A BEGINNER'S FIRST ADVENTURES
What happened to me in making a beginning as a free lance producer of
non-fiction might happen to any one else of an equal amount of
inexperience. My home town had no professional magazine writer to whom I
could turn for advice; and though I devoured scores of books about
writing, they were chiefly concerned either with the newspaper business
or with the technique of fiction, and they all failed to get down to
brass tacks about my own pressing problem, which was how to write and
sell magazine articles. I was not seeking any more ABC advice about
newspaper "stories," nor did I feel the least urge toward producing
fiction. I thirsted to find out how to prepare and market a manuscript
to _The Saturday Evening Post_ or _Collier's_, but the books in the
public library were all about the short story and the novel, Sunday
"features," the evolution of the printing press or the adventures of a
sob sister on an afternoon daily.
So I had to go out and get my education as a magazine writer in a school
of tough experiences. A few of these experiences are here recorded, in
the hope that some of the lessons that were enforced upon me may be of
help to other beginners.
The immediate results of my plunge into free lancing were:
JANUARY--not one cent.
FEBRUARY--$50.46. Seven dollars of this was for the magazine article. No
other magazine acceptances had followed the Wedge. I had not yet caught
the national viewpoint, nor had I picked up much practical information
about the magazine markets.
By March it was becoming painfully evident that a fledgling free lance
should, if he is wise, depend for a while upon a local newspaper for the
larger part of his income. In a school of hard knocks I learned to sell
"stories" of purely local interest to the Kansas City market, topics of
state-wide interest to the St. Louis Sunday editors, and contributions
whose appeal was as wide as the Gulf of Mexico to newspapers in Chicago
and New York.
Also I learned that if the free lance hopes to make any of these markets
take a lively interest in him, he will introduce his manuscripts with
interesting photographs. I rented a little black cube of a camera for
twenty-five cents a day. It had a universal focus and nothing to bother
about in the way of adjustments. To operate it you peeked into the range
finder, then threw a lever. Its lens was so slow that no pictures could
be taken with it except in bright sunlight.
I wrote about motor cars, willow farms, celebrities, freaks of nature in
the city parks, catfish and junk heaps--anything of which I could snap
interesting photographs and find enough text to "carry" the picture.
March saw me earn $126.00 by doing assignments for the city editor in
the mornings and "stories" at space rates in the afternoons for the
Sunday section. At night I plugged away at manuscripts hopefully
intended for national periodicals. But not until late in September did I
"land" in a big magazine. Then--the thrill that comes once in a
lifetime--I sold an article to _Collier's_. It required tremendous
energy to keep up such a pace, but there was sweet comfort in the
thought that, technically at least, I was now my own boss. Gradually, I
broke away from assignment work until I was free to write what I liked
and to go where I pleased.
From finding material in the city, I adventured into some of the near-by
towns in Missouri and Kansas, and soon was arguing a theory that in
every small town the local correspondents of big city newspapers are
constantly overlooking pay streaks of good "feature stories." Usually I
would start out with twenty-five dollars and keep moving until I went
broke. A railway journey no longer meant, as in reportorial days, a
banquet in the dining-car and a chair on the observation platform,
charged up on an expense account. Often enough I slept in a day coach,
my head pillowed on a kodak wrapped in a sweater vest. The elevation was
just right for a pillow; and at the same time the traveler was insured
against theft of his most precious possession, a brand new folding
camera of post card size.
For the little snapshot box soon showed its weakness in an emergency and
had to be replaced with a better machine which had an adjustable
diaphragm, a timing apparatus, a focusing scale and a front like an
accordion. One afternoon it had happened that while two hundred miles
from a city and twenty from the nearest railroad, the snapshot box had
been useless baggage for two hours, while an anxious free lance sat
perched on the crest of an Ozark mountain studying an overcast sky and
praying for some sunlight. At last the sun blazed out for half a minute
and the lever clicked in exultation.
This experience enforced a lesson: "Learn to take any sort of picture,
indoors or out, on land or water, in any sort of weather." After I got
the new machine, with a tripod to insure stability and consequent
sharpness of outline, a piece of lemon-colored glass for cloud
photography and another extra lens for portrait work, I began snapping
at anything that held out even the faintest promise of allowing me to
clear expenses in the course of acquiring needed experience. I
photographed the neighbors' children, houses offered for sale, downtown
street scenes and any number of x-marks-the-spot-of-the-accident.
When a cyclone cut a swath through one of our suburbs, I rushed
half-a-dozen photographs to _Leslie's_, feeling again some of the same
thrilling sort of confidence that had accompanied the first Irresistible
Wedge. Back came three dollars for a single print. Rather a proud day,
that! Never before had one of my prints sold for more than fifty cents.
There were evenings after that when I meditated giving the writing game
good-by in favor of photography; and many a time since then the old
temptation has recurred. The wonder of catching lovely scenery in a box
and of watching film and print reproduce it in black and white keeps
ever fresh and fascinating to me, gratifying an instinct for composition
in one whose fingers are too clumsy to attempt to draw or paint. In
those early days of my adventures in photography an editor came very
near the literal truth when he sarcastically observed: "Young man, life
to you seems to be just one long undeveloped film."
