Will Lissenbee: "Some of the characters of my stories are drawn from real life - the majority of them are, I might say. I frequently find something in my personal experience which I weave into my stories. By a close study of the peculiar characters of the West, I have been able to discover some which seemed to be original characters. The old man in the 'Joy Claim' was a real character, and the very words spoken by this old man were the ones I have often heard uttered by an old man by the name of Harrison who lived in this county." William Murray Graydon : "Many of my boy characters are drawn from real life — nearly all of those, in fact, who figure in my camping and canoeing stories. Of other stories I can name a few characters who exist in the flesh; notably Dr. Galer in the Penrose Plot,' Uncle Joe and the miller in 'Down the Susquehanna,' and Peter in 'Lost in the Slave Land.' In my outdoor and domestic sketches I have drawn upon experiences in my own life." William O. Stoddard: "There is no general rule as to the formation of characters in fiction. Whenever I deal with historical characters, or historical works of any kind, I take the greatest pains to secure accuracy in every particular. Many of my characters, as in 'Crowded Out o' Crofield,' are real, varied for fictional use. Others are suggested by boys or men I have known. Some are what may be called ‘inventions,' but grew out of something, like 'Dat Kinzen and His Friend.' If I see a boy worth catching, or read of one, I put him away for future use, but when he gets in a book he is my own boy and you would probably not know him." James Otis: "The boys I try to depict, or, at least, the greater number of them, have been known by me. I should not feel able to describe the character of a boy in order to have the reader see him as 'real flesh and blood' without having met him, and I think it aids a writer to use the real name of his character, since he must perforce remember the boy as others see him. I do not use my own personal history, although there may be times when I run in something in the way of incident in which I had a youthful hand; thus making the incident as real to me as if I had passed through the same experience." Edward Stratemeyer: "No single individual of any of my stories is real; but each boy represents a certain class of youth, or, in other words, he is made up, if I may be allowed to use the expression, of the elements found in a certain number of boys. Many of the men and women characters are taken directly from life. Every author must draw upon his personal history for material to a certain extent, for the simple reason that he knows that which he does know, or, in other words, that which has been brought home to him. If the experience of another is related to him and he sees the effect of the happening on that person, the whole presents an experience to the author, second-hand and altered, but still an experience, and of great value, because it gives with it the effect as well as the cause." Edward S. Ellis: "I suppose that every writer must of necessity draw to a greater or less extent upon his own experience. Truth is stranger than fiction, and that man who sets out to delineate on paper certain characters necessary to the flow of incident or development of plot is almost sure to recall the very men, women, or children whom he has met, talked to, or perhaps known intimately. They are continually before him, and are often reproduced more vividly than he suspects. "I recall that in one of my first stories of school life I wanted a typical bully-one of those nuisances with which the schools of the olden time were more often afflicted than are the modern ones. I could not shut out the boy who constantly rose before me- - a big, hulking fellow, several years older than each of the rest of us, who was a coward by nature, but whose brutal strength enabled him to play the tyrant among his classmates. It was hard to keep from putting his real name on paper, and many of his doings, as told by me, were unadorned facts. This bully of the olden times is now a man of middle life and a 'gentleman and scholar.' We are warm friends, and when, a few months ago, another schoolmate, now a judge in the supreme court, and I called upon the tyrant of long ago, to chat over those delightful days, I was a little taken back to find that both had recognized the bully whose portrait I drew and whose identity I fancied was unsuspected. We can all afford to laugh over it now, for the picture, though a faithful one, has been lovingly transformed by the hand of passing years. "The brutal teacher who hated children; the manly instructor who loved them; the tyrannical boy who lorded it over the others; the bright, conscientious lad; the sweet, trusting little girl; the obdurate father; the awkward country youth, all these were drawn, in my imperfect way, from life and my own personal experience. "The school bully to whom I have referred is pictured in Ted; or, Getting Even With Him.' What I consider my best story of railway life is From the Throttle to the Presidential Chair.' Chief Arthur, who figures in that, of course, is verity, and so are most of the other characters. "In my stories of Indian and frontier life