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 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 
 
THE ART OF WRITING 
 
The 
 
 Art of Writing 
 
 George Randolph Chester 
 
 * 
 
 The Publishers Syndicate 
 
 Cincinnati, Ohio 
 
 1910 
 
^ 
 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY 
 THE PUBLISHERS SYNDICATE. 
 
 £CU316792 
 
Foreword 
 
 I find, in going over the following pages, 
 that I have taken a most authoritative 
 position; that, in some cases, I have writ- 
 ten with apparent conceit and even apparent 
 arrogance. I shall not change the passages 
 which might seem to justify such conclu- 
 sions. I have tried honestly and earnestly 
 to set down the results of my experience in 
 such a manner that they should be of ac- 
 tual help to those who wish to make a suc- 
 cess of short story writing, and so have 
 written frequently in the first person, and 
 with vigorous decisiveness, wherever I 
 wished to impress very forcibly certain 
 points. It would be possible to remove my 
 personality from these pages, but in doing 
 so they' might be made less forceful; ac- 
 cordingly they shall remain as they are, 
 without apology and without appeal. 
 
 GEORGE RANDOLPH CHESTER. 
 
Contents 
 
 Page 
 
 I. The Sordid Side, - n 
 
 II. Apprenticeship, - 16 
 
 III. Mental Equipment, .... 24. 
 
 IV. Creativeness, ----- 26 
 V. Imagination, 32 
 
 VI. Observation, ----- 36 
 
 VII. Democracy, ------ 42 
 
 VIII. Sympathy, 46 
 
 IX. Humor, ------ 54 
 
 X. Industry, 57 
 
 XI. The Business Story, - - - - 60 
 
 XII. The Political Story, 64 
 
 XIII. The Detective Story, - 67 
 
 XIV. . Stories for Children, 70 
 
 XV. Stories About Children, - 77 
 
 XVI. Stories of Adventure, 79 
 
 7 
 
Page 
 
 XVII. The Love Story, - 81 
 
 XVIII. The Historical Story, - - 88 
 
 XIX. Dialect Stories, - - - - 90 
 
 XX. Stories Not to Be Written, - 92 
 
 XXI. Construction, ----- 94 
 
 XXII. The Beginning, - - - - 98 
 
 XXIII. Development, - 112 
 
 XXIV. The Ending, - - - - 119 
 XXV. Description, 120 
 
 XXVI. General Observations, - - 122 
 
 XXVII. Condensation, - - - - 125 
 
 XXVIII. Length of Stories, 128 
 
 XXIX. Editing, 130 
 
 XXX. Preparing a Manuscript, - - 132 
 
 XXXI. Marketing, 138 
 
THE ART OF WRITING 
 
c 
 
 The Sordid Side 
 
 "f*\ ommercialism" is here considered first, 
 because it is the most flaunted of 
 all bugaboos in art. We have an 
 inherited notion that an "artist" must, of 
 necessity, starve and go in rags, be a poor 
 business man, and have a soul above money. 
 All nonsense! That silly fiction is a relic 
 of past barbarian ages, when no profes- 
 sion but that of warfare really paid, either 
 in honor or riches. To-day the successful 
 artists, in every line, are abundantly re- 
 warded, and only the unsuccessful ones, 
 those least gifted with genius, must strug- 
 gle with the wolf of poverty and whine 
 that this is a soulless age. The period has 
 happily passed when the literary worker's 
 fame and profits were collected only by his 
 heirs; instead, the writers of to-day are, as 
 a class, rather keen business people, not 
 necessarily dissipated or improvident, and 
 
 ii 
 
prosperous enough to be self-respecting. 
 Because you hope to be well paid for the 
 creations of your fancy, do not, for one 
 moment, fear that your finer sensibilities 
 are to be destroyed. Instead, equip your- 
 self for an artistic career, whether you in- 
 tend to seek your expression through brush 
 or chisel or pen, with the same care you 
 would prepare for a commercial life, de- 
 mand your just pay as boldly and receive it 
 with as much self-esteem. Merely be sen- 
 sible ! 
 
 I speak of this so emphatically because I 
 wish to combat, in the very outset, certain 
 entirely false ideals that are quite likely to 
 find lodgment in the minds of beginners. I 
 doubt if there has ever been a time when the 
 cry of commercialism was not raised anent 
 matters of art, or when, on the other hand, 
 artists did not prefer a hot porterhouse steak 
 to a cold marble monument. It has come 
 to be pretty generally acknowledged in these 
 modern days that we shall be an extremely 
 long time dead, and the full realization of 
 this deep truth has the tendency to make 
 one wish to bedeck this all-too-brief life of 
 
 12 
 

 ours with as many gay garlands as possible. 
 In consequence the writers of this Gatling- 
 gun age look upon their thoughts as truly 
 golden, and pen them not so much for pos- 
 terity as prosperity; nor are the thoughts 
 any the less brilliant for their metallic sheen. 
 It is all the matter of incentive, in which Art 
 with a big "A" must say "brother" to As- 
 sets with a big "A;" and both are improved 
 by the association. An empty stomach is 
 not absolutely necessary to the development 
 of a large soul. 
 
 Remember, too, that pose and perform- 
 ance do not go well together. The gentle- 
 men of long hair and Byronic cravats who 
 call themselves Bohemians, and who spend 
 their guzzling time with kindred spirits in 
 the discussion of literature and art and mu- 
 sic, never write real stories nor paint real 
 pictures nor compose real sonatas. Those 
 master students of the human soul whose 
 names we revere worked as industriously as 
 shinglers, and did not know that they were 
 producing literature when they wrote it. 
 Moreover, throughout all the time these 
 then commercial-minded men toiled they 
 
 i3 
 
doubtless had a thought for the diminishing 
 flour barrel, and how the immortal work 
 they were then producing might help to re- 
 plenish it. In a word, art, as art, is never 
 self-conscious. 
 
 What does all this mean? That we shall 
 have no more sincere dramatic or literary 
 or musical or graphic or plastic art? By 
 no means. These things can not die any 
 jmore than the innate longing of the hu- 
 man soul for higher and better and nobler 
 things can die. Art will rise above all 
 sordid circumstances in every age. It will 
 find expression not alone in spite of, but 
 partly because of the conditions that ham- 
 per it. We need not distress ourselves 
 about art. It will take care of itself. We 
 can do little for it. It is as irrepressible as 
 the storms of heaven, and in night which 
 seems the blackest, flashes of its divine ra- 
 diance will gleam so vividly upon our skies 
 that they will dazzle the world. In the 
 meantime, between those glimpses of divine 
 glory, reminding us with startling vividness 
 that within us all there dwells a portion of 
 the Godhead, we will all of us continue to 
 
 14 
 
face the elemental realities of life, food and 
 clothing and shelter and social position — 
 and these demand money. So keep your hair 
 short if you are men, and long if you are 
 women; talk "literature" but little, and work 
 at it much; earn money, and spend it. 
 
 IS 
 
Apprenticeship 
 
 If you plan to earn a living by authorship, 
 you must first very thoroughly prepare 
 yourself to earn a living at something 
 else; for the business of writing, like any 
 other, requires a long and arduous appren- 
 ticeship, and while one learns one must live. 
 So prepare to work, and your temporary oc- 
 cupation, or successive occupations, will be 
 of great value in ripening that knowledge of 
 the world without which no one may hope 
 to successfully enter this field. Considered 
 merely as a school of experience, the calling 
 best fitted as a preparation for this partic- 
 ular career should require one habitually to 
 express thoughts and describe occurrences 
 in writing; it should habitually bring one 
 into contact with all phases of life ; it should 
 be of broad and varied interests and should 
 provide a steady income. The only occupa- 
 tion which seems to fit all these require- 
 
 16 
 
ments is the newspaper profession, and its 
 value for this end is proved by the fact that 
 from the ranks of the newspaper writers 
 come more successful magazine contributors 
 than from any other class of workers. 
 
 The advantages of a newspaper training 
 are many and obvious. In the first place 
 the reporter writes much and rapidly, and 
 he sees in actual print what he has written, 
 an invaluable privilege, learning from day 
 to day to correct his own style by experi- 
 ence and comparison. He learns lucidness 
 and directness, for newspaper writing per- 
 mits of no unnecessary words. He acquires 
 the habit of reliability. When he is sent 
 upon an assignment he knows that he must 
 come back with the item and that he must 
 write it without a moments delay. He 
 loses the tendency to absurd posing, for his 
 associates have penetrated to the kernel of 
 things, have made it their business to de- 
 tect shams at a glance, and have the gift of 
 ridicule developed to an art. Above all, he 
 comes in contact with every sort of man and 
 woman, with every side of life, with all hu- 
 man pathos and comedy and tragedy. The 
 
 17 
 
whole world, all its passions and its emo- 
 tions, its weaknesses and its strength, its 
 degradation and its nobility passes before 
 him in review as a part of his daily routine, 
 and if he has the proper mental equipment 
 his work supplies him not only with mate- 
 rial that he will use for years, but with a 
 trained faculty for appreciating that mate- 
 rial when he finds it. 
 
 To the newspaper life there are, it is true, 
 a few drawbacks. The haste with which 
 articles are written is likely to encourage 
 slip-shod English; one must work hard and 
 at all hours; the associations outside the of- 
 fice are not always of the best, and one must 
 be of sturdy moral fiber to resist the forma- 
 tion of habits which tend to make success 
 impossible; there is, last of all, the tempta- 
 tion to "drift" and to remain a reporter, 
 which, while an interesting occupation, has 
 but very little future in it. Still, weaklings 
 are not likely to attain to much eminence 
 anywhere, and every walk of life is beset 
 with temptations to be fought, and over- 
 come, temptations by the resistance of which 
 to gain strength. 
 
 18 
 
Some one, with wisdom and justice, has 
 said that the newspaper calling is the finest 
 in the world to get into to get out of, mean- 
 ing thereby that it is an unsurpassed step- 
 ping-stone to many other better-paying lines 
 of endeavor; and, as a matter of fact, almost 
 any profession can show among the ranks 
 of its most successful men a large propor- 
 tion of ex-reporters. For the purpose of 
 the would-be story writer, however, a met- 
 ropolitan daily is not to be recommended, 
 especially in the beginning, for in the large 
 cities the work is too minutely specialized. 
 The so-called "country" press— meaning by 
 that the newspapers in cities of two hun- 
 dred thousand or less — is much better. 
 There even the "cub" reporter is given a 
 varying range of assignments which would 
 never fall to his lot in the very large cities. 
 He is likely to have his turn at the police 
 route, at the courts, the city hall, the busi- 
 ness district; he will have a chance to re- 
 port a political meeting, a society function, 
 a business consolidation, a divorce case, a 
 slum settlement, a collection of pictures, a 
 millinery opening, a "show." The result of 
 
 19 
 
his gleanings and the irreverent manner in 
 which he "writes up" these various affairs 
 are likely to be somewhat unpalatable to so- 
 ciety, business, art, and the drama, but it is 
 all excellent training for the "cub," and con- 
 tributes vastly to the range of his palette 
 of colors. He attains an absolute and in- 
 valuable sureness of gauging human motive, 
 and after some four or five years of work 
 along these lines, if he cares to go to a 
 larger city he is almost certain of securing 
 employment which will still further extend 
 his range. The ideal preparation for story 
 writing would be to tour the country in the 
 capacity of a finished reporter, working in 
 many cities — and to avoid, then, the impulse 
 to become merely a polite tramp. 
 
 One thing must be borne in mind: that 
 newspaper men work very hard when they 
 work, and when through they are likely to 
 play just as energetically. The toiler in 
 this line who expects to write a better-pay- 
 ing grade of material than that resulting in 
 his daily column or so must practice at it 
 constantly, must give up a portion of his 
 leisure to more serious literary effort, and 
 
 20 
 
must try incessantly, from the time he starts, 
 to write magazine stories. If a reporter will 
 begin by religiously devoting one solid hour 
 each day to this attempt, never faltering, 
 never wavering, keeping the end steadfastly 
 in mind, for years if need be, in spite of all 
 discouragements, he is bound to succeed if 
 the gift of story- writing is in him; and there 
 is no other way! It seems much to ask, but 
 it is no greater price than is demanded for 
 eminent success in any other line. 
 
 There are other apprenticeships which 
 have proved valuable, other walks of life 
 which have produced their quota of story- 
 tellers. One modern success was a school 
 teacher on the East Side in New York. The 
 human interest in her stories was so pro- 
 found that people of every degree under- 
 stood and appreciated them. So long as she 
 wrote of her actual environment her success 
 was unbounded. When she attempted to 
 wander off into realms with which she was 
 not so familiar, her stories were but medi- 
 ocre. Had she had a wider experience of 
 life, it is not only possible but highly prob- 
 able that she could have treated of univer- 
 
 21 
 
sal conditions and have produced what yet 
 remains to be written — the great American 
 novel. 
 
 Another successful writer was an assist- 
 ant district attorney, a club man in private 
 life, and officially in daily contact with crim- 
 inals of all degrees. He combined these 
 two phases of life with great deftness, and 
 wrote stories along both lines, separately 
 and in combination, which have earned him 
 a distinct place in the magazine field and 
 renders him an assured income of very com- 
 fortable proportions. 
 
 Writers of many other previous occupa- 
 tions have been more or less successful, but 
 in all of them the fundamental principle was 
 the same. Their positions were such that 
 before they wrote successfully they had 
 come in contact with a limitless number of 
 people, and so intimately that they were 
 able to study them in close comparison. It 
 is not possible for all to be newspaper re- 
 porters, nor school teachers, nor district at- 
 torneys, but whatever pursuit in which one 
 is placed, by determination or by circum- 
 
 22 
 
stances, where there are opportunities for 
 study of varied humanity there are possi- 
 bilities to gain an understanding of the hu- 
 man soul, and that is the first and the great- 
 est requisite of the story-writer. 
 
 23 
 
Mental Equipment 
 
 When the apprentice is finally 
 able to take up authorship as 
 a serious career, he will not 
 call his output "literature" any more than 
 a veteran reporter calls himself a "jour- 
 nalist." The ejphemeral writing of no pe- 
 riod has a right to call itself by any high- 
 sounding title. Literature is hoary-headed, 
 and some of it, it must be confessed, is even 
 senile and decrepit. It attains the dignity 
 of its title only with age, with the passing 
 of time which proves its right to continued 
 existence by its having continued to exist. 
 However, the more or less involved writing 
 of the past is to be valued no particle above 
 the crisp and lucid writing of the present. 
 The latter needs only to be winnowed, and 
 out cf the mass that is now being produced 
 there is no doubt that the usual proportion 
 
 24 
 
will be found of permanent value. It is only 
 that our nearness to it interferes with the 
 perspective. 
 
 You yourself may give your name to this 
 coming epoch of American literature; but 
 you will not choose authorship as a profes- 
 sion; authorship will choose you. If you 
 have the necessary qualifications they will 
 not let you rest; and this brings us to the 
 matter of equipment. 
 
