As she talks in private conversation so she talks in public. She is a good speech-maker, a good lecturer. Her spoken words have the pungent vitality of her writing and the reading of her own stories makes the characters come alive startlingly.
It may seem strange to those of us who do not make our own living by creative writing that a woman who has made her mark as a reporter and who still occasionally reports a national convention, finds it so hard to write fiction. Edna Ferber has written for newspapers about all sorts of things under every sort of difficult handicap of time and place, and has produced good “copy.” Yet her short stories, novels and plays, are slowly and laboriously produced. And when the job is done, so closely has she held her nose to the grindstone, that she is unable to perceive the work as a whole, and realize how good it is.
She once rented an apartment on the lake front in Chicago, her desk facing the blue waters. She was in the midst of her novel, “The Girls.” She complained that she could not get on with it, it was hard labor, so hard that in spite of her best efforts she would look at the lake and the trees and the children playing in the street below. Her anxious publisher besought her to turn her typewriter table so she faced the blank wall. She did; and the book was speedily born.
In an article in The American Magazine, under the characteristic title of "The Joy of the Job,” she tells of her methods of work.
“At the risk of being hated I wanted to state that I’ve always felt sorry for any woman who could play whenever she wanted to. She never will know how sweet play can be. Chocolate is no treat for a girl in a candy factory. Play is no treat for an idler. My work is such that morning engagements and festive luncheoning are forbidden. On those rare occasions, two or three times a year, perhaps, when I deliberately, and for the good of my soul, break the rule and sneak off down-town for luncheon, the affair takes on the proportions of an orgy.
