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A Creative Approach
to Writing
ROGER H. GARRISON
HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON

New York Chicago San Francisco Toronto
Copyright, 1951, by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.
April 1964
23046-01 1 1
Printed in the United States of America

Imagination is the use that reason
makes of the material world.
RALPH W. EMERSON
Contents
Note to the Instructor in
Note to the Student xiii
1 . Material Is Under Your Nose i
2. You See Actions 22
3. Out of the Corner of Your Eye 43
4. Your Feelings Are Stirred 60
5. You Create People 83
6. You Shape Your Material 1 1 \
7. You Search for Form 131
y8J You Can Suggest Much 155
9. Finding the Right Words 173
10. And Rewriting 188
11. Creative Imagination 196
12. Your Relation to Your Writing 205
READING LIST 211
INDEX 2 1
7
vii
Note to the Instructor
THE BASIC PREMISE of this book is that all writing is in a

real sense creative. No matter what form the writing takes,
the writer must solve certain problems which are the same
whether he is doing a paragraph theme of simple exposi-
tion or a publishable short story. He must know what he is
talking about, be able to think it through, organize it rea-

sonably and persuasively, and present it with clarity, at-
tractiveness, and vigor. Surely, in a fundamental sense, this
is a creative process.
This is another way of saying that good writing begins
with good thinking. Most teachers of writing know this.
They recognize with renewed force each year that nearly
alltheir students' writing problems are basically thinking
problems. The muddled phrasing, mixed-up sentences,

and badly constructed paragraphs of typical freshman
themes, for example, are obvious demonstrations of the
confused thought processes that produced them. Instruc-
tors also observe, with an annual second-semester resur-
gence of hope, that as students master their subject matter

and learn to arrange it in their minds and speak it out on
paper with simple directnessin short, as students learn
how to think their writing develops sharpness, force, and
even vividness. Furthermore, problems of grammar, usage
(and sometimes even spelling) often begin to solve them-
selves.
This book is designed to provide, in an order of in-
creasing difficulty, some typical problems in thinking that

any writer meets. Though the emphasis is on imaginative
or so-called "creative" writing, the instructor will find that
the methods indicated here are flexible enough to be
ix
x Note to the Instructor
adapted to the needs of beginning students as well as to

the needs of those who have advanced well beyond the
freshman composition level. (There is no reason why even
beginning students should not have the pleasure and gen-
uine mental excitement of working gradually toward the
writing of sketches, features, and short stories. And, as
instructors of creative writing classes know, even more
expert students need constantly to be asked questions of

the kind that this book poses in every chapter. The ques-
tions are basic; but the "answers" increase in complexity
with the growing maturity of the student's mind.)
For example, most writers beginners or even profes-
sionalshave a tendency to generalize, to clothe jvague
Teachers of writing (and
editors) annually wear out thousands of red and blue
pencils writing the phrase "be specific" in the margins of

papers. The only way students learn to be specific is by
learning to see and think specifically. Therefore, the first
chapters in this book show in detail how to observe ob-
people, actions, moods, and feelings and how
jects, scenes,
to think about the results of this observation so that the
writing will be sharp, perceptive, and concrete. Other

chapters describe ways to find the "significant details" in
scene and action; theytell how to observe and express the
intangibles of "mood" and "atmosphere"; and they show

how to see and understand people in order to write con-
vincingly about them. All through the book, the approach
How do you examine your material? What do you
is this:
need to it? What elements of the subject can

know about
you put into words? How do you suggest what you do not
tell? Howdo you find the right words?
One of the teaching devices I have used in this book is
the dialogue. The dialogues some of them actual tran
scriptions from writing class sessionsare used to demon-
Note to the Instructor xi
strate how each student can examine and use his own
experience as a source of material for writing. One dia-
logue, for instance, illustrates how a fragment of a random,
apparently meaningless experience can be developed into
a tightly formed short story. Another shows how to handle
the reporting of complicated scenes or happenings.
In every illustration I have tried to consider the prob-
lems of "unity, coherence, and emphasis" by asking the
student to discover the nature of his subject, his own point
of view toward it, and the effect he wishes his writing to
have upon a reader. In the chapters on "Selection" and
"Rewriting" I have worked out problems of editing by
showing the student how to rethink, the materials of his
observation so that the eventual finished writing will be
in natural and effective order.
Neither the methods nor the suggested writing problems
in this book presume any arbitrary way of teaching. Both
the presentation and the sequences of work have been
set forth informally so that teacher and student will be
adapt them to their own needs. However, any

left free to
kind hopefully assumes certain ideals in terms

text of this
of teaching methods and student requirements. For in-
stance, it is implicit in the way the material is treated here
that students should write much and often, being carefully
guided the while by an instructor who can give some

all
personal attention to each student's work. But since stu-

dents have limitations both of time and ambition, and
because instructors have their own limits of time, stamina,
and the sheer population bulk of their classes, the amount
of writing assigned will vary according to the individual
situation.
The thousand-word theme a week is a requirement
common to many writing courses. I have found it more
useful for the student, especially in the early months of
xii Note to the Instructor
a course, to write something for each class assignment.

These papers should be short often not more than one
paragraph and should represent the student's solution of
a single problem. (Of course, as the problems become more
complicated, the papers will be longer and the time given
to write them should be extended.) The frequent short
papers place no more burden of correction on the instruc-

tor than the longer weekly efforts. And at the same time
the variety of problems given to the student stimulates his
interest and challenges him to develop his skill. Obviously,
thinking is only learned while thinking; and imagination

is
developed by repeated attempts to shape experience.
This book assumes, too, that the writing class will gen-
erally be conducted by discussion and by classroom analy-
sis of student writing.
(This method is possible even with
large classes.) The discussion method admittedly asks much
of the instructor in terms of energy output and concen-
tration. But one of the conditions of true learning is that
a studeiujnust be allowed^ to go wrong and then be led, v
without pressiire, to recognize his errors. Open, informal

class discussion is an effective and vivid way to accomplish
this.
However, no text should presume to do an instructor's
teaching for him. A

textbook, regardless of its merit, is a
useful teaching tool only when it supports and stimulates
the learning process in a way that is
congenial both to
those who teach and those who are taught. It is my hope
that this text will help to make the process of learning to
write a challenging and creative experience.
R. G.
Briarcliff Junior College
Briarcliff Manor, N. Y.
November i, 1950
Mote to the Student
Writers kid themselves about themselves and other

people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing
is just work there's no secret. If you dictate or use a
pen or type or write with your toes it is still just
work.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
THIS BOOK is about some of the basic

problems of writing.
Itspurpose is to discuss some useful ways of solving these
problems. It is written for beginning students who seri-
ously want to learn to write well; and it may help advanced
students who need reminders of those fundamental proc-
esses of creative thinking which underly all good writing.
Though the book is about "creative writing," I think
that the methods and approach I have described here are

sound and productive for anyone who is learning to write.
All writing is creative, anywayyou need to be something
of an artist to transfer ideas, feelings, sights and sounds
into words, whether you are writing a letter or a novel.
Unless you understand that writing is a natural, creative
process and not a complicated thing of structural rules,
special techniques, and maxims on style, you will prob-
ably do anything you can to avoid doing it. But once you
realize that there are some reasonably direct routes from
your experience to the words you use to express it, you

will probably enjoy making a piece of writing. You might
even enjoy it enough to become fairly skillful.
Obviously, you don't learn how to write by reading
about it in a book. But you can learn much by facing and
xiii
xiv Note to the Student
solving the problems of writing one at a time. By being

helped to dissect your own ideas and moods and observa-
tions you may learn to pin them down to concreteness and
express them vividly. Learning how to write like learning
anything else grows mainly from meeting and overcom-
ing the varied difficulties involved in the process. There
are some clear problems in thinking which all writers face;
and there are some basic methods of approach to these
problems which are suggestive and possibly valuable for
you to try.
A method is not a formula. (Formulas are mummified
methods; they tell you exactly what elements in what pro-
portion and what sequence will produce another thing.)
A method is an orderly way of discovering the means to
produce something. Anyone who creates will find, as he
works with his material, that he develops methods in his
approach to creative problems. Though the creative proc-
ess is uniquely personal, there are certain essential ques-
tionsespecially for the writer that can and must be

asked, either by a teacher or by an editor, and usually by
both.
So, this book has been written as a teaching companion.
It is more a series of informal discussions than a textbook.
As in any discussions, there are many asides, personal opin-
ions and digressions; it
might be profitable for you to
disagree with many of them. You will find, too, that this
book asks you to cooperate with it. (You should approach
any book as a collaborator and not
as a passive sponge
asking to be up.) have asked

filled many questions
I
and provided few answers. The truth is, I cannot answer
the questions eitherthat is up to you. Where creative
problems are concerned, there are no ready-made answers.

Neither are there easy-to-apply rules for developing cre-
ative skill. When you have a rule for something, you have
Note to the Student xv
an answer. There is nothing more irrelevant than the
answer to a question that is never asked.
However, before we begin to explore creative problems,
itmight be well to state some plain truths about writing.
Every experienced writer knows these truths. Most begin-
ners have yet to learn them. Briefly, these are:
1. "Inspiration" is rarely the source of fine writing.
2. Writing is neither a knack nor a technique.
3. "Style" cannot be cultivated as a separate thing.
4. Creative writing is not the use of a special literary
vocabulary.
First, about "inspiration." You may hear, especially from
those who don't know how to write, that they need to
"wait until they're inspired." That's wishful thinking. If
writers waited for inspiration before they began to write,
there would be little literature created. I don't deny that
what is called inspiration does occasionally move people
to write; but for the serious writer, the emotional urgency
of inspiration isa fleeting and untrustworthy source of
production. A piece of writing may begin with an "in-
spired" idea, but the shaping of the idea into effective
reading matter is a process whose major ingredient is
simply hard work.
Joyce Gary, the English novelist, has said it as succinctly
as anyone. "Inspiration," he said, "is another name for
knowing your job and getting down to it."
The Summing Up* W. Somerset Maugham said es-

In
sentially the same thing. "It is evident that no professional
writer can afford only to write when he feels like it. If he
waits until he is in the mood, till he has the inspiration
as he says, he waits indefinitely and ends by producing

little or nothing. The professional writer creates the mood.
* W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, Doubleday and Co.,
Inc., N. Y., p. 181. Used by permission.
xvi Note to the Student
He has his inspiration too, but he controls and subdues it
to his bidding. . . ."

Writer after writer has pointed out that so-called imag-
inative inspiration is developed only by long exercise in
effort; imagination is
strengthened and made supple by
steady wrestling with the problems of shaping experience
into appealing or dramatic pieces of writing. Stephen
Vincent Ben6t, one of the finest imaginative writers of our
time, once illuminated this truth with the wry remark:
"I've spent most of my life at a desk."
Obviously, then, creative writing is not a knack or a

natural gift that belongs to a few lucky people. There is
no "knack" to any art. Most writers, especially the good
ones,hammer out their ideas on the forge of persistence,
measuring what they have written against severe and al-
most ruthless personal standards of excellence. Generally,
the better a writer is, the harder he works at writing.
Sheridan's famous dictum: "Easy writing is curst hard
reading," is no clich. Good writing is nearly always re-
writingand this stands as a writer's truism.
This is another way of saying that creative writing is

not merely a technique. You don't just develop a tech-
nique and then proceed to write successfully. Ultimately
you train the whole working of your mind. This idea
contradicts a common belief that writing can be learned
by analyzing and imitating the "techniques" of other writ-

ers.There is no doubt that the careful reading of fine
books will nourish your cultural background and widen
your general understanding of life. Analysis of other writ-
ers will healthfully stretch your mind and develop your
aesthetic sense. Itis
likely to improve your taste and train
your reasoning powers. But it won't teach you how to
write. It will show you how others have written.
You can never learn to write "like so-and-so." You can
Note to the Student xvli
only learn to express yourself. No matter how many models

you study or how familiar you may be with the techniques
of other authors, you write, finally, in your own way.
When you come to write, you are faced with the blank
paper, with whatever ideas are in your own head, and
with your own abilities to say what you are thinking.
You will develop your own techniques. You have to write
about any subject on its own terms and through the filter
of your own personality. You may and you probably will-
end up by using forms or structures or devices that have
been used by generations of writers. But if you approach
your writing problems only in terms of the devices, you
will be going at the job backwards. It's no use worrying
about design unless you know what you're going to build.
It is what you see and feel and think about your subject
that will dictate how you are to write, what form you will
use, or what devices will best do the job of telling.
Technique is often confused with "style." They are not

the same.Technique is method and procedure. It has to
do with the procession of details that results in finished
work. What you learn when you study writing techniques
is that words can be pushed around. Like mosaic pieces
they can be set in many patterns that will look and sound
like something. But making patterns even "correct" ones
is not style. It is not even good writing. Unless you have
something to say, technique is as useless to you as an empty

canteen in a desert. Style comes from ways of thinking
more than from ways of saying. You achieve your own style
when you learn to say, in your own fashion, what you have
to say.
This implies, then, that creative writing is not a special
vocabulary of literary words used in a special manner.
Consider, for instance, how you build up a working vocab-
ulary. You may do it, in part, through wide reading. This
xviii Note to the Student
method is
apt to produce an overbalance of "bookish"
words which come pedantically to the pen because they
have been learned out of a literary context. (This is not
to belittle bookish words; they are useful for many occa-
sions. But it is to say that a vocabulary built largely from
reading will likely "smell of the lamp" and have faint

traces of library mold decaying betwixt the phrases.) Or,
you may develop a vocabulary from varied experience;

the vocabularies of each vocation, for instance, have their
own flavor and cadence.
This second kind of vocabulary should be largely the
creative writer's; his words cannot be too bookish they
must come out of life direct, not life imprisoned between
bookboards. His words should grow from the direct know-
ing of things he has seen and touched or felt or thought
about deeply. He doesn't need to experience everything
himself but he must understand sharply the experience
he writes about. Will he write of pain and sorrow? What
has he said or heard said in pain and sorrow? Will he
write of harvests and farmhands and the busy traffic of
barnyards? What manure
has he had on his shoes? Has he
seen and heard the cow bellow and heave and drop a calf?
Does he know the dry dust-tickle of hay chaff in the throat
and the grainy, sweating gloom of a hayloft in July? If he
does, then he can write of these things; he has worked with
them or watched other people work with them. Because
he knows them he will find words honest words which
feel at home with the places and happenings. Then he will
have something to say. And only then will he begin to
have a style.
Creative writing, therefore, is first creative thinking.
What is the nature of creative thinking? How does it
pro-
ceed? How do you think creatively about experience?
What makes one account of an experience prosaic and dull
Note to the Student xix
and another account vivid and persuasive? If we can an-

swer questions like these -even partially we may begin
to get at the nature of creativeness in writing.
The processes of creative thinking are subtle, but they
are not wholly mysterious. If you have written a poem it
is possible for you to analyze (within limits) how the poem
was born and how it grew. Or, you can have a good notion
of the way a short story developed from a sight or a sound
or a happening. The more you can become aware of the
creative process in yourself, even if in the beginning it is
crude and limited, the better you will be able to train
yourself to write creatively.
This book is based upon the conviction that up to a
point creative writers are made, not born. (It is true that
some people seem have writing ability,
instinctively to
but even an extraordinary natural aptitude needs much
discipline and training.) There are ways to train yourself
to see and express things creatively. These ways are diffi-
cult and energy consuming, but I think they are valid and
productive. My premise is this: Creative writing is writing
produced by a creative mind. This book suggests methods

by which, perhaps, you can develop the kind of creative
thinking that produces fine writing.
A CREATIVE APPROACH TO WRITING
1 .JMaterial Is Under
Tour Nose
Originality is
simply a pair of fresh eyes.
T. W. HlGGINSON
J. HEmaterials for creative writing are not hard to find.

They are right under your nose. To find the stuff of writ-
ing you don't have to be a bohemian and travel to exotic
lands, or live through all the emotions of high tragedy,
low comedy, and middle-level boredom. All around you
every day are things that will make fine pieces of writing,
if only you understand what riches are in them for creative
use. Wherever there are people living together, working,

failing, succeeding, creating, or dreaming dreams; wher-
ever there is a river or a tree or a long, green meadow;
wherever you feel and see and understand with a quick-
ened perception some portion of the world around you,
there is the stuff to write about.
It isa great irony, if you consider the creative possibili-
ties locked in obvious things, that aspiring writers usually
see the pasture greener over some other fence. The truly
interesting things, they say, are in the experience they are
going to have tomorrow. That great story or poem will

finally come if only the setting could be more ideal. ''In-
spiration/' they affirm, needs the goad of change and new
excitement. If you are one of those who is always just
about to write something good; if the great subject is for-

2 Material Is Under Your Nose
ever trembling on the tip of your pen; if today goes by,
and tomorrow, and the next day, and you haven't begun
to write; then you are fooling yourself. You don't really
want to write. You
just think you want to write. But if you
are serious about writing creatively, begin with the mate-
rials at hand.
Creative writing which is to say, creative thinking
begins with the obvious. You must learn to take a new
look at obvious things, see taken-for-granted sights and
people with an unprejudiced eye, find the excitement of
new relationships in the ordinary and the day-to-day. That
iswhere most people live: jn the mundane and the obvi-
ous. That is where most people's aspirations are: in the
usual, the expected and the unspectacular. If you cannot
write (that is, think) convincingly about the places you
are most familiar with, the people you see every day, and
the situations which occur in the mere living of each
twenty-four hours, how do you expect to write of the pro-

found or dramatically tangled skeins of feelings and actions
that go to make drama or stories or poetry?
JlieJiardesfe-fc>ks there is.
The philosopher, A. N. Whitehead, once said: "It requires

a very unusual mind to undertake an analysis of the obvi-
ous." The creative writer is required to have this unusual
mind. That is
why there are so few
good writers. If you
can't see, touch, smell, hear, and understand the people
you write about, your characters will be wooden figures,
jumping like marionettes to the strings of your plot.
Unless you can see the little, vivid details in the places
you describe, your settings will be as unreal as stage scen-
ery looks. Unless, from their acts and words, you can sense
with deep perception the feelings that move people, the
beauty that stirs them, the hopes that urge them, your
writing about men and women will be sterile and cold.
Material Is Under Your Nose 3
Seeing things freshly and clearly is an act of mind and

will. It is notjgsy to look with candid honesty at ordinary
things or people. We
are not used to it because we ha-
bitually observe the world through the colored glasses of
our own prejudices or wishes. Most of us don't see very
much, anyway. We go through each day like people in
dark tunnels_armed only with flashlights. We get through
the tunnels fairly efficiently. But we've only seen the nar-
row paths illumined by our lights. The walls of the tunnels
around us we see only as massesgeneralized sights on the
edges of our attention. Except for objects and situations
that demand our functional attention, we see the rest of
life as a kind of panorama, a large pattern, with few
dej
tails, vaguely understandable in the mass and almost un-
bearably complicated if we look closely. This is self-
protection. If we were sensitive to each detail in everything

around us, we would soon lose our sanity in the inrrpHihlp
jumble of daily disorder. There is too much to see-
whizzing, flickering, jerking, creeping, sliding, standing,
looming past and around and over us. And to protect our-
selves, we see it all as great patterns and big pictures and
over-all views.
We could call these patterns generalizations. For what

is a generalization but the sum of many details? gen- A
eralization is a kind of inclusive understanding or so we
think. We feel somehow that if we can go through an
experience and generalize, we automatically have control

of it. That is one reason why we are so facile in describing
people. People are difficult, stubbornly complex, hard for

us to understand thoroughly. But we cope with people by
pigeonholing them in convenient generalizations such as
1
"clever/ talker," and the like. As any good

"dumb," "good
propagandist knows, a complicated thing appears more
simple with a label.
Breaking through generalizations to the details of con-

crete factsbehind them is hard work that goes against the
flow of habit. Yet the creative writer must minimize gen-
eralizations. He
suspects, as Oliver Wendell Holmes
shrewdly said, that "the rhjgj fnri n* 3n ^my tn h* to
frame general propositions and no general^jyroposition
is worth a damn." The creative writer
sharpens his eyes,
mind, and urges his will to probe underneath the
stirs his
general aspects of experience for the meaningful details

beneath. He looks under the labels, the masks, and the
postures with which people habitually clothe themselves

and others. He has to school himself to see steadily and
whole; to see with a kind of neryeênd in tuition^ which
^discovers revealing and usually overlooked meaning in the
obvious. He lets his mind prowl restlessly around the ob-
vious and the ordinary.
He learns to look at the world the way a child does. A
child hasn't the adult's reluctance to wonder, to admire,
to stare without evasion. The child looks at something to
learn about it, to understand it. He feels it, touches it,
talks about it, stares at it. He doesn't hesitate to ask a
questiona hundred questions even though the questions

may sound silly and obvious. Give a child a stone and he
will learn about the earth, the past, the cataclysms of space,
the erosion of ten thousand years, and the endless, silent
fall of primordial forests. The stone may be obvious. But
what the child wants to know about the stone is not obvi-
ous; it is creative, in the best sense of the word. Or let the
child face an idea, a simple taken-for-granted idea such
as eating with a fork. He won't refuse the idea because it
is obvious. He will ask questions until he understands that
people used to eat with their fingers (and still do in many
parts of the world), that forks used to have two tines, and
that sometimes they have three and four tines, because
different forks havebeen designed for different uses, be-
cause one function dictates a different form than another
function might. In fifteen minutes the child will have
learned about far more than a fork. A
child is not afraid
to ask obvious questions. Nor is he afraid to be naive and
say the direct and obvious. Witness the little boy who said
of a perfumed dinner guest: "She stinks like Daddy's old
shirt." And the same
little boy whose stomach was upset:
"I had up-chuck because my throat was smelly." These

to
statements may not be delicately polite, but they are vig-
orous and vivid and accurate, because the child has no
foolish block of prejudices between his perceptions and
his speech. Because they aren't "sophisticated," children
also speak in images of vividness or great beauty. I once
heard a child, who was looking solemnly across a wind-
beyond say, "Gee, those mountains
flecked lake to the hills
hold up the sky on their back."
This is by way of illustrating that as we grow up we
tend to go through life suppressing our honest reactions
and averting our eyes. Yet without the child's curiosity
and frank openness of vision we cannot ever look cre-
atively at the obvious world around us. We are used to
riding in closed cars (with closed minds) through green-
smelling country sides or busyworking cities, seeing
vaguely that outside the windows are "lovely" or "inter-
esting" views. We
take in great gobs of sights and sounds
in a habit pattern, and we react conventionally to the
whole mass, not seeing any of the significant obvious de-
tails. matter-of-fact people who don't see
Most of us are
anything wonderful about ordinary things unless they are
ballyhooed as sensational or have chromium trimmings.
We are used to superlatives of language, color, and size.
We generalize almost automatically, with loose, flabby,
all-purpose words and phrases "An awe-inspiring view"
. . "In view of the evidence it is a not unjustifiable as-

.
sumption that" "an epoch-making discovery"

. . . . . .
"this historic occasion" "age-old conflict between au-

. . .
thority and freedom."

If you are going to write creatively, you have to shun
this diffuse and sloppy way of observing and generalizing.
The only material you have to write about is "life" and
life has few generalizations. It has lazy husbands, nagging
wives, people who borrow money, and work assignments

due yesterday that haven't been done today. It has unex-
pected laughter, a letter from your sweetheart, elusive
beauties, the shy splendors of lovingkindness and day-
dreams that sometimes come true.
These are the things to write about. They are under
your nose.
Your first job is to take the blinders off your eyes and
look at some obvious, under-your-noses things clearly.
Then see how intelligently you can talk about those things
(for in writing is just perceptive talk, on
many ways good
paper). After you learn to think and talk intelligently
about the obvious, then you can begin writing creatively
about it.
We'll begin with something easy. Let's look at objects

so obvious that you have taken them for granted almost
all your lives, things that you use so automatically that
you rarely think of them consciously for themselves. Take

a good look atjoinijowj^hands. (Before you dismiss this
problem as too elementary, I suggest that you try itall

the way through.)
What do you know about your hands? Five fingers. One
a thumb. Four others of varying finger has a
sizes. Each
nail at the end. The fingers are attached to a roughly
rectangular skin-bone-muscle mass called a palm. Fingers

palm by joints called knuckles. Above the

are attached to
knuckles each finger has two joints except the thumb
which has only one joint. Under the nails at the end of
each finger is a fatty pad. Fingers are thicker at the middle
joints than at the end joints.
What else? Is there anything else? Of course there is.
You have just begun to examine your hands.
What are hands primarily for? To touch with? (But you
can touch with your feet, your shoulders, your back, your
knees.) Are hands just hung at the ends of our arms be-
cause it seems to be a good idea? Naturally, not. What is
the major function of a hand?

To grasp with. Except for a limited ability of the toes
to grasp, the hands are our grasping instruments. How are
they constructed to grasp? The fingers can curl inward

toward the palm; they move easily only in this direction.
The hand can grasp massively that is, crudely, taking an
object in the whole fist. Or it can grasp with great delicacy
because the thumb opposes every other finger (you can
touch the tip of any other finger with the tip of the thumb.
No other finger can do this). So, between thumb and
fingers, it is possible to grasp something delicately, with
precision.
What fingersdo you use the most?
Thumb and forefinger. Therefore, these two fingers are
slightly more flexible and stronger than, say, the fourth
or ring finger, which is awkward and relatively weak be-
it is not much used for
cause pinching or precise grasping.
And so on. You could ask dozens more questions of your
hands. And even though you may have been able to an-
swer the questions above before I answered them for you,
you should be much more conscious of your hands than
you were ten minutes ago. That's just the point. You have
been taking a good look at something obvious. Now you
know a lot about your hands that you may have known
before but you couldn't have said you knew it unless you
asked all these questions to refocus your attention. Fur-
thermore, as you explored your hands, there must have

grown in your mind a slow bud of admiration for them as
efficient instruments, superbly adapted to their job. That,
too, is in point. You may have begun to find that obvious
things can be exciting.

(The real value in an exercise like this lies inwhat it
makes your mind do: it forces you away from generalized
vision and toward explicit, detailed vision. It refocuses
your attention, which is precisely what any creative art

aims to do.)
Now, just for the practice, sit down at your desk, take
out a pencil and a sheet of paper, and describe one of your
hands as literally as you can. Try to describe it exactly for
what you see it to be, not for what you think it is or in
terms of the feelings you may have about it. You will find
yourself forced to ask questions of the hand so that you
can think out plainly and logically what you are going
to say. Before you write, your thinking will have to be
exact, complete and orderly. You have to answer, first, the
question, "What is a hand?" Then you will have to tell
where the hand is located (in relation to what else?), what
the whole hand looks like, what the parts look like, where
they are in relation to the other parts, and, finally, how
the parts interact to perform the whole hand's function.
You will discover that this is a difficult exercise. Good.
The it is, the better; you will realize, then, how
harder
hard itto be thoroughly specificand not general
is
about anything obvious. You will also discover that you

are learning a technique for examining fully, efficiently,
and quickly the material facts of life that are right under
your nose.
To help you to be a little more at home with this tech-
nique, here is another exercise in accurate observation:
Imagine that sitting opposite you is a person who knows
nothing whatever about our modern civilization a trans-
planted Cro-Magnon man, in effect. You are to assume
that this man does know the English language. If you can
go along with this impossible paradox, you will realize
that no object will mean much to your primitive listenei
unless you tell him all about it. Now, suppose you try to
describe to him a common, undecorated, plain-shaped
water Here is one of our most common articles of
glass.
use. How would you go about describing it to someone
who hadn't the faintest idea what it was unless you told
him?
Get a plain water glass and put it in front of you. Ask
questions of the glass.
What is it for? What is its function?
it How
per- does
form that function? Why is
round-shaped itinstead of
square-shaped? Exactly what "shape'* is it? Is this the best
shape for its function? is it made of glass? Could it

Why
be made of some other material? Why is
glass a better
material than, say,
copper?
The trick ask7why)ot every relevant part of the
is to
article. When you ask why of something persistently
enough, you get quickly to essentials. You have to be

direct and specific. You can't drag in details that have
nothing to do with the objectbecause as soon as you ask

"why" of those irrelevant details, they are eliminated.
Now sit down and write a descriptiopuof the waterglass
in a hundred words or less. You
will find yourself writing
short sentences. You will discover that every word has to
be exact. You won't be able to weasel with vague terms
or bluff with generalities, because each word you use-
especially nouns and adjectives in this exercise stands for

a fact. The facts are not alterable, and you need to find
the precise words to match them. For example, you cannot
say, vaguely, that the water glass is "round." It

15 round,
in a way, but so is a ball or a wheel or an egg round after

a fashion.
But if you say that the glass is cylindrical, then you are
getting closer. If it is a slightly tapered cylinder, then your
limiting adjectives to the noun cylinder have to be exact.
In what direction does it taper? And so on.
Here is a sample, partly worked out, of the type of
description these problems require. Is this description ac-
curate? Complete? In the most logical sequence? Are the
words exact in their meaning? If you think not, figure out
why and remedy the deficiencies yourself. If you are con-

vinced that the description needs nothing done to it, why
do you think so? (Remember that the object of these exer-
cises is not graceful wording but exact and literal thinking
and statement.)
The object described here is an ordinary, undecorated
teaspoon.
A teaspoon is a utensil forscooping up and carrying small amounts

of something. It has two joined parts: a flat, narrow, tapered
handle, by which it is held, and a shallow, oval bowl to dip and
carry liquid, food, or other materials. The handle is about four

inches long. It arches slightly upward at the wide end. It curves
sharply downward at the narrow end. The shape of the handle
allows it to fit easily in the hand when it is correctly held resting
across the third finger and grasped between the thumb and first
joint of the forefinger of the right hand. When the bowl is level,
the handle points upward at a shallow angle. A spoon is usually
made of metal or some other hard-wearing, unbreakable material.
Though this procedure may seem too precise and ana-

lytical to have much connection with creative writing, it
Material Is Under Your Nose 1 1
isan excellent reminder for you that words are not vague
symbols to be pushed around whimsically. Words stand
for thingsand happenings. English is a great language
because marvelously rich in words which can utter
it is
almost any shade of meaning and nearly all shapes and

textures of things.
You will realize, when you have finished describing
your hand and the water and some of the other ob-
glass
jects listed in the exercises at the end of this chapter, that

you have been working with facts solid, verifiable fa&,
All writing is based upon facts. Competent writing is the
accurate and logical expression of facts. Creative writing
is the sensitive and
imaginative use of facts. I have printed
these sentences in italics because they are the most im-
portant sentences in this book.
There are, to be sure, many different kinds of facts-
There are sturdy, prosaic, unshakable facts like 2 plus z
equals 4, two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen
equal water, and day is day and night is night. There are
also more intangible facts which don't exist in the same
way that rocks and grass and water do that is, you can't
always prove them by weighing or measuring or analyzing
them. These are philosophical ideas or religious concepts,
for instance. You can't pin them down with fact nouns
or unqualified verbs. You often have to use the long,
Latin-root words which have been coined especially for
is possible for you to talk in a general
these intangibles. It
way about wisdom by using such words as understanding,

perception, humility, humor, tolerance, forbearance,
knowledge, information, judgment, proportion, and the
like. Each of these words has an accepted collection of
related meanings; and among people who are accustomed
to this vocabulary, you can make yourself well understood
-and evn gain the reputation of being profound.
But as a creative writer you will find yourself bound

almost entirely to facts which have direct connections with
sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste. If you want to talk
about wisdom as a philosopher or an academician, you
may use the long words with propriety and effect. But it
you want to talk about wisdom as a creative writer, you
have to showlet me
repeat the word show wisdom in
action. When
you show something in action, you do it
in terms of people or things. In short, you do it in terms
of tangible facts that you can see, smell, taste, hear, and
feel. Read, for example, this familiar story of Solomon
and the two mothers in the Bible (I Kings, 3:16-28).
Then came two women, that were harlots, unto the king, and
ftood before him. And the one woman said, O my lord, and this I
woman dwell in one house; and I was delivered of a child with her
in the house. And it came to pass the third day after that was I
delivered, that this woman was delivered also: and we were to-
gether; there was no stranger with us in the house, save we two
in the house.And this woman's child died in the night; because
she overlaid it. And she arose at midnight, and took my son from
beside me, while thine handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom,
and laid her dead child in my bosom. And when rose in the I
morning to give my child suck, behold, it was dead: but when I
had considered it in the morning, behold, it was not my son,

which I did bear. And the other woman said, Nay, but the living
is my son, and the deadthy son. Thus they spake before the
is
king. Then said the king, The one saith, This is my son that liveth,
and thy son is the dead: and the other saith, Nay, but thy son is
the dead, and my son is the living. And the king said, Bring me
a sword. And they brought a sword before the king. And the king
said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and
half to the other. Then spake the woman whose the living child
was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she
said, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it.
But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it.
Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and
in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof. And all Israel heard
of the judgment which the king had judged; and they feared the
king: for they saw that the wisdom of God was in him to do
judgment.
The man who wrote this story was a creative writer. He

wanted to talk about wisdom, so he showed a man making
a wise decision and, by showing it, made the impression
of wisdom so vivid that almost any school child can cite
Solomon's judgment.
You may reasonably ask here, How about fantasy or
imaginative conceptions? What do you do with facts when
you meet something like Mercutio's Queen Mab speech,
or a creature like Ariel, or a book like Alice in Wonder-
land?
Think about Alice, for a moment. The story is full of
tangible facts pinned down by thing-words and ordinary

unfantastic language. Alice falls down a well. She sees a
rabbit dressed up in trousers and waistcoat. She lands at
the bottom of the well. She eats a little cake. She grows
and shrinks. She sees a tiny door and opens it with a
golden key. Wells, rabbits, doors, cakes, waistcoat, keys,
growing and shrinking, and all the rest of the things in
Wonderland do exist. But they exist normally in a different
context and order from Wonderland. As far as facts are
concerned, Alice in Wonderland is just as factual as a
reporter's story of a train wreck. The difference between
the two pieces of writing is not that the train wreck story
deals with actual happenings and that Alice does not. The
difference is in the probability of the two accounts. (I'll
have more to say about "probability" in a later chapter.)
Lewis Carroll, who had an extremely tidy and well-ordered
mind, simply took delightful liberties with the natural
wder of facts and, by doing so, created fantasy.
This is what I mean, in part, when I say that creative

writing is the sensitive and imaginative use of facts. Lewis
Carroll's fantasy is shrewdly scrambled-up reality. He
knew his facts well enough to make actuality into im-
probabilityand still make it sound plausible. This takes
a high order of imaginative skill. You will rediscover, if
you take the time to read Alice again, how sharply Mr.
Carroll's ear must have been tuned to the cadence of real
speech in other words) because his fantasy people

(facts,
sound reasonable, even if they don't make much sense.
Or, look for his short descriptive passages and phrases,
telling what Alice wore, what a flower looked like, how
Alice felt at this time or that. The descriptions are so obvi-
ously based upon penetrating observation of the facts of

real life that I need not stress the
point further.
The ways that the simple facts of life are transformed
by the creative mind are matters for discussion in later
chapters. But facts come first. That is why I am suggesting
that you examine such obvious things as hands and water
glasses, so that you will be able both to see and talk about
the facts of reality simply and reasonably on paper. This
is more than most
people can do, by the way. When you
have learned to write both simply and reasonably, you may
congratulate yourself on a fairly rare accomplishment.
To begin training in creative thinking with simple

observation and analysis is to root creative writing soundly
in knowledge. The whole purpose of learning how to look
at the obvious is to
develop the skill to perceive in what-
ever you look at its essential shape, meaning, and rela-
tionship to other things. You are looking at objects to

know them. Creativeness begins with knowing. You don't
create out of nothing, nor do you create from vague
knowledge. As far as I know, good writing has never
sprung from ignorance. If you can't look at the simple

materials under your nose and learn from them, I doubt
if you can understand the comedies and tragedies of
human life enough to write creatively about them.
Apply this simple observation-analysis, for example, to

a scene you might want to describe in a story or a sketch.
Suppose you need to describe a deserted city street on a

bitter winter night. There's the street in front of you, an
unordered mass of facts which you see, smell, feel, hear/
and have feelings about. You can't just say, "It's dark and
cold." Of course it's dark and cold. But what kind of cold?
What kind of dark? What is there about the particular
cold-dark atmosphere that made you want to write about
it
anyhow? Is there some relationship between the empty,
echoing street and the kind of feeling you want to express?
What is the relationship? How does it show that is, what
details symbolize it, make it stand out so that a reader can
feel and see its physical reality? How, without listing every
detail that strikes your senses, are
to convey
you going
most vividly your impression of the street?
In short, what do you know about this scene? Do you
know enough about it to select from its outward aspects
the penetrating details that will show it to your reader?
As soon as you begin to ask questions such as these of your
material, you will quickly find yourself looking for as
many facts as the scene or action will yield to your inquir-

ing mind. You'll see things as you saw your hand or the
water glass. You will, probably, see significant details
which are usually overlooked by the casual observer; and
these details willexpand the scene, illumine it, vivify it.
Here an often-quoted passage from John Steinbeck's
is
The Grapes of Wrath which illustrates how effectively

the trained creative observer makes use of ordinary, obvi-
ous facts.
i6 Material Is Under Your Nose
Along 66 . . .*
Along 66 the hamburger stands Al & Susy's Place Carl's
lunch Joe & Minnie Will's Board-and-bat shacks. Two

Eats.
gasoline pumps in front, a screen door, a long bar, stools, and a

foot rail. Near the door three slot machines, showing through glass
the wealth in nickels three bars will bring. And beside them, the
nickel phonograph with records piled up like pies, ready to swing
out to the turntable and play dance music, "Ti-pi-ti-pi-tin," "Thanks
for the Memory," Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman. At one end of
the counter a covered case; candy cough drops, caffeine sulphate
called Sleepless, Mo-Doze; candy, cigarettes, razor blades, aspirin,
Bromo-Seltzer, Alka-Seltzer. The walls decorated with posters,
bathing blondes with big breasts and slender hips and
girls,
waxen faces, in white bathing suits, and holding a bottle of Coca-
Cola and smiling see what you get with a Coca-Cola. Long bar,
and salts, peppers, mustard pots, and paper napkins. Beer taps
behind the counter, and in back the coffee urns, shiny and steam-
ing, with glass gauges showing the coffee level. And pies in wire
cages and oranges in pyramids of four. And little piles of Post
Toasties, corn flakes, stacked up in designs.

The signs on cards, picked out with shining mica: Pies like
Mother Used to Make. Credit Makes Enemies, Let's Be Friends.
Ladies May Smoke But Be Careful Where You Lay Your Buns. Eat
Here and Keep Your Wife for a Pet. I1TYWYBAD?
Down at one end the cooking plates, pots of stew, potatoes,
pot roast, roast beef, gray roast pork waiting to be sliced.
Minnie or Susy or Mae, middle-aging behind the counter, hair
curled and rouge and powder on a sweating face. Taking orders
in a soft low voice, calling them to the cook with a screech like a
peacock. Mopping the counter with circular strokes, polishing the
big shining coffee urns. The cook is Joe or Carl or Al, hot in a
white coat and apron, beady sweat on white forehead, below the
* From The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Copyright 1939 by

John Steinbeck. Reprinted by permission of The Viking Press, Inc.,
N. Y.
white cook's cap; moody, rarely speaking, looking up for a mo-
ment at each new entry. Wiping the griddle, slapping down the
hamburger. He repeats Mae's orders gently, scrapes the griddle,
wipes it down with burlap. Moody and silent.
Mae the contact, smiling, irritated, near to outbreak; smiling

is
while her eyes look on past unless for truck drivers. There's the
backbone of the joint. Where the trucks stop, that's where the
customers come. Can't fool truck drivers, they know. They bring
the custom. They know. Give 'em a stale cup a coffee an* they're
off the joint. Treat'em right an* they come back. Mae really
smiles with her might at truck drivers. She bridles a little, fixes
all
her back hair so that her breasts will lift with her raised arms,
passes the time of day and indicates great things, great times,
great jokes. Al never speaks. He is no contact. Sometimes he
smiles a little at a joke, but he never laughs. Sometimes he looks
up at the vivaciousness in Mae's voice, and then he scrapes the

griddle with a spatula, scrapes the grease into an iron trough
around the plate. He presses down a hissing hamburger with his
spatula. He lays the split buns on the plate to toast and heat. He
gathers up stray onions from the plate and heaps them on the
meat and presses them in with the spatula. He puts half the bun
on top of the meat, paints the other half with melted butter, with
thin pickle relish. Holding the bun on the meat, he slips the
spatula under the thin pad of meat, flips it over, lays the buttered
half on top, and drops the hamburger on a small plate. Quarter
of a dill pickle, two black olives beside the sandwich. Al skims
the plate down the counter like a quoit. And he scrapes his griddle
with the spatula and looks moodily at the stew kettle.
After much
practice your observation process will be-
come (as must become) less and less self-conscious. More
it
efficiently than before, you will penetrate the obvious, find

useful details, and learn how to talk concretely and simply
about life as it is, instead of life as you imagine it to be.
Creative imagination feeds on facts. Learn first how to find
1 8 Material Is Under Your Nose
the facts, and you will be building the only dependable

foundation for creative writing.
PROBLEMS
At the end of each chapter you will find a section called
Problems. These are not exercises in the usual sense but
problems in observation and thinking. There is no "cor-

rect" solution for any one of them. Your job is to work
out each one as thoroughly and as reasonably as you can
and keep at them until you have convinced yourself that
you have done a satisfactory job. If you do only the prob-
lems and don't read the book, you will have done the more
valuable of the two things.
i. Describe
thoroughly, as though you were talking to
someone who had never seen it before, one of the follow-
ing ordinary, undecorated objects. Use 100 words or less.
In this problem, use only simple sentences. The resulting
writing will sound stilted and awkward, but for the time
being, don't pay any attention to that. For now, it is enough
to be thorough, logical and complete, no matter how mo-
notonous and repetitious the words sound.
FUNCTIONAL OBJECTS
Metal wastebasket Window Teacup
Round, wooden Claw hammer Thumbtack
pencil Wood saw (hand Kitchen match
Thread spool tyP e ) Bobby pin
(empty) Fork (regular, Strainer
Door (plain four-tine) Pitcher (plain)
unpaneled) Tenpenny nail Paper clip

SUGGESTIONS
(a) Before you do any writing, get the object you're going
to describe and set it in front of you.
(b) Begin by asking questions of the object:
What's this thing for?
What, roughly, is the shape?
Does its use dictate its shape? How? Is it the best shape
for the purpose?
What is it made of? Does the material it is made of
have anything to do with its use?
Does it have a characteristic texture? What texture?
(c)
Make a scratch list
(not an outline) of
the pertinent all
facts about the article. List the facts in single words or

short phrases, being as cryptic or as brief as you wish. A list
is merely a device to help you handle your material.
(d) Rearrange the list so that the facts are in the most
logical order. (Do not make a formal outline.) Whatever
method makes sense to you and permits you to rearrange
your material efficiently and quickly is good enough for

this purpose.
(e)Write out your description. One way to start is: "A

is an ." and go on
wastebasket object for the purpose of . .
from there.
2. Try to analyze and describe accurately the qualities,
sounds, textures, smells, and tastes of some ordinary arti-

cles. Do each one of these in ten sentences or less and use
simple sentences whenever possible. It doesn't matter how

often you repeat, "This is ." "this is ." "that is
. . ." . . . .
and so on. Right now, your job is to observe and analyze,

not to write graceful sentences. (Learning to have some-
thing to say is more important to you at this point than
learning how to say it.)

