[In the following essay, Aldrich illustrates how to build character and a story line by describing how she created Miss Bishop.]

Several times in the past years your editor has asked me to contribute an article and each time I have been too busy, or thought I was, which is nearly the same thing. This morning another pleasant request has arrived and in the same mail a letter from a young woman with that old query: “Can you help a beginning writer? Where do you get your ideas? How can … ?” etc., etc. I wouldn't go so far as to say it is the hand of Fate, but the simultaneous arrival of the two causes me to put aside the desk work of the moment and do that article for The Writer.

Now I have written and sold about one hundred and sixty short stories and have had ten books published with their by-products of serialization, syndication, English sales, foreign translations, plays, and a movie or two. But I still do not know just how to go about helping a young person in his own story writing. It is the greatest lone-wolf profession in the whole category.

One of my sons, home from the University for vacation, is at this moment across the hall in his room engaged in the throes of evolving a story. Brought up in the writing atmosphere of our home, he expects no help but maternal encouragement. If he has not gained anything from his mother about actual construction, he has learned how to do his work diligently, to rely upon himself, and to take those frequent and sickening doses of rejection slips with something approaching equanimity.

“Where do you get your ideas?” the correspondent queries.

Another young person interviewing me once, asked: “When you are writing one story and another just clamors to be told at the same time, what do you do?” With compassion I eyed her and with patience I answered: “Oh, but they never clamor. If I had two ideas at the same time or ever a few weeks apart, I would think it too good to be true.”

Fresh ideas do not flock to a writer's head (not to this head) like birds to a martin house. One has to labor very hard to catch them. No doubt there are writers who see themes and plots so clearly that they do not have to put the strain on themselves which some of us do. A few times, but so few that they are almost negligible, I have visioned the skeleton of a story in its entirety or have been haunted by some theme which would not down. For those few times I have thanked the gods and hastily sketched the outlines of the stories. But for the most part I have worked hard, walking the floor at times as one would in physical pain, trying to get hold of an idea which would only elude me. Because I know so well in what labor most stories are written, I discount the sincerity of nine out of ten people who say they want to become a writer more than anything in the world. What they want is the satisfaction of seeing their stuff in print, the checks, and that bit of prestige which curiously attaches itself to anyone associated with the business. But they would not want to pay the price,—to spend hours of writing only to tear the story to pieces, or to bear all the early disappointments so familiar to those of us who have come up the hard and slippery way.

Back to the question,—how may we get story ideas when they refuse to present themselves to us as well-defined plots? By putting intensive thought upon a small idea which, in its tiny form and limited feeling, has not enough substance for a story.

Personally, I have found that whenever I am emotionally disturbed, there is the germ of a story in that disturbance,—but only a germ. Which means, given the cause of that disturbance for a beginning idea, I must work on it, change it, add to it, until the final story may be very far removed from the original nucleus.

If I am moved to laughter over the naive actions of an adolescent, a funny experience of a friend, an item in the newspaper, there is reason to believe that I can draw a smile from my readers with any of those episodes from which to plan. If I feel a suspicious moisture in my left eye over some small happening, there is reason to think I may be able to draw a surreptitious tear from some reader's eye with that bit of an anecdote upon which to work. And work is the word, not just a passive attitude, hoping that the story will inspirationally write itself.

Now, a concrete example: I open a newspaper from my old home town and see the headlines: OLD BUILDING TO BE RAZED. WORK BEGINS JUNE FIRST. And, because the editor is an alumnus of the school in question, there is a sentimental third line: GOOD-BYE TO OLD CENTRAL.

I am emotionally disturbed. It brings back a flood of youthful memories and a certain tender regret that the old building is to stand there among the trees no more. After June, the only thing remaining of the rambling brick building will be the memory of it in the minds and hearts of hundreds of men and women. And then, with an eye to business, I begin to wonder how I can work out a story from that uncomplicated emotion of regret at knowing the old building is to be torn down. For the tearing down of a condemned building is not a story nor the son of a story. It is only an incident. And a story must be more than an incident. It must have people in it, real people with hopes and fears. It must have life and color and movement. It must give forth odors and sounds. And something must happen, something to hold the interest or stir the blood, to bring that laughter or that tear.

So I begin the process of fumbling in the dark, putting out tentacles, as it were, from that center of my emotion.

I reason: If I am disturbed, countless other old students will be moved, too. Old teachers, also. I begin to recall some of those instructors, especially those who gave so much of themselves to their students. I'll do the story of a teacher—one who saw the opening of the college and lived through its growth—who will be there at the end of the old building as she was at the beginning. And now I have left the world of reality and slipped into the world of fancy, for my teacher is not to be any particular one but a fictitious person whose characteristics shall embody something from them all. Soon I have named her so that she may seem more real to me. I decide on “Miss Bishop,” and some old-fashioned first name,—Ella. That suits her, for living in the seventies,—“Ella Bishop.”

This Ella Bishop is becoming very real, so that I understand how lonely and sad she is in her old age without much to show in a material way for all her good works. A new president of the college will ask her to resign. If she is to be pictured as sad and lonely and hurt over the loss of her position, she ought at some time in the story to be quite the opposite, for the greatest characteristic of drama is contrast. And all contrast has a touch of the dramatic in it. The contrasting activities of “Dr. Jekyll” and “Mr. Hyde”—of “Faust” and “Mephistopheles”—of “Jesus” and “Judas”—these are the things of which drama is made. I ponder over the question of what can be done for contrast. The old students must rally to her. They must give her one exalted hour, one evening of adulation. It shall be in the old building itself, the night before it is to be torn down. A satisfactory climax: The alumni coming back to pay her homage—the old building's last appearance—and Ella Bishop's supreme moment after despair.

Perhaps I have not yet written a word, only visualized a woman and a situation. But the climax is there, a point toward which I can now work. I go back to pick up the threads of her life. Why did she never marry? Was her life always as barren as it must appear to the modern student? All this to be worked out, and research to be done for the accuracy of a midwestern college background in its evolution. (This latter, a very exacting phase of story writing, but not under discussion here.)

By this time I am writing,—much of the climax first so that later I may work toward it. Ella Bishop has grown as familiar to me as my next door neighbor. To live the lives of his characters, crawling into their very skins, is the writer's prerogative, almost his duty. He must be an actor,—an actor who plays all the parts.

Enough of detailed description. Miss Bishop went on the best seller list several years ago and on the screen this year through a fine interpretation of the actress, Martha Scott,—a story and a photoplay which had their beginnings in a very small germ, the momentary emotion caused by reading a headline: OLD BUILDING TO BE RAZED.

I hope this has not sounded pedantic. There are other ways to develop a story. This one is mine. And while there is very little which an older writer can do to help a beginner (for each one must “gae his ain gait,” as my Scotch mother used to say) there is always the chance that the telling of a personal experience or the explaining of an individual method will find its interested young reader.