Slate writing

“ It was his habit to write a book in the rough, jotting down the main facts and the dialogue. The next writing put it into readable form, and on this second he always worked the hardest, transforming sentences into graceful transitions,—interjecting epigrams, witticisms and clever dialogue, and penetrating the whole with his personality. The third writing (and he never wrote a book less than three times) gave it its final coat of varnish. Burnishing the finished product with untiring skill, it scintillated at last.
Poetry came more easily to him than prose. ”

“ In prose, therefore, we are of opinion that the usual forms of prose may occasionally, and to a certain extent, be departed from, without giving any great offence to the reader.
Not so, however, in rhyming poetry—and, above all, not so in that species of it we are now writing about, the rhymed drama. ”

“ Vice of using many words with little meaning; or words barren of suggestiveness and destitute of figures of speech; and its opposite, the Vice of overloading the style with so many figures of speech and so much suggestion and variety as to disgust or confuse. These vices have been named tautology, dryness, and “fine writing.” Without doubt the simplest narration is the hardest kind of composition to write, chiefly because we do not realize how hard it is. The first necessity for a student is to realize the enormous requirements for a perfect mastery of style. ”

“ No matter what method of narration you may choose, you must make up your mind at the outset to be simple and direct in telling your story. If you try to put style in your work, it will fall flat. After all, style is more or less of a humbug. If your writing is correct, and straight from the heart, and you put your individuality into it, critics will label your way of telling things “style.” ”

“ I would offer you as an alternative that you should produce slowly, at about the rate of one in every two years, short books compact of irony, yet having running through them like a twisted thread up and down, emerging, hidden, and re-emerging in the stuff of your writing, a memory of those early certitudes and even of passion for those earlier revelations. ”

“ That question should be settled with regard to the suitability of the method to the matter of the story—and here suitability is synonymous with naturalness. It must not be forgotten that story writing is only a modern phase of the world-old custom of story telling, and that the printed page should appear as natural and easy to the eye as the voice would to the ear. ”

“ The usual method of obtaining the writing is for the medium to hold the slates alone. When this is the case the medium passes the slates below, and receives in return a dummy which he is continually thumping on the under side of the table for the purpose of showing the sitter that the slates are there all the time. ”

“ But it is hardly less true that prose should be read aloud. "The best test of good writing," said Hazlitt—and no man in his generation wrote better prose than he—"is, does it read well aloud." The sympathetic oral reading of a passage from any prose master, a reading that naturally indicates points of emphasis, shades of thought, nuances of feeling, is often better than any formal explanation, for it reproduces the living voice of the writer. ”

“ Let an author so tell his tale as to touch his reader's heart and draw his tears, and he has, so far, done his work well. Truth let there be,—truth of description, truth of character, human truth as to men and women. If there be such truth, I do not know that a novel can be too sensational.
I did intend when I meditated that history of English fiction to include within its pages some rules for the writing of novels;—or I might perhaps say, with more modesty, to offer some advice on the art to such tyros in it as might be willing to take advantage of the experience of an old hand. ”

“ But in narrating an event, or in describing a setting, after he has determined that event and setting are essential to his single story, the writer may employ the technique of general narrative or descriptive writing. Whatever the form of fiction, its aim is the same, to show real men and women doing in a real world the things one might expect from their natures and the circumstances of their lives. ”

“ But when that first novel has been received graciously by the public and has made for itself a success, then the writer, naturally feeling that the writing of novels is within his grasp, looks about for something to tell in another. He cudgels his brains, not always successfully, and sits down to write, not because he has something which he burns to tell, but because he feels it to be incumbent on him to be telling something. ”

“ But they want only the most fascinating stories that can be told,—stories that both in plot and handling are outside of the beaten path of fiction,—stories so full of incident and movement and so cleverly handled as to interest every one,—stories tersely told, which never, either in whole or part, have appeared in print before, and which are free from padding, foreign phrases, and attempted fine writing. ”

“ They are not extraordinary to those familiar with spiritual facts. I have held a slate in my own hand in the presence of a medium, and received messages on the slate in which every letter was written in double marks, as if written with two different colored pencils, although no pencil was furnished or seen. ”

“ The same sentence becomes periodic by transposition of the less important predicate modifiers, thus―“At midnight, as the clocks were striking the hour, I stood on the bridge.”
It will be observed that the periodic form is adapted to oratory and similar forms of eloquent writing in which the mind of the reader or hearer is keyed up to a high pitch of expectancy; while the loose sentence is the one common in all simple narrative and unexcited statement.
Qualities of Style. Writers on rhetoric note three essential qualities of style, namely clearness, force, and elegance. ”

“ The silhouette of no sentence is ever blurred. Every sentence is ringing with a clear vocal cadence. There, after all, in that vocal quality, is the chief test of good writing. Writing, as a means of expression, has to compete with talking. ”

“ Letters that don't matter, letters from the insignificant and the boresome, simply aren't answered. For small spur-of-the-moment notes to one's intimes who're not too far off, there's quite a little feeling for using slates. ”

“ The argument of the last paragraph is clinched by the fact that of a thousand stories, all of which are well constructed and put together, only a few or perhaps [17] none will be written with any approach to real literary power, in the verbal sense. Of all the writers of to-day who can put together a story in workmanlike fashion how many have the power of the telling word? how many have even a style? ”

