How to Write a Novel

FOOTNOTES:

[1:A] The New Century Review, vol. i.

[5:A] "Shakespeare: His Mind and Art," p. 61.

[7:A] Article in The New Age.

CHAPTER II

A GOOD STORY TO TELL

Where do Novelists get their Stories from?

I said a moment ago that no teaching could impart a story. If you cannot invent one for yourself, by observation of life and sympathetic insight into human nature, you may depend upon it that you are not called to be a writer of novels. Then where, it may be asked, do novelists get their stories? Well, they hardly know themselves; they say the ideas "come." For instance, here is the way Mr Baring Gould describes the advent of "Mehalah." "One day in Essex, a friend, a captain in the coastguard, invited me to accompany him on a cruise among the creeks in the estuary of the Maldon river--the Blackwater. I went out, an