HOW NOVELISTS WRITE THEIR NOVELS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11692, 29 June 1901, Page 5 (Supplement)

HOW NOVELISTS WRITE THEIR NOVELS.

Tiie methods of novelists vary as widely as does their work. Ouida does practically all her writing before breakfast, and is often at her desk as early as five o'clock. Her writing-room is a "study in scarlet," crimson walls, crimson draperies, and soft-burn-ing argaud lamps, fitted with crimson silk shades. She uses red ink and a special kind of apple-green paper.

Maurice Jokai, on the other hand, writes almost invariably at night, and uses only violet ink, to which he is so accustomed that he affects to find in it a kind .of inspiration, and is uneasy and out of sorts if compelled to temporarily substitute for it the ordinary black variety. '•

Madame Sarah Grand finds alcohol in any | shape or form bad for her work. " Even a glass of light wine," she says, " deprives me of 'staying' power." Baring Gould, the never .weary, is greaton local colour, and spares no labour or pains in securing it. Just twenty years ago, be tells, be roamed about, the Essex;marshes for weeks' on end, listening to the sough of the wind among the sedges, and to the lip - lapping of the tide on mudflat and shingle. The result: was " Mehalah," one of the most powerful prose-tragedies ever written. Mr. Zangwill works by fits and starts, often not putting pen to paper for days, or even weeks, at a stretch, ai d then rushing at it with feverish energy. . .. Mr. H. G. Wells, the .talented author of " The War of the Worlds," does his original work of an evening, and revises it ■ next morning. This same revising process is exceedingly drastic, for Mr. Wells isi a remorseless critic of his own works. He is also a great condenser,, For instance, as first written " The Invisible Man" was a novel of 100,000 words. As published, it extended to barely 55.,000. The relative speed of authors varies as widely as do their idiosyncrasies. Charles Knight wrote "The Winds of March" in six weeks. "Lady Audley's Secret," the novel which lifted Miss Braddon into fame ana fortune, took precisely two" months. On the other hand, Robert Barr asserts that he took twelve years in all to produce "The Mutable Many," of which ten were spent in thinking out the plot and two in the actual work of writing. Zola excludes all daylight from his study when at work, and wears usually a suit of pyjamas in summer and an old flannel dress-ing-gown in winter. George Eliot, on the contrary, wrote best with the windows wide open, her ' harmoniously-furnished room flooded with sunshine, and her slender self arrayed daintily in her very best and mostexpensive clothes. Yet she needed to have perfect silence. Even the scratching of a second pen affected her to distraction; so that she and Mr. Lewis had to work apart. Tennyson was equally sensitive to external sounds. In his Surrey house is an absolutely noise-proof room, which he had built for a study. Walls, ceiling, and floor are lined with cork 18in thick.

The ordinary living-room of the house is also Miss Braddon's literary workshop. . The other members of the family come in and out, talk, laugli, sing even, but it does not affect her in the least. She writes steadily on, seated in a low, uncomfortable-looking chair by the fireside, on a pad held firmly .upon the knee, tli'e same„left hand holding also the little ink-bottle, with the middle finger carefully protected against stains by a thimble. Ibsen has a number of fetishescurious carved images of a grotesque character; which he invariably places on his desk ere setting to work. " I could not write a line without their aid," he is reported to have said.