 Leaving aside the purely mechanical re- 
 quirements of a good command of English, 
 which must of course be had if you expect 
 to enter this field, you must have these seven 
 gifts: Creativeness, imagination, observa- 
 tion, democracy, sympathy, humor, and in- 
 dustry. 
 
 25 
 
Creativeness 
 
 If one has not the same instinct which 
 would urge him to become an inventor, a 
 composer, an explorer, a pioneer in any 
 walk of life, he will succeed only in becoming 
 a copyist, and a copyist earns but a copyist's 
 pay. A story, to be interesting, must be full 
 of the same inventive faculty which would 
 go to the fashioning of a wireless motor, or 
 any other triumph of constructive ingenuity. 
 The newspapers frequently contain true 
 stories which are alive with dramatic inter- 
 est, and many which would at first glance 
 seem but to need polishing to reveal them- 
 selves as gems of fiction, and indeed, of many 
 of these stories it is often said that they are 
 "as good as a romance." This is seldom, 
 if ever, entirely true. On examination these 
 interesting occurrences will be found to be 
 lacking in some vital element, and if turned 
 
 26 
 
directly into fiction they would seem but 
 very tame. 
 
 The most dramatic of real life happen- 
 ings are to be looked upon as but raw ma- 
 terial. Their great fault lies in the fact that 
 they are abnormal, else they would not be 
 considered as news; and it is not the abnor- 
 mal which proves of the greatest worth in 
 fiction. To be able to construct the nor- 
 mal, or rather to deal with the abnormal so 
 that it shall seem to be normal, or shall il- 
 lustrate the normal by emphasizing its di- 
 vergences, is the true creative art in story- 
 telling. To make people say, when they 
 have read some clever characterization, 
 "Why, I know people exactly like that," is N 
 to have achieved a triumph, and yet, to ac- 
 complish this requires a high form of cre- 
 ativeness. 
 
 "To hold, as 't were, the mirror up to 
 nature" is quite as much the province of fic- 
 tion as it is of the drama. To offer this re- 
 flection is, too, the ideal of the painter and 
 the sculptor; yet, when the finished product 
 of any of these arts is examined it will be 
 found that the mirror is a deceptive one in 
 
 27 
 
that, while seeming to be accurate, it re- 
 flects nothing with absolute fidelity. Upon 
 the stage all emotions are exaggerated, alL 
 action is accelerated, all motives are inten- 
 sified, all characters are deliberately over- 
 drawn, conversations are condensed and ab- 
 breviated so that they come directly to the 
 point that must be made ; yet with all these 
 distortions, or, to speak more truly, by 
 A means of them, the effect of reality is pro- 
 duced. The most brilliant conversation of 
 real life, if transferred verbatim to the stage, 
 would become a dreary and a tedious thing 
 because of the lack of concentration and 
 crisp directness. 
 
 The artist who paints a picture of an 
 ideally beautiful woman spends much time 
 in the search of a model who will exactly 
 meet his requirements, and yet when he 
 finds her he does not paint a portrait of her. 
 He corrects the inevitable defect. He paints 
 a perfect nose, perhaps, upon an otherwise 
 imperfect countenance. Perhaps in forming 
 his ideal figure he paints the head of one 
 woman, the bust of another, the arms and 
 limbs of still another. The sculptor pro- 
 
 28 
 
ceeds in exactly like fashion. Nothing is 
 perfect. It remains for the artist to create 
 perfection, and he achieves this ideal in ex- 
 act proportion to his skill and to the perfect- 
 ness of his conception. So, while the writer 
 of fiction must invariably go to real life for 
 his models, he must never attempt to make 
 them mere portraits. He must supply what 
 they lack, and in this his creativeness must 
 come into play. 
 
 This applies not only to character-draw- 
 ing and description, but to plot and inci- 
 dent as well. Out of an approximate half 
 dozen characters and half dozen scenic back- 
 grounds and half dozen incidents the writer 
 must create an entire new world, and yet 
 one illustrative of the world we all know. 
 His characters, if he has wrought wisely and 
 well, will be found, on close analysis, to be 
 like no living people whom any one has ever 
 met, and yet the most of them must seem 
 like people whom we all have known. Only 
 the central actor or actors in your drama 
 should be unusual, and not always even 
 these. The incidents will be found, on de- 
 liberate study, to occur with an opportune- 
 
 29 
 
{must seem to be occurring most naturally* 
 jiess never met with in life, and yet they 
 This is the true creative power, and without 
 it no writer can succeed. 
 
 As an exercise, try to set down, accu- 
 rately and briefly, confining yourself to a 
 hundred words each, what you think you 
 know of the characters of ten of your neigh- 
 bors or acquaintances. When you have 
 done this, go over each commentary care- 
 fully and with calm, deliberate judgment. 
 You will find that, unconsciously, you have 
 exaggerated out of its true proportion some 
 characteristic of each person, and have omit- 
 ted to give due prominence to certain off- 
 setting characteristics. Try as you may to 
 be fair, you will find that your sense of jus- 
 tice has been outweighed by your personal 
 prejudices, even at the time when you were 
 trying to be most judicial. Aiding your 
 prejudices, your creative faculty has already 
 been at work. This is one of the psycho- 
 logical reasons why "gossip" is seldom, if 
 ever, true. 
 
 Revise these brief character-drawings 
 rigidly, and compel yourself to be absolutely 
 
 30 
 
just. You will find that your characters in 
 the second writing are not nearly so pic- 
 turesque or interesting as in the first, where 
 your creative faculty had unconsciously 
 heightened their coloring. 
 
 Now write the ten character drawings a 
 third time, allowing your creative faculty 
 full play, and build up the characters as 
 they would be useful to you in fiction, exag- 
 gerating them all you like but still com- 
 pressing your estimations into the hundred- 
 word limit. You will find now, if your 
 work has been well done, that your people 
 have become more real to you than the per- 
 sons from whom they* were drawn. They 
 are warmer, more insistent of life and mo- 
 tive. Building upon -necessarily imperfect 
 types, you have created personages entirely 
 typical, in place of partly so, of their 
 leading characteristics. This illustration, 
 though perhaps a lame enough one, explains 
 what I have been trying to tell of the dif- 
 ference between cold fact and colorful fic- 
 tion, between imperfect realism and more 
 perfect idealism, between copyism and cre- 
 ativeness. 
 
 3i 
 
Imagination 
 
 Imagination goes hand in hand with the 
 creative faculty. It not only builds up 
 in advance the ideal which the creator 
 tries to attain, but it furnishes the accessory 
 detail which places that ideal in its logical 
 environment. It supplies the waving trees 
 and the green grass and all the scenic back- 
 ground against which the tragedies and 
 comedies of your mimic life are enacted. It 
 is by imagination's magic aid that the men 
 and women of fiction seem to truly and ac- 
 tually live and move and have their being 
 in the minds of their creators. 
 
 It is probably a very safe venture to state 
 that every successful writer sees his char- 
 acters as vividly as if they were in the flesh. 
 They walk abroad, and the sun shines on 
 them; the heat of midday warms them and 
 the breezes of night chill them; they re- 
 spond to every phase of emotion; their 
 
 32 
 
hearts beat under the thrill of love; their 
 blood surges with hate; their eyes dim with 
 tears. They are real, virile, human beings, 
 and, having fixed in his mind the motif of 
 his plot, having devised his situations, and 
 having brought into created being the peo- 
 ple who are to work out his comedy or his 
 tragedy, the writer gifted with this wonder- 
 ful faculty of imagination has but to keep 
 the eye of his mind steadfastly upon his 
 characters and watch them work out their 
 story for him. He only needs to set down 
 what they do and say. 
 
 Try a simple test of this. Place in your 
 field of mental vision a man and a woman. 
 Let the woman be, say, brunette and viva- 
 cious, the man tall and stern. They are 
 standing amid bleak trees. The cold twi- 
 light is coming on. There are little flakes 
 of snow in the air. The man suddenly 
 stoops and picks up something from among 
 the dry leaves at his feet. The woman 
 as suddenly springs for it and tries to 
 take it away from him. Are they laugh- 
 ing when they do this, or are they in des- 
 perate earnestness? Look at them and see, 
 
 33 
 
What is the object over which they are 
 wrestling? It it a tell-tale letter, a docu- 
 ment of importance, or perhaps a kerchief 
 with a strange initial embroidered in the 
 corner? It is a little too dark to see from 
 a distance what the object may be, but there 
 is just a glint of white. 
 
 With these two characters and this situ- 
 ation in your mental vision, keep within 
 sight of the man and the woman, and see 
 what they do. Construct your own story. 
 Go gack and create a series of incidents 
 which might have led up to this situation. 
 Go forward and create the climax to which 
 this leads, but always keep the imaginative 
 vision of the two, as if in the actual flesh 
 and blood, in your mind. / There is a house 
 near by. You can see a gleam of light 
 through the half-denuded branches of the 
 trees. Who is in that house? Is it the 
 man's wife or the woman's husband? Is it 
 the man's father and mother or the girl's? 
 Or are these two man and wife, and are 
 children there? Out of your knowledge of 
 probable human events you may select a 
 thousand hypotheses to form a background 
 
 34 
 
and an explanation and a denouement for 
 this man and this woman among the trees 
 in the chill twilight struggling for the pos- 
 session of something that glints white in 
 their hands; but if, while you pursue the 
 contributory facts, you lose clear mental 
 vision of the actual features and bodies of 
 the man or the woman, of the salient points 
 of their scenic environment, your imagina- 
 tion is at fault and you can not write inter- 
 estingly. Mere creativeness without imag- 
 ination is the cause of the dry-as-dust sto- 
 ries you read/\ You must have both, and 
 they must work in absolute harmony, nei- 
 ther one operating to the detriment of the 
 other. 
 
 35 
 
Observation 
 
 Tis is the faculty upon which both 
 creation and imagination are built. 
 After all, we have finite minds, and 
 man only creates after known forms; he 
 only imagines upon material foundations. 
 Our most brilliant castles in the air are but 
 more delicate variants of familiar structures 
 of brick and stone ; the most expert builders 
 of air-castles, then, are those who have most 
 closely observed and mentally indexed to 
 minute detail our mundane castles. 
 
 There is no end to the store of informa- 
 tion, scarcely obtainable from reference- 
 books, which the observing mind will and 
 must acquire. What wild flowers and what 
 garden flowers bloom in certain months? 
 What trees are indigenous to certain local- 
 ities, and what are their characteristics of 
 sprouting their leaves and developing them 
 and shedding them; of blossoming and bud- 
 
 36 
 
ding and bearing fruit? Have you noticed 
 how the white under sides of leaves, while 
 fluttering up in a breeze, give quite a differ- 
 ent shade of green to a tree? Have you ob- 
 served the differing apparent color of still 
 or running water at differing times of the 
 day, at differing times of the year, under 
 differing atmospheric conditions? How 
 many common insects can you recall and 
 describe? What effect has a frown upon 
 the other features of a man's countenance? 
 How many sorts of sunsets, as infinite in 
 their variety as the shapes of clouds can 
 you at this moment mentally catalogue and 
 briefly describe? Have you ever noticed the 
 peculiar heave of the body given by a man 
 straightening up under a hod of brick, or 
 the unconscious rhymthic pauses, for rest 
 of the muscles, indulged by a man mixing 
 mortar? 
 
 At this moment, as an exercise, try to de- 
 scribe the facial expressions of ten men, all 
 between the ages of thirty-five and forty, all 
 differing, and yet none abnormal. Give to 
 each some characteristic mannerism or ges- 
 ture, due to nervousness or habit. Try to 
 
 37 
 
A 
 
 write the descriptions of these men, con- 
 fining yourself to fifty words for each one, 
 yet allowing your descriptions to be full 
 enough to convey a satisfying mental pic- 
 ture. Let us stand these ten men up in a 
 row and see what they look like : 
 
 "Number one is short and fat, with wide 
 lips and wide teeth and a wide nose. His 
 round cheeks are pink like a young boy's, 
 and his whole expression, except for the 
 shrewd lines about his eyes, is one of almost 
 cherubic infancy; yet every once in a while 
 he winks almost imperceptibly with his right 
 eye to emphasize some minor point in his 
 conversation. He is very self-important, is 
 number one, and jolly, too, but nevertheless 
 crafty." 
 
 Let us count this. Seventy-nine words. 
 Too many by twenty-nine. This, however, 
 is the first writing, just as it occurred to us. 
 Now we must edit it and reduce our num- 
 ber of words to the given figure without sac- 
 rificing the picture. Let us try. Here is the 
 second attempt: 
 
 "Number one, self-important and appar- 
 ently jolly, is short and fat, with wide lips 
 
 38 
 
and wide teeth and wide nose. His round, 
 pink cheeks make him seem of almost che- 
 rubic infancy, but shrewd, crafty lines hem 
 his eyes, and occasional sly winks flicker 
 from the right one while he talks." 
 
 So much for Number one. Right after 
 or immediately preceding his description, he 
 ought to say something brief and pointed 
 which will further bring out his character, 
 and every time he is brought anew into your 
 story, brief reference should be made, as he 
 speaks, to his receptive cherubic appearance 
 or his craftiness or his wink, thus keeping 
 his picture fresh in the mind of your reader. 
 
 Now, without losing sight of this guile- 
 ful gentleman, let us take the next one in 
 line: 
 
 "Number two has a mustache cut off in a 
 stiff line above his upper lip, and it seems to 
 bother him a great deal, for his nervous 
 hand is constantly straying to it, trying to 
 put the invisible and long-since-clipped ends 
 into his mouth. For the rest, he is lean and 
 cadaverous, with a narrow forehead and 
 shifting gray eyes and stiff, wiry hair, and 
 he has an air of being constantly upon the 
 
 39 
 
alert lest some one might tap him suddenly 
 upon the shoulder and tell him that he is 
 arrested." 
 
 Ninety-four words. We have been very 
 extravagant in our analysis of this interest- 
 ing character. We must cut down his de- 
 scription, however, to almost one-half, and 
 still retain the same strength of portraiture 
 and character-drawing; for, observe this, no 
 portrait description, unless it conveys with 
 it an idea of character, is worth the setting 
 to paper. 
 
 This condensation is a much more diffi- 
 cult task than the other, but it must be done. 
 Here is the result : 
 
 "Lean and cavaderous number two has a 
 narrow forehead, shifting gray eyes, and 
 stiff, wiry hair. His hand strays nervously 
 to his straight-clipped mustache, trying to 
 put into his mouth the missing ends, and he 
 seems constantly alert lest a sudden tap 
 upon the shoulder might mean his arrest." 
 
