THE WRITER'S DIRECTORY OF PERIODICALS The fifth printing of this Directory-which is constantly being revised and enlarged-began in THE WRITER for January, 1928. The information for it, showing the manuscript requirements of the various publications listed, is gathered directly from the editors of the periodicals. An asterisk preceding the name of a periodical indicates that the information has had the editor's "O.K." Items not so marked are as accurate as they can be made, but editorial "O.K." on proof submitted was not received before printing. Before submitting manuscripts to any publication it is advisable to secure a sample copy. (Continued from June WRITER) *ASSOCIATION MEN (M), 347 Madison Ave., New York. $2.00; 20c. F. G. Weaver, editor. The official organ of the Y. M. C. A. Uses general articles of interest to young men which are usually written on assignment; no fiction and little poetry. Length limit, 2,000 to 2,500 words. Pays the 1st and 15th of each month following acceptance. *ATHLETIC JOURNAL (M, except July and August), 6858 Glenwood Ave., Chicago, Ill. $1.50; 15c. John L. Griffith, editor. Devoted to school and college athletics. ATLANTIC MONTHLY (M), 8 Arlington St., Boston, Mass. $4.00; 40c. Ellery Sedgwick, editor. Uses articles on a wide variety of subjects; autobiographical material of unusual interest; a limited number of short stories; verse; and in the "Contributor's Club," brief, unsigned familiar essays. Pays on acceptance. *AUTHOR & JOURNALIST (M), 1839 Champa St., Denver, Colo. $2.00; 20c. Willard E. Hawkins, editor. A magazine for writers. Desires practical articles on writing and selling literary material by men and women who can speak authoritatively, such as successful writers and editors. Sets no length limit, but prefers short material. Overcrowded at present, so that it does not invite manuscripts, but will consider all submitted. Pays on acceptance from one half a cent, minimum, to one cent a word for exceptional material. *AUTOCAR MESSENGER (M), Autocar Company, Ardmore, Penn. Robert F. Wood, editor. A business publication, circulated free of charge to motor-truck owners in all fields of business. Uses material relative to the truck industry and of interest to truck owners. Sets length limit at from 800 to 1,000 words and pays on acceptance. *AUTOMOBILE DIGEST (M), 22 East 12th St., Cincinnati, Ohio. $2.00; 20c. Ray F. Kuns, editor. Reaches automobile dealers, garage men, mechanics, automobile salesmen, and filling station owners, with general business and technical stories on automotive subjects. Buys matter for the department, "Shop Hints," and occasionally buys photographs of good window displays, novel filling stations, etc., and pays on acceptance. AUTOMOBILIST (M), 1030 Park Square Building, Boston, Mass. $2.00; 20c. Charles B. Butler, editor. Uses general articles of interest to car owners, poetry, humorous verse, and jokes, but no fiction. Sets length limit at 1,200 words, buys photographs, and pays, at a minimum rate of one cent a word, on publication. *AUTOMOTIVE DAILY NEWS (D), 25 City Hall Place, New York. $12.00; 10c. Alexander Johnston, editor. A trade journal, printing the trade news of all branches of the automobile industry, including the manufacturers and dealers. Sets length limit at 500 words, buys photographs, and pays at the rate of thirty-five cents a tabloid-column inch. *AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRIES (W), Chilton Class Journal Company, 56th and Chestnut Sts., Philadelphia, Penn. $3.00. Norman G. Shidle, directing editor; John C. Gourlie, managing editor. Devoted to the interests of executives of automotive manufacturing plants, taking up the particular engineering production and marketing problems with which these executives are faced. Offers practically no market for the professional writer. *AVE MARIA (W), Notre Dame, Ind. $2.50; 5c. Rev. Daniel E. Hudson, C. S. C., editor. A Roman Catholic weekly, preferring fiction with a religious tone. Uses short stories, novelettes, serials, general articles, juvenile matter, and poetry. Sets no length limits, does not buy photographs, and pays, at a minimum rate of $3 a printed page, soon after publication. *AVIATION (formerly Air Service Journal) (W), 250 West 57th St., New York. $4.00; 15c. R. Sidney Bowen, Jr., editor. A publication dealing with aeronautical matters. Prints business, general, and technical articles and news; buys photographs; and pays on acceptance. *AVIATION STORIES AND MECHANICS (M), 1841 Broadway, New York. $3.00; 25c. Joe Burten, editor. Uses stories pertaining to flying, not ex CONTINUED ON INSIDE BACK COVER AN AUTHORS' MONTHLY FORUM Volume 40 July, 1928 