there is very little, of course, outside of the historical portions, which is not pure fiction. Deerfoot, who figures in nine of Porter and Coates' books (and respecting whom I have received many inquiries, a number from the other side of the Atlantic), is an ideal red man, who, I fear, never existed in the flesh, though the great Tecumseh came the nearest to him. He was undoubtedly the greatest Indian that ever lived, and had he yielded to the Christian influences, would have done his race incalculable good. It is hardly necessary for me to add that in my historical works for the young, such as 'The Indian Wars of the United States,' The Eclectic Primary History of the United States,' etc., I endeavor to give nothing but facts." Clarence C. Converse: "I have written stories in which my characters were not realstories of occurrences which never happened, located in places that would be rather difficult to fix geographically; and many of these manuscripts received a much readier welcome at the hands of the autocratic publisher than other accounts of veritable incidents in which my friends or acquaintances were actors. But I could never feel that satisfaction in constructing, these fabrications which follows the telling of a story in which the hero is at least an acquaintance or messmate, the scenes familiar ones, and the vessels or smaller craft more than mere fancies. Therefore, just so far as the exigencies of story-writing permit, I take the leading characters, and lesser ones, — as well as incidents, from real life and actual experiences, personal or otherwise; and then the time spent at my desk is almost as pleasant to me as if I were out on the water with my hero, enjoying a thrash to windward, exploring some picturesque island, or witnessing whatever else is in hand. "Dick Willard is not, I confess, the real name of a certain sailor friend of mine, who was first mate at nineteen, under his father, of the Gifford, - a vessel much larger than the little Duchess, of Beakon Cove, — though I had him in mind when I wrote Bino Island,' a serial I have just finished. Again, Chet Harvey is not the identical name which is written down in the family Bible opposite the date of the birth of another acquaintance; and this young man's life may not, on the whole, have been quite so full of varied adventures as those that befel Chet in the chapters of my late Chautauqua Lake story. "This is as I prefer to write; and after this fashion I intend ever to write; getting just as closely to the whole truth as I can without becoming prosy; building my stories up about actual events in the lives of my friends, and drawing just as little as possible on my imagination. Nor do I think that a writer with such a method can be soon written out. For the longer I live, the longer I knock about this old earth of ours, the more strongly do I become a believer in the saying, 'Truth is stranger than fiction.' Things are constantly occurring which could hardly be the inventions of the rambling pen of a Haggard or a Verne. It is the unexpected which is constantly happening. I feel that a writer has but to tone down, rather than heighten, these actualities, and shape them into cumulative sequence in the development of his plots to produce the most interesting and effective stories. "I have often made use of personal experiences. Now and then we come across a person such as Haggard did, in the original of his hunter, Allen Quatermain, a gentleman recluse in Africa, some of whose hunting experiences were even more unique and seemingly unreal than any of those Haggard appropriated. I have found the forecastle, the sail-loft, and the camp-fire inexhaustible sources for stories that need very little shaping to make them intensely readable. Some of the facts I should hesitate to recount, had they been the creations of my own brain, instead of being unquestionably realities. Chance, Providence, call it what you may, does some marvellous juggling with men and things mundane; and if we lay aside our books of current fiction and but look about us, take up the daily papers,- we find there many things happening every day far more strange and improbable than those we read of between its covers." Charles A. Fosdick ("Harry Castlemon"): "Some of my characters are drawn from life, but still they are not what you would call real. There's Frank Nelson, for example. Every time I think of him I seem to see before me a classmate who was his exact counterpart in some things-a boy who possessed wonderful physical and moral courage, who always stood at or near the head of his class, and who was the best runner and foot-ball player in school; but there all similarity between him and Frank Nelson ceases. The real boy did not have wealthy and influential friends, as the 'Young Naturalist' is supposed to have had. He had his own way to make in the world, and has done it in a way most surprising and gratifying to everybody who knows him. He went to the seat of war as a private of the 'Ellsworth's boys' regiment, was promoted for gallantry during the seven days' fight in front of Richmond, became adjutant of the 116th N. Y. Infantry, charged with his regiment through the slashings of Port Hudson, and came out with a colonel's