 Merely by way of illustration two of these 
 ten characters have been described. Por- 
 tray the other eight yourself, still retaining 
 clearly the mental pictures of all the ones 
 
 40 
 
previously brought into existence, standing 
 in their row, more or less impatiently, ac- 
 cording to their natures, and you will find 
 to just what degree your powers of obser- 
 vation have been unconsciously at work. 
 If you can not go further than four more 
 distinctly drawn characters, cultivate your 
 observation. Study the faces of people 
 whom you meet. Watch their actions. It 
 should be said, however, that a deliberately 
 cultivated faculty of observation will never 
 completely take the place of a natural one, 
 one which, arising through a universal in- 
 terest in all objects and in all surroundings 
 of life, has taken unconscious note of all its 
 minute and vital details. The importance 
 of this faculty can scarcely be overestimated, 
 as you will discover to your later humilia- 
 tion if you set down details without know- 
 ing them to be entirely accurate. You 
 would make yourself very foolish, for in- 
 stance, to have flies or mosquitoes annoy a 
 character in your story at some mountain 
 resort, for at very easily accessible heights, 
 quite delightful to human beings, flies and 
 mosquitoes can not exist. 
 
 4i 
 
Democracy 
 
 Democracy is essential, but it must be 
 instinctive, not forced or self-con- 
 scious. You must talk with both 
 bank presidents and ditch diggers, as you 
 have opportunity, with the same personal 
 interest, an interest which arises not from 
 mere curiosity nor even from definite pur- 
 pose, but from your innate brotherhood, 
 which makes these and all grades between 
 and beyond but men, and human, and 
 closely akin to your own clay. If you can 
 do this without priggish inner aloofness, 
 without toadyism on the one hand, or, upon 
 the other, without the condescension which 
 you fondly but futilely believe that you can 
 conceal, you will become intensely inter- 
 ested in the struggles, the failures, the ambi- 
 tions, and the triumphs of both, and you will 
 gain the sometimes humiliating but always 
 wholesome lesson that there is but very lit- 
 
 42 
 
tie difference in any of us, except as to the 
 merest of externals. Strip the roughened 
 hide from your ditch digger and the mas- 
 saged and velvety skin from your banker, 
 take from the one his probable crudities of 
 language, and from the other his more or 
 less affected niceties of speech, and you will 
 find their code of ethics much alike, their 
 humanity exactly the same. They have the 
 same capacity for love and hate, the same 
 self-struggles, the same belief in their own 
 preponderance of good above evil. 
 
 It must be your task to have as much as- 
 sociation with as many different sorts of 
 men as possible, to strip from them this 
 outer husk of use and habit, heredity, train- 
 ing, and environment, and lay bare the hid- 
 den man. Find this first, then you can re- 
 store the shell and study with intelligence 
 divergent modes of thought and habits of 
 life, and the varying expressions of these 
 that are made necessary by different sur- 
 roundings and opportunity. After all, you 
 are searching for the undying mysteries 
 of immortal humanhood, a recognition of 
 which must be at the root, if not at the sur- 
 
 43 
 
face, of every worth-while story, whether it 
 be comedy or tragedy; and you are just as 
 likely to find your soul problem in a squalid 
 tenement room as in a Fifth Avenue man- 
 sion, or just as likely again, avoiding these 
 two extremes, to find it in some pleasant 
 home of the moderately well-to-do, or in 
 some cottage of that large class which, 
 though without hope of riches, has fought 
 away the threat of poverty. 
 
 A writer must be of no caste or class. He 
 must be of all castes and all classes, for the 
 problem of life is infinitely larger than en- 
 vironment or custom, or accidents of birth 
 or breeding or wealth. Remember that the 
 people about you, as distinctive and as indi- 
 vidual as they may be, are, after all, as 
 viewed in their true perspective with crea- 
 tion, ephemeral creatures of no consequence, 
 who live but for a day and flutter their idle 
 lives away until they die in the chill of the 
 evening by uncounted thousands, without 
 having left any impress whatever upon the 
 earth that bore them, or upon its vital af- 
 fairs. A hundred years from now perhaps 
 not one out of all the people you know will 
 
 44 
 
be remembered; but humanity itself, with 
 which, on the final analysis, you deal, is ever- 
 lasting. If you are most fortunate you may 
 meet men of large affairs, but even among 
 these there are very few whose deeds, whose 
 graves, whose very names will not be quickly 
 forgotten, and even these few are but ordi- 
 nary clay. Beneath your story, then, of 
 their trifling emotions and the puny epi- 
 sodes in which they figure, there must be 
 something universal, something which ap- 
 plies, just as well in one age as in another, 
 to all humanity in its larger relation to the 
 spirit of all things. It is not always pos- 
 sible to segregate this kernel of universal 
 humanity, to put your finger upon it, to say 
 that this deep, underlying truth is the thing 
 you wished to prove or to illustrate; but 
 you may be quite sure that if your story 
 awakens a quick response in the minds and 
 hearts of the majority of your readers, you 
 have, perhaps by blind instinct, woven a 
 grain of this intangible leaven into your 
 work. 
 
 45 
 
Sympathy 
 
 Sympathy must be a part of your de- 
 mocracy, and a large part. You 
 must try, in the attempt to under- 
 stand yourself, to obtain an understanding 
 of every other man. You must try to know 
 his mental outlook; to find out what he 
 thinks and why he thinks it. You must 
 bring yourself to appreciate precisely why 
 the horse-thief stole the horse, how he jus- 
 tified himself in that act, and sympathize 
 with him in so far as to see why, had you 
 been in his place, with his heredity, train- 
 ing, environment, and mode of thought, 
 you, too, would have stolen the horse and 
 felt that you had a legitimate excuse. 
 
 You can not paint the woes of others un- 
 less you yourself can, by comprehension at 
 least, suffer that woe. Actual suffering 
 would bring you nearer to an understand- 
 
 46 
 
ing of it, perhaps, but it might also blunt 
 your other faculties of creation, imagina- 
 tion, and observation, and blunt, too, your 
 desire to observe, to imagine, and to create; 
 but so long as you are thoroughly conscious 
 of the capacity to suffer, so long as there lie 
 in you the conscious elements of woe and 
 of sorrow, you can project yourself into that 
 frame of emotion long enough and clearly 
 enough to analyze it, and to set down its 
 salient features. And that capacity can 
 come about only through sympathy. 
 
 Shut yourself in for a moment. You are 
 now a man of virile middle age who have 
 fought your way from obscurity to inde- 
 pendence. You have been self-centered in 
 business. You are married. Your wife, still 
 retaining, in your eyes, her youth and 
 beauty, has been your trusted helpmate 
 through all these years. You have loved her 
 and have placed implicit confidence in her. 
 At the very point when you are able to set 
 aside your more weighty business problems 
 and to sit back with a sigh of content and 
 say, "I have won, and I can now begin to 
 enjoy life," you have come home to find that 
 
 47 
 
your wife, tiring of the long struggle and 
 of what she deems inattention on your part, 
 has eloped with a man you had considered 
 to be your best friend. 
 
 You find that the telephone is cut off. 
 You have inadvertently locked yourself in. 
 There is no way to get out until morning. 
 You are entirely alone in that empty house 
 with all its haunting memories, and with 
 no human soul in whom you may confide. 
 You must pass the long night there with 
 no company but your own tumult of 
 thoughts. Outside there is nothing but 
 darkness. 
 
 Now consider. Lose your own self com- 
 pletely. Actually be this man. What are 
 your emotions through that night? What 
 floods of rage and murderous fury surge 
 through you? What softening memories 
 come to torment you ? What bewilderments 
 overwhelm you as you try to understand 
 how this terrible thing could be? What 
 self-reproaches come to you? 
 
 There occurs, at some time during that 
 night, a crisis, during which your emotions 
 crystallize into a definite purpose; and then 
 
 48 
 
in what desperate mood do you meet the 
 dawn? 
 
 We will now say -that you have passed 
 through this ordeal. What you have suffered 
 would fill pages, yet no one would care to 
 read all that you could write about your men- 
 tal and moral and physical struggle. What 
 you must do is to pick out the salient features 
 of that struggle; to give not the detailed 
 steps but the impression of that night of 
 agony in as few words as possible, so that 
 the reader, in passing with you through that 
 period of torture, will gain a complete feel' 
 ing of your suffering and know just how it 
 was, as if he had himself suffered. That ap- 
 peal to his sympathy through your own is 
 a higher art than the detailed analysis of 
 every step in this mental and moral and 
 physical cataclysm. The former uses of the 
 coldly scientific analysis and the present use 
 of the impressionist method in producing 
 an emotional effect upon the reader, is one 
 of the chief divergences between the old 
 school of fiction writing and the modern 
 school, and the modern school is vastly bet- 
 ter. 
 
 49 
 
For a test, write your hypothetical expe- 
 riences of that night as fully as you like, 
 then cut it down exactly one-half. Cut the 
 residue down another half, still trying to 
 produce the effect of a night of agony, and 
 without sacrificing any phase of the episode 
 of your mental attitude during it; then see 
 how much better and more effective is the 
 quarter-length than the full-length compo- 
 sition. 
 
 Take other situations which demand sym- 
 pathy, and see how you can handle them. 
 
 You are a young woman, attractive, re- 
 fined, pure, intelligent, spirited. You have 
 been raised, if not in luxury, at least in com- 
 fort. You are the oldest child. Your father 
 dies, leaving behind him nothing but debts. 
 Everything is sold, and you, with your 
 mother and two younger sisters, go away 
 from the loathed place where suddenly you 
 find that you have no friends. The struggle 
 for life begins. Your mother is ill, the two 
 sisters are too young, and perhaps too deli- 
 cate, to work. You try to find employment, 
 and in the first place into which you go you 
 are met with a coarse insult to your youth 
 
 50 
 
and your attractiveness and your woman- 
 hood. Still you can not give up the strug- 
 gle. Your needs force you. There is very 
 little at home to eat. There is rent to be 
 met. Everything salable has been sold. 
 You have positively no recourse. You must 
 earn money. You meet with rebuff after 
 rebuff and with insult after insult; some- 
 times with worse — with kindness which acts 
 as a cloak to insult that bides its time and 
 opportunity. Put this soul and its torments 
 on paper, without melodrama and without 
 artificiality, if you can! 
 
 Again, you are a man of below the aver- 
 age in education, intelligence, breeding, op- 
 portunity, and environment. You have com- 
 mitted a crime, perhaps in the heat of pas- 
 sion, perhaps as a rash expedient. They are 
 hunting you. You are hiding in a dark cor- 
 ner in a cellar, half concealed by some rub- 
 bish. You hear footsteps coming down the 
 stairway. You are desperate. You are 
 cowering, with all your muscles tense, ready 
 for flight or fight. The gleam of a lantern 
 accompanies the steps, and the lantern 
 swings closer and closer to your corner. 
 
 5i 
 
Besides the foremost man, who is carrying 
 the lantern, there are three others, all huge 
 men, your equals in physique, and they are 
 all armed. You have a revolver in your 
 hand as you wait. Your heart beats so vig- 
 orously that you fear it must be audible. 
 The lantern approaches quite closely, then 
 it turns, and the men who have been coming 
 straight toward you walk away to other 
 parts of the dim cellar. They make the 
 rounds and return to the bottom of the steps. 
 They are about to go up, when the leader 
 with the lantern turns back, comes closely 
 a little part of the way again toward your 
 corner, but finally gives up the search and 
 goes upstairs with the other men. 
 
 Of course you can not approve of that 
 wretch, even as he cowers there in the cellar, 
 with his revolver gripped in his hand so 
 hard that it leaves the impress of its every 
 marking in his palm, but you must sympa- 
 thize with him. Be that man in your sym- 
 pathy and write his emotions, then condense 
 them to a mere paragraph so that you can 
 make your reader, who also can not possibly 
 
 52 
 
approve of him, feel with him that same hu- 
 man sympathy. 
 
 Here have been given three tests of this 
 quality in yourself. Write these three, then 
 devise seven more situations calling for sym- 
 pathetic treatment, and condense them until 
 you have conveyed that impression of sym- 
 pathetic emotion in the briefest and most 
 effective manner of which you are capable. 
 
 S3 
 
Humor 
 
 A 11 these qualities, creativeness, observa- 
 f*\ tion, imagination, democracy, sym- 
 
 ^ pathy, must be tempered by humor. 
 A sense of humor is the foundation of all \ 
 optimism. A sense of humor is the universal 
 solvent of human emotion. A sense of hu- 
 mor is the touch-stone which renders the 
 most puzzling of human problems under- 
 standable; but it is also a thing which is 
 born and can never be acquired. If you 
 have not the gift you might just as well 
 never try to obtain it. If you have it count 
 yourself blest, but be careful of its use. 
 You can make yourself most absurd with a 
 lack of discretion in this particular. 
 
 In more serious work the value of humor 
 is in the making of contrast. 
 
 Two men in a room confront each other. 
 One has a revolver in his hand, the other 
 is entirely at his mercy. 
 
 54 
 
"Quickly !" says the man with the re- 
 volver. "Walk across to that window and 
 wave your handkerchief, or I shall fire !" 
 
 "Fire, then," says the younger and 
 slighter of the two. 
 
 It is a tense moment. They glare into 
 each other's eyes, and in neither man is 
 there any sign of weakening. Then sud- 
 denly a hoarse voice at the window croaks: 
 
 "Fire ! Fire ! O, fireman, save my child !" 
 
 It is a green parrot hanging in a cage. 
 In spite of the grave matter at issue be- 
 tween them smiles flit across the faces of 
 both men. The absurd incongruity of the 
 interruption appeals to the sense of humor 
 in each one, and for a moment the tension 
 is relaxed. The older and darker man is 
 the first to strive to regain it. He tries to 
 bend his previous inflexible sternness of gaze 
 upon his opponent, but the chattering bird, 
 once started, keeps up its irrelevant scream- 
 ing, and the tension definitely breaks. 
 
 "Come," appeals the younger man, after 
 the parrot has quieted down; "let us sit 
 here and look at this thing from another 
 angle." 
 
 55 
 
From that point on the situation may 
 have a dozen different terminations, a score 
 of them, a hundred; but the point has passed 
 where any interjected remark by the par- 
 rot can have a humorous significance. The 
 next one, no matter how irrelevant, would 
 have a tragic significance in the story. Im- 
 agine the effect if the next absurd phrase 
 should be croaked while the younger man 
 lay dead ! Part of the absurdity of the orig- 
 inal interruption came in its unexpectedness, 
 and about humor there is nearly always that 
 quality. Its largest value in your own work 
 will come about through its unexpected oc- 
 currence to you as you proceed with your 
 construction. Very few good humorous sit- 
 uations are deliberately built. They just 
 happen. As for straight humorous writing, 
 there is no need to analyze it or even dis- 
 cuss it here. Born humorists need no in- 
 struction, and the other kind need not try. 
 
