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A TEN-DOLLAR prize is awarded each month for the best letter published in this department.

Editor, the Forum:

AN UNREALIZED REALISM

Realism, as writers commonly use the term, is the opposite of romanticism. As to their relative merits in relation to writing, I have nothing here to say. What concerns me is that the realism of the realists is such an incidental, perhaps one may be pardoned for saying it, usually such a superficial thing.

Realism, as it is practiced, consists of taking a small cross-section of life and then following out the minutia of it with painstaking, often painsgiving detail. The thing, when it is well done, has its value, and on the whole I prefer it to the common run of romanticism. Yet I wonder that a larger, pardon the awkwardness of it, a realer realism, does not find more place with writers. Perhaps the trouble is that it has as yet so little place with publishers and readers. But outside of fiction it is beginning to come into its own. I mean the realism of a world which does not, in fact, consist at all of isolated incidents or cross sections of this and that, but is a very big and a very important totality.

What is the first thing you do when you really want to get hold of a city? You climb up to the top of the highest hill, or take an elevator to the top floor of the highest building, and survey the city as a whole, to get the "lay" of it.

But you say there is no way of doing that with the human life of a city. There you have to get next to individuals, or at least "types," by which we

often mean outstanding eccentricities of sub-normal or super-normal individuals.

Nevertheless the two biggest things that are happening in the world just now are the sense of life as mass, and the sense of human history as process. Geography has helped us to realize the one, the world, or rather the earth as a whole. Economics is helping us to realize the other, the movement of civilization, which we are beginning to understand as a river and not the private mill-pond of a sect or a class.

Is n't it time that writers were beginning to reflect these two supreme discoveries of the modern world, and that realism became real enough to get beyond microscopic minutia-ness and take account of the mightiest of all dramas, the drama of the worldwide, age-long evolution of things as they are.

Or must we still wait with Kipling to deal with the "God of things as they are" as our swan-song, our "L'Envoi," wherein we sing of an age "when earth's last picture is painted, and the tubes are all twisted and dried, when the oldest picture has faded, and the youngest critic has died ?" Is n't that too much after the manner of the preachers who have always been relegating reality here to one side in the interests of this or that hypothesis about heaven or hell? What is the matter with a real realism now and here, a realism as big, as moving, as alive as life itself? Robert Whitaker.

Los Angeles, Calif.

Editor, the Forum:

WHEN AN EDITOR MISSES A WRITER

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There must be countless new, interesting, and useful things with which you are in daily contact that would interest our readers, and our rates, I think, would be much more satisfactory to you than formerly.

Remember that your ideas may be worth money and it is so easy to capitalize the interesting things you see. True we can't use pictures of freaks of nature, advertising devices, or queer accidents, because there are so many of them, but new time and labor saving kinks, photographs and circulars of the

many clever devices now appearing in the stores may easily yield you a good profit with little effort. The magazine itself is the best guide as to what we use. You do not have to be a skilled writer and, indeed, some of our best contributors never use a typewriter. Sometimes a brief description accompanied by a rough sketch from which our artists can make a drawing is enough. Photographs with human figures are always best, but often an advertising circular will answer our needs.

If for any reason we have not been able to use any of the material you sent us in the past, do not be discouraged but try again now today - because we are always in the market for things that will interest our readers.

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The writer has received many personal requests from editors for material, which is nothing unusual in itself, but here we have a form letter evidently going to the "missed" contributors, who must represent a great number, presumably, since Popular Mechanics draws manuscripts from all points of the world. It is easy enough to keep check on a few writers. Popular Mechanics requires a great variety of material; there must be a constant flow; the need is never-ending. The editors do receive volumes and volumes of articles and items, and that is just why it piques one how a great publication like Popular Mechanics keeps track of its hordes of writers, then reminding the "missed."

Aside from indicating an interesting sidelight to the writing business, this letter of Popular Mechanics reveals the precise character of the stuff it needs, being particularly encouraging to the young and new contributor. Frank V. Faulhaber.

Brooklyn, N. Y.

Editor, the Forum:

BUILDING A STORY

Out of confusion I have evolved a system by which it is possible for a busy wife and mother to work progressively on a story and make every spare half-hour count.

When the plot first presents itself I scribble rapidly the general idea of the whole story. I give it a name, no matter how absurd, and I usually make out a cast of characters, too.

Afterward, I type on white paper all the parts which "seem to write themselves" and are in fairly good order in my mind. But wherever "my engine stalls" or something "cramps my style," I stop typing and take sheets of yellow paper on which I again write in long hand; leaving wide spaces to permit of elaboration, erasing, and bringing ideas to the surface. Along the margins are dotted questions, notes, or any helpful suggestions. If the ending of the story is clear at all, I continue my typing of that part.