Number 7 O'Neill and the Untrained Playwright By DORIS F. HALMAN Valuable advice from a reader for the American Play Company. O ONE has done more for American playgoers and less for official playreaders than Eugene O'Neill. While amateur authors after big rewards are still turning out dramas called "Otto's French Marie" or "Luigi's Chinese Yo-San," dozens of inexperienced young idealists after fame have begun to try the market with imitations of a master whom they themselves, in fits of abstraction, doubtless describe as inimitable. When a highly successful freak play like "Strange Interlude" brings about an immediate epidemic of unconstructed plays divided willynilly into as many acts as the author can think of, and all bespangled with easy asides and soliloquies, it seems time for some one whose business it is to criticize such efforts to utter a friendly warning. rooms in a farmhouse simultaneously; smothers his actors behind symbolic masks. However freakish his mood, he approaches or achieves a masterpiece. But the young playwright who takes him for example must remember two points. First, O'Neill can do the old-fashioned "well-made" play if he wants to. Second, his genius often transcends, rather than benefits by, the tricks he is attempting. The world's greatest couturière could probably not create a style before she learned to cut and sew from simple paper patterns. Nor has a dauber who did not know how to draw the human frame ever been commissioned to fresco a cathedral. Lindbergh mastered airplane mechanics before he started for Paris in the dawn, and that practical, hand-soiling labor took none of the poetry out of what happened afterward. Yet the young person who would write drama-by far the most intricate of literary forms-so often expects a commercial career without the knowledge or practice of technique. This is doubtless largely due to the scorn in which the word "technique" is held by Broadway wiseacres. Let the tyro not be misled. Those gentlemen merely mean that in their opinion technique should be learned on theatre stages rather than in classrooms-in which event it is known by less elegant cognomens. The lead O'Neill is a giant in the modern theatre, a restless, unsatisfied genius making his own laws. His powerful art, though long trained, is still flexible; he plays his tune on first one instrument and then another, always experimenting toward the perfect song. If he wants to write an undersized drama like "The Emperor Jones," he does it, scorning to pad. If he feels capable of nine acts that play five hours in the theatre, he turns out a "Strange Interlude." He provides one story with three scenes, another with fourteen; lays bare four ers of "show business" may not care a straw what makes a play tick, but when a play does tick they know it, and they care enormously. A play ticks only when it produces the illusion of life. A period play must transport its spectators straight back into its own year. A foreign play must carry its audience abroad as surely as any ocean liner. Even a fantasy must for the moment establish a belief in supernatural creatures, in the dim and lovely shadows of a world that may touch ours. But the illusion of life, if well achieved, passes unobserved by those whom it convinces. A good play seems so easily written, so effortless of thought and scene and word. As a matter of fact, this illusion of perfect naturalness is produced by every trick of the craft, by sheer stage mechanics, by false report of life. No one can develop into a successful dramatist until he has learned (1) the tricks, (2) to conceal the tricks, and (3) to throw them away or adapt them to his individual style. "Strange Interlude" is expressed superbly by the Theatre Guild production in the medium for which it was intended. It is common knowledge that critics who read the printed text find much therein to stir their sense of humor. The story itself is an unimportant chronicle of several unheroic and not very interesting human lives. One has only to read a parallel plot evolved by an amateur and offered to play brokers to realize fully what shoddy stuff it is. The story is developed in nine acts, some vibrating with the compact tenseness of their material, some weaker and less convincing. The dialogue varies from profundity to that surfeit of profundity which sounds merely sophomoric; and it is, as everyone knows, shot through and through with aside and soliloquy. Now, the aside and the soliloquy were banished from the theatre with the advent of realism, because they no longer gave any one the illusion of life. It was one thing for some remote and regal hero, draped in velvets, to stand forth at his