 56 
 
Industry 
 
 I have placed this last for emphasis — the 
 ability to work and keep on working, 
 even after you think that you have 
 passed the limit of endurance. There is no 
 permanent success to be achieved in any 
 line without work, and particularly is this 
 true of authorship. To begin with, assum- 
 ing always that you are to make your own 
 way from the start — and every worth-while i 
 career is so sustained — you will have some 
 bread-winning occupation which will leave 
 you tired when your drudging hours are 
 over. Social attractions will take up some 
 of your spare time, and so, right in the 
 very beginning, what literary labor you do 
 will be performed in hours that are stolen 
 from rest and recreation and sleep. This 
 reason alone keeps in eighteen-dollar-a- 
 
 57 
 
week grooves, for a lifetime, many men 
 eminently fitted for success in writing. The 
 disheartening part is that your first efforts 
 will doubtless be unsuccessful; that night 
 after night and morning after morning must 
 be given up for a year, for two years, for 
 three years, possibly, to toil that seems 
 fruitless. This does not sound so much of 
 a hardship until you try it; until the days 
 of discouragement come; until all your ef- 
 forts, applauded by your friends, are scorned 
 by the only critics worth while — those who 
 would actually buy your material and pay 
 real money for it. The only course to take 
 in such cases is to work! When discour- 
 agement comes, work! When you are tired 
 out, and sick even of your ambition, work! 
 When the temptation comes to slip back 
 into the rut, to drift along with the lazy 
 tide, rouse yourself and work! I do not 
 very much believe in the genius of inspira 
 tion. I thoroughly believe in an adaptabil- 
 ity and a natural liking for a pursuit, and 
 then in work, work, work! Not work by 
 fits of sudden enthusiasm, but steady, all- 
 the-year-round work! Nothing but work! 
 
 58 
 
 \ 
 
And that is the royal path to success. Other 
 people have said this so often and in so 
 many ways that it seems trite and stale, 
 but I mean it! I have passed through 
 the grind, and I know. C Lay aside idle 
 planning and dreaming, and WORK!; 
 
 59 
 
The Business Story 
 
 Unless you are strong enough to cre- 
 ate the fashions, follow them, for 
 stories change fashion from year 
 to year as markedly as do clothes. As 
 you will see, if you keep understandingly 
 in touch with the current magazines, the 
 story which to-day has precedence over all 
 others in popular demand is the business 
 story. The same thrill which used to 
 characterize stories of adventure, the same 
 intensity, the same struggle to win now ap- 
 pears just as effectively and picturesquely 
 in depicting the commercial and political 
 battles of this financial age. If you know 
 anything worth telling about the conduct 
 of any business, if you have any fertility 
 in plot and facility in character-drawing, 
 you may combine those requisites in a story 
 which will have a better chance of accept- 
 ance than any tearful tale of Philip and 
 
 60 
 
his Chloe. The strategies of finance, high 
 and low, frenzied and trapped; the romance 
 of millions, and how they were made or 
 stolen; the Titanic battles of the kings of 
 commerce; the ambitions and struggles and 
 final triumphs of the butcher, the baker, and 
 candlestick-maker; the daily affairs of the 
 "tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, apothecary, 
 plow-boy, thief," these and their service in 
 the cause of the Great God Success are the 
 things which interest the live public of to- 
 day. 
 
 To write a business story you must know 
 intimately of business detail. A knowledge 
 of the mere outward detail is scarcely 
 enough. You must know not only the mi- 
 nute method of procedure in the particular 
 line of business which you are handling, but 
 you must know the spirit and mental atti- 
 tude of the men who conduct that business, 
 for in no class of story can you make a more 
 absurd failure than in this, if you are not 
 thoroughly posted. To write a brokerage 
 story and have brokers say that you must 
 have worked in a broker's office, to write a 
 mercantile story and have merchants say 
 
 61 
 
you must have worked in a store, to write 
 manufacturing stories and have manufac- 
 turers say that you must have worked in a 
 factory, with knowledge of the inside ma- 
 nipulative conditions of each of these, is to 
 be successful. Anything else spells failure. 
 Experience is necessary in this line. You 
 can not invent business conditions, business 
 knowledge, or business detail, and without 
 much contact with business men, in their 
 business life, you are quite likely to misun- 
 derstand their attitude and action in busi- 
 ness deals. Having the experience, this is 
 the most prolific field of all for the modern 
 writer, for it covers the subject which the 
 large mass of the American public has most 
 at heart. Even women to-day read business 
 stories with avidity. 
 
 The materials lie everywhere. The story 
 of how Hiram Jones bought Ezra Tidball's 
 successful Dry Goods and Notions Empo- 
 rium at Hick's Mills Cross Roads and made 
 a failure of it, or took over the unsuccess- 
 ful Emporium and made a success of it, or 
 "euchered" Ezra out of it, or was cleverly 
 foiled in the attempt, is likely to prove just 
 
 62 
 
as good fiction material as the consolidation 
 of all the railroads in the world. In either 
 event there might be a more or less perfunc- 
 tory love-story interwoven, and there should 
 also be some problem involving business 
 honor. Despite the general impression to 
 the contrary, among people who talk merely 
 for conversation's sake, there is, throughout 
 the entire United States, a keen awakening 
 of business honor; and this notwithstand- 
 ing that business affairs have never been 
 so shrewdly conducted. The line between 
 business trickery and business cleverness, 
 however, is quite sharply drawn, and it is 
 at the crossing of this line that the most 
 dramatic business stories will be found. 
 
 63 
 
The Political Story 
 
 Here again absolute knowledge must 
 be had, or your stories will be 
 both silly and absurd, and people 
 who are posted will know it. The news- 
 papers are full of political charge and 
 counter-charge, and they furnish a wealth 
 of material in the way of incident, most 
 of it exaggerated, but a great deal of it 
 containing much truth. Many of these in- 
 cidents are elaborate enough upon which 
 to build a thoroughly satisfactory plot, but 
 neither incident nor plot are sufficient, no 
 matter how complete, without an intimate 
 knowledge of the class of men concerned. 
 Both the reformer and the grafter are rich 
 material, but they must be understood, 
 and to understand them they must be 
 known. The reformer is easier to compre- 
 hend, for his leading motive coincides with 
 
 64 
 
the code of ethics which we have all been 
 taught. He possesses a trace of fanaticism 
 which often renders him absurd, but when 
 he is free from this absurdity and possesses 
 ability he is a clean-cut, vigorous man of 
 great dramatic value. The grafter, on the 
 other hand, without an intimate acquaint- 
 ance with his motives, is well nigh incom- 
 prehensible. It must be remembered that 
 in most cases he justifies himself, to himself 
 at least, for all his acts; that he does not 
 imagine himself to be a moral leper; that 
 he has both actual and fancied virtues upon 
 which he prides himself very highly, and 
 that he stoutly contends even to himself, in 
 the final analysis, that he is an admirable 
 man. 
 
 It does not matter whether you agree 
 with him in this estimate or not. It is not 
 your province to editorialize in a story. 
 You must present the man as he is. If the 
 man's purposes and methods must be dis- 
 approved, so construct your story that the 
 reader will furnish the disapproval. Never 
 call your villain a villain. Present his vil- 
 lainous act or his villainous speech without 
 
 6 5 
 
comment and without indignant coloring, 
 just as the act presumably happened or the 
 speech was presumably spoken, and do not 
 overdraw either one. Your audience will 
 very quickly decide his character if you have 
 drawn him correctly, and they will not thank 
 you for having left them no room for the ex- 
 ercise of their own intelligence. For the 
 same reason it is not wise to call your hero 
 noble upon every page, nor your humorous 
 character funny, nor your disagreeable 
 woman sour. 
 
 Material for political stories will be found 
 everywhere, from the rural district to the 
 city, from ward to national politics, and if 
 well drawn they are always interesting and 
 always salable. Experience, again it must 
 be insisted upon, is absolutely requisite, 
 however, in the handling of these stories, 
 and without that intimate knowledge they 
 had best be let severely alone. 
 
 66 
 
The Detective Story 
 
 One enters the realms of fancy, now, 
 and more latitude for divergence 
 from truth is permitted here by 
 custom than in the two classes of stories 
 above named. It is quite likely that the 
 true detective story has not yet been writ- 
 ten. Nearly all of them which have found 
 vogue are most radical distortions, and ap- 
 peal to the reader not from their proba- 
 bility, but from their ingenuity. Sherlock 
 Holmes, to cite an instance, is a purely 
 imaginative creature, the like of whom has 
 never existed, and probably never will exist, 
 and he is as far from the truth as those di- 
 verting thieves, Raffles and Arsene Lupin. 
 Exaggerated character drawings, however, 
 are, by custom, allowable throughout in sto- 
 ries of this kind, and they are even recom- 
 mended as heightening the color. 
 
 These and all other mystery stories are 
 
 6 7 
 
almost necessarily written backwards; that 
 is, the solution of the puzzling situation 
 must be known in advance by the writer, and 
 the developments which lead up to the solu- 
 tion carefully worked out, so that conceal- 
 ment is maintained until the very end. If 
 the writer begins with a mystery unsolvable 
 to himself, and constructs a story about this, 
 finally working out a solution, he is furnish- 
 ing the intelligence of his reader with the 
 same basis for deduction as himself, and his 
 denouement will be anticipated. On the 
 other hand, if the creation of the story is 
 started with the solution fixed firmly in 
 mind, it is possible to bafHe the reader from 
 beginning to end, while still holding his 
 piqued interest and attention, which is fully 
 as essential as endless ingenuity of plot. 
 
 There is an excellent market for this type 
 of story if it is cleverly written, and no very 
 deep knowledge of criminology seems re- 
 quisite, to judge from certain commercially 
 successful examples, although a mastery of 
 criminal court proceedings and police rou- 
 tine should be had. At least two women 
 have been quite facile in this line, but in the 
 
 68 
 
work of both of them the lack of knowledge 
 of criminal character is conspicuous, and 
 makes their creations of necessity ephem- 
 eral. More accurate knowledge might 
 give them a more permanent value. Perma- 
 nent fame, however, is reserved for the 
 writer — and he will almost of necessity be a 
 man, since only a man can have a properly 
 intimate acquaintance with his types — who 
 will pen the story of actual modern detective 
 work, filled with brilliant character draw- 
 ings of criminals as they actually are and 
 detectives as they really exist, and with plot 
 and incident as they might with exact prob- 
 ability occur. These will be brutal stories 
 and sordid, but they will be full of fighting 
 and red blood and virility and thrilling situa- 
 tions and dramatic climaxes. There will not 
 be in them so much keen mental deduction 
 as there will be physical supremacy, and 
 once they have their vogue established, they 
 will command a high price. Truth always 
 does. 
 
 69 
 
Stories for Children 
 
 There is nothing so difficult to write, 
 and which pays so little in mone- 
 tary returns, considering the amount 
 of labor and talent required, as stories 
 for children. The gift of writing them 
 acceptably is a very rare one, and people 
 are more often mistaken in their ability 
 in this line than in any other. It seems 
 a simple thing to do, but it is not. In 
 the first place, few people understand the 
 processes of a child's mind, and in the en- 
 deavor to write down to their comprehen- 
 sion insult their intelligence. So many 
 people forget, or never seem to have com- 
 prehended, that children, in mental fiber, in 
 observation, in comprehension, and in rea- 
 soning power, are precisely like their el- 
 ders, with the sole exception of lacking ex- 
 perience upon which to base their deduc- 
 tions. Most of the attempts to appeal to 
 
 70 
 
the intelligence of children are utterly silly. 
 There is nothing truer than that men are 
 but children of a larger growth, but the con- 
 verse is equally true. A few writers have 
 realized this, and have appealed, soberly 
 and with splendid success, directly to the 
 child intelligence as if it were grown up, 
 being only careful to use an easy range of 
 vocabulary, ideas which can come within 
 the range of child experience, and plot and 
 incident which are free from the need of 
 maturity. Love, for instance, may be be- 
 tween the sexes, but must be absolutely 
 sexless. 
 
 An immoral lesson or an immoral deduc- 
 tion must, of course, never be possible, but 
 neither is it necessary to try, in every page, 
 to cram a moral preachment down the 
 throats of poor, badgered infants, who must 
 listen,, every day of their lives, to wearisome 
 sermons from some one or the other of 
 many misguided acquaintances. If you had 
 to endure, throughout every revolution of 
 the earth upon its axis, to have some three 
 or four people solemnly warn you to be 
 good, you would become tired, by and by, 
 
 7i 
 
of being naturally good because you were 
 born that way and because your natural in- 
 stincts set in that direction, and be tempted, 
 merely out of self-assertiveness, to be bad. 
 It is quite possible to convey good moral 
 lessons without being so infernally obvious 
 about it. Happily the spasm is passing in 
 which it was considered immoral to tell 
 children fairy stories. Their imaginations 
 are fully as keen as ours, and need food just 
 as their bodies do, and it is most comfort- 
 ing to run across a tale now and then which 
 is meant merely to amuse them and to en- 
 gage their fancies. About once in a gener- 
 ation a Frank L. Baum arises to bless the 
 children, and is richly rewarded, but, like 
 the writer of humor, he is born, not made. 
 If you have inclinations in that direction, 
 you might try. You can never know 
 whether or not you have a gift until you put 
 it to the test. 
 
 The writing of stories for the very young 
 has, however, one very valuable feature for 
 all beginners. Several writers whom I know 
 had their earliest literary practice upon the 
 writing of children's stories, and were com- 
 
 72 
 
pelled thereby to seek simplicity of lan- 
 guage. It becomes necessary to use as 
 many words of one syllable as possible, 
 never to use a three-syllable word where a 
 two-syllable word will do, and never to use 
 a word of more than three syllables at all. 
 It would seem at the first glance that this 
 would hamper expression. On the contrary, 
 it is a vast aid to it. Let us examine a 
 sample paragraph. 
 
 "At the close of day the man stood on the 
 top of the hill, a black blot against the red 
 rim of the sun. The cold wind of the night 
 blew upon him from out the icy north. 
 Looking down on the far-off city which he 
 had just left for all time, he hid his face in 
 his hands and sobbed." 
 
 You will find, upon glancing over these 
 sentences, which are taken from no story 
 whatever, but which might well serve as the 
 introduction to one, that out of sixty-two 
 words, all but six consist of one syllable, 
 while the six exceptions are extremely 
 simple words; yet I do not believe that any 
 more vivid picture could be constructed 
 with all the polysyllabled Latin derivatives 
 
 73 
 
in the world. I would not counsel any one 
 to attempt to found his style upon Addison 
 or Steele or any other writer living or dead, 
 but I would counsel long and painstaking 
 practice in the art of writing in simple 
 words. You are compelled by this to di- 
 rectness of speech and clearness of idea. 
 You are bound to gain force by it. If you 
 have thoroughly grounded yourself in this 
 practice, you need the style of no other man 
 from which to copy. Afterwards you may 
 take liberties with your self-imposed restric- 
 tions ; may allow yourself as wide a choice as 
 you like, but always those fundamentals of 
 directness and clarity will be the basis of 
 your work, and you can not go far wrong. 
 For this reason I would commend the writ- 
 ing of stories for young children. If you 
 can secure the opportunity to edit or write 
 a child's page for some newspaper for a 
 year or two, take it at any price. Your gain 
 in simplicity of expression will be worth an 
 incalculable price to you in after years, if 
 you take up writing as a permanent profes- 
 sion. 
 
