NOVEL WRITING.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIX, Issue 79, 2 March 1929, Page 15

NOVEL WRITING.

PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM’S METHODS. I have found, in my study of the story market, that sex is dropping a little, writes Mr E. Oppenheim, the famous English novelist. Crime is coming in again. A good, sound romantic story is what they want. France wants nothing else but sex. I get less for my translation rights into French than even into Yugo-Slavian. I don’t talk sox. I attribute my popularity to having kept away from sex. To an extraordinary, extent, my readers are men.

Normally, this is how I write my novels. At the villa Deveron, which is my winter home, it is always fair weather, or almost always. During mornings, on my porch or in my summer house, I dictate, and my secretary writes her notes silently. Formerly, when my dictation was taken directly on the typewriter, the noise would disturb me. I have no time schedule for dictation, nor do I make appointments which .are likely to interfere with my dictation. I do not end the day’s dictation at any arbitrary point in time, but only at the natural conclusion of a phase. Upon receiving the typescript of the first dictation, I may redictate the entire novel. It is inevitable that I should have to redictate parts. Ido not work from a synopsis or from any previously conceived plan. I am not conoerned with the development of character, but with situation. I begin with a central situation. On rare occasions I may begin with a | man and a woman. Ido not know |at the beginning of a day’s dictation what the end of that day’s dictation will bring forth. But once I have launched my chief character, that character and subordinate characters seem to me to take on independent life, and I am reduced to the status of a chronicler. I seem to have lost control over their conduct, and they carry on to the end of the dictation, as if they had a reality of their own. So, .at least, it seems to me, a maker of stories while you wait.