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    The Author's Craft: With an Essay From Arnold Bennett By F. J. Harvey Darton
    The Author's Craft: With an Essay From Arnold Bennett By F. J. Harvey Darton
    The Author's Craft: With an Essay From Arnold Bennett By F. J. Harvey Darton
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    The Author's Craft: With an Essay From Arnold Bennett By F. J. Harvey Darton

    By Arnold Bennett and F. J. Harvey Darton

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    “The Author's Craft” is a 1914 work by Arnold Bennett that explores the art of writing novels and plays, as well as being an author in general. This fantastic guide contains timeless tips and advice from a veteran author, making it useful for budding writers and others with an interest in what makes an author. Contents include: “Seeing Life”, “Writing Novels”, “Writing Plays”, “The Artist and the Public”, etc. Enoch Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) was an English writer. Although he is perhaps best remembered for his popular novels, Bennett also produced work in other areas including the theatre, propaganda, journalism, and film. Other notable works by this author include: “Helen with a High Hand” (1910), “The Card” (1911), and “Hilda Lessways” (1911). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with an introductory essay by F. J. Harvey Darton.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWhite Press
    Release dateOct 11, 2019
    ISBN9781528787741
    The Author's Craft: With an Essay From Arnold Bennett By F. J. Harvey Darton
    Author

    Arnold Bennett

    Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) was an English novelist renowned as a prolific writer throughout his entire career. The most financially successful author of his day, he lent his talents to numerous short stories, plays, newspaper articles, novels, and a daily journal totaling more than one million words.

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      Book preview

      The Author's Craft - Arnold Bennett

      1.png

      THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT

      With an Essay from

      Arnold Bennett

      By F. J. Harvey Darton

      By

      ARNOLD BENNETT

      First published in 1914

      This edition published by Read Books Ltd.

      Copyright © 2019 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be

      reproduced or copied in any way without

      the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available

      from the British Library

      Contents

      THE INDUSTRIOUS APPRENTICE

      SEEING LIFE

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      VI

      VII

      WRITING NOVELS

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      WRITING PLAYS

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      VI

      THE ARTIST AND THE PUBLIC

      I

      II

      III

      THE INDUSTRIOUS APPRENTICE

      An Excerpt From

      Arnold Bennett

      By F. J. Harvey Darton

      By a custom not unusual among authors, Arnold Bennett has re- nounced one gift of his godparents. It may be a mere perversion of modesty; or it may be one of those practical, insidious attacks on the pubic memory which lead to the stereotyping of such labels as Henry Irving or Hall Caine: whatever the cause, the novelist of the Five Towns has sloughed a name. He was christened Enoch Arnold Bennett. Which noted, the first name may be left to resemble its first holder, of whom we are told that he was not.

      Arnold Bennett came into the world on 27th May 1867. On the same day of the same year was born the Card, Edward Henry Machin, and in the same year the nuptials of the Bursley old wives, Constance Povey and Sophia Scales (nèes Baines), were celebrated. This exact chronological parallel between creator and created is hardly of profound significance, but it is one of a number of minor coincidences of the kind.

      The town which had the foresight to bear me, and which is going to be famous on that score—a cheerful piece of mock egotism from The Truth about an Author— was, more strictly, the district of Shelton, north-east of Hanley, in The Five Towns or Potteries. It is obvious that that whole region made an indelible impression on the young Arnold Bennett. He was evidently very sensitive to early impressions, and the minuteness of the local descriptions in the Five Towns novels reflects his extraordinary boyish receptivity. He says of the Baines' s shop, for instance—the scene of much of The Old Wive’s Tale—that in the seventies, I had lived in the actual draper's shop, and knew it as only a child could know it. He remembered also the sound of rattling saucepans when he was about two or three, and a very long and mysterious passage that led to a pawnshop all full of black bundles. These are unexciting details, but they suggest that strange process of unconscious assimilation of environment during youth which so many authors transmute in later days into the fabric of life.

      Arnold Bennett clearly discovered the solace of literature, in any real sense, after his school days were over, and it may perhaps be concluded that on the whole he received in youth little vital encouragement towards letters. It was not intended that the polite profession of writing was to furnish him with the bread and butter of life, much less the cakes and ale. Like Edwin Clayhanger, he was educated at Newcastle- under- Lyme, at the Endowed Middle School. He matriculated at London University ( that august negation of the very idea of a University ) about 1885, and thenceforth devoted himself to the study of the law, in the office of his father, a solicitor.

      He left the Five Towns in 1889, and went to London, where he entered a solicitor's office, and combined cunning in the preparation of costs with a hundred and thirty words a minute at shorthand. He received £200 a year for these services, and it was some time before he realised that he was one of Nature's journalists, and could earn greater sums by more congenial work.

      Yet the realisation might have come to him even earlier. Before he left Hanley he had been an unpaid contributor to a prominent local paper. It may have been the well-known Staffordshire Sentinel (the Signal of the novels) ; or it may have been an evanescent rival, like those connected with Denry Machin and George Cannon, the bigamous husband of Hilda Lessways. For some such journal, at any rate, he acted as local correspondent, and turned out, unfailingly, half-a-column a week of facetious and satirical comments upon the town's public and semi-public life. He tried also, during this early period, to write a short story and a serial: both failures. These experiences, no doubt, helped to give him facility, while they could hardly have afforded him room for useless vanity. If the solicitor's office did not drive him into literature, it at any rate permitted the study of it. Arnold Bennett collected books—as a collector, not as a reader—and simply gorged on English and French literature for the amusement I could extract from such gluttony. A chance observation by a friend, according to his own account, revealed to him that there might be an aesthetic side to art and letters: an equally fortuitous remark, a little later, suggested to him that he himself (soi-disant, till then, the most callous and immobile of philosophers) might possess the artistic temperament. He won a prize of twenty guineas in a journal which it is hard not to identify as Tit- Bits. He had a story accepted by The Yellow Book. The thing was done, both psychologically and in the facts of the market: he was an author, a man of letters. The date of this new birth may be put approximately at 1893.

      The Tit-Bits prize was awarded for a compact humorous compression of that famous one-thousand-pound competition serial, Grant Allen's What’s Bred in the

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