between Mat Rullen and Moll. There is no clash. This episode contains the Ending of the Story. It shows definitely the conclusive act by which the main character or some force set in motion by the main character, solves his problem. It is summed up in the very last line, "He slept in her arms, safely and secure."

The Significance of this story is that it shows that a haven consists of a place in which a man may shut out the world, and that Mat Rullen found this haven not where he had hoped and expected to find it, but in the arms of the woman Moll. It has other significances than that, of course; but therein lies its main significance. Yet for our particular purpose, the chief interest of this story is the way in which Mr. Williams, being a competent artist, has dramatized his Setting.

In order to understand the task confronting a writer who wishes to deal with Setting, it is necessary to realize that there are two kinds of Setting, the first designed merely to give sufficient Background to make the action of his characters plausible; the second designed to convey in addition a certain Atmosphere or Impression. This story of Mr. Williams's is concerned with the second kind of Setting, that designed to convey a certain Atmosphere or Impression.

In the first scene (lines 1 to 407) and in the Final Episode (lines 774 to 878) Mr. Williams's story is concerned with the second kind of Setting, that designed to convey a certain atmosphere or impression. In the second scene, it is concerned merely with such setting as will give background for the action to be portrayed.

"Solitude" is not strictly a story of Atmosphere; the Story of Atmosphere has almost entirely disappeared in this era of fiction. The closest approach to it is the Story with Atmosphere. If this story had stopped at the first scene it would have been a story of Atmosphere, for up to that point the Atmosphere was a definite force in the story, always and ever present. But as soon as Mat

Rullen enters the cabin and confronts Charlie Day, the Atmosphere of Solitude gives place to another force. Throughout that scene it is not a moving force. Although it appears again in lines 761 to 773, it is merely to show the effect upon the character of the encounter with Charlie Day. Even in the final episode it is used largely for background and for contrast, to emphasize more strongly the loneliness of Mat Rullen after his ineffectual attempt to find a haven in the cabin with Charlie Day.

Yet in that portion of the story wherein the Setting is used for the purposes of creating a definite impression, Mr. Williams's handling of his material is decidedly worth studying. He has a definite impression which he wishes to convey: "A canvas which bore a scene that might fitly have been called 'Solitude' (see lines 65 and 66). I have pointed out before that to all creative writers the materials are the same, that the difference lies in treatment. Two men looking upon the same scene will reproduce different pictures. What we are concerned with in studying "Solitude" as a Case in Craftsmanship is finding what is fundamental. Herein enter the qualities of the artist: style and creative ability. His mastery of style will show itself in his choice of words; his creative ability will show itself in his rendering of his reaction to the scene he wishes to portray. When all is said and done his task is to write a description. Description consists in reproducing for your reader or hearer your sensations on a certain occasion, in accordance with your artistic purpose. Creative ability in the sense of making something from nothing does not, so far as my observation is concerned, exist at all. When I say that a writer must have creative ability, I mean that he must have imagination; that he must see in images. Images to the creative writer are forces in motion. In reproducing his sensations on a certain occasion he will be successful insofar as he shows forces in motion. He will succeed in recreating an impression, insofar as he builds up that im

industry" he will admit only those details which will contribute to that impression. If, for example, he wishes to show "a hive of industry" he will admit only those details which show a hive of industry; he will show workmen hurrying; he may show architects rushing about with blueprints; he may show trucks being driven at full speed; he may show steam-shovels lifting great loads of dirt; but he will not show sleeping dogs lying in the sun; he will not show people lolling about, for the simple reason that those details will not contribute toward building up the impression. I use the words "building up" advisedly because that is what the creative artist does when he reproduces his sensations. The thing to be borne in mind is that the reader is helpless in the hands of the competent writer. The writer can force him to experience any sensation he desires; he can determine in advance the impression he desires, and having determined it, he can build it up; he can build it up in only one way, and that is by appeals to the senses; for any impression that we experience is merely the sum of our sensations on that occasion. The appeals to Taste, Touch, Smell, Hearing, and Sight, are the weapons of the writer. Plausibility demands that in regard to the thing seen, he shall make clear to the reader its form, its location, its color and movement. Mr. Williams does these things superbly; and nowhere does he lose sight of the impression that he wishes to convey. In the very initial sentence of the story he speaks of the "lonely reaches of the wilderness, motionless in the bonds of winter, extended to the utmost horizon." His words thereafter are carefully chosen. He uses the words "black," (line 3) and "blackness" (line 6) because of their connotation; and where he has occasion to

