If you don't write fiction

For each memorandum I stuck a pin in the state maps pasted on the wall of my workshop. When there were several pins in any neighborhood, I would sling my kodak over my shoulder, the carrying case strapped to the tripod-top, like a tramp with a bundle at the end of a stick. And then away, with an extra pair of socks and a harmonica for baggage. Besides the material that I felt certain of finding through advance information, luck always could be trusted to turn up some additional "stories." The quickest way to find out what there was to write about in a town was simply to walk into the local newspaper office, introduce myself and ask for some tips about possible "features." I cannot recall that any one ever refused me, or ever failed to think of something worth while.

I do not know yet whether what I discovered then is a business or not, but I made a living out of it. Whereas reporting on a salary had begun to be something of a grind, the less profitable roamings of a free lance furnished a life that had color and everlasting freshness.

Sometimes, trusting in the little gods of the improvident, I was lured into the backwoods of the Ozarks by such a name as "Mountain Home," which caught my fancy on the map; and with no definite "stories" in mind I would go sauntering from Nowhere-in-Particular in Northern Arkansas to Someplace Else in Southern Missouri, snapping pictures by the roadside and scribbling a few necessary notes. One of those excursions, which cost $24.35, has brought a return, to date, of more than $250, which of course does not include the worth of a five days' lark with a young Irishman who went on the trip as a novel form of summer vacation.

He found all the novelty he could have hoped for. After some truly lyric passages of life in Arkansas, when we felt positively homesick about leaving one town to go on to another, we reached a railroad-less county in Missouri infested with fleas; and to secure a discount on the stage fare on the thirty-five-mile drive from Gainsville to West Plains (we had to have a discount to save enough to buy something to eat that night) we played the harmonica for our driver's amusement until we gasped like fish. His soul was touched either by the melody or by pity, and he left us enough small change to provide a supper of cheese and crackers.

Some happenings that must sound much more worth while in the ears of the mundane have followed, but those first days of free lancing seem to me to be among the choicest in a journalistic adventurer's experience. Encounters with a variety of celebrities since then have proved no whit more thrilling than the discovery that our host, Jerry South of Mountain Home, was lieutenant-governor of Arkansas; and though I have roamed in five nations, no food that I ever have tasted so nearly approaches that of the gods as the strawberry shortcake we ate in Bergman.

Even in the crass matter of profits, I found the small town richer in easily harvestable "stories" than the biggest city in the world. A few years later I spent a week in London, but I picked up less there to write about than I found in Sabetha, Kansas, in a single afternoon. Sabetha furnished:

Half of the material for a motor car article. (When automobiles were still a novelty to the rural population.) This sold to Leslie's.

An article on gasoline-propelled railway coaches, for The Illustrated World.

A short contribution on scientific municipal management of public utilities in a small town, for Collier's.

A character sketch about a local philanthropic money lender, for Leslie's and the Kansas City Star.

An account of the Kansas Amish, a sect something like the Tolstoys, for Kansas City, St. Louis and New York newspapers.

Short Sunday specials about a $40,000 hospital and a thoroughly modern Kansas farm house for Kansas City and St. Louis Sunday sections.

The profits of these excursions were not always immediate, and until after I had worked many weeks at the trade there were periods of serious financial embarrassment. To cite profitable trips too early is to get ahead of my story, but the time is none the less propitious to remark that a country town or a small city certainly is as good a place for the free lance to operate (once he knows a "story" when he sees it) as is New York or Chicago, Boston, New Orleans or San Francisco. I often wonder if I would not have been better off financially if I had kept on working from a Kansas City headquarters instead of emigrating to the East.

I might have gone on this way for a long time, in contentment, for my profits were steadily mounting and my markets extending. But one day my wanderings extended as far as Chicago, and there I ran across an old friend of student days. He had been the cartoonist of the college magazine when I was its editor. He wore, drooping from one corner of his face, a rah-rah bulldog pipe; an enormous portfolio full of enormities of drawing was under one arm, and, dangling at the end of the other, was one of the tiniest satchels that ever concealed a nightgown.

In answer to questions about what he was doing with himself, he confessed that he was not making out any better than most other newly graduated students of art. I argued that if Chicago did not treat him considerately, he ought to head for New York, where real genius, more than likely, would be more quickly appreciated. Also, if this was to his liking, I would invite myself to go along with him.

We went. Now sing, O Muse, the slaughter!

CHAPTER VI

Most of the editors with whom you will have to deal are home folks, like yourself, from Oskaloosa and Richmond and Santa Barbara and Quincy. Few are native-born New Yorkers, and scarcely any of them go around with their noses in the air in an "upstage Eastern manner." Most of them are graduates of the newspaper school, and remnants of newspaper cynicism occasionally appear in their outspoken philosophy. But be not deceived by this, for even in the newspaper office the half-baked cub who is getting his first glimpses of woman's frailties and man's weak will is the only cynic who means all he says. All reporters who are worth their salt mellow with the years; and editors who amount to much usually are ex-reporters trained to their jobs by long experience. The biggest editors and the ones with the biggest hearts have the biggest jobs. Most of the snubs you will receive will come from little men in little jobs, trying to impress you with a "front." The biggest editors of the lot are plain home folks whom you would not hesitate to invite to a dinner in a farmhouse kitchen.

