Then there will come a day--I feel it--when the business-like Editor
will say to himself: "What in thunder is the sense of my paying one
man to write a story of sixty thousand words and another man to read
it and tell it again in sixteen hundred!"

We shall be expected to write our novels in chapters not exceeding
twenty words. Our short stories will be reduced to the formula:
"Little boy. Pair of skates. Broken ice, Heaven's gates." Formerly
an author, commissioned to supply a child's tragedy of this genre for
a Christmas number, would have spun it out into five thousand words.
Personally, I should have commenced the previous spring--given the
reader the summer and autumn to get accustomed to the boy. He would
have been a good boy; the sort of boy that makes a bee-line for the
thinnest ice. He would have lived in a cottage. I could have spread
that cottage over two pages; the things that grew in the garden, the
view from the front door. You would have known that boy before I had
done with him--felt you had known him all your life. His quaint
sayings, his childish thoughts, his great longings would have been
impressed upon you. The father might have had a dash of humour in
him, the mother's early girlhood would have lent itself to pretty
writing. For the ice we would have had a mysterious lake in the
wood, said to be haunted. The boy would have loved o' twilights to
stand upon its margin. He would have heard strange voices calling to
him. You would have felt the thing was coming.

So much might have been done. When I think of that plot wasted in
nine words it makes me positively angry.

And what is to become of us writers if this is to be the new fashion