eagles on his shoulders. He afterward went to Congress, and is now Commissioner of Immigration. The newspapers will tell you his name. "When I think of Don Gordon, I recall a boy who was in my Latin class at the high school. He was a young Hercules, and there was no boy in our room who could take his measure on the ground or beat him at the bat. When it came to books, he was good there, too. A favorite with both teachers and students, he was too honest and altogether reliable to get into trouble of any sort, as Don Gordon was in the habit of doing. Perhaps that part of Don's history is drawn from some of my own expe. rience. The last sentence will answer your fourth question. "Windy, Timbertoes, Hurricane, and the two trappers spoken of in the Gunboat Series probably came the nearest to being real characters. We used to hold public debates in the high school every Friday afternoon, and the first named boy would tire us out with his longwinded speeches. That was the way he gained his cognomen. I don't know what has become of him; but Hurricane, so called from the energetic way he had of running the bases, is now a prominent Democratic congressman. When I tell you that he brought Mr. Cleveland's name before the first convention that nominated him for the Presidency, you can easily guess who he is. While he was yet a schoolboy, he marked out the course he intended to follow through life, and he has never allowed the obstacles he found in his path to turn him from it by so much as a hair's-breadth. "Timbertoes, whose name was bestowed on him on account of his wooden-leg style of progression, was an acting ensign and watch officer attached to the ironclad on which I served as captain's clerk during the Red River expedition. The two trappers, Dick Lewis and Bob Kelley, were Union men who hid in the sunk lands near New Madrid to escape the conscript officers. They came aboard my vessel several times to exchange garden truck for flour, 'store tea,' tobacco, and other little things of which they stood in need. Of course, I pumped them most assiduously, and obtained many valuable ideas from them. "If you had asked me if any of the incidents described in my stories are real, I could have given you a more satisfactory answer. Almost everything that happened to Frank Nelson and Archie Winters, as narrated in the Gunboat Series, really did take place. Of some of the scenes I was an eye-witness, and others were told to me by those who took part in them. To illustrate Frank's escape from Shreveport, as well as his subsequent adventures with the bloodhounds that were put on his trail, was no myth, and neither was his betrayal by the dis heartened Union soldier-bishop, who tried to obtain more grub and better treatment by currying favor with his rebel jailers; for I saw and talked with an escaped prisoner who passed through just such an ordeal. The terrible havoc occasioned by the explosion of a rebel shell in the Ticonderoga's turret during the first day's fight at Fort Pemberton is a matter of history. The boat was the Chilicothe, and the officer who commanded the gun at which the slaughter took place was Acting Ensign Horace Hannon, an Illinois boy and a resident of Cairo. Diamond Lake, where Don Gordon lived, has an existence (only its real name is Moon Lake), and the silver that Clarence Gordon so ardently desired to unearth was concealed around there somewhere. The incidents described in that book (the first volume of the Boy Trapper Series) were suggested to me by an old darkey on the ram Samson, who often said that when the war was over he intended to return to his master's plantation and take possession of a fortune which he had buried in the ground at the command of his 'missus.' He was the only one who knew where it was, and when he found it he was going to keep it. "The way Godfrey Evans was surprised in his home while he and his family were at dinner, and his bold dash for liberty, were incidents that happened in the neighborhood of which I am speaking. I was serving on the gunboat Forest Rose at the time, and we had with us some of the survivors of a Missouri regiment which had been badly cut up at Chickasaw Bayou during Sherman's attack on Vicksburg. As the Forest Rose exhausted through her smoke-stacks, she could run without making the least noise, and this enabled us to approach close to a plantation house before the inmates knew there was danger near. We were slowly swinging in to the bank, intending to put a party of smallarmed men ashore to see what there might be in the house, when all of a sudden a rebel in full uniform rushed out of the back door, ran to a horse that was saddled and waiting close by, swung himself upon the animal's back and put out at top speed across an old cotton field that must have been half a mile wide. The soldiers of whom I have spoken opened fire at once, and although a perfect shower of bullets kicked up the dirt before, behind, and on both sides of that gallant white horse and his plucky rider, to my unspeakable delight they got away unscratched. I stood on deck near the pilot house and saw it all; and although I held a loaded Enfield rifle in my hands, I would not have fired at the rebel for any money. I wanted him to escape; and when