What you ought to know when you invade New York without much capital and no reputation to speak of is that you are making a great mistake to move there so early, and that most of the editors to whom you address yourself know you are making a mistake but are too soft-hearted to tell you so.

Like most other over-optimistic free lances, we invaded New York with an expeditionary force which was in a woeful state of unpreparedness.

In a street of brownstone fronts in mid-town Manhattan, a hurdy-gurdy strummed a welcome to us in the golden November sunlight, and a canary in a gilt cage twittered ecstatically from an open window. This moment is worthy of mention because it was the happiest that was granted to us for a number of months thereafter. We rented a small furnished room, top floor rear, and went out for a stroll on Broadway, looking the city over with the appraising eyes of conquerors. We were joyously confident.

One reason why we thought we would do well here was that the latter months of the period preceding our supposedly triumphal entry had seen me arrive at the point of earning almost as much money at free lancing as I could have made as a reporter. Meantime, I had thrilled to see my name affixed to contributions in Collier's, Leslie's, Outlook and Outing, not to mention a few lesser magazines. I thought I knew a "story" when I saw one. I knew how to take photographs and prepare a manuscript for marketing, and New York newspapers and magazines had been treating me handsomely. What we did not realize was that while the New York markets were hospitable enough to western material, they required no further assistance in reporting the activities of Manhattan Island. We had moved away from our gold mine.

Our home and workshop now was a cubbyhole so small that every piece of furniture in the place was in close proximity to something else. My battered desk was jam against my roommate's drawing table, and his chair backed against a bed. Then, except for a narrow aisle to the door, there was a chair which touched another bed, which touched a trunk; the trunk touched ends with a washstand, which was jam against a false mantel pasted onto the wall, and the mantel was in juxtaposition with a bureau which poked me in the back. The window looked south, and adjacent buildings allowed it to have sunlight for almost half an hour a day.

Yet it would have been a cheerful enough place if our mail had not been so depressing. Everything we sent out came right back with a bounce, sometimes on the same day that we posted it. With indefatigable zeal we wrote feature "stories" about big topics in America's biggest city and furnished illustrations for the text. But the manuscripts did not sell. For two bitter months we kept at it before we discovered what was wrong. You may wonder how we could have been so blind. But there was no one to tell us what to do. We had to find out by experience.

In November our income was $60.90, all of it echoes from the past for material written in the west.

"How that crowd in the old office would laugh at us when we trailed back home, defeated!"

That was the thought which was at once a nightmare and a goad to further desperate effort. Day after day the Art Department and the kodak and I explored New York's highways and centers of interest. The place was ripe with barrels and barrels of good "feature stories," and I knew it; and the markets were not unfriendly, for by mail I had sold to them before. But now we could not "land."

On Christmas Day there was a dismal storm. Our purses were almost flat, and my box from home failed to arrive. To get up an appetite for dinner that night we went for a walk in a joy killing blizzard. I wanted to die and planned to do so. The only reason I did not jump off of a pier was the providential intervention of several stiff cocktails. (I am theoretically a prohibitionist, but grateful to the enemy for having saved my life.) The black cloud that shut out all sunlight was our measly total for December—$18.07.

One glimmer of hope remained in a growing suspicion that perhaps some of the "stories" we had submitted had seen print shortly before we arrived. Possibly some other free lances—I would now estimate the number as somewhere between nine hundred and a thousand—had gone over the island of Manhattan with a fine tooth comb? I began haunting the side streets to seek out the most hidden possibilities, and ended in triumph one afternoon in a little uptown bird store.

For two hours the young woman who was the proprietor of the store submitted to a searching interview, and I emerged with enough material for a full page spread. Then, taking no chances of being turned down because the contribution was too long, I condensed the "story" into a column. The manuscript went to the Sunday Editor of the New York Sun, with a letter pleading that "just this once" he grant me the special favor of a note to explain why he would not be able to use what I had to offer.

"Well enough written," he scribbled on the rejection slip, "but Miss Virginia has been done too many times before."

With that a great light dawned. Further investigation discovered that we had run into the same difficulty on numerous other occasions. We newcomers had no notion of how thoroughly and often the city had been pillaged for news. We could not tell old stuff from new. Manhattan Island is, indeed, the most perilous place in all America for the green and friendless free lance to attempt to earn a living. There is a wonderful abundance of "stories," but nearly all of them that the eye of the beginner can detect have been marketed before. Any other island but Manhattan! When dog days came around, I took a vacation on Bois Blanc in the Straits of Mackinac, and found more salable "stories" along its thinly populated shores than Manhattan had been able to furnish in three months. Everything I touched on Bois Blanc was new, and all my own. Anything on Manhattan is everybody's.