QUALITIES AND TEXTURES

Describe the difference between fluorescent light and incan-
descent light.
What does corduroy feel like?
Describe the smell of hot, buttered toast.
Describe the ticking of a cheap alarm clock as you hear it late
at night in a quiet room.
In what way does velvet feel different from satin?
What is the difference between cigar smoke and cigarette

smoke?
What do peanuts taste like?
Describe the sound of water dripping into water.

Describe the sound of a slowly frying egg.
What does a wool blanket feel like?
Describe the feeling of thefirst taste of cold water after you
have been working hard in the hot summer sunshine.
SUGGESTIONS
(a) You
will find yourself, at first, trying to solve these
problems in terms of adjectives and adverbs. Try to think

out your observations mostly in terms of verbs and see what
happens.
(b) Involve as many of your senses as you can in these
analyses. How you feel about some of these textures is

important. Often, comparison is as subjective as it is ob-
jective. Pin your feelings down concretely

that is, try to
figure out what elements of the thing you're looking at are

the causes of your own reactions.
(c) You be tempted to make comparisons in terms of

will
imagesthat is, "This object is like ." For the time

. .
being, don't try to make images. Be as literal and direct in

your statements as you can.
Material Is Under Your Nose
EXAMPLE
Herea sample of the accurate and vivid perception of
is
detailby the novelist Virginia Woolf. It is the opening

paragraph of Kew Gardens, a short story.*
From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred

stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half-
way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked
with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red,
blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough
with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were
voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when
they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the
other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of
the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth,
grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown,
circular veins, or falling into a raindrop,
expanded with such
it
intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one
expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left
in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon
the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath
the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in
the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and
tongue-shaped leaves. Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly
overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the
eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.
* From A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, by Virginia
Woolf, copyright, 1944, by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company and
The Hogarth Press, Ltd. Mrs. Woolf rewrote her material many
times before she considered it finished. This story, as her husband,
Leonard Woolf, indicates in the foreword of the collection, was
probably in the "first sketch" stage.
2. Ton See Actions
. And happiness and misery are not states of being,

. .
but forms of activity; the end for which we live is

some form of activity, not the realization of a moral
quality. Men are better or worse according to their
moral bent; but they become happy or miserable in
their actual deeds. In a play, consequently, the agents
do not perform for the sake of representing their in-
dividual dispositions; rather, the display of moral
character is included as subsidiary to the things that
are done . . .
ARISTOTLE
IT IS almost axiomatic that action is life. We are end-
lessly seeing or being part of action of some kind. Even

when we are supposedly most quiet when we sleep-
scientists tell us that we change position thirty or forty
different times during an average night. Psychologists say
that under the thin layer of consciousness our minds are
sleeplessly restive: the latest psychiatric theories are labeled
"dynamic/' Physically, we are nervous, palpitating organ-
isms. Pumping heart, coursing blood, rhythmically con-
tracting diaphragm, muscles in tension all demonstrate

that we are a-tremble with motion. The behaviorist psy-
chologists say that we even "think" in motions, in shifting
body-sets of complex minuteness. And the philosophers,
too, recognize the role of motion in life. A. N. Whitehead
said: "We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the
moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only
fitfully guide it by taking thought."
You See Actions 23
This is all obvious. Yet plain as it is, most of us don't
see much of the motions of life. We look past the thou-
sands of revealing little actions that illumine the people
and situations of each day. We ignore them because they
are familiar. (Would you ordinarily look twice at a person
walking, a woman sewing, a man hammering nails?) Be-
cause we take little note of routine actions, we find them
hard to write about. Like the ordinary objects we talked
about in the last chapter, we haven't learned to look
sharply at motions to discover their real characteristics.
For instance, the way we usually see motion and talk
about it is in terms of perfunctory observation and stereo-
typed words. We reach for our standard packet of clich
reactions. If a thing moves rapidly we say, "quick as a
flash" or "like lightning" or "with blinding speed" or "in
a hell of a hurry." When something is slow we say "slow
as molasses" or "slow as mud" or "at a snail's pace." To
this list, which you can expand for yourself, add over-
worked adverbs like quickly, fast, jerkily, smoothly, and
so on. We
use these stock expressions so often that they
have become a kind of formula, a verbal shorthand, for
talking about action. Actually, these words reflect the lazy
habits of sight and mind that keep us from seeing things
as they really move.
Actions, like objects, have certain qualities or charac-
teristics which can be pinned down by accurate observa-
tion.Motions don't take place in a vacuum: they are from

someplace to someplace; they are against something, be-
hind something, through something. They are in terms of
the thing that moves: a hand, an eye, a saw, a wheel. They
are in contrast to stillness or compared to speed. When you
think of action in this way, you begin to realize that it
can have almost a texture or a "shape" as inanimate ob-
jects do.
24 You See Actions
Think about the act of walking, for instance. Walking
iscertainly a common enough movement, so thoroughly
taken for granted that we rarely think about it. Yet walk-
ing is not as simple an action as it looks. Our language
recognizes that walking is
complicated (or, rather, people
have recognized it and have coined the words). We don't
just walk. We amble, strut, stumble^ clump, prom-
stride,
enade,_saunter^ramble, step, march, pace, tread, tramp,

traipse, toddle, waddle,^~shuffle,~patrol, file, track, glide,
prowl, straggle, meander, hike, strpH, trek, stalk, flit, stray,
pljpd,jrud[ge7st^g, and ambulate. To say nothing of per-
ambulate, ]patter, hitch, scuff, limp, trip, and stagger. There
are many more "walking" words, of course. And the num-
ber of possible qualifying adverbs would fill two or three of
these pages. But stay away from the Thesaurus (an instru-
ment of the devil for a beginning writer) and use your
eyes instead. Watch people walk. See for yourself that they
don't merely walkthey move in certain ways: strut, am-
ble, and so on.
How many times, when you have watched someone
walk, have you tried to isolate the special quality, the key
characteristics of that particular motion? What outstand-
ing impressions did you file away in your mind? Were

you able to say to yourself: that man is ambling; this man
struts; that woman slinks (or slithers or strides, depending
upon the women you choose to watch)? You probably

didn't verbalize the walking motion in such a deliberate
way. Actions are harder to verbalize than objects, which

is why it is harder to use verbs than nouns.
Wedon't immediately think of actions in terms of
words, in any case. Rather, we sense actions. see them We
in relation to something else, and we note wordlessly
what the quality of that relation is. We have our own
feelings about actions that is, we react to the impressions
You See Actions 25
they make on us. For instance, if you have ever seen a jet
plane whoooosssshhh across an airfield at 650 miles an

hour, you don't say to yourself: "That plane, like a black
leaf in a hurricane, whizzed across the field and disap
peared into the distance." Of course you don't. To begin

with, that sentence bad, self-conscious writing; and sec-
is
ondly, you don't think about actions that way at all.

Chances are, when the jet plane went over, you just felt:
"Wow! !"and perhaps you had a quick thought of awed
fear that any man-made thing could go so fast. Only later,
when you thought about the plane, about your feelings,
about the physical background of the whole action, could
you begin to put into words for a reader a picture of
what you saw. You thought how you first glimpsed the
plane, a little black speck in the sky over the sun-browned
hills. You remembered how quickly it grew in size as it
came toward you. You remembered that you had to jerk

your head abruptly to follow the plane as it sped over you.
You recalled that you didn't hear the sound of the plane
until the jet was nearly gone from sight; and you remem-
bered that the sound was a swishing, burbling, hollow
noise, like a giant blowtorch in an iron barrel. You re-
called the hard blue of the sky, the dust whorls on the
hardpan of the runways, the parked planes. You brought

back your own stomach-tensed excitement, the sense of
exhilaration at seeing something go as fast as that plane
did. You found that you could remember in detail the
action which you saw and felt as a whole.
You both see and feel actions. And before you can talk
about them, you have to sift them through your mind and
make an assessment of them. You have to find out their
quality. In the case of the jet plane just described, the
action was fast. What kind of fast? Many things go rapidly
what sort of "fast" was this? Was it smooth, rough, jumpy,
26 You See Actions
fluid, erratic? Was it aimless speed? Purposeful? How do
you know? This is where your emotional reactions to
movement are involved. Was
the plane faster than what?
What did the physical surroundings contribute to your
feeling about the speeding plane? What did it remind you
of? You have to tumble this whole experience around in
your mind, ask questions of it, roll it over on your mental
tongue, recall it again and again. Eventually you will be
able to refine from the many sensory and emotional ele-
ments of the experience tke major impression that the
action made upon you.
Thinking through an action is not as deliberate and
self-conscious as I have madesound. In practice you will
it
find that much of this summing up is nearly automatic

or subconscious. But before the process becomes auto-
matic, you need to cultivate this probing, questioning
mind until it becomes habitual.
attitude of
The essential thing in writing creatively about motion
is to be able to pin an action down sharply and vividly
with the right verb, the apt phrase, the picture-making
image. In order to do this, you have to be able to see the
action as a whole, see same time in detail, and
it at the
recognize (usually at the same time, too) that your emo-

tional reactions are involved. Then later you must be
able to select from this unordered mass of facts the key
elements in the movement, the one or two characteristics
which will bring up for your reader a picture of the action
you witnessed. These key elements may be either objec-
tive or subjective or a combination of both.
Here, spun out in detail, is a suggestion of the process

as it
might have occurred in the mind of Henry David
Thoreau. Thoreau was walking one morning in the woods
near Walden Pond. He saw a scarlet tanager flying from
branch to branch in the trees. The movement probably
You See Actions 27
came to him out of the corner of his eye: the quick flutter,
the red color of the bird, the green canopy of the leaves
over his head. He was not looking for the tanager. He
may not have had any intention of writing about this
ordinary, brief sight: probably sank into his mind in a
it
flash, to be registered there with the of other

thousands
impressions of Walden. But Thoreau had trained himself
to be a phenomenally keen observer. Physically, this is
what he must have seen: above, the green of leaves, laced
with the brown lines of branches; bright patches of sun-
shine; the nervous, fluttering dart of the bird; the red of
its plumage against the green of leaves. In his mind he
must have felt: appreciation of the color, delight at the

contrast of red and green, a sense of the rapid motion of
the bird. (None of these facts, I am
sure, occurred to him
consciously. We don't think or react to anything so stum-
blingly and literally.) But later, as Thoreau was writing

in his notebook, he created in a single sentence this action
in a way that pictures sharply for the reader the thing as
Thoreau must have seen it:
The tanager flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite

the leaves.
The one verb, ignite, lifts the sentence out of mediocrity,

gives it vividness and
pictorial value. It pictures instantly
for the reader the color value of flame, the flickering mo-
tion of fire, the feeling of contrast that one would get from
the flare of a scratched match in the darkness. This analysis
may be labored and overdone, but you will find, if you

consciously try to determine why you use certain words to
describe actions, that this is the step-by-step method that
your mind spans with speedy efficiency.

The creative part of this kind of thinking comes when
you can deliberately relate one set of facts to another set
28 You See Actions
of apparently unrelated facts. Thoreau's tanager had noth-

ing to do with But Thoreau's mind sifted out the
fire.
key impression of the flight of the bird and found a simi-

larity in another key impression, that of fire. And so, he
was able to create a fine image to bring back to his reader
vividly what he saw.

To demonstrate one way the mind sifts experience to get
at the facts, imagine for a short while that you are a listener
at a class discussion. The following dialogue (transcribed
from an actual writing class) gives some indication of the
way this literal, fact-finding analysis can stir up vivid
images in the minds of ordinary, untrained observers. The

object of this group discussion was to consider action and
how to observe it, in terms of the act of walking.
INSTRUCTOR: What happens ordinarily in the act of

walking? Say something about the mechanics of it, Take
the action apart, first, and let's see how it goes.
FITZGERALD: You mean first a person puts out one leg
and then the other and how the feet go down and so on?
INSTRUCTOR: Yes.
DICKENS: But everyone walks in a different fashion.
Paulson, there, swings along, Pattersonhumps a bit, if you
know what mean.
I
INSTRUCTOR: But wait a moment. You're already trying

to characterize each kind of walk with a verb, and you're
not taking the action itself down into its parts. The over-
all impression comes later. Of course, we all try to add up
an action in a few words it's more convenient, really. But

just for the practice, let's get completely literal on this.
Step by step.
JACKSON: Let me try it. Now let me see. Well, first, . . .
your legs, swing forward from your body swing from the
hips. Most people reach out about twenty inches or so, I
You See Actions 29
mean a stride of about twenty inches. You usually land
heel then flat-footed, then up on the ball of your foot
first,
as one leg goes back and the other one swings frontward.
PAULSON: You mean your legs swing from your hips like
sticks stiff?
DICKENS: Like pendulums?

JACKSON: Oh no, they bend a little at the knees, that is
most people bend a little well, wait a minute, I haven't
finished. The rest of your body does some work, too.
KLEIN: What about your hands?
JACKSON: I'm coming to that. Now where was I oh yes
as each leg swings toward the front, the rest of your body
sways a little from side to side. I mean nobody, not even
soldiers for instance, walks stiffly erect. There's a sort of a
sway.Now, then, about the hands. They swing, too. Front-
ward and backward.
JELLINEK: When your left leg goes forward, your right
hand goes to the front it's an opposite swing, not the same
hand on the same side.
DICKENS: Some people lean forward when they walk.
PAULSON: Women walk different than men. Women
have a knock-kneed look, I mean, and men swing out a
little more.
MCGREGOR: I'd rather watch a woman walk any time.
INSTRUCTOR: I think Miss Jackson's breakdown of the
action did the job as far as we need to do it for this pur-
pose. At least
you don't you, that certain things
all realize,
are common to all people's walk the basic mechanics are

the same?
JELLINEK: Sure, but what are you driving at?

INSTRUCTOR: Well, let's take a certain person's walk.
Somebody in this group. You all know each other pretty
well. How would you characterize, say, the way Miss Pat-
terson walks? Miss Dickens said a minute ago that she
jo You See Actions
"humps" what did you mean by that? I mean, what ele-

ments of Miss Patterson's walking action caused you to use
the word "hump"?
DICKENS: She she hasn't got as loose or free a walk
. . .
as McGregor, for instance. I mean, she seems to be just a

little humped up in the shouldersoh, I don't know. I
just sort of got the impression of "hump," and now I'm

not sure it's
right.
INSTRUCTOR: You think about it for a minute. Perhaps it
would be easier if we started the other way from a char-
acteristic to a person. Suppose we take the word, graceful.
Who, do you think, walks most gracefully?
in this group,
(The group finally agreed that Miss Dickens had the

most graceful walk. She is a lissome girl, medium height,
slender but not thin, long-legged.)
INSTRUCTOR: Why do you all think that Miss Dickens'
walk is
graceful? What do you mean, in other words, by
graceful?
PAULSON: I think she walks smoothly.
DICKENS: You mean, I slink?
MCGREGOR: No, you don't slink, but I agree that you do
walk smoothly sort of flow along.
. . .
INSTRUCTOR: Tell us what you mean by smoothly.

MCGREGOR: Smooth means not jerky not erratic.
. . .
Even, you know, not bump-bump.

INSTRUCTOR: But you're still not telling us anything, are
you? This is an action we're talking about, and you're just
picking words that say only roughly what you mean.
JELLINEK: How else can you do it? You have to put it
into words to write about don't you?it,
INSTRUCTOR: Certainly you do. But, I think, you are

considering Miss Dickens' walk only in terms of the words
not in terms of the walk. Miss Dickens, would you mind
walking around the room for us just a minute?
You See Actions 31
DICKENS: I won't walk like myself with everybody look-

ing at me.
(She walked about the table several times and then sat
down.)
PAULSON: I still
say smooth.
JELLINEK: That's right. What else can you say? You pick
the thing apart too far, and you get wordy and say too
much.
INSTRUCTOR: Well, let's attack it another way. Suppose
you were standing at the top of a dam. The water was
rushing over the top of the concrete spillway in a thick
green-blue stream. Would you say that the motion of the
water was smooth?
JELLINEK: Yes.
INSTRUCTOR: Now suppose you saw a huge, perfectly
balanced wheel, turning slowly on an axle. The motion
would seem slow, massive and almost inexorable, wouldn't
it? Would you say that it, too, was smooth?
MORGAN: You could, certainly but it would be a dif-
ferent kind of smooth.

INSTRUCTOR: Exactly. It would be a "different kind of
smooth." Now a minute ago, Miss McGregor said that Miss
Dickens' walk wasn't "bump-bump." Suppose you had a
two-wheeled cart, and part of each wheel was flat. The
motion of the cart would be ...
MCGREGOR: Bump-bump.
INSTRUCTOR: Yes. Miss Dickens' walk wasn't bump-
bump. Was it not bumpy in the same way that a smooth-
wheeled cart is different from a flat-wheeled one?
MCGREGOR: No, of course not. Naturally, Miss Dickens
isn't a cart I mean, I didn't mean to say that she walked
like a smooth-wheeled cart, but I wanted to point out what
I meant by smooth so I said it wasn't jerky, or something
like that.
g2 You See Actions
INSTRUCTOR: What have we been doing here? What mis-
take have we been making in trying to talk about the way
Miss Dickens walks ... or doesn't walk?
MORGAN: Well, what we've said so far hasn't had much
to do with walking has it?
DICKENS: We've been juggling smooth's and jerky's and
other words like that.
JELLINEK: Pushing words around.
INSTRUCTOR: That's right I think that's what we've
been doing. Pushing words around. But let's get back
where we belong to the action we want to write about.
Miss Dickens' walk.
JELLINEK: Here we go again.
INSTRUCTOR: Let me get you started. Do you agree with
me that when she walks, Miss Dickens seems to lead a little
with her chin?
DICKENS: Oh yes, that's right, I know I do because my
aunt always nagged me for that.
MCGREGOR: Yes, that's right, I've noticed that because
the rest of her seems to flow along after her chin. There's
the smooth again.
PATTERSON: know another thing. She doesn't lift her
I
feet very high. I mean they swing close to the ground.

JACKSON: Well, I know where I got the impression of
gracefulness. It's her skirts. She always wears full skirts,
and they ripple when she walks.

PAULSON: That's because she's got long legs. There's
another thing, the legs, that is. Her legs are long, and she
seems to swing them smoothly there's that word again
I mean the stride looks . . .
well, fluid, because she doesn't
bend at the knees as much as some people.
INSTRUCTOR: Perhaps we can sum up a few things now.
She leads with her chin; the rest of her seems to flow along;
her stride looks fluid because she moves her long legs
You See Actions 33
evenly, and her full skirts contribute to the look of smooth-

ness. What else? Is there
anything else?
KLEIN: I like the way she walks because it seems lilting.
I mean, you could see her from the back and say to your-
self, "Gee, that girl looks as though she felt fine/'
INSTRUCTOR: That's very interesting. Why do you say
that? How do you know?
KLEIN: That's just the way I feel about it, I guess.
INSTRUCTOR: I know, but what makes you feel that way?
What do you see, in other words, that gives you that
feeling?
KLEIN: I see what you mean. Well, she has a kind of a
sway not one of these hippy waggles that some girls have
but just a little sway from side to side that's free and easy
.
you know, relaxed and graceful.
. .
PAULSON: Like dancing, you mean?

KLEIN: That's just it that's just what I was trying to
put my finger on. Lots of times her walk reminds me of
someone waltzing the old-fashioned sweeping glides, you
know. Oh, I don't mean to say that she waltzes from one
side of the road to the other, but the way she sways is ...
is... controlled) the same way dancing is controlled.
INSTRUCTOR: This reminds me of a poem by Robert
Herrick. This little poem see if you don't agree says, in
one fashion what we are feeling for here that is, the
quality let me repeat the quality of Miss Dickens' walk.
When as in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows

That liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
Oh, how that glittering taketh me!
Notice especially the brilliant use of the word liquefac-
tion "how sweetly flows that liquefaction of her clothes."
34 You See Actions
There's your word smooth made into a picture, and into
an image. And even the words move along the same way
the motion does. Why are those words good? What do
they do?
MORGAN: Well, they show it to you. You can see the
petticoat swish around with that word tempestuous.

INSTRUCTOR: Now at last now we are getting down to
the thing. As we have been talking about the act of walk-
ingMiss Dickens' walking we've made the mistake of

thinking of the words that might be applied to the action
instead of observing the action very, very closely, seeing
what exactly the action was made up of, and then trying
to make it show in words.
JELUNEK: Well, then, when we talk about her walking

action being "graceful," then we're just talking around
it I mean, being indirect about it?
INSTRUCTOR: Probably.
JELLINEK: But then how do you get it into words?
INSTRUCTOR: Why don't you try to think about it in
other terms? We have pretty well analyzed the character-
istics of her walk. Mow do you feel about these? Are they
true? Do they make you think of anything else there's

the important thing does her walk make you think of
anything else?
KLEIN: I'm thinking of a young tree in a gentle breeze.
That's farfetched, isn't it?
INSTRUCTOR: Perhaps. Depends upon how you use it.
JELLINEK: The little

swaying movement makes me think
of ice skating somehow.
PATTERSON: If I were a man, that's the way I'd like to
seemy girl walk. It's very womanly, somehow.
KLEIN: That's right. Free, and well, free and easy
. . .
and lilting, as I said before.

MCGREGOR: Well, I'll say one thing, I won't be able to
You See Actions 35
look at anybody walking for a long time without wonder-
ing what I'm looking at.
JACKSON: Me, either.
I have expanded the discussion to this length because
I wanted you to see clearly how difficult it is to get out of

the mental habit of classifying actions according to certain
stock words. Toward the end of the group discussion, the
participants were beginning to shake free from this habit.

Accurate vision and fairly perceptive reaction were at work
on the simple act of walking. Later, when the group came
to write about actions, they found themselves trying to
isolate the key characteristics of each one. They began to
cast around for images similes and metaphors and pic-
torial verbs that would re-create the action rather than
talk around it. At first, naturally, the words and images
were overdone, strained, too flamboyant. But as they
worked with the problem, their own critical judgment
sharpened. They beganto "feel" when the image was
"right" and when was farfetched or awkward. And from

it
that point on, the whole process became less and less arti-
ficial and more and more habitually skillful observation.
Just to make the method clear, consider two more sim-
ple actions. The eating. The act of eating is routine
first is
enough, though can often be complicated by etiquette,

it
social symbolisms, and national customs. But essentially,
eating is the securing of food from a receptacle and the

placing of the food in the mouth. That involves a few
basic movements with the arm and hand: hand holds fork;
arm moves forward and down so that fork can spear food
on plate; arm moves upward slightly to carry food to
mouth; teeth and lips clamp over food; hand and arm
remove fork, leaving food in mouth. Yet to describe these
motions, we have a collection of cliches which we employ,
36 You See Actions
in a loose fashion, to describe their quality. We
say: "She
picks at her food" or "he bolts his food" or "she eats
daintily" or "he gulped his meal" or "he shoveled in his
food."
Here is another common cliche* about the act of eating:
"He wolfed his food." The word wolfed is meant to show
that the eater is animal-like in his hunger, that he tears
at his that, perhaps, his chewing and
food with his teeth,
gulping are accompanied by little grunts and growls. Yet
when you say "wolfed," you really aren't giving a clear
picture of a particular person in a particular circumstance
eating a meal. You are simply indicating in rather tired
and hazy language that he is a quick, voracious, and rather
sloppy eater. But if you look closely and watch the action
of his eating, you will begin to see that perhaps you can
be much more accurate and vivid in your description than
you are when you say "wolfed." How do you know he's
"wolfing"? Does he crouch over his plate? Is his head bent
close to the table?Does he scoop up the food in hasty
gobbets? Does he tear meat away from the fork? Does he
hold the fork in his fist? Does he talk with his mouth full?
Does gravy drip from his lips and chin? Does he spill food
around the plate? Do his eyes lift up from his food occa-
sionally and dart penetratingly around as though looking
suspiciously for interruption? Does he curl his left arm
around the plate as though to protect his food while he
shovels it up with the other hand? Do his jaws move
rapidly, mouth open, while he chews? Does he move his
head toward the food for each bite or does he bring the
food up to his mouth without moving his head?
Begin to answer these questions accurately and you will
begin to be able to draw a clean, vivid picture of a man
"wolfing" his food. And you won't use the cliche*. You will
discover that some special motion this person makes or
perhaps it is a sound, like the sucking smack of lips will
You See Actions 37
not only symbolize "wolfish" eating in general but will
apply to your character in particular. You don't write
about "people" you write about a person. Whatever in-
dividualizes the person in the way of actions, mannerisms,
or visible traits helps to characterize him.
Here's another familiar motion: the act of stretching.
Perhaps the most common clich is: "She stretched like a
cat." When this simile was first usedseveral thousand
years ago, I would guess it did have an imagistic fresh-

ness. The lazy, fluid, contemptuously graceful stretch of
a cat a good thing to picture. But by this time, that ex-
is
pression is tired and overused. We've come to say "stretch

like a cat" because it's ready made and easy, not because
it fits
any specific person stretching. As we did with walk-
ing and eating, we have to observe the motion keenly
as it is made by some one person we wish to talk about.
Usually when a person stretches he lifts up his arms,

throws back his head a little, expands his rib-cage, takes
a deep breath and lets it out slowly. There is a feeling of
pleasant tension to a stretch. It's a way of breaking the

strain of one position and relaxing easily into another.
But when we say, "She stretched like a cat," we have to
pin the action down to one person. "She" is female, natu-
rally; women stretch more daintily than men. There usu-
ally isn't the feeling of rib-cracking vigor about a woman's
stretching that there is about a man's. A woman will
usually put her fingertips behind her head, swing her
elbows wide, slowly turn her head from side to side, arch
her back a little, and bring her arms down again gently.
Where a man is
apt to make a grunting, gurgling sound,
a woman will either stretch silently or make small, drawn-
out breathy sounds.
But our woman who "stretches like a cat" has to be even
more particularized than this. Is she slight? Tall? Thin?
Heavy? Blonde? Brunette? Long hair or short hair? Lithe
g8 You See Actions
or clumsy? Where is she? Sitting or standing? How sitting
or standing? On a sofa, legs curled up, a book on her lap?
Sitting on a an ironing board? What's she
stool in front of
wearing? Tight sweater? Loose blouse? Skirt or slacks?

And so forth. These visual facts make a difference in your
description of stretching, because some of the facts will be
used to illustrate this woman. For instance, if her hair is
long and blonde and silky, your major impression of her
stretching motion might be a cascade of hair, rippling as
she throws her head back. Or, if she has a lithe, supple
body, your dominant reaction to the stretch might be one
of admiration for the shapeliness and grace of her arm mo-
tions, the round outlining of her breasts under the blouse,
the easy sway of her shoulders.
When you observe an action, you must (i) see it in the
physical terms in which it occurs (in the stretching action,
some of these are: chest, arms, hair, clothes, etc.); (2) rec-
ognize that you also see it in terms of your own reactions

to it; and (3) think of it usually afterward in terms of
something else (like something, as though something, etc.).

The most important thing in looking at actions is to
ask of each action this question: What shows? If you stand
beside a highway and watch the speeding cars go by, here
are some of the things that "show": the smooth-rushing
movement contrasted with the static background of road-
side trees and shrubs; the spinning wheels; the momentary
glance at the faces of people in the cars; the idle glances
of the riders at you, standing by the side of the road; the
burred hum of the motor; the bubbly, tearing sound of
the tires on the road; the quick crescendo and diminuendo
of sound; the slight sway of the car as it rounds a curve.
There are countless other things to see and hear in that
brief moment of the car passing. Some one or two of those
things will be the "terms" in which you write: they are

the things that "show."
You See Actions 39
Another common action experience riding in a train.
is
You talk of the movement there in terms of the steadily
unrolling panorama of passing countryside; the blur of

telephone poles; the clackity-clackity-clackity-clack of the
wheels; the rapid ding-ding-ding-ding-ding of roadside
crossing bells as you sweep by. These are the elements of
action to look for because they embody motion in them-
shape and tangibleness; and they give you
selves, give it
themeans to re-create for your reader the movement you
want him to see.
PROBLEMS
Writing about actions requires, almost by definition,
that you use verbs. However, in the problems below, make
it your first task to analyze and write down the actions in
their proper sequencethat is, what happens first, second,

third, etc. and don't worry if you find yourself using
unpictorial work-verbs such asis, be, do, and the like. It
ismore important, right now, for you to be able to see an

action clearly and break down that action into a detailed
sequence than it is to use a minimum of words with maxi-
mum effect. That comes later.
SIMPLE ACTIONS
Describe the action of driving a nail with a hammer. Assume
that the nail is already stuck in the wood and just analyze the
striking motion.
Describe the motion of sweeping with a broom. Concentrate

your description on the movements of arms and body.
Describe the throwing of a ball overhand.
Describe window curtains moving in a breeze.
Describe someone turning the pages of a book, one at a time.

Assume that the book is on his lap.
40 You See Actions
COMPLICATED ACTIONS
As with the above, break down these actions into their
exact sequence. It will help if you have someone perform
the actions for you. Watch the motions carefully. See
exactly what happens.
Describe the way someone lights a cigarette. Begin with the
taking the pack out of pocket or purse.
Describe a woman knitting. Pay close attention to the move-
ments of fingers and forearms.
How do children skip rope?

What is the difference between the way a man runs and the
way a girl runs?
Describe two men cutting wood with a two-man saw.
Tell how to start a car. List every action.
GENERAL ACTIONS
This time pay attention to exact sequence of mo-
less
tions and more attention

to the over-all impression you
have of a general action. The suggestions listed are too
complicated to be broken down into single movements.
The problem here is to suggest the action by describing
significant parts of it
(and this includes your own reactions
to it).
Describe a gang of men pitching hay from a stack into a wagon.
Describe a crowded dance floor when the music is fast, hot, and
"solid."
What does a speedboat look like as it goes past you at forty

knots?
Describe a yard full of chickens as it looks to you while you are

throwing feed to them.
You See Actions 41
How does a man look when he is mowing a lawn?
Describe a woman applying lipstick to her mouth.
How does a group of women look during a business meeting of

a "club"?
Describe a housewife hanging clothes on a line.
SUGGESTIONS
(a) If you can, keep your descriptions to 250 words or less.
Whenever possible, use short sentences.

(b) Be scrupulous about adjectives and adverbs; be sure
to use accurate rather than overvivid words: the action
makes the word, not the word the action.
(c) In these problems on motion take the attitude that you
are writing a manual of procedure for someone who
doesn't know how to pound a nail, light a cigarette, knit,
and so on.
(The ideas in these problems are merely suggestive-

I list
it isn't necessary that you write about these things only.

Think up problems of your own, objects and actions that
especially interest you. The main reason for doing these
exercises at all is to develop your thinking skill. No matter
what subjects you choose to analyze and describe, be sure
that you think them out before you do any writing. Do
not let the pen originate the thought.)
EXAMPLE
This passage, from Ernest Hemingway's Death in the
Afternoon, is an excellent illustration of the way actions
are both seen and felt. It is particularly useful for our pur-
poses because Mr. Hemingway even tells us how much of

the particular action can be seen by a close observer.
42 You See Actions
First Bullfight . . .*
I remembered, at the first bullfight I ever saw, before I could see
it clearly, could even see what happened, . . . white-
before I
jacketed beer vender passing in front of you, two steel cables

between your eyes and the ring below, the bull's shoulders smooth
with blood, the banderillas clattering as he moved and a streak of
dust down the middle of his back, his horns solid-looking like
wood on top, thicker than your arm where they curved; remem- I
bered the midst of this confused excitement having a great mo-

in
ment of emotion when the man went in with the sword. But could I
not see in my mind happened and when, on the next

exactly what
bull, watched closely the emotion was gone and saw it was a
I I
trick. saw fifty bulls killed after that before had the emotion
I I
again. But by then could see how it was done and

I knew had I I
seen it done properly that first time.

When you see a bull killed for the first time, if it is the usual
run of killing, this is about how be standing
it will look. The bull will
square on his four feet facing the man who will be standing about
five yards away with his feet together, the muleta in his left hand
and the sword in his right. The man will raise the cloth in his left
hand to see if the bull follows it with his eyes; then he will lower
the cloth, hold it and the sword together, turn so that he is standing
sideways toward the bull, make a twist with his left hand that will
furl the cloth over the stick of the muleta, draw the sword up from
the lowered muleta and sight along it toward the bull, his head,
the blade of the sword and his left shoulder pointing toward the
bull, the muleta held low in his left hand. You will see him draw
himself taut and bull and the next thing you will
start toward the
see is that he isand either the sword has risen into
past the bull
the air and gone end over end or you will see its red flannel
wrapped hilt, or the hilt and part of the blade sticking out from
between the bull's shoulders or from his neck muscles and the
crowd will be shouting in approval or disapproval depending upon
the manner in which the man has gone in and the location of the
sword. That is all you will see of the killing.
*
Reprinted from Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway;
used by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribners Sons, N. Y
3. Out of the Corner of
Tour Eye
Historians have a great advantage over novelists in

that they can state a supposed fact without explaining
it.A novelist, using the same fact, must explain it in
order to make it clear to the reader.
KENNETH ROBERTS
/xS YOU examined objects and actions in the last two

chapters you must have realized that you rarely see any-
thing by itself an isolated phenomenon. Whatever you
look at has a background, a foreground, a left side, and a
right side and something more which you see "out of the
corner of your eye." We see things in contexts: objects plus
surroundings. Most things are meaningless until you re-
late them to their surroundings.
Suppose you put a glass of water on a bare table in a

whitewashed room. You can't talk about this glass of water
at all unless you relate it to its surroundings. It is a par-
ticular glass of water. It is in special circumstances (on a
bare table in a whitewashed room), and you talk about it in
terms of its context. You talk about its position, its form as
compared to the angular table and the flat floor and walls,
its color, its relative size, and so on.
Or, to use another example, imagine that you were
magically able to suspend a colorless, round, glass marble
in mid-air against a neutral background. You would hardly
43
44 Out of the Corner of Your Eye
be able to look intelligently at the marble without relating
it,visually and mentally, with other things around it. You
will notice that even in writing this bare description of the
marble I have had to indicate some relationships, vague
though they were. I said "suspend" the marble; and the
word intimates "suspend" in relation to something. So I
said "mid-air," and this automatically implied in the midst
of something else.
This is a far-fetched example, of course. The things we
see and write about are more ordinary (and more compli-
cated) than this. We see trees and and streets and

rivers
people doing things; we see and a girl sharpen-

fist fights,
ing a pencil, youngsters kissing under a street light and

people eating salami. These ordinary events are not so
cleanly isolated as the marble in mid-air. They are tied
to all sorts of surroundings and feelings. For the writer,
the context of a fact is more important, almost, than the
fact itself. Since itis nearly
impossible to talk about an
isolated fact, you have to talk about it largely in terms of
its physical and emotional surroundings.
Almost any problem of description will show you the

truth of this. Suppose you have just climbed a high moun-
tain. You are looking at the view. It is impressively beau-
tiful, and you want to talk about it. You can't say, "It's
impressively beautiful," and let it go at that. You are more

specific that is, you talk about the things that make up
the view. You are standing on a cliff edge high up on the
mountain. You have just reached this point after a long,
hot climb. Beneath your feet, the cliff drops steeply away
to a tiny green valley, thousands of feet below. On youi
sweat-damp back the sun bakes warmly, and a gusty breeze

pleasantly fingers your shirt. Afternoon sunshine burnishes
the upthrust rocks. Sculptured regiments of clouds march
slowly across the blue field of sky. Winding through the

Out of the Corner of Your Eye 45
valley below, a stream glistens in the green meadow. As
you look, you can see and name one thing after another
which contributes view which you have said is
to the
"beautiful." You are, in short, describing a thing
by de-
scribing its surroundings and your feelings about them.
Many things have entered into the statement that the view
is "impressively beautiful": your own emotions as you
stand "on top of the world," the combination of warmth,

light, and color in the golden afternoon, and other phys-
ical and emotional elements too numerous to list here.
To show how facts are dominated by their surroundings,
let's talk about this same mountain view as it looks five
minutes later. The sun has suddenly clouded over. The

breeze, no longer cool, feels chilly; your shirt sticks clam-
mily to your back. The rocks shoulder dull gray and sullen
against the cliff. The valley looks cold and far away; the
little is a leaden streak across it. Standing on the
stream
cliffedge no longer exhilarates you; instead, you feel a bit
depressed and faintly frightened as you stare over the sheer
fall of rock to the gray depths. You turn and walk away.
This change in context (made somewhat melodramatic

in the preceding paragraphs) demonstrates a truth that
every writer should know: you can't see just one thing
and exclude the rest; you see a thing and its setting. Ob-
jects plus surroundings and the surroundings are more
important than the objects.
Just as there are ways to look at single facts like your
hand or the door or a water glass, there are ways to look
at the contexts around facts. To learn these ways, you have
to develop a state of mind and feelings that is incessantly
and intelligently curious and naive. To the creative
person, nothing "obvious," nothing is dull or taken for

is
granted. Childlike, you must learn to look at an ordinary

object, ask obvious questions of it, and move on to the
next thing. What's that? Why is it there? What's it for?
Why is it there instead of here? How fast is it

going? Why?
And endlessly why. When you ask ''Why?", you are asking
for the relationship between, say, a water glass and a tea-
cup, and when you learn relationships between things,

you begin to understand them.
Picture a man standing on a street corner waiting for a
bus. If you are going to describe him
he stands there, as
you can't simply say that on a street corner

he's standing
waiting for a bus that's too vague. How does he stand?

Slouching? Hands in pockets? Head turning one way and
another? Is he reading a newspaper? Is he leaning on a
sign? What kind of sign? Are there other people near
him? How does the street look? Dirty? Clean? Is it windy?
How do you show that it's windy? Scraps of paper blowing
in the gutter? What's behind the man? Stores? A wooden
fence? A lot? What kind of day is it? Cold? Warm?
vacant
Gray? Sunny? What sounds do you hear? Horns? The roar
of motors as cars pass? The hum of tires? Voices? News-
boys hawking headlines?

Automatically, quickly, you have to ask question after
question of the scene of the man who waits for a bus. You
have to see and hear much more than just the man. There
are thousands of facts relating to him. These facts ob-
served and selected by you will illuminate the scene so
that when you tell about it, other people can see it as you
want them to.
The fact of the man on the street corner is like a stone
dropped into apond; from it, around it, because of it,

still
many ripples hurry out toward the shore. The writer has
to be interested both in the spot where the stone plopped
into the water, and the ripples. He has to see them both
at the same time, yet see them separately, too. And he has
to be able to pick out the ripples which interest him as
significant. He has to see details at the same time he is
seeing a pattern.
This takes skilled observation of a kind that we are all
equipped to make but that is not ordinarily required of
us. We usually see only the pattern (or the detail), but
rarely do we take the trouble to seeor to recognize that

we see pattern and detail together. Fortunately, we can
train ourselves to see things in this inclusive way. Basic
to this skill is learning to relate the details of what you see
to each other and which they occur.
to the context in
Most of us can, by an effort of memory, re-create some
scene or event we have observed. The way we re-create it
is by pulling out of the fuzzy memories of the scene the
facts of sight and sound that associate themselves as back-
ground. The more facts we are able to associate (make a

pattern of) the more concrete the memory becomes. When
a scene is finally re-created vividly, we discover that it is
built up of details pulled out of the whole scene which,
added together, produce a single coherent impression.
To reproduce here another dialogue,
illustrate this, I
thistime between one student and the instructor, in which
we worked with the problem of recalling an event and its
context.
I: See if you can remember, as clearly and vividly as you

can, some happening or event which impressed you very
much. It doesn't matter what the event was. It could be a
particularly beautiful sight or an action of some kind or a
natural phenomenon like an earthquake or a heavy rain-
storm. Some one impressive thing that you remember with
especial vividness.
ELLEN: The thing that impressed me most was a hurri-
cane. I was in the middle of it.
I: The New England hurricane of 1938?

ELLEN: No, this was in Bermuda. I live there. The hurri-
cane came up all of a sudden, it seemed like. I've never
seen such wind. It scared me, and I remember every detail

about it.
I: In order to show you the kinds of questions you have

to ask of happenings you think you remember very well,
suppose we concentrate for a few minutes on this hurri-
cane. You said you remember every detail of it. Suppose
you tell me about the hurricane as you saw it. Make me
see it as you did, and hear it, and feel it. If you get stuck,
I'll ask you questions.
ELLEN: Well, it was a very sticky day, I remember. You
know, sticky-hot and muggy. After a while I felt sort of
uneasy about it, so I went and closed all the shutters be-
cause I knew it was going to blow pretty hard. Well . . .
then the wind came up and the shutters banged the wind
wasn't steady at first but it came in heavy gusts and then
the lights went out. I was all by myself. It scared me, and
it lasted a long time, but when it was over not much dam-
age had been done to the house, only a lot of trees up-
rooted and palm branches all over the place. It was some
wind. There was lots of rain, too.
I: Is that all there was to it?
ELLEN: No, but hard to remember exactly.

it's
I: You didn't give any details to

speak of.
ELLEN: No, I didn't, did I?
I: Let's start at the beginning. Where were you when
you first began to suspect that a storm might be coming?

