FICTION FORMULA

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22419, 4 June 1938, Page 18

FICTION FORMULA

Ah Love! Could thou and I with Fate conspire . To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, « , . Would not we shatter it to bits—and then , . Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire! So wrote Omar. Few people realise the deliberation with which publishers of cheap household fiction have shattered the world of experience in order to put together a bright and harmless little globe for their readers. The result makes the writing of serials and stories for “domestic” magazines a very specialised art. I have seen the editor of a large collection of women’s magazines put a short story aside after glancing at the first page, remarking: “This won’t do. It says here that the heroine is 17. My readers want her to be . 22,” Probably his thousands of readers never notice the absence of girls of 17 from their weekly magazines; and to them, presumably, the world is gradually becoming a place in which all girls are 22. Misery in Fashion It is easy enough to make a heroine 2“ years old; but at present she should be not only 22, but miserable, and that will naturally alter the plot. Just now there is a fashion for misery among heroines, and misfortune after misfortune must overtake them. There is also a persisting fashion for graveyard scenes, and I was told by one serial writer recently about a certain magazine which had in its possession a drawing of a young woman weeping on a tombstone. The publishers thought it so appealing that they wanted to print it on the cover of the maga- 1 zine, so they asked my friend to write a special serial which the picture would serve to illustrate. He wrote the story and they used it; but with the whimsicality of publishing houses they did not use the drawing. Apart from the rigid design of a serial—a climax every 2000 or 5000 words, and no long descriptions either of thoughts or appearances—the theme is also confined within rigid bounds. It is an out-of-date fancy, for instance, that the “working classes,” as they are called in less democratic countries than this, want to read about Earls and Countesses. That domestic servants used to like to read of them—or that publishers thought they did—3o years ago is indicated by the fact that the Cinderella story, in which the poor girl marries the Duke, is known to-day as a “kitchen plot.” But the kitchen plot, unless very carefully worked, no longer convinces the reader of twopenny magazines. At present British working women like to read about persons placed in the same circumstances as themselves; what they want are homely, sympathetic stories. ' - One of the troubles that assail publishers of popular fiction for women is the fact that as soon as t’ people who write it become successful they lose sight of homely, sympathetic themes, and, instead of graveyards,. they persist in includin cocktail parties in their stories. And if there is anything to which readers are antipathetic, it is cocktail parties. My own opinion is that what has caused this inti-snobbish tendency is not the spread if democratic ideas so much as the hardness of the times. To the very poor, to be

Serials to Order

(SPECUXET WHITTEN FOE THE PRESS.) [By MARGARET JEPSON.]

rich is enough; they do not believe that the rich can really suffer. Which accounts for the fact, perhaps, that it is only in tales of the emotions that humble characters are much desired. In stories of adventure any character may have a title or be a millionaire. Tabu The themes and situations forbidden in household fiction are nearly innumerable; but writers learn to avoid them automatically. Such subjects as divorce, of course, are absolutely barred. An editor once ran all the way down a long passage after me to warn me that they didn’t want any stories of “matrimonial triangles, or anything like that.” In stories where the heroine and hero are married, either may suspect the other of anything; but the suspicion must always be unjust. If the heroine is unmarried she may be suspected of wh:.!. you please; but she must never be really guilty of it. It would not do for her even to be the innocent victim of a bigamist. In one story of which I know, when the plot made it necessary for tl.i heroine to be either illegitimate or the daughter of a thief, the publishers preferred her to be respectable. Marriage without love makes a strong plot; but as no heroine must care more for money or convenience than for true love, the presence of an invalid relative in need of aid in the first scenes of a story almost always indicates that the heroine is going to make a loveless marriage. Such questions as whether nice girls should drink or smoke are evaded by never mentioning whether the heroine does so or not; and one may safely say that the hero’s only excuse for getting drunk comes when he has been crossed in love. It is not permissible for any character to entertain any political opinion. Religion, also, except in the most general sense, is best not mentioned lest sectarian readers may be offended. The regulations which govern the writers of stories for, schoolgirls’ magazines are of course even more strict. I once knew a man who wrote L0;000 words a week for schoolgirls; but his "plots were very hard to conjure up, for he was never allowed to have a man in them, and the very burglars with which he enlivened them had to be elderly females. . Wrong Diagnosis? The domestic fiction formula is based solely on the publishers’ idea of what the public wants, and it has been arrived at by years of trial and error—error, of course, being anything which will call forth a letter of condemnation from any reader whatsoever. But it has often seemed to me that the person who will write to a publisher complaining because the heroine of a story smokes is not the average but the exception; and that the publishers’ idea of the state of the public literary digestion is probably mistaken. For it is a fact that, in spite of all this effort to give the public what it wants, the sale of popular magazines wholly devoted to fiction is steadily declining. In England a great number have gone out of existence in the last 10 years. Publishers blame 'the wireless and th r. talkies. Unquestionably the talkies provide romance in a more convincing form than the written word; but they, have also strengthened the public digestion to the point where it craves a little realism, which possibly accounts for the unfortunate rise in circulation of the American magazines which contain relentlessly exact descriptions of actual crimes and disasters.