But to return to our troubles in New York. The only hope I could see was to create a line of writing all our own. This determination resulted in a highly specialized type of "feature" for which we found a market in the morning New York World. It combined novelty with the utmost essence of timeliness. For example, precluding any possibility of being anticipated on the opening of Coney Island's summer season, we wrote early in February:

"If reports from unveracious employees of Coney Island are to be trusted, the summer season of 1910 is going to bring forth thrilling novelties for the air and the earth and the tunnels beneath the earth."

We listed then the Biplane Hat Glide (women were wearing enormous hats that season) and Motor Ten Pins—get in a motor car and run down dummies which count respectively, a child, ten points; a blind man, five; a newsboy, one. Then the Shontshover. We explained the Shontshover in detail because it was supposed to have a particularly strong appeal to the millions who ride in the subway:

"New York's good-natured enjoyment of its inadequate subway service is responsible for the third novelty of the season. In honor of a gentleman who once took a ride in one of his own subway cars during the rush hour, the device has been named the 'Shontshover' (from 'Shonts' and 'shover'). It is the sublimation of a subway car, a cross between a cartridge and a sardine can. The passengers are packed into the shell with a hydraulic ram, then at high speed are shot through a pneumatic tube against a stone wall. Because of the great number of passengers the Shontshover can carry in a day, the admission price to the tube is to be only twenty-five cents."

We suggested on other occasions that new churches should have floors with an angle of forty-five degrees, on account of the prevailing fashion of large hats among women; that City Hall employees were outwitting Mayor Gaynor's time clock by paying the night watchman to punch it for them at sunrise, and that beauty had become a bar to a job as waitress in numerous New York restaurants. (O shades of George Washington, forgive us that one, at least!) These squibs did nobody any harm, and did us on the average, the good of the price of a week's room rent. We never meant them to be taken seriously or ever supposed that any one in the world would swallow them whole. But among our readers was a square-headed German; and one of the most absurd of our imaginings turned out, as a result, to be a physical possibility.

"Ever since it was announced, a few days ago, that hazing in a modified modernized form is to be permitted at West Point," we related, "a reporter for the World has been busily interviewing people of all ages and interests to find the latest ideas on the subject.... Some small boys in Van Cortlandt Park yesterday afternoon, diabolo experts, suggested 'plebe diabolo.' It is simply diabolo for grown-ups. A rope takes the place of the customary string and a first year man is used for a spool. Any one can see at a glance what a great improvement this would be over the old-fashioned stunt of tossing the plebe in a blanket."

A few months later I picked up a copy of the Scientific American and chortled to read the account of a German acrobat who was playing in vaudeville as the "Human Diabolo."

But this sort of thing was merely temporizing, and we finally had to abandon it for subjects more substantial. By a slow and harrowing process we learned our specialties and made a few helpful friends in New York's Fleet Street. The fittest among the many manuscripts turned out by our copy mill survived to teach us that the surest way into print is to write about things closest to personal knowledge—simple and homely themes close to the grass roots. We turned again to middle western topics and the magazines opened their doors to us. We plugged away for six months and cleared a profit large enough to pay off all our debts and leave a little margin. Then we felt that we could look the west in the face again, and go home, if we liked, without a consciousness of utter defeat. For though we had not won, neither had we lost. Our books struck a balance.

When the Wanderlust began calling again in May, I sat many an evening in the window of our little room, gazing down into the backyard cat arena or up at the moon, and dragging away at a Missouri corncob pipe in a happy revery. Some of my manuscript titles of editorial paragraphs contributed to Collier's trace what happened next:

Which is to say that it was sweet to see the home folks again, to eat fried chicken and honest homemade strawberry shortcake and to slumber on a sleeping porch. Our forces had beat a strategic retreat, but the morale was not gone. Our determination was firm to assault New York again at the first favorable opportunity. Meanwhile, we had learned a thing or two.

CHAPTER VII

It was wise—and foolish. Wise, because it furnished the capital with which every free lance ought to be well supplied before he attempts to operate from a New York headquarters. Foolish, because it took all joy of life out of my manuscripts while the session of strenuousness lasted and left me wavering at the end almost on the verge of a physical breakdown. Nights, Sundays and holidays I plugged and slogged, nor did I relent even when vacation time came round. I sojourned to the Michigan pine woods, but took along my typewriter and kept it singing half of every day.

The new year found me in New York again, alone this time and installed in a comfortable two-room suite instead of an attic. A reassuring bank account bolstered up my courage while the work was getting under way.

This time I made a go of it; and such ups and downs as have followed in the ten years succeeding have not been much more dramatic than the mild adventures that befall the everyday business man. "Danger is past and now troubles begin." That phrase of Gambetta's aptly describes the situation of the average free lance when, after the first desperate struggles, he has managed to gain a reasonable assurance of independence.

Confidence comes with experience, and when you no longer have any grave fears about your ability to make a living at the trade, your mind turns from elementary problems to the less distracting task of finding out how to make your discovered degree of talent count for all that it may be worth. After trying your hand at a variety of subjects, you will find your forte. But take your time about it. Every adventure in composition teaches you something new about yourself, your art and the markets wherein you gain your daily bread. The way to learn to write—the only way—is by writing, and you never will know what you might do unless you dare and try.