ELLEN: Let's see ... I was in the living room, I think.
I: What were you doing?
ELLEN: Reading. Sitting in father's overstuffed arm-

chair. I remember that because from his chair you can
look out the big window to the ocean.
I: What made you stop reading?
ELLEN: I don't know the quiet, I guess. It was awfully
quiet.
I: How do
you know it was quiet?
ELLEN: That's a silly question. It was quiet, that's all.
No sounds.
I: But how do you about quiet?
talk
ELLEN: Oh, suppose it looked quiet. For in-
I see. Well, I
stance, all the flowers around the trees and the walls looked
limp. There's usually a breeze that stirs them and makes

sounds at the corners of the house. And the sea looked
quiet, too. You know on a regular clear day when the sun
shines over everything, the waves sort of dance. Whitecaps
sparkle in the sun. White on green. This time the sea
didn't look like that.
I: How did it look?
ELLEN: That's hard to ... it looked greasy; that's it,
greasy. Long swells. Oh, and

couldn't hear a single bird.
I
Which was strange because the birds are always cheeping

and squeaking around in the trees and under the eaves of
the house. Then later I turned on the radio, and it seemed
awfully loud. Contrast with the quiet before, I guess.
I: You said the sea looked
greasy- different from times
when the sun shone on the whitecaps. Wasn't the sun shin-
ing on this day?

ELLEN: I think ... no ... well, it was and it wasn't.
I mean it was light, all right, but it wasn't like sunshine.
Sort of a yellowy glare. Over everything. And, come to
think of it, it was a funny thing, there weren't any shadows
at all. I noticed that because I used to watch where the
corner-of-the-house shadow went at different times of the
day. And it should have just

at this time of the afternoon
about reached the flower bedsthe shadow, I mean and
there wasn't any shadow at all, only the yellow light. Kind
of yellow-orange.
I: You said before that you were scared. Did you feel at
all scared before the hurricane struck?
ELLEN: Yes.
I: Why?
ELLEN: I don't know, exactly . . . well, yes I do. I was
all alone in the house.
I: No one home at all?
ELLEN: No, just me and the two dogs.

I: Oh, two
dogs. I thought you said you were alone.
ELLEN: No people, no other people, I meant.
(By this time, you should have noticed that detail after
detail of the background and context of the hurricane
came back memory was probed with
to this student as her
questions. With each detail, the picture comes clearer and

clearer; she remembered not only things that she had seen
directly, but things that were on the periphery of her
sight "out of the corner of her eye." She had "forgotten"
them because at the time she had had no particular reason
to focus her mind on them or to relate them to the whole
experience.)
We went on:
I: What were
the dogs doing all this time? Where were
they? In the livingroom with you?

ELLEN: Yes, they were lying down near the chair. I re-
member I got up to let them out, and I had to call them.
That was queer because usually when anybody makes a

move to let those dogs out they scoot out of the house and
wag their tails and almost mow you down, they're so happy
to get out.
I: What happened when you let them out?
ELLEN: I
opened and
the dooryou should have seen
all the bugs that were trying to get in the screen. Even
little birds, flying around and knocking themselves against
the screen. I had to shut the door in a hurry.

I: What when you got outside?
did you do
ELLEN: wasn't exactly outside, it was in a patio well,
It
yes, of course, it was outdoors. Well, usually the dogs race

for the gate and wait for me to open it so they can get out.
Not this time. They stuck close to the house.
I:
Anything else?
ELLEN: I looked around some. There's a road that goes

past our house. It looked funny, all yellow even though
it was
really black macadam. I didn't see anybody. I
watched the ocean again. The swells were getting heavier
because I could hear the water crashing around on the
shore. After I looked around some more, I went back into
the house.
I: When did the hurricane come?
ELLEN: After I went in, it got darker and darker. Then
the wind began. And the rain.
I: I have asked enough questions now to show
think I
you the idea. You

can't describe anything or talk about
anything without asking questions like these of yourself

and of the scenes or actions you are describing.
Notice that always I asked, what happened? Exactly what

happened? What did it look like? What were some of the
concrete details of sight and sound the nongeneralized
results of observation? What feelings did she have? How
did the feelings affect the way she looked at the scene?
And so on. At the end of it, I asked this student to
write a short description of the event we had discussed. The
first draft of her Bermuda hurricane description is printed
in full below. Compare it with the verbatim questions-
and-answers of the discussion session, and you will see how
much vivid and significant detail of context and back-
ground was drawn out of the student's memory to give
vigor and life to the writing.

HURRICANE
was sitting in a deep armchair reading a book. There wasn't
I
a sound anywhere. turned a page, then looked out the window

I
in front of me. The hills and sea looked brassy; the gray sea with
pale light on the crests of the swell looked as thick as mineral oil.
After a while began to notice sounds. The earth seemed to
I
rumble. The waves were thundering in the caves under the island.
My two dogs were nervously asleep on their sides next to me; once
in a while they would jerk their heads up and whimper.
The air was hot, very hot and muggy. No birds were singing.
I stood up and called the dogs. felt had to get outside.
I I
When opened
I the patio door, masses of big frogs, birds, flies,
cockroaches, and mosquitoes were clustered there, trying to get
into the house. We got out quickly and shut the door. The dogs
didn'twant to stay out. wondered why. They usually cried to be
I
taken out, and if took them for an extra walk they were so happy
I
they practically knocked me over in their joy. But now they slunk
near the house. Their tongues lolled out, red and panting.
looked at the huge flowers growing up the walls and hanging
I
from the trees. They were tightly closed and the leaves hung
limply against their stems.
There seemed to be yellow light everywhere, but there were no
shadows. No shadowsanywhere.
The road by the house was deserted. Not a cyclist or a carriage
passed by. was lonelier than ever outside, so called the dogs
I I
and we went back in. The dogs immediately went to my room and
both of them waited while pulled back the skirts of my dressing-
I
table. They always went in there when they were uneasy. When
I closed the skirts around them they felt snug and secure.
went around the house and closed all the shutters. By now it
I
had got completely dark, so went back to the living room and
I
turned on all the lights and listened to some boogie-woogie on

the radio. Dutch courage.
Suddenly, above the jazzy blasts of trumpets and drums I heard

the wind. A long gust tore viciously at the house, cracked some
the roof and ripped loose a shutter and sent it crashing
tiles off
against the wall of the house. As abruptly as it began, there was

absolute calm again.
Then, in a hard crescendo, there came a steady drum of rain.
An explosion of wind shook the house to the foundations. Simul-

taneously, the radio commentator said, "The hurricane has reached
the islands. Winds reaching velocities of 150 miles per hour are
"
expected to
The radio went off, the whole house went dark, and the winds
worried with the house like a dog with a bone.
If you can learn to see things and their contexts clearly

in a kind of panoramaand file your impressions away
for future reference, you'll save yourself the trouble of
the self-cross-examination that was demonstrated in the
dialogue above.
A panorama, as you know, is a "mental picture of a series
of images or events." You can teach yourself to see pano-
ramically. Soldiers being trained for scout duty in World

War II were taught a crude form of this skill. Men in
forward observation posts had to learn to take quick
sweeps of terrain with their eyes, see widely and specifi-
cally at the same time, and then report what they saw. The
soldiersbegan their observation training by looking at a
blanket on which were placed articles of military equip-
ment: canteen, bayonet, messkit, shoes, automatic pistol,
a half-filled clip of cartridges, and the like. At first, the
soldiers were given a half minute to study only four or
five articles. Then they were asked to look away from the
blanket, name the items, describe their condition, and

indicate the relationship of each article to the others on
the blanket. Gradually the number of items on the blan-
ket was increased and the observation time cut down.
Soon the soldiers could, after a five-second look, see, re-
member and relate twenty, thirty and even forty articles.
Almost anyone willing to make the small effort of will
involved can develop this "perceptive" seeing to a certain
degree. It does involve will power, though. You know how
hard it is, for instance, to try to read a book while, at the
same time, there are conversations going on around you.
It is possible (within limits) to give your attention to both
things. Yet to be broadly attentive and retentive in this
way is basic to a creative writer's equipment. I do not
mean that you have to spend your waking hours looking
at or listening to everything with great intensity. But you
do have to cultivate habits of mind which, when neces-
sary, willhelp you to see, relate, and therefore "remem-
ber" quite fully what you have experienced. While you are
learning to do this you will, naturally, be awkward and
self-consciousabout it. But after a while it will become
more relaxed and nearly habitual. And, parenthetically,
you will find yourself enjoying the ordinary things of life
with a vividness that will surprise you; you'll be able to
seemuch more than you could before.
All through this discussion of contexts and backgrounds

I have used the expression related to or the relationships
of things. Finding connections, resemblances, or patterns
in the unrelated sights and experiences of ordinary living
is one of the writer's main
jobs. Yet our natural skills-
like sight, hearing, touch usually function in an unrelated
fashion. For example, when you move your eyes from one
point to another, you do not see the intervening spaces

unless you stop and focus on them. Lift your eyes up
from this book, focus on one spot on the wall, and then
move your gaze slowly to a spot on the opposite wall. As
you moved your head, your gaze passed the space from
one wall to another in a slow blur. Now, as you read this
next line of type, try to be conscious of the way your
eyes move. They move in slow, looping jerks, from focus

to focus, as you take in words or small groups of words.
You do not read with a smooth sweep of eye; and you do
not see anything with a smooth, fully focused glance. Your
eyes move rapidly from point to point.
But your mind, marvelous machine and collector of
stimuli, bridges the visual gaps by relating them in terms
of form, idea, feeling, and the like. When
you look
"around a room" you do not literally "see" the whole
roomthat is, your physical eyes don't see it but your
mind pulls together for you, with incredible speed, the
sum of the glances you have made around the room, and
you say, "I can see the whole thing." What you mean is
that your mind has related the whole thing for you.
don't want to digress into a discussion of the physiol-
I
ogy and psychology of sight. But I use this example to

point out that the skill of relating one thing to another
is one we all have and use every day. The creative person
merely sharpens the skill and makes it more conscious.

The process of creating something is, after all, imposing
form on something that has no apparent form; and form
is, basically, relatedness of one part of a thing to another
part.
PROBLEMS
The problems listed here are only suggestions. Just for
practice, though, make up problems
in re-creating contexts
that will fit allof writing needs: violent action,
sorts
crowds, a quiet scene, a single action against a backdrop

of group actions, a tableau, and the like. The best prob-
lems for your purposes are those which come directlv-QU*
of your own experience.
SIMPLE BACKGROUNDS
Write a piece about a man who is
leaning over a bridge, fishing
in the river below. It's a hot summer day.
Describe a man in a canoe.He is farout on a large lake. It is

fiat calm. Evening. The man isn't paddling just sitting, smok-
ing a pipe and trailing a hand in the water.
It is evening. A high-school boy and girl, obviously deep in

puppy love, walk by your house. They are holding hands.
Write as though you were watching them, unobserved, from
your front porch.
It's a magnificent autumn day, and a puppy is
chasing leaves
on the lawn.
Two couples are cooking marshmallows on the beach at night.

It's summertime.
A solitary little boy, bundled up in a big snowsuit, is sliding

down the road outside your house. He trudges uphill, belly-
flops, coasts down, trudges back up again.
A small girl stares at a store window display of dolls.
COMPLICATED BACKGROUNDS
A local ballgame. About 300 people in small bleachers to left
and right of home plate. It's the last half of the ninth, tie score,
home team at There are two outs, score is three and two on
bat.
the batter and men on first and second. In your description

consider the crowd as well as the players. Try to reproduce the
"color" of the scene.
A young man is playing the piano at a large party. Piano is in

corner of big livingroom. He is playing Chopin brilliantly,
with superb dash and feeling. People at party are surprised.
They begin to gather around piano.
SUGGESTIONS
As I suggested in the body of this chapter, select an
incident that impressed you very much and write it up.
Try several things.
(a) This time, write as smoothly as you can, keeping always

in mind that the ordinary, exact word is better than the
exotic, vague word.
(b) As before, think out the problem first; make scratch
lists you think you need to) of the facts you think you'll
(if
use; and then begin to write.

(c) Do at least three drafts of each problem.
EXAMPLE
The way the context characterizes and illumines a hap-
pening aptly shown in this description by Thomas
is
Wolfe of the death of a man in a New York City subway

station. All men die but this death is particularized by
what the artist saw and felt about it.
Death the Proud Brother*

At the heart and core of the most furious center of the city's life
below Broadway at Times Square a little after one o'clock in
the morning, bewildered, aimless, having no goal or place to which

I wished to go, with the old chaos and unrest inside me, I had
thrust down the stairs out of the great thronging street, the tidal
swarm of atoms who were pressing and hurrying forward in as
a haste to be hurled back
fierce into their cells again as they had
shown when they had rushed out into the streets that evening.
Thus, we streamed down from the free night into the tunnel's
stale and fetid air again, we swarmed and hurried across the
*
Reprinted from From Death to Morning by Thomas Wolfe; copy-
right 1935 by Charles Scribner's Sons; used by permission of the
publishers.
floors of gray cement, we thrust and pushed our way along as
furiously as if we ran a race with time, as if some great reward
were to be won if we could only save two minutes, or as if we

were hastening onward, as fast as we
could go, toward some
glorious meeting, some happy and fortunate event, some goal of
beauty, wealth, or love on whose shining mark our eyes were
fastened.
Then, as I
put my coin into the slot, and passed on through the
wooden turnstile, saw the man who was about to die. The place
I
was a space of floor, a width of cement which was yet one flight
above the level of the trains, and the man was sitting on a wooden
bench which had been placed there to the left, as one went down
the incline to the tunnel.
The man just sat there quietly at one end of the bench, leaned
over elbow resting on the arm of the
slightly to his right with his
bench, his hat pulled down a little, and his face half lowered. At
this moment there was a slow, tranquil,
hardly perceptible move-
ment of his breath a flutter, a faint sigh and the man was dead.
In a moment, a policeman who had watched him
casually from a
distance walked over to the bench, bent down, spoke to him, and
then shook him by the shoulder. As he did so, the dead man's body
slipped a little, his arm slid over the end of the bench and stayed
so, one hand hanging over, his shabby hat jammed down, a little
to one side, upon his head, his overcoat open, and his short
right
leg drawn stiffly back. Even as the policeman shook him by the
shoulder, the man's face was turning gray. By this time a few
people, out of the crowds that swarmed constantly across the
floor, had stopped to look, stared curiously and uneasily, started
to go on, and then had come back. Now, a few of them were
standing here, just looking, sayihg nothing, casting uneasy and
troubled looks at one another from time to time.
And yet I think that we all knew that the man was dead. By this
time another policeman had arrived, was talking quietly to the

other one, and now he, too, began to look curiously at the dead
man, went over and shook him by the shoulder as that other one
had done, and then after a few quiet words with his comrade,
walked off rapidly. In a minute or two he came back again and
another policeman was with him. They talked together quietly for
a moment. One of them bent over and searched the man's pockets,
finding a dirty envelope, a wallet, and a grimy-looking card. After
prying into the purse and taking notes upon their findings they
just stood beside the dead man, waiting.
The dead man was a shabby-looking fellow of an age hard to
determine, but he was scarcely under fifty, and hardly more than
fifty-five. And, had one sought long and far for the true portrait
of the pavement cipher, the composite photograph of the man-
swarm atom, he could have found no better specimen than this
man. His only distinction was that there was nothing to distinguish
him from a million other men. He had the kind of face that one
sees ten thousand times a day upon the city streets, and cannot
remember later.
This face, which even when alive, it is true, was of a sallow,
sagging, somewhat paunchy and unwholesome hue and texture,

was dryly and unmistakably Irish city-Irish with the mouth thin,
sunken, slightly bowed, and yet touched with something loose and
sly, a furtive and corrupt humor. And the face was also surly,
hang-dog, petulant, and servile the face of one of those little

men a door-man at a theater, a janitor in a shabby warehouse,
office building, or cheap apartment house, the father-in-law of a
policeman, the fifth cousin of a desk-sergeant, the uncle of a

ward-heeler's wife, a pensioned door-opener, office-guard, mes-
senger, or question-evader for some Irish politician, schooled to

vote dutifully for the "boys" upon election day, and to be flung
his little scrap of patronage for service rendered and silence kept,
apt at servility, fawning, cringing to those sealed with the mark of
privilege and favor, and apt at snarling, snapping, gratuitous and
impudent discourtesy to those who had no power, no
privilege, no
special mark of favor or advancement to enlarge them in his sight.
Such was indubitably the man who now sat dead upon the subway
bench.
4. Tour Feelings Are Stirred
The resources of a writer's brain are his knowledge of

facts, the results of his observations, the richness of
his emotions, the vigor of his imagination, the mental
training which enables him to see effect in cause and

cause in effect.
HENRY S. CANBY
jCOUR creative task has hardly begun when you have

learned to observe and write effectively about obvious
things and the facts of their behavior. These are only
skeletal materials. You must have them to construct a
piece of writing. But your creation gets its flesh, its heart,
and, if Imay venture the vague language, its soul from

less tangible realities than the sticks, stones, smells, and
noises of the physical world. Life is, of course, something
more than and motions. Among other things, it is
objects
full of hums and discords and the sudden harmonies and
jangles of emotions. Life stirs with feelings; it is moved by

the subtleties of motive; it is quickened by the disguised
urgencies of desire. We
are more sentient than intellec-
we feel more than we think. We are constantly in
tual;
moods and fits and states of mind. We do things by
"hunches" or "impressions." Much of what passes for
thinking in our daily lives is no more than emotional self-
justification for states of mind. We even alter immovable
realitiesby applying to them the shapes and textures of
our moods. We look at things through the emotional
colored glasses we happen to have on when we see them.
60
Your Feelings Are Stirred 61
At one time, for instance, we can watch a gay party and

remark sourly that most parties are the pastimes of fools,
mockeries of gaiety. A week later we can attend exactly
the same kind of party and have a wonderful time. The
truth is, we haven't seen either party flatly, as a phenome-
non alone. What we have said is: I see this party, and this
is how I feel about
now; therefore this is the way it is.
it
Feelings penetrate our lives so deeply and operate on us

and our surroundings so persistently that they are a rich
source of material for writing.
Yourfirst responsibility as an artist and anyone who
says he is a creative writer claims to be an artist is to give
shape or form or coherence to the raw material you are

working with. Where there is form, there is a sense of
proportion in the maker of it. Where there is proportion,
there is a clear mind that can move away from the mate-
rial and see not only its internal harmonies but its rela-
tion to other things, too. Some of the raw material for

your writing is emotion. You ought ô know emotion from
yofir own experience ofjt know what anger, love, spite,
envy;"^hd^_tenderness are like in qualityjndjtexture^ of
feeling! But more importantly, you have to get outside
these feelings, be objective about them, to know what
they feel like to other people.
(Never forget, when you are writing, that your reader
looks at before he looks with: you have to show him some-
thing coherent to look at before he can identify himself
with it or react to it. He isn't he can't be as close to the
the material as you are.)
Understanding emotion from the outside as well as from

the inside requires two different capacities of you. First,
you need to trainôurself to observe the signs_pf emotion
in yourself ancT otherpeople. This you cando by much
the same method as I have described in earlier chapters.
62 Your Feelings Are Stirred
But more significantly, the observation takes an act of will.

You cannot allow yourself to be involved in and stirred
too much by emotions when you write about them. You'll
be too close. Your writing will be overcharged with your
own feeling, andthis is usually trueas a result it is likely
to be turgid, wordy, and too full of symbols which have
more meaning for you than for your reader.
Emotion is contagious. Most of us react sympathetically
(or the opposite) to situations which throb with feeling.
You will do this, because you are human. But if you are
too,
also a writer, you eventually have to tear yourself away
from participation. You may be deeply and powerfully
caught up in torrents of passionate feeling that you want
urgently to write about. Yet before you can write a co-
herent word about them you must be able to set the feel-
ings aside (and yourself with them) to view them with the
dispassionate appraisal of a scientist calculating a chemical
reaction. Creative writers control their material; the mate-
rial does not control them. Art is conscious, deliberate,
calculated. The most effective
'
'spontaneous" writing has

usually been revised twenty times.
This moving away to a calculated objectivity is an act
of will; it demands force of character. Do not be surprised
that I inject here what seems to be a moral admonition.
The morejrou_jvmte1j:he jroore ^^Jî^^coysr that
wilting requires as much of your character as it does of
your imagination. Even the mere physical act of writing
depends uponTyour determination to chain yourself to a
desk for hours every day while you wring, batter, twist,
cut, club, and wrench the forms and words of a creation
from your mind and feelings.
Within certain limits, as we know from the work of
psychologists, emotions can be observed, tabulated, and
even predicted with some precision. For example, when
one young child in a family is jealous of a brother or
the psychologists say, "sibling jealousy." They know

sister,
that sibling jealousy normally expresses itself in typical
ways: the jealous child hits the other, snatches toys, wets
his pants or his bed, sulks, or creates scenes to bring atten-
tion to himself. Similarly in older people, where strong
emotions like jealousy are often hidden under layers of
repression, the psychiatrist can analyze the emotions by
interpreting their outward signs: psychosomatic illness or
disability,compulsive or unsocial habits, and the like.
As a
writer, you are not thus scientifically concerned
with emotion. You analyze less than you present or drama-
tize. In order to present emotion convincingly you have
to project it in terms that look and sound real to your
reader. You are not convincing when you say, ''The air
was charged with tension" or "I was livid with anger" or
"His lip curled in disgust" or "Happiness gleamed from
her eyes." These are the lazy writer's clich indicators that
emotion of some sort is going on. But they don't convey
any sense that something real is occurring: they are merely
"words, words, words."
Emotions do not happen in a wordy vacuum. They are
felt by people. These people express themselves by acting
out their emotions against the backdrop of their surround-

ings. Emotions show in facial expression, tone of voice,
body action, looks, glances, tears, and violence. They show
in a slump of the back, a lift of the eyebrows. They are
reflected in other people's reactions to the emotions: the
gasp of surprise or shock, the sudden twist of a head, the

quick warm clasp of a hand. These are some of the terms
in which you write about emotion, the tangible outward
signs of inner disturbance.
The best place to begin observing these tangible terms
is in
yourself. Let's see what anger does to you, for exam-
pie.(Anger is a violent emotion and lends itself easily to

examination because its expressions are usually crude and
forthright.) The chemistry of anger is the same in you as
it is in the Australian bushman: the quick pang of recog-
nition of danger or object of hate; the massive internal
secretion of adrenalin that gives extra energy either to
fight or to run away this is the same in all men. But each
person expresses anger in his own way.
How does anger feel to you, inwardly? Does your belly
feel tight? Is there a sinking sensation in your throat and
stomach? Do your insides seem to writhe with distaste or
fury? Do
tears start uncontrollably to your eyes? Some-
times, when the anger is deep, can you feel the blood leave
your face and the muscles around your eyes and mouth
grow so tight they feel numb? Do your legs shake with
tension? Do you feel choked, as though you desperately
wanted to breathe and could not? If you can determine
how anger feels to you listing as concretely as posssible
the terms of its inward expression then you can be sure
that anger feels this way to millions of other people, too.
Now for your anger's outward signs. What do you do
when you are angry? Are you noisy? Do you stamp your
feet or curse or shout? Does your voice change pitch and
quality do you speak hoarsely or quietly or thinly? Do
you throw things? Do your fists clench? Do you stand
stiffly,
frozen by your anger into a shaking automaton?
Or do you fling yourself about with aimless fury? If you
can draw away from yourself, if you can see a picture of
yourself angry, almost as though you were watching a
stage play where the protagonist was someone else then
you will begin to be able to write about your own anger.
You will see it as it looks, as well as know how it feels.
As an exercise, make a list of your own outward and in-

ward expressions of anger. From the list select those feei-
your Feelings Are Stirred 65
ings and seem to you to be most typical of
actions that
yourself. Then a hundred words or so, to describe
try, in
yourself angry. When you have decided what the

when
terms of description are, you will find that you have
listed a good collection of tangible, specific facts about
anger. Then you won't make the common mistake of

generalizing. You won't say, for instance, "Anger makes
me want to hit things," because in saying that you aren't
being concrete, and your reader won't have a picture of
you. But if you show the reader your hands, balled into
fists, your whole body taut and ready to explode into hit-
ting, your senseless pounding of a door or a table, then

you are saying with much greater effect, "Anger makes
me want to hit things."
(Writing about emotions, as indeed writing about most
things, is an exercise in dramatizing reality. The creative
writer cannot talk about emotion clinically: he has to
demonstrate a case history. If you are writing a story and
your people aren't showing themselves by doing things; if
they aren't walking, shouting, posturing across the stage

of your writing, then you are talking around them or writ-
ing parallel to them, like an academician or a philosopher.

You are saying only, "This happened," and "That hap-
pened," when you should be saying, "See! This moves this

way, that moves that way, the two things look so-and-so.")
Once you have seen that the way you write about a
violent emotion is, its outward or
usually, in terms of
physical expressions, then you should examine some of
the more subtle emotions"impressions" of things, for
instanceto see in what terms you can talk about them.
Because our feelings are always with us, we habitually
color the plain facts of with the tinges of our emotions
life
about them. It is a common

thing for us to characterize
a building or a natural scene with words that have emo-
66 If our Feelings Are Stirred
tional overtones. We say, this place is "gloomy'* or that
place "overwhelming." We are more apt to voice x>ur
is
impressions of a place than our impersonal observations

of it. It won't be hard, for instance, for you to recall a
house which immediately repelled you on your first visit.
You had a feeling of unfriendliness and hostility the
moment you walked into the place. Yet the house wasn't
a live thing. It did not have the power, of itself, to be
hostile or forbidding. But you got the "impression" never-
thelessit gave you that "mood." What gave you the
feeling? Was the front hall dark and gloomy? Did the
rooms smell musty and not lived-in? Did you feel that the
house looked out from its setting almost furtively, peering
through surrounding trees as though at an intruder? Or
did the house feel hostile because it was too austere, too
well kept to feel like a home that people lived and loved
in? How do you know it was austere? What did you see
that made you think so?
On the other hand, to take the opposite illustration, you
surely know a home that seems to envelop you immediately

in affectionate warmth and security. It is an "easy" house,
a house with the echoes of laughter in its walls, a house
that takes you in with the friendly informality of an arm
over the shoulders. What gives you this feeling of friend-
liness? Is the sight of a roller skate and a catcher's mitt
it
on the front steps, the casual leavings of children's play?

Is ita picture in the hall that the occupants obviously
like to look ata waterfall scene cut from a feed and grain
calendar trite but admired? Is it a peep around a door-
way into a living room that has deep, worn furniture,
and books scattered on tables instead of regimented on
shelves? Is it the rich smell of something cooking in the
kitchen? What physical evidences, in short, give you the
impression of a "friendly" house?
In these paragraphs I have been talking about subjective
impressions. These impressions have sources and express
themselves just as any emotions do. In the examples of the
friendly and unfriendly houses, a whole series of related
physical facts summed themselves up in your mind and
expressed themselves in a single, inclusive impression. In
ordinary conversation, you can get away with general indi-
cations of your impressions. You can say, "That's a very
gloomy, unfriendly place," and if necessary you can go

on to explain to your listener what you mean. But when
you are writing about it, you must remember that your
reader can't ask you what you mean: all he has is the cold
page in front of him. You have to give him enough in-
formation so that he can see what you saw, think about it
as you did then he can have the impression you want him
to have. If you want to transfer your feeling about a place
to a reader, you have to re-create for him the outward,
physical terms which produced the impression for you,

as well as the thoughts about it that thronged your mind.
Even more subtle than impressions or subjective reac-
tions are moods. One of the most common writing prob-
lemsespecially in stories or plays is the creation of

suitable moods or "contexts of feeling." Little creative
writing is done in the glare of flat light, so to speak; there
are shadows, highlights, and contrasts. Your people meet
one another, conflict with one another, act upon one
anotherthis is the essence of what is called "plot." And
in all these actions, tensions and conflicts are created, many
of which have to be expressed as moods. IJnless you have
lived the life of a hermit, you must have seerToiHbeen a
player in many tense scenes. Have you ever opened a

door suddenly, not thinking about what was on the other
side, and surprised two people in the midst of a bitter
argument? The opening of the door cut off the sound

of their voices as sharply as though you had snapped out a
light in a closet. They stood facing one another, tense with

restrained feeling, their heads swiveled toward you with
surprised and artificial politeness. Between them, like a

taut, quivering rope, was a mood, suspended for a moment
by your interruption. You felt the mood, felt somehow

that the air was prickly with the knife points of conflict.
You muttered your excuses and quickly backed away,
shutting the door.
The mood you sensed was as tangible as a slap in
that
the face. Yet didn't have a shape or a color that you
it
could point to or name. It wasn't tangible in the same

way as a brick is tangible, but it was every bit as real to
you. How do you write about emotions when they are
expressed in moods?
As before, you begin by finding out in what terms the
mood shows itself. Instead of making a straightaway analy-
sis, this time I have made up a conversation between you
and me which will show the method of getting at the

terms of moods. Though the dialogue takes some time to
read, it represents a useful process for you to follow in
your own mind when you come to re-create a mood in
writing.
You: What sort of mood do you want to talk about?

I: Oh, something fairly vigorous and obvious.
It will be
easier to take it
apart. I'm thinking, for instance, of the
mood of a strike mob I was once caught in. It was a big
moband a big mood, too.
You: Were you one of the strikers?
I: Oh, no, I was
completely out of it, a stranger. As a
matter of fact, I was in the army at the time. Out in
California. For some reason, I can't remember what, I had
been sent from Long Beach to Burbank on an errand
I thinkit was to
pick up some packages of maps. At least,
I was in a jeep and the thing was crammed with rolls
of brown-paper parcels marked "Secret" and "Confiden-
tial."
You:How did you see the strike mob?

I:came over Cahuenga pass and went down the hill
I
toward Burbank. The Warner studios are down there, and

the main road goes right past them. I could see that the
road was jammed with what looked like thousands of
people.
You: What did you think it was?
I: I didn't know. Naturally, I was curious, but I had my
parcels to deliver, and I couldn't stop to rubberneck as I

would have if I'd been a civilian. But I couldn't get
through. Crowds were too thick. Lots of cars had stopped
on the highway, and horns were honking, people were
leaning out of car windows yelling, "What the hell's the
matter?" I had an advantage with the jeep because I
pulled out of traffic and went across a field where there
was a small path.
You: Did you get around the crowd?
I: Part way around. I got to some side streets but I was
blocked again, this time by several lines of pickets, with
a thick crowd behind them. They didn't pay any attention
to me. I just sat and watched. There was a lot of confused
yelling and aimless moving around.

You: Well, how did you feel a "mood" in this crowd?
I: I didn't sense the mood right then I was too far on
the edge of things. After the picket lines started to move,

I edged the jeep along behind them because, if they went
far enough, I could get back on the highway on the other
my disgust, I found myself sitting in

side. Pretty soon, to
front of a hotdog stand opposite the main entrance of
the studio. The crowd on either side of me was too dense
to try to shove the jeep through. So I just cut the motor

and watched. That's when I began to feel the "mood" of
the crowd that I mentioned.
You: Why didn't you sense the mood before this?
I:
suppose because I wasn't close enough to it to see
I
any more than a generalized mass. Now I began to spot

individual faces and actions and see groups of men
little
doing specific things. I asked a guy who

was lounging near
me what the fuss was about. "Hell, I dunno," he said.
"Union says it's a lock-out, studio says it's a strike. Half
these guys' 'and he flipped his hand at the moving crowd
"half these guys just come over from the Lockheed plant
because the union told 'em some other unions was gettin'
shafted on this deal." He leaned over to me and said with
a hoarse confidence, "Y'know, all them guys really want
is a fight. Spoilin' for a fight." Right then, I heard some
sharp shouts, the crackling, mouthy sound of a public

address loudspeaker, and swelling crowd noises. A
car was
edging slowly out of one of the studio gates. Men were

prancing around it, shaking their fists, leaning into the
windows, pointing at the driver. Suddenly the car began

to rock crazily back and forth. Some men at one side of it
were pushing in unison. They were joined quickly by
dozens of men looked like ants suddenly come to a spot
of sugar on a floor. The car tipped over with a jerk. Over
the noise of people I could hear the thin crash of glass
as the windows broke. The side door opened upward and
the driver crawled out, shaking his head and yelling.
You: This all sounds confused so far I don't get any im-
pression of a mood yet because too many scattered things
are going on.
I: You're right, it was confused. But just after the car
was tipped over, the loudspeaker started up again I

couldn't hear what it was saying but I could hear the sound
and the studio gates opened up to let some people out. A
yellwent through that crowd that sounded like the grow-
ing roar of a football crowd when somebody is making a
long run with the ball. They surged toward the gates,
then made a kind of path through which the handful of
people who had come out of the gates began to walk. I
watched the faces of the mob on the edge of that path.
They were taut, mean. I could hear the yelling: "You
sonofabitching scab!" "Dirty rat." "What about us, you
scab bastards!" "How do you feel, stooges?!!" The people
coming through the path of strikers looked scared, with-
drawn into themselves. One woman she must have heard
one insult too many darted into the crowd swinging her
arms and screaming. Some men grabbed her; they were
half laughing, half serious. They picked her up by the
arms and legs. Hands snatched and tore. Her skirt came
off, her blouse rolled up and nearly covered her face. She
was twisting and writhing and screaming with anger, her
legs moved white above her stockings. Arms grabbed
roughly at her as she passed. Suddenly there were small
little knots of men sway-
fights everywhere, fists swinging,
ing back and forth, people running, and through it all
the confused swelling shouts.
Then I felt that this mob was waiting to do something
violentas a mob. It was like a saturated chemical solu-
tion:one more drop of something and this milling, noisy
group would crystallize its action.
You: What, especially, gave you this feeling?
I: Well, I suppose I got the feeling or the mood of po-
tential violence from the little individual scenes, the
glimpses of people's faces, the grating undersound of rage

in the voices I could pick out separately. Certainly I did
not feel the mood from the generalized crowd situation;
it seemed to be the sum of many details.
You: How would you go about describing this "mob
mood" you've been talking about?
I: I think the most effective way would be a kind of
movie-camera method: close-ups, long shots, panoramas,

blended together in such a way as to build up to a coherent
impression.
You: Do you mean quick sketches of individual scenes
linked with general impressions of noise and motions and
the like?
I: Yes. The method reminds me of one of the most
moving newsreels I ever saw. After Franklin D. Roosevelt's
death. The cortege wound its way down Pennsylvania
Avenue in Washington. The only sounds were the thud-
ding of muffled drums, the march of feet, the clack of
horses' hoofs, the screak of wheels. The newsreel editor
had used Chopin's "Death March" for background music.
And the camera wandered in and out of the crowds which
lined the street for miles. Grave faces. Heads bared. Men
with tears in their eyes. A woman's face twisted with
weeping. An old Negro woman, holding a handkerchief
to her streaming eyes, waving a fluttering goodby to the
caisson as it passed. Flags at half-mast. The stillness of the
crowds, the sad stillness and the weeping. And in one place
the round-faced mournfulness of a little boy who felt the
mood of the people around him without really knowing
what it was all about. That's what I mean by the "movie-
camera method" the collected individual facts which,
summed up, re-create the mood you felt.
You: Then the job of writing up a mood is really a two-
part one: you have to recognize that you feel a mood
first,
that is and be able to pick out the facts or

subjectively,
the stimuli or what-have-you that give you the mood; and
second, you have to select from those facts the ones which
you are going to write up so that your reader can also be
stimulated into the same mood.
I: That's just about it, in general. I'll come to the busi-
ness of "selection" in the next chapter, but you've pretty
well summed up the way to think about "mood" before
you write about it.
It should be evident, by now, that even "mood" and the

fairly subtle emotional contexts of subjective impressions
depend upon specific, tangible facts for their source and
interpretation. One of the hardest jobs in creative think-
ing is that you have to learn to think about one thing in
terms of other things. This is
especially true of mixed-up
and essentially vague states of being such as emotions and
feelings.
But after you have trained yourself to see and interpret
emotions in specific terms, you face a second difficulty;
and this difficulty is in you, the person, the human being.
You have your own emotional attitudes toward the collec-
tion of facts that sums up a mood or an impression or a
situation full of feeling. Because you are human, you take
sides emotionally with what you see; you like it or dislike
it in varying degrees. Your interpretation of what you ob-
serve, then, is likely to be biased, distorted, limited, or

expanded by your own feelings. As a writer you must take
care to do everything you can to limit this personal dis-
tortion. Here is why. Most of us, when we like something,
will look at it with some care, take pleasure in finding
out a lot about it, turn it over and over in our minds.
On the other hand, when we dislike something, we nor-
mally turn away from it; we instinctively reject or refuse
to look carefully at things we find distasteful. Therefore,
we don't see it as well as we see the thing we But you
like.
are a writer. You can't do that. You'll miss something you

ought to see.
Suppose you are a gentle person who hates conflicts and
fighting. You always turn your back on squabbles. You
try to evade even the sound of argument. This is peaceful

and commendable of you. Unfortunately, life is noisy with
brawls, spats, combats, and the sound of scolding. Unless
you intend to write only about calm, peaceful subjects
(and try to find them), sooner or later you are going to
run smack up against the problem of creating a scene full
of angry, combative characters. Will you know how they
are going to act? Or are you going to guess about it thus
revealing to your reader that you don't know what you

are talking about? I am not urging you to enjoy fighting
or to relish the squalls of anger that blow through most
people's lives. But I do strongly suggest that you firmly
direct yourself to look at as much of life as you can,
whether you like some of it or not, so that you will know
what you are writing about.
What I am saying, in an oblique fashion, is that each of
us takes a point of view toward the facts of life. When we
say, "the facts of life," we mean the facts of life as we see
them. A point of view is
basically emotional, and it's a
dominant fact for you as a writer to recognize. For the
writer of factual articles or articles of opinion, a point of
view which is consistent and thoroughly backed up by
facts is not only desirable, it is indispensable. For the crea-
tive writer one who writes poems where people
stories or
other than himself carry the burden of the tale a point of
view that is too dominating might get in his way and con-
fuse matters. If you are going to create fictional characters,
for instance, they can't all be little replicas of you, looking
at life from the same point of view you do. Therefore,
you must first realize how thoroughly your own emotions

color the to put on paper; and second, you
life you want
have to understand why you have the point of view you
do have so that you can train yourself to observe things
from several points of view.
For example, a tourist and a farmer, looking out over
the same fields, would probably have completely different
points of view about what they saw. The tourist, from a
city or suburb, would be likely to feel and remark upon

the fresh greenness, the hazy lumps of mountains miles
away beyond the valley, the smell of fresh-cut hay, the

warm breeze. The farmer, on the other hand, might be
speculating upon the effectiveness of his neighbor's con-
tour plowing, the state of the young corn, the hint of rain
in the towering cumulus clouds to the west, and the ad-
visability of cutting the hay on number four pasture while

the weather still held.
Similarly, a layman and a doctor, both witnessing an

accident, would probably be moved in different ways: the
ordinary person's shock and horror and fascination would
be, in the doctor, secondary to his professionally cultivated
point of view which would cause him quickly to assess a

victim's wounds, calculate the effect of shock, and take
the necessary first-aid measures.
Obviously, it would be impossible for the tourist and

the farmer or the layman and the doctor to write similar
descriptions of the same events. The whole emotional con-

text for each man is so different that anything but super-
agreement would be out of the question. Yet some of

ficial
the characters you may want to write about will have
points of view just this widely different from your own.

But you will be creating both of them. Each character will
have to be consistent with himself; he will have to stand
up as a person with his own characteristics, his own points
of view. Obviously, at least one character you create will
reflect more than a little of yourself. But too many charac-
ters with your bias, your attitudes, your blind spots, will
bore a reader to death with sameness.
So, by all means have a point of view. But know what
it is, where it comes from, and to what extent it colors your
objective view of the rest of the world. Ralph Waldo

Emerson said of Thoreau:
His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses.

