by Mark Twain
A man who is born with the novel-writing gift has
a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a
novel. I know this from experience. He
has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no
story. He merely has some people in his mind,
and an incident or two, also a locality. He knows
these people, he knows the selected locality, and he
trusts that he can plunge those people into those
incidents with interesting results. So he goes
to work. To write a novel? No—that
is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he
is only proposing to tell a little tale; a very little
tale; a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which
he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what
it is by listening as it goes along telling itself,
it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it
spreads itself into a book. I know about this,
because it has happened to me so many times.
And I have noticed another thing: that as the
short tale grows into the long tale, the original
intention (or motif) is apt to get abolished and find
itself superseded by a quite different one. It
was so in the case of a magazine sketch which I once
started to write—a funny and fantastic
sketch about a prince and a pauper; it presently assumed
a grave cast of its own accord, and in that new shape
spread itself out into a book. Much the same
thing happened with “Pudd’nhead Wilson.”
I had a sufficiently hard time with that tale, because
it changed itself from a farce to a tragedy while
I was going along with it—a most embarrassing
circumstance. But what was a great deal worse
was, that it was not one story, but two stories tangled
together; and they obstructed and interrupted each
other at every turn and created no end of confusion
and annoyance. I could not offer the book for
publication, for I was afraid it would unseat the
reader’s reason. I did not know what was
the matter with it, for I had not noticed, as yet,
that it was two stories in one. It took me months
to make that discovery. I carried the manuscript
back and forth across the Atlantic two or three times,
and read it and studied over it on shipboard; and
at last I saw where the difficulty lay. I had
no further trouble. I pulled one of the stories
out by the roots, and left the other one—a
kind of literary Caesarean operation.
Would the reader care to know something about the
story which I pulled out? He has been told many
a time how the born-and-trained novelist works.
Won’t he let me round and complete his knowledge
by telling him how the jack-leg does it?