 As has been pointed out, this is not a 
 74 
 
paying branch. Commercial reasons are be- 
 hind this. Most of the children's pages in 
 the newspapers are supplied by syndicates 
 which provide the entire pages, including 
 the illustrations, very cheaply, sometimes 
 for as low as three dollars a week, furnish- 
 ing the same material to a great many pa- 
 pers. They do not pay high prices to their 
 writers because there are so many of them, 
 girls and beginners who do not expect much 
 for their labor. There are but very few 
 children's magazines, and these are unable 
 to pay large prices because they find it im- 
 possible to secure much advertising for their 
 pages. Children are not buyers of merchan- 
 dise to any large extent, and the older peo- 
 ple, as a rule, see their advertisements in 
 other places. 
 
 So far we have discussed only stories for 
 the very young, but magazine and Sunday 
 newspaper stories for youths of from twelve 
 to eighteen do not offer a much better mar- 
 ket, the same reasons prevailing. Stories of 
 this type for book publication, however, are 
 more worth while from a monetary stand- 
 point, as witness the books of Henty, Louisa 
 
 75 
 
M. Alcott, and others. Such books are usu- 
 ally written in series, and comprise, for boys, 
 tales of clean adventure in which the manly 
 qualities of courage and honesty have a 
 prominent part; and for girls, home or 
 school stories in which the counter-balanc- 
 ing feminine virtues have an equally impor- 
 tant place. In both of these the action must 
 be constant, for the minds of the young are 
 eager and restless as much so as their 
 bodies, and require constant change. 
 
 While very exceptional talent in this line 
 will reap a satisfactory commercial reward, 
 the same amount of effort and ability, if 
 spent upon general fiction, will pay much 
 better. It will not be for you to choose, 
 however. You will discover, eventually, 
 that you can write some things much bet- 
 ter than others. When you find that branch 
 of work, unless you are one gifted with a 
 universality of genius, stick to it and de- 
 velop it to your highest power, and at the 
 same time develop your market. Concen- 
 tration here, as in every other line of busi- 
 ness in the world, will achieve a most com- 
 fortable and satisfying success. 
 
 7 6 
 
Stories About Children 
 
 Stories about children, for "grown- 
 ups" to read, fall into an entirely 
 different class from those above, and 
 for these stories, well written, there is al- 
 ways a most eager demand. Josephine 
 Dodge Daskam, George Madden Martin, 
 Myra Kelly, and others, have attained 
 both fame and competence in this line, 
 and the fundamental feature of their work 
 has been that it is true to all childhood. 
 They have penetrated and understood the 
 minds and hearts of children, not to ap- 
 peal to them, but to appeal to others who 
 know and understand. Almost any bright 
 child may form the basis of such portrai- 
 ture. It must be borne in mind, how- 
 ever, that here, as in all other classes of 
 fiction-writing, stories do not come to your 
 hand ready-made. They are imperfect, as 
 you find them in real life, and your observa- 
 
 77 
 
tion and experience can only give you the 
 germ of the stories and the character-draw- 
 ing. The stories themselves must be devel- 
 oped from the material you find, and the 
 same rules which apply to other story con- 
 struction apply here. There must be a be- 
 ginning, a purpose, and a climax. 
 
 78 
 
 
Stories of Adventure 
 
 This is a class of story which will 
 never die, and its range is as wide 
 as the globe itself. Even in the 
 meekest and the mildest of us there ex- 
 ists at least the rudiments of a desire to 
 wander forth into the unknown, to do 
 battle, and to conquer, and if we can not 
 do this in the tender flesh, we insist upon 
 doing it in the hardy imagination. Good, 
 stirring stories of adventure excite and 
 still satisfy the wanderlust of most of us. 
 No hard and fast rule can be laid down 
 for this class of story, for it is of end- 
 less variety. Wherever circumstance or en- 
 vironment may be devised that fearless 
 men may venture into danger and peerless 
 women may be rescued, there will be found 
 the materials, and truth may put the cover 
 upon her well and rest a while. Only be 
 
 79 
 
careful that one thrill treads sharply upon 
 the heels of another, that your heroine be 
 as good as she is beautiful, your hero with- 
 out a trace of fear, and your villain remorse- 
 lessly blood-thirsty, and you may wander at 
 will in the realms of your fancy to devise 
 enough violent deeds for them to do. The 
 locale may be in a city, a village, or a forest; 
 on sea, in a mine, or in an airship; at the 
 equator or the north pole, in Japan or Africa 
 or America, in the past, the present, or the 
 future, or in all of these, bearing always in 
 mind, above everything, that you must have 
 swift and continuous action and high moral 
 purpose; for there is nothing cleaner in all 
 the realms of literary composition than the 
 morals of your slashing melodrama. To 
 that writer who can devise a new setting for 
 the old elements of adventure stories there 
 awaits laurels of gold which can be coined 
 into abundant dollars. 
 
 80 
 
The Love-Story 
 
 In no line of fiction is the tremendous 
 change in public taste shown more 
 than in what is known as the straight 
 love-story. In the old type love was a 
 strange, abstract sort of creation with every 
 hint of sex carefully eliminated, though 
 it was the be all and end all of the 
 living world. Impossible men wooed im- 
 possible maidens through long chapters 
 devoted for the most part to poetic de- 
 scription. An entire page was given up to 
 describing the sunny day in June in which 
 the story opened, and the remaining pages 
 told how the birds flitted in the trees and 
 the butterflies hovered over the flowers; 
 how the breezes, straying from far-off mead- 
 ows and laden with the fragrance of new- 
 mown hay, stirred gently the locks of the 
 fair-haired maiden in the garden plucking 
 
 81 
 
roses. End of first chapter. Chapter two 
 was devoted entirely to a description of the 
 fair-haired maiden; her lips, her eyes, her 
 alabaster brow, and every part of her vis- 
 ible perfections were carefully catalogued 
 and indexed until, at the close of the chap- 
 ter, He, astride a prancing charger, dis- 
 mounted at the gate. He was sometimes 
 rich and sometimes poor, but necessarily 
 honest. There was a rich and necessarily 
 dishonest man, considerably older and in- 
 variably of a dark complexion, who wanted 
 to marry her, and who was favored by her 
 parents. Need we say, dear reader, that 
 after much trial and tribulation and heart- 
 breaking sorrow and sickness-unto-death, 
 the rich but dishonest man was proved a 
 villain and she married Him ? Last of all, 
 after the story was all over, there was a de- 
 scription of the bridal garments and the 
 name of the hymn which was played as they 
 walked up the aisle of the church, in full 
 view, as they passed the window, of the vil- 
 lain's shining tombstone. About the only di- 
 vergence ever permissible in this class of 
 stories was in the names of the characters. 
 
 82 
 
Plot, incident, and character-drawing were 
 almost identical. 
 
 The modern straight love-story scarcely 
 exists, but love is still with us, as potent as 
 it was when it first rolled forth from chaos, 
 and in a story its presence is nearly always 
 necessary. In most cases, however, it is 
 only elementary and incidental, being ad- 
 mitted as a leading motive, but giving way 
 in interest of detail to the absorbing action 
 which grows out of it or revolves about it. 
 Men are ready to do battle and to die for love 
 just as promptly as ever, if need be, but the 
 condition is recognized in its truer relation 
 to life. Nearly always the love-story of to- 
 day is written with a frank recognition, 
 though by no means always expressed, of 
 the sex relation. It is taken for granted 
 that two given persons are more in har- 
 mony with each other psychologically, phys- 
 iologically, mentally, and spiritually than 
 either of these same two persons would be 
 with any other person. In this attitude 
 there has been no change since civilization 
 recognized the right of a woman to mutual 
 choice, but, nevertheless, love as the lead- 
 
 83 
 
ing incident of a story has been well nigh 
 discarded. It becomes the motive, mostly 
 A in the background, upon which all other in- 
 cidents are hinged and to which they refer. 
 The explanation is very simple, though the 
 principles have not changed. Men do not 
 neglect their business because they are in 
 love, but they succeed in it to prove to the 
 woman of their choice their prowess and 
 so to win her admiration, precisely as the 
 knights of old used to go out before break- 
 fast and kill an enemy or so, to lay the cap- 
 tured arms and accoutrement at the feet of 
 their ladies; only business does not seem so 
 romantic as righting, and it takes more space 
 and prominence to arouse interest. 
 
 The girl of the modern story is as differ- 
 ent from the girl of the early story as a 
 modern girl is different from the early girl, 
 or, in fact, as modern times are different 
 from early times. She is healthy of mind 
 and body. She is not innocent in the old- 
 time sense of being ignorant, and above all 
 she is independent, all facts which have been 
 so many death-blows to the old-time twad- 
 dler. The girl in the old-time love-story was 
 
 84 
 
exaggerated from the models that the writer 
 saw around him, and carried to the Nth 
 degree of what he thought a clinging vine 
 ought to be like. Women read these stories 
 and sighed and wept over them, and what 
 influence they had upon heredity, heaven 
 only knows. Happily we have outgrown 
 them. The girls in the stories of to-day are 
 drawn, as are all other characters and inci- 
 dents, from actual life, idealized but slightly, 
 and they have infinitely more naturalness; 
 and charm and winsomeness. 
 
 This branch of the work is so persistently 
 dwelt upon here because, with the very 
 young and consequently with every amateur, 
 the love-story, as a rule, f ollows immediately 
 upon those early attempts at poetry in which 
 every line is very carefully begun with a 
 capital letter and in which the last word of 
 each second and fourth line is most painstak- 
 ingly rhymed. When we come to have a 
 dim perception that perhaps Tennyson, 
 through some intangible reason or other, 
 had a trifle the advantage of us, we turn to 
 prose, and what more natural than the tran- 
 sition to poetic prose? It is the springtime 
 
 85 
 
of life with us, when birds twitter and flow- 
 ers bloom and morning skies blush red, and 
 all because love is in the world. Perhaps 
 those strangely stilted creatures who did 
 nothing all day long but fall in love and stay 
 in love from preface to finis, who talked love 
 and plotted love, dreamed love and thought 
 love, and all but ate and drank it through 
 the pages of the long since forgotten Godey's 
 Ladies' Magazine, owed their being to the 
 fact that American literature itself was then 
 quite young. To-day, in the dawning ma* 
 turity of Western letters, all is changed. 
 Once in a decade, perhaps, there is pub- 
 lished a strong and worth-while tale of love 
 which wades seas and scales mountains, but 
 for the most part this vast main-spring of 
 human motive and action is crowded into its 
 case with the other cogs and pinion wheels 
 that go to make up the general largeness of 
 life. 
 
 To tell the truth, editors do not particu- 
 larly care for love-stories, especially of the 
 variety that is likely to be turned out by the 
 young. They know, and writers who have 
 trod the thorny path which leads to suc- 
 
 86 
 
cess know, that this sort of tale is the most 
 difficult of all to write, and that the happy 
 medium between the mawkish sentimental- 
 ity of puppy love and the perfectly frigid at- 
 titude of those who marry because two can 
 live cheaper than one, is most difficult to 
 obtain. It is better by far to leave love- 
 stories alone, unless one happens to have a 
 special gift for them. In that case no con- 
 trary advice will hurt, because the gifted one 
 will pay no attention to it, but "will follow 
 his natural bent, even as you and I." 
 
 The obvious stories, based upon the ev- 
 ery-day comedy and tragedy about you, with 
 love perhaps as a background motive, al- 
 low me to repeat, are better. Some day, 
 when maturity comes, when you can study 
 this great emotion and passion in its true 
 relations, when you have attained facility 
 as a writer, you may perhaps write the great 
 love-story, but until then practice upon 
 something you can comprehend. 
 
 87 
 
The Historical Story 
 
 This is the sugar, or salt, or other 
 staple commodity, of the story- 
 telling and story-selling trade. It 
 is dear to our souls, it warms the cockles 
 of our hearts, this swash-buckling old friend 
 of ours. Occasionally the writers of his- 
 torical stories spend much time and re- 
 search to rehabilitate a by-gone period, to 
 reproduce it in all the finery and charm 
 that perspective lends it, and to make it 
 an accurate picture of the past, but with all 
 their labor it becomes, in fact, merely but 
 a background upon which to hang stirring 
 romance and adventure, and what was said 
 in relation to stories of adventure conse- 
 quently applies here. There is no question 
 that the historical setting gives to such sto- 
 ries the enhancement of color, but if at- 
 tempted they should be as near historically 
 accurate as patient research can make them. 
 A few mere "gadzooks" and "godswounds" 
 
 88 
 
will not take the place of this care in mak- 
 ing anything like permanent success. For 
 the balance the same rule applies to the con- 
 struction of these stories as to the construc- 
 tion of all others. They must have a cen- 
 tral theme, carried out to a logical conclu- 
 sion, and the character-drawing must be 
 true, not necessarily to the period so much 
 as to all humanity, its motives and its emo- 
 tions, its aims and ambitions, and its striv- 
 ings for a higher level. For myself, the writ- 
 ing of a historical story does not attract me. 
 I prefer the incidents and the people whom 
 I find dwelling near me, whom I meet in 
 clubs and hotels and in the parlors of my 
 friends, whom I see upon the streets of my 
 own city, on railway trains, and in distant 
 places, and it seems to me that if one can 
 write truthfully and well of these familiar 
 things, if he can reflect with fidelity the ani- 
 mating spirit, the customs, and the every- 
 day life of his own time, he will be writing 
 the true historical story; that is, the story 
 which in the future shall be regarded as of 
 value and interest for its historical fidelity, 
 in addition to its interest as an episode in 
 the never-ending drama of the human soul. 
 
 89 
 
Dialect Stories 
 
 Whatever else you do, be careful 
 of dialect. Mere "freak" spell- 
 ing by no means makes dia- 
 lect, which is the easiest of all things to 
 overdo. It should only be used where ab- 
 solutely necessary, and then with the ut- 
 most caution. Every phonetically spelled 
 word which deviates from the normal 
 should be said aloud and listened to with 
 a trained ear, to make sure that it repre- 
 sents exactly the required sound. Discard 
 nearly all of the conventionally misspelled 
 and frequently used words which have come 
 to represent Irish, German, Hebrew, Negro, 
 and other racial speeches. In the ordinary 
 "comic dialect," in nine cases out of ten, 
 these are more or less absurd exaggerations. 
 Unless you are thoroughly familiar with Ne- 
 gro character and have been in close and 
 
 90 
 
intimate enough contact with these half 
 childlike, half savage people to know per- 
 fectly their modes of speech — and thought 
 — do not, in the name of all consistency and 
 logic and sanity, attempt to write Negro 
 dialect. The same applies to all other like 
 cases. Dialect is seldom necessary to the 
 sustainment of the human interest of a 
 story, and the color it adds is better left out 
 unless it is well done. 
 
