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ON KEEPING YOUR EYES OPEN

One of the drawbacks of an Advanced Civilisation is the fact that it tends to lessen the power of Observation.

A Course in Observation

Begin your observation course by noting anything and everything likely to have a bearing on the subject of your writing, and jot down your observations in the briefest of notes. No matter if it seem a trifling thing, in the early part of your training it will be well worth your while to record even the trifles, since this all helps to develop and focus the faculty for observation.

One of the drawbacks of an advanced civilisation is the fact that it tends to lessen the power of observation. The average person in this twentieth century sees next to nothing of the detail of life. We have no longer the need to cultivate observation for self-protection and food-finding as in primitive times. Everything is done for us by pressing a button or putting a penny in the slot, till it is fast becoming too much of an effort for us even to look ; and the ability to look--and to see when we look--is, consequently, disappearing through disuse.

You will be surprised how much there is in this practice of observation, once you get started.

For example: If you intend to write a story, you will need to study the various types of people figuring therein; the distinguishing characteristics, the method of speaking, and the mental attitude of each.

Next in importance to the human beings are the circumstances involved.

Does your heroine decide to leave her millionaire-father's palatial home and hide her identity in slum-work and a room in a tenement?

You will have to do a fair amount of first-hand observation to get the details and general "atmosphere" appertaining to a millionaire's residence and mode of living, and contrast these with the conditions that represent life in the squalid quarters of a city.

Perhaps you will tell me that it is impossible for you to make these observations, as you do not know your way about any real slum, or you are not on visiting terms with and any millionaire. That raises another important question that I hope to deal with later, when we come to the subject of story-writing. Here I can only say, Don't attempt to write upon topics you are unable to study at near range.

Instead of being content with this, start making careful observations, and you will soon have something else to write about. Notice how a dog talks--with his ears; he can tell you almost anything, once you learn to read his ears. And when you have noted all the points you can in this direction, and mastered this part of his language, see what you can learn from his walk; you can estimate a dog's temper and feelings, his sorrow, his joy, and the state of his health, by noticing the variations in his walk. Why, any one dog can provide you with a book full of observations.

You may say, however, that as your story is to be a short one, you could never use up a book full of observations if you had them.

Very likely; but always remember that you need to have a score of facts in your head for every one you put down on paper. You must be thoroughly saturated with a subject before you can write even a brief description in a telling and convincing manner. Therefore, never be afraid of making too many notes in your observation-book.

Many of these entries you will never refer to again; the very act of writing them down will so impress them on your memory that they become a matter-of-course to you. This in itself is valuable training; it is one of the processes by which a person may become "well-informed"--an essential qualification for a good writer.

While over-elaboration of detail in your writing is seldom desirable, apart from a text-book or a treatise, knowledge of detail is imperative if that writing is to conjure up situations in the reader's mind and make them seem vividly real. In describing scenery, for instance, you do not need to give the name of every bit of vegetation in sight, till your MS. looks like a botanical dictionary; but it is useful to know those names, you may require some of them; and until your work is actually shaping, you cannot tell exactly what you will use and what omit.

The habit of keen observation will save you from a legion of pitfalls. The more you train your eyes to see, and your mind to retain what you have seen, the less chance there is of your putting down inaccuracies.

I have been reading a MS. wherein the heroine--a beautiful girl with a face like a haunting memory --spent a whole afternoon lying full-length on the grass, the first sunny day in February, revelling in the scent of violets near by, and watching the swallows skimming above her. If the writer had no opportunity to observe the comings and goings of swallows, she might at least have turned up an encyclopaedia, when she would have found that swallows do not arrive in England till well on into April.

Then, after 249 more pages, the beautiful girl finally died of a broken heart--obviously absurd! In real life she would have died on the very next page of rheumatic fever and double pneumonia, after lying on the wet grass all that time!

Frequently, when I point out similar errors to the novice, I get some such reply as this, "Of course, that reference to swallows was only a slip of the pen"; or, "After all, it is merely a minor point whether she lay on the grass or walked along the road; it doesn't really affect the story as a whole."

True, such discrepancies may be only minor details; but, on the other hand, they may not. I have noticed, however, that the writer who is inaccurate on small points is equally liable to inaccuracy where the main features of the story are concerned; and the writer who does not know enough about his subject to get his details right seldom knows enough about it to get any of it right.

The Assessment of Spiritual Values

There is one aspect of life that can only be learnt by observation; a phase of your training where books and lectures can be of but little assistance to you. Important as it is that you should note the material things relating to your subject, it is still more important that you should train yourself to note the psychological bearings and the spiritual values of life, since these are often of far more vital consequence to a story than the plot.

So often in the world of men and women around us it is the unseen that counts. Just below the surface life is teeming with motives and aims and ideals and personality; with problems that involve mixed feelings, and produce paradox and misjudgment, and apparently irreconcilable qualities. These may show scarcely a ripple on the outside, and yet be the real factors that are shaping lives, and influencing the world for better or for worse, and, incidentally, affecting the whole trend of a story.

To gauge these abstract qualities and their consequences accurately is the biggest task of the writer; and according to the amount of such insight that he brings to bear on his subject, will be the durability of his work, since this alone is the part that lives. Fashions and furniture, scenery and architecture, maps and dynasties, laws and customs, even language and the meaning of words, all change; and the older grows the world, the more rapid are the changes. The only things that remain unaltered are the laws of Nature and the longings of the soul. Hence the only writings that last beyond the changing fashions of the moment are those that centralise on these fundamental things, giving secondary place to ephemeral details.

If you want your work to live, it is useless to make the main interest centre in something that will be out-of-date and passed beyond human memory within a very little while.

