WITH PIPE ALIGHT

Southland Times, Issue 18939, 12 May 1923, Page 9 (Supplement)

WITH PIPE ALIGHT

WRITING A NOVEL. (By “Criticus.”) People are warned to avoid the writing of books, and the principal reasons given comes from the Orphant Annies who keep on telling us that there are critics who Will get you, if you Don’t 1 Watch Out. In the brave old days there were shoals of critics who sharpened fine old battleaxes and licked their lips in ecstatic anticipations of slaughter whenever a- man took up his pen; but times have changed and the critics are of small account because of the safety of numbers. The mechanical setting of type, cheaixming the printing of books, has enabled tne authors to swarm over the battlements of the critical strongholds and to stamp them into submission, as Chaka's impis stamped the bonfires to the routing of the missionaries in Zululand years ago. The assault was carried out under heavy fire and the casualties were heavy, but numbers have told and to-day the critics are aids to publicity rather than executioners. No longer is it worth the expenditure of breath to ask that one’s enemy should write a book. Books have numbers to protect them. What then is it that keeps the flood from swamping the entire world? We all have pens and paper, we all have ambition; why then do we not sit down and begin scribbling our immortal words for the improvement of the race?

Is it modesty? I think not. There are few of us so modest that we shun the idea of writing a novel once the notion comes into our mind. But most of us are driven away from the fulfilment of our desires by sheer laziness. What more enjoyable occupation is there than the planning of an ageshocking work, the marshalling of a great literary idea, especially when the fire is burning comfortably or the train is making its rhythmic way between the two reels of hurrying landscape? The great New Zealand novel has not yet been written, but it has been planned by hundreds of us—though I venture to think that my own unpenned story is the greatest of all the great, albeit my judgment may not be absolutely free of bias—and therein lies the secret. Once I heard that someone in Otago had already carried a New Zealand novel into its sixth volume and was trudging steadily on, wondering when the end was going to come. That is, or was, the embodiment of persistence in error of insobriety of ambition. Now in mine own work there can be no such disaster, for I have the ending of my novel all ready. I can see it! My hero stands in his room, and the afternoon sun, striking against the frame of the old Colonial window, projects the bars upon him. He realises that he is a prisoner, and he looks despairingly to the west, whence cometh his childhood sweetheart. He will marry her and settle down—he can see it through those bars—and thinking of the days when the world he loved was about him, he sighs: “And her ankles are so thick!”

I have it all ready for the concluding page and it will pull me up at the close of the first volume. A sequel may come; but the first story will take us no more than ankle-deep. Why not begin? Why not write? Just think of the tremendous labour of committing a novel to paper. A short story can run to ten thousand words and appear a very slight affair. A story of thirty thousand words is a novelette of modest proportion; but the novel means the setting down of a hundred thousand words at least (I would require twice that number), to say nothing of the revision. If one wrote a quantity equal to a column of the Southland Times every day, such a novel as I pen would require steady, exasperating and exhausting work for one hundred and twenty days. That represents the actual labour of writing, quite apart from the toil of battling with new ideas which threaten the entire scheme of the story and reveal the inconsistencies of the chapters already finished and put away The toil of it is tremendous! It is better, more satisfying to go over and over, the plot and the people who make it—putting. them into pictures and popping them into illuminating situations, planning the insidious method of revealing the secret springs without being detected in pulling back the covers. With Pete-, my favourite tobacco incinerator, throwing his snares into the air I can catch the features of my people and see through and through them, but always I can dissolve them at a puff and turn to other things. Once I put them down on paper they will acquire bodies and be opaque—who then will see through them? The plotting of a novel is the best part of it, I should say: the joy of creation without the labour of materialisation is there, we arc in the clouds and the earth of the inked-paper is completely hidden.

Also, my friend, the fiercest critic may polish his waddy in vain—we are not for his club night while our novel is in the country of the mind. Oh, yes, I know the critics were dismissed at the outset, but there is one’s self to satisfy . . . the fiercest critic of all. But two' hundred thousand words ’ . . . . and ....

The jolly thing would probably be a failure anyway . . . that is if any publisher bought it.

Thus, Peter, is the deluge dammed and the majority of us left to the safer and more satisfying pleasures of reading and