use the word "white" he is careful to qualify it by the use of other words contributing to the effects of loneliness and solitude. He speaks, for example of "other reaches of barren land white with the snow (lines 14 and 15). He is careful to give his location and the form of what he is observing by saying "In the great cup formed by the surrounding mountains" (lines 10 and 11). His whole description is full of images; everything is personified; even the dead tree is likened to "a skeleton at the feast" (lines 47 and 48). When he speaks of the sunlight he says it is "no more to be endured by human eye than a glance from the sun itself" (lines 28 and 29). The lake is likened to a hand with three fingers and a thumb (lines 73 to 81). The forces of the wilderness he likens to Brobdingnags, the gigantic people of Gulliver's Travels (lines 169 to 217); always Mr. Williams is appealing to one of the senses. Color and movement are of course the appeals he makes most frequently. He does speak of the "crashing, splitting," in line 50; chiefly he depends upon the appeal to the eye. I should like to have seen appeals to the sense of smell, for the reason that in creating emotion, as Kipling says,

"Smells are surer than Sights and Sounds
To make the heartstrings crack."

Even granting this lack, there is much for the student of writing to learn from this story. Its significance is clearly and definitely extracted; for the special purpose for which I am making this examination, it presents a first-rate "Case in Craftsmanship." It shows how a competent artist, desiring to create a certain definite effect or impression goes about his task, and accomplishes it. The story "Solitude" is decidedly worth reading for any one interested in writing good Settings.

ROBERT HILLYER

JOHN MARQUARD

IN

IN OUR first talk I dwelt at length on the psychology of composition and in other places I have striven to make clear that the writer taps his sub-conscious mind. To encourage a flow from the so-called inspirational centers and subject the product to the censorship of the intellect, so that you do not put down things unrelated to the subject or ineptly expressed, is the process in simple terms, and the writer should strive to create conditions fostering this dual process.

I must have made clear by this time that the writing world is a synthetic world-a putting-together world and it would naturally follow from this that conscious analysis

a taking-apart world is poisonous to the creative spirit. Under certain circumstances discussion of literature is helpful in the production of literature, but it can be laid down as a general rule that when a writer becomes involved in a heated discussion over technique or a controversy regarding literature, the creative play-world in which he ought to live crumbles.

If a writer asks himself whether his heroine should have red hair or black, he is in danger of starting a series of intellectual alternatives ending in a wilderness of indecision. The writer is not to ask whether his heroine ought to have red hair or black, but to discover what kind of hair she has. Analysis there is without doubt in artistic creation, but it takes place below the threshhold of consciousness, and what comes up from the sub-conscious is positive and not negative, what a thing is and not what a thing is not.

I have known writers who avoided literary groups as they would the plague, because literary discussion stirred them up and mixed them up. There was always somebody to ask them why they had n't made their sonnet into an epic, or their epic into a play, or their

play into a novel, or their novel into a short story. I have known other writers who associated only with painters or musicians, because with practitioners of a different craft they breathed the spirit of art without any debilitating discussions of technique.

The extreme of inspirational writing would seem to be the cases in which authors feel that they are possessed by the spirits of the departed. One of the most exaggerated examples of this is the case of Mrs. Pearl Curran and her novels given to her, as she declares, automatically by one "Patience Worth." This matter has been treated by Mary Austin in a number of the Unpartisan Review. Mrs. Austin points out that there is a strong element of the automatic in all literary writing. Socrates, like many another author, believed that he was guided by a familiar spirit. I have already referred to the fact that Amy Lowell humorously spoke of an imp as dictating her poetry to her.

The integration of the various powers of a successful writer is so perfect that it is very easy for him to ascribe the ease of his work to some entity outside himself, but there is no reason to suppose that it proceeds from any agency other than his subconscious mind. To write automatically is a not uncommon gift, and we may distinguish the difference between automatic writing and creative writing very easily. One does not take any proprietary interest in any truly automatic writing he may do; he gets from it none of the artist's thrill. If it happens to have literary value, it does not seem to reflect his own personality in any sense-releases no complexes - and it may have no literary value at all.

