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( Originally Published 1944 )
As staunch as oak, by every wind deflected, PROSE, of course, in the Cash and Carry connotation, may take many forms, some of them painful. The essay, for instance, ranks now with the Dodo Bird. Forgetting the other forms let us here consider only the novel and the short story. Both are, of course, prose. Prose is something a college student gets himself all tangled up in when he stops thinking of writing as writing and begins to think of it as a sort of wordy tight-rope walking. To write good prose naturally is to have a flair for expressing yourself simply. Simplicity is, today, the keynote of all good writing, whether it is good writing for exhibitionistic purposes, such as Belles Lettres, or good writing which it is hoped will sell for cash. Unfortunately in high schools and colleges many of the literature classes still insist upon the study of the classics. This is the precise equivalent of studying John L. Sullivan's fistic technique in order to become a modern boxer. The modern boxer has learned to cut so many muscular corners that John L. Sullivan today wouldn't have a chance with them using his old technique. Present-day writers owe more to the growth of the art of publicity copy-writing than they do to Melville, Milton, Moliere, Cervantes, Defoe, or Swift. An advertising copy-writer wishing to write a twenty-five word' ad usually writes it out in five hundred words and then proceeds to cut. When he can no longer get another word out of the copy, or another comma switched to a neater position, he considers his ad finished. After a time he begins to get the knack of cutting corners with words so deftly that his first drafts need less and less cutting. The modern prose writer must know something of this streamlined way with words since no editor or publisher will let him go flossy. There are various ways to learn this. These ways ;re as various as the many writers I have known. Some of them, as a matter of fact, had the knack at the outset. One way which seems to me particularly efficient is to have someone give you the thought, or gist, of a sequence in a story or a novel and then try your hand at wording it. Comparison of this with the original is usually quite revealing, and not a little maddening. I would suggest that you thus try your hand at the "Sleeping Bag" sequence in Mr. Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Mr. Hemingway started out, apparently, with an awesome gift for making words lie down and say uncle, even in a sleeping bag. The average beginning prosateur starts out by writing full novels or short stories in his own awkward style and sending them in to publishers, thus prejudicing the publishers against anything else of the guy's he may see in the future. Sometimes this works, It does, particularly, if the tyro, from the start, has a natural gift for word-slinging. More often than not it fails to work just as it would fail in a man who wished to play the saxophone and started out by buying the instrument and next getting an engagement to play in public before practicing. Naive early prose often has quite the same effect upon editors' ears as the saxophone would have upon your ears under such lamentable circumstances. Richard English, one of the most successful of the present day slick-paper writers, has a way of expressing it which seems to me boundlessly practical. He says (I am not quoting him verbatim) that he writes every story as though it were a telegram. for which he were going to have to pay-by the word himself. Most modern prose is, in fact, telegraphic in effect —that is, the highest-paid modern prose. It is designed to express the most possible thought in the least possible space. You will find the magazines today filled with short stories, by experts in venal writing, which contain, per short story, as much story value as the full novels of a century, or even a half-century ago. An instructive insight into the possibilities of this may be noted in the truncated radio versions of seven-reel motion pictures. It is obvious that this condensed sort of prose will increase in popularity. For instance consider the play "Hold Back the Dawn," which, after being made into a motion picture, was given as a lengthy radio serial covering a week's time over the National Broadcasting System's Star Playhouse. Later the same story was given in a half-hour in the Screen Guild Theatre's broadcast (C. B. S.). This latter half-hour version lacked nothing material from the many former renditions. While this sort of dido is not, strictly speaking, Prose, it comes, nevertheless, from writing-from truncated writing which now governs, and increasingly will govern, the writing of prose in this country for the more vast cash-and-carry-markets. I have no doubt that Richard English, if he wished, could rewrite the half-hour version of "Hold Back the Dawn" into a twelve hundred word Collier's short story. It is the ability to do this sort of thing which is highly paid in all quarters today. It means, sadly enough, on the other hand, that the beginning writer today not only has to consider the truncation of his ideas but must also take into consideration the fact that the story content of anything he writes must be increasingly compact in order to hold interest. In short, the writer, today, of a twelve hundred word Short-Short must have about as much plot in it as he would have had in a five thousand word short story two or. three decades ago. Fortunately this is not true of the modern commercial novel. |
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