The Technique of Fiction Writing

How to write with finish and power can be learned only by long continued and intelligent practice, if it can be learned at all.

any treatise on rhetoric,

Perhaps a little argument in support of the statement is called for.

construction is at once easier and more important to learn than executio

conceptive or constructive technique and executive technique.

simply because a story is a whole and the result of careful co-ordination of parts.

must decide, almost in a breath, the scale, the style, the spirit, and the particularity of execution of his whole design."

The artist must now step down, don his working clothes, and become the artisan.

Moreover, it is debatable whether the art of verbal expression can be studied objectively with any great profit. But the art of putting a story together can be studied objectively with profit, and its principles are subject to direct statement.

The subject is too inclusive for adequate treatment here.