DO YOU WANT TO WRITE?

I should be slow to advise the most gifted person to enter the literary profession. It is a life of infinite labor and hardship. The rewards are commensurate if you win them. But comparatively few who strive to enter in do so. Nobody lacks the sense to write, I believe; but most people lack the intuition, that hidden truth out of which romance and poetry and all literary illusions are made.

Very few people who read books know or suspect the literary casualties in an author’s life. The most successful, as the least renowned of us, suffer amazing losses in labor and a corresponding depreciation in self-confidence. You may buy a seat on the stock exchange, get a ticker and do business there according to your own secret information about the market. But you cannot buy a seat among the editors in this country if you are a writer. Neither can you discover the ticker in their mind which determines the worth and unworthiness of your copy. They also are taking a chance with the public which reads. It is a fickle public, apt to change its mind any time.

Nothing is less profitable than to study a magazine with reference to producing copy peculiar to it. You are almost sure to make the mistake of writing something similar to the article or story you have studied, when your common sense should warn you that the editor will not want to repeat that dose. You have been subtly guilty of a repetition of the motive back of the story you took for a pattern, which is reason enough to expect that the thing will be refused.

An editor must have a kaleidoscopic mind. He cannot tell you with any degree of accuracy what he wants, because he does not know very far in advance what his readers want. But he can tell you as quick as a flash what he does not want, because he has more past experience than you can imagine to guide him in rejecting unavailable copy.

The best bet, I discovered long ago, was to find out what was true and vital in the experience of the greatest number of people and to write that. As a rule it is so old and elemental as to have become identical with them, like a man’s ribs. He rarely ever thinks of them. There is such a body of thought and emotion in all of us of which we no longer speak. We have lost the words to do so. But when we see them written out it is as if we had recovered some dearer speech of ourselves.

The language we use is for the obvious, the things we do and say, or for the impressions we wish to make upon others. We have ten thousand dialogues for lovers, a considerable vocabulary for speaking piety and eloquence, and we are not short on narrative sentences; but I challenge any man to prove that it is easy to tell in words what is going on in his mind which is peculiar to him and not to be told. He is thinking them in the same way he breathes to live--by way of being mentally conscious. He is registering himself in every emotion, motive, and desire faster than these mental sensations can be translated into words.

Language is artificial. We only use it to be heard, or to be seen in the written word, or when we are so moved that we are practically talking to ourselves. The greater part of the thinking we do is so mixed with feeling that it is like a circulatory system of consciousness, therefore the only absolutely veracious mental versions of what we really are.

To set down as much of this copy of us as possible has been my particular business as an author. It requires a sort of loving cunning in the use of words which has been the most fascinating feature of my work. Mere words will not do. They must convey the color, charm, and pulse of life. They must have a private twinkle of wit in them that makes a good-natured noise like laughter through the keyhole of the reader’s mind. If you take pains, make every one count like a stroke in the picture of a secret trait which is peculiar to all of us, the individual reader gets the same shock of surprise that he would have if his mother had been eavesdropping his mind. It makes him nervous, wondering how much else she has heard.

As to that, it is like seeing God; you cannot do it without being pure in heart. So I doubt if we could interpret the secret hearts of men and women without feeling very close to them in love and sympathy. My observation of meaner-minded people is that they never really understand other people, only what is evil or potentially evil in them. I reckon it is a blessed provision of Providence that we only see through the glass darkly when our deeds are evil. Otherwise the wicked would have a frightful advantage over the innocent and good.

One of the most profitable experiments I make along this line is to write out good impulses peculiar to people who are not good, but have a perpetual hankering after their might-have-been virtues.

They invariably rise like woefully undone children to the bait. I get a batch of letters from sinners the moment such a paragraph picture of their futile goodness appears in print. Some of them very smart and bitter, but feeling that soothing plaster I have laid on the wounds their sins have made in them. Others are low in the dust. They do not expect to rise. Still, they want me to know they have enjoyed the relief of a few tears on their cheeks.

I do think this is a dear thing about men, even the worst of them--how they will confess their tears of grief or regret to a woman in whom they believe or whose confidence they desire to win. If she is an elderly person with some wisdom of their sex, she knows that these are histrionic tears, shed to move her. Still, it is an artless sort of compliment they pay her good old simplicity. But if we should tell how many men and which men we have seen weep, the world would never believe us! The poor things are driven to it as we are driven to little hysterical manifestations with our dearer men which we should never try to put over on another woman. Before other men they must play the part of pride, strength, and courage, even if they have no such attributes; but once in so often the last of them will break down before one of us, quiver his chin and let his tears flow, because he knows that we know he is really a child who never grows up, begging for cake when he is a boy and for sympathy when he is a man.

Very few lost and undone women ever show up, but now and then one comes in a letter, lays her head on my Circuit Rider’s Widow’s knees and whispers that she remembers when she felt like that, referring to some paragraph, say, in ‘My Book and Heart.’ This is as near as one of them ever comes to admitting that she no longer has the right to feel like that. And none of them ever sign their names. Thus they let you know they do not expect an answer. It is their sad way of walking like ghosts for a few lines close to what they believe is a kind heart.

It must be fearful not to be good if you are a woman, because you never can forgive yourself, while a man can and will do so with the least encouragement from you. If the woman he loves shrives him, he will rise up and strut like a spiritual peacock without ever taking the trouble to lay his case before the Lord in prayer. He is the greatest economist in contrition the world ever saw.

But when you think about it, this only goes to prove how transparent they are. I am by men as I am by the more occult Scriptures--they are not difficult to understand if you have the right mind toward them, not antagonistic or suspicious.

But I am always careful never to let one know I am reading him. Nothing upsets a man so quickly as to realize that you are seeing him maneuver in and out of sight behind the lines of the rôle he is reciting so well to you. He is offended. He takes his leave of you like a puppy with its tail between its legs, or he goes off with a prideful stride. Presently he tells somebody that he does not like that woman. But he does. He simply dislikes the glimpse he had of himself mirrored in her old Sea-of-Galilee mind.

I never answer such letters. Let them read Paul’s epistles! But I do feel closer kin to them than one ever does to the comfortable saints or to the brazenly virtuous.

When you have been a mother and known such richness of hovering love as that, after you are childless the wings of your heart do feel strangely empty. I have sometimes considered adopting a bunch of bad grown-up children and starting them all over at their A B C’s of morals and decencies. But it would never do. This whole countryside would be working presently with runaway children. I have a vague suspicion that I am not an easy person to live with. I have a hot and heady temper, and exacting standards acquired in these lonely hills where there is no world to obstruct or soften my convictions about what is right or wrong, and about the exceedingly early hour when dutiful people should get up and go about their tasks. As the stepmother of sinners I might be rather terrible in my manifestations. Besides, I could not love them as a real mother loves. I should lack that essential wisdom in dealing with them. So I have abandoned the idea, except to think about it.