FOREVER AT THE CROSSROADS
Keep studying. Keep experimenting. Set yourself harder tasks. Never be
content with what you have accomplished. Match yourself against the men
who can outplay you, not against the men you already excel. Keep
attempting something that baffles you. Discontent is your friend more
often than your enemy.
From the moment that he is graduated out of the cub reporter class,
every writer who is worth his salt is forever at the crossroads,
perplexed about the next turn. Nowhere is smugness of mind more deadly
than in journalism. To progress you must forever scale more difficult
ascents. The bruises of rebuffs and the wounds of injured vanity will
heal quickly enough if you keep busy. Defeated or undefeated, the writer
who always is trying to master something more difficult than the work he
used to do preserves his self-respect and the respect of his worth-while
neighbors. The fellow with the canker at his heart is not the battler
but the envious shirker who is too "proud" to risk a fall.
Swallow what you suppose to be your pride; it really is a false sense of
dignity. Make a simple beginning in the university of experience by
learning with experiments what constitutes a "story" and by drudging
with pencil and typewriter to put that "story" into professional
manuscript form. Get the right pictures for it; then ship it off to
market. If the first choice of markets rejects you, try the second, the
third, fourth, fifth and sixth--even unto the ninety-and-ninth.
Few beginners have even a dim notion of the great variety of markets
that exist for free lance contributions. There are countless trade
publications, newspaper syndicates, class journals, "house organs," and
magazines devoted to highly specialized interests. Nearly all of these
publications are eager to buy matter of interest to their particular
circles of readers. Every business, every profession, every trade, every
hobby has its mouthpiece.
Remember this when you are a beginner and the "big magazines" of general
circulation are rejecting your manuscripts with a clock-like regularity
which drives you almost to despair. Try your 'prentice hand on
contributions to the smaller publications. That is the surest way to
"learn while you earn" in free lancing. These humble markets need not
cause you to sneer--particularly if you happen to be a humble beginner.
Every laboratory experiment in manuscript writing and marketing, though
it be only a description of a shop window for a dry goods trade paper,
or an interview with a boss plumber for the _Gas Fitter's Gazette_, will
furnish you with experience in your own trade, and set you ahead a step
on the long road that leads to the most desirable acceptances. The one
thing to watch zealously is your own development, to make sure that you
do not too soon content yourself with achievements beneath your
capabilities. Start with the little magazines, but keep attempting to
attain the more difficult goals.
Meanwhile, you need not apologize to any one for the nature of your
work, so long as it is honest reporting and all as well written as you
know how to make it. Stevenson, one of the most conscientious of
literary artists, declared in a "Letter to a Young Gentleman Who
Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art," that "the first duty in this
world is for a man to pay his way," and this is one of your confessed
purposes while you are serving this kind of journalistic apprenticeship.
Until he arrives, the novice must, indeed, unless he be exceptionally
gifted, "pay assiduous court to the bourgeois who carries the purse.
And if in the course of these capitulations he shall falsify his talent,
it can never have been a strong one, and he will have preserved a better
thing than talent--character. Or if he be of a mind so independent that
he cannot stoop to this necessity, one course is yet open: he can desist
from art, and follow some more manly way of life."
In short, so long as you _keep moving_ toward something worth attaining,
there is nothing to worry about but how to keep from relapsing into
smugness or idleness. The besetting temptation of the free lance is to
pamper himself. He is his own boss, can sleep as late as he likes, go
where he pleases and quit work when the temptation seizes him. As a
result, he usually babies himself and turns out much less work than he
might safely attempt without in the least endangering his health.
When he finds out later how assiduously some of the best known of our
authors keep at their desks he becomes a little ashamed of himself.
Though they may not work, on the average, as long hours as the business
man, they toil far harder, and usually with few of the interruptions and
relaxations from the job that the business man is allowed. Four or five
hours of intense application a day stands for a great deal more
expenditure of energy and thought than eight or nine hours broken up
with periods when one's feet are literally or metaphorically on the desk
and genial conversation is flowing. Most of the men and women who make a
living out of free lancing earn every blessed cent of it; and the amount
upon which they pay an income tax is, as a rule, proportioned rather
justly to the amount of concentrated labor that they pour into the
hopper of the copy mill.
You who happen to have seen a successful free lance knock off work in
mid-afternoon to play tennis, or to skim away toward the country club in
his new motor car are too likely to exclaim that "his is the existence!"
Forgetting, of course, the lonesome hours of more or less baffling
effort that he spent that day upon a manuscript before he locked up his
workshop. And the years he spent in drudgery, the bales of rejection
slips he collected, the times that he had to pawn his watch and stick
pin to buy a dinner or to pay the rent of a hall bedroom.
Young Gentlemen Who Propose to Embrace the Career of Art might be
shocked to learn--though it would be all for their own good--that a
great many writers who are generally regarded with envy for their "luck"
take the pains to follow the market notes in the Authors' League
_Bulletin_, the _Bookman_ and the _Editor Magazine_ with all the care
of a contractor studying the latest news of building operations. Not
only do these writers read the trade papers of their calling; they also,
with considerable care, study the magazines to which they sell--or hope
to sell--manuscripts. They do not nearly so often as the novice make the
_faux pas_ of offering an editor exactly the same sort of material that
he already has printed in a recent or a current issue. They follow the
new books. They keep card indexes on their unmarketed manuscripts, and
toil on as much irksome office routine as a stock broker. A surprisingly
large number of the "arrived" do not even hold themselves above keeping
note books, or producing, chiefly for the beneficial exercise of it,
essays, journals, descriptions, verse and fiction not meant to be
offered for sale--solely copybook exercises, produced for
self-improvement or to gratify an impulse toward non-commercial art.
For instances I can name a fiction writer who turns often to the essay
form, but never publishes this type of writing, and an editorial writer
who, for the "fun of it" and the good he believes it does his style,
composes every year a great deal of verse. A group of six Michigan
writers publish their own magazine, a typewritten publication with a
circulation of six.
These men are not content with their present achievements. They regard
themselves always as students who must everlastingly keep trying more
difficult tasks to insure a steady progress toward an unattainable goal.
"Most of the studyin'," Abe Martin once observed, "is done after a
feller gets out of college," and these gray-haired exemplars are--as all
of us ought to be--still learning to write, and forever at the
crossroads.
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FINIS
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