FullReads

The third chapter is “taken up with the humours of a local cricket match.”

Thank you, Mr. Sub-editor. I feel I owe you gratitude.

In the fourth, Ursula Bart (I was beginning to get anxious about her) turns up again. She is staying at the useful Lady Mary’s place in Yorkshire. She meets Basil by accident one morning while riding alone. That is the advantage of having an American girl for your heroine. Like the British army: it goes anywhere and does anything.

In chapter five Basil and Ursula meet again; this time at a picnic. The sub-editor does not wish to repeat himself, otherwise he possibly would have summed up chapter five by saying it was “taken up with the humours of the usual picnic.”

In chapter six something happens:

“Basil, returning home in the twilight, comes across Ursula Bart, in a lonely point of the moor, talking earnestly to a rough-looking stranger. His approach over the soft turf being unnoticed, he cannot help overhearing Ursula’s parting words to the forbidding-looking stranger: ‘I must see you again! To-morrow night at half-past nine! In the gateway of the ruined abbey!’ Who is he? And why must Ursula see him again at such an hour, in such a spot?”

So here, at cost of reading twenty lines, I am landed, so to speak, at the beginning of the seventh chapter. Why don’t I set to work to read it? The sub-editor has spoiled me.

“You read it,” I want to say to him. “Tell me to-morrow morning what it is all about. Who was this bounder? Why should Ursula want to see him again? Why choose a draughty place? Why half-past nine o’clock at night, which must have been an awkward time for both of them–likely to lead to talk? Why should I wade though this seventh chapter of three columns and a half? It’s your work. What are you paid for?”

My fear is lest this sort of thing shall lead to a demand on the part of the public for condensed novels. What busy man is going to spend a week of evenings reading a book when a nice kind sub-editor is prepared in five minutes to tell him what it is all about!

Then there will come a day–I feel it–when the business-like Editor will say to himself: “What in thunder is the sense of my paying one man to write a story of sixty thousand words and another man to read it and tell it again in sixteen hundred!”

We shall be expected to write our novels in chapters not exceeding twenty words. Our short stories will be reduced to the formula: “Little boy. Pair of skates. Broken ice, Heaven’s gates.” Formerly an author, commissioned to supply a child’s tragedy of this genre for a Christmas number, would have spun it out into five thousand words. Personally, I should have commenced the previous spring–given the reader the summer and autumn to get accustomed to the boy. He would have been a good boy; the sort of boy that makes a bee-line for the thinnest ice. He would have lived in a cottage. I could have spread that cottage over two pages; the things that grew in the garden, the view from the front door. You would have known that boy before I had done with him–felt you had known him all your life. His quaint sayings, his childish thoughts, his great longings would have been impressed upon you. The father might have had a dash of humour in him, the mother’s early girlhood would have lent itself to pretty writing. For the ice we would have had a mysterious lake in the wood, said to be haunted. The boy would have loved o’ twilights to stand upon its margin. He would have heard strange voices calling to him. You would have felt the thing was coming.

So much might have been done. When I think of that plot wasted in nine words it makes me positively angry.

And what is to become of us writers if this is to be the new fashion in literature? We are paid by the length of our manuscript at rates from half-a-crown a thousand words, and upwards. In the case of fellows like Doyle and Kipling I am told it runs into pounds. How are we to live on novels the serial rights of which to most of us will work out at four and nine-pence.

It can’t be done. It is no good telling me you can see no reason why we should live. That is no answer. I’m talking plain business.

And what about book-rights? Who is going to buy novels of three pages? They will have to be printed as leaflets and sold at a penny a dozen. Marie Corelli and Hall Caine–if all I hear about them is true–will possibly make their ten or twelve shillings a week. But what about the rest of us? This thing is worrying me.