Every page is numbered straight through, regard

Editor, the Forum:

less of color, so that it is possible to follow the thread of the story in spite of the knots and tangles on the yellow sheets.

The story thus constructed is put into a folder and labelled with its nickname. It is kept close at hand as long as it clamors for attention. Whenever opportunity offers, I take out a yellow sheet and concentrate on that particular problem which may be thought out on the train (I am a suburbanite) or done over entirely in a public library, or whipped into shape while dinner cooks.

After a while that set of yellow pages is ready for typing and so the story steadily assumes form.

When it is all white it may be revised or "set away to mellow," or it may be ready to send out on its voyaging.

This method is suggested only as a good substitute for the one of waiting for those wonderful, long uninterrupted days which never come.

Larchmont, N. Y.

JUST WHAT IS LITERATURE?

A literary production, we are led to imagine, may be realism or it may be romance. It may be poetry or prose. It may even be that hybrid which is neither prose nor poetry but which its devotees love to call free verse and which is yet, like the Indian who is named for what he is or what he does, to receive its final cognomen if so be it survives long enough to acquire one.

Madeleine Swift Auld.

bution to literature." We get the book and find in it no "elevation" nor "vigor" nor "catholicity of We find literature defined by one lexicographer as "Productions such as are marked by elevation, vigor, and catholicity of thought, purity and grace of style, and artistic construction." But just what is literature? We read of some new book as "a great contrithought," no "purity of style" nor "artistic construction"; but we do find plenty of rot about sex

complexes, the immoral meanderings of the newly rich or the degenerate rich (these meanderings as old as the human race and now hailed as signs of present-day decadence or advancement according to the point of view of the author) but lacking in everything within the purview of the definition quoted.

Often these "great contributions to literature" are, frankly, stories of the open and notorious lewdness of the principal characters, portraying the lowest in human depravity, featuring the purely animal instincts and frequently garnished with bald profanity.

We read of "literature," "poor literature," "good literature," and "real literature." Almost everything, in fact, at one time or another and by one critic or another, has been called "good literature" and "real literature"; but there must be a quality, a something, possibly indefinable, certainly not understandable by your "humble correspondent," which distinguishes "real literature" from what the masters have built into the classics, a something too illusive

to be caught and impaled with a prosaic definition but perfectly attuned to the naturally acute literary sense of its lovers and sponsors.

Hoping to get some light on what is now considered the best by good authorities, I have recently read several of the prize stories widely advertized, and by prominent publishers at that, as "real literature." These books are written in very ordinary language as to style and construction and the rest; but what they do excel in is detail of sordidness and unblushing or only slightly veiled lewdness.

Is it prudery to expect or look for cleanness in literature? Is it "goody-goody" to think that a story need not contain profanity, vulgarity, and obscenity in order to be realistic? Does real literature involve the description, the featuring of the sordid, vulgar, and mean in the lives of degenerates and perverts and of the naturally vicious and immoral?

Sleepy Eye, Minn.

LeRoy G. Davis.

Editor, the Forum:

EUGENE FIELD GIVES ADVICE TO YOUNG AUTHORS

Eugene Field, with his wide experience in journalism, was eminently fitted to give advice to young writers. The young reporter who happened to be so fortunate as to win Field's friendship during his creative period on the Chicago Daily News, soon found that in this man of wide reading he had a helpful friend. Field was at all times a lovable acquaintance. He was generous in notable ways. He would pour out the riches of his mind and heart to his friends in exchange for a little appreciative comradeship. Such comradeship he treasured most highly.

Here is some of the advice that he once gave to young writers:

"A young writer cannot be too careful in his choice of words. Eternal vigilance is the price of a correct English style. Colloquialisms are not to be fought out of existence - they cannot be. They are exceedingly useful and at times they are exceedingly effective, for the same reason that the introduction by adroit public speakers of homely phrases or popular proverbs into their speeches invariably catches the ear and wins the heart of the audience. But a writer must know his weapons before he can use them with effect. It is brutal of him to employ a bludgeon when the services of a rapier are demanded,

and he exhibits unpardonable selfishness who fritters away time at fencing when only a club can achieve his purpose.

"There are now, we think, 120,000 words in the English language. The possibilities in the use of synonyms are remarkable, and we should say that to the study of synonyms the young writer should apply himself diligently. To the newspaper writers we are looking with solicitude and hope, for the reason that outside of the columns of the press our literature does not seek to make any progress at all. Our literature of the press is, on the other hand, constantly improving, and in the last ten years that improvement has been marked."

