After correcting the
manuscript, it is put in typewriting and again revised. There are
also two revisions of the proof. While I do not shirk the tasks
which approach closely to drudgery, especially since my eyesight
is not so good as it was, I also obtain expert assistance. I find
that when a page has become very familiar and I am rather tired of
it, my mind wanders from the close, fixed attention essential to
the best use of words. Perhaps few are endowed with both the
inventive and the critical faculty. A certain inner sense enables
one to know, according to his lights, whether the story itself is
true or false; but elegance of style is due chiefly to training,
to a cultivation like that of the ear for music. Possibly we are
entering on an age in which the people care less for form, for
phraseology, than for what seems to them true, real--for what, as
they would express it, "takes hold of them." This is no plea or
excuse for careless work, but rather a suggestion that the day of
prolix, fine, flowery writing is passing. The immense number of
well-written books in circulation has made success with careless,
slovenly manuscripts impossible.
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