Both as a matter of expediency and of getting as much fun out of the work as possible, it is well in the beginning to be versatile. Eventually, the free lance faces two choices: He may become a specialist and put in the remainder of his life writing solely about railroads, or about finance, or about the drama. Or he may, as Robert Louis Stevenson did, turn his hand as the mood moves him, to fiction, verse, fables, biography, criticism, drama or journalism—a little of everything. For my own part, I have always had something akin to pity for the fellow who is bound hand and foot to one interest. Let the fame and the greater profits of specialization go hang; "an able bodied writin' man" can best possess his soul if he does not harness Pegasus to plow forever in one cabbage patch.

Like the Ozark Mountain farmer who also ran a country store, a saw mill, a deer park, a sorghum mill, a threshing machine and preached in the meetin' house on Sunday mornings, I have turned my pen to any honest piece of writing that appealed strongly enough to my fancy—travel, popular science, humor, light verse, editorials, essays, interviews, personality sketches and captions for photographs. Genius takes a short cut to the highroad. But waste not your sympathy on the rest of us, for the byways have their own charm.

While one is finding his footing in the free lance fields, he had best not hold himself above doing any kind of journalistic work that turns an honest dollar. For he becomes richer not only by the dollar, but also by the acquaintances he makes and the valuable experience he gains in turning that dollar. There was a time—and not so long ago—when, if the writer called at the waiting room of the Leslie-Judge Company, the girl at the desk would try to guess whether he had a drawing to show to the Art Editor, a frivolous manuscript for Judge or a serious article for Leslie's. At the Doubleday, Page plant the uncertainty was about whether the caller sought the editor of World's Work, Country Life, the Red Cross Magazine or Short Stories—he had, at various times, contributed to all of these publications.

Smile, if you like, but there is no better way to discover what you can do best than to try your 'prentice hand at a great variety of topics and mediums. The post-graduate course of every school of journalism is a roped arena where you wrestle, catch as catch can, for the honors bestowed by experience.

This experience, painfully acquired, should be backed up by an elementary knowledge of salesmanship. Super-sensitive souls there are who shudder at the mere mention of the word; and why this is so is not difficult to understand—their minds are poisoned with sentimental misapprehensions. Get rid of those misapprehensions just as swiftly as you can. If you have something to sell, be it hardware or a manuscript, common sense should dictate that you learn a little about how to sell it.

Expert interviewers prepare themselves both for their topic and their man before they go into a confab—a practice which should be followed to some extent by every writer who sets out to interview an editor about a manuscript. What you have to offer should be prepared to suit the needs of the editor to whom the contribution is addressed. So you should study your magazine just as carefully as you do the subject about which you are writing. In your interview with the editor or in the letter which takes the place of an interview, state briefly whatever should be useful to his enlightenment. That is all. There you have the first principles of what is meant by "an elementary knowledge of salesmanship." If you don't know what you are talking about or anything about the possible needs of the man to whom you are talking, how can you expect to interest him in any commodity under heaven? Say nothing that you don't believe—he won't believe it, either. Never fool him. If you do, you may sell him once, but never again.

There is no dark art to salesmanship; it is simply a matter of delivering the goods in a manner dictated by courtesy, sincerity, common sense and common honesty. Be yourself without pose, and don't forget that the editor—whether you believe it or not—is just as "human" as you are, and quick to respond to the best that there is in you. Shake off the delusion that you need to play the "good fellow" to him, like the old-fashioned type of drummer in a small town. Simply and sincerely and straight from the shoulder—also briefly, because he is a busy man—state your case, leave your literary goods for inspection and go your way.

He will judge you and your manuscript on merits; if he does not, he will not long continue to be an editor. The two greatest curses of his existence (I speak from experience) are the poses and the incurable loquaciousness of some of his callers and correspondents. Don't attempt to spring any correspondence school salesmanship on a real editor. Learn what real salesmanship is, from a real salesman—who may sell bacon, or steel or motor cars instead of manuscripts. He lives down your street, perhaps. Have a talk with him. He will tell you of the profits in a square deal and in knowing your business, and what can be accomplished by a little faith.

If you are temperamentally unfit to sell your own writings, get a competent literary agent to do the job for you. But don't too quickly despair, for after all, there is nothing particularly subtle about salesmanship. Sincerity, however crude, usually carries conviction. If you know a "story" when you see it, if you write it right and type it in professional form and give it the needed illustrations; then if you offer it in a common sense manner to a suitable market, you can be trusted to handle your own products as successfully as the best salesman in America—as successfully as Charles Schwab himself. For, above all, remember this: the editor is just as eager to buy good stuff as you are to sell it. Nothing is simpler than to make a sale in the literary market if you have what the editor wants.

