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

FOREVER AT THE CROSSROADS

Keep studying. Keep experimenting. Set yourself harder tasks. Never be content with what you have accomplished. Match yourself against the men who can outplay you, not against the men you already excel. Keep attempting something that baffles you. Discontent is your friend more often than your enemy.

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.

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FINIS

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