 Where one succeeds in dialect work, a 
 thousand fail. It requires a very musical 
 ear to detect and analyze the variation in the 
 pronunciation of words which makes dialect, 
 and it requires an intimate knowledge of 
 every living and thinking habit of the race 
 or district under consideration to know the 
 characteristic words in use; and this, after 
 all, is not only the live spirit of dialect, but 
 its main divergence, even more important 
 than mere differences of pronunciation. Un- 
 less you are sure that you can do these things 
 in absolute perfection, let them entirely 
 alone and turn your attention to something 
 else. 
 
 9i 
 
Stories Not to be Written 
 
 A void, by all means, the morbid and 
 ILl the gruesome. There is no de- 
 ■*■ ^ mand for them. It is doubtful if 
 Poe could to-day place in a good, well- 
 paying market his marvelous stories. As a 
 nation we want and demand cheerfulness. 
 Last, but not least, avoid the salacious and 
 the impure as you would poison. Aside 
 from the moral aspect, there is no money in 
 this sort of writing, notwithstanding the tre- 
 mendous success of "Three Weeks," which 
 at the time of penning this treatise is the 
 latest notable putrescence to assail the nos- 
 trils of the reading public. Where one story 
 of this sort succeeds, innumberable others 
 fail, and justly so. After all we are a whole- 
 some people; perhaps none more so in the 
 world. Moreover, while a success of this 
 sort might be possible in a book, in a mag- 
 azine it is entirely out of the question. No 
 magazine which will pay worth-while prices 
 
 92 
 
will purchase stories of this type. Let them 
 alone entirely. Do not allow yourself to 
 run away with the idea that they are artistic. 
 The most artistic things in the world are 
 the cleanest. The time has gone by when 
 it was considered »that artists, musical com- 
 posers, and authors must necessarily be of 
 unclean lives or of unclean thought. The 
 most successful artists in every line to-day, 
 and those the artistic excellence of whose 
 work most deserves success, are the cleanest 
 of habit and of mind, and if you want to 
 court professional failure and personal mis- 
 ery, try deviation from the wholesome prin- 
 ciples of right living and right thinking 
 taught in the Bible or in any other code of 
 ethics upon which a great and permanent re- 
 ligion has been founded. I speak this not as 
 one who would preach, but as a practical 
 man who has seen nearly all modes of life, 
 and whose judgment, which he feels to be 
 not entirely an unripe one, has picked out 
 positively the best; and remember that, no 
 matter how painstakingly you try to dis- 
 guise it, your true self will show through 
 your writing. 
 
 93 
 
Construction 
 
 A short story can not attempt to take 
 in the entire scope of a novel, nor 
 could any good novel be shorn of 
 its extraneous matter and condensed into 
 the compass of a short story. A novel 
 may comprise in its pages the detailed 
 history of a lifetime, the growth and dis- 
 integration of a nation, the improvement 
 or retrogression of a world. The short 
 story must be confined to a single inci- 
 dent. A short story should be to the 
 novel what a song is to an opera. Some- 
 times the song may be better than the wliole 
 balance of the opera which contained it, and 
 may be remembered longer. A novel may 
 be roughly compared to a landscape paint- 
 ing in which a beautiful tree is the most im- 
 portant figure, and the short story would, 
 following the analogy, be a painting of the 
 tree itself. The whole import of the book 
 
 94 
 
"Ben Hur" could not be compressed into the 
 limits of a short story, but the chariot race 
 of Ben Hur, with some trifling work to re- 
 model the rough edges where it has been 
 torn from its setting, would make a magnifi- 
 cent short story. Get this difference fixed 
 clearly in your mind before you attempt to 
 write. You must have one clearly defined 
 episode about which everything must cen- 
 ter. The plot may be as elaborate as you 
 like, but never for one moment may you for- 
 get that it must all revolve about or lead 
 up to a single climax. Miner episodes, it is 
 true, it may have in plenty, but these must 
 never be used unless they are illustrative of 
 or contributory to the main episode. 
 
 It is only within the last two or three 
 decades that this really new phase of liter- 
 ary accomplishment has developed to its 
 present pre-eminence. The short story in 
 its modern development is an entirely dis- 
 tinct creation, differing as much from the 
 early efforts of Boccaccio and his ilk as the 
 verse of Kipling differs from the epics of 
 Homer. There is no ground of comparison 
 because they are of an entirely different 
 
 05 
 
genus. It is as H. H. Wells put it, when 
 asked to decide which he thought the bet- 
 ter of two excellent but entirely dissimilar 
 stories. 
 
 "It is absurd," he said. "It is like asking 
 me which I like the better; butter or but- 
 tercups." 
 
 The early short story was the narration 
 of a mere passing incident, the event of a 
 day or a night. It was only the part of a 
 story. The modern short story has a be- 
 ginning, a purpose, and a climax. It com- 
 prises within its brief expanse clean, clear 
 character-drawing, and may, like the novel, 
 cover the entire career and purpose of a life- 
 time, but, unlike the novel, it must convey 
 the impression of this lifetime through the 
 illustrative episode which forms the entire 
 backbone of the story. The modern devel- 
 opment has action, description, and logical 
 construction, and all the elements which 
 used to make the successful old-fashioned 
 novel, but made tense and terse by the elimi- 
 nation of all but one illuminative climax. 
 
 In your early practice skeletonize your 
 story. Think it over well and shear of all 
 
 96 
 
its extraneous and contributory phases the 
 dramatic or other episode which is to be 
 your climax. Express this on paper in as 
 few terse words as possible. Add to this, 
 then, in brief, separate sentences the epi- 
 sodes which are to lead up to your climax. 
 When you have a clear and definite under- 
 standing of what you are about to do, se- 
 lect the names of your characters and their 
 scenic environment and invest them in your 
 own mind with a living, breathing person- 
 ality. Then start your story. If you invest 
 your characters with this personality before 
 you have studied well the construction, the 
 people whom you have created will take the 
 bit in their teeth, will run away with your 
 story, and destroy your theme. Inciden- 
 tally they may make a better story out of it 
 than you would have done, but this will 
 scarcely happen in your earlier efforts. 
 
 97 
 
The Beginning 
 
 Having selected your story and being 
 quite sure that you have a story to 
 tell, proceed as an old newspaper 
 man once told me was the proper way to 
 write news items. Begin in the middle, and 
 write both ways. By that it is meant that 
 you must make some almost startlingly in- 
 teresting statement at the beginning of 
 your story. Make your first page, your 
 first paragraph, your first sentence, your 
 first words, if possible, so absorbing that 
 they will force the attention of the reader, 
 and carry it through to the end of what 
 you have to say. The trick is compara- 
 tively simple. Do not write an introduc- 
 tion. 
 
 By way of illustration I am going to pre- 
 sent the beginning of a half dozen of my 
 own stories. It might have been more mod- 
 est to select those of other writers, to give 
 you examples from Poe and Hawthorne, 
 
 98 
 
from Flaubert and De Maupassant, from 
 O. Henry and Robert W. Chambers, but, 
 after all, I am much more familiar with 
 my own work, and it follows, too, as nearly 
 as I can make it, the principles in which I 
 firmly believe. 
 
 To begin with, here follow the first three 
 hundred and eighty-nine words of the man- 
 uscript of "Selling a Patent," one of a se- 
 ries of the adventures of one J. Rufus Wal- 
 lingford which were first published in the 
 "Saturday Evening Post" and afterwards 
 incorporated into a book under the title of 
 "Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford:" 
 
 A fussy little German, in very 
 new looking clothes which fitted 
 him almost like tailor-made, rushed 
 back to the gates of the train-shed, 
 where the conductor stood with his 
 eyes fixed intensely upon his watch, 
 his left hand poised ready to wave. 
 "I left my umbrella," spluttered 
 the passenger. 
 
 "No time," declared the autocrat, 
 not gruffly or unkindly, but in a 
 tone of virtuous devotion to duty. 
 99 
 
The little German's eyes glared 
 through his spectacles, his face 
 puffed red, his gray mustache bris- 
 tled. 
 
 "But it's my wife's umbrella!" 
 he urged, as if that might make a 
 difference. 
 
 The brass-buttoned slave to duty 
 did not even smile. He raised his 
 hand, and in a moment more the 
 potent turn of his wrist would have 
 sent Number Eighteen plunging on 
 her westward way. In that mo- 
 ment, however, the Pullman con- 
 ductor, waiting with him, clutched 
 the blue arm of authority. 
 
 "Hold her a second," he advised, 
 with his thumb pointed far up the 
 platform. "Here comes from a dol- 
 lar up for everybody. He 's rode 
 with me before." 
 
 The captain of Eighteen gave a 
 swift glance and was satisfied. 
 
 "Sure. I know him," he said of 
 the newcomer, then he turned to 
 the still desperately hopeful passen- 
 ioo 
 
ger and relented. "Run!" he di- 
 rected briefly. 
 
 The gentleman who has secured 
 for Carl Klug this boon, merely by 
 an opportune arrival, was not hur- 
 rying. He was too large a man to 
 hurry, so a depot porter was doing 
 it for him. The porter plunged on 
 in advance, springing heavily from 
 one bent leg to the other, weighted 
 down with a hat box in one hand, 
 a huge Gladstone bag in the other, 
 and a suit case under each arm. 
 The perspiration was streaming 
 down his face, but he was quite con- 
 tent. Behind him stalked J. Rufus 
 Wallingford, carrying only a cane 
 and gloves; but more, for him, 
 would have seemed absurd, for 
 when he moved the background 
 seemed to advance with him, he 
 was so broad of shoulder and of 
 chest and of mid-girth. Dignity ra- 
 diated from his frame and carriage, 
 good humor from his big face, 
 wealth from every line and crease 
 101 
 
of his garments, and it was no mat- 
 ter for wonder that even the rigid 
 schedule of Number Eighteen was 
 glad to extend to this master of cir- 
 cumstances its small fraction of 
 elasticity. 
 
 In this space, which was the beginning 
 of a story running to the unusually cum- 
 bersome length of twenty thousand words, 
 five clearly defined character portraits are 
 suggested: the German passenger, a train 
 conductor, a Pullman conductor, a depot 
 porter, and J. Rufus Wallingford, who is 
 the central figure of the story. The Ger- 
 man is the man whom Wallingford pro- 
 ceeds to rob of his patent on a sales-re- 
 cording device; but three of the characters 
 — the train crew — never appear again; and 
 while these are graphically enough pic- 
 tured, close analysis will show that they are 
 not as carefully drawn as the two leading 
 characters. They are only described as to 
 the general characteristics of conductors and 
 porters, being left indefinite as to facial and 
 bodily characteristics so that the reader may 
 form his own pictures of them. To have 
 
 102 
 
described them more accurately would have 
 been to have fixed them too firmly in the 
 minds of readers; they would then have re- 
 mained in the memory and have excited a 
 lingering wonder as to when they would ap- 
 pear again. 
 
 In this beginning action is started at 
 once. The picture is one that has life and 
 motion. Moreover, the background is one 
 with which nearly all people are familiar. 
 There is a hint, too, that the man Walling- 
 f ord is a "smooth" individual, and not overly 
 scrupulous. 
 
 Let us go over the first paragraph again: 
 
 A fussy little German, in very 
 new looking clothes which fitted 
 him almost like tailor-made, rushed 
 back to the gates of the train-shed, 
 where the conductor stood with his 
 eyes fixed intently on his watch, his 
 left hand poised ready to wave. 
 
 At the very outset and within a few 
 words two characters and immediate action 
 are introduced, and the reader is interested 
 at once, if he is going to be interested at all. 
 
 103 
 
The next example is the beginning of a 
 story called "Skeezicks," published in "Mc- 
 Clure's Magazine :" 
 
 "Does Master Charles Edward 
 Freeman, Esquire, live here?" po- 
 litely asked Uncle Joe, pausing in 
 mock hesitation. 
 
 The small boy on the gate-post, 
 who had been idly drumming his 
 heels against the smooth wood, at 
 once checked back his smile of 
 greeting, ready for any amount of 
 serious pretense. 
 
 "Yes, sir," he answered, with 
 equally grave courtesy. 
 
 "And is the gentleman at home?" 
 Uncle Joe was anxious to know. 
 
 "No, sir," replied the boy, not 
 even the suspicion of twinkle in his 
 inscrutable eyes. 
 
 "No?" inquired the young man 
 in surprise. "It 's really too bad 
 that he is away, for I wished to 
 see him on rather particular busi- 
 ness not unconnected with choco- 
 late creams. Please tell him that 
 104 
 
I called, will you?" And Uncle Joe 
 slowly moved on. 
 
 That broke the combination. 
 
 "Uncle Joe!" cried an eager 
 voice, childish this time and quite 
 unlike the one that had been used 
 up to this point. "Come back, 
 Uncle Joe ! I 'm Charles Edward 
 Freeman, but really and truly I 'm 
 not at home, you know, because 
 I 'm right here on the gate-post." 
 This with a gleeful laugh. 
 
 Uncle Joe returned, but uncon- 
 vinced. 
 
 "You do n't mean to claim that 
 you are Master Charles Edward 
 Freeman, Esquire, do you?" he de- 
 manded. 
 
 "Yes, sir." The boy was again 
 gravity itself. 
 
 "Nonsense ! Why, it 's quite im- 
 possible. Charles Edward Free- 
 man is a regular six-foot-two name, 
 with a plug hat and a cane and 
 other trimmings. I 'm certain 
 you 're not six foot two. Jump 
 105 
 
down here and let me measure 
 you." 
 The entire whimsical nature of what is 
 to follow is foreshadowed in these para- 
 graphs, and two of the three main charac- 
 ters are introduced at once. 
 
 The next example is from "The Strike 
 Breaker," also published in "McClure's:" 
 Young Tremont paused to light 
 a cigar, but, as he did so, he cast 
 a quick glance down the dark alley 
 opposite which he stood. It was 
 just as well to be cautious. At first 
 the alley- way seemed empty, but as 
 the match flared up and the end of 
 his Havana caught the fire, a rough 
 figure came from behind the big 
 telephone pole. Instantly Tremont 
 dropped his hands into his overcoat 
 pockets. As the figure came to- 
 
 m 
 
 ward him, the muzzles of two con- 
 cealed hammerless pistols were 
 pointing straight at it, a cool finger 
 on each trigger. 
 Again, in the first paragraph, a back- 
 ground picture, a hint of character-drawing, 
 106 
 
and action, always action. In this, too, ob- 
 serve that in very few words the reader is 
 given a distinct imagery of the surround- 
 ings. Read it over and you will see that 
 there is no description whatever. There is 
 a mere mention of a dark alley mouth with 
 a telephone pole in it, and yet I venture to 
 say that after the reading of that paragraph 
 you had a vivid mental picture of the entire 
 scene. The point is that only the impres- 
 sion of the scene was given and you supplied 
 all the missing details from your own imag- 
 ination and your own memory of such lo- 
 calities. 
 
