As soon as you have done two or three days’ stint on the book--you ought to plan to write so many words a day or a week, and it’s no matter that you don’t know what they will be--as soon as you’ve got a fairish start you will find that you have several persons in your story who are, to all intents and purposes, as much alive as yourself and considerably more self-willed. They will promptly take the story in their hands and you will have nothing to do in the remaining 50,000 words or more but to set down what happens. The extreme physical fatigue consequent upon writing so many words is all you have to guard against. Play golf or tennis, if you can, so as to offset this physical fatigue by the physical rest and intellectual exercise they respectively afford. Auction bridge in the evenings, or, as Frank M. O’Brien says, reading De Morgan and listening to the phonograph, will give you the emotional outlet you seek. 15 No doubt many who have read the foregoing will turn up their noses at the well-meant advice it contains, considering that we have largely jested on a serious subject. We take this occasion to declare most earnestly, at the conclusion of our remarks, that we have seldom been so serious in our life. Such occasional levities as we have allowed ourselves to indulge in have been plain and obvious, and of no more importance in the general scheme of what we have been discussing than the story of the Irishman with which the gifted after-dinner speaker circumspectly introduces his most burning thoughts. We mean what we have said. Writing a novel is one of the most rounded forms of self-education. It is one of the most honorable too, since, unlike the holder of public office, the person who is getting the education does not do so at the public expense. We have regard, naturally, to the mere act of _writing_ the novel. If afterward it finds a publisher and less probably a public--that has nothing to do with the author, whose self-culture, intensive, satisfying and wholesome, has been completed before that time. Whether a novelist deserves any credit for the novel he writes is a question, but he will get the credit for it anyway and nothing matters where so wonderful an experience is to be gained. Next to being hypnotized, there is nothing like it; and it has the great advantage that you know what you are doing whereas the hypnotic subject does not. No preparation is necessary or even desirable since, even in so specific a detail as the outline of the story the people of your narrative take things entirely in their own hands and reduce the outline to the now well-known status of a scrap of paper.... We talk of “advice” in writing a novel. The best advice is not to take any. THE END TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.