This insight as to the subtleties of life is the quality that gives vitality to your writing. Without it your characters will be no more alive than a wax figure in a draper's window, no matter how handsomely you may clothe them in descriptive matter. Have you ever read a story wherein the heroine seemed about as real and alive as a saw-dust-stuffed doll, and the hero had as much "go" in him as a wooden horse? I have, alas! thousands of them! And the reason for the lifelessness was the lack in the author of all sense of "spiritual values."

It is so easy to record the obvious. What we need to look for is the truth that is not obvious. For instance, at first sight it may seem quite easy for us to decide why a person did a certain thing. A woman makes an irritable remark. Why did she make that irritable remark? Bad temper! we promptly reply. But perhaps it wasn't bad temper; it may have been due to ill-health--a bad tooth can generate as much irritability in half an hour as the worse temper going. Or it may have been caused by insomnia; or by nerves strained to the breaking-point with trouble and anxiety. Or the speaker may have been vexed with herself for some action of her own, and her vexation found vent in this way.

If you were writing a story, the cause of her irritability might be an important link in the chain of events. And in scores of other directions, the cause of an action might be infinitely more important in the working out of your plot than the action itself.

Moreover, if you want your work to appeal to a wide and varied audience, you must take as your main theme something that is understood by all conditions of people; something that makes a universal appeal. That is why the greatest writers make the human heart the pivot of their stories, as a rule. Readers are primarily interested in the doings of, and the happenings to, certain people; and very particularly the motives that led up to the doings and happenings, and the reasons why certain things were said and done, and the psychological results of the sayings and doings.

In the main, it is not of paramount importance to you, when you are engrossed in a story, whether the scene is laid in Japan among decaying Buddhist temples, or in a Devonshire village. It is the personality of the characters, their sorrows and joys, their struggles and love affairs, and the solution of their human problems that make the chief claim on your interest. Certainly, the scenery and "local colour" and inanimate surroundings may influence you favourably or otherwise--backgrounds and the general "setting" of a story are valuable, more valuable than the amateur realises; nevertheless, they are not the main features, and should never be made the main features in fiction.

Once you grasp the importance of the "spiritual values," in life itself no less than in writing, you will understand why it is that some books survive centuries of change and social upheaval, and appeal to all sorts and conditions of temperaments. When we study Shakespeare at school, we invariably wonder in our secret heart what on earth people can see in him. To our immature intelligence he can be dulness itself, while his style seems long-winded, and many of his plots appear most feeble affairs beside our favourite books of adventure. We are not sufficiently developed and experienced in our school days to be able to understand and appreciate his greatness, which lies in his amazing knowledge of the human heart and his grasp of "spiritual values."

One of the fascinating things about life is the way it is for ever offering us new discoveries. We never need get to the end of anything. There are always heights beyond heights, depths below depths, further recesses to penetrate, fresh things to find out. And nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than when we come to the study of human nature itself. The writer who strives to depict men and women as they really are is always coming on new surprises; he never arrives at the end of his observations. And he soon realises how infinitely more important are the subtle workings of the heart and mind than all the material things that crowd the outside surface of life.

To be able to write convincingly about people, we must know them; to know them we must live among them, and sympathise with them--for there is no other way to know and understand the human heart. It is very easy to ridicule people's weakness, and make cheap sarcasm over their failings; but it is useless to make your observations with a cynic's smile. The cynic really gets nowhere; he merely robs life of much of its beauty, giving nothing in its place.

To write about people so that we grip the hearts of all who read, it is necessary to look beyond the superficial weaknesses, and below the temporary failings, to that part of humanity that still bears the image of the Divine Creator. And you need sympathy to accomplish this.

Would-be authors often tell me that they are sick of their everyday routine--office work, teaching, nursing, home duties, or whatever it may be--and long to throw it all up so that they may devote all their time to writing.

But you cannot devote all of your time to writing! The beginner never understands this. A great deal of an author's time is taken up with the study of people, and a general quest for material for his books.

While you are in the early stages of your writing, it is absolutely necessary for you that you should be doing some sort of other work in company with your fellow-creatures, and experiencing the ordinary routine of life, else how can you possibly get your writing properly balanced and true to life?

If you try to isolate yourself from the everyday happenings of normal existence, avoiding the tiresome duties and the irksome routine, merely keeping your eyes on your MS., or on yourself, or on only the things that appeal to you, how can you ever expect your work to be in right perspective? Under such conditions what you write would be bound to give an incomplete, incorrect view of life, one-sided, and out of all proper proportion, and--the result could be nothing but a dire failure.

Stay where you are, and make your corner of the universe your special study.

Perhaps you think you know everything that is to be known about people around you. But do you, I wonder? Do they know everything about you--your ideals and inner struggles, and aims and aspirations?

I doubt it.

Experience shows that very often the people we know least of all are those with whom we come into daily contact. We take them for granted. We do not even trouble to try to understand them. That they should have doubts and difficulties, heart-aches and hopes and high aspirations, even as we have, sometimes comes as a surprise to us.

Begin your observations just where you are now. See if you can find the glint of gold that is always somewhere below the surface in every human being, if we can but strike the right place. Try to sort out the reasons and the motives that are thick in the air around you. See if you can discern another side to a person's character than the one you have always accepted as a matter of course.

And write down your discoveries and your observations. You will need them later on.

Here, then, is the first step in training yourself for authorship. It is only one step, I admit; but you will find it can be made to cover a good deal of ground.

PART THREE

THE HELP THAT BOOKS CAN GIVE

Steady, quiet, consecutive reading is necessary if we are to do steady quiet, consecutive thinking; and, without such thinking, it is impossible for writers to produce anything worth while.

The Bane of "Browsing"

With such matters as reading for recreation we have nothing to do here. Training for authorship means work, regular work, stiff mental work.

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