I saw him jump his horse over the fence that ran between the field and woods, and turn about in his saddle, and wave his plumed hat in the air to let his wife and daughters know that he was all right, I tell you I felt like giving him a lusty cheer. "The incidents described in 'Our Fellows,' particularly those that relate to Mark Colman's interview with the Indian who stole the dinner, and to his thrilling adventure at Dead Man's Elbow, are mainly true, having been written out almost word for word as they were told to me by an old, gray-headed overseer who lived at Rosedale Landing in the State of Mississippi. And so I might go on, through all the books and stories I have written, picking out here and there a true incident or a character that is more real than imaginary. But I have said enough to give you an idea of my way of writing, and I suppose that is what you want. An author always prefers to be the leading harvester instead of a mere gleaner- to get his ideas at first hand rather than from books and papers; for then no one can accuse him of plagiarism. But it is hard to be original these days. You remember that Terence, who flourished 150 years before the Christian era, wrote about it: 'In fine, nothing is said now that has not been said before.' Some of our every-day expressions, which we think to be of recent origin, are as old as the hills; for example: 'Cowards do not count in battle; they are there, but not in it.' That is what Euripides said 400 years B. C." The foregoing letters prove the necessity of having a knowledge of human nature in order to be a successful story-writer. Nearly all the writers quoted here are of the opinion that every writer must, to a certain extent, draw upon personal experiences, and use real persons for his characters, so that they might seem real to the reader. THE WRITER is published the first day of every month. It will be sent, post-paid, ONE YEAR for ONE Dollar. • All drafts and money orders should be made payable to William H. Hills. Stamps, or local checks, should not be sent in payment for subscriptions. THE WRITER will be sent only to those who have paid for it in advance. Accounts cannot be opened for subscriptions, and names will not be entered on the list unless the subscription order is accompanied by a remittance. When subscriptions expire the names of subscribers will be taken off the list unless an order for renewal, accompanied by remittance, is received. Due notice will be given to every subscriber of the expiration of his subscription. No sample copies of THE WRITER will be sent free. 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Will editors kindly end their reviews with the words: "Sent postpaid on receipt of one dollar, by Cora Linn Daniels, Franklin, Mass." It is remarkable that an author of experience and ability, like Mrs. Daniels, should expect an editor to pay any attention to a book sent in such a way. A review of her book in any periodical is an advertisement of it. Editors are accustomed to print reviews of such books as are likely to be of interest to their readers, without making any charge for the advertisement involved, because such reviews are in a certain sense news, and deserve to be printed like any other news matter. The least the publisher can do in such a case, however, is to send for review always a copy of the best edition of his book, as some slight return for the valuable advertisement given to him without money cost. To send to an editor what is confessedly a cheap, imperfect, and unsalable edition of a book, asking him to review it, and in addition to print gratuitously at the end of the review a line giving the price at which good copies of the book are sold and the publisher's address, is simply to impose on the good nature and courtesy of the editor addressed. An editor is not bound to review every book that is sent to him, or even to acknowledge its receipt, any more than a man is to answer a letter as a favor, just because the person who has asked the favor has enclosed a stamp. In the case of the letter the mere expense of postage is generally the least tax on the person who is addressed. Research that may be required, the trouble of writing, the interruption of a busy man's work, are not taken into account by the inquirer, who complains as if he had a personal grievance in case he has "enclosed a stamp" and failed to receive it back on a letter that would have cost the writer unrewarded time and bother. In the same way, publishers often ask too much of editors in asking them to review unimportant or uninteresting books. Every editor who regularly publishes book reviews gives every year to publishers in advertising space ten times the value of all the books they send him, -and writes the advertisement for the publisher into the bargain. Very few of the books that are sent to him have value for his library; the rest he must dispose of as he can, and scores of them bring to him only their value as waste paper. The editor of THE WRITER, for example, has received since the first number of the magazine was published, seven years ago, along with many useful books, a great many hundred volumes that he would have been glad to sell for what the paper, press work, and bind |