The plots were frameworks about which the stories were to be constructed and editors were inordinately fond of them. One got “an idea for a story.” What was meant was that a new trick had been thought out. Nearly all the adventure stories and the well-known American western stories were so constructed. A man went into the redwood forests or into the deserts and took up land. He has been a rather mean, second-rate chap in civilization but in the new place a great change comes over him. Well, the writer had got him out where there was no one looking and could do as he pleased with the fellow. Never mind what he had been. The forests or the deserts had changed him completely. The writer could make a regular angel of him, have him rescue downtrodden women, catch horse thieves, exhibit any kind of bravery required to keep the reader excited and happy. A word of good sense dropped in anywhere would have blown the whole thing to pieces but there was no danger. In all such writing all consideration for human beings was thrown aside. No one lived in such tales. Let such a writer begin to think of human beings, care a little for human beings, and his pasteboard world would melt before his eyes. The man in the desert or in the redwood forests was of course the same man he had been before he went there. He had the same problems to face. God knows we would all flee to the forests or the deserts at once if going there could so transform anyone. At least I know I should waste no time in getting there. In the construction of these stories there was endless variation but in all of them human beings, the lives of human beings, were altogether disregarded. An Alabama Negro was given the shrewdness of a Connecticut Yankee, a trick that made some writer temporarily famous and brought him wealth. Having made his Negro think like a Yankee, having made him practice all the smart cute tricks of the Yankee, there was nothing to stop the writer producing a thousand tales with the hybrid Negro as the hero of them all. Only the giving out of the patience of the editors or of the public could stop him, and both seemed inexhaustible. As to what the writer himself suffered under these circumstances, that was a different matter. One supposed that any man who attempted the writer’s craft had, at the beginning, some real interest in the people about him but this was quickly lost. The imaginative life of the romancer must be lived entirely in a queer pasteboard world.