CHAPTER VIII

A parallel case is that of the editor of a magazine of general circulation. He manages a forum so much larger than the famous stadium at San Diego that the imagination is put to a strain to picture it. On the generally accepted assumption that each sold copy of a popular magazine eventually reaches an average of five persons, there is one forum in the magazine world of America which every week assembles a throng of ten million or more assorted citizens, gathered from everywhere, coast to coast, men and women, young and old, every walk of life. A dozen other periodicals address at least half that number, and the humblest of the widely known magazines reaches a quarter of a million—five times as many persons as jammed their way into the San Diego stadium one time to hear a speech by the President of the United States.

Put yourself into the shoes of the manager of one of these forums, and try to understand some of his difficulties.

A dozen times a day the editor of a popular periodical is besieged by contributors to make some sort of answer to the question: "What kind of material are you seeking?"

What else can he reply, in a general way, but "something of wide appeal, to interest our wide circle of readers"?

There are times, of course, when he can speak specifically and with assurance, if all he happens to require at the moment to give proper balance to his table of contents is one or two manuscripts of a definite type. Then he may be able to say, off-hand: "An adventure novelette of twenty thousand words," or, "An article on the high cost of shoe leather, three thousand five hundred words." But this is a happy situation which is not at all typical. Ordinarily, he stands in constant need of half a dozen varieties of material; but to describe them all in detail to every caller would take more time than he could possibly afford to spare.

He cannot stop to explain to every applicant that among what Robert Louis Stevenson described as "the real deficiencies of social intercourse" is the fact that while two's company three's a crowd; that with each addition to this crowd the topics of conversation must broaden in appeal, seeking the greatest common divisor of interests; and that a corollary is the unfortunate fact that the larger the crowd the fewer and more elemental must become the subjects that are possible for discussion.

Every editor knows that a lack of judgment in selecting themes of broad enough appeal to interest a nation-wide public is one of the novice scribbler's most common failings. It is due chiefly to a lack of imagination on the part of the would-be contributor, who appears to be incapable of projecting himself into the editorial viewpoint. I can testify from my own experience that a single day's work as an editor, wading through a bushel of mail, taught me more about how to make a selection of subjects than six months of shooting in the dark as a free lance.

Every editor knows that nine out of ten of the unsolicited manuscripts which he will find piled upon his desk for reading to-morrow morning will prove to be wholly unfitted for the uses of his magazine. The man outside the sanctum fails utterly to understand the editor's dilemma.

This is the situation which has produced the "staff writer," and has brought down upon the editor the protests of his more discriminating readers against "standardized fiction" and against sundry uninspired articles produced to measure by faithful hacks. The editor defends his course in printing this sort of material upon the ground that a magazine made up wholly of unsolicited material would be a horrid mélange, far more distressing to the consumer than the present type of popular periodical which is so largely made to order. All editors read unsolicited material hopefully and eagerly. Many an editor gives this duty half of his working day and part of his evenings and Sundays. All of the reward of a discoverer is his if he can herald a new worth-while writer. Moreover, the interest of economy bids him be faithful in the task, for the novice does not demand the high rates of the renowned professional.

Yet even on the largest of our magazines, where the stream of contributions is enormous, the most diligent search is not fruitful of much material that is worth while. The big magazines have to order most of their material in advance, like so much sausage or silk; and much of the contents is planned for many months ahead. Scarcely any dependence can be placed upon the luck of what drifts into the office in the mails.

Inevitably, the magazines must have large recourse to "big names," not because of inbred snobbishness on the part of the editors but because the "big name," besides carrying advertising value, is more likely than a little one to stand for material with a "big" theme, handled by a writer of experience. A surer touch in selecting and handling topics of nation-wide appeal is what counts most heavily in favor of the writer with an established reputation. Often enough it is not his vastly superior craftsmanship. I know of several famous magazine writers who never in their lives have got their material into print in the form in which it originally was submitted. They are what the trade calls "go-getters." They deliver the "story" as best they can, and a more skillful stylist completes the job.

Success in marketing non-fiction to popular magazines appears to hinge largely upon the quality of the thinking the writer does before he sets pen to paper. A classic anecdote of New York's Fleet Street may illustrate the point:

The publisher of a national weekly was hiring a newspaper man as editor.

"Is this a writing job?" the applicant inquired.

"No!" growled the publisher, "a thinkin' job!"

The writer of non-fiction is in the same boat with the editor who buys his articles; he calls himself a writer, but primarily he is up against a thinking job. The actual writing of his material is secondary to good judgment in selecting what is known as a "compelling" theme. If he can produce a "real story" and get it onto paper in some sort of intelligent fashion, what remains to be done in the way of craftsmanship can be handled inside the magazine office by a "re-write man." Make sure, first of all, that what you have to say is something that ought to interest the large audience to which you address it.

Nobody with a grain of common sense would attempt to discuss "The Style of Walter Pater" to fifty thousand restless and croupy auditors in the vast San Diego stadium, but the average free lance sees nothing of equal absurdity about attempting to cram an essay on Pater down the throats of a miscellaneous crowd in a stadium which is from a hundred to two hundred times as large—the forum into which throng the thousands who read one of our large popular magazines.