He saw as with a microscope, heard as with an ear trumpet, and
his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard.
And yet none knew better than he that it is nof the fact that im-
ports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. . . .
(italics added.)
This is
just another way of saying that your accurate obser-
vation of the world and your emotional reactions to it
are inextricably mingled and that emotions are as signifi-
cant as facts.
So far in this chapter I have talked about the terms of

emotional expression, and I have suggested that these
terms are rarely seen with complete objectivity they pass
through the filter of your own emotional attitude or point
Now let's return for a moment to the admonition
of view.
I made on page 61, which was that you have to be able
to move outside emotions and see them dispassionately
before you can write well about them.
Ordinarily, when we have been mixed up with situa-
tions that vibrate with feeling, we generalize our reactions

to them. We
say, "That was a horrible mix-up! I'm glad
I'm out of it" or "It was so confusing and frightening that
my stomach sinks when I think about it" or "It was em-
barrassing, all felt very much ashamed." These

and we
vague descriptions do not begin to tell your reader what
emotions were involved, who had them, what caused them,
or anything else. Like the ever-convenient and seductive
cliches, generalizations lurk behind every corner of thought
to mess up the possibility of good writing.
We are especially vague in our talk about emotions,
anyway. Our language is thick with "high-voltage" words-
words with whole amperes of generalized emotional cur-
rents in them. It is one of the easiest tricks in the busi-
ness to spread these high-tension words around in order
to get a spurious effect. (Politicians do it all the time.) To
show you what I mean, test your own reactions to the fol-
lowing strings of words. Read them across slowly and

aloud, as though you were savoring them. Unless your
heart is made of rock, you should feel some slight emo*
tional reaction after each string.
1.
poor . . .
hungry . . .
ragged . . .
crippled . . . shiver-
ing. . . weak. . . .
2. deserted . . .
lonely . . . destitute . . . lost . . . sad . .
longing. . . .
3. home . . . hearth . . . mother . . . love . . .

security . . *
faith. . . .
4. happiness . . .
gentleness ... joy ... freedom . . .
hope. . . <
5. lust . . .
greed . . .
envy . . .
spite . . .
passion . . . hate. . . .
For each string of words anyone with even half an

imagination can conjure up a cliche picture of something
they stand for. From i., for instance, I could make up a
picture of woe that could come straight out of Dickens:
It'sChristmas Eve. A little boy, shivering in pitiful rags,
leaning on a crude crutch, stands wistfully in front of the
bright window of a food store. Well-fed, warmly clad
passers-by ignore his outstretched hand. large tear rolls A
silently from his eye and freezes on his cheek. And so on
and so on. Yet, you might have made up, from this string
of suggestive words, an entirely different picture from my
oversentimentalized one.
The real point is that these words weren't accurate
enough to tell either of us the same thing. They aroused

our emotions, but they didn't stir us specifically. If an
author writes words which have no more control over his
readers than these loosely emotional word-strings, then he
has failed his job.
But when you are too close to emotions, when they still
have you boiling and disturbed, then you are apt to use
these loose words, and use them lavishly. The amateur
writer almost invariably tries to write of emotions when
they're still too hot to touch. He writes passages that are

full of the high-voltage words with elipses in between
. . .
... to signify the gasps ... of passion. He is so preoccupied

with his feelings that he forgets to set his scene, introduce
his characters, create his context of meaning and his
reader flounders around the page without a landmark.
So, before you write, you have to wrench yourself away
from these feelings: pull them out of you, so to speak, and
set them on a table where you can look at them with in-
telligent curiosity to fix the terms of their expression. This
takes considerable force of mindand we're back to the
willpower talked about earlier. However, there are ways
I
to cope with this problem; and these ways will help you
train yourself to write about emotions.
1. Don't try to write finished stuff about an emotional

situation that still disturbs you. Make notes on it, write
it out if you want to, but let it cool off for a few days before
you seriously try to re-create it. Wordsworth's definition

of poetry "Emotion recollected in tranquillity" is a good
guide for you here.
2. A useful sign that you are ready to write about emo-
tion is when you can sit down and calmly list the sequence
of events that led up to and through the emotional scene.
When you have got far enough away to be able to see the
thing sequentially, you are probably "cool" enough to
begin writing about it.
3. When you no longer take sides with the people or
things involved in the emotional scene when, frankly, it

doesn't matter that much to you then you are ready to
make a qualitative judgment of the experience. You can
determine impersonally what is important and what is not.
You can sum up the experience and compare it, propor-
tionally, with other things.
4. When you are curious enough to figure out for your
own satisfaction what caused the emotional scene and why
it made such a fuss at the time, you are probably ready to
be objective enough about it to re-create it intelligently.
If you cope with your emotional material this way, you

will discover that theimportant things about it have stayed
with you: the highlights and contrasts and vivid details
remain, and the tangled meshes of feelings have straight-
ened themselves out. You will not be satisfied to use loose,
high-voltage words, but you will demand from yourself
the re-creation of the emotion in terms that a reader can
see and smell and touch and hear. Then your reader will
begin to understand what you're driving at.
PROBLEMS
Using just the sketchy suggestions of situations listed
here, write short pieces which will re-create mood or im-
pression. These are merely sample ideas; only use them if
you can fill them out with your own experience.
Saturday night at the local arena. It's the eighth round of the
main bout. Fighters are an upcoming youngster against a ring-
wise veteran. been a savage fight so far, advantage about
It's
even for either fighter. The crowd is all worked up. Describe
8o Your Feelings Are Stirred
round eight as the final roundone of the fighters wins by a

knockout in the last thirty seconds after a brutally punishing
round. Use this framework as a means for picturing a night at
the fights.
You're in a group of people. Conversation has been general.

Then two voices are raised. Talk begins to die down. Two men
are arguing. Then one man grossly insults the other. Describe
the mood of the group.
Early morning. Spring. You're in the plains country farming

land where the earth seems to stretch flatly to infinity. You
step out of the farmhouse and walk toward the fields. What's
it like?
Describe a ride in a roller coaster.
autumn. You're at a county fair. You've worked very hard

It's
allsummer, and this is the first outing you've had. You've got
your best girl by the arm, a wad of money in your pocket.
What is it like to tour the midway?
Describe the mood of a large library reading room at about
3:30 P.M.
You've been skiing all day, now it's late
evening. A group is in
the main room of a ski lodge. Huge fire in fireplace. What's the
general mood?
You're involved in a petty, increasingly bitter argument with a

friend. You know it's not important, yet neither of you gives in
and the whole thing gets worse and worse. How do you feel?
SUGGESTIONS
(a) Helpful in thinking through problems of emotion in
writing is this device: list various emotions anger, fear,
sorrow, etc. then under each emotion, list first your own
expressions of it, and then other people's expressions of
it as you have observed them. Don't write these out at
length; just make lists.
(b) In every case, avoid overcharged emotional words as

much as you can. Look for the substantives of the emotion*
EXAMPLE
Look for the substantives of emotion in this passage by
D. H. Lawrence.
Father*
WhenWilliam was growing up, the family moved from the Bot-
toms to a house on the brow of the hill, commanding a view of the
valley, which spread out like a convex cockleshell, or a clamp-
shell, before it. In front of the house was a huge old ash-tree. The
west wind, sweeping from Derbyshire, caught the houses with full
force, and the tree shrieked again. Morel liked it.

"It's music," he said. "It sends me to sleep."
But Paul and Arthur and Annie hated it. To Paul it became almost
a demoniacal noise. The winter of their first year in the house
their father was very bad. The children played in the street, on the
brim of the wide, dark valley, until eight o'clock. Then they went
to bed. Their mother sat sewing below. Having such a great space
in front of the house gave the children a feeling of night, of vast-
ness, and of terror. This terror came in from the shrieking of the
tree and the anguish of the home discord. Often Paul would wake
up, after he had been asleep for a long time, aware of thuds down-
stairs. Instantly he was wide awake. Then he heard the booming
shouts of his father, come home

nearly drunk, then the sharp re-
plies of his mother, then thebang, bang of his father's fist on the
table, and the nasty snarling shout as the man's voice got higher.
And then the whole was drowned in a piercing medley of shrieks
* From Sons and Lovers
by D. H. Lawrence. Copyright 1913 by
Mitchell Kennerley. Reprinted by permission of the Viking Press/
Inc., New York.
and cries from the great, wind-swept ash-tree. The children lay
silent in suspense, waiting for a lull in the wind to hear what their
father was doing. He might hit their mother again. There was a
feeling of horror, a kind of bristling in the darkness, and a sense
of blood. They lay with their hearts in the grip of an intense an-
guish. The wind came through the tree fiercer and fiercer. All the
cords of the great harp hummed, whistled, and shrieked. And then
came the horror of the sudden silence, silence everywhere, outside
and downstairs. What was it? Was it a silence of blood? What
had he done?
The children lay and breathed the darkness. And then, at last,
they heard their father throw down his boots and tramp upstairs
in hisstockinged feet. Still they listened. Then at last, if the wind
allowed, they heard the water of the tap drumming into the kettle,
which their mother was filling for morning, and they could go to
sleep in peace.
5. You Create People
... A writer should create living people; people not

characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can
make people live there may be no great characters in
his book, but it is
possible that his book will remain
as a whole; as an entity. . . .
RNEST HEMINGWAY
UP TO this point we have been working with prelimi-

nary materials, learning how to dress the stage to create a
lifelike background for the players. we come to the Now
main show and our most puzzling raw material people.
When a writer creates people, his reader has to be able
toknow them, and know them better than he can ever
know real people. The characters and the reader must
quickly form a relationship that is impossible in real life.
In the space of a few thousand words, three hundred pages,
three acts, or whatever, the reader not only has to become
acquainted with a gallery of people, he has to believe in
them, know their motives, understand their frustrations,
and feel with them in their problems or dilemmas. There-
fore, the people you write about must stand out plainly.
Their motives and actions must be comprehensible. This
is not to say, I add hastily, that characters must be crudely
simple, without complexity or subtlety; it is only to say that

their personalities must be more consistent, more of a piece
than those of real people.
Real people are confusing. They are never "all of a
piece/' An ordinary man is such a bundle of incongruous
83
84 You Create People
traits, and mixed desires that any
conflicting motives,
observer of him can
say, with Hamlet, "What a piece of
work is a man!" Never, even in apparent intimacy, can
we know another person wholly. We know some people in
general, and our closest associates we know in many par-
ticulars.Yet there are always puzzling inconsistencies and
unexplained traits that hint to us of an inner stream of
life so deep and secret that it is untouchable by another.
Somewhere, even in the humblest of men, is

apt to be a
streak of the infirmity called ambition, and with it the
faint trace of hard arrogance that makes his general humil-
ity puzzling. In a cruel man you may find, deeply hid,

tenderness or the touch of banal sentimentality that causes
you to wonder how deep the cruelty goes. Perhaps in a
vain person, inexplicably, is a mocking echo of self-
laughter, and you wonder how the vanity is supportable.
Or with a person you feel to be greatly good and virtuous,
you may sense and cannot prove the gray sin of self-con-
gratulation. Even in the most common persons you will
find almost infinite complication.
Consider a young man in love, to begin with a simple
case. He is alternately trustful and jealous and both at
the same time. His love for some girl melts him to be
tender; and sometimes it makes him want to hurt her.
One moment he will idealize his love. The next moment
he is
passionately critical of her most innocent defects,
because love makes him see them so clearly that he rages
at the flaws in his idealization. He is
proud to introduce
his sweetheart to his friends. Yet, sometimes, his own ego-
tism makes him afraid to let her be seen for fear she will
seem more common to others than she does to him.
Well, perhaps, a young man an unfair ex-
in love is
ample. Such young men, traditionally, are in an unnatural

-state. There are more mundane examples. What about the
You Create People 85
man who passes you in the street? What about the people
who press sweatily against you in a crowd or jostle you in
a store? Are they so complicated? Aren't most ordinary
men just types you can be certain about? No. Of each of
these people there is only one thing you can be sure: that
each considers himself unique in the world. Each person
protects his own identity by insisting to himself, with
wordless surety, that he is not like other men. (Don't you
do that? Deep down, aren't you sure of your own unique-
ness?) To
you, the observer, one man may be as like his
neighbor as one leaf on a tree is like another. But because
each person is dead sure of his own differentness, he is
an individual, he is different from others; and his self-
esteem shows itself, partly, in traits of character and oddi-
ties of action that belong to him alone.
Each man has, further, a secret life (as we all have)
which is at the core of his individualness. Few but the
psychoanalyst or the creative artist can get at this inward-
ness; and of the two, the creative artist is likely to hit
closer to the truth. You can measure "personality" with
evidence only so far. Beyond that is the truth of creative
imagination.
You cannot, as a writer, generalize a man as a unit in a
social whole. He is too complex for that. If you write about
him just as he is, then you will be a biographer or a his-
torian or a social scientist. You will give a reader much
useful information about a man this way, but you will
not be creating people, which is the job of the creative
writer. It is sometimes convenient for the historian or
the social scientist to group people, to order and classify
them according to status and group motivation, and to see
them as blobs of plastic clay,molded by large, impersonal
forces called "environment" and "mores" and "society."
(This is not a backhanded attack on social scientists. Prop-
erly understood, their findings should be supremely useful
in understanding the larger backdrop against which men
move and live.) But the creative writer commits artistic
suicide the moment he sees masses of people instead of
a person. As a writer, your relation to human beings is
person-to-person: you do not write about Mankind, you

write about John or Mary or Joe.
This is all general and theoretical. How do you get Joe
down on paper? Do you observe him, analyze him, list
his traits? Do you try to re-create him as he is in a word-
picture of the real thing? Of course not. He would be a?

confusing and hard to understand as a real person is
too real for the reader to know him very well. The mere
accumulation of physical detail, no matter how well ob-
served, will not bring fictional persons to life. Your hardest
job is to create fictional people who are believable to the
reader because they are capable of a life of their own.
Unlike real people, written characters must be consistent
with themselves and with the created world in which they
move. You do not reproduce life merely; you create some-
thing like This is the creatiyejparadox fjjjat the jnore
life.
cunning you are as an artificer, the more convincing you

71
will be as "real people in your writing.
j_creator^f
In general, then, how do you begin T:Kis~ Jot? How do
you get at people for writing purposes? First, you recog-
nize that at least in the first steps fictional people are
creations in almost exactly the same way as statues are
creations.Real life has served as a model for them, but they
are not literally real. Right at this point, lift your eyes up
from this page and try to recall some character you have
wanted to write about and it is enough, for this moment,
just to recall a general picture or impression.
As I write this, I am thinking of an old man I know;
I'd like to write about him someday. He is in his late
seventies, yethe stands as slimly straight as a young birch.
His skin tanned and smooth, and about his eyes is only
is
the fine fan of wrinkles which comes from squinting into

the sunlight. He is tall. He dresses well; he wears a dark,
double-breasted suit with an air, as though a girl were
waiting for him around the next corner. Below his fine-
brushed, white hair grow straight, thick eyebrows, and
looking out under them are cool gray eyes, clear around
the iris, with no trace of aged rheum. He sounds like a dis-
tinguished old gentleman, doesn't he? He is but only in
his looks. When he opens his mouth to speak, he is a stupid,
bigoted old fool. Not only is his voice nasal and harshly
unpleasant, the things he says are mean, crabbed, andjelf^
righteous. He is a rabid anti-Semite, though like any fanatic
Senas long since forgotten his reasons for this. He hates
Negroes because he once lived in the South (for six months
in 1902), and he "knows the color problem first hand, sir,
first hand." He has never done a lick of productive work in
his life.His father made enough money in the Civil War

to provide him with a comfortable idleness all his days.
Yet he is brutally critical of "the working class" and does
not hesitate to condemn "the shamefully lax standards of
work these days, compared to when I was a young man."
Yet I want to write about him not about his stupid,
futile life but about the way he makes old age look: serene,
dignified, vigorous, and wise. I would like to combine this
man's outward aspect with the character and soul of

another old man I know. The second man is a children's
doctor. Last year, at sixty-eight, he gave up active practice,
not out of choice but because he was too gnarled and
knotted with arthritis to get around to his patients any
more. The doctor is a short, tubby, shapeless little man.
He never was good looking. His hair always looks un-
combed and ragged. And it is hard to look away from an
ugly wart next to his nose; it seems to dominate his face
like the bull's-eye of a target. He dresses badly, too. He
buys a suit if it fits

approximately, never bothering to have
it altered, and thenceforth rarely thinking to have it
pressed. But it doesn't matter how he looks. I have seen

how he is with a hurt child, and, seeing him then, I have
forgotten entirely his slovenly appearance. The gentleness
in him is marvelous. He soothes. He calms. child's pain A
seems to focus his skill like a sharp light; and when he has
to hurt one of his small patients he does it with a deft
quickness that minimizes the youngster's fright. He can

say, in a voice that almost brings tears to your eyes, "There
now, little man, that's all we have to do, and it won't hurt
any more/'
Now the doctor sits at home. He works, as much as his
infirmity will allow, on a manual for pediatricians, trying

to distill his experience for younger men. Even a little
work is painful to him because leaning over a desk and
moving his arthritic hands agonizing. Yet he is no close-
is
mouthed martyr. He complains often about his misery,

but it is with such a hint of underlying laughter at the
whole ridiculous dissolution of his body that the com-
plaints are almost philosophical asides on the human
comedy.
To me, the outward symbol of this doctor's fine life is
the lithe and handsome person of the first old man who
looks so distinguished. I am not trying to be sentimental
when I do this. It appeals to my sense of fitness. I want to
re-order reality so that the just and dramatic climax of
the doctor's life is embodied in the outward evidence of
vigorous and comely old age. This has dramatic validity
because I want to affirm the character of the doctor posi-
tively and vividly. (This is my point of view. Another
writer, with equal reason, could use the doctor's triumph
over his lumpy exterior as a dramatic means; or a third
writer could have a fine, cynical time developing the con-
trast between the first old man's looks and his crabbed
character.)
What I am saying in this example of the two old men is
that characters are drawn from real life, but they are not
exact replicas of particular lives. When you create charac-
ter, you draw on your observations of many people. You
may use the face and body of one person, the gait of
another, the physical traits of another, the personal flaws
or virtues of several more, and so on. As a writer you are
not concerned with photographic likeness; you work to-
ward a probable or convincing synthesis. This is another
kind of truth than literal representation. It is, if I may use
the words, artistic truth, because it is self-consistent; it has
its own inner and outer harmonies; it is capable of being
recognized, remembered, and understood on its own terms.
What some of the methods for getting at your mate-

are
rial? How
do you go about thinking a character through?
Where do you begin? Naturally, the answers to these ques-
tions vary with each person, but certain general processes
of thinking will be broadly true for most of us.
As you begin by learning what to look for. By
before,
this time, you should have trained yourself to observe
things with some perception. Anyway, the plainly visible
things about people are easy enough: clothes, shape, move-
ments, and the like. But people are not just phenomena,
and mere sterile observation is not enough. You can no
more re-create a character by describing his outward as-
pects than you can by describing a clothes display dummy
in a department store window. People affect us mainly
through a vague element called "personality." You not

only have to determine, for your own use, what "person-
go You Create People
ality" is, but you have to discover in what terms you can
talk about it.
There are more ways to talk about people than there
are for talking about any other subject. You can describe
them subjectively or objectively or a combination of the
two. You can them through your own eyes, through
present
You may show them in an action either
others' eyes, or both.
by reporting it or re-creating it; and similarly, you may

have them speak directly, or you may tell about what they
have said, or both. You may introduce them to your
reader briefly or in lengthy description; or indirectly, by
showing their influence on other characters. No matter
how you decide to manage it, there are certain fundamen-
tal problems in character creation which you will always
have to solve. One
of these problems is getting a character
started introducing him to your reader.
In ordinary social relations, you recognize the signifi-
cance of "first impressions." You feel, as we all do, that
these are "important," and when you meet new people you
try to act in such a way that they will have a good opinion
of you. You should have no trouble remembering your
own first reactions to some
of your friends or acquaint-
ances. The initial handshake, the preliminary words, the
quick, over-all assessment, and you "knew instinctively"

that you had met a person whom you would like or dislike.
Obviously, these first reactions are often untrue. Like
everything do with human beings, they

else that has to
change and modify themselves. Bjit_the_people you create

forâjreader
have to impress him at once injxactly the
way you want him to be impressed. Your characters won't
have several years' acquaintance with the reader, but only
a few thousand words in which to make their personalities
felt.Unless you are writing a vast novel whose main char-
acter develops slowly over a long stretch of time, you have
to use more abbreviated ways of showing personality than

are given us in real life. (Frankly, you have no business
writing a "vast novel" unless you have been through all
this fifty times maybe a hundred.)
Try to analyze how you get a first impression of some-

one. Are physical looks the main thing? Tone of voice?
Way of moving? The look of the eyes? Mannerisms of
hands or face? Or is the impression more subtle, something
you "can't quite put your finger on"?
More than likely, a first impression is basically emo-
tionalthat is, you feel or sense something about another
person before you think much about him. "Strong" per-
sonalities immediately and forcefully "impress" us because,
somehow, we and vigor at once, ap-
feel their strength
parently by vague interpersonal "vibrations." Obviously,

though, when you write of a "strong" personality, you
cannot merely say, "He is a
strong person; he gives every-
body vibrations." A reader has little to see or feel from
your opinion of a character: he must see and understand
him on the character's terms.
To get a closer to possible ways to introduce peo-
little
ple, join me in a discussion of a theoretical first impression
you might have had of someone you saw or met.
You: Well I met a man in an art museum the other day.

Never saw him before. We had wandered into the same
room nobody else around and I remember sitting down
on a bench to look at one of the pictures more carefully.
I: Where was this man when you first saw him?
You: Actually, I didn't see him right away. I was look-

ing rather hard and I suppose a bit dreamily at one of
my favorite pictures: "The Great Wood," by Ruisdael. I
suppose I sensed another person out of the corner of my

eye, but I wasn't paying much attention.
I: What was the first thing that made you realize there
was another person in the room with you?
You: I heard his footsteps. I remember now, they were
brisk, coming down the corridor, then they slowed down
and finally stopped, someplace behind me. I suppose I
must have thought that he was looking at one of the pic-
tures, though I didn't look around to see.
I: But when did you actually see this man?
You: As a matter of fact I heard him before I saw him.

I was so caught up in the picture you know it? the great
sky, the clean, green-yellow light through all the trees that
when he spoke I almost jumped.
I: He spoke?
You: Yes. He must have come up softly behind me be-
cause his voice sounded very close. He said, "Magnificent
thing, isn't it?" and Iturned around.
I: What did you feel when he spoke?
You: As I said, I was surprised surprised,
I suppose,
because one generally expects a kind of hushed reverence

in art museums at least, having somebody speak out be-
hind you with that kind of hearty companionableness
seems as out of place as singing drinking songs at a funeral.
I: You said you turned around what did he look like?
You: He was surprisingly small; I expected a big man,
from the deep sound of his voice. But he was small, spare,
dressed in a quiet old suit gray, I think standing very
erect, with his head cocked a little to one side, still looking
at the picture, not at me. He had on steel-rimmed glasses.
His hair was blond, gray at the temples, thin on top. He
had a thin face, with sharp planes around the cheeks, and
his mouth was
set pleasantly in a half smile. After he
spoke
and I turned, he kept his head cocked for a moment, and
then looked right at me and said again, "Perfectly magnifi-
cent."
I: What did you do?
You: I've forgotten I suppose I stammered something

about, "Yes, yes, isn't it?" or something like that and then
I remember saying lamely, "It's one of my favorites."
I: Was the man standing all this time?
You: No he came around and joined me on the bench,
and we sat there silently for a little bit, just looking at the
picture.
I: Then what
happened?
You: Well, I was curious. Here was this man total
stranger who barged right into my

rapt contemplation
with a rather commonplace remark. And yet I didn't re-
sent it him and right away. And I
at all. I rather liked
didn't mind when he walked around and sat
in the least
down on the bench as though we were old friends.
I: You looked at him some more?
You: Oh yes. We got to talking right away. Or rather, he

got to talking. He pointed at the picture and talked about
the light. And then he went on about how painters got
their effects, told me all sorts of things about "overpainting"
and glazes and varnishes and so on. He had an amazingly
broad and at the same time, unselfconscious fund of
information about painting.
I: How did you feel about this "lecture"?
You: I didn't feel as though it were a lecture at all.
Really, the man was so likable and friendly and not at all
intrusive about his conversation.
I: Why didn't you feel that he was "intrusive"? You said
a moment ago that people didn't expect to have strangers
speak so familiarly in art museums.

You: I suppose it was because he expressed admiration
for something I admire made us kindred spirits right
away, or something like that.
I: But how did you feel that he was not intrusive, even
then? It's quite possible that another person, making the
same remark, might have annoyed you.
You: Yes, I guess that's right. It was probably in the way
he did it. I mean, I didn't feel assaulted by his opinion; it
seemed to match my own thoughts at the time quite
smoothly.
I: How would you go about summing up a first im-
pression of this man, then?
You: I can see that a first impression wouldn't be much
concerned with his physical appearance. I would probably
talk best about it in terms of the Ruisdael the painting
and my own feelings about this man, much as I have
talked it mean, the important things about this
to you. I
impression were the mutual admiration of the painting,

my surprise and eventual pleasure at being interrupted,
and then the friendly and unforced attitude which this
man took.
I: At least, that would be a way to begin thinking
about it.
should be plain, from the foregoing, that first im-

It
pressions are not usually remembered in terms of cata-

logued detail. You don't remember each item of clothing,
each mannerism; you choose (or remember) a dominating
trait or a few outstanding details. Then you use that salient
characteristic as a means, temporarily at least, for describ-
ing your first impression to other people. Essentially, this

is the method of the caricaturist. (And here I am using the
second meaning of the word caricature. 1 don't mean an
enlargement of the grotesque or the ridiculous; I mean,
rather, the selection and emphasis of particular qualities
so that recognition comes from these alone. Cartoonist^
for example, created in a few bold lines a recognizable im-
pression of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt: uptilted

cigarette holder, prominent upper teeth, jutting jaw and
presto, F. D. R.) In writing, the aim is almost exactly as it
is in
caricaturing: to delineate in a few sharp phrases the
essential ingredients of an impression. If the look of a
saucy eye, the tempestuous rustle of a skirt, the bold free
swing of a shoulder, or the hint behind a nuance of a lifted
eyebrow dominate your first impressions of a character,
then with these things you may re-create that feeling for
your reader.
The following demonstrate two different ways of intro-
ducing character. The first example shows how W. Somer-
set introduces the leading character of one of
Maugham
his most famous short stories; the second is the reader's
first glimpse of Leopold Bloom, hero of James Joyce's
Ulysses.
is the way we first meet Sadie Thompson, in Rain.*
Here
Notice how one or two brief, symbolic physical details are
made to stand for the quality of the woman.
"Miss Thompson was sailing with you to Apia, so I've brought

her along here."
The quartermaster pointed with his thumb to the woman stand-
ing by his side. She was twenty-seven perhaps, plump, and in a
coarse fashion pretty. She wore a white dress and a large white
hat. Her fat calves in white cotton stockings bulged over the top
of long white boots in glace kid. She gave Macphail an ingratiat-

ing smile.
"The feller's tryin' to soak me a dollar and a half a day for the
meanest sized room/' she said in a hoarse voice.
*
Reprinted by permission from "Rain" in W. Somerset Maugham,
Collected Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, Doubleday and
Co., Inc., N. Y.
James Joyce's introduction of Leopold Bloom,* how-
ever, depends only a little on outward detail, as you will
see. First, the author makes a statement about Bloom
(which, symbolically, strikes a main note of Bloom's char-

acter throughout the book) and then he allows us to hear
the working of Bloom's mind as he begins to get break-
fast for his wife.
Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts
and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed
roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes.
Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate
a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly,
righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and
air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning
everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.
The coals were reddening.
Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn't
like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle
off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and
squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The
cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.
Mkgnao!
O, there you are, Mr. Bloom said, turning from the fire.
The cat mewed in answer and stalked stiffly again round a leg
of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writing table.
Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.
Mr. Bloom watched curiously, kindly, the lithe black form. Clean
to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the
butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his
hands on his knees.
Milk for the pussens, he said.

Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
* From James Random

Joyce, Ulysses. Reprinted by permission of
House, Inc.
But a character is more than a first impression. Char-
acterswalk across the stage not once but many times. They
throw themselves into the life you have created. They
speak and move and tangle themselves in dilemmas. Now
your character is introduced, what comes next?
What comes next in real life? You meet someone, get an
impression of him, and then what? Chances are, you see
him doing something. He may be doing something com-
pletely inconsequential: riffling a pack of cards or walking
down a street or anything equally mundane and unreveal-
ing. But sooner or later, your real acquaintance will be
mixed up in an action which gives you a clue many clues
to what kind of person he is. "You are what you do/'
someone said. It was Aristotle's principle that character
is revealed
by action; and though Aristotle's analysis was
based only on the drama, his contention is still sound
advice for a creative writer.
Here is an outline of a famous story, told indirectly
that is, the characters aren't shown doing anything; I'm
only telling you that they're doing something.
A man was taking a walking trip. Some thieves beat him up

and left him. One passerby saw the hurt man and avoided him;
and so did another traveler. But the third traveler was kind. He
took care of the hurt man.
That's pretty bare and uninteresting, isn't it? Now read

the original, written with an economy and vividness that
most writers can't begin to match.
A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho,and fell

among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded
him, and departed, leaving him dead. And by chance there
half
came down a certain priest thatway: and when he saw him, he
passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was
came and looked on him, and passed by on the other
at the place,
side. Buta certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he
was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, and went
to him, and bound up wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and
his
set him on his own

and brought him to an inn, and took care
beast,
of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two
pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, "Take care
of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when come again,
I
I will repay thee."
From this brief account, we may not know what the

Samaritan looked like or what clothes he wore; but from
barely a dozen actions (count them) there has been created
a picture of a good, charitableman which has lasted nearly
two thousand years.
This is an extremely simple example. What do you do
when your character is involved, complicated? Well, take
Hamlet, one of the most complex characters ever created.
He may talk and soliloquize in superb poetry, but he shows
in one action after another the anguish and self-reproach
he feels for balancing on the raw knife-blade of indecision.
Instead of facing his uncle directly with the murder of his
father, Hamlet causes a play of the crime to be performed.
The play may have "caught the conscience of the king,"
but essentially it was an act of Hamlet's to postpone de-
cision. Again, as Claudius prays, Hamlet stands ready to
kill yet afraid to kill. He goes to his mother's chamber
and berates her and himself, by doing so in one of the
bitterest scenes in literature, diffusing the furious point
of his rage that could not be brought to specific violence
against the guilty king. It is as much what Hamlet does as
what he says that gives this play its classic fascination for
actors, readers, and audiences.
Now back to the writing problem. You have introduced
your character. You know that you must show him in

action that will reveal what kind of person he is. All right,
what actions? How do you choose? Certainly, you can't
show every twitch or move. To find the answer, go back
to real people again. Suppose your character is waiting im-
patiently for a bus. How do real people wait impatiently
for a bus? They crane their necks and look down the road.
They look at their watches. They consult timetables. They
pace nervously back and forth. Or, they sit, stoically,
smoking a cigarette. Or, they try to read a magazine, look-
ing up from the page with quick inquiry every time motor
noises sound close. And so forth. Ask yourself about your
character. Is he the kind of person who waits (i) patiently,
(2)nervously, (3) tensely, (4) dumbly, (5) et cetera? When
you have decided what your character will do while he
waits for a bus, dig back into your real-life observation to
seewhat you know about such persons; or, combine what
you know an action here, a mannerism there into a con-
sistent pattern for your created person.
Unlike people, characters can't waste motions;
real
whatever they do, even if it is aimless idleness, has to con-
tribute to the greater effect of a story or a sketch. Your
reader is interested not only in the people you create but
in what happens to them; and you won't keep your reader's
interest if
you spend too much time talking about your
characters before you have them do something which be-
gins to move a story toward a climax. Therefore, you need

to be careful to choose actions which reveal as much of
your characters as possible and which, at the same time,

are necessary actions in the unfolding of a story. Here is
an excellent example of a scene which not only introduces
a character but tells you a great deal about him simply
by showing you some of the actions he performs. (This is

the beginning of a fine short story, "Champion," by Ring
Lardner.)
ioo You Create People
First Knockout*
Midge Kelly scored his first knockout when he was seventeen.
The knockee was brother Connie, three years his junior and
his
a cripple. The purse was a half dollar given to the younger Kelly
by a lady whose electric had just missed bumping his soul from
his frail little body.
Connie did not know Midge was in the house, else he never
would have risked laying the prize on the arm of the least com-
fortable chair in the room, the better to observe its shining beauty.
As Midge entered from the boy covered the
kitchen, the crippled
coin with his hand, but the movement lacked the speed requisite
to escape his brother's quick eye.
"Watcha got there?" demanded Midge.

1
"Nothin ," said Connie.
"You're a one-legged liar!" said Midge.
He strode over to his brother's chair and grasped the hand
that concealed the coin.
"Let loosel" he ordered.
Connie began to cry.

"Let loose and shut
up your noise/' said the elder, and jerked
his brother's hand from the chair arm.
The coin fell onto the bare floor. Midge pounced on it. His weak
mouth widened a triumphant smile.
in
"Nothing huh?" he said. "All right, if it's nothin' you don't want
it."
"Give that back," sobbed the younger.

"I'll give you a red nose, you little sneak! Where'd you steal it?"
"I didn't steal it. It's mine. A lady give it to me after she pretty
near hit me with a car."

"It's a crime she missed you," said Midge.
Reprinted from "Champion" in How to Write Short Stories by

*
Ring Lardner; used by permission of the publishers, Charles Scrib-

ner's Sons.
Midge started for the front door. The cripple picked up his
crutch, rose from his chair with difficulty, and, still sobbing, came
toward Midge. The latter heard him and stopped.
"You better stay where you're at," he said.
"I want my money," cried the boy.
"I know what you want," said Midge.
Doubling up the fist that held the half dollar, he landed with
all his strength on his brother's mouth. Connie fell to the floor with
a thud, the crutch tumbling on top of him. Midge stood beside the
prostrate form.
"Is that enough?" he said. "Or do you want this, too?"
And he kicked him in the crippled leg.
"I guess that'll hold you," he said.
There was no response from the boy on the floor. Midge looked
at him a moment, then at the coin in his hand, and then went out
into the street, whistling.
Action, you will agree, is revealing. But action is not an

end in itself. Any stock character, or "type" character, can
be shown in a number of revealing actions, yet the picture
of him will be stilted and oversimplified. In past centuries
(or in today's movies) it was the fashion for dramatists to

create characters after a "humour" a humour being an
outstanding character trait, an oddity, or some one ruling

aspect of personality consistently displayed by a person.
Thus, a sullen "humour" was easily dramatized by giving
it two arms, two legs, a voice, and a steady disposition to
be sullen in any circumstance. A glutton was always
gluttonous. A philosopher was always philosophical. Using
all for the writer to move
just one trait, it was no trick at
his character about and to let him talk: he was only one-
dimensional and could not possibly complicate matters by

being an individual.
In commedies the greatest skyll is this lightly to touch
All thynges to the quicke; and eke to frame eche person so,
That by his common talke, you may his nature rightly know.
The olde man is sober, the yonge man rashe, the lover triumphyng
in joyes,
The matron grave, the harlat wilde, and full of wanton toyes.
Whiche all in one course they no wise doo agree;
So correspondent to their kinde their speeches ought to bee.*
But
if
you want to present well-rounded characters who
will be complex enough to be interesting, you have to
allow your reader to see them from several points of view.
You will need to show how one character affects another,
for instance.As in real life, people are known not only by
what they do and say but by the effect they have on other
people. Suppose you want to write about some man who is
a powerful, ruthless employer and administrator. He runs
with hard-driving efficiency. He is slow to praise
his factory
an employee, quick to fire anyone who disagrees with
him. What would be a good method of revealing him in
addition to showing him in action? One way would be
to let the reader seehim through the eyes of some of his
employees. How
about a scene in which the employees
discuss the boss or something the boss has done? That's
what often happens in real life, and it is a good device for
a writer, too.
I hardly need to point out dialogue as another device.
Talk always (or nearly always) an indicator of character.
is
And it is not only what a person says that is important: it

is the
way of saying it, the circumstances in which some-
thing is said, the timing of a remark or a conversation, and
* Richard Edward, Damon and Pythias, acted before Queen Eliza-
beth, 1564. Quoted from The English Drama, An Anthology ooo-
1642, ed. by E. W. Parks and R. C. Beatty, W. W. Norton & Co., Inc,,
*935 P- ">*
the cadence of the talk. An inexperienced writer will
usually make his characters talk too much. But the same
principle applies to talk as to action: do you need it to
reveal character or to move the action forward? If you
don't need delete it. (It is worth pointing out here that
it,
dialogue is a very dependable device for changing pace

or mood. It's amazing how a page will come to life when
it is broken up with talk.)
The subject of creating character is nearly inexhaustible.

And each time you write a story or a sketch, the char-
acter problem has its own special difficulties. Rather than
work out here too many different devices and methods, it
is more useful for
you if I suggest basic principles to you
and leave you to wrestle out their execution. That is what
you will have to do in any case, whether you have at your
elbow one book or fifty books on the subject.
Up to now I have only hinted at the most important
element in writing about people, and that is your own re-
lation to them. You know them better than anyone else
can. You know them so well that you cannot only talk
about them, you can let your own voice be heard through
them. You even know them well enough that you are able
to eavesdrop on the slow murmur of their thoughts; and
you can show your reader clearly the path from the
thoughts to the resulting actions (a thing that is
impossible
to demonstrate in real life.)
This is more than the mere selection and shaping of
physical evidence. No matter how carefully you observe
people or how shrewdly you choose and emphasize traits
and no matter how convincingly you make
characteristics,
a character talk and act, in spite of the plausibility of your
settings and problems, unless your characters have what
I must vaguely call "temperament" or, with equal vague-
ness, a sense of inner life stirring underneath their observ-
able beings, they will be flat and thin and not quite "real."
This extra something is you, the writer, revealing your
own attitudes toward life and people, reflecting your emo-
tional temper in the varied life of your writing.
Inevitably, there is
part of yourself in every character
you create. This is whatômefcritrcoirean~l>y claimmg~that
most fiction is basically autobiographical. Most good
writers readily admit that, in one fashion or another, in
their characters they are writing about themselves. You
can't help adding part of your own personality to a char-
acter which is, after all, the result of your observation and
thought and feeling.

This may give you a feeling of Olympian omnipotence.
These are my characters, you may say with some truth;
I'll have them do this, and feel that, and think the other,
to suit my purposes. To a certain extent, naturally, this

iswhat you must do. Yet here is just the point at which you
should be most wary. You can't let your characters turn
into You's. Neither can you allow your reader to sus-
little
pecttoo oftenthat you are squatting behind each page,

pulling the strings for your puppets. This is a quick way
to create characters in stock sizes, without giving them the
interesting complexity that is in real people.

One of the best ways to learn to create characters who
are not mere reflections of yourself is to begin, as usual,
with real people whom you know well. Choose a close
friend or a relative for a subject. Draw a word portrait of
him, being as accurate and as unbiased as you can about
his chief characteristics and mannerisms. When you feel
sure that you know him and when you are sure that a
reader, from your portrait, would know him too then sit
back and try to invent some reasonable situation in which
to place your character. Suppose he is a brash, extroverted,
noisy, good-hearted fellow whose idea of a fine time is to

spend an evening in a smoky hall playing the piano, drink-
ing beer, and matching harmonies with assorted convivial
baritones and tenors. You have been with him on many a
rousing beer-hall spree and you know how he acts and

almost the way he thinks in these circumstances.
But now try to imagine this same extrovert in another
setting: he's been trapped by his girl into going to a
formal afternoon concert and tea at the local conservatory
of music. You, his friend, can no longer predict how he
will act, but you can imagine. Also, you have been to
formal concerts and teas yourself. You know how you
feel. It isreasonable to assume, isn't it, that your friend
will have some of the same feelings about formal teas that
you have? Therefore, the sketch you would write of your

friend at the formal tea would have elements of yourself
in it your feelings. But those feelings would be subordi-
nated and changed and molded into the personality of your
friend because you have to show his reactions to the
feelings.
This sublimation of yourself is even more difficult when
you create a wholly fictional character. Let's see what the
creative thought process might be in this case. Suppose,
out of the bits and pieces of your observations of real peo-
ple, you have assembled the person of a middle-aged
schoolteachera professor of romance languages at a small
college. In your composite you have skillfully combined
the characteristics into a plausible harmony. He is a tall,
shambling man, and he walks with an absent-minded

looseness, as though his body were going in one direction
and his mind in another. He has a gentle face; the features
seem to melt softly into one another until there is nothing
about his visage that catches the eye. He is neither a good
teacher nor a bad one. His students don't particularly like
io6 You Create People
himand they don't dislike him, either. For twenty-two
years he has read the same lectures, showed the same small
animated enthusiasms at exactly the same passages in Don
Quixote and the same dialogues in Corneille and Racine.
For twenty-two years he has lived in the same rambling,
clapboard house at the corner of Elm and College Streets.
All this time, during the long years of teaching and
through generations of students, he has been secretly and

passionately at work translating legends and poems of
some of the medieval French ballade writers. His whole
heart and mind have gone into the work. He dreams of
the reception his translations will have among the scholars.
He hopes no, he knows that he has managed, at last, to
transmit the freshness and vigor of the originals into an-
other language. At last his book is published. He waits in
a fever for the first reviews in the journals. They arrive. He
sees:"Competent, but pedantic." "Adequate, though miss-
ing the spirit of the originals." "A pedestrian performance,
losing in translation the poetic fervor of the great lines."
"A dull but useful addition to the body of English trans-
lations of period literature." Howdoes he feel, this pro-
fessor of yours? How do you transmit the disappointment,
the cumulating sense of failure, perhaps the hopeless
recognition of his own futility?