The reason for the absence of a thrill and also for the probable lack of literary quality is that the perfectly automatic writer takes

The Writer

AN AUTHORS' MONTHLY FORUM

WILLIAM H. HILLS.

.Editor MARGARET GORDON...Assistant Editor JOHN GALLISHAW Contributing Editor Conducting a Department in the Craftsman

ship of Fiction Writing

been to be useful. It will continue to be published primarily for the benefit of its readers, aiming to assist them as much as possible; exposing duplicity and fraud from which they might suffer; printing matter designed to help and encourage them to do better work; guiding them in looking for markets for their manuscripts; giving information about noted authors and writers of the day who are rising into prominence, the methods of literary work, and current literary topics; printing the news of the writing and publishing worlds, and

bers of the writing craft. Plans are being made for the further improvement of the magazine and the extension of its service under the new editorial control, which will begin with the next number.

In ending my work as the responsible editor of THE WRITER, I take this occasion to thank the many friends of the magazine who in the years that I have conducted it have given me such generous assistance.

An interesting leaflet on "The Writing of College Textbooks" may be obtained from Seba Eldridge, Associate Professor of Socialogy at the University of Kansas, who is promoting a new type of college textbook as consulting editor for the educational department of a New York publishing concern. His idea is that college textbooks now are addressed, not to students, but to subject-matter, and that they should be written with a quite different emphasis, one on the problem and human-interest side of the given subject, rather than on the finished knowledge of it.

"In short," he says, "the typical college textbook begins at the wrong end of its subject, namely, at the knowledge rather than the problem end; thus reversing the actual process of intellectual activity, which begins with problems and an active interest therein, and arrives, via systematic investigation of those problems, at knowledge in regard to them." . . "The prime need," he adds, "is for textbooks so written as to establish and maintain contact with the student's interests throughout, stimulate thought on those interests, and assist in the methodical investigation of problems arising therefrom." Textbooks for elementary and secondary schools are quite commonly written according to this method, and there are a few college textbooks planned and executed along these lines, including Flint's "The Conscience of the Newspaper," which was reviewed recently, with high praise, in THE WRITER.

A writer sends a manuscript to an editor. He hopes for an immediate decision. That is natural and right; but does an editor whenever a manuscript comes in drop everything that he is doing in order to read the manuscript at once? Certainly some editors do not. They calmly let manuscripts accumulate until they need copy, or have time for critical examination of the manuscripts received. A week passes, a fortnight, a month, or even more. The writer watches for the coming of the postman with his manuscript returned, or Glory be! a check. He is impatient with the slowness of the editorial decision. Meanwhile the editor is busy with other matters editing copy, to correct blunders which the writers should have corrected before sending out their manuscripts, reading proof, writing letters, planning his periodical, estimating how much room certain articles will take, arranging illustrations maybe, possibly struggling with business details, in short, doing the thousand and one things that editors must do, wholly apart from the work of

judging manuscripts. At last maybe in a week, maybe in a month, or a longer period

comes the time for attention to the manuscripts. Writers do not always realize that an editor seldom judges a manuscript by itself. Manuscripts have a relative value, relative not only to the needs of the periodical to which they are submitted, but relative to one another. An editor wants only the best of the material that is offered to him. A given story may seem to him pretty good, but he will not want it if he has a better one in his unopened manuscript envelopes. For that reason editors commonly read manuscripts in batches, comparing one good manuscript with others, and accepting finally the manuscripts in any particular batch which seem to them the best. Once in a great while an editor gets a manuscript so good that he has no hesitation about it he knows immediately that he wants to print it; but most manuscripts do not rise above mediocrity. "Not so bad; not so good" is the editor's judgment of most of the manuscripts he reads, and when the supply of manuscripts that he is sure he wants is short he must decide which of the mediocre ones are best. If he should read these manuscripts separately, one by one as they come in, most of them would be returned. The postponement of his decision until he can read a batch of manuscripts together really helps the author in many cases, since it gives him a chance of acceptance that otherwise he would not have. Sometimes, of course, careless and unsystematic editors neglect manuscripts for an unreasonable length of time, but as a rule editors make decisions as promptly as they can. Writers should not be impatient, and they should remember that judging manuscripts is only one of many things that editors have to do. Generally the larger a periodical is and the more manuscripts it receives, the sooner editorial decisions are made, because a batch of manuscripts comes in every day, and there is a sufficient force to handle them. Editorial decision from a few large periodicals may be