Much as we may regret to acknowledge it, there is no way to get around the fact that the larger and more general the circulation of a periodical, the more universal must be the appeal of the material printed and the fewer the mainstays of interest, until in a magazine with a circulation of more than a million copies the chief classifications of non-fiction material required can easily be counted upon the fingers. The editor of such a publication necessarily is limited to handling rather elemental topics; so it is not to be wondered at when we hear that the largest publication of them all makes its mainstays two such universally interesting and world-old themes as business and "the way of a man with a maid."

Examine any popular magazine which has a circulation of general readers, speaking to a forum of anywhere from a quarter of a million to ten million assorted readers, and you will find that the non-fiction material which it is most eager to buy may easily be classified into half a dozen types of articles, all concerned with the ruling passions of the average American, as:

Examine a few of these types of contributions to arrive at a clearer understanding of why they are so justly popular. Your average American is, first of all, keenly interested in his job. It is much more to him, usually, than just a way to make a living. It fascinates him like a game, and you often hear him describe it as a "game." What, then, is more natural than that he should eagerly read articles of practical helpfulness concerned with his activities in office or store, factory or farm? The largest of our popular magazines never appear without something which touches this sort of interest, stimulating the man of affairs to strive after further successes and advancement in his chosen occupation. Many specialized business and trade publications and more than a score of skillfully edited farm magazines thrive upon developing this class of themes to the exclusion of all other material.

A second vital interest is the hearthstone—suggesting such undying topics as love and the landlord, marriage and divorce, the training of children, the household budget, the high cost of living, those compelling themes which have built up the women's magazines into institutions of giant stature and tremendous power.

Politics is another field of almost universal interest, broadening every day now that women have the ballot and now that our vision is no longer limited to the homeland horizon, but finds itself searching eagerly onward into international relationships. Once we were content, as a national body politic, to discuss candidates for the Presidency or what our stand should be upon currency and the tariff. To-day we are also gravely concerned to know what is to become of Russia and Germany, or how the political and social unrest in France and Italy and England will affect the peace of the world.

As a fourth point, your average American these days is quick to respond to anything worth while concerning his recreations. As a consequence, much space is reserved in the big magazines for articles on society, travel, the theater and the movies, motor cars, country life, outings, and such popular sports as golf, baseball and tennis. Every one of these topics, besides being dealt with in the general magazines, has its own special mouthpiece.

Health always has been a subject constantly on the tip of everybody's tongue, but never before has so much been printed about the more important phases of it than appears in the popular magazines of to-day. Knowledge of the common sense rules of diet, exercise, ventilation and the like are becoming public possession—thanks largely to the magazines and the newspaper syndicates.

A sixth mainstay of the magazines is in the presentation of articles dealing with happenings of national interest or personalities prominent in the day's news. This task grows increasingly difficult as the newspapers tighten their grip upon the public's attention and as the news pictorials of the moving picture screen gain in popular esteem by improved technical skill and more intelligent editing. The magazine of large circulation must go to press so long before the newspapers and the films that much perishable news must be thrown out, even though it is of nation wide appeal. The magazines are coming to find their greatest usefulness in the news field in gathering up the loose ends of scattered paragraphs which the daily newspapers have no time to weave together into a pattern. In the magazine the patchwork of daily journalism is assembled into more meaningful designs. Local news is sifted of its provincialism to become matter of national concern. Topics which you rapidly skimmed in the afternoon newspaper three or four weeks ago are re-discussed in the weekly or monthly magazines in a way which often makes you feel that here, for the first time, they become of personal import.

The purpose of the suggestions sketched above is not to supply canned topics to ready writers, but to set ambitious scribblers to the task of doing some thinking for themselves. Instead of shiftlessly tossing the whole burden of responsibility for choice of topics to a hard driven editor, and whining, "Please give me an idea!", search around on your own initiative for a theme worth presenting to the attention of a throng of widely assorted listeners—for a "story" that ought to appeal to America's multitudes. If your topic is big enough for a big audience, your chances are prime to get a hearing for it. Dig up the necessary facts, the "human interest" and the national significance of the case. Then, rest assured, that "story" is what the editor wants.

CHAPTER IX

Verse is largely its own reward.

Fiction, when it turns out successfully, fetches a double reward. It pays both in personal satisfaction, as a form of creative art, and also as a marketable commodity, which always is in great demand, and which can be cashed in to meet house rent and grocers' bills.

It is not within the scope of this little book—nor of its author's abilities—to attempt a discussion of fiction methods. Too many other writers, better qualified to speak, have dealt with fiction in scores of worth while volumes. Too many successful story tellers have related their experiences and treated, with authority, of the short story, the novelette and the long novel.

The purpose here can be only to urge that an attempt to write fiction is a logical step ahead for any scribbler who has won a moderate degree of success in selling newspaper copy and magazine articles. The eye that can perceive the dramatic and put it into non-fiction, the heart that knows human interest, the understanding that can tell a symbol, the artist-instinct that can catch characteristic colors, scents and sounds, all should aid a skilled writer of articles to turn his energies, with some hope of achievement, toward producing fiction. The hand that can fashion a really vivid article holds out promise of being able to compose a convincing short story, if grit and ambition help push the pen.

