of his hands as helping others to see. To others he lends his mind. But this mind that truly sees the world gains pleasure also for itself from the seeing. Miss Rebecca West shows us the young girl of her novel, The Judge / looking out upon the Edinburgh street. She tells us:

She had this rich consciousness of her surroundings. ... It kept her happy even now, when from time to time she had to lick up a tear with the point of her tongue, on the thin joy of the twilight.

Really the world was very beautiful.

Indeed, Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton 1 2 points out that it was principally Browning’s “rich consciousness” of his surround¬ ings that brought the poet his great joy in life:

Browning’s optimism is of that ultimate and unshakeable order that is founded upon the absolute sight, and sound, and smell, and handling of things. If a man had gone up to Browning and asked him with all the solemnity of the eccentric, “Do you think life is worth living? ” it is interesting to conjecture what his answer might have been. ... If he . . . had simply answered the question . . . with the real, vital answer that awaited it in his own soul, he would have said as likely as not, “ Crimson toadstools in Hampshire.” Some plain, glowing picture of this sort left on his mind would be his real verdict on what the universe had meant to him.

1 The Judge, Rebecca West. Doran.

2 Robert Browning , G. K. Chesterton. Macmillan.

Chapter II The Materials Of Description

Sight and sound and smell and handling of things. — This “absolute sight, and sound, and smell, and handling of things,” which Mr. Chesterton considers the root of optimism, is the material of descriptive writing. When we want to make our words recreate for others the experiences that have reached us through eye, and ear, and nose, and palate, and finger tips, we write description. When we read words of others “about the shining, colored, sounding, hot, cold, bitter, sweet things which must have touched and smitten their senses ,” 1 we read descrip¬ tion. Description finds its subjects in things — such things as Rupert Brooke 2 loved:

These I have loved:

White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;

Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;

Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;

The benison of hot water; furs to touch;

The good smell of old clothes; and other such —

The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,

Hair’s fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers About dead leaves and last year’s ferns. . . .

Dear names,

And thousand other throng to me! Royal flames;

Sweet water’s dimpling laugh from tap or spring;

1 The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology , Vernon Lee. Dodd, Mead.

2 Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Dodd, Mead.

IO

Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing;

Voices in laughter, too; and body’s pain,

Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;

Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;

And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;

Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;

And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;

And new-peeled sticks; and shiny pools on grass; —

All these have been my loves.

The child’s love of things. — This love of things is the gift of all of us when we are children.

When I was a little boy [writes the author of a paper on “The Flavor of Things” in the Contributors Club of the Atlantic Monthly I used to get a great deal of satisfaction out of stroking a kitten or a puppy, or crushing a lilac leaf-bud for its spring fragrance, or smelling newly turned soil, or tasting the sharp acid of a grape tendril, or feeling the green coolness of the skin of a frog. I could pore for long minutes over a lump of pudding-stone, a bean-seedling, a chrysalis, a knot in a joist in the attic. There was a curious contentment to be found in these things. My pockets were always full of shells and stones, twigs and bugs; my room in the attic, of Indian relics, frag¬ ments of ore, birds’ eggs, oak-galls, dry seeds and seaweeds, bottled spiders, butterflies on corks. All the lessons of the schoolroom seemed of no consequence compared with Things so full of intimacy, of friendliness.

All children love things in this way, because of their appeal to the senses; and I suppose that all older people do, too, though they may not know it.

Dr. Samuel McChord Crothers’s “The Ignominy of Being Grown-Up” 1 2 records another small boy’s delight in things:

For four years my Philosopher has been interrogating Nature, and he has not yet begun to exhaust the subject. Though he has

1 Essays and Essay-Writing , William M. Tanner. Little, Brown.

2 By the Christmas Fire , Samuel McChord Crothers. Houghton Mifflin.

II accumulated a good deal of experience, he is still in his intellectual prime. He has not yet reached the “school age,” which in most persons marks the beginning of the senile decay of the poetic imagina¬ tion.

In my walks and talks with my Philosopher I have often been amazed at my own limitations. ... In comparing notes with my Philosopher I am chagrined at my own color-blindness. He recognizes so many superlative excellences to which I am stupidly oblivious.

