How to write

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 freelance writer faces two choices: He may become a specialist and put in the remainder of his life writing solely about technology, 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.

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. 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.

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.

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 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.

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