The temptation to dogmatize here is strong, for the witness can testify that he has seen enviable success crown many a fiction writer who, apparently, possessed small native talent for story telling, and who won his laurels through sheer pluck and persistence. One of these pluggers declares he blesses the rejection slip because it "eliminates so many quitters."

But of course it would be absurd to believe that any one with unlimited courage and elbow grease could win at fiction, lacking all aptitude for it. Just as there are photographers who can snap pictures for twenty years without producing a single happy composition (except by accident), and reporters who never develop a "nose for news," there are story writers who can master all the mechanics of tale-telling, through sheer drudgery, and yet continually fail to catch fiction's spark of life. They fail, and shall always fail. Yet it is better to have strived and failed, than never to have tried at all.

Why? For the good of their artists' consciences, in the first place. And, in the second, because no writer can earnestly struggle with words without learning something about them to his trade advantage.

A confession may be in order: your deponent testifies freely, knowing that anything he may say may be used against him, that for years he has been a tireless producer of unsuccessful fiction, yet he views his series of rebuffs in this medium calmly and even somewhat humorously. For, by trade, he is a writer of articles, and he earnestly believes that the mental exercise of attempting to produce fiction acts as a healthy influence upon a non-fictionist's style. It stimulates the torpid imagination. It quickens the eye for the vivid touches, the picturesque and the dramatic. It is a groping toward art.

"Art," writes one who knows, "is a mistress so beautiful, so high, so noble, that no phrases can fitly characterize her, no service can be wholly worthy of her."

Perhaps such art as goes into the average magazine article is not likely to merit much high-sounding praise. In our familiar shop talk we are prone to laugh about it. But even the most commercial-minded of our brotherhood cherishes deep in his heart a craftsman's pride in work well done. So your deponent testifies in his own defense that his copybook exercises in fiction, half of which end in the wastebasket, seem well worth the pains that they cost, so long as they help keep alive in his non-fiction bread-winners a hankering after (if not a flavor of) literary art.

And now must he apologize further for using a word upon which writers in these confessedly commercial days appear to have set a taboo? Then a passage from "The Study of Literature" (Arlo Bates) may serve for the apology:

"Life is full of disappointment, and pain, and bitterness, and that sense of futility in which all of these evils are summed up; and yet were there no other alleviation, he who knows and truly loves literature finds here a sufficient reason to be glad he lives. Science may show a man how to live; art makes living worth his while. Existence to-day without literature would be a failure and a despair; and if we cannot satisfactorily define our art, we at least are aware how it enriches and ennobles the life of every human being who comes within the sphere of its gracious influence."

So, we repeat: for the good of the artist's self-respect as well as for his craftsmanship it is worth while to attempt fiction. If only as a tonic! If only to jog himself out of a rut of habit!

If he succeeds with fiction he has bright hopes of winning much larger financial rewards for his labor than he is likely to gain by writing articles. Non-fiction rarely brings in more than one return upon the investment, but a good short story or novel may fetch several. First, his yarn sells to the magazine. Then it may be re-sold ("second serial rights") to the newspapers. Finally, it may fetch the largest cash return of all by being marketed to a motion picture corporation as the plot for a scenario. In some instances even this does not exhaust all the possibilities, for if British magazines and bookmen are interested in the tale, the "English rights" of publication may add another payment to the total.

Not all of the features of this picture, however, should be painted in rose-colors. A disconcerting and persistent rumor has it that what once was a by-product of fiction—the sale of "movie rights"—is now threatening to run off with the entire production. The side show, we are warned, is shaping the policy of the main tent. Which is to say that novelists and magazine fiction writers are accused of becoming more concerned about how their stories will film than about how the manuscripts will grade as pieces of literature. To get a yarn into print is still worth while because this enhances its value in the eyes of the producers of motion pictures. But the author's real goal is "no longer good writing, so much as remunerative picture possibilities."

We set this down not because we believe it true of the majority of our brother craftsmen, but because evidences of such influences are undeniably present, and do not appear to have done the art of writing fiction any appreciable benefit. If your trade is non-fiction, and you turn to fiction to improve your art rather than your bank account, good counsel will admonish you not to aim at any other mark than the best that you can produce in the way of literary art. For there lies the deepest satisfaction a writer can ever secure—"art makes living worth his while."

CHAPTER X

From the moment that he is graduated out of the cub reporter class, every writer who is worth his salt is forever at the crossroads, perplexed about the next turn. Nowhere is smugness of mind more deadly than in journalism. To progress you must forever scale more difficult ascents. The bruises of rebuffs and the wounds of injured vanity will heal quickly enough if you keep busy. Defeated or undefeated, the writer who always is trying to master something more difficult than the work he used to do preserves his self-respect and the respect of his worth-while neighbors. The fellow with the canker at his heart is not the battler but the envious shirker who is too "proud" to risk a fall.