Field was constantly harping on precision in the use of words. As a student of several languages he had received unusual training in word meanings. That is why there is weight in his warning to young writers not to take the English language as they find it in common and vulgar usage. "It is their duty," he wrote, "to study, test, and prove words, to retain that which is good and cast away that which is bad in speech. In the performance of that duty they shall find delight and profit and therefore shall duly win permanent benefits for mankind." George F. Paul.

Chicago, Ill.

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The Manuscript Clubs

A REGULAR department which seeks to discover the value of the social group of writers as a critical guide to the work of its members.

Editor, THE WRITER:

Evidently a first-rate discovery has been made in the gradual proof that manuscript clubs are effective nurseries of writing talent.

The discovery seems to have come about in the same way that long-sought solutions of industrial and even scientific questions occur: slow elimination, by trial, of all other possible solutions.

One pleasing fact emerges that the organized way of doing most things in our modern life is not the right way to cultivate literary talent. The "expert," the high-hat teacher, the "bureau," and other imitations of business organizations, fail. The thing that succeeds is the natural, informal, unpaid laborof-love of congenial people getting together and just talking about something they all take interest in.

I don't believe the success of these friendly groups comes more than one-third from actual advice back and forth about details of a story under discussion. I think two-thirds comes from the joy and stimulation of mingling with people who think and talk as does the budding author himself. A thousand thoughts arise, find expression and develop from the expression into more thoughts, in such an atmosphere, that would die on the

lips and wither in the borning in the company of commonplace people.

Until success and publishers' checks come along to dignify a writer's fancies, he must inevitably feel that his ways of thinking and the dreams that haunt him are childish. He hardly dare pursue them. His family in most cases will assist this mood! In the rare cases when they don't, he is blessed! I knew the venerable mother of Bill Nye in her nineties long after her son was dead. In her old age she was still a dreamer, passionately interested in intellectual themes. She had always been so. She told me how in the early days in Wisconsin, with her little brood of boys going to the local school not without some danger from the Indians still around at that time, she would welcome them home every afternoon and go over their lessons with them, then listen sympathetically to all their wild boyish imaginings, sharing stories with them partly invented by herself and partly by them. It was no wonder that two of the boys grew up and chose professions, while the third became in his time the greatest and most distinctly American of humorists.

This kind of sympathy is exactly what a manuscript club offers. It is like sunshine to a struggling plant, and far more valuable than

specific counsel as to plot, character, and treatment of a story. All through literary history we find clever people as parts of congenial groups. The Shakspere-Marlow-Ben Jonson group, the Lake School of poets, the Dickens-Thackeray group, the Addison-Pope group, the Emerson-Thoreau group, each with its brilliant satellites, are pretty good examples of, in effect, manuscript clubs, though they may not have thought of themselves so and may not have wholly realized it.

Just the other day, an editorial in the New York Times discussed the influence of mind on mind:

"Faraday paid his tribute to the effect that Sir Humphry Davy had on him. Auer von Welsbach was so stirred by Bunsen that he studied the rare earths and later devised the Welsbach gas-mantle. Righi's lectures had much to do with bending Marconi's mind to the study of electro-magnetic waves. It was the stimulating Ostwald who inspired Svante Arrhenius to the electrolytic dissociation theory."

But the social method of writing, as used in a manuscript club, can be just exactly the wrong one under some circumstances. In the field of advertising copy (to which you have referred more than once in connection with this topic) what little fire and talent there may be in any writer of advertising originally is stamped out by "too many cooks." I ought to know, as I have been mixed up with what we elegantly call "copy" for fifteen years. By the time everybody from the president of the company doing the advertising to the sales manager and others have criticized the effusion, the writer of the first draft is reduced to stupefaction, even if not discouraged at the outset by the wish to put a little glamour around soap, shaving-cream, cash-carriers, steel desks or what not. The worst examples of cooperative composition are to be found in the advertising field, which, far from being an incubator of literary skill, is more like a lethal chamber. O. A. Owen.

New York.

THE WRITING OF HISTORY

Failing a science of human nature, there can be no doubt that the essence of the critical faculty lies in the knowledge and understanding, so far as it can be acquired, of human nature. For the function of history is not merely to ascertain facts, but to interpret them aright. Let the historian by all means be impartial; let him be damned as heartily as the most austere member of the scientific school could desire if he wilfully suppress or falsify evidence; let him be no advocate, except of that which is pure and lovely and of good report. Yet he must, I repeat, be not merely a recorder but an interpreter; and to interpret human nature, his knowledge thereof must be not only wide but sympathetic.

Sir John Fortescue. THE WRITING OF HIS(Longmans, Green & Co.)

TORY.

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