In one of our walks we stop at the grocer’s, I having been asked to fill the office of domestic purveyor. It is a case where the office has sought the man, and not the man the office. Lest we forget, every¬ thing has been written down so that a wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein, — baking-powder and coffee and a dozen eggs, and last and least, and under no circumstances to be forgotten, a cake of condensed yeast. These things weigh upon my spirits. The thought of that little yeast-cake shuts out any disinterested view of the store. It is nothing to me but a prosaic collection of the necessaries of life. I am uncheered by any sense of romantic adventure.

Not so with my Philosopher. He is in the rosy dawn of expecta¬ tion. The doors are opened, and he enters into an enchanted country. His eyes grow large as he looks about him. He sees visions of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in all their bewildering, concrete variety. They are in barrels and boxes and paper bundles. They rise toward the sky in shelves that reach at last the height of the gloriously unattainable. He walks through the vales of Arcady, among pickles and cheeses. ' He lifts up his eyes wonderingly to snowy Olympus crowned with Pillsbury’s Best. He discovers a magic fountain, not spurting up as if it were but for a moment, but issuing forth with the mysterious slowness that befits the liquefac¬ tions of the earlier world. “ What is that? ” he asks, and I can hardly frame the prosaic word “Molasses.” “Molasses!” he cries, gurgling with content; “what a pretty word!” I hadn’t thought about it, but it is a pretty word, and it has come straight down from the Greek word for honey. . . .

Cultivating the observation of things. — Some of us, usually poets, like Rupert Brooke, keep these keen senses unspoiled and undimmed as we grow older. Amy Lowell in her life of

Keats quotes from William Sharp’s Life and Letters of Joseph Severn:

Severn was astonished by his companion’s faculty of observation. Nothing seemed to escape him, the song of a bird and the undernote of response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some animal, the changing of the green and brown lights and furtive shadows, the motions of the wind — just how it took certain tall flowers and plants — and the wayfaring of the clouds: even the features and gestures of passing tramps. . . .

Miss West, in a phrase which I omitted when I quoted from The Judge , calls this alertness a “ fortuitous possession, a mere congenital peculiarity.” But if for us it is not a “congenital peculiarity,” we need not despair; just as the ability to write may be cultivated, so this may be cultivated. And as without it, congenital or acquired, it is impossible to write one sentence of description, it must be encouraged and developed by students who are beginning a course in descriptive writing. Lord Riddell, in his interesting book Some Things That Matter , l suggests a method:

Attention is a habit of mind. You can force yourself to pay atten¬ tion and observe, but if you wish to become an effective, consistent observer you must cultivate the observing habit of mind. . . .

Houdin, the great French conjurer, trained himself to observe by special exercises. He would walk past a shop window and, without stopping, notice and memorize as many of the objects displayed in it as he could; then he wrote down a list of them. At first his lists were short, and his walking pace had to be slow. But by assiduous prac¬ tice he was able in one quick glance to notice and afterwards record an incredible number of things, and the faculty of swift observation thus acquired was half the secret of his success as a magician.

. . . Can you accurately write down the colour of the eyes of any dozen people you know? You will find it a difficult task. A written record is a wonderful test of observation. If you want to observe

1 Some Things That Matter , George Allardice Riddell. Doran.

accurately, write down what you see. . . . The pen is a wonderful aid to the eye. . . .

Hearing is as important to observation as sight. Some people have more acute hearing than others. But hearing can be developed in the same way as observation through the eye.

Charles Dickens had this power of observation — had it, Walter Bagehot 1 remarks, in an “ inordinate measure.” He writes:

We have heard, — we do not know whether correctly or incor¬ rectly, — that he can go down a crowded street, and tell you all that is in it, what each shop was, what the grocer’s name was, how many scraps of orange-peel there were on the pavement. His works give you exactly the same idea. The amount of detail which there is in them is something amazing, — to an ordinary writer something incredible. There are single pages containing telling minutice, which other people would have thought enough for a volume. ... He has . . . the peculiar alertness of observation that is observable in those who live by it. He describes London like a special cor¬ respondent for posterity.