Swallow what you suppose to be your pride; it really is a false sense of dignity. Make a simple beginning in the university of experience by learning with experiments what constitutes a "story" and by drudging with pencil and typewriter to put that "story" into professional manuscript form. Get the right pictures for it; then ship it off to market. If the first choice of markets rejects you, try the second, the third, fourth, fifth and sixth—even unto the ninety-and-ninth.

Few beginners have even a dim notion of the great variety of markets that exist for free lance contributions. There are countless trade publications, newspaper syndicates, class journals, "house organs," and magazines devoted to highly specialized interests. Nearly all of these publications are eager to buy matter of interest to their particular circles of readers. Every business, every profession, every trade, every hobby has its mouthpiece.

Remember this when you are a beginner and the "big magazines" of general circulation are rejecting your manuscripts with a clock-like regularity which drives you almost to despair. Try your 'prentice hand on contributions to the smaller publications. That is the surest way to "learn while you earn" in free lancing. These humble markets need not cause you to sneer—particularly if you happen to be a humble beginner.

Every laboratory experiment in manuscript writing and marketing, though it be only a description of a shop window for a dry goods trade paper, or an interview with a boss plumber for the Gas Fitter's Gazette, will furnish you with experience in your own trade, and set you ahead a step on the long road that leads to the most desirable acceptances. The one thing to watch zealously is your own development, to make sure that you do not too soon content yourself with achievements beneath your capabilities. Start with the little magazines, but keep attempting to attain the more difficult goals.

Meanwhile, you need not apologize to any one for the nature of your work, so long as it is honest reporting and all as well written as you know how to make it. Stevenson, one of the most conscientious of literary artists, declared in a "Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art," that "the first duty in this world is for a man to pay his way," and this is one of your confessed purposes while you are serving this kind of journalistic apprenticeship.

Until he arrives, the novice must, indeed, unless he be exceptionally gifted, "pay assiduous court to the bourgeois who carries the purse. And if in the course of these capitulations he shall falsify his talent, it can never have been a strong one, and he will have preserved a better thing than talent—character. Or if he be of a mind so independent that he cannot stoop to this necessity, one course is yet open: he can desist from art, and follow some more manly way of life."

In short, so long as you keep moving toward something worth attaining, there is nothing to worry about but how to keep from relapsing into smugness or idleness. The besetting temptation of the free lance is to pamper himself. He is his own boss, can sleep as late as he likes, go where he pleases and quit work when the temptation seizes him. As a result, he usually babies himself and turns out much less work than he might safely attempt without in the least endangering his health.

When he finds out later how assiduously some of the best known of our authors keep at their desks he becomes a little ashamed of himself. Though they may not work, on the average, as long hours as the business man, they toil far harder, and usually with few of the interruptions and relaxations from the job that the business man is allowed. Four or five hours of intense application a day stands for a great deal more expenditure of energy and thought than eight or nine hours broken up with periods when one's feet are literally or metaphorically on the desk and genial conversation is flowing. Most of the men and women who make a living out of free lancing earn every blessed cent of it; and the amount upon which they pay an income tax is, as a rule, proportioned rather justly to the amount of concentrated labor that they pour into the hopper of the copy mill.

You who happen to have seen a successful free lance knock off work in mid-afternoon to play tennis, or to skim away toward the country club in his new motor car are too likely to exclaim that "his is the existence!" Forgetting, of course, the lonesome hours of more or less baffling effort that he spent that day upon a manuscript before he locked up his workshop. And the years he spent in drudgery, the bales of rejection slips he collected, the times that he had to pawn his watch and stick pin to buy a dinner or to pay the rent of a hall bedroom.

Young Gentlemen Who Propose to Embrace the Career of Art might be shocked to learn—though it would be all for their own good—that a great many writers who are generally regarded with envy for their "luck" take the pains to follow the market notes in the Authors' League Bulletin, the Bookman and the Editor Magazine with all the care of a contractor studying the latest news of building operations. Not only do these writers read the trade papers of their calling; they also, with considerable care, study the magazines to which they sell—or hope to sell—manuscripts. They do not nearly so often as the novice make the faux pas of offering an editor exactly the same sort of material that he already has printed in a recent or a current issue. They follow the new books. They keep card indexes on their unmarketed manuscripts, and toil on as much irksome office routine as a stock broker. A surprisingly large number of the "arrived" do not even hold themselves above keeping note books, or producing, chiefly for the beneficial exercise of it, essays, journals, descriptions, verse and fiction not meant to be offered for sale—solely copybook exercises, produced for self-improvement or to gratify an impulse toward non-commercial art.

For instances I can name a fiction writer who turns often to the essay form, but never publishes this type of writing, and an editorial writer who, for the "fun of it" and the good he believes it does his style, composes every year a great deal of verse. A group of six Michigan writers publish their own magazine, a typewritten publication with a circulation of six.

These men are not content with their present achievements. They regard themselves always as students who must everlastingly keep trying more difficult tasks to insure a steady progress toward an unattainable goal. "Most of the studyin'," Abe Martin once observed, "is done after a feller gets out of college," and these gray-haired exemplars are—as all of us ought to be—still learning to write, and forever at the crossroads.

FINIS