“ I am ill,—too ill to work any more. Don't let anything or anybody come between us unless [Pg 120] you want my death. Others can give you everything—everything but understanding. Trust the man to whom you are the center of the universe.
Eternamente,
EDGAR.
Careful and painstaking in the writing of letters to editors and friends, Mr. Saltus invariably wrote to me on a yellow copy pad and in pencil. In twenty years the writing against the tinted background has become indistinct, but, poor as it is, a fac-simile of one of his letters will be given. ”

“ Its unity of tone—which is characteristic of the short story, dramatic and of atmosphere—results from its simplicity as to persons, events, and setting, and its unity of style results from its unity of tone. The elements of the short story are less complex than those of a longer fiction, and the fact causes all the modifications in the general technique of fiction as manifested by the short story. In the short story, for instance, there is less opportunity than in the novel to manage secondary events to build up character or personality. ”

“ That means is to write with due elaboration, lest the phrasing seem stark and flat in comparison with the softly moulded contours of life itself. There are two elements in literature, the fact and the form; they are equally important and should be equally complete. When considering the fitness of a plot to serve as the skeleton for a short story, remember that in execution the thing must be written with due verbal elaboration, else it will be angular and unattractive, and that the idea of many incidents, people, or places cannot be so written in the space available. ”

“ In all countries the metrical tale is many generations older than the prose story; for prose writing is a refinement of the literary art which flourishes only when reading has become popular; while verse, being at first a kind of memoria technica used for the correct transmission of sacred texts and the heroic tradition, strikes the ear and fixes the recollection of an audience. The exploits of mighty warriors and the miracles of saints—love, fighting, and theology—form the subject matter of these stories in verse. ”

“ sketches too—he could do charming things, if only he had known how to finish them!—and, on the writing-table at his elbow, scattered sheets of prose and verse; ”

“ An unfailing sign of the amateur, at least of the amateur with no innate sense of fictional values, is a story made up of hard and angular blocks of narration, description, and dialogue. The skilled writer—if the particular story permits, a proviso always to be understood—will intermingle speech with action and description with both. ”

“ Style, literary power, the right word in the right place—all will resist the tooth of time, but no one will preserve a story from the contagion of decay at the heart. Indeed, in the juster sense, a shapely design is the necessary foundation or basis for perfect writing, which is no mere varnish. ”

“ Secondly, that in these household stories (the models for which were originally oral tradition) the thing most to be avoided is a discursive or descriptive style of writing. Brevity and epigram must ever be soul of their wit, and they should be written as tales that are told. ”

“ When the writer of a story is not using narrative or description, he will be transcribing the speech of his characters. And in the matter of transcribing speech the writer of fiction has a chance comparable with that of the dramatist and the practitioner in the graphic arts. The effect of narrative or description upon a reader is secondary and derivative; the effect upon him of written speech or dialogue is very nearly primary. ”

“ If the position is correct, and if all downward strokes are made toward the center of the body, each pupil will develop uniform slant, though different pupils may develop individual slants. Following the same rules, and practicing at the same time under similar conditions, different slants result, because of the variations in length of arms, and other physical conditions. The degree of slant is not a matter of grave importance so long as each writer develops uniform slant in his own writing. ”

“ The adoption of a too inclusive mode of narration may lead the writer astray; conversely, the mode of narration most nearly suited to the necessities of his story will aid in holding his pen to the line. If the story is of action, unconcerned with motives save by implication, and the writer tells it in the first person, or in the third person from the viewpoint of a single character, he will be led to confine himself to the depiction of the panorama of events, which is the work in hand. ”

“ Those fellows jump on to a thing like chained lightning, and they got a way of writing that is just a lot of little twists and curls, but one means a whole sentence—they call it 'shorthand'—and doing that way, they can set down talk as fast as anybody can speak, and there were a dozen of them there with pencils and paper in their fingers. ”

“ Those were not days, be it remembered, when people wrote fiction for the sake of introducing discussions. There still lingered in the novelist's mind the time-worn heresy that he had a story to tell, and that his people must act as well as talk. The plot—delightful and obsolete word!—was then in good repute, and conversation was mainly useful in helping on the tale, in providing copious love scenes, and, with really good novelists, in illustrating and developing character. ”

“ Upon variety depends largely that delightful and elusive quality which we call Euphony. No writer or reader can be long insensible to that music of words which is as intangibly tangible in prose as in poetry,—different in the one from the other, but as real and truly a source of delight in speech as in song, in prose as in verse. It is true that what is written is not necessarily read aloud. ”

“ Since the novel, to be a work of art, must be impersonal, neither autobiographical nor biographical.—I am not, of course, speaking of the historical novel, whether the history involved be ancient or contemporary, nor am I speaking of an admitted satire. ”

“ His voice, full and mellow by nature, and in perfect control, responds to all the many changes of emotion that the part demands, the unmatched rhythm of the prose rendered as he renders it carrying one clean out of one's self as one listens. It is only when one comes to one's self on the curtain-fall that one finds one's self wondering, Can this be prose? Surely, never before was prose, English prose, as beautiful to the ear as English verse. ”

“ Your mother's impersonations of my wife, her messages—Voices—may be due to mind-reading, to clairvoyance, but the method of their delivery certainly lies beyond any known law. In that glows my hope. Grant the possibility of direct writing, of the power of the mind to think its will upon paper without the aid of hand or pen, and a whole new world is opened up, the horizons of life are infinitely extended. ”