I then make voluminous notes. Then begins the agony. Each
day it besets me, winter or summer, from five in the morning till
breakfast time. I awake at five and lie in bed, thinking out the
chapter that is to be written that day, composing it word for word.
That usually takes me up till seven. From seven till eight I am
engaged in mental revision of the chapter. I then get up and write it
down from memory, as fast as ever the pen will flow. The rest of the
morning I spend in lounging about, thinking, thinking, thinking of my
book. For when I am working on a new book I think of nothing else;
everything else comes to a standstill. In the afternoon I walk or
ride, thinking, thinking. In the evenings, when it is dark, I walk up
and down my room constructing my story. It is then that I am happiest.
I do not write every day--sometimes I take a long rest, as I am doing
at present--and when I do write, I never exceed fifteen hundred words
a day. I do not greatly revise the manuscript for serial publication,
but I labor greatly over the proofs of the book, making important
changes, taking out, putting in, recasting. Thus, after 'The
Scapegoat' had passed through four editions and everybody was praising
the book, I felt uneasy because I felt I had not done justice to my
subject; so I spent two months in rewriting it and had the book reset
and brought out again. The public feeling was that the book had not
been improved, but I felt that I had lifted it up fifty per cent."

"I am convinced," he continued, "that my system of writing the book in
my head first is a good one. It shows me exactly what I want to say.
The mental strain is, of course, immense, and that forces you to go
straight to your point; for the mind is not strong enough to indulge
in flirtations, in excursions at a tangent, as the pen is apt to do."

Hall Caine was accused, when he began writing, of obscurity, of a
predilection for tortuous phrases. "I think that now I have almost
gone too far in the other direction," he says; "the critics blame me
for a neglect of style. But--you remember the story of Gough and his
diamond ring--I am determined not to let any diamond ring get between
me and my audience. Writing should not get between the reader and the
picture. I take a great joy in sheer lucidity, and if any sentence of
mine does not at the very first sight express my meaning, I rewrite
it. Obscurity of style indicates that the writer is not entirely
master of wha