I.
AUT FICTION, AUT NULLUS.
“Well, my dear,” said John Milton Edwards, miserably uncertain and turning to appeal to his wife, “which shall it be – to write or not to write?”
“To write,” was the answer, promptly and boldly, “to do nothing else but write.”
John Milton wanted her to say that, and yet he did not. Her conviction, orally expressed, had all the ring of true metal; yet her husband, reflecting his own inner perplexities, heard a false note suggesting the base alloy of uncertainty.
“Hadn’t we better think it over?” he quibbled.
“You’ve been thinking it over for two years, John, and this month is the first time your returns from your writing have ever been more than your salary at the office. If you can be so successful when you are obliged to work nights and Sundays – and most of the time with your wits befogged by office routine – what could you not do if you spent ALL your time in your Fiction Factory?”
“It may be,” ventured John Milton, “that I could do better work, snatching a few precious moments from those everlasting pay-rolls, than by giving all my time and attention to my private Factory.”
“Is that logical?” inquired Mrs. John Milton.
“I don’t know, my dear, whether it’s logical or not. We’re dealing with a psychological mystery that has never been broken to harness. Suppose I have the whole day before me and sit down at my typewriter to write a story. Well and good. But getting squared away with a fresh sheet over the platen isn’t the whole of it. The Happy Idea must be evolved. What if the Happy Idea does not come when I am ready for it? Happy Ideas, you know, have a disagreeable habit of hiding out. There’s no hard and fast rule, that I am aware, for capturing a Happy Idea at just the moment it may be most in demand. There’s lightning in a change of work, the sort of lightning that clears the air with a tonic of inspiration. When I’m paymastering the hardest I seem to be almost swamped with ideas for the story mill. Query: Will the mill grind out as good a grist if it grinds continuously? If I were sure–”
“It stands to reason,” Mrs. Edwards maintained stoutly, “that if you can make $125 a month running the mill nights and Sundays, you ought to be able to make a good deal more than that with all the week days added.”
“Provided,” John Milton qualified, “my fountain of inspiration will flow as freely when there is nothing to hinder it as it does now when I have it turned off for twelve hours out of the twenty-four.”
“Why shouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know, my dear,” John Milton admitted, “unless it transpires that my inspiration isn’t strong enough to be drawn on steadily.”
“Fudge,” exclaimed Mrs. Edwards.
“And then,” her husband proceeded, “let us consider another phase of the question. The demand may fall off. The chances are that it WILL fall off the moment the gods become aware of the fact that I am depending on the demand for our bread and butter. Whenever a thing becomes absolutely essential to you, Fate immediately obliterates every trail that leads to it, and you go wandering desperately back and forth, getting more and more discouraged until–”
“Until you drop in your tracks,” broke in Mrs. Edwards, “and give up – a quitter.”
“Quitter” is a mean word. There’s something about it that jostles you, and treads on your toes.
“I don’t think I’d prove a quitter,” said John Milton, “even if I did get lost in a labyrinth of hard luck. It’s the idea of losing you along with me that hurts.”
“I’ll risk that.”
“This is a panic year,” John Milton went on, “and money is hard to get. It is hardly an auspicious time for tearing loose from a regular pay-day.”
John Milton and his wife lived in Chicago, and the firm for which John Milton worked had managed to keep afloat by having an account in two banks. When a note fell due at one bank, the firm borrowed from the other to pay it. Thus, by borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and from Paul to pay Peter, the contractors juggled with their credit and kept it good. Times were hard enough in all truth, yet they were not so hard in Chicago as in other parts of the country. The World’s Columibian Exposition brought a flood of visitors to the city, and a flood of cash.
“Bother the panic!” jeered Mrs. Edwards. “It won’t interfere with your work. Pleasant fiction is more soothing than hard facts. People will read all the more Just to forget their troubles.”
“I’m pretty solid with the firm,” said John Milton, veering to another tack. “I’m getting twelve hundred a year, now, with an extra hundred for taking care of the Colonel’s books.”
“Is there any future to it?”
“There is. I can buy stock in the company, identify myself with it more and more, and in twenty or thirty years, perhaps, move into a brownstone front on Easy street.”
“No, you couldn’t!” declared Mrs. Edwards.
“Why not?”
“Why, because your heart wouldn’t be in your work. Ever since you were old enough to know your own mind you have wanted to be a writer. When you were twelve years old you were publishing a little paper for boys–”
“It was a four-page paper about the size of lady’s handkerchief,” laughed John Milton, “and it lasted for two issues.”
“Well,” insisted his wife, “you’ve been writing stories more or less all your life, and if you are ever a success at anything it will be in the fiction line. You are now twenty-six years old, and if you make your mark as an author it’s high time you were about it. Don’t you think so? If I’m willing to chance it, John, you surely ought to be.”
“All right,” was the answer, “it’s a ‘go.’”
And thus it was that John Milton Edwards reached his momentous decision. Perhaps you, who read these words, have been wrestling soulfully with the same question – vacillating between authorship as a vocation or as an avocation. Edwards made his decision eighteen years ago. At that time conditions were different; and it is doubtful whether, had he faced conditions as they are now, he would have decided to run his Fiction Factory on full time.
“An eye for an eye”
A writer whose stories have been used in the Munsey publications, Pearson’s and other magazines, writes:
“How is this as an illustration of timeliness, or the personal element in writing? – I went in to see Mr. Matthew White, Jr., one day with a story and he said he couldn’t read it because he had a sore eye. I had an eye for that eye as fiction, so I sat down and wrote a story in two hours’ time about an editor who couldn’t read any stories on account of his bum lamp, whereby he nearly missed the best story for the year. Mr. White was interested in the story mainly because he had a sore eye himself and was in full sympathy with the hero. I took the story down and read it aloud to him, selling it, of course. The story was called, “When the Editor’s Eye Struck.”
(Talk about making the most of your opportunities!)
§
The Bookman, somewhere, tells of a lady in the Middle West who caught the fiction fever and wrote in asking what price was paid for stories. To the reply that “$10 a thousand was paid for good stories” she made written response: “Why, it takes me a week to write one story, and $10 for a thousand weeks’ work looks so discouraging that I guess I’d better try something else.”
§
Poeta nascitur; non fit. This has been somewhat freely translated by one who should know, as “The poet is born; not paid.”
