by Clarke Venable

Originally published in the June 1933 issue of Writer's Digest. Extensive research uncovered no copyright renewal.

The word color, as used and abused both by writers and readers, hinges too often upon the sense of sight and minimizes or ignores the equally important senses of taste, touch, smell, and hearing, all of which are part and parcel of this thing called color.

When most fully achieved and most expertly handled by the novelist, color calls into full use and play all the five senses and not infrequently makes use of that sixth sense which, ignorant of a better phrase, I shall call spiritual discernment.

Dictionarians have given much space to the definition of the word color, but for the purposes of the novelist they have not pinned it down. It can be captured in countless ways more easily than it can be defined; its appreciation is sharply and definitely limited by human experience, which, of course, lies within the experiences of the senses.

I know a dozen writers of Western stuff who can make the reader smell saddle leather — and that is color. Ruth Suckow can take you into a farm kitchen and make you smell everything from the dish rag to hot biscuits — and that is color. I know one outdoor writer, who, in his writings, makes the best coffee and fries the best trout I have ever tasted—and that is color. I know writers who can take you for a literary stroll and make you keenly conscious of all that goes on around you — and that is color. And there are a few writers (alas! too few) who in the development of character can cause you to employ that sixth sense, spiritual discernment. And that, too, is color.

A friend and I once went into the deep south on a quail hunt. While waiting on the lawn of the plantation house for the carriage that was to convey us to the sedge fields, I lost sight of my dog. Knowing him to be of the investigating type, I went in search. I found him in front of one of the negro cabins, licking the face of a howling pickaninny so black that one who has never seen that child can have no true understanding of the word black.

"Humph!" said my friend, who was a writer during those months when he could not hunt, "Has that dog a good nose?"

"Excellent," I answered.

"Is his hearing good?"

"Yes,"

"See well?"

"As well as any dog."

"Um-m. Darn smart dog! Make a writer, probably. He's getting a taste of local color."

Thus my wise friend, in a spirit of fun, made use of his knowledge that true color comes through an employment of all the senses.

~

Color is a composite thing and when handling it one must differentiate between color of the whole and the atmosphere stuff in small scenes that make up the whole. Let me clarify by example:

A novel treating with the life of a doctor in a small town presents, in its entirety, a certain color. This is achieved by a thousand and one little spots of color which, studied separately, present little or nothing of the feeling induced by the whole.

Let us say that a scene calls for the doctor's office as the stage. We get the smell of it—drugs, antiseptic, stale cigar smoke, a hint of ether, all blended to create an odor as definitely known to us as the perfume of a rose. We see the case of shining instruments, and hope they shall never be used on us. We get a glimpse of the torture chair with its handles and straps. We see a curtained door that leads to some mysterious sanctum, and we hear the low sound of voices coming from that sanctum. We wonder whether the words import hope or pronounce a death sentence.

All these things can be used with effect in building up atmosphere for a given scene. They are effective as a spot because they are true of the offices of thousands of small town doctors. But the color and feeling of the town and the life there must come from a multiplicity of scenes. The life of that doctor must be woven into the lives of all. Paradoxically, the more he is submerged the more clearly he stands forth.

Next to poor dialogue, poor color can destroy a novel quicker than anything else. Want of color can make it very shallow. On the other hand, if spread on too thickly it destroys all depth. As a matter of fact it is not spread on at all. Let us think of color as threads rather than as a medium to be applied at will. As threads it becomes part of the warp and woof; it is woven in, not plastered on. Many otherwise good stories have been spoiled by the author's failure to make this distinction.

Beginners frequently fall into the error of thinking that color can be supplied in long descriptive passages. I recall a certain manuscript that once came to my desk—a modern Western. The basic situation and plot were good. But the thing as a whole was as flat as near beer and less intoxicating. No color. But the story was worth saving, if possible. I had a long talk with the author and flattered myself that I had made myself clear. In a remarkably short time he was back— too short a time, I thought, for a good rewrite. Had he made a rewrite? No sir! He had plastered that manuscript with patches. He described mountain scenery, he used all the known adjectives in picturing glory and granduer, and he had fairly hurled paint pots at all the inanimate things that came under his eye. But the animate and the every-day affairs of their lives were left in status quo.

No, color is not to be achieved with all the descriptive adjectives in the world. It is far too subtile for that!

It has been truly said that the success of a joke lies in the ear of the listener rather than in the tongue of him who tells it. In like manner the appreciation of color, in all its nice gradations, lies within the sensual experiences of the reader, plus the employment of that sixth sense earlier spoken of as spiritual discernment. The reader can appreciate color to the limit of his own sensitiveness and no further.

