A man who is born with the novel-writing gift has a difficult time of
it once he tries to build a novel. I cognize this from experience. He has
no clean idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He simply has some
people in his mind, and an incident or two, besides a locality. He knows
these people, he knows the chosen locality, and he trusts that he can
plunge those folk into those incidents with absorbing 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 much than apt to go