 Below is the first paragraph of "Move 
 On," a story published in "Munsey's-:" 
 Along about midnight, a man 
 with his head bent and his shoul- 
 ders huddled against the biting 
 cold, turned from the railroad track 
 and limped painfully back to the 
 brickyard, where the smoke from 
 thick, squat chimneys glowed red 
 and promised warmth. As he en- 
 tered the lane of sheds he saw a 
 lantern come swinging up from the 
 107 
 
other end, and hid himself in the 
 shadow of a pile of clay-hung lum- 
 ber. The watchman stalked by, 
 whistling cheerfully. Out of the 
 corner of his eye he saw the va- 
 grant as the gleam of the lantern 
 flashed upon him, but he paid no 
 attention; he did not want to see 
 the man. He was a big, bluff, 
 hearty fellow who had known cold 
 nights himself. 
 
 Here is the same principle; to begin pre- 
 cisely as if the reader were familiar with all 
 the preceding circumstances, to leave out all 
 the uninteresting details, and to proceed at 
 once with the groundwork of the story. In 
 other words, your characters are introduced 
 at a moment when they are already in ac- 
 tion, and the story is under way at the mo- 
 ment you meet them. 
 
 Next follows the beginning of "Fanchon 
 The Lobster," published in the "Saturday 
 Evening Post," a story of entirely different 
 type from any of the others, but introducing 
 the two leading characters, Pierre Piquard 
 
 108 
 
and the remarkable lobster, and both in 
 action: 
 
 Oh, it was an admirable lobster! 
 Excellent! Per-fect! Pierre Pi- 
 quard gesticulated with joy, both 
 plump, white hands clasped before 
 his throat, even while Francois ges- 
 ticulated with pain. There had 
 been other lobsters which had ar- 
 rived sturdily protesting after their 
 long and tiresome journey from the 
 east, but none with the tremendous 
 vitality — and spirit! — of this one. 
 The moment Francois, used to the 
 feeble and sluggish movements of 
 the creatures, had thrust down his 
 hand, there came a swift move- 
 ment and click, and behold, from 
 one lean finger of the dancing Fran- 
 cois dangled the entire weight of 
 the beast! 
 
 The beginning of "The Making of Bobby 
 Burnit," published as a series of stories in 
 the "Saturday Evening Post," afterwards as 
 a connected book, and then turned into a 
 
 109 
 
play, is slightly different because it intro- 
 duces a character who, though one of the 
 leading personages in the "cast," is dead be- 
 fore the story begins. It is attempted in 
 this, however, to present an interesting and 
 unusual situation in the very first paragraph, 
 and the manner in which "Bobby" has been 
 accepted by the public would lead to the be- 
 lief that this was accomplished. 
 
 "I am profoundly convinced that 
 my son is a fool," read the will of 
 old John Burnit. "I am, however, 
 also convinced that I allowed him 
 to become so, by too much absorp- 
 tion in my own affairs and too lit- 
 tle in his, and, therefore, his being 
 a fool is hereditary; consequently 
 I feel it my duty, first : to give him 
 a fair trial at making his own way, 
 and second: to place the balance of 
 my fortune in such trust that he 
 can not starve. The trusteeship is 
 already created and the details are 
 nobody's present business. My son 
 Robert will take over The John 
 Burnit Store and personally con- 
 no 
 
duct it, as his only resource, with- 
 out further question as to what else 
 I may have left behind me. This 
 is my last will and testament." 
 
 That is how cheerful Bobby Bur- 
 nit, with no thought heretofore 
 above healthy amusements and Ag- 
 nes Elliston, suddenly became a 
 business man, after having been 
 raised to become the idle heir to 
 about three million dollars. Of 
 course, having no kith nor kin in 
 all this wide world, he went imme- 
 diately to consult Agnes. It is 
 quite likely that if he had been sup- 
 plied with dozens of uncles and 
 aunts he would have gone first to 
 Agnes anyhow, having a mighty 
 regard for her keen judgment, even 
 though her clear gaze rested now 
 and then all too critically upon him- 
 self. 
 
 Practice beginnings conscientiously, and 
 your time will not be wasted, for when you 
 have a good beginning you are almost cer- 
 tain to build good stories. 
 
 in 
 
Development 
 
 I have attempted to show that an intro- 
 duction should, above all things, in- 
 clude in some way the idea of motion, 
 and particularly visible motion; that the 
 nature of the story should be foreshadowed 
 in it, and that the plot should begin at 
 once, without tedious explanation or de- 
 scription. The development of the story 
 must proceed with equal swiftness. Bear- 
 ing constantly in mind the climax which 
 makes your story worth telling, proceed to- 
 ward it as soon as you have your ground- 
 work laid, your characters introduced, and 
 the minor episodes relating to introduction 
 out of the way. It is not meant that you 
 should leave out all the interesting details 
 which go to the making of color. Write 
 these as fully as you like, remembering 
 that it is always easier to cut out than to 
 supply new material, but be very sure, in 
 
 112 
 
your revision, that you do not let stand 
 any color which clogs the definite onward 
 sweep of your narrative. 
 
 Let me refer back to the tales of which 
 the beginnings have been given in the pre- 
 ceding pages, in order to show how simple 
 is the outline of a short story. 
 
 In "Selling a Patent," Mr. Wallingford 
 persuades Mr. Klug that the way to sell a 
 patent to a monopoly is to form a manufac- 
 turing company, and by competition compel 
 the monopoly to buy him out. He joins with 
 Mr. Klug in the forming of this company 
 and immediately proceeds to bankrupt it, 
 forcing all its property and other valuable 
 considerations, including the patent, to a 
 sheriff's sale, in which he buys up the patent 
 for "a song," having previously arranged to 
 sell it to the monopoly at a good price. That 
 is the skeleton. The means he employed, the 
 various people with whom he associated, are 
 the details, but the detail is never allowed to 
 overshadow the story, which ends precisely 
 upon the climax of Wallingford's securing 
 possession of the patent. 
 
 In "Skeezicks," through a whimsical con- 
 "3 
 
versation with Uncle Joe, Skeezicks gains 
 the idea of buying an engagement ring for 
 a young lady of whom he thinks a great deal 
 and with whom Uncle Joe is in love. Upon 
 the eve of her departure for Europe, just as 
 Uncle Joe is going to propose, he sees Skee- 
 zicks* engagement ring, an imitation dia- 
 mond, upon her finger. He has just met his 
 rival coming away from the house and im- 
 mediately jumps to the natural conclusion, 
 upon which he remains silent. After she 
 has gone away Skeezicks inadvertently lets 
 slip the fact of his purchase of the ring, 
 and Uncle Joe follows the young lady upon 
 the next train. The story ends with a tel- 
 egram, presumably signed by Skeezicks, 
 which states that Uncle Joe is coming to 
 trade rings. All there is to plot is told in 
 the above sentences, but the story occupied 
 an approximate seven thousand words in the 
 telling. This was all color and contributory 
 incident, every bit of which went toward the 
 building up of the climax. 
 
 In "The Strike Breaker'* the figure ap- 
 proaching Tremont in the dark is Lanigan, 
 a striker who wants to come back to work 
 114 
 
as a "scab," though he is an ardent union 
 man, because his wife and boy are sick. 
 Tremont accepts him gladly, since his fight 
 against the strikers is likely to fail because 
 he can not get a competent engineer. Lani- 
 gan comes into the factory, which is prac- 
 tically in a state of siege, has his life heavily 
 insured, becomes the backbone of Tremont's 
 strike-breaking organization, and later, over- 
 come by the thought of the want and misery 
 which his action is causing the families of 
 his brethren of the union ranks, resigns and 
 goes out among the vengeful mob surround- 
 ing the factory to explain that he has quit. 
 He is shot by an enemy in the crowd. The 
 story ends abruptly upon the death of Lani- 
 gan, it being told long previously that his 
 wife and child are well provided for and 
 have moved to the country, amid healthy 
 surroundings. That story, as published, 
 counted ten thousand words, a length sel- 
 dom permitted by any magazine. 
 
 The next story, "Move On," is merely an 
 episode wherein a man, reduced to the ranks 
 of tramping because he is unable to find 
 work within the scope of his ability, is com- 
 
 "5 
 
pelled to move on, though starving and half 
 frozen, from city to village and from village 
 to farm, and from farm back to village and 
 city, the climax coming when at last, a mis- 
 erable outcast, and most forbidding and re- 
 pellant-looking, he finds the man who, in his 
 rough way, takes pity on him and makes 
 him a human being again. There is scarcely 
 any trace of plot to this, and yet it required 
 five thousand words to form sufficient con- 
 trast to make the climax of rest sufficiently 
 strong. 
 
 In "Fanchon the Lobster," a tale of ab- 
 surdity, the lobster is made a pet by Pierre 
 Piquard. A fellow countryman insists upon 
 having that lobster cooked for his dinner. 
 He forcibly seizes it and plunges it in a pot 
 of boiling water. Pierre, the chef, then, out 
 of revenge, prepares a sauce for the lobster 
 which makes the incontinent diner die of 
 acute indigestion. The diner was a stranger, 
 and Pierre paid his funeral expenses so that 
 he might go out on splendid Sunday morn- 
 ings and lay wreaths of water-cress upon the 
 grave of Fanchon. 
 
 In "The Making of Bobby Burnit," Bobby 
 116 
 
loses control of his father's business through 
 a consolidation with a rival, a stock com- 
 pany being formed and Bobby being voted 
 out of an influential position, or even divi- 
 dends on his holdings, because, in his igno- 
 rance, he permitted his rival, who was also 
 his father's old enemy, to obtain possession 
 of a' majority of stock. Afterwards, with 
 the help of his trustee, who proves to be 
 Agnes Elliston, the girl with whom he is in 
 love, he is able to regain control. This sen- 
 tence tells exactly what he did, but how he 
 did it is the interesting part. 
 
 These brief examples are given to show 
 the simplicity of plot to which a short story 
 must necessarily be confined. If you have 
 a story in mind, skeletonize it as briefly as 
 these have been outlined before you begin; 
 but it is not wise to attempt to minutely plan 
 all the detail, for if you are fertile enough 
 to write good stories at all, you will find 
 that a curious psychological process begins 
 almost as soon as you start to write; both 
 your characters and your situations, more 
 or less, act almost as if endowed with inde- 
 pendent life and intelligence. They will ut- 
 
 117 
 
terly refuse to follow the rigid lines you have 
 laid down for them, and will work out side- 
 plots and incidents and situations of their 
 own. 
 
 Suppose your story to be precisely as the 
 last one mentioned; how a young man lost 
 his business through lack of knowledge of 
 stock company manipulation, and how he 
 regained it with the assistance of his "best 
 girl." You will have a more or less definite 
 idea of the exact steps by which this is to 
 be done, but when you have finished your 
 story you will find it entirely different, in the 
 majority of cases, from the one you set out 
 to write. You may have followed your skel- 
 eton exactly, but your detail will be very 
 different from that which you intended, and 
 if you are gifted at all in the writing way, 
 the altered result will be much better than 
 the original could have been. 
 
 \ 
 
 iig 
 
The Ending 
 
 Above all things, quit when you are 
 iJk through. Stop exactly on your cli- 
 ■*■ "^ max. If you deem it necessary to 
 tell what became of your characters after 
 the ending of the story, hint at it, or 
 prophesy it, before you reach your dra- 
 matic ending. Do not shoot off a solitary 
 remaining Roman candle after you have 
 displayed your grand, final set piece. 
 
 119 
 
Description 
 
 Some description is, of course, vitally 
 necessary, but leave out all lengthy 
 delineations of people, of places, of 
 scenery. Scattered information about these 
 through the story when they are positively 
 needed, but sketch them in very briefly, sug- 
 gesting just enough of general outline to 
 let the imagination of the reader build up 
 for himself the missing detail. If you must 
 write description, write it. Be painstak- 
 ing about it; show that your observation 
 is keen and sympathetic; go over the work 
 and polish it; get it so that it is really a 
 poetic gem told in musical prose ; then, hav- 
 ing gloated over it to your heart's content, 
 throw it away. It is only a clog upon the 
 swing of your narrative. 
 
 The above, of course, refers to descriptive 
 passages as applied to short story writ- 
 zrig. If you mean to do descriptive writing 
 
 120 
 
— if you have a strong natural inclination 
 for it — that, of course, is a different matter. 
 It is not meant here to decry descriptive 
 writing, which is an art well worth culti- 
 vating, but merely to insist that description 
 of any length has no place in the short story. 
 Every short story writer should be able to 
 write minutely detailed description, if for 
 no other reason, to be able to judge what 
 to leave out in condensation. This is largely 
 a matter of observation, of logical arrange- 
 ment, and of rhetoric, and separate practice 
 in this will well repay the effort. 
 
 121 
 
General Observations 
 
 Confine yourself as much as possible 
 t to definite action, and to conversa- 
 tion which is in itself both vital 
 and interesting. Insert conversation very 
 early in your pages. Some stories will 
 not permit of this, but in the majority 
 of cases if the first page of your manu- 
 script contains no quotation marks, that 
 is, no directly important speech delivered 
 by one of your characters, you had best 
 remodel your story to introduce conversa- 
 tion much earlier. There is a good mechan- 
 ical reason for this. A solid page of narra- 
 tive, especially at the beginning, looks very 
 dead to the reader. The eye, glancing down 
 the page, however, will catch a short sen- 
 tence set apart in quotation marks, and if 
 that sentence is a virile one, the reader, 
 glancing over the pages of the magazine 
 with no intention whatever of reading every 
 
 122 
 
article in it, will go back to the introduc- 
 tion and begin the story which contains that 
 virile sentence. It is legitimate to take ad- 
 vantage of this trait in human nature. If 
 you have a message to deliver and can not 
 get a hearing for it, you might as well not 
 be possessed of the message. You must re- 
 member, too, that the same device which 
 will catch the eye of the reader of a maga- 
 zine will catch the eye of the person who 
 reads your manuscript. It is a part of the 
 art of story-telling to take advantage of all 
 the little points which will render what you 
 have to say more interesting. 
 
 Do not indulge in philosophy or com- 
 ment except very, very briefly, and only 
 when necessary to explain character. Even 
 then your drawing may be much better ac- 
 complished by action or a terse bit of speech. 
 
 Be sure that you are in earnest; be sure 
 that you believe what you say; be sure that 
 your story is true in every particular, true 
 in logic, true in character-drawing, true to 
 the best instincts that are in you. No hu- 
 man being must be the worse for a line 
 
 123 
 
that you write. If you have a gift you 
 must not prostitute it. Perhaps all of us 
 who have written have penned stories for 
 which we are sorry, but if the constant at- 
 tempt is put forward to produce the best 
 there is in you, the general average is bound 
 to tell, and the effort is certain to have its 
 bearing upon your standing in the story- 
 telling field. 
 