This latter fact must be a determining factor and guide in the handling of color in any novel. The audience aimed at must be kept in mind. Does the writer of first-class Western stuff handle color in the same fashion as Dr. William Beebe? Far from it! Beebe knows his audience, as does the Western writer, and both succeed because they know the sensitivenss of the scales upon which the product is to be weighed.

~

I shall now utter the heresy that pleasing color (as thought of in terms of sales value) and true color need not be one and the same thing. I have sat inthralled by a novel, highly and pleasingly colorful, only to discover at some later date that the color was faked. It had sales value, it provided escape (the thing which the reader is always in search of), and from a standpoint of movement and interest it had all that any novel need have—save verity.

True color is based upon verity and fact. Imagination alone will not supply it however high the imagination of the writer. His faked colors will pale on him when the light of fact is turned upon them. Which is but another way of restating one of the central themes of this series, viz.: that all the attributes of verity are possible only with him who knows his people and his locale.

Many beginners in the field of the novel are ignorant of this requirement or willfully blind to it. As a beginner he is still in the mould and ntood of a reader. He begins to write as a means of escape from the treadmill of every-day life; he sees romance and high adventure afar off and sees nothing near at hand. Therefore, with pen in hand he begins a story of Palo-Pago or Fartherthanthat.

For the sake of illustration let us go along with him to Fartherthanthat and observe how true color fails him because of his ignorance of fact.

Down comes the pen and up goes the curtain. Our hero is discovered on a raft in the midst of the wide Pacific and for company (as well as for story purposes) he has with him on the raft the villian and our fair Ermantrude. (Don't laugh, reader! Since that day when Louis Tracy used this old idea well in "The Wings of the Morning" I have seen God-knows-how-many manuscripts and printed stories with precisely that beginning.)

Now, by the blessing of Providence and the will of the storyteller this raft is being borne by friendly wind and tide to comberwhite shores of a south Pacific isle. Soon the fronded palms appear, swaying in the soft wind of the Trades.

But wait! Now we begin to strike difficulties. Should they be palms? And what is the season and do trades blow there? And what is the general nature of the shore lines of these atolls? Heigh ho! Well, I've said it and the raft is too near short to quibble over that little speck of color. One must make a landing.

Let us now throw in a few breakers and rocks so that our hero, early in the game, may through valor and manly strength stumble ashore with fair Ermantrude and also rescue the villian from the very teeth of a man-eating shark. (If the villain is not rescued, here endeth the story, which is much too soon. The hero must be given at least sixty thousand words in which to bring about the very thing which the shark most thankfully would have furnished.)

But again wait! Are the atolls rock-ribbed or are they of coral formation with low shore lines gently shelving into the deep? How about breakers on a gentle shore line when soft trades are blowing? And are sharks common there?

Oh, well, we are ashore and thank God for so narrow an escape. Now for a little rest and a search for food and shelter. As the three poor souls walk along the beach tropical birds go screaming through the trees. Oh, my soul! What birds are they? And do birds, who have never seen man and therefore have no cause for fear, take screaming flight? I am sure I don't know, at least not from personal experience. Scientists say not—and scientists and explorers go everywhere.

And now—Ho hum! And now I vote that we leave those three wretched creatures to work out their own salvation while we return to Hickory Centers, U. S. A., there to write about people we know, things we know, philosophies and psychologies we know, and do it with such strength and devotion to verity that readers will know that we know!

TEMPO: ITS INFLUENCES

But wherever we go, and whatever we write, we will discover that the use of color varies according to the type of novel. In other words, tempo steps in and gives some commands to color. Furthermore, tempo actually becomes a part of the color of the whole. Tempo, like color, is a subtile something difficult to segregate and analyze. It is an integral part of style, of which countless books have been written without exhausting the subjects so much as the readers thereof.

Dictionaries don't help us much with the word tempo. It is hard to define what cannot be confined; it is difficult to limit the illimitable. I submit that all the definitions of all the lexicographers would be of little value to that writer who has no natural feeling and understanding of tempo. His story will be as jerky and dissonant as would be the efforts of a musician who took no heed of the rate of movement and rhythmical divisions of his score.

Obviously, tempo must be in harmony with the nature of the story. The quick march of crime stories or of high action stuff would be ruinous to a novel treating with more sheltered lives. It would be out of harmony and therefore off color, since tempo is a part of color.

