Volume 40

A

SI WROTE Mr. O'Brien, "Yarbwoman"

is not a story I myself would include in a collection under the adjective he has chosen. It is to me merely a good job of carpentry, not the best even of my own stories. But it does illustrate my method of producing a story which has for its first motive the necessity of paying the rent.

In the middle of the last century the bluffs on Lake Pippin in Wisconsin were infested by rattlesnakes. A man was bitten by one, and died. His brother wore his boots, and also died. The snake's fang was found imbedded in the boot. My mother's father, Charles P. Ingalls, was a hunter and trapper on Lake Pippin at that time. He told the story to my father in Dakota Territory in 1870, and my father happened to tell it to me in Missouri in 1923.

Number 5

ideas for stories, names that strike my fancy, songs, descriptions of scenery, weather, people, analyses and criticisms of stories and plays, are helter-skelter in all of them. They follow me around the world by parcel post.

One white-hot summer day in Tirana, Albania, I confronted the necessity of selling a story. My immediate future was practically penniless unless I did. Before I sold a story I had to write it, and not one of the ideas simmering in the back of my mind was ready to jell. I tried several on the typewriter, but they would not crystallize. So I began to read the notebooks.

I do not think that this is the correct way in which to write a story. Nine tenths of the ideas jotted down in notebooks should die there. They may be perfectly good ideas for some one else to use, but the idea that should make a story will not lie inert in a notebook. It will have some indefinable affinity with the writer, so that it will sink into his mind and slowly take form there, take on a kind of life of its own, and demand to be written.

Now I have half a hundred notebooks, which I constantly intend to put in order. Each is neatly lettered on the outside, but inside they are as orderly as hash. Quotations from my reading, expense accounts,

Real stories come out of the subconscious, eventually, and write themselves. Nevertheless, the rent must be paid, and if only a story will pay it, and no story is ready to write itself, one must be written by main strength and awkwardness.

A page of my notebook said: Pagan renaissance begun in Italy by Leonardo and Guido Bruno-England, by Shakespeare and Bacon- reached Germany with Schelling, Goethe, and Hegel. Schiller pantheistic. Idea. Rattlesnake bites man, he dies. Brother wears boots, dies. Snake's tooth imbedded in boot. Ambassador Morgenthau says of Turks that Europe "could not uproot their inborn preconception that there are only two kinds of people in the world—the conquering and the conquered." Is there a people that is neither?

I said, "I'll use that snake idea."

There was a demand for more of my Ozark stories, so I decided to put this story in the Ozarks. But I must invent a reason why a man wore his dead brother's boots. The Ozark hills are muddy only in seasons when snakes are sluggish and don't strike quickly. I must have a swamp. This troubled me, because I know no swamps in the Ozarks, and did not know that the Ozark dialect is used where there are swamps. But I said to myself, "Who will know the difference?" This is indefensible. Had I been in the States I would have verified this point, but in Albania I couldn't; there was not time; I needed the check. As it happens, there are swamps in southeastern Missouri where the people speak the Ozark dialect, so the story was accurate in setting. But that was pure luck.

Having the swamp, I had to provide some motive which would take the characters to it, one after another, so that they would wear the boots. This problem was entirely too much for my staggering mind; I left it to work itself out. I must also provide some false explanation for the successive deathssome point on which not only the characters, but the readers would fix their attention, so that the boot would not be suspected. If

the characters looked at the boot, they wouldn't wear it, there would be no story and no check. If they suspected an enemy of causing the deaths, they would arrest him for murder, and that brought in too many complications. The deaths must be mysterious. There was nothing for it but the supernatural.

But Ozark folk are not superstitious. They are a shrewd, hard-headed, humorous lot, who would suspect any ghost of being a joker under a sheet. There are no ghosts in the Ozarks, perhaps because even ghosts would dislike being so misunderstood. Stop! why not a yarbwoman? Far in the backwoods, among people simpler and more ignorant than any to be found in the Ozarks today, a yarbwoman might be regarded with fearful awe. Especially if there were something unusual about her, in addition to her skill with herbs. Suppose she liked snakes? Solved!

Many sympathetic persons admire and even like snakes. I do. And in California the alfalfa farmers keep black snakes to eat the gophers.

At this point I stopped conscious thinking. I had the story as clearly as I have any story before writing it. I had the kernel of the plot, I had an Ozark yarbwoman, a Florida swamp without its Spanish moss and alligators, the snakes, and two or more unsympathetic characters-they must be unsympathetic, because they were to die of snakebite, and their deaths must be no sorrow to the reader. I stopped thinking, and began to brood, to dream.

Fiction writing is essentially an auto-hypnotic process. No story is real to the reader unless it is real to the writer, and the only experience which we know to be unreal but feel to be real is a dream. The writer is a person whose mind will split in two, so that he can dream and be awake at the same time. The writer's true task is subjective in the very delicate control of this precarious mental process. There is more to be said about this, but not here.

I brooded on this place in the Ozarks until I saw it, felt it, smelled the swamp and the