riter, not the reader of
fiction, and that implies much.

CHAPTER I

THE WRITER HIMSELF

Critical Faculty--Cultivation of Genius--Observation and
Information--Open-mindedness--Attitude Toward Life--
Prejudice and Provincialism--The Social Question--Reading--
Imagination.

Accessible as are the data of the fiction writer, the facts and
possibilities of life, their very accessibility places him under strict
necessity to sift the useful from the useless in search for the pregnant
theme. For if life presents a multiplicity of events to the writer, from
which he may select some sort of story with little labor to himself,
life also presents the same multiplicity of events to the reader, who
can see the obvious as well as the lazy writer, and who will not be
pleased with a narration of which he has the beginning, middle, and end
by heart. A tale which does not interest fails essentially, and novelty,
in the undebased sense of the word, is the root of interest. Therefore
the writer of fiction who takes himself and his art seriously must
develop the open and penetrating eye and the faculty of just selection.
All is not gold that glitters, a fact that too often becomes painfully
evident only when some tale discovered with joy and developed with
eagerness lies coldly spread upon paper. The beginner who will approach
his own conceptions in a spirit of unbiased criticism and estimation
before determining to set them down will save himself useless labor,
much postage, and many secret tears. Half of the essentially feeble
work produced that has not a chance of getting published is the result
of the writer's falling in love with his own idea simply because it is
his own idea. The defect is in conception rather than in execution, and
a matter of first importance to the writer is to develop the faculty of
estimating his unelaborated ideas.

Unquestionably this faculty can be developed. The struggle for its
development is half over, in a practical sense, when the writer comes to
judge his concepts at all before writing, when he wins free of the habit
of writing just to be writing, and of choosing to work on a particular
tale because it is the best he can squeeze from his brains at the
particular moment, rather than because it is absolutely good and he
knows it to be absolutely good.

Unquestionably, too, the critical faculty is powerless to supply worthy
conceptions. But that is beside the point. If the con