best pose, dead center stage, and tell the audience his inmost thoughts in poetry. It was quite another when, dressed like the spectators and going through their everyday joys and woes, the protagonist of realistic drama talked loudly to himself or made long personal remarks to the audience about the other characters, who turned their backs and pretended not to hear. The aside and the soliloquy, become absurd, had the effect merely of holding up the action, of pulling the onlookers out of the atmosphere; they were finally discarded as a too-easy means of delivering exposition. Playwrights grew more subtle, learned to tell their patrons secrets about their characters by allowing the latter to reveal themselves in action. It was only the amateur playwright who, not sufficiently skilled to keep his action going, now found himself with one figure alone upon the stage and let it cover a gap by talking to itself. Whereupon this amateur is suddenly supported by the greatest American dramatist! Splendid, thinks he! No need to work any longer at characterization or the means for avoiding a stage wait. To the ash-can with technique! Does Eugene O'Neill use it? Several hundred people might have gone to "Strange Interlude" out of curiosity. The story might have disgusted them; the nine acts might have put them to sleep; the asides and soliloquies might have sent them into guffaws. This, of course, does not happen. Thousands cram the theatre at which "Strange Interlude" is playing; the first edition of the printed copy sells at twenty times its value. Why? Because O'Neill, not somebody else, wrote it. Because, acted to the derstanding, such flares of savage beauty that hilt, it emerges with such vitality, such unone sits to the end with that high interest which is almost exaltation, and comes out of the five hours willing to sit through more. O'Neill's genius often transcends, rather than benefits by, the tricks he is attempting. Yet it is the questionable tricks that the blind young writers copy. It is true that a looser form of play-con struction is coming into fashion. It began abroad with expressionism, which was not something invented to startle the world, but the quite natural-and therefore right—expression of an abnormally excited and unhappy people under governmental chaos. The looser form is also used by such gentle conservatives as Galsworthy, for his latest play, "Escape." Any ambitious young playwright has the right to try it. Only, he must not borrow it because some other man has made fame or money on it, for then he will not succeed. It must be to him the one possible way of expressing his vision or his mood, of telling strangers his story in the highest, clearest terms. TH Meanwhile, he must remember that managers must be practical; that his name has no value to them, and that many sets and large casts are expensive. There are still excellent plays written which preserve the simplicities. It will help him to get started professionally if he first studies Sidney Howard and George Kelly before he tackles O'Neill. They know their business and will serve as good models for his form. And let him write no plays whatever, unless he has something of his own to tell within a form's limits. Form does not count very much in the long run, anyhow. If a playwright expresses his Truth, thenand then only-he can hold the world's attention. The Law of the Novel By W. L. WERNER HERE is nothing secret nor sacred about a Law of Literature. It is merely a recipe for producing a marketable article efficiently. The author can break the law, as a cook can disregard a recipe; but that makes neither readable literature nor edible cake. The best cakes follow the recipe; the best literature follows the rules. To get a recipe, you must answer two questions: what do you want? and how do you get it? You want a certain degree of tenderness and a certain flavor in cooked products; and the recipe says so much salt, so much stirring, so long in the oven. You want readable qualities in a book, and a certain formula will best produce them. I What should any piece of writing have to satisfy the reader? Let us observe this reader closely. He sits comfortably in a chair. His head does not move, but his eyes do. Back and forth along the lines they shift, twentyfive times to a page, and perhaps two pages every minute. A monotonous process, this shifting. Back and forth, back and forth, a momentary rest when a page is turned, a shift of the body after a scene or a chapter. More pages bring increased monotony and increasing fatigue. Cries outside the window. take one's attention; a buzzing fly distracts one; eyes leave the book to examine a spot on the