Parallel with improvement in skill as a photographer, I developed a
working plan to insure more profitable excursions afield. My interested
friends among editors and reporters gladly gave me hints about possible
out-of-town sources of "stories," and I studied the news columns, even
to the fine type of the Missouri and Kansas state notes, with all the
avidity of an aged hobo devouring a newspaper in the public library. For
every possibility I made out a card index memorandum, as--
KANAPOLIS, KAS.
Geographical center of the country. Once proposed as the
capital of the nation--and of the state of Kansas. Now a
whistling station and a rock salt plant.
For each memorandum I stuck a pin in the state maps pasted on the wall
of my workshop. When there were several pins in any neighborhood, I
would sling my kodak over my shoulder, the carrying case strapped to the
tripod-top, like a tramp with a bundle at the end of a stick. And then
away, with an extra pair of socks and a harmonica for baggage. Besides
the material that I felt certain of finding through advance information,
luck always could be trusted to turn up some additional "stories." The
quickest way to find out what there was to write about in a town was
simply to walk into the local newspaper office, introduce myself and ask
for some tips about possible "features." I cannot recall that any one
ever refused me, or ever failed to think of something worth while.
I do not know yet whether what I discovered then is a business or not,
but I made a living out of it. Whereas reporting on a salary had begun
to be something of a grind, the less profitable roamings of a free lance
furnished a life that had color and everlasting freshness.
Sometimes, trusting in the little gods of the improvident, I was lured
into the backwoods of the Ozarks by such a name as "Mountain Home,"
which caught my fancy on the map; and with no definite "stories" in mind
I would go sauntering from Nowhere-in-Particular in Northern Arkansas to
Someplace Else in Southern Missouri, snapping pictures by the roadside
and scribbling a few necessary notes. One of those excursions, which
cost $24.35, has brought a return, to date, of more than $250, which of
course does not include the worth of a five days' lark with a young
Irishman who went on the trip as a novel form of summer vacation.
He found all the novelty he could have hoped for. After some truly lyric
passages of life in Arkansas, when we felt positively homesick about
leaving one town to go on to another, we reached a railroad-less county
in Missouri infested with fleas; and to secure a discount on the stage
fare on the thirty-five-mile drive from Gainsville to West Plains (we
_had_ to have a discount to save enough to buy something to eat that
night) we played the harmonica for our driver's amusement until we
gasped like fish. His soul was touched either by the melody or by pity,
and he left us enough small change to provide a supper of cheese and
crackers.
Some happenings that must sound much more worth while in the ears of the
mundane have followed, but those first days of free lancing seem to me
to be among the choicest in a journalistic adventurer's experience.
Encounters with a variety of celebrities since then have proved no whit
more thrilling than the discovery that our host, Jerry South of Mountain
Home, was lieutenant-governor of Arkansas; and though I have roamed in
five nations, no food that I ever have tasted so nearly approaches that
of the gods as the strawberry shortcake we ate in Bergman.
Even in the crass matter of profits, I found the small town richer in
easily harvestable "stories" than the biggest city in the world. A few
years later I spent a week in London, but I picked up less there to
write about than I found in Sabetha, Kansas, in a single afternoon.
Sabetha furnished:
Half of the material for a motor car article. (When automobiles were
still a novelty to the rural population.) This sold to _Leslie's_.
An article on gasoline-propelled railway coaches, for _The Illustrated
World_.
A short contribution on scientific municipal management of public
utilities in a small town, for _Collier's_.
A character sketch about a local philanthropic money lender, for
_Leslie's_ and the Kansas City _Star_.
An account of the Kansas Amish, a sect something like the Tolstoys, for
Kansas City, St. Louis and New York newspapers.
Short Sunday specials about a $40,000 hospital and a thoroughly modern
Kansas farm house for Kansas City and St. Louis Sunday sections.
The profits of these excursions were not always immediate, and until
after I had worked many weeks at the trade there were periods of
serious financial embarrassment. To cite profitable trips too early is
to get ahead of my story, but the time is none the less propitious to
remark that a country town or a small city certainly is as good a place
for the free lance to operate (once he knows a "story" when he sees it)
as is New York or Chicago, Boston, New Orleans or San Francisco. I often
wonder if I would not have been better off financially if I had kept on
working from a Kansas City headquarters instead of emigrating to the
East.
I might have gone on this way for a long time, in contentment, for my
profits were steadily mounting and my markets extending. But one day my
wanderings extended as far as Chicago, and there I ran across an old
friend of student days. He had been the cartoonist of the college
magazine when I was its editor. He wore, drooping from one corner of his
face, a rah-rah bulldog pipe; an enormous portfolio full of enormities
of drawing was under one arm, and, dangling at the end of the other, was
one of the tiniest satchels that ever concealed a nightgown.
In answer to questions about what he was doing with himself, he
confessed that he was not making out any better than most other newly
graduated students of art. I argued that if Chicago did not treat him
considerately, he ought to head for New York, where real genius, more
than likely, would be more quickly appreciated. Also, if this was to his
liking, I would invite myself to go along with him.
We went. Now sing, O Muse, the slaughter!