How would you feel in his place?Here, intimately, is
your relation to your character. Re-create the circum-
stances. Project yourself into the twenty-two years of striv-
ing, of hope. Then realize that it is not you who have

undergone the disillusionment, but another person en-
tirely. Once you have put yourself in his place and felt
with him and of him, once you have savored the feelings
forwhat they are, then you must withdraw to a place apart,
leaving the feelings behind leaving a part of yourself be-
hind, to be modified and changed and made a part of the
gentle professor who had to meet the failure of his life
work. The question is not, How would you have met this
failure? but, How would he meet it?
This is a very difficult thing to do. Your character be-

longs to you, and you feel for him and with him but in
the end, you must let him stand up on his own feet, to be
a person in his own right. The feelings and inner thoughts
which you have pried out of yourself to give to him no
longer belong to you. This released part of yourself is like
a ball that you have thrown: it has left your hand, and you
are content to watch it from a distance to see where it
lands.
You need to nourish a sense of humor about the process.
By humor I do not mean that you should laugh at it
at least not too often. You take your characters from
reality, which, because you are a humanbeing, involves

you emotionally. You put yourself into your characters,
and this weaves you emotionally a second time into the
process. But a sense of humor allows you to step aside
enough to see what is going on it lets you, therefore, cope
with the creation as an artist instead of as a partisan.
Imagine, for one more example, that you want to create
a character based on your observation of a local politician.
You have watched this man in action for several years. He's
a town fixture. Everybody knows him because he's a
ubiquitous glad-hander who manages to have his nose in
nearly every slice of the civic pie. As you

see him, he's
ignorant, ambitious, small-minded, a practiced liar, and a

thorough humbug. You despise everything he stands for.
It makes you writhe him elected year after year.
to see
You wonder bitterly a supposedly intelligent electorate
if
really knows what a venial character he is. You are per-

sonally wound up in this man with your emotions, aren't
you? In real life you wouldn't cross the street to spit in
io8 You Create People
his eye, would you? Yet if you want to write about him, or
someone like him, you can't afford to be emotionally
wound up. You need to resist the temptation to moralize,
to scorn, or to condemn. This would be one-sided writing,
clouded too much with your own feelings. The creative
writer seeks to understand rather than to judge. And here
is where you need the sense of humor, indispensable for
seeing things in their proper proportion. Instead of being

angry at the noisy little fool of a politician, you can laugh
gently at him (to yourself), and thus see through his bom-
bast and fraud. You can be tolerant, and therefore under-
standing. And, most importantly, a sense of humor allows
you to take pleasure in people, no matter what they do
and regardless of your private opinions of them. People
are a part of life. As a writer you are immersed in life up
to your neck, not only to live it yourself but to project it
for other people.
PROBLEMS
Describe your first impressions of someone you have met
recently.
Think of someone whom you know very well and try to de-
scribe him
for a reader only through dialoguethrough what
he says and how he says it. Assume that you are overhearing a
conversation but can't see the people talking.
In three sentences or less,give thumbnail impressions of four

different people as they would be revealed by: (i) opening a
door, (2) being spotted in a crowd, (3) walking by, (4) sleeping,
(5) talking. These impressions should give your reader some
indication of the character of the person you're describing.
Using only people you know or have seen as models, describe

in a hundred words or less, (i) an old man walking,
(2) a fat
girl running, (3) a teen-age boy smoking a pipe, (4) a three-
year-old child playing in a sand box, (5) a woman staring out
of a window with avid curiosity, (6) a twelve-year-old boy
coming into the house for lunch.
Using actions only, describe someone whom you (i) like, (2)
dislike. The job here is to reveal character through action,
keeping straight description to a minimum.
Using both description and dialogue, re-create two middle-

aged women gossiping at a card party.
SUGGESTIONS
Any other ideas you have for describing people are use-
ful for this problem.
(a) It is helpful to write three or four different

versions of
the same thing in writing about people. Try to reveal
character through talk or action or straight description
or combinations.
(b) Rewrite thoroughly and exhaustively. Eight or ten
rewrites per problem are not too many.
(c) It is
good practice to fill a notebook with a "rogues*
gallery" of character sketches. Try writing about two or
three dozen people whom you know paint "pictures" of
them in words.
(d) Another helpful thinking device is to think out a char-

acter, as though for a story, and then keeping your situ-
ations as reasonable as possible invent all kinds of situ-
ations for the character, trying to determine what he
would do in the circumstances. Make lists of his probable
actions.
EXAMPLES
These brief examples, from the opening lines of two
by Stephen Vincent BeneX will give
different short stories
you further hints about how characters first meet their

readers.
uo You Create People
Freedom's a Hard-bought Thing*

A long time ago, in timesgone by, in slavery times, there was
a man named Cue. I want you to think about him. I've got a
reason.
He got born like the cotton in the boll or the rabbit in the pea
patch. There wasn't any fine doings when he got born, but his
mammy was glad to have him. Yes. He didn't get born in the Big
House, or the overseer's house, or any place where the bearing
was easy or the work light. No, Lord. He came out of his mammy
in a hand's cabin one sharp winter, and about the first thing
field
he remembered was his mammy's face and the taste of a piece of

bacon rind and the light and shine of the pitch pine fire up the
chimney. Well, now, he got born and there he was.
O'Halloran's Luckt
They were strong men built the Big Road, in the early days of
America, and it was the Irish did it.
My grandfather, Tim O'Halloran, was a young man then, and
wild. He could swing a pick all day and dance all night, if there
was a fiddler handy; and if there was a girl to be pleased he
pleased her, for he had the tongue and the eye. Likewise, if there
was a man to be stretched, he could stretch him with the one blow.
I later on in years when he was thin and whiteheaded,
saw him
but youth he was not so. A thin, whiteheaded man would
in his
have had little chance, and they driving the Road to the West.
It was men cleared the plains and bored through the
two-fisted
mountains. They came in the thousands to do it from every county
in Ireland; and now the names are not known. But it's over their
graves you pass, when you ride in the Pullman's. And Tim O'Hal-
loran was one of them, six feet high and solid as the Rock of
Cashel when he stripped to the skin.
* From Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Eenet, published by Rine-

hart & Company, Inc. Copyright, 1940, by Stephen Vincent BeneX
f From Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Benet, published by Rine-
hart & Company, Inc. Copyright, 1938, by Stephen Vincent Bene*t
6. Ton Shape Tour Material
The mind considers the object in whole and in part,

in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the
balance of its contemplates the form of the ob-
parts,
ject, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the
mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the
object.
JAMES JOYCE
.T ORthe last five chapters we have been experimenting

with some o the raw materials of writing. Now, like
prospectors with sacks full of ore, we need to take our
material to the smelter to separate the valuable and the
useful from the dross.
This analogy holds up for the writer, too. If you are a
good observer, if your mind and memory are well stocked
with the stuff of living, then you bring your material, all
unassorted, to the writing table and to the blank white
page, where you refine it and shape it and turn it into a
well-made thing. You can't use everything. You choose and
discard. You select and throw away.
You
select. This is standard advice, and you will find it
in most books on the art of writing. But how you select,
and what to select are very subtle problems. I am afraid I
cannot give you any solutions to these problems, though
there are some general principles that might pass for
solutions. Iwould rather set up some problems and let
you solve them for yourself, since that's what you will
have to do anyway. As a starter, suppose you read carefully
111
1 12 You Shape Your Material
the following quotation from an essay by the American
novelist,Frank Norris.* This anecdote has in it the seeds
of a key principle in writing. Ponder it long and remember
it, because you will rarely find better advice.
Once upon a
time had occasion to buy so uninteresting a thing
I
as a soup ladle. The salesman at the silversmith's was oblig-

silver
ing and for my inspection brought forth quite an array of ladles.

But my purse was flaccid, anaemic, and must pick and choose I
with all to make a brave

the discrimination in the world. I wanted
showing with my gift to get a great deal for my money. went I
through a world of soup ladles ladles with gilded bowls, with

embossed handles, with chased arabesques, but there were none
to my taste. "Or perhaps," says the salesman, "you would care to
look at something like this," and he brought out a ladle that was
as plain and unadorned as the unclouded sky and about as
beautiful. Of all the others, this was most to my liking. But the
price! ah, thatanaemic purse; and I must put it from me! It was
nearly double the cost of any of the rest. And when I asked why,
the salesman said:
"You ware the flaws of the mate-
see, in this highly ornamental
rial and you can cover up a blow-hole or the like by
don't show,
wreaths and beading. But this plain ware has got to be the very
best. Every defect is apparent."
On an argument for simplicity.

the surface of it, this is
But more than suggests an answer to the major

this, it
question you should ask of every piece of writing you

produce: ''What do I want this piece of writing to do?"
Perhaps you haven't considered that writing has to do
something. Many beginning writers think it is enough for
their writing merely to be. What do I mean by do? What
is the function of creative writing?
I suggest this as true: creative writing must have an

effect. And I further suggest that the effect is usually emo-
*
Reprinted by permission from "Simplicity in Art" in Frank Norris,
The Responsibilities of the Novelist, Doubleday and Co., Inc,, 1903.
You Shape Your Material 1 1
3
tional, moving the reader

to recognition, sympathy, laugh-
passion, or pleasure. Creative writing

ter, fear, nostalgia,
enlists the reader as a participant at least to a degree.
(This does not exclude so-called expository writing from

being "creative." Informative or persuasive writing can
give the reader pleasure from the skill of its arrangement
or from the cumulative force of its argument, without
being, itself, "emotional.") I must make one crucial quali-
fication immediately: to say that creative writing should
have an emotional effect is not the same as saying that
is emotional writing. Or, to put it another
creative writing
way, you do not need to treat your subject emotionally in

order to produce an emotional effect in your reader. But
I will havemore to say about this shortly. The problem
now is:what must your writing do to produce the desired
effect? How do you go about it?
Let's begin, as usual, with an example. What, in real
life, affects your feelings? Suppose you are sitting in your
living room reading the newspaper. You run across this:
Child Killed by Truck
While playing a game of tag in the
street, John Doe, Jr., 4, son of Mr.
and Mrs. John Doe of 21 First
Street, was struck and killed by a
passing truck. He died in the am-

bulance on the way to Memorial
Hospital. The driver of the truck,
Joe Jones, said that the boy had
run suddenly into the street be-
tween two cars parked along the
curb. Witnesses said that the truck
was moving slowly at the time of the
accident. The driver was not held.
Your reaction to this is probably a kind of generalized

pity. What a shame that a little boy should be killed. And
1
14 You Shape Your Material
how badly the truck driver must feel. It's too bad that
children have to play in the streets. Dangerous business.
And you turn the page to the sports section to see how
the Dodgers made out in last night's game. This isn't
callous of you. The killing of the child was presented too
impersonally for you to feel it strongly. You, the reader,

weren't enlisted or involved in the thing, and your emo-
tions, therefore, were only vaguely stirred.
But what you had been there? What if you had seen
if
it yourself? That's something else again. There's Johnny's
house. The kids are shouting and running on the front

lawn. You can hear a radio going somewhere in the back
of the house. A little girl stands up against a tree, her arm
over her eyes. She is counting in a childish singsong,
"... seven, eight, nine, ten! here I come, ready or not!"
She turns around, looking for victims to tag. She sees
Johnny. He's crouched behind the back bumper of a car
parked in front of his house. She cries, "I see you, Johnny!"
and starts to run after him. He laughs, high and excited.
He runs. You hear, suddenly, the noise of a motor, the

hissing screech of air brakes, the blurt of a horn, a tearing
shriek of fright. You see the truck lurch to a stop, the
driver's horrified face. Out of the corner of your eye you
see the front door of Johnny's house open. A woman is
coming wiping her hands on an apron, looking toward
out,
the curb. You see a little body crumpled on the road. It
squirms and makes faint mewing noises. There is an
instant when motion seems suspended and sound seems
dead. Then, around the scene, people whirl and eddy, and
you hear the gasping sobs of a woman.
Is your reaction to this generalized? Is pity vague? Is
terror academic? Probably not. Obviously, it is the thing
that happens, more than what is said about it, that pro-
duces emotional effect. The task of the creative writer is to
select those happenings or those elements of a scene which
You Shape Your Material 1
15
produce most sharply the effect he desires. So, we are back

to the big question again: what do you want your writing
to do? If, as I did in the description above, you want to
move your reader to terror or pity, then you select the
elementsthe substantives of the scene which you calcu-
late will most effectively move him to have those feelings.
Obviously, there was much more to this accident scene than

the things I wrote down. It was a lovely day, for instance,
and the afternoon sunshine was warm and bright. This
was a typical suburban neighborhood: a tree-lined street;
big comfortable houses set well back from the sidewalk,
each with broad front lawn; cars parked in driveways
its
or in front of houses all down the street; a glimpse of a
woman hanging out the washing in the back yard of a

house across the street. But I didn't need these details to
tell you about the accident. I wanted you to get into it
quickly. I wanted it to shock you. If my aim had been to

have you feel a slowly growing sense of coming tragedy, if
I had wanted the scene to produce gradual horror rather
than shock, then I would have selected other details to
talk about. I would have given you a glimpse of the truck
as it turned into Johnny's street. I would have built up
the happy, careless game of tag. I would have shown you,
perhaps, Johnny's mother. Possibly I would have made

the incident more poignant by telling you a little about
Johnny's family: he was an only child, his older brother

had been killed in the war, his mother's life had been
bruised by one tragedy after another, and so forth.
I chose this melodramatic incident because it demon-
strates crudely and directly what selection does to produce

effect. Let me repeat this because it's important: what you
select depends upon what you want the writing to do.
Suppose, to choose a less violent example, you want to

set a scene of rural calm and peace. You want your reader
to feel the slow serenity of early evening as he would feel
it with you, sitting on the veranda of a farmhouse and
looking across the pastures to the darkening hills. There is
so much to see! So much to describe!
There always is. What do you do now? Do you marshal
your vocabulary and bring up battalions of adjectives?
They make an impressive array: still, quiet, calm, serene,
lovely, slow, gentle, peaceful, hushed, muted, subdued,
hazy, restful, soothing, sleepy, dusky, beautiful. Yet all
these words, surcharged though they are with feeling,
don't tell your reader anything. They don't move him or
involve him in the scene you want to create. What are you
going to pick out of the scene to make him feel the way
you want him to?
Instead of answering this question, let's re-create the
problem; then you can figure out your own solution.

QUESTION: What do you want this piece of writing to
do?
ANSWER: I want the reader "to feel the slow serenity of
early evening as he would feel it sitting on the veranda
of the farmhouse and looking across the pastures to the
darkening hills."
QUESTION: Do you want the description to be long or
short?
ANSWER: Just long enough to be convincing long
enough to set the scene for a subsequent action in a story.
QUESTION: What are the terms of description?
ANSWER: I can select from six general sources; and they
are the things I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and my own
reactions (feelings). Some of these are:
SIGHT
The red flush of sky ... hills almost black against horizon . . .
a touch of lambent green light seems to hover above the skyline

, the pearly gray of the light . .
. . the cattle in the far pasture
.
are hard to see, they graze slowly toward the woodlot ... the
sheep clustered around the big elm tree in the close pasture . .
17
can still see the black faces, woolly backs black silhouette of . . .
a horse ... the warm red color of the barn wall dew glistens . . .
on the long grass by the chicken house the white fences look . . .
even whiter than usual ... the dog lies at my feet ... the first
pale winking of fireflies ... the glow of a pipe bowl and a faint
gray riffle of smoke which floats and catches the last light . . .
the evening star . . . the flitting black shapes of birds against the
sky . . . the soft weathered texture of a stone wall . . . the slow,
easy motion of the rocking chair next to me ...
SOUND
The occasional muted clunk of cowbells once in a while the . . .
stirring of sheep and the small baa of a lamb ... a horse nickers,
far-off, the sound seems to come out of the ground ... the rustle
and sleepy-drawn-out cluck of roosting chickens . . . faint creak of
rocking chair . . . the dog sighs, a long breath ... a steer moos,
low and muffled across the . . . valley, faintly, the yelping of a
dog ... a frog sounds, oooonn/c . . . ooonnfc, deep bass . . . and
the melodic thread of the peepers . . .
SMELL
The barnsmell, diluted by distance fresh-cut grass the . . . . . .
warm, amber smell of hay the sharp, nutty smell of tobacco . . .
smoke . spicy, apple pie odor from the kitchen ... the light,
. .
sweet hint of clover . . .
TASTE
Fresh, rich taste of new-lit tobacco . . . the full aftertaste of
dinner . . .
TOUCH
Drowsy-tired . . . the sag of used muscles . . . clean crispness of
fresh clothes . . . faint damp-cool breeze . . . warm pipe bowl in
the palm . . . comfortable support of chair against back . . .

gen-
eral well-being . . .
FEELINGS
been a good day
It's seven tons of hay baled and in the barn . . .
. number five cut and ready for tomorrow

. . cattle look fine . . .
. what a gorgeous evening ... can almost hear the "golden

. . I
found of horns in the west'* evening like this would make any* . . .
body feel poetic . . . it's good to feel so relaxed . . . well, we've
earned it, anyway . . . mind always feels calm and free when it's
satisfied with itself . . . it's so peaceful I can't help contrasting

with the city... no raucous screeches here, no raw fumes, no
... so fine an evening you want to stretch out
intrusive noises
your hands and hold it, just the way it is ...

This list represents just a part of your "raw materials"
some results of perceptive observation and feeling. The
list takes longer to read than it does to think out; your
mind can flick over this many facts with startling speed
and thoroughness. And I'll venture the assertion that a
summing up, somewhat like this (though not so ordered
and self-conscious) is the first action of a creative imagina-
tion at work on the stuff of life.
Now you need to sift the material. You know what you
want the writing to do, and the question is: what method
will do it best? You have a number of choices, any one of
them useful.
1. You can try to discover whether the scene has any one
dominant impression a sight or a sound, for instance-
that seems to represent the whole picture. For ex-
ample, it was
quiet and peaceful, yet not dead silent.
What accentuated the quietness? What one thing
made the quiet seem most apparent?
2. Perhaps your impression of serenity came from an
accumulation of separate details, none of them related
except in your mind. Of the accumulated details, what
ones seem most important? How are they linked to-
gether?
3. Or maybe the total impact of the scene focuses itself in
a single emotional reaction in yourself. What is the
reaction? In what terms will you describe it?
4. Or does the whole impression of the scene contrast
with a remembered impression of another, less peace-
ful scene? What are the high points of contrast?
19
There are other possibilities, of course, but these will be
enough to start on. And when you have finished with the
process, you may discover that all this material has refined
itselfinto a single sentence or phrase or image. Or, the
description of sunset and evening might be so suffused

with your own feeling that it nearly turns into poetry.
do not need the greater intensity of
Ordinarily, you
poetic image. (Again, it depends upon the purpose of the
writing.) You need only to be convincing or lifelike.
One of the reasons why good writing is such grinding
hard work, why it demands so much from the writer, is
that the process I have so generally described takes place

in the creation of almost every sentence, every image,
every small scene. Naturally, it doesn't occur in this ex-

tended, halting fashionat least not all the time. Even-
tually, it becomes a habit of mind. (As I have said or
implied repeatedly, creatiyejvnterj^^
It is not only the selection of significant details that
is needed. A longer piece of writing short story or ex-

tended sketch or narrative poem has to have a cumula-
tive growth; it must move toward a single, coherent effect
through actions, incidents, and the unfolding of various

scenes.This means that every action a character makes,
every word he speaks, every glimpse of scenery that you
give your reader has to contribute to this effect. Now
think back to the anecdote about choosing the soup ladle
that I
quoted at the beginning of the chapter; let us apply
it to the more complicated problems of an extended piece
of writing.
Applied to writing, that anecdote said: it is what you

have to say and the sequence or form in which you shape
it that is crucial. Structure, form, sequence by these a
piece of writing stands or falls.No skill with words, no
brilliant diction or eloquence can repair flaws in structure.
i2o You Shape Your Material
Like the chasing and arabesques on the soup ladle, a
writer's adjectives, elaborate phrases, or clever images will
only cover up and obscure the facts. The facts must speak
for themselves. It is less the creative writer's task to com-
ment upon them than to present them.
Suppose you wish to write about a scene of heart-
tugging beauty, full of emotional appeal. Perhaps the

setting is a great cathedral. There is music and the soaring
voices of a choir. The whole scene cumulates for you with
such perfection that your response is passionate and
affirmative. You feel close to tears, your heart rises in your
throat. Will you say, as an author, "Oh, how magnificent!"?
Will you put into the mouth of a character, "How lovely,
how You will do this if you are more con-
beautiful!"?
cerned with your own feelings than you are for your
reader's participation. For him, you need to select the
facts, the substantives that will stir him as you were stirred
and only those which will do the job. The great, warm
flare ofa stained glass window. The tiny, golden thread
of sunlight on the altar. The surging harmonies of voices
is it the Hallelujah chorus? and under them the son-
orous organ. Glimpse of an old man, eyes closed, face
uplifted. The bowed head of a woman. And a sense of
exaltation soaring, like blown incense, to the vaulted dim-
ness above. Perhaps these are your substantives. Let them
speak for themselves. Do you look at a Rembrandt through

colored glasses? Would a giant sequoia be more effective
hung with neon lights?
The need to cut out all elaboration and author-
editorializing is at the root of the problem As
of selection.
a further guide to what you select, here are four suggestive
questions which apply, I think, to any type of writing,
whether it be simple description or the re-enactment of
desperate tragedy.
You Shape Your Material 1 2 1
1. Are the you choose relevant to the subject? That

facts
is, commensurate with the size or aspect of
are they
the subject? Is an image too overblown, too strenu-
ous for the mild aspect of the fact? Do you say,
"colossal" when you really mean "fairly large"?
2. Are the facts Do they reveal a
you choose necessary?
character trait that the reader needs to understand
a story? Are they vital to the reader's vision of a scene?
Do they move the action of an incident forward? Are
they so necessary that a scene or character or action
will be crippled without them? (This is the real test.
A piece of writing should be so tight that you can
neither add anything or delete anything without spoil-
ing it.)
3. Are the facts you choose probable? Given the other

elements of your subject, are the facts likely? Would
a character who has acted in one fashion be likely to
act in such-and-such another fashion? Is this action
likely to happen as a result of that one? Is a sequence

of events reasonable in the context you have created?
Is the climax of a series of actions a natural result of
what has gone before?

4. Are the facts you choose dramatic? Do your facts show
things or only tell them?
Suppose you are writing a sketch of an action; you want

to tell someone else about an automobile accident you
were in, and you want to create for this reader all the
shock and fright and smashing suddenness of the crack-up.
Do you need to spend a page or two telling where you had
come from, what you did there, where you were going, and
why? Probably not: these facts would not be relevant to
the accident itself. If there were several other people in the
car, do you need to describe each one of them carefully?
Probably not: the descriptions would not be necessary to
re-create what happened in the accident unless some
specific act of one of the people had a direct effect upon
you or upon the total scene itself. Would you need to
analyze and describe your own feelings in the midst of the
crash? No: it is hardly probable that in the midst of the
accident's confusion and terror you had any time for more
than instinctive reactions. Above all, you would need to
recall and select and record those tangibles of sight and
sound and touch that would help the reader participate
as closely as words will let him in experience as you went
it.
through
you write a short story, for instance, you need to check
If
every element in it by the four measuring sticks listed

above.A story is, by definition, a thing in which something
happens. Characters squirm out of dilemmas or overcome
problems. They perform a series of actions and come to
some kind of conclusion. Since stories usually begin in a
writer's mind with character, the first job is to think out a
plausible person. (See Chapter 5.) Now you can begin to

use the four measurements as you think out a story plot.
What sort of thing would be apt to happen to a character
like this? (Is it probable?) Is he saying and doing things
that fit his personality? (Is it relevant?) Does he have to talk
as much as he does, or struggle as much as he does? (Is it
necessary?) Are his actions the best or most illuminating
you can contrive? (Is it dramatic?) Remember that the
greatest faults of beginning writers are those of omission
they do not omit enough. (Whenever you catch yourself
admiring a patch of your own writing, be suspicious of it.
It should belong to the story or the sketch, not to you.)
Another useful criterion of selection, especially for
story writing, is this: Is there conflict or dilemma which
needs resolution? If you have a choice between an action
which is merely positive and an action which makes your
characters struggle, choose the latter in most cases. It is
true in real life that trouble brings out the best (or worst)
in people. Why shouldn't the same be true for fiction?
Which is better for the creative writer to say:
She is on a diet, so she didn't eat the chocolate candy that was
passed to her.
or
Susan took the candy plate with a smile, but inwardly she yearned.
Chocolate creams, slick and sweet in the centers, fudge centers,
thick and creamy underneath their chocolate jackets, crisp al-
monds. Her eyes hungered after the plate as she passed

. . . it
to her neighbor. "No thank you," she said.
This is a very real conflict, as those who have to refuse
candy will testify. But the principle holds good whether

it concerns a foolish little conflict of desire over a
piece of
candy or the struggle of a man to light a fire in order to
save himself from death by freezing, as in Jack London's
fine story, "To Build a Fire."
The choice of details depends mostly upon your sub-
ject and the over-all effect you are working toward. In gen-
is better to select a detail which
eral, it points up a contrast
than one which emphasizes a similarity. (This is a
part of
the technique of making images, which I will discuss more
fully in the next chapter.) Just as a minor example and
setting aside for a moment any consideration of the gen-
eral tone of the thing you are writing compare the fol-
lowing statements for contrast. One of them you could

find in any standard murder mystery tale; the other is one
of Henry David Thoreau's delightful witticisms:
The circumstantial evidence was very strong because his finger-
prints were found on the murder weapon.
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a

trout in the milk.
1
You can go on to apply this idea of contrast to innumerable
actions and situations. When does a gunshot sound most
loudly? When it is most quiet. Where do you see luxury
and wealth most apparent? When it is next door to poverty.
When does violence seem most shocking? When it occurs
suddenly in a context of mildness. When is lust most re-
vealing? When it despoils innocence. Where is ambition
most ruthless? When it
tramples the inoffensive. And so
on. There is no point in my working out examples for you
or quoting stories and excerpts which show this. They
won't do you any good when you come to the problem
yourself. It will be enough that you recognize the idea
of contrast as a useful principle of selection.
There are some final considerations of selection (though
I have most certainly not touched all of them) which will
come when you have completed a piece of writing. The
thing is done. First draft. Hot and smoking from the type-
writer or the pen. Go away and leave it alone for a week
this also is standard advice then try to come back to it as
though you had never seen it before. (What do you think

your reader does?) Assuming that your story or sketch or
whatever is approximately what you want it to be and
you're lucky if it is look at it structurally again for these
things: pace and clarity. Just for the moment, disregard the
language; it is easier to fix sloppy wording than it is to
repair faulty structure. Concentrate on the facts you have

selected. Is one action early in your story too bulky? Does
it take too long? Does it slow
up the pace where your nar-
rative should be fast? Maybe you selected the wrong action.
Or maybe you told the right action in too much detail. Or,
later on in the story, does your chief character solve his
crucialproblem too quickly? Does he say enough of the
it clear
right things? Is why he does one thing instead of
another? Did you select the clearest elements of the scene?
Many of your selection problems will almost solve them-

selves, ifyou take toward your reader the same kind of
sensitive common-sense and courteous attitude you would
use toward a respected conversational partner. When you
talk face to face, you are whether you are aware of it or
not constantly adjusting the tone and quality of your in-
formation to what your listener seems to be taking in with
interest. You talk in longhand or shorthand as the face of
your listener seems to require. As H. G. Wells once re-

marked, "But in writing there is the blank face what will
they understand, what must be explained, and repeated,
1 '
and what is too difficult for them to believe?
If in your writing you unerringly select the relevant, the
necessary, the probable, and the dramatic; if, with fault-

less timing and exact clarity, you select so that your writing
moves smoothly to a rounded conclusion then you are a

genius, and you don't need this book or any book to help
you learn how to write.
PROBLEMS
From now on, you are on your own. I suggest that you
take at least ten different writing problems extended
action, description of scenery, an anecdote or story inci-
dent, the material for a poem and for each make lists of
the facts, as I did in this chapter, under the various head-
ings of the senses and whatever other headings you need
to add. List all the possible facts for each one until the lists
cover several pages. Then try to write each scene or situ-
ation or description in at least five different ways: for
different effects, from other points of view, and so on. Each
time, you will find, there is a different problem in selection
for you to solve.
Suppose, for example, you are describing a meeting of

You Shape Your Material
clubwomen the weekly gathering of the town's most ex-
clusive group,The Tuesday Culture Circle. These women
have captured a second-rate author who is to talk to them
about his latest novel. Here are five possible points of
view you could take toward this situation, each point of
view demanding different substantives to express it.
1. Satire. You want to indicate that the "culture" of the

Culture Circle is
synthetic, pretentious, self-conscious,
and somehow painfully foolish.
2. Humor. Like Helen Hokinson, whose cartoons of
clubwomen are genially satirical yet without the
sometimes savage sharpness of satire, you want to
show the ludicrous elements of the meeting: over-
weight, middle-aged women acting girlishly idealistic.
Comparison of fact with aspiration.
3. Compassion. The fundamental goodness of the group.
The good The earnestness. The real striving and
will.
the real failure of the striving. The mistaken (or mis-
directed) tastes.
4. Ridicule. The stupidity of fatuous activity of a group.
Comparison with a "higher" level of cultural achieve-

ment make this group look small and
in order to
cheap. Emphasis on "tea-time" food rich cakes, tiny

sandwiches, etc.
5. Dispassionate objectivity. An almost photographic re-

port of the scene and what occurs in it.
List the facts (not your opinions) which will show the
reader (not tell the reader) each of the five points of view
listed above.
After you have written, rewritten, and re-rewritten every
one of the fifty different problems, try a few more without
making lists. Be sure to think them out before writing.
EXAMPLE
Mark Twain had an unerring eye for the humorous and
the significant detail in situations. Notice in the following
selection the things he chose to describe in order that you
might have a picture of a typical American phenomenon-

lower school graduation exercises.
The Graduation Exercises*

In the fullness of time the interesting occasion arrived. At eight
in the evening the schoolhouse was brilliantly lighted, and adorned
with wreaths and festoons of foliage and flowers. The master sat
throned great chair upon a raised platform, with his black-
in his
board behind him. He was looking tolerably mellow. Three rows

of benches on each side and six rows in front of him were occu-
pied by the dignitaries of the town and by parents of the pupils.
To his left, back of the rows of citizens, was a spacious temporary
platform upon which were seated the scholars who were to take
part in the exercises of the evening; rows of small boys, washed
and dressed to an intolerable state of discomfort; rows of gawky
big boys; snowbanks of girls and young ladies clad in lawn and
muslin and conspicuously conscious of their bare arms, their grand-
mothers' ancient trinkets, their bits of pink and blue ribbon, and
the flowers in their hair. All the rest of the house was filled with
nonparticipating scholars.
The exercises began. A very little boy stood up and sheepishly
recited,"You'd scarce expect one of my age tospeak in public
on the stage," etc. accompanying himself with the painfully
exact and spasmodic gestures which a machine might have used
supposing the machine to be a trifle out of order. But he got
through safely, though cruelly scared, and got a fine round of
applause when he made his manufactured bow and retired.
From Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Copyright,

1922, by the Mark. Twain Company. By arrangement with Harper 8c
Brothers.
A little shamefaced girl lisped "Mary had a little lamb," etc.,
performed a compassion-inspiring curtsy, got her meed of ap-

plause,and sat down flushed and happy.
Tom Sawyer stepped forward with conceited confidence and
soared into the unquenchable and indestructible "Give me liberty
or give me death" speech, with fine fury and frantic gesticulation,
and broke down in the middle of it. A ghastly stage fright seized
him, his legs quaked under him, and he was like to choke. True,
he had the manifest sympathy of the house but he had the
house's silence, too, which was even worse than its sympathy. The
master frowned, and this completed the disaster. Tom struggled
awhile and then retired, utterly defeated. There was a weak at-
tempt at applause, but it died early.
"The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" followed; also "The
Assyrian Came Down," and other declamatory gems. Then there
were reading exercises and a spelling fight. The meager Latin class
recited with honor. The prime feature of the evening was in order
now original "compositions" by the young ladies. Each in her turn
stepped forward to the edge of the platform, cleared her throat,
held up her manuscript (tied with dainty ribbon), and proceeded
to read, with labored attention to "expression" and punctuation.
The themes were the same that had been illuminated upon similar
occasions by their mothers before them, their grandmothers, and
doubtless all their ancestors in the female line clear back to the
Crusades. "Friendship" was one; "Memories of Other Days";
"Religion in History"; "Dream Land"; "The Advantages of Cul-
11
ture ; "Forms of Political Government Compared and Contrasted";
"Melancholy"; "Filial Love"; "Heart Longings," etc., etc.
A prevalent feature in these compositions was a nursed and

petted melancholy; another was a wasteful and opulent gush of
"fine language"; another was a tendency to lug in by the ears
particularly prized words and phrases until they were entirely
worn out; and a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred
them was the inveterate and intolerable sermon that wagged its
crippled tail at the end of each and every one of them. No matter
what the subject might be, a brain-racking effort was made to
squirm it into some aspect or other that the moral and religious
mind could contemplate with edification. . . . There is no school
in allour land where the young ladies do not feel obliged to close
their compositions with a sermon; and you will find that the sermon
of the most frivolous and the least religious girl in the school is
always the longest and the most relentlessly pious. . . .

Let us return to the "Examination." The firstcomposition that
was read was one entitled "Is this, then, Life?" Perhaps the reader
can endure an extract from it:
In the common walks of life, with what delightful emotions does

the youthful mind look forward to some anticipated scene of fes-
tivityl Imagination is busy sketching rose-tinted pictures of joy. In
fancy, the voluptuous votary of fashion sees herself amid the fes-
tive throng, "the observed of all observers." Her graceful form,
arrayed in snowy robes, is whirling through the mazes of the joy-

ous dance/ her eye is brightest, her step is lightest in the gay
assembly.
In such delicious fancies time quickly glides by, and the welcome
hour arrives for her entrance into the ely si an world, of which she
has had such bright dreams. How fairylike does everything appear
to her enchanted vision I Each new scene is more charming than
the last. But after a while she finds that beneath this goodly ex-
terior, all is vanity: the flattery which once charmed her soul now
grates harshly upon her ear; the ballroom has lost its charms; and
with wasted health and embittered heart she turns away with the
conviction that earthly pleasures cannot satisfy the longings of the
soull
And so forth and so on. There was a buzz of gratification from

time to time during the reading, accompanied by whispered ejacu-
lations of "How sweet 1" "How eloquent!" "So true I" etc., and
had closed with a peculiarly afflicting sermon the
after the thing
applause was enthusiastic. . . .
Next appeared a dark-complexioned, black-eyed, black-haired

young lady, who paused an impressive moment, and began to
read in a measured solemn tone.
igo You Shape Your Material
Dark and tempestuous was the night. Around the throne on high
not a single star quivered} but the deep intonations of the heavy
thunder constantly vibrated upon the ear; whilst the terrific light-
ning reveled in angry mood through the cloudy chambers of
heaven, seeming to scorn the power exerted over its terror by the
illustrious Franklin I Even the boisterous winds unanimously came
forth from their mystic homes, and blustered about as if to enhance
by their aid the wildness of the scene. . . .
This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manuscript and

wound up with a sermon so destructive of all hope to non-Presby-
terians that it took the first prize. This composition was considered
to be the very evening. The mayor of the village,
finest effort of the
in delivering the prize to the author of it, made a warm speech
in which he said that it was by far the most "eloquent" thing he
had ever listened to, and that Daniel Webster himself might well
be proud of it.
It may be remarked, in passing, that the number of compositions
in which the word "beauteous" was overfondled, and human ex-

perience referred to as "life's page," was up to the usual average.
7. Ton Search for Form
Form: the shape and structure of anything. . . . Form
usually suggests reference to internal as well as ex-

ternal structure and, often, suggests the principle that
gives unity to the whole. . . .
WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY
AjJL this book I have had in mind the classic

through
idea of form and function: the form is the expression of
the function. That is why I asked in the last chapter,
"What do you want this piece of writing to do?" The par-
ticular form of your writing inevitably grows from three
closely related things: (a) the nature of your material,

(6) your own
point of view toward it, and (c) the effect
you want the finished writing to have upon the reader.
Therefore, instead of talking about forms, as such, let us
try to discover what it is you want your writing to accom-
plish, and then see what form best suits your aim.
"Prose," said Ernest Hemingway, "is architecture, not
interior decoration." The architecture of a thing is the
sum of its purposes, both functionally and aesthetically.
The architect who builds a house adapts that dwelling to
the terrain on which it is built, to the needs of the people
who it, and to the necessities of shelter, effi-

are to live in
ciency, and finally of beauty. The best house is that one
which makes the most of its location, size, and the mate-
rials from which it is constructed.
If this analogy is true for writing (and I think it is) then
the best form for a piece of writing is that which make*
132 You Search for Form
the most of the subject. You would not make a ship's
anchor chain out of pack thread; no more would you try
to make a novel out of a brief mood or a solitary happen-
ing; nor would you try to tell an action story in the short
space of a single anecdote.
There is a wide choice of more or less recognizable
forms in prose. These are loosely labeled short story, essay,
sketch, short-short, novelette, novel, feature article, and
so on. It is
helpful and interesting to study forms for
themselves; but no matter how much you know about the
short story form, for instance, your skill with the form
won't do you any good until you have some substance to
bring it to life. Therefore, let us first investigate a general
subject about which you might want to write, then discuss
what special forms could be used to express various points
of view toward it.
One of the main themes in much modern writing is the
life of men com-
in great cities. City culture, with all its
plexities, its environmental

pressures on people, and its
apparently impersonal largeness, has been and will con-

tinue to be rich material for writers.
Assume, to begin with, that out of your experience and
observation of big-city life you find yourself curiously in-
terested in little-known or unusual jobs or occupations
and in the people who do these jobs. For example, you
have been in a subway station in the morning's small hours
and seen the squads of armed men who swiftly collect the
day's take in coins from the turnstiles: you want to know
more about the collection procedure. Or, you run across
a dingy little silversmith's shop whose proprietor makes
marvelously delicate and beautiful things in metal yet
he has only one arm. Why does he do it? How does he do
it? Or, you discover, in a large old cellar beneath a ware-
house, the establishment of a man whose occupation is
You Search for Form 133
brewing special beers and ales for discriminating clients.

He is a master brewer and his products are delicious. How
did he get into that business? What are some of the re-
quirements of his clients?
To you these jobs are fascinating. You do research on
them. You talk to the people and find out how they got
started, why they like their work, how long they've been
at it, and the like. You collect many informative and vivid
little anecdotes as well as the straight facts about the jobs
themselves.
When you begin to think about writing up these things,
chances are your main idea is to tell people about them
and why they are interesting. What "form" would you
use for this?
From your apparent point of view toward the subjects
and from your desire to "tell" about them, it sounds as
though you should write a feature article. The average
feature is both informative and entertaining and if that
is what
you want your writing to do, then the feature form
is
probably the one to use. (Feature writing is a particular
skill which deserves a whole book, and I won't do more
than mention it here. Many of the things I have discussed

in this book apply to features as well as to other types of
writing.)
Suppose, however, that your point of view toward the
city theme is more general than this; you want to discuss
city culturemore philosophically and you wish to air
your opinions and interpretations of, say, the sociological
aspects of neighborhood divisions in large cities. This is a

different function to ask of the writing. You need to have
a more direct relation with the reader than is usually pos-
sible in the feature article. Possibly the best form to ex-
press this second point of view would be an informal essay.

Most essays are, like features, informative but there is
Search for Form
more of the author in them. (One of the finest examples
in recent writing of the informal essay treatment of the
big-city theme is E. B. White's Here Is New York.)

But if your interests are in the problems and dilemmas
of individuals: in the clashes of personality, in the glimpse
of a sad-faced boy in juvenile court, in the sight of a red-
faced policeman giving a traffic ticket to a loud-talking
woman, or in any of the poignant or amusing or dramatic
things which happen every day to ordinary peoplethings
which are important to you because their happening stands
for something that doesn't show on the surface then you
will probably turn to some form of fiction for your ex-
pression.
As an illustration of one way the life-stuff of reality may
be formed into fiction, I will develop an inconsequential
happening into a plot for a brief story. Whether this
happening is insignificant is not important. What is im-
portant for our purpose is the way it takes on form. The
process we will unravel here is largely the same, whether
you are shaping a story of deep psychological meaning er-
as in this you want to write a light little story, designed
mainly to entertain.
Imagine that we are walking together around the city;
we have no special purpose in mind. Lunch hour comes.
We're hungry. We stop in a little restaurant, find an unoc-
cupied booth, and sit down for a hamburger and coffee.
In the booth next to ours there is a young couple. We can
see only the tops of their heads, but every once in a while
we hear snatches of talk, a short laugh, and the indistin-
guishable murmurs of conversation. Then, clearly, we
hear the man's voice, with an edge of irritation in it.
"Aw, honey, said you were a pretty good cook, didn't I?"
I
11
"Apparently I'm not good enough for you, though, the girl
answered snappishly.
"But oh, hell, sure you are. I mean after all we've only been
married for months and you just can't.
five ." . .
"You mean in six months can't cook as well as your

I
your
blessed mother could I"
"Now, honey, don't get mad. Please. Gosh, mean it takes a I
how to be as good a cook as.

while to learn ." . .
"Well, Lawrence Jennings, if you knew how many hours spend I
shopping and cooking to make your meals nice, you'd. ." . .
"Shhhh, honey, please, not so loud. People are looking at

us. . . ."
And the voices subside to staccato undertones. In a few

moments, with a scrape of feet and crackle of paper bags,
the young couple leave, the girl carrying her shopping
bundles, standing severely erect, her heels snapping
smartly on the floor. "Lawrence Jennings" follows, look-
ing sheepish, fumbling at his hip pocket for his wallet to
pay the check. You and I look at each other, smile a small
smile with our eyes, and finish our meal.
This is a slice of material for you. What could you do
with it? What is here that might make a piece of writing?
Suppose we let the following extended example serve as
a demonstration of one way that form can grow naturally
out of subject and point of view.
Obviously implied in the bit of conversation we over-
heard was a small conflict one of those ordinary, young-
married spats that could (and does) happen to everyone.
In fact, you and I were mildly amused because of its near-
clich typicalness.
(You could object here and say, "Now, wait a minute;
this sort of thing isn't worth much as fiction material. It's
commonplace and trite and 'formula' and really not worth

bothering about." My only answer to that is, "No subject
is it is only the writer's mind that is stale,
commonplace;
trite, or ordinary." Clarence Budington Kelland, himself
a masterful yarn-spinner, once said: "There are three
things that make a good story. Take characters people

like young lovers; salty old philosophers and put them
in an interesting situation. Let 'em work out of it. You
don't need a novel solution. Hell, who cares about novelty?
The eternal verities aren't novel. But what's better?")
So we have a young married couple nice-looking kids-
involved in an argument. The man doesn't think his wife
cooks as well as his mother did; the girl is mad because
she has worked hard to prepare tasty meals, and her big
oaf of a husband doesn't appreciate the meals. (And by
feminine extension of logic, he therefore does not appre-
ciate her, either.)
Let your imagination play around with this situation.
Draw on your observation of the young people, on what
you heard them say, and how they said it. Try to build up
a larger picture of them: What's probable? What's likely?
What do you think is behind the conflict in the way of
day-to-day behavior?
You: They were dressed well. The man's suit fit de-
cently; looked as though it came from a good shop. And
I liked the girl's clothes simple but not cheap. (And
wrapped around a neat figure, too.) The man probably

has a good job in some office white-collar level.
I: How do
you guess that?
You: By the tone of their voices pleasant, good diction.
. . The way they talked rather than what they said.
.
I: But "nice" folks,

you think?
You: Yes.
I: What kind of place do you imagine they live in?
You: A small apartment you know the kind of place;

the rent is a shade too high for the income living room,
bedroom, small efficiency kitchen. Probably she keeps it
up neatly. Her mother-in-law was probably a good house-

keeper, too.
I: Do you see any kind of a story?
You: There's the conflict about the cooking new wife

versus mother-in-law. And, as we heard the girl say, she's
trying hard to be the best kind of a cook. There's a com-

petitive feeling toward her husband's mother undoubtedly.
I: What would be a likely activity for the bride, then,
having this feeling?

