Now, to work! About a title. Better have one, even if it’s only provisional, before you begin to write. If you can, get the real, right title at the outset. Sometimes having it will help you through--not to speak of such cases as Eleanor Hallowell Abbott’s. The author of _Molly Make-Believe_, _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_ and _Old-Dad_ gets her real, right title and then the story mushrooms out of it, like a house afire. Ourselves, we are personally the same. We have three corking titles for as many novels. One is written. The other two we haven’t to worry about. They have only to live up to their titles, which may be difficult for them but will make it easy for ourselves. We have a Standard. Everything that lives up to the promise of our superlative title goes in, everything that is alien to it or unworthy of it, stays out. This, we may add parenthetically, was the original motive in instituting titles of nobility. A man was made a Baron. Very well, it was expected that he would conform his character and conduct accordingly. Things suitable to a Baron he would thenceforth be and do, things unbefitting his new, exalted station he would kindly omit.... It works better with books than with people, so cheer up. Your novel will come out more satisfactorily than you think. Which brings us to the matter of the ending. Should it be happy or otherwise? More words have been wasted on this subject than on any other aspect of fictioneering. You must understand from the very first that you, personally, have nothing whatever to say about the ending of your story. That will be decided by the people of your tale and the events among which they live. In other words, the preponderant force in determining the ending is--inevitability. Most people misunderstand inevitability. Others merely worry about it, as if it were to-morrow’s weather. Shall we take an umbrella, they ask anxiously, lest it rain inevitably? Or will the inevitable come off hot, so that an overcoat will be a nuisance? Nobody knows, not even the weather forecaster in Washington. If there were a corresponding official whose duty it would be to forecast with equal inaccuracy the endings of novels life would go on much the same. Readers would still worry about the last page because they would know that the official prediction would be wrong at least half the time. If the Ending Forecaster prophesied: “Lovers meet happily on page 378; villain probably killed in train accident” we would go drearily forward confident that page 378 would disclose the heroine, under a lowering sky, clasped in the villain’s arms while the hero lay prone under a stalled Rolls-Royce, trying to find out why the carburetor didn’t carburete.