[In the following interview, originally conducted in 1943, Williams reveals to van Gelder his method of writing.]

"One of the tough problems of a writer," said Ben Ames Williams, an extremely likable man who has been established as a writer for twenty-seven years, "is rarely talked about. But it is a problem that always has bothered me. It is this: what to do with yourself in the afternoons. I've tried just about everything—golf, bridge, backgammon, mah jong, a couple of hookers of whisky and the movies. You see, there's this need for anything that will give your brain just a little to do, just enough action to get the work out of it, so that you can go to sleep at night. Otherwise, you're working endlessly.

"We spend about six months each year on our farm in Maine—go to bed before sunset and get up before sunrise—and there we have an elaborate croquet game that sometimes is good for five hours in the afternoon—the way we work that is, the ball never is out of bounds; you wander all over the countryside. That's good, but hardly a complete solution. Now Ken Roberts (author of "Northwest Passage") works in the mornings, then carves wood. He also manages his place, which is a fairly large one. However, at night he works for an hour just before dinner. Well, as you can see—no cocktails. And if it were me I'd be all steamed up again, would rush through dinner and keep right on working afterward. My system is to work for three or four hours very hard in the morning—only the first two hours are any good, but I never realize that I'm getting tired and make a lot of extra work for myself by continuing on beyond the time when I should quit."

Probably in the minds of most of his readers Mr. Williams is stamped as a Maine man. His imaginary Maine village of "Fraternity" was the background of many of his most popular stories. Actually he was born in Mississippi—a grandnephew of the Confederate General Longstreet—grew up in Ohio, and was schooled in Massachusetts, in Cardiff, Wales—where his father was United States Consul—and at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

"My wife comes from a Maine family—but she was born in China and lived there until she was thirteen. It was more or less of an accident that we went to Maine, but there I met A. L. McCorrison, the Bert McAusland of my stories, and we—well, we hit it off. Through Bert I got the feel of his country and so I used it often as a setting. Place means a lot to me—it is the conditions of life that make people—and I learned the conditions of life there. Then Bert died in 1931, willing us his farm. We spend a lot of time on the farm, but I haven't used a Maine setting much in these last twelve years—a lot of the sting went out of the countryside with Bert.

"Of course, what it all comes down to—the meaning must be there for you, that's the first need when you sit down to write anything. When I was younger I suppose I was hardier when it came to accepting meanings—my first story that managed to get between book covers was written in ten days in 1919, and it came out of a glance through Polti's 'Thirty-six Dramatic Situations.' The situation was that of enmity between brothers. With only that to start, and some knowledge of whaling, I wrote All the Brothers Were Valiant—which apparently still is read because I still get letters about it. In other words, I found the meaning after the start had been made. But usually the meaning, feeling whatever it is, comes first.

"One foggy night years ago I rowed a boat out to a bell buoy and sat alone, the bell clanging beside me—nothing but the sound, the water, the night, the fog—and smoked a pipe. Well, to me that situation meant a lot, it stirred my imagination, and at least a dozen—probably more—of my stories have come out of those few minutes by the bell buoy, though the bell buoy never has been in one of them. There's no explaining it. It's just that the moment had meaning for me."

Mr. Williams said that he had had proof early that he had no inborn ability as a writer. "Starting in 1910, I worked as a newspaperman for four years, and every night through those four years I spent two to three hours trying to write short stories, and the four years were up before one of my stories sold. Well, a man who works that hard and doesn't get anywhere for that long is no born writer. I finally taught myself enough to get along and since then have sold going on 400 short stories and serials. Yes, I used Polti—in fact I'm his translator. I learned what a short story must be. But I don't write them any more."

"Why did you stop?"

"Partly because I lost my respect for money back in the depression when I became overanxious and couldn't sell the stories that I wrote. And partly because they weren't fun any more.

"Four times in my life I've turned my back on easy money because I knew that for me easy money wasn't any good. When my stories were selling in the top markets, when the movies were snapping them up—I'd reverse my field and feel better when I'd turned out stuff that was different and that I thought was good, even if the editors didn't think so. You see, if you go along playing up to the standard you've set just because that standard happens to be popular, you get into a formula—and for you the formula inevitably wears out. It's too much like digging ditches when you're hired out to dig them. Some one else is telling you to dig here and dig there, and then go back and dig a little deeper where you dug before. There's no more fun in it. I repeat myself enough on my own when I go my own way.

"The last time I turned away from short-story writing it wasn't because I wanted to—I had lost the touch. Stories are becoming shorter and shorter as the big weeklies more and more imitate the picture magazines. They'll all be down to one word on a page one of these days.

"I can't turn around in those short lengths, and, anyway, I enjoy writing novels. For in them I can take the space I need, can say the things I want to say, can enjoy the work of writing, can be—completely—my own man, not hired out to any one."

Mr. Williams said that he does an enormous amount of preliminary blocking out of characters before he really settles into the work of a novel.

"For example, before writing The Strange Woman—which is having a rebirth that astonishes me but makes me fairly happy, too, as it is selling well enough so that it is not necessary for me to rush on the books that I have in the works now—I wrote about 100,000 words of biographies of the main characters before I started the story.

"In most of my novels you'll find good-sized chunks of characterization as a new person is introduced. These usually represent a good many thousand words that I wrote when I was thinking out the person.

"I always write at length, getting it all down. I write rapidly and not too critically and revise slowly and with pains. I rewrote one chapter in Time of Peace—my latest book—thirteen times.

"I'm happy writing books—it is unfortunate that I didn't start as a novelist instead of a short-story writer. But I had no choice. There was so much respect in my family for books that—well, the idea that I could write anything so impressive as a book did not occur to me until I was well along in my thirties. It was only after publishers had been putting hard covers on my stories for a number of years that I decided to make a try as a novelist."