Let it not be thought, however, that tempo is achieved solely by the amount of action or want of action in a paragraph, page, or chapter. Choice of words, accent, and sentence construction exert a tremendous (if unseen and unanalyzed) influence on the movement. Just as color is imparted through a nice choice of words, so is tempo more definitely fixed and accented through word choice. The picture to be presented must determine the choice of words, sentence construction, accent, and cadence. Let us take an example:

Two novelists, working separately, decide to use Broadacres, the country seat of Colonel Silverspoon, as the setting for their stories. The house is an early Colonial, deep-seated in century-old trees, and it is far off the beaten path. The place can go on for another hundred years without anything of importance taking place there. On the other hand, almost anything might take place there.

Novelist A thinks the setting and the people of the locale splendidly suited to a novel of decadence, vanished glory, and the pathetic conflict of yesterday's customs and ideals brought face to face with the inescapable now.

Novelist B, however, with a mind that simply does not travel along such lines, thinks it an excellent place for a very baffling murder wherein Colonel Silverspoon furnishes the corpus deltcti and Broadacres, with its gloomy interior, strange servants, and still stranger kinsmen, furnish the background, color, and suspects.

Now we have a single given setting but we have two novelists descending upon it with minds and ideas as opposite as the poles. Each, in his field, 1s a skilled workman.

Novelist A, in his opening and throughout his story, is after the flavor of Broadacres — itS manners, customs, ideals, philosophies. At the very beginning he must determine and sct the tempo. His choice of words must be in harmony with that tempo, with the color of the whole, and with his central theme. In all probability he will choose words with their roots in the romance languages. They will be words with great vowel beauty and his sentences will be fluid. If he does his work well some of the critics will speak of him as a stylist .. . though the Lord knows (if the critics do not), that any man is a stylist who is master of his style!

Novelist B, for instance, is also a stylist though he is less likely to get credit for it. He has a murder mystery to solve at Broadacres and in the cause of justice he must be a-doing. Colonel Silverspoon has been foully done in, no doubt about it. A trusted old negro butler entered the dim library room with a toddy and there lay the Colonel with a knife in his heart.

Now the moonlight, with all its witchery, is mellowing the white columns of the verandah and the slender drooping arms of the willow tree at the sunken pool are tracing exquisite lacework designs on the water. But does Novelist B care a hoot or a hurrah about that? He does not! He knows that Colonel Silverspoon has been brutally murdered and he knows equally well that a pack of voracious readers will be tramping on his heels and actually running ahead of him in an effort to get their hands on the murderer.

In keeping with the nature of the story the tempo here must be fast. Short, pithy words and sentences. Good Anglo-Saxon words, not pretty in themselves but possessing great force and not subject to so many connotations as the Latin words used by Novelist A. Tempo, color, style—all will be woven together with as much skill as that displayed by Novelist A. But there can be no similarity of method for the reason that each man must keep an eye and ear attuned to harmony.

Control of tempo is absolutely essential to good style. Control does not mean monotonous constancy. A skilled engineer can draw his train smoothly though he varies the speed from six to sixty miles per hour. He has control.

And because tempo is (or should be) under the control of the author, there must be honesty in its use. For commercial reasons it has become something of the vogue to arrest attention in the opening sentence or paragraph. No use to quarrel with it. In a complex, quick-moving age wherein people read as they run this is a requirement which can be ignored only at your own peril and cost. But there is such a thing as going too far in the effort to arrest attention. A short story, because of its compass, may begin on high action, sustain the flight, and end on high action. In the novel, however, both the characters and your readers must have some breathing spells. No novelist has the right to commit murder, arson, and mayhem in the first chapter and then have nothing happen thereafter.

In the good old days of the dime novel the reader was caught up in the first paragraph by the sound of cracking rifles and the sight of redskins biting the dust. "Take that, ye blasted varmints!" hissed Captain Strongheart as he rammed home another cartridge, "And that, and that, and that!" From which the reader could see that things were about to begin and would doubtless continue.

And they did continue — Indians being plentiful and frontiersmen numerous and brave. It was gallop and shoot all the way from old Liberty Landing to the Sweetwater Trail. And, if not art, at least there was honesty in the tempo. More downright honesty, I am inclined to believe, than is present today in many contemporary novels wherein all the strength of movement is compressed into the first few chapters, with the remainder growing weaker and feebler and utterly unable to maintain the quick march promised in the beginning.

Color, tempo, style — these things are promises. They are your covenant with your reader. They are present in your beginning, and your readers are won over to go along with you on the implied promise that you will be constant on the line of march and that you know where you are going. Of the millions of readers, comparatively only a few will constitute your audience; no writer can be all things to all men. But to a small company you are the guide, setting a tempo that was pleasing to them in the beginning, and handling color in a manner tempting to their palates.

You made certain representations and you asked for credit. Be sure that you don't change the terms after the loan has been made!