William Allen White, without consciously thinking anything of the kind, is dimly aware that people generally have a right to know him as a big-hearted man who makes some mistakes but whose sympathy is with the individual man and woman and whose passion is for social progress. The best way to make people generally acquainted with William Allen White is to write a novel--say, _In The Heart of a Fool_, which they will read.... The best way to get to know anybody is to get him to talking about somebody else. Talk about one’s self is a little too self-conscious. And there you have it! It is exactly because such a writer as H. G. Wells is in reality pretty nearly always talking about himself that we find it so difficult to appraise him rightly on the basis of his novels. Self-consciousness is never absent from a Wells book. It is this acute self-consciousness that makes so much of Henry James valueless to the great majority of readers. They cannot get past it, or behind it. The great test fails. Mr. James is dead, and the only way left to get at the truth of Mr. Wells will be to make him Chancellor of the Exchequer or, in a socialized British republic, Secretary of Un-War.... Dare to be a Daniel Carson Goodman. Write That Novel. Don’t procrastinate, don’t temporize. Do It Now, reserving all rights of translation of words into action in all countries, including the Scandinavian. Full detailed instructions as to the actual writing follow. 13 You may not have noticed it, but even so successful a novelist as Robert W. Chambers is careful to respect the three unities that Aristotle (wasn’t it?) prescribed and the Greeks took always into account. Not in a single one of his fifty novels does the popular Mr. Chambers disregard the three Greek unities. Invariably he looks out for the time, the place and the girl. If Aristotle recommended it and Robert W. Chambers sticks to it, perhaps you, about to write your first novel, had better attend to it also.