You: She might have a whole shelf full of cookbooks,
the latest gadgets for the stove. And it's likely that she
spends a good part of every afternoon trying hard to create

a masterpiece for the husband's dinner.
I: And when the husband eats the "masterpiece" . . . ?
You: Maybe he comments on how good it is BUT

"When mother did this dish, she ." . .
I: And
the girl's reaction?
You: Anger, of course and frustration. Angry at hus-
band and mother-in-law.
I: What
"problem" has she, then?
You: Obviously she has to overcome, in some way, the
idea in her husband's mind that "mother's" cooking was
better than her own.
I: You have a main character. She has a problem that's
fairly easy to state. How would she be likely to work out

of it?
You: It would be natural for her, I suppose, to try

harder and harder, day after day, to get up the superlative
meal. Still, no luck with the husband. Then, at last, she's
desperate. She's failed to beat her mother-in-law's culinary
ghost.
I: What then?
You: would be just like a woman to go and spill her
It
troubles to some other woman. Maybe the girl goes next

door. Middle-aged divorcee lives in that apartment. She
sympathizes with the girl's plight men are selfish brutes,

they never realize how much trouble they make for
women, and so forth. Maybe the girls have a couple of
cocktails. Or three doubles.
Sounds likely. And then?
I:
You: Then the girl goes back to her apartment late.

Her husband is home. She doesn't care, for once, what he
gets for dinner. She throws a can of beans into a pan, fries
up some bacon, turns the gas up too high, scorches the
food. Never mind scorch or no scorch, he's going to eat
it. She
slops the food on to plates, bangs it down in front
of her husband. He eats. Surprised look on his face. He
eats again. The food has the flavor that remembered
flavor of his mother's cooking: she used to burn every-
thing. The husband is satisfied, the bride triumphs, and

all is peaceful in the Jennings household.
I:Very ingenious. Is a trick ending like that a fair thing
to do to a reader?
You: Trick endings are usually not fair. But I think
this one is a possible ending. It isn't too farfetched, given
the circumstances. The rest of the story has built up to
something like that.

I: What do you want the story to do?
You: just for entertainment, really. There's nothing
It's
"significant" about it. The theme is light too light for

any heavier treatment.
I: Exactly. Then how long should your treatment be?
You: Not very long a couple of thousand words. Maybe

the short-short form is the one to use.
Thus far, to sum up briefly, we have done the following:

(a) we have found a conflict, (6) imagined it into a plausi-
ble plot, (c) decided on the nature of the subject (pleas-
antly inconsequential), (d) decided on a point of view (the

story is for entertainment only), and (e) estimated that
the story will fit the prose form known as the short-short.
Now and only now is it time to talk specifically about
a form.
The "short-short" ranges in length from
1500-2500
words, usually. There
is little time for characterization in
detail, and therefore the number of people in a plot of

this sort is
strictly limited (here we have three). There is
also little time to develop more than one conflict or di-
lemma. Because the aim is to entertain, the writing must
be deft, light, tightly packed. Scenes, action, dialogue must
carry the maximum impact in a minimum space. (Do not
feel superior to this type of writing; it is extremely hard
to do it
well.)
Amajor problem in the architecture of this story is
pace: how much time to spend characterizing the girl (let's
call her Ann), and how much on the husband? Will you
do it through dialogue, mostly, or description, or both--

and how much of each? How do you make the people be-
lievable, and yet not be so brief that they seem merely to
be puppets or caricatures? There are no formula answers
to these questions; you must work them through on thew
own terms.
But it may help if I sketch out briefly a workable struc-
ture for the story we<have developed.
The story follows a classic pattern: the struggle of a
single character to overcome a problem. It has a begin^
ning, a middle, and an end. The beginning shows Ann
(the bride) with a problem; the middle shows how she
attempts to solve the problem by various efforts until the
reader almost believes that she is not going to solve it
Then Ann decides on a if-he-doesn't-like-it-to-hell-with-
him course of action, leading up to her careless prepara-
tion of the dinner. And the ending is the result of this
decisive action.
Because the story is so short, here is one way it could
work out in terms of proportion ("pace").
The reader needs to meet the chief character (Ann)
immediately in the first paragraph. (Why is this so? Why
not spend a paragraph setting the scene?) In this short
space, the reader must become acquainted with her, must
like her. (Again, why? Would the story be successful if the
reader didn't like her?) The reader must see, too, that she
isa fine, conscientious cook.
In the next paragraph the story's "problem" is
pre-
sented. (Why here instead of later?)
And in the third paragraph, we meet Ann's husband.
He should be likable, too. (Why don't we meet the hus-
band earlierbefore the statement of Ann's problem?)
One more paragraph develops Ann's personality and her
relation with her husband. You need to convince the
reader further that she is making strenuous efforts to be
a fine cook.
Having stated the story's problem in paragraph 2, you
now need toshow the conflict in action. Perhaps you show
the young couple at dinner.Ann has cooked up a superla-
tivemixed grill, with crisp salad on the side, and light,
smooth fudge cake for dessert. She watches her husband
anxiously. He eats. She asks how he likes it. He likes it fine.
Wonderful dinner BUT. And Ann feels disconsolate

about another "failure."
When you finish this section (several paragraphs) you
have completed the end-of-the-beginning of the story. You
have introduced the main character (Ann) and the prin-
cipal minor character (her husband). You have shown thfr
conflict between them, and your reader knows that Ann's
is: how can she
problem equal, in her husband's mind, the
perfection he remembers in his mother's cooking? With
this information, the reader is set for what happens.
Now the "body" of the story begins. Ann tries and tries
to solve her problem. She spends long hours in the kitchen.
She shops with care and imagination for the best meats,
the freshest vegetables, the most exotic seasonings. She
cooks meals that would make a connoisseur drool with
delight. But no luck. Ann becomes morose. She doesn't
know what to do. And in this mood, she goes next door
to talk to the sympathetic divorcee.
The divorcee knows all about men. Heartless, selfish
creatures. Thoughtless, self-centered, sloppy, and takers-
of-wives-for-granted all husbands are alike. The divorcee

feeds Ann some strong cocktails and some further cynical
advice.Ann gets to the point where she doesn't care what
her husband thinks about her cooking.
Now comes the end-of-the-middle the climax. She de-
cides that if she can't
please her husband with her wonder-
ful cooking, then he can take what he gets whether he likes
it or not. She's
going to get together the simplest dinner
she can prepare, and if he doesn't like it well, that's too
bad. If he objects she might even get mad enough to walk
out on him. And from here on, what happens in the story
depends upon how the husband acts. The action of the
story which the main character (Ann) has forced up to
this point is now out of her hands. This is the end of the
middle or "body" of the story.
The story's ending comes fast. Ann burns the bacon,
scorches the beans, and
uses limp lettuce for the salad.
Her husband reminder of his mother's cooking:
finds a
he loves the burned dinner. Now Ann knows what she has
co do. The mystery has been resolved. It is a surprise twist,
of course, but it solves the conflict. The loose ends of the
problem are tied up. The

story ends.*
I have taken all this
space to develop this story because
though it is admittedly slight in theme it has in it the
seeds of a most important lesson for fiction writers. Stories
must be architecturally sound. They should be absorbing.
They need strong plots. (It
often seems to me that learning
writers fail to ask themselves this crucial question: "Would
people really be interested in this story? Would they find

it
absorbing right from the start?" Too often writers think:
"Will they admire the writing, my cleverness with words,
my subtlety of thought?")
Incidentally, the "surpise ending" is, in itself, neither
good nor bad. Many short-shorts, as you will find if

you
study them, are a surprise ending and nothing else an
original situation, the characters "running in place" for a
thousand words until the time comes for the surprise to
be sprung. This is, I think, an illegitimate way to use the
surprise. The whole point of a surprise ending (as it is
the
point of any good story) is that the reader's attention has

been caught by a series of actions which have held him
so closely that he has not thought about the ending at all.
It should be plain from the foregoing that the "form"
of your writing comes last (usually) rather than first in
your writing considerations.

Suppose, for example, that you wanted to project an
even smaller segment of experience than the one illus-
trated in the short-short we just developed. Perhaps you
wish only to transmit a mood, or the isolated interest of
a single, provocative little incident which seems to have
no beginning-middle-end possibilities in it. Your form for
this would probably be the sketch, which has little or no
* This
analysis was based on a story, "That Certain Flavor," by Lee
Rogow, in This Week Magazine, April 10, 1949.
"plot'* in the sense Ihave been describing it. The sketch

is an form; it requires much skill from the writer
elastic
to keep reader interest because the emphasis is less upon
what happens (plot) than upon what mood or feeling is
to be sustained. (There has been an increasing amount of
distinguished writing in the sketch form in the last few

years. One fine example of a type of sketch is James Thur-
ber's familiar "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," which
isnothing more, structurally, than a series of improbable
and amusing daydreams of heroism contrasted with the
obvious meek futility of the daydreamer.)
There are several helpful questions* to be asked of your
material in order to determine what form of writing will
best express it. If what you have to tell is simply a series
of happenings, one after the other, you will have a story
whose unraveling will probably be in terms of narrative:
this happened, then that happened, then the other oc-
curred. However, if your subject requires that you present

a happening, then another happening which occurs be-
cause of the first one, you will have a more complicated
form because you will need to establish a chain of proba-
bilities. E. M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, says: "... A
story [is]
a narrative of events arranged in their time
sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis
falling on causality. ... If it is in a story, we say 'and

then?' If it is in a plot, we ask 'why?'.'*
In constructing a story, the reference I made in Chap-
ter 4 to "movie camera method" is a useful one to remem-
ber. If you imagine that, instead of a writer, you are a
movie camera which glides about a scene picking up visual
impressions, dialogue, and actions, you will discover that
you will be organizing your story's proportions in terms
of their proper (best) effects upon the reader. You will
begin to sense when and how much character talk you

need,how detailed a description should be, what propor-
tionone action should take as against another, whether
you need a bit of "flashback" and where it fits most rea-
sonably.
The broadest and most complex of the prose forms is,
of course, the novel. Though I have discussed many of
the problems of a novelist in this book, the form itself
deserves a separate study, and I will not go into it here.
No matter what form your writing finally takes, it is
Heedful for you to remind yourself again and again that
the best form is that which makes the most of the subject.
Keep in mind, too, that your relation to your reader is a
responsible one you are responsible. Especially in fiction

is ittrue that you are required both to enlist your reader's
feelings and to appeal to his judgment that is, to his sense
of the fitness and comeliness of your imaginative realities.
Form, as I said earlier, results from the coherence or
meaning which you find in your subjects.
Finally, therefore, to remind you once again of the
practical approach a writer needs to take toward "form,"
here are the three key questions to ask:
What do I want this writing to do?
What kind of subject have I?
How do I feel about it?
Work out the answers to these questions reasonably and
fully, and the form is
likely to take care of itself.
PROBLEM
Read this story straight through. What was the author
trying to say? What do you think of the form of the story?

Does the form if you can discover any make the most of
the subject? What would you do to improve this sketch?
What needs editing? What needs rewriting?
DAVY*
went to high school with Davy, and knew him, and
I knew
I I
why he was different. He used to be an ugly, gawky kid, with

baggy pants, rundown shoes, and light green shirts that were
sweat-drenched, and the shirttails always hung out. He had
dirty,
bands on his teeth, and he had straight black hair and black eyes,
and the girls didn't like him. Davy was different. He was different
well because everybody knew about his mother: the long/
tragic years of waiting, the hope and nobody said anything. He
couldn't write the weekly English themes we sweated out for Miss
Tompkins and Miss Tompkins said he had "no romance in his
soul." didn't like History; the binding was busted off his book
He
and the pages about the Civil War were missing. School was kind
of anyway. Nothing mattered until you were a Senior, and
silly
then was too late.

it
The boys had to be good in sports and weak with the books,
and the girls had to be cheerleaders. The boys had to wear blue
satin jackets on Fridays with orange stripes down the arms and
they had to have Varsity letters that looked like hunks of colored
bath towel sewed on their sweaters. They had to look the part of
smelly locker rooms, initialed books, and jammed lockers in the
hall. And the boys had to go with short-skirted girls who necked
in theback of the bleachers.

Only Davy didn't go with girls. He didn't go with girls because
he thought they wouldn't have him anyway. Not growing up with
a mother had made him different. He didn't know about girls-
what they said and what they did. No one had ever told him. He
didn't smile at them or talk to them or kid around and boys at
G.H.S. weren't that different. He told me once he knew his mother
couldn't help it, but that no girl would marry him because be-
cause of what had happened to her and so he figured he'd just
as soon not get mixed up with them.
But, Davy played football and he had a big identification
bracelet. He began to grow into his ugliness until it was just cute
* Used by permission.
By Sarah Jane Farrell.
and masculine, and all began to like him, and Jean, my
the girls
best girlfriend, guessed shewas crazy about him. Only she wasn't
but Davy didn't know that. He played on the football, basket-
ball, and baseball teams. And he was good. He wore faded blue-
jeans, army shirts and moccasins like the other boys, and he
walked down the halls in big huddles with the other boys on the
teams while they told jokes about traveling salesmen. He carried
only one book at a time wedged in between his hip and his wrist
because both hands were always dug into his pockets. All the boys
walked that way and they never did homework and they never
had pencils. They were late for classes; they were always late
because all the boys were late. Marble floors, banging lockers,
and the big study Davy always sat at the
hall with the big tables.
back of the room with all and Jean sat closer front at
the boys,
the table with all the girls. We never worked because the girls
were talking about the boys and the boys were talking about
football.
We went to the games on the team bus during football season.
The girls satup front in a nervous little lump, and the boys sat in
back and swore and laughed extra loud at jokes. Then at the
game there was numbing cold, hoarse throats,
mud, hotdogs, big
drags on cigarettes in trembling hands, and the other team was
unfair. The girls clutched "their" boys' varsity jackets and the
silver footballs they wore around their necks, and the boys wore
dirty socks thatalways brought them luck. And then it was over
and the waited
girls either bursting with spirit or respectfully
sad, according to the game of course. Then the boys came out
and got on the bus and sat with their girls. The windows were
frosty and the bus driver always turned the lights off. The boys
were tiredand muddy and punchy and they kept their heads on the
girls' shoulders all the way home. In basketball season, they got
off the bus and then walked home in the snow together, and the
girls remember the big blue varsity jackets with snow on them.
Davy really seemed to be like the other boys now. Everybody

liked him. He built roadblocks with the other boys on Hallowe'en,
and went to the Junior Prom in the Spring and so things were
pretty smooth and then fell in love with him. He'd pulled my
I
pig-tailswhen was ten, hit me over the head with dirty track shoes
I
when was thirteen and then lent him my Algebra homework

I I
when was fifteen. And if you lent a boy your homework it nearly
I
always meant you'd end up liking him, so guess it was no surprise

I
to either of us. It was too bad fell in love with him because he
I
was just getting over the final break-up with Jean. was easy after I
Jean and we'd always been good friends. let him bask in his
I
sorrow for a week. All the boys hung their heads and acted surly
for at least a week after a break-up. Davy did too. And then I
became a member of the "chosen few." had prestige because

I I
waited after football practice and wore his ring during basketball
I
games. Everything was the same as it had been with Jean only
Davy didn't love me. But didn't know that and sometimes don't
I I
think he did either.
The first time something went wrong was one day in October.
I met him after football practice and we decided to walk up to
Weeks' and get a little free tutoring in Intermediate Algebra.
Weeks was good at it and besides we felt like walking.
I walk with Davy. Even then he was quite tall and
liked to I
thought of all the cars that would go by and see me with him. He
had nice smooth tan skin, big hands and liked to look at himI
when he walked. We were walking up Central Drive slowly

because it was a steep hill and he said: "Gee, love to go hunt- I
ing." smiled because

I already knew that and because
I loved I
to picture him walking down the road with the gun "broken" over
his arm.
"Someday," he said, "I'm just going to take off and head for
the woods and just hunt the whole damned time. Sleep outdoors,
eat what I've gotten and just roam around away from everything
and everybody."
I looked at him. I didn't like to hear him talk about that because
it Davy had never asked me to go hunting with
didn't include me.
him. He'd asked Jean though. How could he want to be away from
everything when everything was so close, right here in Rockville.
Sure there was a lot out of Rockville but what? Big cities, juvenile
delinquents and probably a lot of football teams that were bigger

and better than G.H.S.: but Rockville was our home-town, and all
you had to do was ask the boys home from the war those who'd
gotten back how much the town meant. They'd tell you. Paul
Bowman had lost his eyes at Anzio and all he ever talked about
was how the one thing in the world he wanted was just to walk
down Maple Street and see the houses, Bigelow's, the Post Office,
and Looie the tramp with his dog Jackson. He also wanted to see
the difference between night and day, but we all secretly thought
he'd probably rather see Sue Linscott more. Anyway I didn't
like tohear Davy say those things about being away from every-
thing because it scared me. He stopped in the middle of the hill
and said with a grin: "Did you ever break a duck's neck?"
"Of course not," I said.
"God, what a feeling. It'sso soft and warm, you can almost feel
"
the blood pounding and
"Dave, don't talk like that," said my stomach getting
I
squeamish. "It makes you sound like well it makes you sound -
queer." He gasped. The word fell like a rock in the silence. The
very sound of it seemed to cut the air. Everything around seemed
heavy and oppressing and my stomach pounded in sheer fright.
Strange, peculiar, funny, dopey, I thought wildly. Why couldn't I
have said one of them but queer that one word queer. He
turned violently to me. His eyes burned.
"Go ahead and say it,'* he said, "go ahead. It makes me sound
like I'm insane." Neither of us moved. I
gulped. I didn't ever
want word especially from him, and it got away
to hear that
from him before he knew what he was saying. didn't ever want I
to talk about that. The other boys weren'tWhy did he like this.
have to ruin a perfectly good afternoon just to be dramatic. It

would break up everything. started to cry, though didn't want
I I
to. Davy's face changed, he took my hand and stammered:

M
| I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. Honest. Please don't cry. I
I,
what can you do when a girl cries?" My heart leaped.

well, hell,
That was just what the other boys would have said. Davy had just
been trying to be different, just trying to impress me before. He
hadn't meant it. The big shadow that had come between us for a
minute disappeared. He squeezed my hand and we started to walk
again not saying a word. Truth was couldn't think of anything
I
to say. You had to say something sweet now all the other girls
did when "something" happened.
"Mad?" he said.
"A little/' pouted. You couldn't be too easy with them. You
I
had to make them crawl. Then he spun me around and before had I
time to finish what was going to say, he kissed me. With awkward
I
fondness, he let me go, and said: "What did you do that for?" I
He glared at me. That shadow came back again between us.

"What does anybody do anything for?" he said sullenly. And he
walked on ahead of me. didn't cry this time. Somehow didn't
I I
think it would be effective. This wasn't what I'd expected or what

I wanted.
caught up with him and we walked to Weeks' without another
I
word. We did Algebra and more Algebra that little stub of a
pencil looked so silly sticking up out of his big fist. But I was mad
righteously and deliciously mad. Our first fight and all the girls
said making up was the most fun. Yet, what was the matter with
him? He didn't have to shout at me. Sure I liked him, but the other
girls would think I was the biggest dope in the world if I let him
get away with this. We left at six and walked down the hill. My
bus came at six-thirty, so Davy waited with me. His identification
bracelet was cold on my wrist.
"Davy, do you want your bracelet back?" I said.
"Nope. just want you never to ask me again why

I I do any-
thing. know I'm queer but that's the way want it "
I I
"
"You're not queer, Davy. just didn't know and I
"Skip it," he said quickly. "Skip it. See you tomorrow." He
feigned a punch at my chin, turned and walked off down the road
with his hands couldn't get it out of my head. "Just
in his pockets. I
want you never me again why do anything." Why? Maybe

to ask I
Iwouldn't tell the girls anything. What could say? And knew I I
what they'd say. Pretty near all of us thought the same way as far
as boys were concerned. They'd think it was queer. (That word
again.) They'd think should have made him take the bracelet
I
back. But I didn't want that. I loved Davy. He was tall, and he
played football and the other girls liked him. I could count at least
eleven of the sophomores who wished they were going with him
and you could always tell about a boy if other girls were jealous.
The week went heavily by. didn't feel too well I and then
suddenly had pneumonia.
I was in a fog of night-lamps, penicil-
I
lin, blood tests, pillows, and the flower print of the counterpane.
When I
got to the baked-potato stage of my illness, Mom let Davy
come and see me. She said she didn't like him he wasn't the
"right sort" but she felt "sorry for the poor kid." That made me
mad but Dad laughed and and let
said for her not to be silly
romance bloom if it must. That made me mad too, but didn't say I
anything because that meant that Mom would let Davy come and
see me.
He came almost every afternoon until began to wonder if he I
was on the team any more. That worried me a little but not nearly
as much as the thought that would miss the Fall Dance. In the
I
meantime, Davy and played gin rummy, he taught me to play

I
poker and he brought me all my work from school. Mom and he

made friends, which was a good thing because it confirmed Dad's
belief that "you've just got to give these kids the benefit of the
doubt. They're all pretty regular." And so on. Davy would come
at four, and about six-thirty he'd go down to the kitchen with Mom
and before he left he'd bring me my supper tray. Mom complained
about him getting underfoot but think she liked it. All mothers like
I
to have boys underfoot especially if those mothers have daughters.

The night of the dance Davy came up and we played gin rummy
and told him wished he'd gotten someone else and gone.
I I I
didn't wish it, but you had to say those things. He said he'd made
a date and he meant to keep it, and besides he didn't like to dance
anyway which wasn't true because he did. The girls all said he was
the best dancer in our class the boys just grunted, but they
hadn't ever danced with him so they didn't know. All the boys
hated to dance and most of the time they shuffled aimlessly around
the floor in questionable time to the music. Davy didn't dance that
way but he still said he hated to dance. All the boys did.
Along about the first of December I went back to school and all
the sophomores were whispering that Davy and had been mar-
I
ried secretly and that I'd never been sick at all. didn't say any- I
thing because had been sick, we hadn't been married, and be-
I
sides you always kept the sophomores "in the dark." It was more
fun that way and everybody did it. That winter was a good one.
Davy snowmen but we didn't build many because
liked to build
there wasn't too much snow and usually by the time Davy got out
of basketball practice it was too dark to see. We went sleigh-
riding a lot over Christmas vacation and played snap-the-whip
on the ice on the duck pond in the village.
Well, finally along about the end of February the snow went
away and we had and wind for pretty nearly all of
slush, ice
March. It was sometime in April when everything changed. As a
matter of fact it was April 18th. remember because it was Mom
I
and Dad's anniversary, and had the snow tires taken off the
I
Plymouth. That night Davy and went to the movies down in Stock-
I
ton, the next town. It was a war picture and we were both glad
when it was over when the news came on and the cartoons.
Davy liked the cartoons especially. But they had a long show that
night and had a film short on hospitals and how they treated T.B.,
cancer, typhoid and insanity. When they came to insanity they
were "calling attention to the deplorable conditions in our mental
institutions today and the manner in which the disease itself is
received by the general public." My heart flipped October and

the walk up to Weeks', the cold, the bracelet, and almost lost
I
Davy. Why in God's name did we have to come tonight? should I
have stayed home with Mom and Dad on their anniversary. We

could have come tomorrow night as easily and they wouldn't 'have
had this stinking lousy show with its stupid pictures and oily advice.
Why didn't they shut up? How did they know what it was like?
They didn't know how it felt to wonder all the time whether you'd
end up the way your mother or your father, sister or brother had.
They Just could never know. "Insanity can be cured, insanity can
be cured," the voice droned from the screen, getting progressively
louder. Davy started to laugh. He kept on laughing, harsh, loud,
N
unnatural laughter.
"Stop he shouted suddenly. "Turn the damned thing off,
it!"
oh, turn it A girl in the row in front of us turned and looked

off!"
at him with an open mouth, a stupid curious expression on her face.
A man further down turned frowning and then waggled his head
in mutual irritation with his wife. A chorus of shhhhh went up here
and there and somebody said, "Get the usher." Looking, staring,
turning everybody. Davy stood up abruptly, grabbed my arm
and we stumbled over people until the end of the row, then ran
down the aisle and outside.
We had to walk to Rockville because we'd been at the late
show and the buses didn't run after ten. Everything looked so
healthy and lush and the spring air moved in easy little gusts
warm and soft. How could the world be so light-hearted, every-
thing so full of the excitement of Spring and still have people in
it so unhappy. Poor, unhappy Davy. Where was the best place for
him? Where could he hide? Where could he be where people

wouldn't give a damn about what had happened to his parents,
where people wouldn't hold it against him and block him out of
every healthy normal thing there was. took his hand as we walked
I
along and he turned his head away from me. walked along look-I
ing down at the road, and then Davy stopped, wrenched his hand
out of mine, put his face in his hands, and turned his back on me.
There in the middle of the old Stockton road, with nothing but the
parkway down the hill, and the little twin lights of a few cars as
they went along. Dark and deathly quiet. And saw his shoulders I
shaking and heard the shocking sobs shocking because I'd never
heard a boy cry before didn't know they did. Boys were sup-
I
posed to be hard and tough. Boys never cried. But Davy was cry-
ing; and then didn't care whether anybody'd ever cried before.
I
He was unhappy -as unhappy as he could be. turned him around I
and put my arms around him.

"Oh, Davy," said, "Davy, let me tell you something." He put
I
his arms around me, his face in my neck and said huskily,
"Don't bother. know what it is."

I
"You don't know what it is," I said evenly. I could feel the
anger rising and churning around in my stomach. Anger at every-

one and everything that made things like this.
"You're crying, Davy, because because you're ashamed and
well, you've got no right to be. Me? why me you know me.
You don't need to feel ashamed in front of me. Do you think I
do you think it matters it how Davy, knew all about you I
when started going with you. And if you're ashamed for anyone
I
else, you're foolish. Do you honestly think they care, Davy? Do
you honestly believe that they hold something over you or or

something against you because of of your mother something
that you couldn't help, that that you had no part of? If you do
you well, you know you're wrong."

Shut up, you fool, kept thinking. Shut up before you say too
I
much. He held me convulsively for a moment, then swung around

and walked quickly down the road. While we walked it kept run-
ning through my head that didn't care. didn't care whether he I I
was tall, whether he played football or broke his bread at lunch.

I hadn't cared for quite a time because he'd started to matter to
me just as a person a tortured, helpless person. pitied him I
with all the love wished could have loved him with. Because
I I
I didn't love him. guess hadn't for a while. And began to see
I I I
how he'd "loved" me. was dependable was "someone there."

I I
But what could do now? To give him his bracelet back would have
I
been a slap in the face, yet now didn't feel that bracelets or I
football meant much any more. We got to Rockville and the light
was still on in the little taxi shed by the station. Davy got a
cab, and we went home. He said nothing and I said nothing. We
didn't need to.
And so I went with Davy until after we'd graduated in June and
then went away in
I
July for the summer. I
gave him a new I.D.
bracelet; told him I I wanted to keep his old one. Then didn't I
see him for a long time. The whole crowd split up, what with
college and all and Davy went to work with his father up at the
ski lodge at Mountain View. They cut wood and sold it to people
for firewood. Then the next fall his father remarried and Davy's
house seemed to pick up a little. only saw Davy occasionally I
sometimes whenI went to town for the

papers and sometimes we'd
talk a long time without saying much.
Then there was college again, and vacations and that spring
was when I made the trip to the mental hospital with Davy. The
nurses with the dark blue capes and the red linings with the neat
white monograms H.V.M.H. on the collar. Red brick, green bars,
locked doors, the thick doors with the chicken wire between the
two layers of glass. The nurses had keys on their belts and their
uniforms were stiff and white and cold. The people in the wards,
the people in the shapeless hospital clothes people who stood
and blankly stared for hours on end the people that were "dif-
ferent."And that was where Louise was and that was where she
would always be; for Louise was Davy's mother. That was why
Davy was different.
I wore his bracelet for a long time, just never took it off unti'
yesterday. I feel sort of lost without it.
8. Ton Can Suggest Much
. . .
language includes much more than oral or writ-
ten speech. Gestures, pictures, monuments, visual
images, finger movements anything deliberately and

artificially employed as a sign is, logically, language.
.JOHN DEWEY
E of the most frustrating things about writing is that

words are maddeningly inadequate. Suppose you want to
transmit the simple idea that it is raining. You say, "It's
raining." Someone looks out the window, sees the same
thing you do, and replies, "Why, so it is." And that's
enough for ordinary use, isn't it? In a rough-and-ready,
telegraphic fashion you have indicated the weather to
some other person. But your reader can't look out the win-
dow with you. All he has are the words you have written.
He looks at the page, and there you have written, "It is
raining." Your reader doesn't know whether it's a drizzle

or a cloudburst, a hard, wind-driven rain or a gently spat-
tering spring shower. Obviously, he needs more informa-
tion. Then suppose you say, as you might to someone who
was near you but who couldn't see out the window at
that moment, "Boy, raining like the devil/' That's a
it's
little better a very little. At least, you have got across the
idea that it is raining pretty hard; but you still haven't

made a picture of the rain for the reader. "Raining like
the devil" could mean any one of a dozen things to him:
gusty curtains of rain, straight-down solid sheets of water,
the slanting drive of a squall, the heavy-drop patter of a
155
156 You Can Suggest Much
thundershower. All right then, you say, I'll tell him all
about it: the sounds, the sights, the feeling of the hard
rain.
But readers are perverse. They get bored quickly. If
you tell your reader too much about the rain, he may say,
"This fellow takes a long time to get to the point," and
turn away without reading further. And there you are,
hung on the writer's most persistent dilemma: how to
suggest much and say little. Multum in pawomuch in
little. You should tack that on the wall over your writing
desk as a motto. One of the basic skills of a creative writer

is the ability to suggest.
How do you suggest? How do you reduce a complicated
feeling or action to a few words? How do you build your
stairway to the reader's imagination? Indirectly all through
this book I have indicated ways to do this: the caricaturist's
technique in Chapter 5, the need for selection, the obser-

vation of meaningful details. But these are quite literal
ways almost mechanical ways of managing your mate-

rial. The next step requires imagination. This is where we
move away from the comfortable security of the tangible

into the more subtle workings of creative thought.
Jgne way to suggest more than you say is to usfsymbols.

is a sign by wf
jV_symbol, the dictionary says,
knows a thing, a visible sign pf an iHpa nr nf an.
quality
other object. For instance, you walk down the street and
see three gilt balls hung in front of a window and you say
to yourself, "pawnshop/' The staff and two twined snakes
of the caduceus means "medicine" or "medical." The red
cross means first aid or help in trouble. And so on. Daily
life is full of signs which stand so familiarly for other
things that we scarcely think of them as "symbols." Indeed,

if you stopped to analyze the number of symbols that you
You Can Suggest Much 157
use or recognize each day, you'd be amazed at how many
there are.
But the importance of symbols for writing is not so
much what they are, as whether they have a common mean-
ing for most people. When you use a symbol or when
you create one, for that matter you must be sure it is a
sign that your reader can recognize or understand .out of
his own experience. Many writers forget this vital quali-
fication. They find symbolisms or make them that are
so subtle or so learned or so obscure that their readers
must puzzle through their writing as though they were
working out a difficult translation. (It is the rare genius
who can get away with this.) Writers who become too
entranced with symbols often get so thoroughly tangled
up that they end by writing in a special language, under-
standable only to a few initiates and a handful of sym-
pathetic critics. W. Somerset Maugham* has truthfully
(if querulously) stated

a sharp reminder to those who suc-
cumb to the temptation of writing with vague complexity:
Some writers who do not think clearly are inclined to suppose

that their thoughts have a significance greater than at first sight
appears. It is flattering to believe that they are too profound to

be expressed so clearly that all who run may read, and very nat-
urally it does not occur to such writers that the fault is with their
own minds which have not the faculty of precise reflection. Here
again the magic of the written word obtains. It is very easy to
persuade oneself that a phrase that one does not quite understand
may mean a great deal more than one realizes. From this there is
only a little way to go to fall into the habit of setting down one's
impressions vagueness. Fools can always be

in all their original
found to discover a hidden sense in them.

* W. The Summing Up, by
Reprinted from Somerset Maugham,
permission of the publishers, Doubleday and Co., Inc.
You cannot forget that a symbol is merely a device for
suggesting much while saying little being sure, all the
while, that your symbols have commonly understood
meanings. I am not particularly concerned with functional
symbols such as the pawnshop's gilt balls and the barber's
striped pole. These don't come into your writing prob-
lems often, anyway. But there is another category of sym-
bol which is sometimes useful, even though it may lead
you into cliches if you're not careful. This is what I will
call the type symbol. The type symbol is a favorite of
advertising illustrators and political cartoonists. (I some-

times think they would be helpless without it.) The most
common method of creating this symbol is to show people
in the typical "uniforms" of daily life. Heavy shoes, cover-
alls, rolled shirt sleeves, and a tin lunch box are the
equivalent of a factory worker. Picture of a man with

white coat and stethoscope equals doctor. Woman with
apron, broom, and dustcloth is, obviously, housewife. You
can think of a dozen others without half trying.
Slightly more subtle are the stereotypes out of real life,
though these are still cliches or type symbols. For example:
a car pulls up in front of your neigbor's house. A man
gets out and goes up the front walk carrying a squat black
bag. "Hmm," you say, "the Joneses are having the doctor."
Or, at another time, you are at the railroad station. It is
8:35 A.M. There is a man standing on the platform waiting
for a train. He wears an impeccable gray flannel suit. A

gray homburg sits squarely on his head. Under his arm
is tucked the morning paper. In his hand is a slim, zip-
pered briefcase. He's a commuter, of course. Probably a

junior executive in some well-established, conservative
business office. Stereotypes such as these are easy to rec-
ognize. Sometimes they are effective ways of saying much
in little because around them your reader will uncon-
sciously assemble his own familiar impressions of the same

thing.
A good symbol is, fundamentally, a good picture. A
is worth a thousand words"; it
"picture says, undeniably,
much in little. Therefore, a writer needs to have a pic-
torial eye for things that sum up or symbolize much more
than they are in themselves. For example, one of the
war showed a
greatest photographs taken during the last
Chinese baby, alone, forlorn, and crying bitterly amid the
tangled rails and rubble of a bombed railway station. Few
pictures have better symbolized the pathos, brutality, and
senseless The picture sets off in the
wreckage of war.
viewer's mind a chain
of feelings and images: the death
of families, the ruin of homes, the wrack of grief, the
helpless innocent terror of children, the anonymous mar-

tyrdom of catastrophe. No spate of words could have con-
veyed half the meaning of this one symbolic picture.
This suggests a means for coping with large, complex
happenings without drowning the reader in a flood of
words. The small, personalized segment of a greater thing
can often be made to symbolize the whole with greater
effect (and therefore, jmore understandably) than a gran^
;
diose attempt to spread out panoramas in

jArords.
Suppose~yoii wantTtb write about an immense, natural
Thousands of people are homeless
disaster such as a flood.
and suffering. Huge tracts of earth are sodden and ruined.
Desolation is Misery has ten thousand faces. You
vast.
can't write about it all there's too much. What do you

do? You look for things to symbolize the whole, things
that will suggest the size and impact of the tragedy, and
the pathos of it. You tell about a farmer named John
Jones and what happened to his home and his wife and
four children. Perhaps you let him tell some of it in his
own words: the wild warnings in the middle of the night,
the first terrifying wall of water roaring across the fields,
the shuddering house, the family clinging desperately to

the roof while water rose to the eaves and lapped angrily
past the chimney. Perhaps you find another symbol men's
common effort in dangerby showing how a little group
of struggling men tried to open the sluiceway of a spill
dam while the rising water curled spitefully over the
ragged wall of sandbags hastily thrown up. Or a touch of
grimly humorous contrast in the sight of a dog, a cat, and
several chickens perched on the roof of a small shed which
lurched slowly by in the flood. A
picture of tragedy: the
quiet rows of blanketed forms, ignominiously barefooted,
in the improvised morgue of a warehouse. And the long,
lazy veils of gray rain, hanging endlessly from a dark sky,

forecasting more flood to come.
Here, for instance,is the
way a Life magazine* writer
handled the lead text block of a disaster story. Though
had photographs you will notice how the
the article also
reporter used symbol after symbol to suggest, with verbal
pictures, the magnitude and the human pathos of the
happening.
THE SOUTH AMBOY CLOCK

STOPS AT 7:26
One night last week, in the grubby little factory city of South
Amboy, N. the city hall clock pointed to 7:26. Some of the
J.,
9,500 people in town were eating dinner, but along the main drag
the stores were open and shoppers were out in the drizzling rain.
In some of the houses, parents helped their teen-age girls struggle
into their party clothes, for St. Mary's School was having its junior
prom that night. Near the waterfront a Pennsylvania commuter

train from Manhattan slid past the yards adjoining the railroad's
docks, heading for the station. Nearby on Pier A, longshoremen

* No. Time
Life, Vol. 28, as, May 29, 1950. Copyright Inc.
were transferring the last of 12 freight cars of ammunition to a

string of lighters. Standing offshore in Raritan Bay was the
Isbrandtsen Line's Flying Clipper, her hull still scuffed from a recent
bombardment by Chinese Nationalist planes. She was to load the
shells and antipersonnel mines for a voyage to Pakistan.
The city hall clock never got to 7:27, and the 467 tons of the
Flying Clipper's deadly cargo never got loaded. The explosives
erupted into the sky above South Amboy. The concussion shattered
windows over a radius of 12 miles; hundreds of people, blinking
at the sound of the blast, looked at their arms and legs and saw
that flying daggers of glass had stabbed them. In a Catholic church
the stained glass windows dissolved over the worshippers who left
their prayers to run into the streets crying that atomic war had
come. The city's lights went out, a man was blown out of a barber
chair and a high school boy, tying his tie before a mirror, saw his
image disintegrate as the glass flew at him. In the wrecked and

darkened business area the dazed shoppers heard the wail of
sirens, while all over town a rain of oily mud, blasted from the
bottom of the bay, came down on them in dirty gobs. Panicky
crowds tried to leave town and head south, while portly Mayor
John B. Leonard, who had been dumped on the floor in front of
his collapsing television set, manned a sound truck to bawl
hoarse assurances that the danger was past.

At dawn, with the cause of the explosion still unknown, people
saw that Pier A, the freight cars and ammunition lighters had
vanished. So had 22 longshoremen, and four were known dead.
Three hundred and twelve were injured. In the waterfront area,
sown with live mines, searchers walked gingerly as they began a
hopeless search for the other victims of an explosion more devas-
tating than New Jersey's famous Black Tom disaster of World
War I.
There are many kinds of symbols that a writer can use.

But there is no need for me to go into them here* The
wave of a hand, the sound of a bell, the expression on a
face, the sight of an object almost anything can be a
symbol, once you have established a meaning for it. The
main thing to remember is that a symbol is merely a device
Txrsave you time, to help your reader understand some-
thing more quickly, and to let you say much in little.
The need for much meaning in few words is not satisfied
if you only use
symbols occasionally. When, in the space
of a few thousand words, you must make and sustain the
illusion of fulland energetic life of far greater duration
than the short minutes or hours it takes to read the words,
then every paragraph and nearly every sentence must be
so charged with meaning thrry iurr^t more than they
thy
say. This is the function
oî'mflggryJCreative writing is
full of similes and metaphors. In tact,this is almost a defi-
nition of creative writing. It unfolds picture after picture,
not statement after statement. Your ability to coin images
is one measure of yourskill in creative
thinking.
Many beginning writers believe, mistakenly, that find-
ing the right similes or metaphors is a happy accident of

inspiration that "they just come to you when you're in
the right mood." This is not so, of course. Image-making
is as deliberate and calculated a skill as any other part of
the writing process. Go back for a moment to the begin-
ning of this chapter where I tried, fumblingly, to indicate

that it was raining very hard. "It is raining" was not
enough to say. But since images are instinctive to us, I

floundered around and said, "It is raining like like . . . . . .
the devil." That's a very inefficient simile, but the "like"

shows that there is a need to compare the rain to some-
thing else, to make

a thumbnail picture of it by bringing
in another idea. I could have said, "It is raining like a
waterfall," and thus crudely have expressed the weight
and volume of rain. Or, if the rain were gusty and spat-
could have used a metaphor and said, "The sharp
tering, I
drumroll of rain against the window," bringing to you a
comparison in terms of sound. In any case, to make a

proper image about the rain, I have to probe around in
my mind for an apt comparison. The rain looks like . . .
a wall, a veil, a curtain, a sheet, etc. It sounds like ... a

drumroll, hammers, solid as a wave, the rattle of dry
leaves, etc. None of these is satisfactory, but this is the
start of the process of image-making.
"Making an image," paraphrase Aristotle, "in-
if I may
volves an insight into the resemblances between objects
that are superficially unlike." A rainfall is not a wall or a
sheet or a drumroll but it may resemble these things;
and the molding together of two "superficially unlike"
pictures might make a fine, vivid image which will save
you dozens of words of straight description. Another way
of defining an image is: talking about one thing in terms
of something else.
Making good images requires two main things of you:

(i) a well-stocked mind and memory, full of the results
of your perceptive observation of the world around you.
and (2) the taste, the sense of fitness and comeliness, the
insight, in short, the imagination, to see that one thing
resembles the other. We have thoroughly discussed the
firstrequirement. The is difficult and evasive be-
second
cause seeing resemblances is the essence of creativeness.
However, there are ways to learn how to see this way, and
it is with these ways that we will be concerned from
now on.
The need for an image begins with a situation or a series
of factswhich you want to condense. Just for practice, I'll
spin out a couple of examples in a sort of stream-of-con-
sciousness fashion to see if it is
possible to reveal the
nature of the process.
Here we are sitting on a rock in the woods sunshine . . .
comes down through the trees, a cool green-yellow . . .

patches of blue-glitter sky . . . the sun far off and small
and bright as brass . . .
you see a bird, a bluebird ... it
fliespast a background of warm-brown tree trunks and

the blue color of the bird is sharp and clear . . .
lovely
blue color . . . How blue? Blue as . . . as . . . ? The blue-
bird like . . . like . . . ? No, not a similetoo heavy . . .
What kind of blue? Electric? No, clich Like the . . . sea?

No, sharper than that . Like the sky? Yes, quite
. . like
the sky today But . . . that's clich, too "The blue- . . .
bird, like a piece of summer sky ..." No, that's blah . . .
self-conscious about metaphor? "Winged sky"?

. . . How
No, sounds freshman poetry The bluebird car-
like . . .
ries the sky on his back There it is.