 124 
 
Condensation 
 
 This part of the "editing" is so im- 
 portant that it has been deemed 
 wise to consider it separately. 
 After you have finished, go over your 
 story and cut out ruthlessly every unneces- 
 sary word, sentence, paragraph; every un- 
 necessary page! Ask yourself, about each 
 individual atom of your story, "Is this vi- j 
 tally necessary to the painting of my pic- 
 ttflre, the unfolding of my plot, the develop- 
 ment of my climax ?" If it is not, cross it 
 out. If you follow this rule strictly you 
 will find that you have destroyed most of 
 your pet passages, your flowery descrip- 
 tions, your philosophical deductions, your 
 keen character analyses, but you will prob- 
 ably have saved your story from the waste- 
 basket. Too much stress can not be laid 
 upon this matter of condensation. More 
 
 125 
 
good stories are probably ruined by begin- 
 ners through the fault of diffuseness than 
 through any other cause. 
 
 It is not meant that anything vitally nec- 
 essary or interesting should be cut out to 
 make your story shorter, but only that the 
 unnecessary things should be shorn away. 
 Unnecessary descriptions, unnecessary con- 
 versations, even unnecessary episodes will 
 be found, upon careful editing. Some of 
 these things you will think that you have 
 expressed most neatly, and it will be diffi- 
 cult for you to let them go, but subject them 
 to the one rigid test of whether they are 
 absolutely essential to the development of 
 your story. If they are not, you might save 
 them with the idea of using them in some 
 place where they will be more apropos, but 
 in any event do away with them. This, 
 during your apprenticeship. Later, after 
 you have gained facility and judgment and 
 insight, you may take liberties with this 
 rule and permit to remain passages and per- 
 haps incidents not exactly needful, but that 
 are in themselves attractive enough to pay 
 for the space they take up; but your judg- 
 
 126 
 
ment as to this, in the beginning, will not 
 be very certain, and it is best to hold very 
 rigidly to your main theme. If you become 
 proficient in writing, and find a market for 
 your ware, and stay in the profession per- 
 manently, as the years pass on you will 
 find yourself leaving out extraneous matter 
 in the first writing, but it is almost impos- 
 sible to do this at the start; there are too 
 many temptations to take attractive by- 
 paths. A good rule is to count the words 
 after your story is written, cut out one- 
 third, rewrite it so as to have clean copy, 
 then cut out all you can additionally. 
 
 127 
 
Length of Stories 
 
 In this place the proper length of short 
 stories might be mentioned. Seven 
 thousand words, by a known writer, 
 is the utmost limit that is permissible in 
 the average magazine, and even then the 
 story must be one of most exceptional 
 merit; but it would be almost fatal to 
 his prospects for the beginner to offer a 
 story of over five thousand words. Three 
 thousand is a much better length, and the 
 amateur will find a more ready accept- 
 ance for even a two-thousand-word tale. 
 Almost any editor who would hesitate 
 over a three or four-thousand-word manu- 
 script would find space for one of equal 
 merit of two thousand words, and be glad 
 to get it; for there is a dearth of this length 
 story. It requires much more skill to write 
 an acceptable two-thousand- word story than 
 one of seven thousand. Stories of from six 
 
 128 
 
or seven hundred words to a thousand are 
 also eagerly sought by many magazines 
 which have a separate department for 
 sketches of this length. These sketches are 
 excellent practice, too. They should be con- 
 fined merely to a dramatic climax and such 
 absolutely necessary details as explain it 
 and throw it into relief. Some few publica- 
 tions will accommodate stories of almost 
 any length if of exceptional merit. If they 
 are too long they are run as two installment 
 or even three installment stories, but the 
 drawback to this is that the market is so 
 restricted, and if the "Saturday Evening 
 Post" and one or two other publications 
 which use them should refuse your stories 
 of exceptional length, they stay upon your 
 hands; so it is best to hold rigidly in the 
 beginning to an absolute four-thousand- 
 word limit, keeping as much under that 
 length as possible. 
 
 129 
 
Editing 
 
 This is of almost as much importance 
 as the building of the story itself. 
 Certain authors who turn out very 
 careful and very highly polished work, edit 
 and even rewrite their stories an infinite 
 number of times. This is largely a tem- 
 peramental matter. Writers with newspa- 
 per training can scarcely be brought to 
 do this, and in their case so many edit- 
 ings and rewritings are seldom neces- 
 sary, for the newspaper worker learns to 
 edit as he goes. The writer of this trea- 
 tise almost invariably has his stories typed 
 three times. The first typing is edited 
 I for both condensation and construction,, 
 but it would be better for the amateur 
 to do this in separate revision. The first 
 writing should be studied very carefully 
 for construction. It might be necessary to 
 alter almost the entire plot, to leave out or 
 
 130 
 
put in episodes, conversations, and descrip- 
 tions. In the second editing the condensa- 
 tion should be done. The third editing 
 should be for polish, and in this the attempt 
 should be made to improve all descriptions 
 and conversations, to improve rhetoric and 
 diction, to express every thought more clev- 
 erly. A fourth transcription should then be 
 made on good paper for mailing, and this, 
 before it is sent away, should be gone over 
 very carefully for typographical errors. No 
 manuscript should leave your hand until it 
 is letter and comma perfect. No typograph- 
 ical slips, no careless typewriting should be 
 permitted, for these things have their un- 
 doubted influence. The question of how 
 many times you are to edit a manuscript, 
 however, depends entirely upon your nat- 
 ural instinct and habit of accuracy, and the 
 question is one which, after all, remains to 
 be solved in practice, with perhaps a sepa- 
 rate solution for each writer. 
 
 131 
 
Preparing a Manuscript 
 
 By all means typwrite your offerings. 
 It would be very expensive to hire 
 this done, and might also be an 
 unwise investment; but small typewriters 
 can be bought very cheaply, and it is no 
 trick for any person with a trifle of pa- 
 tience to learn to operate one with suffi- 
 cient facility. Longhand stories, if leg- 
 ibly written, will be read, but the easier 
 you can make it for the manuscript reader 
 in the editorial office the more favorably 
 he will feel toward your offering. Of 
 course you will write only upon one side of 
 the paper, whether you are preparing your 
 manuscript in longhand or on a typewriting 
 machine. If the latter, double-space your 
 "copy," to allow of interlineations, and leave 
 a reasonably wide margin. Write your 
 name and address upon the first sheet, and 
 put the page number upon every page, to- 
 
 132 
 
gether with the title of the story, so that if 
 the sheets become separated it will be easier 
 to identify them and reinsert them in their 
 proper places in the manuscript. It is not 
 advisable to tack manuscript together by 
 clips or fasteners of any sort. I have sent 
 out hundreds of manuscripts, and have never 
 fastened any of them together, and have 
 never had a sheet lost from any of them. 
 The reason for not binding them is that 
 manuscripts are most conveniently handled 
 by reading the first page and slipping it be- 
 hind the last one, reading the second page 
 and slipping that behind the first one, and 
 so on, so that after the last page has been 
 read and slipped behind the pack, the en- 
 tire manuscript remains first page up, as it 
 was before. 
 
 The rule about "mailing flat" has been 
 promulgated so often by publishers that, by 
 this time, it would seem everybody should 
 know better than to roll a manuscript. 
 From the experience of the writer, however, 
 in handling the "copy" of amateurs, all peo- 
 ple do not know this. Rolled manuscripts 
 will not be read. They will be returned 
 
 *33 
 
without comment, no matter how good the 
 story is. If you want to know the reason 
 for this send away a rolled manuscript. 
 After it comes back from its two weeks of 
 tightly cramped wandering, try to hold it 
 open and read it, and you will discover this 
 to be almost a physical impossibility. Edi- 
 tors and manuscript readers are very busy 
 men, and they have not the time to struggle 
 with follies of this sort. 
 
 Use paper of the regulation size, approx- 
 imately eight and one-half by eleven inches, 
 and fold it, if you wish to save postage, the 
 proper size to go in a "legal" envelope. A 
 better plan is to fold it over just once. You 
 can secure, very cheaply, stout Manila en- 
 velopes of just the right size to accommodate 
 these half-folded sheets. When mailing a 
 manuscript in this way, a sheet of paste- 
 board, cut to the right size, should be en- 
 closed within it, unless the manuscript is 
 rather stiff, to keep it from bending and to 
 keep the corners from curling over. Still a 
 better plan is to send the manuscript per- 
 fectly flat, without folding at all. Envelopes 
 
 134 
 
of the proper size for this may be secured at 
 almost any stationer's shop, and sheets of 
 pasteboard, cut to the same size as the manu- 
 script, should be placed front and back, 
 slight rubber bands being placed around the 
 whole before insertion into the envelope. 
 This insures that your manuscript, clean 
 and unbent, will lie before the manuscript 
 reader as neatly as it lies before you after 
 you have finished it, and the psychology of 
 this fresh appearance is of just as much 
 value as if you went in to see a business 
 man neat and clean in place of rumpled and 
 unwashed. You produce a favorable impres- 
 sion upon him in the first place, and then 
 if you have anything worth while to say, 
 you have secured an audience prejudiced in 
 your favor. For this reason, after the re- 
 turn of a manuscript examine it critically, 
 and if it shows the least sign of wear, re- 
 copy it before you send it out again. This 
 seems a lot of work, but it pays. 
 
 Be sure that you prepay full first-class 
 postage, and enclose a like amount in a sep- 
 arate small envelope, the latter marked on 
 
 135 
 
the outside with the information that it con- 
 tains stamps to a certain amount accompa- 
 nying such and such a story. Do not write 
 the editor a letter telling him how good the 
 story is. Any letter to an editor, unless he 
 has already accepted some of your stories, 
 or unless you know him personally, is en- 
 tirely useless. Your offering will rest 
 strictly upon its own merits. Have your 
 name and address on the first page of the 
 story; that is sufficient. The editor knows 
 to whom to return it if he can not use it, 
 or whom to pay in case he accepts it. 
 
 After you have your manuscript ready to 
 mail go over it once more. You may find 
 a place to substitute a better word for one 
 already used, to alter, at the last moment, 
 a phrase or a speech so that it will be more 
 to the point. You will invariably find some 
 commas that should have been left out or 
 places where some should be inserted; you 
 will find one or more misspelled words, due 
 to haste in writing, possibly, and other lit- 
 tle defects the correction of which will make 
 your offering more perfect. It might even 
 
 136 
 
strike you that an entire page, or two or 
 three pages, should be rewritten. If so, do 
 not spare the pains, for in the long run this 
 care will pay you large dividends. No busi- 
 ness, and story-writing is a business, ever 
 succeeded without a minute and painstaking 
 attention to details. 
 
 137 
 
Marketing 
 
 When your effort is ready, try to 
 market it. Do not pay any at- 
 tention to the criticism of your 
 friends ; do not bother them with your work. 
 They do n't know anything about it, and if 
 they did could not tell you. The only critic 
 for whose opinion you need at all care is 
 the public, and that public is fairly well un- 
 derstood by the men who buy manuscript. 
 Make up your mind to this fact ; you will 
 receive absolutely fair treatment. There is 
 no "clique" in the publishing business, and 
 it does not require a "pull" to obtain recog- 
 nition. I can not understand how this silly 
 idea of favoritism came about, unless it was 
 evolved by unsuccessful writers to soothe 
 their own sense of chagrin. I have met 
 most intimately nearly every editor in the 
 United States and have talked shop with 
 them, not only in their offices but in their 
 clubs, over luncheons and dinners, and I am 
 
 138 
 
quite sure that there is no other business or 
 profession in the world which is more 
 frankly and honorably and openly con- 
 ducted. The only passport you need to the 
 courtesies and good graces of publishers is 
 to have written a good story, one that is 
 true in its analysis and protrayal of human 
 life. They are on the lookout all the time 
 for wholesome stories written entertainingly 
 and from a fresh angle, and once that story 
 is written, the entire profession extends to 
 you the right hand of fellowship and wel- 
 comes you among the elect. Aside from the 
 search for a new point of view, for fresh 
 treatment in handling, the magazines are 
 quite anxious to secure new writers because, 
 for the same grade or sometimes even a bet- 
 ter grade of stories, they pay the unpam- 
 pered ones much less than they do those 
 who have made their reputations. It is pre- 
 cisely the old law of supply and demand, as 
 potent here as it is in the sugar and salt 
 trade and I personally know that every 
 physically presentable manuscript is read, 
 not only dutifully but eagerly, in all the 
 magazine offices. 
 
 139 
 
Be careful not to go to the wrong mar- 
 ket. Magazines are as different as people, 
 and what suits one will not suit another. 
 Study the different publications, and try to 
 decide to which one your story will be most 
 acceptable. The sort of material they are 
 already using is the sort they want. It 
 would be absurd to try to sell opera-glasses 
 to a blind man for his own use. 
 
 Do not be discouraged! When your 
 manuscript comes back it will no doubt be 
 accompanied by a printed slip of rejection. 
 This is the only criticism you may expect, 
 but it will be sufficient; you will know that 
 the story was not what was wanted. Study 
 it over, compare it with the stories that are 
 published in that magazine, and try to find 
 out why yours was not good enough. If 
 you find that point, eliminate it, and send out 
 your manuscript again and again and again, 
 going from the top down to the bottom of the 
 list of the more than thirty magazines now 
 buying material at prices which make writ- 
 ing worth while. My own first accepted 
 story went a weary round and brought a 
 ridiculously small price. My second I sent 
 
 140 
 
to seven magazines before it was finally 
 taken, but it earned me five times as much 
 as the first. My stories now do almost no 
 traveling, and they bring me exactly forty 
 times as much as my first one, which, if you 
 stop to think it over, is a very fair explana- 
 tion of why the magazines are anxious to 
 find new writers. 
 
 If you can secure a foothold at all, the 
 business is quite profitable enough to en- 
 gage your earnest attention. Within the 
 year following the acceptance of your first 
 two or three stories your earnings will prob- 
 ably be large enough for you to give up any 
 other occupation and devote your time ex- 
 clusively to writing. You will be paid a 
 very small rate at first, but the rate is raised 
 very rapidly if your work remains uniformly 
 good. When your price comes up to five 
 cents a word you may call your earnings an 
 income, for you will be receiving from five 
 to ten thousand dollars a year, the mere fact 
 that you are obtaining the five-cent rate, 
 which is a very good one, insuring that your 
 work is enough in demand to keep you busy. 
 On top of this income, which, by the way, 
 
 141 
 
like an income in any other business, is only 
 to be earned by continuous application, by 
 the keeping of regular office hours as it were, 
 there are the possibilities of book publication 
 and of dramatic rights ; and success in these 
 fields means a comfortable fortune. 
 
 What I have set down here comes as the 
 result of years of hard "grinding;" I only 
 hope that the result may be to make the 
 path easier for others. There is plenty of 
 room in the profession; come on up and be 
 one of us. If I knew of anything else help- 
 ful to say to you, I would say it, gladly. I 
 can do no better, or no more, I think, than 
 to recapitulate: 
 
 First, prepare to earn a living at some- 
 thing else for a time. 
 
 Second, test yourself thoroughly to see 
 if you have the necessary qualifications for 
 the profession. 
 
 Third, Work! Work all the time, be- 
 fore, during, and after your first success. 
 Just work. I wish I could make you realize 
 to the full just what it means to WORK! 
 
 142 
 
no 
 
 G 1 1912 
 
 .