tablecloth. There is an unconscious debate; "there is a struggle between the influences which would make one attend to work and those which impel to reading a novel." (Pillsbury, Attention.) More pages, more shifting of the eyes, more fatigue; the result is a tossing aside of this dull work, or perhaps sleep brings relief. It is the first business of any writer to counteract the fatigue of the reading process. Increasing fatigue (the term is used in a popular sense; Hollingsworth and Poffenberger, Applied Psychology, deny that it is real physical exhaustion) must be met by an increasing interest. And increasing interest, translated into the language of writing, means just one thing, climax. The first law, then, of any writing — novel, short story, play, poem, essay—is climax. There are a number of ways of getting climax in novels, but four methods seem to be especially used by successful writers. One old method is the chase. Two persons start out, one ahead of the other; the gap is narrowed; a capture is nearly made; but the pursuer stumbles and loses ground; again he gains; a third person gives the pursued one a lift or misdirects the pursuer; a wider gap; then closer, closer, closer-he's caught! You can find this plot in racing stories, in the movie farces, in stories of pirates, in detective stories, in the quest of this or that species of Golden Fleece. You can find it sexually in the novels of Richardson, and martially in the novels of Cooper. It is an old and tried device. Its faults are that the near-captures are too obviously manufactured (those snapping twigs of Cooper!), and that the final capture seems an achievement of the author rather than of the previously baffled pursuers. Another method of climax is the struggle. Here the characters meet, clash, separate to concoct fresh stratagems, meet again, call for unexpected reserves of physical strength or cowboys or soldiers-and the villain bites the dust. Frequently such combats come at the end of chases; they furnish the big scenes, the dramatic quality of the book. The job is to keep the fight even until the end and then to let the hero win in a plausible manner. A third method is the misunderstandingthat impersonal substitute for a villain. Twins are confused. The Prince of Graustark is expected, and Mr. Blotz of Cincinnati gets off the train. Lovers' squabbles! Misunderstood wives! Mr. Howells liked these tricks; he could avoid villains and still have troubles to solve. But in any long fiction, misunderstandings are difficult to handle. One becomes impatient with the characters. A few words of explanation in the first act or the first chapter ought to have settled the matter. That young Corey, for instance, who called on the Lapham girls and nobody could tell which one he loved! What a lover! The misunderstanding that carries a short story cracks under increased weight and length. A fourth popular method of securing a climax is the gradual revelation of a mystery. Who killed Mr. Wopple? What lies back of that smiling mask or that minister's black veil? What are the secrets of haughty Mme. de Clavale? Confessions! Revelations! The puzzle, the cryptogram, the riddle of this painful earth, the meaning of life and the mystery beyond! In this group fall problem novels, and detective stories, and the intricate, hinting revelations of Henry James. Chase, struggle, misunderstanding, mystery - these are the most common devices to counteract outside diversions, to overcome fatigue, to rivet the reader's mind to the story. II. But the problem of the novel-or of any long piece of writing-differs from the simplicity of a short story. In the latter, as Poe pointed out, there is unity; everything moves directly and swiftly to one predetermined end. The story is read at one sitting, and a unified impression is received and retained. But the novel is read in several or many sittings. Characters must be strong enough to be carried over for days or (in the case of serial publications) for months between readings. And when an hour or two or three are free, the story must not be too monotonous for continued reading. Climax, that characteristic of all good literature, must be carefully handled in the novel. The rise in interest must be present, but not so strong, not so rapid as in a short story. "A considerable duration even of comparatively intense sensations blunts the sense organs and makes it easy to distract the attention from them." (Pillsbury, Attention.) Probably every reader has found at least one book in which the emotional quality wells up and blinds him from further reading before the end is reached. There was the Man Without a Country who hurled his book into |