Of course, your mind may work in an entirely different
way from mine. You may make wide mental swings
through your memory, or you may, as I have done many
times, sit in a kind of suspended freeze of concentration
with an image quivering at the end of your pen. But you
will find, I think, that you ordinarily pick and haul at the
you and at the store of remembered facts

facts in front of
in your mind
you get two or three things that match
until
up intoan appropriate image. Here is one more example:

the problem is to make an image of the sunrise on a cer-
tain morning.
It's mid-November . . . been raining all night . . . now
beginning to clear I'm standing on the slope of a hill, . . .
looking down into a valley which looks like a dark bowl

. ..streak of light in the east . . stars looked washed .
out . . . eastern light misty, gray is a broad band . . . . . .
the naked trees stand out black against the pale, cold
morning sky there's the rim of the sun edging up

. . .
over the it looks red

hills bloodshot through ... . . .
the mist an eye .

suspicious eye ... it comes
. . like . . .
up slowly now a June dawn would burst golden into the

sky ... The sun came up like like came isn't a

. . .
pictorial verb The sun edged up ... like a suspicious

eye looking over the rim of hills The sun edged up
. . .
and peered over the rim of hills like a suspicious eye from
behind a wall. That's an elaborate image too elaborate
for some kinds of writing but it is pictorial; it does sug-
gest more than it says.

It further suggests a method of making images: look for
the possibility of giving personal attributes to impersonal

things, or vice versa. I said, for example, that the sun
(an impersonal thing) looked like a "suspicious eye" (a
personal or human attribute). You need to be very careful
with this method. Personalizing inanimate objects has
been called "thej^hetic fallacy/' because thetemptation
to infuse everything with motive and feeling is pernicious
ancTlikely~To seduce you'lnto^verbal looIisHhess. Likejmy

device, you nced^Toîse^Kisj5he with care and
^
l^tejiest
your writing be oveTblown^ndTv^^^S^
AnotKer tfimgto consular is the quality or the general
effect of the facts that you want to condense into an image.
Suppose you are writing about a character who is a terrible

bore. He thinks highly of himself. He is forever getting
"a good idea" or having an "original thought," or so he
thinks. But you don't think his ideas are worth a hoot:
they're dead, tasteless, dull, and repetitious. You want to

get this whole impression into one image as nearly as you
can. What is the quality of his ideas? Well, they're "dead,"
you say. How do you mean, "dead"? Oh, monotonous, no

life in them, colorless, hollow, ordinary. And this bore
of a character keeps bringing them up with dull regu-
larity. Now let's try it: "His ideas were as dead as ..."
What? A doornail? A mackerel? No, these are just lazy

cliches of "deadness." The quality of deadness here is
something cumulative; it makes me think of rows and
1 66 You Can Suggest Much
rows of something. Now I must cast around in my memory
for "rows and rows" of dead things I have seen. Not bodies
of people that brings in too many other considerations;
the same is true of animals. But I remember seeing a
cornfield in the spring rows of stubbled cornstalks, limp,
brown and soggy. "His ideas were as dead as last year's
cornfield." Well, that will do for the time being. It may
not be the exact image you want, but it's close enough for
a first draft. At least the quality of your boring character's
"dead" ideas has been suggested.

Stephen Vincent Bendt, a brilliant and sensitive image-
maker, coined many suggestive images in his writing. Here
is one from "Spanish Bayonet," in which Bent describes
the quality of faded beauty in a middle-aged woman:
Mrs. Gentian had the wreck of what must have been a great
beauty. The beauty had gone, but its jealousy, apparently, re-
mained acrid as the dregs of spoilt incense.
You usually indicate the quality of something by com-

paring it to another thing of familiar quality. Many images
grow out of comparisons. Assume, for example, that you
want to indicate the superlative uselessness of something.
Merely to say, "This thing is superlatively useless," is not

enough; there is no pictorial value in the words superla-
tively useless.
Try comparison. What is the most useless
thing you can think of? Absolutely no good for any use
at all? "As uselessas ." What? Your mind digs back
. .
into the memory compartment labeled good-for-nothing

objects, and you dredge up all sorts of things: useless as
a fur coat at the equator, useless as a cigarette without a
light, useless as a lifeboat in the desert, and so on. You

think up dozens of things. Either they are too farfetched
or too flippant or too strained, or they don't fit the tone
of your subject, or they aren't accurate enough. Here's how
John Donne expressed supreme uselessness, in a poem
called The Will. He is talking to his ladylove, saying that
when he dies he will give to others all that he was and
all he thought. And he tells his lady that all her beauty
and grace exist only in his loving eyes; that when he is
dead, "... all your graces no more use shall have than a
sun-dial in a grave." No more use than a sun-dial in a
grave the image has vivid finality.
Comparison is also a matter of degree. In your writing

you are always having to invent ways of expressing grad-
ualness, speed, happiness, pain, size, diminutiveness, and
the like. As always, you need to find comparisons that har-
monize plausibly together, ones that express accurately
and vividly the degree or quality of the thing you are
talking about. One of the common mistakes that begin-
ning writers make is to invent images that are too bold,
too startling, or vigorous for the subject. When the tone
of a descriptive scene is quiet and somnolent, obviously
an image that brings explosive or rapid or nervous pic-
tures to your reader's mind is not apropos; it doesn't have
the right degree of quiet or sleepiness. If you are describ-
ing a sunset on a calm evening, for instance, you don't
want to make images about the color which use strenuous
verbs such as "splashed," "flared," "exploded," "burst/*
"soared," and the like. These words are, obviously, too
strong for the tone or level of your description, and you
search for quieter ones.
Another image from BeneYs "Spanish Bayonet" illus-
how vividly words of the right "weight" and texture
trates
suggest the quality of a thing to a reader:
The evening air was light with the frail sweetness of crepe-
myrtie; a little wind stirred in the trees like the ghost of a hum-
mingbird.
The most useful way of suggesting through images is, I

suppose, the metaphor. You make a metaphor by giving
i68 You Can Suggest Much
one thing a name or an attribute of another; and thus,
to
more quickly than you can with a simile, you suggest a
resemblance between unlike things. When you say, "It
was a bright diamond of a day," you are metaphorically
speaking of a clean, clear day which resembles a diamond
for flawless sparkle. Other examples: the wind slunk
around the corner and whimpered in the alley; the moun-
tains shouldered the sky. In each of these cases, you are
making one type of fact perform an act which is clearly

the attribute of something else.
One more image be enough for our purpose. As will

before, I will try to show how the thought process might
work through to the metaphor. You are writing about the
amusements of average people movies, television and
radio programs, dances, and such. You're supercilious
about these things. You don't approve of them. Waste of
time, energy, creative ability. You think of the bobby-sox
crowd you saw at a juke joint one night. There they stood,
mouths open, eyes glazed, bodies rhythmically twitching,
listening to some "real gone jive." They looked paralyzed,
hypnotized. Or, you remember people sitting at the radio,
wholly absorbed in the strained fatuities of a famous
comedian. Their laughter was forced, vacuous, foolish.
Your problem is to make an image which will sum up all
this and which, at thesame time, will express your attitude
toward this sort of amusement.
Passive is word ... all
the these people look like open
mouths . . .
empty and dull . . .
especially the juke-boxers
. look as though they were doped, drugged ... as a
. .
matter of fact, that seems to be a chief characteristic of this

amusement ... it drugs it's a kind of narcotic . . . . . .
was it Marx and "opiate of the people"? that applied . . .
to religion Amusements, like opiates

. .
no, not a
. . . .
simile try metaphor

. . his
. fun drugged him . . . . . .
here! The piddling narcotics of amusement.

Writing that is too full of images, however, is likely to
be turgid and overrich like a pudding too stuffed with
sweetmeats. It makes "purple patches.'* Here again, as
with the selection of incidents and facts in a story, the
measuring sticks of relevance, probability, and necessity
apply. You make an image to satisfy a need to condense
your writing, to say much vividly in a few words. When
you are too infatuated with your skill in imagery, you are
likely as many learning writers do to confuse words with
sense and to defeat your ends by falling in love with the
means.
In this connection, it may amuse you and I hope in-
structyou to read what I consider the worst piece of
writing I have ever seen. It was a prize winner in an essay
contest, sponsored by a town patriotic organization, and it
was written, in all seriousness, on the theme of History
and Citizenship.
HOW OUR HISTORY GIVES US FAITH

IN THE AMERICAN FUTURE
Young man, did I hear you say our future is hopeless, that the
atomic bomb marks the Armageddon of civilization? I fear that
such defeated nihilism has assailed the American youth throughout
the roiling acres of our homeland.
Look, Sir, see your forebearers struggling to lay the cornerstone
of a future power, which one day would hold the torch of Demo-
cratic living. Think of our pioneers or of freezing and starving
soldiers in the Revolution without the essentials of life. Such inci-
dents hampered this new-born nation but never the spirit of our
people, always gleaming bright.
Westward our progenitors surged, facing the gleaming fang
and blazing eyes of war and the wilderness. Always there seemed
to exist an unseen power guiding the destinies of a curtailed
humanity.
America was shaken by the bloody War of 1865; men were
forced literally to murder their brothers. But when the smoke
cleared the pioneers looked to a brighter future. They kept faith
and lived. The future is in the hands of your generation. Fear not.
Stand solidly and staunchly on the principles of your democracy.
Above all, maintain the faith of your fathers for fruited plains and
amber waves of grain are blessings of Almighty God upon a
nation that holds to its Christian principles and ideals.
Farewell, Sir, and never forget the history of your American
nation, for it is the light of future security in the world to all who
hope to see her prosperity increased, her principles indoctrinated,
her sceptre universalized.
Incredible, isn't it? I hardly need to comment on the de-
fects of this (ithas no virtues). It is in poor logical order;

it is stuffed with cliches; its imagery is confused; it has
few (if any) facts to give the writing firmness and tangible-
ness; it is addressed vaguely to "Sir" (though it does not
explain who "Sir" is or what he has to learn from this
effusion); it is highly emotionalized (without indicating
any real reasons for the emotion); its central idea (if it has
one) is not clear and the average reader's reaction to this
is undoubtedly one of amazed disbelief.
PROBLEMS
The problems here are, in many ways, merely finger
exercises. They are worth doing because practicing scales
doesn't hurt a writer any more than it does a piano player.
SYMBOLS
Make a list of at least fifty familiar gestures, motions, postures,
or situations which in your opinion mean the same thing to
enough people so that they could stand for "symbols." Then
opposite each symbol, write briefly what you think it stands
for. For example: Woman standing, hands on hips, foot tap-
ping rapidly, stands, I think, for annoyed waiting or impa-

You Can Suggest Much 17 *
tient boredom. You may have a different idea, in which case
that's not a good symbol. Another sample: arm outstretched,
hand turned palm up, fingers clenched, index finger crooked/
means "come here." Or, dark clouds mean possible rain. Or,
siren means fire or ambulance. You should be able to think
of a hundred of these.
IMAGES
For each one of the following, invent at least a half dozen
good images.
Wind in autumn leaves Birds in early morning

Nerve-wracking noise Sunshine in dark room
Boring conversation Complete silence
SUGGESTIVE SELECTION
Choose at least four large-scale catastrophes or events which you
know about first-hand. Select the segments of each event that
will best re-create the whole. Write these out at some length.
EXAMPLE
Notice how Alan Paton in Cry, the Beloved Country,*
uses symbolic suggestion to enlarge and at the same time
to intensify the idea of fear he writes about.
Have no doubt
it is fear in the land. For what can men do when
so many have grown lawless? Who can enjoy the lovely land,
who can enjoy the seventy years, and the sun that pours down on
*
Reprinted from Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton; copy-
right 1948 by Alan Paton; used by permission of the publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons.
the earth, when there is fear in the heart? Who can walk quietly
in the shadow of when their beauty is grown to
the jacarandas,
danger? Who can lie peacefully abed, while the darkness holds
some secret? What lovers can lie sweetly under the stars, when
menace grows with the measure of their seclusion?
There are voices crying what must be done, a hundred, a thou-
sand voices. But what do they help if one seeks for counsel, for
one cries this, and one cries that, and another cries something
that is neither this nor that.
We do not know, we do not know. We shall live from day to

day, and put more locks on the doors, and get a fine fierce dog
when the fine fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold on to our
handbags more tenaciously; and the beauty of the trees by night,

and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall
forego. We shall forego the coming home drunken through the
midnight streets, and the evening walk over the star-lit veld. We
shall be careful, and knock this off our lives, and knock that off
our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution.
And our lives will shrink, but they will be the lives of superior
beings; and we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear
of the unknown. And the conscience shall be thrust down; the
light of life shall not be extinguished, but be put under a bushel,

to be preserved for a generation that will liveby it again, in some
day not yet come; and how it will come, and when it will come,
we shall not think about at all.
Cry the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the in-
heritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him
not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor
stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire.
Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing,
not give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear
will rob him of all if he gives too much.
9. Finding the Right Words
"When / use a word/' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather

a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to
mean neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make
words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is
to be master that's all."
Through the Looking-Glass
XF YOU have ever tried to pick up a blob of mercury,

you have a fair notion of how hard it is to make words do
exactly what you want them to do. No matter how sharply
you observe your surroundings or how penetratingly you
analyze experiences, you must, finally, fit these things into
words which will re-create them for your reader. There
is
plenty of good advice on word usage in dozens of
competent books on writing. These tell you, sensibly,
to use familiar words instead of exotic ones, short, con-
crete words instead of long, abstract ones. They tell you,
further, to prefer short sentences to long ones; they suggest
that simplicity and lucidity are to be preferred to circum-
.oeution and ornamentation. (Thus, following this advice,
I should have re-written this last sentence to say: A short
sentence is better than a long one. Don't get fancy and beat
around the bush when you can come straight to the point.)
Most of this is excellent advice for any writer.
But the trouble with the advice though it is undeniably
sound is that it usually admonishes rather than explains.
174 Finding the Right Words
The study of grammar and its rules, for example, is both
necessary and useful in learning proper written speech.
But grammar is simply common speech legitimatized. A
writer does not use words according to their legitimacy
in a sentence structure. He uses words as a means to an
end. Whatever wordsfamiliar or notthat make the most
natural and enlightening expression for the subject in
hand are the words a creative writer uses. (Normally, of
course, one writes grammatically; but whenever necessary,
correctness is always sacrificed to these other needs.)
Language doesn't begin with the machinery of saying
things. It begins with the need to say things. Since people
have needed to say tens of thousands of things in all de
grees of directness or subtlety, the English language is,
therefore, exceedingly rich. (Its very fullness and flexibility

is one of the writer's
biggest problems. It tempts him to
think of words for their own sakes, instead of thinking of
words in terms of his particular need of them.)
The creative writer's relation to words is much like the
cabinetmaker's relation to wood. A
cabinetmaker sets out
to make a piece of furniture. First, he determines the need
it. Then he
for designs it to fulfill the need, to perform the
function. Finally, he considers his materials. He chooses
the kind of wood that is best, both functionally and aes-
thetically, for the furniture piece he has designed. Then

he makes the chair or table or cabinet. Similarly, the crea-
tive writer chooses words his materials in the weight,
strength, color and texture needed

for his piece of writing.
The full process of creative thinking has taken place be-
fore words are considered.
To carry the wood-working analogy a bit further: sup-
pose you want to make a mallet. You will need a hard,
tough, resilient wood for the head; the mallet head will
have to take hard pounding without splintering or dent-
Finding the Right Words 175
ing too much. Therefore, you choose hickory or ash or oak

because these woods will stand up and take the battering.
Now, as a writer, suppose you want to express the idea of
hard pounding. Like the wood for the mallet, you will
need some tough, hardy, pounding words. Here are some
possibilities:
pound clout sock belt thud slam

thump bang knock hammer crash crack
bump whip clack batter smack lick
These are fine, vigorous words to express hard or violent

contact.But which one are you going to use?
This is still going at the problem backward, isn't it? The
question is not, Which word am I going to use? But,
Which one do I need? You don't approach words as words
when you are writing. You begin, as we have begun all
through this
book, by asking: What is
happening? Exactly
what is happening? How strong is it? How weak is it? What
is its
quality? How
close is it? How far away?
Let's examine a real writing problem and see how we
go about getting words for it. You are writing a story. You
need a brief description. It's before dawn in the forest.
Your character has been walking all night. Now he is near-
ing habitation a lumber camp. You want your reader to
know what he sees and hears. Among other things, he hears
the sound of an ax through the cold, misty stillness of the
morning. How do you get that ax-sound into words? Listen
to it, first. The sound is clear, a little hollow, diminished
slightly by distance and the intervening trees. It is rhyth-
mic, regular, the stroke of a skilled woodsman cutting
fallen wood for logs. As nearly as I can reproduce it in
letters, the quality of the ax sound is thock thock . . . . . .
thock . . Now add up the facts of your observation: it is

.
quiet before-dawn-dark
. . .
regular thock, thock . . . . . .
quite a distance away misty cold .

person listening
. . . . . . . .
.
lonely, hollow sound. Choose the facts you need. Then
. .
search for the words. How about "clack"? No, that won't
do it has overtones of "Thud" isn't right
flat clattering.
a thud heavy, dull. "Crack" is a little closer but "crack"
is
is too sharp, it has a splintery feel. Try this: In the stillness

he heard, far off, the measured knock of an ax against
wood. "Measured knock" is fairly close, I think, to the
texture of the sound of the ax.
This is an artificial prolonging of the process through
which your mind moves with great speed. In good writing,
words do not shape thought. Rather, words are pulled out
of your mind, weighed with the reality they are standing
for, and used with calculated economy as they are needed
to make pictures or show actions. Let the need choose the
word. Think out the thing to be written wordlessly pic-
torially then search for the word.
Lewis Carroll, in Alice in Wonderland, makes an in-
direct (though shrewd) comment that we can apply:
Here one of the guinea pigs cheered, and was immediately

suppressed by the officers of the court. (As that is rather a hard
word, will just explain to you how it was done. They had a large
I
canvas bag, which tied up at the mouth with strings: into this they
slipped the guinea pig, head first, and then sat upon it.)
"I'm glad I've seen that done," thought Alice. "I've so often
read in the newspapers, at the end of trials, 'There was some
attempt at applause which was immediately suppressed by the
1
officers of the court, and never understood what it meant till
I
You become skilled in choosing words in the same way

you learned to observe simple objects. As one beginning
writer remarked in her journal:
I'm discovering that hearing things is a kind of "observing,"
too. I never realized how many different sounds a footstep makes
on a pavement. I'm playing a game of matching sounds with
things and then hunting for words or images which will refled
them accurately and therefore vividly. It seems so ignorant tc
have gone through life only hearing big, general sounds and
missing the fascinating specific ones because really didn't pa> I
much attention to them. This morning tried to find a good word

I
for the way water drips on tin. I tried "plink," for instance. Then
I
compared this with the dripping of our faucet which "tonks" in
the drain, making a kind of wet hollow-echo sound. I'm learning
to listen. And because I'm listening everything around me seems
so much more real than it used to be.
The more practiced you become

words to
in linking
reality, the less awkward and the

the process will be
smoother and more vivid your writing will become.
This is another way of saying that the creative writer's
vocabulary grows mainly out of his experience rather than
from his theoretical thinking. You will discover, if you try
to write too far beyond your experience, that you will be
tempted into using vague words to disguise your ignorance.

Before you know it, you will mistake the words for the
real thing. And this is the beginning of stilted, unnatural
writing. Thoreau once remarked: "A writer who does not
speak out of a full experience uses torpid words, wooden
or lifeless words, such words as humanitary, which have a
paralysis in their tails."
But there an opposite to this. The very fullness of
is
your experience may get in your way and make you too
conscious that your expression of it is, perhaps, oversim-
plified. No matter how well you select your facts, your
thorough knowledge of them is likely to tempt you to
qualify them, try to make them more precise than is neces-
sary. Qualifying takes extra words. Adjectives pile up.
Phrases multiply. The
tough, vivid words you originally
had are watered down to precise, legal-sounding terms.
Witness the "expert." He knows so much about his sub-
ject that he hedges it about with "maybe's" and "per-
haps's." Every statement he makes is weighted by a quali-
fication or two dangling heavily from it. Soon he is saying
things such as "It is, however, not without some slight

justification that and using words like expedite,
. . ."
extraneous, ameliorate, and plenitude. And, in a trice, he

becomes not only dull, but hard to understand. Here's an
anecdote to illustrate:*
A home economist from the nearby state university was giving

a cooking demonstration before a group of farm women. "Take an
egg/' she explained, "and carefully perforate the basal end. Du-
plicate the process in the apex. Then, applying the lips to one of
the apertures, by forcibly exhaling the breath discharge the shell
of its contents."
Eighty-five-year-old Aunt Cassie turned to a neighbor. "Beats

allhow different these newfangled ways is/' she whispered.
"When I was a gal we just poked a hole in each end and
blowed!"
Think of this story whenever you get the urge to spread

out more words than you need. Poke a hole in each end of
the urge and blow.
have reminded you many times that creative writing
I
is Within the limits of your need to say exactly

for effect.
what you mean, with words of the right weight and tex-
ture, it is legitimate to use the words themselves for effect,
too. Often, the sense of aword, and its sound, combine to
produce effects. And
sometimes a series of similar sounds
in a sentence will strengthen the sense of a passage. These
*
Reprinted by permission from "College English," by Dorothy Mc-
Donald, The Readers Digest, April 1949.
are devices to be used sparingly. Overuse of them will
make your writing sound self-consciously arty.
Two examples of this will be enough, I think. Here are
seven magnificent lines from Book I of John Milton's
Paradise Lost:
The Sulphurous Hail

Shot after us in storm, oreblown hath laid
The fiery Surge, that from the Precipice
Of Heav'n and the Thunder,
receiv'd us falling,
Wing'd with red Lightning and impetuous rage,

Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now
To bellow through the vast and boundless Deep.
What happens to the last line if you substitute "roar" for

"bellow"? Or, "detonate" or "concatenate" or "rumble"^ or
"resound"?
This passage, from James Joyce's Ulysses,* shows even
more sharply how words, as they tumble about stream-of-
consciousness fashion in Stephen Dedalus* mind while he
stands by the sea, can be employed both for sound, cadence,
and meaning to produce vivid effect.
In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, cov-
ering greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant

away. shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing chafing
will float I
over the low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick.
Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss ooos.
Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks.

In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And,
spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating
foam poo I, flower unfurling.
Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing reeds lift Ian-
* From James Joyce, Ulysses. Reprinted by permission of Random

House, Inc.
i8o Finding the Right Words
guidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in
whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day

by day: night by night: lifted, flooded and let fall.
I needn't do any more than point out another kind of

word-effect: sentence length and complexity. Generally, a
scene full of harshness and violence demands the staccato
treatment of short sentences, vibrant with vigorous verbs.
The massive, slow dignity of a rolling sea, crashing pon-
derous waves upon the shore, retreating in surges and
swelling again upon the rocks and beaches, may take a
sentence with long and rolling phrases, full of subordinate
clauses and the weight of rich words.
These are simply rhetorical tricks, to be used with the
greatest caution. You only need these fine verbal embroi-
deries when they fit the subject and never when you
admire them for themselves.
The real test of word use, finally, is naturalness. How
naturally does your writing read? Do your words fit the
size or dignity of your subject? Are you always conscious
of the words? Do you sense yourself behind the page, the
author self-consciously trying to verbalize experience? If
the words get in your way, if they keep calling attention to
themselves because they are bizarre or out of place, then
your writing is bad. Language, like the glass in a window,
exists to let in light; your job is to provide the lightnot
fancy designs on the glass.
And above all, Don't mistake simplicity for
simplicity.
mere briefness or shortness of words. Simplicity is the
saying of a thing as it should be said no more or less than

this. Thus, simplicity is ever so much harder to achieve
than grandiosity or, oppositely, vulgarity. If you can be
both simple and grand, your writing is likely to be great
writing. The following story, for its simplicity and almost
perfect aptness of word use, is one of the greatest pieces of

writing I have ever read. Read it, and see what you think.
And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden
in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from
the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.
And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, "Where
art thou?"
And he said,
"I in the garden, and
heard thy voice 1 was afraid, because I was
naked; and hid myself."
I
And he said,
"Who told thee that thou was naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree,
whereof Icommanded thee that thou shouldst not eat?"
And the man said,
"The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the
tree, and I did eat."
And the Lord God said unto the woman,
"What is this that thou hast done?"
And the woman said, "The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat."
And the Lord God said unto the serpent,
Because thou hast done this,
Thou are cursed above all cattle,
And above every beast of the field;
Upon thy belly shalt thou go,

And dust shalt thou eat
All the days of thy life:
And will put enmity between thee and

I the woman,
And between thy seed and her seed:
And it shall bruise thy head,
And thou shalt bruise his heel.
Unto the woman he said,
I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception;
In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children;
And thy desire shall be to thy husband,
And he shall rule over thee.
i8a Finding the Right Words
And unto Adam he said,
Cursed the ground for thy sake;
is
Insorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.

Thorns also and thistles shall bring it forth to thee;
And thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,
Till thou return unto the ground;
For out of it wast thou taken:
For dust thou art,

And unto dust shalt thou return.
And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother
of all living. Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God
make coats of skins, and clothed them.
And the Lord God said, "Behold, the man is become as one of
us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand,
"
and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever
therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden,
to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the
man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims,
and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of
the tree of life.
I can't end this chapter about "finding the

right words"
without making some suggestions about your work habits.
You can read and theorize all you want about writing;
but, at last, down and do it. How you go
you must sit
about it is, of course, your own business. You may like to

write longhand or on a typewriter. You may crave a neat,
uncluttered desk, with stacks of clean paper on one side
and a dozen sharpened pencils in ordered ranks on the
other. Or, perhaps you need an old table, piled with books,
and mussy with scraps of paper full of cryptic notes to
yourself. Whatever physical
conditions make you com-
fortable and allow you to keep your mind on the primary
business of thinking and scribbling, are the right condi-
tions for your writing. If you find yourself fussing and
finicking with the "proper" arrangements, chances
are you
are just fooling yourself putting off writing by using
"conditions" as an excuse.
But now the important things. First, if you can possibly
manage it, set a regular time each day for writing. Dis-
cover when your mental and physical powers are at their
peak, and set aside this time for writing. If you know, for
instance, that at 8:00 A.M. you are going to be at your writ-
ing desk, and that, like it or not, you are going to stay
there until 1:00 P.M., you will soon get over the urge (and
it's a
strong urge) to put off writing until you feel more
like it. There is much, as any psychologist will tell you, in
"assuming the attitude."
How long you write or how much you write are things
thatyou learn to measure for yourself. Some people can-
not write for more than two hours without burning out
completely the day's quota of creative energy. They pro-
duce at high speed; to try to push themselves for more
than two hours is just a waste of time. Others are more
deliberate. Short spurts of writing are followed by half
hours of pacing up and down or sitting in an easy chair,
thinking. Others can write steadily and slowly for three,
four, and five hours, stopping by the clock instead of stop-
ping when they are tired. Some can even write all day,
every day. This is a matter of personal capacity. You will
find your own limits.
What if you come to your desk at the set hour and you
haven't a thing to write about? Write anyway. Keep a
journal or a day-book. Jot down anything you wish in it.

Think back over the last twenty-four hours and record
some sights or sounds that you heard, the fragments of
ideas that may have turned over in your mind. Make up
stories about them. Or look out the window and write
down what you see. The important thing is to write
every day.
Should you use an outline for everything you write?
That, too, depends on you. My experience is that outlines
with elaborate headings, subheadings and sub-subheadings
are cumbersome. They take time and energy to make. Like
anything else you write, once you have pinned down your
thoughts in that kind of detail, they take on an obstinate
life of their own. You begin to write to the outline instead
of to the subject, with a consequent loss of fluidness and
freshness. But you do need a guide, especially for a long
piece of writing such as a story or a book. For this purpose,

a collection of notes, roughly in order, is enough to keep
you from straying too far from your main ideas. Some-
times, though, after you have tried three, six, nine times to
pull the writing together without succeeding, an outline

may serve to shake out incoherences and digressions and
help you finish the job. To use an outline or not to use
one, depends on your need of one.
Another familiar frustration is getting started. You may
be full of ideas. You may have a piece of writing cleanly
thought through and ready for words. But the obstinate,
obdurate, stubborn thing won't get started. The first sen-
tence, the first paragraph just won't come out. (This frus-
tration is especially typical when you try to write a feature
article, where the "lead" is
important.) The best sugges-
tion I have for this is to start writinganything. Just get
going. Write nonsense and if you have to, try-
foolishness
ing the while to keep as close to your subject as you

all
can. Just begin to grind out the ideas, regardless of their

order, even if it takes you two or three pages or more.
This works satisfactorily for many writers. After you have
finally into your subject, you can throw away the
dug
scribble you started with. It has served its
purpose.
The main job is down on paper. As you write,
to get it
be as clear and you can. Don't stop to polish

as vivid as
up a bad sentence or paragraph if it will hold you up too

much. First time is only first draft. No creative writer fin-
ishes anything in one draft. Or two drafts. Or sometimes
twenty drafts. He rewrites.
PROBLEMS*
Reread some of the pieces you have written in the last
three of four months, and look at the words for their tex-
tures, their exactness, etc. There
no need for extended
is
'
'exercises" in word usage. Let the need choose the word.

I
suggest that as you read other authors, you keep an
ear tuned to word use. See where other writers have suc-
ceededor not in using the best words for their
purposes.
EXAMPLE
The character sketch below is a section from a short
story, "Dry September," by William Faulkner.* Read it
carefully several times. Notice the use of certain key words

such as bright, haggard, furious. Try to determine whether
Faulkner has used his words with such deliberateness that
the artifice is hidden (because
inconspicuous artifice is
usually a sign of skilled writing).
She was thirty-eight or thirty-nine. She lived in a small frame

house with her invalid mother and a thin, sallow, unflagging aunt,
where each morning, between ten and eleven, she would appear
* From William Faulkner, These Thirteen. Reprinted by permission
of Random House, Inc. Copyright 1931 by William Faulkner.
i86 Finding the Right Words
on the porch in a lace-trimmed boudoir cap, to sit swinging in the
porch swing until noon. After dinner she lay down for a while,
until the afternoon began to cool. Then, in one of the three or four
new voile dresses which she had each summer, she would go down-
town to spend the afternoon in the stores with the other ladies,
where they would handle the goods and haggle over prices in
cold, immediate voices, without any intention of buying.
She was of comfortable people not the best in Jefferson, but
good people enough and she was still on the slender side of
ordinary-looking, with a bright, faintly haggard manner and dress.
When she was young she had had a slender, nervous body and a
sort of hard vivacity which had enabled her to ride for the time
upon the crest of the town's social life as exemplified by the high-
school party and church-social period of her contemporaries while
stillchildren enough to be un-classconscious.
She was the last to realize that she was losing ground; that
those among whom she had been a little brighter and louder
flame than any other were beginning to learn the pleasures of
snobbery male and retaliation female. That was when her
face began to wear that bright, haggard look. She still carried it to
parties on shadowy porticos and summer lawns, like a mask or a

flag, with that bafflement and furious repudiation of truth in her
eyes. Oneevening at a party she heard a boy and two girls, afl
schoolmates, talking. She never accepted another invitation.

She watched the girls with whom she had grown up as they mar-
ried and got houses and children, but no man ever called on her
steadily until the children of the other girls had been calling her
"aunty" for several years, the while their mothers told them in
bright voices about how popular Minnie had been as a girl.
Then the town began to see her driving on Sunday afternoons
with the cashier in the bank. He was a widower of about forty
a high-colored man, smelling always faintly of the barbershop or
of whiskey. He owned the first town, a red runabout;
automobile in
Minnie had the first motoring bonnet and veil the town ever saw.
Then the town began to say: "Poor Minnie!" "But she is old enough
to take care of herself," others said. That was when she first asked
her schoolmates that the children call her "cousin" instead of
"aunty."
It was twelve years now since she had been relegated into
adultery by public opinion, and eight years since the cashier had
gone to a Memphis bank, returning for one day each Christmas,
which he spent at an annuaf bachelors' party in a hunting-club on

the river. From behind their curtains the neighbors would see him
pass, and during the across-the-street Christmas-day visiting they
would tell her about him, about how well he looked, and how they
heard that he was prospering in the city, watching with bright,
secret eyes her haggard, bright face. Usually by that hour there
would be the scent of whiskey on her breath. It was supplied her
by a youth, a clerk at the soda fountain*. "Sure; I
buy it for the
old gal. reckon she's entitled to a little fun."
I
Her mother kept to her room altogether now; the gaunt aunt ran
the house. Against that background Minnie's bright dresses, her
idle and empty days, had a quality of furious unreality. She went
out in the evenings only with women now, neighbors, to the moving
pictures. Each afternoon she dressed in one of the new dresses and
went down-town alone, where her young cousins were already
strolling in the late afternoons with their delicate, silken heads
and thin, awkward arms and conscious hips, clinging to one
another or shrieking and giggling with paired boys in the soda-
fountain when she passed and went along the serried stores, in
the doors of which sitting and lounging men did not even follow
her with their eyes any more.
10. And Rewriting
The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can.

Because Ihave the greatest respect for the reader, and
if he's going to the trouble of reading what I've writ-
tenI'm a slow reader myself and I guess most people

are why, the least I can do is make it as easy as pos-
sible for him to find out what I'm trying to say, trying
to get at. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.
-E. B. WHITE*
of the healthiest things a beginner writer can learn

is that nothing he writes is sacred. The cheerful willing-
ness to throw away five or ten pages, to cut paragraphs
down to sentences, and to rework "finished" writing dozens
of times, are signs that a beginning writer is beginning
to learn his business. He begins to understand that writing
isnot a one-shot job, but a painstaking molding and shap-
ing and kneading of material into a form. One measure
of his growing skill at the craft is his ability to do the cut-
ting, patching and rearranging of rewriting. "Get it right,"

is a good writer's motto.
Nearly even those of skilled writers, are
all first drafts,
verbose, awkward, and disconnected. Ideas have gaps in

one place and overflow in another. Sentences and para-
graphs are turgid and muddy. A first draft is like the
slowly emerging shape of a statue from a block of stone.
*
Reprinted from Writers and Writing, by Robert Van Gelder; used
by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons.
188
And Rewriting 189
The rough shape of the work may be plain. But there is
much chisel work and smoothing to be done.
still
The end of the first draft is a dangerous time. You have

wrestled with your adversary, and you have thrown him.
You feel relieved of a weight. Naturally. Getting through
any hard job and writing is hard gives you the same
kind of relief you might feel after carrying heavy suitcases
for endless blocks and, finally, you put them down. It is
at this point that you should be wise and put the piece of
writing away. By all means, feel relieved. But don't mis-

take the relief for a sense of completion. Just don't touch
the draft for three or four dayslonger, if you can keep
away from it. As most books on writing advise, "Let it
cool off." Start another project. Get absorbed and heated

up with some new ideas for a time.
After a decent interval, go back to your draft. Do your
best to persuade yourself that you are going to read the
thing as though it had been written by someone else. Then
read the whole piece through without stopping. When
you've finished, sit back and ask yourself these questions:
What was the author trying to do? On his terms, was he
successful? What effect does this thing have on me? Does
it
get anywhere? Does it say anything? It is worth saying?
The chances are that your answers will be, "Well-yes-and-
no" something less than completely affirmative. Read it
through again. After this second reading, if you think it
fails utterly in every part, you might just as well throw it
away and start over again. However, if there are glimmers,

here and there, of merit and insight, maybe you can make
it amount to something after all.
We'll suppose, for the moment, that it is a short story

you have written though these rewriting suggestions are
useful no matter what the form of the piece. Now go
through it a third time, pencil in hand, and mark the

igo And Rewriting
passages where you think the story line is blurred or off
the track. Try to figure out why. Do you need this anec-
dote? Is that bit of dialogue necessary? Should this action
be expanded? Do you need another series of happenings
toward the story's end to clarify the climax? Have you
selected the best material for each incident?
The first is not fiddling and fussing
step in rewriting
with words. you secure and shape the general outline
First,
and basic content of the work. This is a matter of struc-
ture. Be old-fashioned about it. Make sure that your story
has a beginning, a middle, and an end. See that your de-
scriptions and happenings are relevant, necessary, proba-
ble and dramatic in relation to the over-all intent of your
writing. This is not easy. You may have a special fondness

for a passage that your good sense tells you isn't really
needed. Suppose your story has three pages of fine, witty
dialogue, bright with bon mots and really quite subtle in
its reflection of people. But having read the story through
three times, you know honestly that this passage doesn't

add to the narrative or the characters; it's just a pleasant
digression, though a rather clever one. That is the best
possible sign that you should delete it entirely.
The opposite is true of a passage which is too thin. Your
story demands more material at this point or that, or more
detail to clarify a motive or vivify an action. What details?
What is needed? How much is needed? What is suitable
to the characters? Now is the time to find this added mate-
rialand build it into the inadequate scene until it shows
your reader what he needs to be shown in order to under-
stand it and be moved by it.
Now make your major deletions and repairs. Write
drafts to fill the big gaps. Pull the thing together once
more. Put away for a while. Then read
it it
through for the
fourth time, giving all your attention to the structure.
And Rewriting 191
Never mind the words or the awkward phrasing at this
stage. You may have to repeat the process I have just out-
lined many times how many times depends upon your
subject, your skill at fixing the bad spots, and so on.
When you are sure that you can neither take out or add
another fact or incident or speech, then you have done the
first big job. Your architecture is sound; the shape is clear.
Now you can attend to the refinements.
While you are rewriting, keep in your mind the funda-
mental idea that all creative writing is designed to affect.
Therefore, the first major refinement to think about is
this: have you used the most effective order of events or
facts? Do they build up naturally and inevitably to cli-

maxes of action or persuasion? Suppose your main charac-
ter in a story has to face a sudden tragedy the death of a
child or a husband. You have to show how the tragedy
affects her. Perhaps she weeps bitter heart-tearing weep-
ing. When most effective to have her cry? During the
is it
tragedy? Right after it is over? Long after it is over? Which

would be the more dramatic? Which would be most in
character? Or, to use one more example, perhaps you are
describing something like a tremendous series of noises

or explosions. What is the best way to show the cumula-
tive effect of the noise? Do your facts add up and build
upon one another in the most vivid possible fashion, or is
there a let-down in the middle of the description?
When you have shaped the main outlines of your writ-
ing and rearranged the materials in their most effective
sequence, you have done the hardest part of rewriting.
Now you can tinker with the details: smoothing sentences,
sharpening images, and changing words. A good piece of
writing usually should flow along smoothly, with the
rhythms of the sentences moving in natural, unforced
cadences. One reliable way to test for natural cadence is to
igs And Rewriting
read aloud. If your phrasing is stilted or twisted, you will
stumble in the reading. Mark the points where you hesi-
tate or read haltingly so that you can come back later
and smooth them out. Getting good cadence in your writ-
ing is largely a task of reshaping sentences so that they
follow fluidly one after the other. Within each sentence,
any one of several variations of phrases may be euphonious.
The only way to satisfy yourself on this is to try the sen-
tence various ways. The way that sounds most natural is
likely to be the best one.

