How to write

Every laboratory experiment in manuscript writing and marketing 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. 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 freelancer 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 freelancing earn every blessed cent of it.

Those 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 study the market; not do they 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.

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.

Source: If You Don’t Write Fiction, by Charles Phelps Cushing

Something in the misty sunshine this morning made you restless. Vague longings, born of springtime mystery, stirred your blood, quickened the imagination. Roads that never were, and mayhap never will be, beckoned you with their sinuous curves and graceful shade trees toward velvety fields beyond the city’s skyline. The sweet fragrance of blossoming orchards tingled in your nostrils and thrilled you with wanderlust. Haunting melodies quavered in your ears. Adventure never seemed so imminent. A golden day. What will you do with it?

You could write to-day, but if you did, you know you could support no patience for prosy facts, statistics and photographs. Whatever urge you feel appears to be toward verse or fiction. Well, why not? Try it! You never know what you might do in writing until you dare.

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.

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, withsome 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.

“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.”

For the good of the artist’s self-respect as well as for his craftsmanship it is worth while to attempt fiction. If only to jog himself out of a rut of habit!

Source: If You Don’t Write Fiction, by Charles Phelps Cushing

The editor of a magazine of general circulation. 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.

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. 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 freelancer.

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.

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.

Source:  If You Don’t Write Fiction, by Charles Phelps Cushing

Journalists so clumsy that, in the graphic phrase of a short grass poet, “they seem to write with their feet,” sell manuscripts with clock-like regularity to first-class markets. The magazines, like the newspapers, employ “re-write men” to take crude manuscripts to pieces, rebuild them and give them a presentable polish. The matter of prime importance to most of our American editors is an article’s content in the way of vital facts and “human interest.” Upon the matter of style the typical editor appears to take Matthew Arnold’s words quite literally:

“People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.”

No embittered collector of rejection slips will believe me when I declare that the demand for worth-while articles always exceeds the supply in American magazine markets. None the less it is true, as every editor knows to his constant sorrow. The appetite of our hundreds of periodicals for real “stories” never has been satisfied. The menu has to be filled out with a regrettable proportion of bran.

A good style will enhance the manuscript’s value, but want of verbal skill rarely will prove a fatal blemish. Not so long as there are “re-write men” around the shop!

It is not a lack of artistry that administers the most numerous defeats to the novice freelancer. It is a lack of market judgment. When he has completed his manuscript he sits down and hopefully mails it out to the first market that strikes his fancy. He shoots into the dark, trusting to luck.

A huge army of disappointed scribblers have followed that haphazard plan of battle. They paper their walls with rejection slips, fill up a trunk with returned manuscripts and pose before their sympathetic friends as martyrs.

Many of these defeated writers have nose-sense for what is of national interest. They write well, and they take the necessary pains to make their manuscripts presentable in appearance. If they only knew enough to offer their contributions to suitable markets, they soon would be scoring successes.

 When you have completed a manuscript, forget the inspiration that went into its writing and give cold and sober second thought to this matter of marketing. Too many discouraged novices believe that the bromide of the rejection slip–”rejection implies no lack of merit”–is simply a piece of sarcasm. It is nothing of the sort. In tens of thousands of instances it is a solemn fact. Don’t sulk and berate the editors who return your manuscript, but carefully read the contribution again, trying to forget for the moment that it is one of your own precious “brain children.” Cold-bloodedly size it up as something to sell. Then you may perceive that you have been trying to market a crate of eggs at a shoe store. Eggs are none the less precious on that account. Try again-applying this time to a grocer. If he doesn’t buy, it will be because he already has all the eggs on hand that he needs. In that event, look up the addresses of some more grocers.

The same common sense principles apply in selling manuscripts to the magazines and newspapers as in marketing any other kind of produce. The top prices go to the fellow who delivers his goods fresh and in good order to buyers who stand in need of his particular sort of staple. Composing a manuscript may be art, but selling it is business.

Naturally, it requires practice to become expert in picking topics of wide enough appeal to interest the public which reads magazines of national circulation. Every beginner, except an inspired genius, is likely to be oppressed with a sense of hopelessness when he is making his first desperate attempts to “break in.” The writer can testify feelingly on this point from his own experience.

 Source:  If You Don’t Write Fiction, by Charles Phelps Cushing

Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements. - Samuel Johnson

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader. - Joseph Joubert

This is something that I cannot get over — that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character. - Karl Kraus

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. - Karl Kraus

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze. - D. H. Lawrence

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word. - Georg C. Lichtenberg

I think it’s bad to talk about one’s present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension. - Norman Mailer

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous. - W. Somerset Maugham

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it… I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent. - André Maurois

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk. - Henry Louis Mencken

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. - Henry Miller

It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer. - W. Somerset Maugham

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are. - W. Somerset Maugham