Rewriting sentences and single words is, when you get
down to it, a matter of taste. When all the factors are
brought into account your reader, your subject, your in-

tentit is for you to decide whether to use a vigorous,
racy slang word or a moderate, staid, ordinary one. The
real test, as I said in Chapter 9, is naturalness. Whatever
iseasy and unforced I would guess was right for the pur-
pose. If you use the apt and natural words of civilized
speech, your writing will be distinguished to the degree

that your mind is distinguished.
When you have done hacking, cutting, rewording, inter-
lining, and repunctuating, your manuscript is as it should
be a mess. You may have rewritten some portions of it
fivetimes or twenty times. Of your original draft perhaps
only a few sentences are intact. (As you grow in experience,

perhaps you will be able to write longer "clean" passages.)
Pull all the pieces together and copy it for the last time.
Put it away again for a few days. Then give it a final read-
ing, make the minor changes you are sure to find, and
consider the job done.
Yet, if you are a scrupulous craftsman hope you and I
are trying to be one you will never think

your writing is
"done." You will always want to make one more change,
add a good phrase, change a word here and there. This is
And Rewriting 195
as it should be. The writer who is too easily satisfied is
apt to be a slovenly workman. You know the old definition

of genius: "the capacity for taking infinite pains/' It ap-
plies to writing as well as to painting, sculpture, cabinet

making, or bricklaying; if you are willing to take pains,
you are apt to do finer work.
But you must recognize, as all craftsmen do, that there
is a
point beyond which tinkering and adjusting will do
more harm than good. It takes time to learn this. I don't
know of any special ways for you to recognize when your
work is finished, because it
depends wholly upon your
developed and your sense of taste or fitness at
instincts
the time you have produced the work. The more you write
and compare your writing with the finished work of other
writers whom you admire, the more sure your instinct for
the "right time to stop" will become. Any good craftsman
comes to know the top limit of his capacities. He is sure
that he can be better than he is; but he senses that at his
present level of skill and experience he has done the best
he can.
You may feel that my description of rewriting exag-
gerates the complexity of the process, that it is really sim-

pler than I have made it out to be. Not at all. It is harder-
much harder than I have begun to indicate in this short
chapter. I can only repeat what I have said again and
again: good creative writing is hard, complicated, subtle
labor. It is nerve-racking, time-consuming, energy-burn-
ing work. Its practitioners are many. Its masters are few.
Its satisfactions sometimes are profound.
PROBLEMS
You can practice rewriting by trying to edit almost any-
thing. It is excellent training and good fun, too to pick
194 And Rewriting
passages from textbooks and rewrite them. (You'll find
plenty to cut and change in textbooks. This one is no
exception.) Even better than rewriting bits from textbooks
is trying to redo passages from novels or short stories.
As a starter, here is a loosely written excerpt from a
first draft of an unpublished short story. The experience
is familiar, and you should be able to rewrite this into a
tight, persuasive incident.
For mechanical convenience, I suggest that you copy
this out, double or triple spaced, with wide margins so as
to give yourself plenty of room to add and change.
The office was large, dingy, very Victorian, with a large old
dusty mirror above the fireplace. A fireplace is an incongruous
thing in a dentist's office. Beside the fireplace was a battered roll-
top desk, its top littered with bills. In a bay window stood the
dentist's chair. Hovering over it, darkly menacing, was a tree,
whose trunk is a motor, whose branches are electric cords, and
whose fruit is a variety of drills. It's a frightening nightmare tree.
The floor is covered with linoleum in large black and white checks.
Walking in, your feet grate a little upon it because you have
picked up sand from the icy street below. The constant black and
white pattern of the floor beats and throbs against your eyes like
a frightened pulse.
The dentist has a twinkle in his eye. His glasses are steel-
rimmed, and they reflect, repeat the twinkle. He has on a white
coat. His hands are large and clean. And he has dazzling smiling
teeth.
You get into the chair and he swathes you in a white sheet and
tilts you back. Scrutiny. Asmall mirror moving around inside your
cheeks. None here. A pause. A frown. Another instrument. It
scratches, probes. A tiny finger of pain in your jaw. UH uh. He

looks again. "I'm afraid you have a little cavity here, Joan."
11
"Will take long, Doc? Your stomach heaves a little with
it
fright. You don't like dentists. You curse yourself for being so
craven. "I have a luncheon engagement."
And Rewriting 195
He looks again. "I can finish it by 1 1 More search-
:30." Pause.
ing. "That is, if I don't find anything else.*' He turns abruptly to

mix something in a little glass dish. The mood changes.
"The reason your teeth are good is because your father has
always taught you to preserve them in alcohol.'* The twinkle again.
"Have you still got the bottle of Charleston rum on the mantel?"
"Oh, Doc, we'd NEVER move that. It's traditional."
"Haven't had any good rum since your father died." He came
closer again and tilted the chair some more. Another careful look.
A flick of his foot turns on the drill. You shrink. His glasses are
cold steel now. It is as if they were opaque. Intense. Reflecting
nothing, revealing nothing. The drill probes. The noise of it fills
your head, obscures everything else. Lapping out to the corners of

the room. It hits the soft part with a penetrating pinpoint of pain.
"Gaw-amn-ooool"
Only for a moment. The little sparkle again.
"You're just like your father. You two are a profane pair." Then
again, intense, vibrating. He hurts. He knows he is hurting you.
When it is over, he strokes your hair once, impulsively and hard.
It is hard for him to have to hurt you. He smooths your hair once
more, and then twinkles again.
"Wash out your mouth."
Then he turns and heats the wax for an impression.
SUGGESTIONS
(a) piece structurally sound?
Is this
the point of view consistent or does it shift from

Is
objective to subjective without much reason? What will

you do about it?
Is it wordy? Why?
Do you, as reader, need to know more about the scene

than you do?
(b) Rewrite it, inserting your own experience where it is
needed, but trying to keep the flavor (if there is any) of
the original.
77. Creative Imagination
True, I talk of dreams;

Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,

Which is as thin of substance as the air,
And more inconstant than the wind . . .
Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet
IT IS not easy, nor will it be useful, to try to define crea-

tive imagination too closely. There are too many personal
factors in the imaginative process to make such a defini-
tion either accurate or enlightening. But it may help you
ifwe explore, in a more general fashion than before, the
nature of creative imagination, and what is demanded of
you if you want to stimulate and develop it.
Imaginative ideas are not "the children of an idle brain."
The creative imagination is not a quixotic turn of mind.
It is not the private property of dreamers or romantics.
To confuse imagination with the idle and speculative fan-
cies of daydreaming is to say that it is merely a loose-
minded pastime, vague, without mental and emotional
nourishment, and faintly foolish. This would deny imagi-
nation to Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Cer-
vantes, and the great company of artists, philosophers, and
writers whose imaginative works have not only outdone
reality but out-lasted it. It takes some virility and sub-
stance to defeat the slow erosion of time. Is it an accident
that works of real imagination outstay monuments, heroes,
and systems? Or is it a hint that in the creative imagina-
tion there is something of the Absolute?
196
Creative Imagination 197
it is currently fashionable to think so, imagina-
Though
tion not the disguised expression of the subconscious.
is
I suppose there are excellent psychological explanations of
the nature of imagination. Certainly, memory, the marks

of past experiences, inner tensions, and outer pressures
have something to do with it. Yet to explain imagination
by tracing the functioning of the id, super-ego, and repres-
sive mechanisms of the individual mind is merely to blue-
print the mechanical whirrings and clankings of the ma-

chinery without taking notice of much else. This may
well be, in fact, the way our minds act in imagining. But
there is more to it than mere process. If you define imagi-
nation as the expression of the subconscious you take
away, it seems to me, all responsibility from the person
doing the imagining. Imagination then would resemble a
mental vomiting, involuntary and uncontrolled. This can-
not be true, at least for the writer, because of all people
he is responsible not only for what he says but for knowing
precisely why he says it.
I prefer to think of imagination as reason set a-fire, rea-
son expanded in power and depth, reason vaulting above

the mundane and the flatly rational. Isn't it a primary
characteristic of the great works of creative imagination
that they are sweetly reasonable and mightily persuasive?
We need, here, a working definition of creative imagi-
nation, at least as it applies to the writer. You may not
agree with this one, but, in any case, it is a positive state-

ment for you to argue with or think about.
Imagination is the curiosity to ask why a thing is, the
understand how it got that way, and the capacity
ability to
to wonder reasonably what it could be in other circum-
stances.
This is vague necessarily, since it covers vast ground. But
let me put it another way, repeating in general what I have
said elsewhere. Before you can do any fruitful imagining,
198 Creative Imagination
you have to know a great deal. But knowledge is not

enough; you must perceive relations between the things
you know. Then, at last, you must project your knowledge
and perception of reality into pictures which are reason-
able imitations of life.
This is the basic method of all creative literature: to rep-

resent reality by means of images, ".. to hold the mirror
.
up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her

own image, and the very age and body of the time his form
and pressure." Every work of creative writing is a network
of images. The main function we expect of it is that these
pictures or images will be at least as vital and moving as
the real life they represent.
But what is more useful for you, as a learning writer, is
not a definition of creative imagination but an understand-
ing of what is
required of you to sustain it and keep it
stirring and fully at work. If you believe, as I do, that
creative imagination is a function of the reason, you will
recognize that it is possible to manufacture "inspiration."

Inspiration is imaginative insight; and insight never comes
without the preparatory spadework of hard and productive
thinking. Therefore, you can create inspiration by pressing
your mind to be incessantly curious. Curious about every-
thing. Why this? Why that? Why this result from those
causes? The key word is, why. No person or happening or
object will stand unyielding against the intelligent on-
slaught of the word why. Relationships appear. Sources are
uncovered. Motives are revealed. Probabilities are envi-
sioned.
For example, a historian can record the fact that one
hundred and twenty years, seven months, and five days ago
a wagon train of pioneers, magnificently equipped, set
out to cross the Sierras; and he can say only that the train
utterly disappeared, without leaving so much as a bleached
skull or broken axle-tree to hint at its fate. The historian,
by finding and recording the fact, has done his duty as a
chronicler. He may draw a conclusion from the fact, but
as a historian he is not justified in doing any more than
this. No more facts no more mention of this group of
pioneers.
But the creative writer can't get away with this. He has
to explain it. He needs to tell how and why it happened.
His answer may not be truehe has no more facts than
the historianbut it has to sound true. If the writer is
curious enough about the fact (and his reader will be),
his persistent questioning of it is likely to suggest a number
of reasonable explanations why the pioneers disappeared.
(Insistent curiosity about a fact like this one, for instance,

involves not only thought but research: what were the
Sierras likeone hundred and twenty years ago? What
about Indians? How well equipped were the pioneers?
What leadership did they have? The basic requirement of
insight, in short,
is knowledge.)
Creative imagination can be deliberately courted by

getting absorbed in the job of writing. You know that
your enthusiasm for any work is usually greatest when
you are most thoroughly immersed in it. This is especially
true of writing. The self-stimulating aspect of regular
hours of writing and the setting of a quota of such-and-
such number of words per day is extremely important in
nourishing and training the imagination. The old saying,
"You are what you do," is not far wrong in the writer's
case. When you are writing, you are a writer, no matter
how fumbling or poor your work may be. If you assume
an attitude seriously enough and often enough and intelli-
gently enough, it is likely that the attitude will become
a natural part of you.
At least, this is one way to build the habit of imaginative
thinking. If, day after day, you press yourself with restless
curiosity to think in terms of images, pictures, probabili-

ties, motives and drama, it would not be surprising, at
last, that the stuff of writing began to flow through your

mind with some effectiveness.
But, unfortunately, this is too clean a picture. It is my

guess that creative imagination never "flows." It moves,
yes, and in a pattern which you will come to recognize
after awhile. But it does not "flow."
The way your material moves in your mind from reality
to imaginative creation is a sequence which, though it
differs in degree for each person, is probably similar for
everyone. At least I will venture that certain clear steps

in the imaginative process can be pinned down and de-
scribed.
The first step, usually, is the vague perception of the
outline of an idea. For a writer, this might be an idea for a
story. You get an idea, say, for a long story about a queer
old man named Gaffer Sykes whom you knew, vaguely, as
an odd character in a tiny seacoast village near the place
where, as a boy, you spent your summers. You recall that
Gaffer claimed to have been once a sea captain that he
had sailed everywhere, had made and lost several fortunes.
At last, he had retired to a cranky and indigent old age.
When you knew of him, he was just a dirty, nasty-tempered
old hermit, scoffed at by children and politely ignored by
the townspeople. But when you got to know him, you
found that his temper was only a pose, a rebellion against
time and circumstance. And this was where your story
idea firstbegan to form.
The second step is a reorientation of your mind; around
the general story idea begin to gather the observations and
thoughts you made years ago and tucked away into mem-
ory. Associations multiply. You remember the smell of the
sun on seaweedy rocks, the nasal flatness of Gaffer's voice,

the pearl-gray shingles of his weathered shack down in the
cove, the brass sheen of the ancient sextant he used to
fondle as he talked. You begin to build from these things
the structure of your story. You try a first draft.
Here begins, often, the third stage of the sequence of
The work bogs down. The material
creative imagination.
becomes stubborn, perverse, unmanageable. You're stuck.
You enter the period of frustration.
is a mild statement. It is mild compared to an
This
author's plight when he has his main character in a
dilemma that simply won't resolve itself reasonably; or
when his research tells him that a certain sequence of
events occurred, and he can'tmake any sense whatever of
the sequence; or when every word he writes sounds false,
tinny, pretentious, overblown, or vacuous. Yet this period
of frustration, whether you like it or not (and you won't),
is not only inevitable, it is necessary for the functioning
of the creative imagination. It is the hot fire in which

the dross is burnt out of the ore. It is that part of the
writing process that is the most exhausting and often the

most profitable.
Because out of it, often enough to make it worth the
trouble, come
the pictures and the insights which are the
true products of imagination. Yet the experience of frus-
tration followed by the invariably hard struggle for insight
into the solutions of imaginative problems is always a
thing full of strain and even anguish. Many experienced

writers have testified that the more they know about writ-
ing, the more labored and painful they find this part of
the process.
At last, once the insights are thus strenuously arrived
at, there is a period of doubt and evaluation of them. Are
they true? Are they reasonable? Are they a natural de-
2O2 Creative Imagination
velopment of the material? Will they have a life of their

own?
This, I think, is the method of creative imagination. I
have made sound complicated. It is. And you may rea-
it
sonably ask: How does one know whether one has a crea-
tive imagination? There's a glib answer for that: If you
have, you'll know it; if you don't have, you'll never know
it. But that answer is neither fair nor
wholly true. There
are some signs, usually reliable, that your creative imagina-
tion not only exists but that it is working fully and deeply.
One of these signs is when you find yourself talking and
thinking naturally about the people and situations you
have created, as though they were as real as a next-door
neighbor. You know your characters well enough to tell

stories about them, just as though they had pasts and
presents and futures like the rest of us. When you can
chuckle over the possible mishaps that old Gaffer Sykes
can get himself into between sunset and sunrise, you may
be fairly sure that your imagination is
functioning crea-
tively. And when the shouts and cries, noises and smells
of a fictional event come so strongly to your mind that
you're not exactly sure, sometimes, where reality ends and

fiction begins, then your imagination is at full tide.
Another sign, too subjective to be counted on, is your
own heightened sense that the whole world vibrates and
pulsates with vivid life, and that everything you see and
feel is sharp and strong. Your own feelings delight you.
And the thought that the life in you is also in other men
gives you that compassion for people that is the only basis
for understanding them.
Best sign of all of the vigor of your creative imagination
is the feeling that you must write. That you are uncom-
fortable unless you do write. That you feel full, urgent
with the need to make a good piece of writing. That what-
ever keeps you from writing, however seductive, is tem-
porary and of no great account. If you feel this way, you
are a writer, and you will write no matter what else
necessity forces you to do.
EXAMPLE
Writers rarely give- us the chance to "look inside" to see
the creative imagination at work. But here is a passage from
a piece by Virginia Woolf* which seems to me to be a
remarkable portrayal of the creative reverie at work upon
a mundane fact of life.
Perhaps it was in the middle of January in the present year that

I looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a
first
date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of

the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book;
the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantel-
piece. Yes, it we had just
must have been the winter time, and
finished our tea, for remember that was smoking a cigarette
I I
when looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time.
I
Ilooked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged

for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the
crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind,
and thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of
I
the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark inter-
rupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made

as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon
the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.
How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it
a way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then
little
leave it. ... If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been
* From A Haunted House and Other Short Stories by Virginia Woolf,

copyright, 1944, by Harcourt, Brace and Co., Inc. Reprinted by per-
mission of Harcourt, Brace and Co. and The Hogarth Press, Ltd.
made for a picture, it must have been for a miniature the minia-
ture of a lady with white-powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks,
and lips like red carnations. A fraud, of course, for the people
who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that
way an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people
they were very interesting people, and think of them so often,
I
in such queer places, because one will never see them again,
never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house
because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said,
and he was in process of saying that opinion art should have
in his
ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from

the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to
hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one
rushes past in the train.

But for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was
made by a nail after all; too big, too round for that.
it's might I
get up, but if I

got up and looked at it, ten to one shouldn't be I
able to say for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever
knows how it happened. Ohl dear me, the mystery of life; the in-
accuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity!
72. Tour Relation to
Tour Writing
Having to say something is a very different matter

from having something to say,
JOHN DEWEY
YOU are the one who wants to write. I have taken it for
granted all along that you are serious about it. Perhaps
because of this, I have made the business of creative writ-
ing sound harder and more complicated than it is in
practice. Well, Iwould rather have made it sound this
way than have given you the easy and specious idea that
with a few good formulas, plot graphs, and "tricks of the
trade" you could be a writer. This would have been like
telling you that you could play the piano like Rachmani-
noff after ten easy lessons. In ten easy lessons you can learn
enough to render Chopsticks with fidelity and some feel-

is what you want, ten lessons are
ing. If Chopsticks enough.
Neither am
deluded enough to think that this book
I
or any book can teach you how to write.No matter if you

have believed everything I have said, and
if you have done
every exercise adequately and even brilliantly, you still

may not be a writer. What I have tried to do is to get
you thinking about the writing process thinking hard
about it. If you want to write, you can't avoid this. Get
your mind whirling, said William James, and see what
happens.
205
2o6 Your Relation to Your Writing
The writer is no special breed of man, due extra
privilege and homage because of his talent. As Words-
worth said of the poet: "He is a man speaking to men:
a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more
enthusiasm and tenderness, who has greater knowledge of

human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are
supposed to be common among mankind. ..." But this
gives no
writer an excuse to set himself apart from others;
it rather impels him to immerse himself more deeply in
the volitions and passions of life so that he may satisfy his
impelling need and the need of all men to re-create life
in order to understand it. If you, as a writer, begin to think
of yourself as a cut above the cabinetmaker, the stone-
cutter, and the architect, you shut yourself off from the
sources of your craft. If you begin to preen yourself on
being an "artist," then you are on your way to the
bohemian preciousness which, except for the grace of
God, will keep you from writing anything anyone will
want to read.
Self-expression that springs from whim, vagary, and
irrationality has no place in the creative process. Real
creativenessis
fundamentally truthful; it has its roots in
honest perceptions and real knowledge, not the pretense of
knowledge. And it is
presented truthfully that is, well-
composed, free of spurious tricks and self-important elab-

orations.
Therefore, to be a creative writer you must have a ma-
ture interest in the work. Maturity underlies all creative
effort. If you are thinking of writing in terms of its rewards
fat checks for stories, No. i
spot on the best-seller list,
fifty thousand dollars for a movie script, fame and adula-

tion from an admiring public then your attitude toward
writing is immature. You may achieve the best-seller list,

still feeling this way. You may even make a lot of money.
Your Relation to Your Writing 207
though most writers don't. But you probably won't have
written anything worth much. Immaturity and real creative
achievement never I say this flatly never go together.
This is not to urge you to shun commercial writing or
to wrap yourself in the dignity of your art and create mas-
terpieces in a garret. By all means try to write for money.
There is nothing crass about wanting to be a writer and
being paid for But the need for maturity still applies.
it.
No matter how a piece of writing you do; no matter

trivial
what kind of market you write for, whether it is pulp,
slick, or highbrow, approach the job as though it were
worth doing. You have to be mature enough to realize
that for every two hundred thousand words you write,
maybe five hundred will be remembered day after to-

morrow. But if you write every piece as though it were
worth writing, then you will be an honest commercial
writer, probably a good one, and maybe even a great one.
For example, I doubt whether even Shakespeare, except
when he wrote the long poems and the sonnets, was con-
scious of posterity. He was writing, as best he knew how, to
appeal to public taste and to move the emotions of the

people who crowded the theaters to see his plays. Except
for his incidental poetry, Shakespeare's work was almost
wholly commercial; and even most of the incidental poetry

was written for a patron, after the fashion of the day, in
the hope of the few guineas the patron would be pleased to
bestow. Being commercial did not hurt Shakespeare.
Indirectly, this is a comment on what the writer's atti-

tude should be toward his readers. Obviously, it is Shake-
speare's readers who have kept his work alive. We read
Shakespeare and he will be read long after we are gone
because the great core of his work, commercial though it
was in motive, is well and honestly made, truthful to itself
and to its material. Except in a few artificially inserted
208 Your Relation to Your Writing
scenesespecially in the early days Shakespeare, the

writer, did not talk down to his audience. His attitude
was must have been of an equal speaking to equals,
it
of a craftsman who knew that "good theater" was legiti-

mate but that false tricks, emotion-begging scenes, and
cheaply sensational language were unfair. If you read
Shakespeare through chronologically, you will see how his
work has many false tricks and self-conscious
youthful, early
appeals to audience prejudice or applause. But when he
reached maturity, Shakespeare spoke as "a man
artistic
speaking to men," with none of the flummery and conde,

scension of a superior talking to inferiors.
It isnot likely that you will be a Shakespeare. Yet you
will need to set standards of excellence for yourself that
may seem impossible. If you want to be mediocre, that is
your privilege; but I have never heard of a writer who
either wanted to be mediocre or who liked to be con-
sidered so. Your standards are your own, after all. It is a
further evidence of your mature approach to writing that
you not only make your standards high enough to be worth

working toward, you are cheerfully willing to discard, re-
write, change, reshape, and rethink writing that doesn't
come close enough to these standards to satisfy you. Ex-
cellence cannot be compromised. A
thing is either ex-
cellent or it is not. From time to time, there will be some
things you will write which will be ''good enough." But

you would be wise not to cultivate the "good enough"
habit. The question to ask of any writing you do, whether
it is a story for an adventure
pulp magazine or a novel
over which you have labored for two years, is this: Of its
kind, is can do? If I had a choice
this absolutely the best I
between a workmanlike adventure-pulp story and a
fine,
vast, overdone, sloppy novel, I would take the pulp story
without hesitation.
Your Relation to Your Writing 209
Excellence takes patience, and I suppose patience is the
firstevidence of maturity. The creative writer needs pa-
tience because excellence never comes easily. More often
than not, the worth of a thing is in direct proportion to its
difficulties. The get-results-quick attitude is no help to a
writer. (I doubt good for anyone else, either.) The
if it is
impatient writer, who would rather rush through his novel

and get it on the best-seller list than make sure it is a well-
made novel, is not a writer. He is a huckster,
purveying
cheap merchandise for quick profit. He fills his book with
characters who go rapidly to bed with one another, or who
fling themselves wildly into unreasonable situations, be-

cause he knows that there is a guaranteed audience for this
kind of stuff.
(Don't misunderstand me, I am not against sex; but I
am against it as a device to sell books. If a writer wants to
know how the subject of sex should be handled, let him
read Chaucer. There is no objection to sex, violence,
fraud, perversion, unnatural greed, grinding ambition, or
sensational heresy, providing it is used by a writer as a
natural, dramatic result of his material. Sensationalism,
employed by impatient writers, is merely sensationalism.
The sensational, worked inevitably into a piece of writing
by a patient craftsman, can be the climactic greatness of
real tragedy.)
This adds up to an impressive list of personal require-
ments. You'd think, to read this, that a writer has to em-
body most of the virtues and few of the vices that plague
other men. It would be wrong to imply this. I am talking
about the patience, humility, keenness, maturity, honesty,
and scrupulousness of a craftsman in relation to his craft.
Talking to you, as a would-be writer, I urge you to culti-

vate them in order to be a craftsman. What you are as a
person is no one's business but your own. I would guess,
2io Your Relation to Your Writing
parenthetically, that a person who is honest enough with

himself to be a good writer is likely, also, to be a fairly
palatable fellow when you get to know him. (Apparently

Shakespeare was. Yet Richard Wagner was insufferably
selfish and willful, Marcel Proust was a snob, James Joyce
was bitter, Christopher Marlowe was a brawler.) It is my

belief though I am
aware of the many exceptions that
the creative imagination is most genially nourished in a
healthy mind. Certainly, the vigor in most fine writing is

not the hectic flush of fever but the full, strong pulse of
strength. Creative writing likeany art is the effort of
intelligent, sensitive, perceptive, and articulate people to
make and express it in coherent form.
sense out of life
But Do you want to write? Get at it,
this is moralizing.
then, and everlastingly at it. There is deeper pleasure, I
think, in creating and building than in anything else.

Whatever the frustrations there are in writing; whatever
the hard, solitary, mind-wracking hours at a writing desk
costyou in the way of the pleasures of social life and the easy
freedom of your friends; whatever else it may cost you,
remember no one is making you write except your-
that
self. And you will know, at last, as every creative writer
knows, that the job is worth it.
Reading List
J. HIS LIST does not pretend to be a complete reading pro-
gram for writers. It merely suggests a handful of writings

to be read as illustrations of the ways different authors
handle their writing problems. The selections are emphati-
cally not meant to serve as models for the "right" ways to
solve particular writing problems. Though the readings are
loosely grouped according to their relevance to specific

chapters in this book, many of them will be useful as ac-
companiments to
any of the chapters.
Reading lists usually reflect the tastes and enthusiasms

of the person who compiles them. However, I have tried to
select these readings for their diversity and their excellence.
Represented here are novels, news reports, feature articles,
histories, scientific and philosophical works, essays, and

short stories. There is even a selection from a cookbook.
All of these pieces, whatever their form or subject, are well
written; of their kind they are good and often brilliant
examples. There is enough variety here that you should
find yourself stimulated to browse widely and intelligently
on your own. The best reading comes from browsing, any-
wayall a reading list can do is to get you started.
CHAPTER i
Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, William

Sloane Associates, 1949.
Stephen Vincent Bent, "Spanish Bayonet/' from Selected
Works of Stephen Vincent Benet, Vol. 2, Farrar and Rine-
hart, Inc., pp. 113 if.
212 Reading List
John Hersey, Hiroshima, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1946.
Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, Modern Library, pp. 2-12.
John P. Marquand, Point of No Return, Little, Brown & Com-
pany, 1949, Chapter 2 and pp. 125-130.
John Bartlow Martin, "The Strangest Place in Chicago/'
Harper's Magazine, No. 1207, December 1950.
J. B. Priestley, Delight, Harper and Brothers, 1949, pp. 4, 7, 18,
21, 31, 37, 42, 56, 66, 95, 100, 103, 110, 127.
Irma S. Rombauer, "Cakes," from The Joy of Cooking, The
Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943.
CHAPTER 2
Joseph Conrad, Typhoon, Chapters 10-22.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, Modern Library,
Part One, Chapters 6 and 7.
William Faulkner, "Dry September/' from These Thirteen,
by William Faulkner, Random House, Inc., 1931.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Oxford University Press,
1949, Chapter 8.
Douglas Southall Freeman, "How to Accomplish the Impossi-
ble/' Chapter 18 of Lee's Lieutenants, Vol. 2, Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons, 1945.
Ernest Hemingway, "After the Storm," and "A Day's Wait/'
from Winner Take Nothing, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933.
T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Doubleday, Doran
& Co., Inc., 1935, Chapters 61-68.
CHAPTER 3
Katharine Brush, "Night Club/' originally printed in Harper's

Magazine, September 1927.
Albert Camus, The Plague, Alfred A. Knopf, 1948, pp. 7-21.
Douglas Southall Freeman, "A Night in the Wilderness,"
Chapter 33 of Lee's Lieutenants, Vol. 2, Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1945.
Reading List 213
John Galsworthy, "Indian Summer of a Forsyte," from The
Forsyte Saga, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934.
A. B. Guthrie, The Way West, William Sloane Associates,
1949, pp. 26-38.
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, Modern Library, pp. 6-8, 11-13,
196-198.
Wallace Stegner, "Turtle at Home/' The Atlantic Monthly,
April 1943.
Mark Twain, Life On the Mississippi, Harper 8c Brothers, 1950,
Chapters 4 and 10.
CHAPTER 4
Sherwood Anderson, "The Strength of God," from Winesburg,
Ohio, Modern Library.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, Modern Library, pp. 17-27.
Stephen Crane, "The Blue Hotel," from Twenty Stories, by
Stephen Crane, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1926.
John Galsworthy, "The Apple Tree," from Five Tales, by John
Galsworthy, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918.
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, Modern Library, Chapter 8.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Harcourt, Brace & Com-
pany, Inc., 1949, Part 3.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act II, Scenes i and 2.
Thornton Wilder, "The Marquesa de Montmayor," from The
Bridge of San Luis Rey, Albert and Charles Boni, 1927.
CHAPTER 5
Sherwood Anderson, "On Realism," from Sherwood Ander-

son's Notebook, Boni and Liveright, Inc., 1926.
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives' Tale, Harper's Modern
Classics, Harper & Brothers, 1950, pp. 37-39.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Oxford University Press,
1949, Chapter i.
Ernest Hemingway, "Fifty Grand," from The Collected Short

Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Modern Library.
314 Reading List
Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay, Modern Library, Chapter i.
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, Chapter i.
Katherine Mansfield, "The Daughters of the Late Colonel,"
from The Garden Party, by Katherine Mansfield, Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., 1922.
Guy de Maupassant, "The Diamond Necklace," from Selected
Tales of Guy de Maupassant, Random House, Inc., 1950.
Dorothy Parker, "Arrangement in Black and White," from
The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker, Modern Library.
William Shakespeare, Richard III and King Henry the Fourth,
Parts I and II.
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex and Antigone.

Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March, Harper 8c Brothers, 1948.
CHAPTER 6
Stephen Vincent Bent, "Everybody Was Very Nice," from

Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Bentt, Vol. 2, Farrar 8c
Rinehart, Inc.
Erskine Caldwell, "Saturday Afternoon" and "Kneel to the
Rising Sun," from Jackpot, The Short Stories of Erskine
Caldwell, Duell, Sloan & Pearce.
John Dos Passes, Three Soldiers, Modern Library, Part 3.
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Modern Library, Chapter i.
James Joyce, "The Dead," from Dubliners, Modern Library.
Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country, Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1948, Chapters 18-26,
CHAPTER 7
"The Book of Esther," from The Holy Bible, King James

version.
Stewart Chase, "The Luxury of Integrity," from The Nemesis
of American Business, The Macmillan Company, 1930.
Joseph Conrad, Victory, Modern Library, Chapters 4-8.
James Joyce, "Counterparts," from Dubliners, Modern Library.
Reading List 215
Franz Kafka, "First Interrogation," from The Trial, Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., 1937.

T. E. Lawrence, "The Expedition against Akaba," Chapters
39-54 from Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Doubleday, Doran &
Co., Inc., 1935.
Jonathan Swift, "A Modest Proposal," from Satires and Per-
sonal Writings, Oxford University Press, 1933.
Mark Twain, Life On the Mississippi, Harper & Brothers,
1950, Chapter 40.
Virginia Woolf, "Time Passes," from To the Lighthouse,
Modern Library.
CHAPTER 8
Sherwood Anderson, "Hands," from Winesburg, Ohio, Modern

Library.
"The Book of Ruth," from The Holy Bible, King James
version.
Willa Gather, O Pioneers!, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913,
Part i.
Will Cuppy, "A Short History of Man," from How to Tell

Your Friends from the Apes, Liveright Publishing Corp.
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, Chapter i.
William Sansom, "The Long Sheet," from Fireman Flower and
Other Stories, Vanguard Press, Inc.
CHAPTER 9
Gelett Burgess, "Short Words Are Words of Might," from
Essays for Our Time, Bader and Wells (eds.), Harper 8c
Brothers, 1947.
James Gould Cozzens, The Just and the Unjust, Harcourt,
Brace & Company, Inc., 1942, Chapter 8, pp. 389-434.
O. E. Rolvaag, Giants in the Earth, Harper & Brothers, 1929,
Book I, Chapter 2.
Samuel T. Williamson, "How to Write Like a Social Scientist,"
from The Saturday Review of Literature, October 4, 1947.
216 Reading List
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Modern Library, Part
VIII.
CHAPTER 1O
Rudolf Arnheim, et al, Poets at Work, Harcourt, Brace &
Company, Inc., 1948.
Kenneth Roberts, / Wanted to Write, Doubleday 8c Co., Inc.,
1949-
CHAPTER 11
Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, The Philosophical Li-

brary, Inc., 1946, Introduction II and Chapter 5.
Ernest Dimnet, The Art of Thinking, Simon and Schuster,
1928.
Don Marquis, The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel,
Doubleday Company, Inc., 1950.
8c
Jonathan Swift, "A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhn-

hnms," from Gulliver's Travels, Oxford University Press,
1933-
CHAPTER 1*
Helen Hull, ed., The Writer's Book, Harper & Brothers, 1950.
W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, Doubleday and
Co., Inc.
Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation," from Selected
Writings of Gertrude Stein, Random House, Inc., 1946.
Index
actions,how to observe, 22-28; caricature, relation to charac-

of walking, analyzed, 28-35; ter, 94
of eating, analyzed, 35-37; Carroll, Lewis, 13, 14; Alice
terms of expression of, 38; in Wonderland, excerpt,
sequence of analysis of, 38; 176; Through the Looking-
problems in writing of, 39- Glass, excerpt, 173.
41; as revealing character, causality, in plot, 143
97; character of Hamlet "Champion," Ring Lardner,
shown by, 98 excerpt, 100-101
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, character, fictional, 74-75;
The, Mark Twain, excerpt, and relation to reader, 83;
127-130 sources of, 83-84; creation
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis of, 86-88; consistency of, 86;
Carroll, 13, 14; excerpt, 176 models for, 86; methods for
anger, analysis of, 63-65 creating, 89-108; problems
architecture, of prose, 131; of of creating, 90; first impres-
stones, 142 sions of, 91; revealed by ac-
Aristotle, quoted, 22; on im- tion, 97; stock types, 101;
agery, 163 writer's relation to, 103,
Aspects of the Novel, E. M. 106; ways to write about,
Forster, excerpt, 143 104-108; problems in writ-
associations, imaginative, 200 ing of, 108-109; in stones,
122
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 209
Bene*t,Stephen Vincent, 109;
clarity, elements of, 124
"Freedom's a Hard-bought
cliches, of action, 23, 35-37; of
Thing," excerpt, no; emotion, 63
"O'Halloran's Luck," ex-
coherence, expression in form,
cerpt, no; "Spanish Bayo-
144
net," excerpt, 166-167
comparison, 166-167
Bible, The Holy, 12 how to
complex happenings,
write of, 159-161
cadence, 192 conflict, 122
Canby, Henry S., quoted, 60 contexts, physical, 43; how to
817
8l8 Index
observe, 47-53; problems in "Dry September," William

writing, 55-57 Faulkner, excerpt, 185-187
creative imagination, nature
of, 196-197; habit of, 199; eating, action of, analyzed,
products of, 201; existence 35-37
of, 202; method of, 202 effect, of characters in stories,
creative literature, basic 102
method of, 198 eloquence, 119
creative writing, description Emerson, Ralph W., on Tho-
of, 11; dependable founda- reau, 76
tion for, 18; function of, emotional effect, 113
112; effect of, 113 emotional expression, terms
Cry, The Beloved Country, of, 76
Alan Paton, excerpt, 171- emotional writing, 113
172 emotions, 60; as sources for
writing, 61; understanding
of, 61; observation of, 62;
"Davy," Sarah Farrell, short cliches of, 63; ways to write
story quoted, 145-154 about, 78; problems in writ-
Death in the Afternoon, Er- ing of, 79
nest Hemingway, excerpt, English language, 1 1 richness
;
41-42 of, 174

"Death the Proud Brother," essay, 132-134
Thomas Wolfe, excerpt, 57- experience, as source of facts,
59 28; creation of in writing,
deletion, need for,
103 47-53
description, terms of, 116
detail, significant, 5, 15; how
to relate in description, facts, how to find, 1-18; rela-
47-54 tion of, to writing, 1 1 how

;
Dewey, John, quoted, 155, 205 to relate, 27; isolated, 44;

dialogue, as revealing charac- related to each other, 44;
ter, 102 shaped by surroundings, 45;
diction, 119 speak for themselves, 120;
dilemmas, characters in, 97 quality of, 165
Ponne, John, "The Will," Farrell, Sarah, "Davy," short
quoted, 166-167 story quoted, 145-154
drama, a criterion of selec- Faulkner, William, "Dry Sep-
tion, 121 tember," excerpt, 185-187
dramatizing emotions, 63 feature article, 132-133
Index
feelings, see Emotions process of making analyzed,

fiction, as autobiography, 104; 163-165; overbold, 167;
source of forms in, 134 overuse of, 169; problems in
form, 119; definition of, 131; making of, 170-171
relation of, to
function, imagination, creative, see cre-
131; sources of, 131-134; of ative imagination
fiction, 132; natural growth impressions, sources of, 65;
of, 135; example of story how to analyze, 65-67; of
form developed, 134-141; as character, analysis of, 91-94
expression of coherence and
meaning, 144 James, William, quoted, 205
Forster, E. M., Aspects of the journal, writer's, 183
Novel, excerpt, 143 Joyce, James, Ulysses, excerpt,
"Freedom's A Hard-bought 96; quoted, in; Ulysses, tyi-
Thing," Stephen V. Benet, cerpt, 179-180

excerpt, no
frustration, writer's, 201 Kelland, Clarence B., quoted,
function, relation to form, 131 136
"Kew Gardens," Virginia
generalizations, 3-6; of emo- Woolf, excerpt, 21
tions, 76-77, 113; about peo-
ple, 85 Lardner, Ring, "Champion,"
grammar, defined, 174 excerpt, 100-101
Grapes of Wrath, The, John Lawrence, D. H., Sons and
Steinbeck, excerpt, 16-17 Lovers, excerpt, 81-82
Life, quoted, 160-161
Haunted House and Other London, Jack, "To Build a
Stories, A, Virginia Woolf, Fire," 123
excerpt, 203-204
Hemingway, Ernest, quoted, maturity, 206
83; Death in the Afternoon, Maugham, W. Somerset, The
excerpt, 41-42; quoted, 131 Summing Up, excerpt, 157;
Herrick, Robert, quoted, 33 "Rain," excerpt, 95
Higginson, T. W., quoted, i
meaning, expressed by form,
humor, sense of, in writer, 144
107-108 metaphor, 162; how to make,
"humour," in character, 101 167; process of making, 168
moods, analysis of, 68-73;
images, 26; Aristotle quoted problems in writing of, 79-
on, 163; ingredients of, 163; 81
22O Index
motions, characteristics of, 23 proportion, 108; of story, 143
movie-camera method, 72, 143 purple patches, 169, 170
narrative, 143 "Rain," W. Somerset

naturalness, word use, 180 Maugham, excerpt, 95
necessity, as criterion of selec- reader, writer's relation to, 61;
tion, 121 involvement of, 114; effects
Norris, Frank, "Simplicity in of writing on, 143; writer's
Art," excerpt, 112 obligation to, 155
novel, 132 relevance, criterion of selec-
novelette, 132 tion, 121
resemblances, basic to im-
objects, observation of, ana- agery, 163
lyzed, 6-8 rewording, 192
observation, techniques of, 9; rewriting, 188-190; steps in,
analysis of, 14; of emotions, 190-193; problems in, 193-
62 195
"O'Halloran's Luck," Stephen Roberts, Kenneth, quoted, 43
V. Bendt, excerpt, no
order, effective, 191 "Samaritan, The Good," story
outlines, 184 of, 97-98
selection, 72-73, 103; dictated
pace, criterion of selection, by function of writing, 115;

124;problems in, 139-140 method 115-118; of sub-
of,
panorama, how to observe, 53 stantives, 120; guide to, 120-

pathetic fallacy, 165 122; criteria of, 121-125;
Paton, Alan, Cry, The Be- problems in, 125-126
loved Country, excerpt, 171- self-expression, 206
172 sensationalism, 209
patterns, observation of, 47 settings, physical, how to ob-
people, how to observe and serve, write about, 43-55

write about, 83-108; writer's Shakespeare, William, 207-208
relation to, 103; complexity short-short form, 132, 139
of, 104 short story, 132; sample plot
plot, 2; source of, 134; sample developed, 134-142
developed, 134-142 similes, 162
point of view, 74, 88, 126; "Simplicity in Art," Frank
as source of form, 135 Norris, excerpt, 112
probability, criterion of selec- sketch form, 132, 142-143
tion, 121 Solomon's Judgment, 12
Index
Sons and Lovers, D. H. Law- Van Gelder, Robert, Writers
rence, excerpt, 81-82 and Writing, excerpt, 188
"Spanish Bayonet/' Stephen vision, detailed, 8
V. BeneX excerpts, 166-167 vocabulary, 11, 116, 177
spontaneous writing, 62
standards, of writer, 208 walking, action of analyzed,
Steinbeck, John, The Grapes 28-35
of Wrath, excerpt, 16-17 Wells, H. G., quoted, 125
stereotypes, 158 White, E. B., 134; quoted, 188
stilted writing, 177 Whitehead, A. N., quoted,
story, definition of, 122; archi- 2, 22
tecture of, 142 "Will, The," John Donne,
suggestion, writer's basic skill excerpt, 167
at, 156; problems in writ- Wolfe, Thomas, "Death the
ing, 170-171 Proud Brother," excerpt,
Summing Up, The, W. Som- 57-59
"
erset Maugham, excerpt, Woolf, Virginia, Kew Gar-
157 dens," excerpt, 21; "A
surroundings, importance in Haunted House and Other
description, 43 Short Stories," excerpt, 203-
symbol, 62; importance of, 204
157; as time-saving device, words, emotional, 77; emo-
162 tionally charged, 116; use
of, 173; writer's relation to,
Thoreau, Henry D., 26, 76, 174; problems in use of,
177 175-176; choice of, 176-177;

Through the Loo king-Glass, vague, 177; used for effect,
Lewis Carroll, excerpt, 173 178-179; used naturally,
Thurber, James, 143 180; problems in usage of,
Twain, Mark, The Adven- 185
tures of Tom Sawyer, ex- Wordsworth, William,
cerpt, 127-130 quoted, 206
type symbol, 158 work habits, of writer, 182
60
writer, resources of,
Ulysses, James Joyce, excerpts, Writers and Writing, Robert
95-96, 179-180 Van Gelder, excerpt, 188

understanding, need for in writing, raw materials of, 118;
writer, 108 writer's relation to, 205-208

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CO > UJ

HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON

Printed in the United States of America

Note to the Instructor in

Note to the Student xiii

1 . Material Is Under Your Nose i

2. You See Actions 22

3. Out of the Corner of Your Eye 43

4. Your Feelings Are Stirred 60

5. You Create People 83

6. You Shape Your Material 1 1 \

7. You Search for Form 131

y8J You Can Suggest Much 155

9. Finding the Right Words 173

10. And Rewriting 188

11. Creative Imagination 196

12. Your Relation to Your Writing 205

READING LIST 211

THE BASIC PREMISE of this book is that all writing is in a

talking about, be able to think it through, organize it rea-

problems. The muddled phrasing, mixed-up sentences,

gence of hope, that as students master their subject matter

This book is designed to provide, in an order of in-

creasing difficulty, some typical problems in thinking that

adapted to the needs of beginning students as well as to

expert students need constantly to be asked questions of

pencils writing the phrase "be specific" in the margins of

writing will be sharp, perceptive, and concrete. Other

intangibles of "mood" and "atmosphere"; and they show

need to it? What elements of the subject can

adapt them to their own needs. However, any

kind hopefully assumes certain ideals in terms

that students should write much and often, being carefully

guided the while by an instructor who can give some

personal attention to each student's work. But since stu-

a course, to write something for each class assignment.

papers place no more burden of correction on the instruc-

thinking is only learned while thinking; and imagination

without pressiire, to recognize his errors. Open, informal

However, no text should presume to do an instructor's

teaching for him. A

Writers kid themselves about themselves and other

THIS BOOK is about some of the basic

that the methods and approach I have described here are

your experience to the words you use to express it, you

solving the problems of writing one at a time. By being

tionsespecially for the writer that can and must be

asking to be up.) have asked

problems are concerned, there are no ready-made answers.

The Summing Up* W. Somerset Maugham said es-

as he says, he waits indefinitely and ends by producing

He has his inspiration too, but he controls and subdues it

to his bidding. . . ."

Obviously, then, creative writing is not a knack or a

This is another way of saying that creative writing is

by analyzing and imitating the "techniques" of other writ-

only learn to express yourself. No matter how many models

Technique is often confused with "style." They are not

something to say, technique is as useless to you as an empty