The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 18
The girl with literary ambitions belongs to one of two classes. Hither she thinks she could earn her living at home, by writing for magazines, or she wants to become a "journalist."
The profession of letters is broad and liberal. It presupposes a college education—yet I have known girls to graduate from the eighth grade into the short-stery field, because they found inspiration and help in the English masterpieces which they read after working hours. It presupposes leisure, elegant surroundings, and a restful environment, and yet one of the daintiest fairy-tales I ever read was penned by a woman between the time that she sent five growing girls off to school, and the washing of the breakfast dishes. I know of no work in which patient, persistent, unfailing effort and study bring such rich rewards, because the joy of giving birth to a new thought is equaled only by the joy of the mother in her first born. The writer extracts something more than mere dollars from the profession of letters—the happiness peculiar to congenial work, intensified by steady, mental growth, and the development of resources within herself which rescue her from morbidness, loneliness and selfishness.
The successful writer must draw information and inspiration from her contact with human nature. She must know people in order to write of them, consequently she is never self-centered. She may become egotistical, spoiled by flattery when success is achieved, but during her probation she is dependent upon her fellow-men, therefore interested in them, and so is herself interesting.
Against this argument must be arraigned the stern fact that the woman who is entirely dependent upon her own efforts should not turn to writing, even though she may have the gift, as a profession in which she can secure immediate returns. She must combine writing with more practical work, something that will pay her board and keep a roof over her head until she wields the pen with such dexterity that financial returns are sure and regular. This period varies. Some women suddenly develop a gift for humorous versification, epigrammatic little essays, or a new field of fiction, and score phenomenal success; but as a rule the history of the writer who builds a substantial success reads far differently. My first story was written—and promptly rejected—when I was fifteen. I drew my first weekly salary as a writer (and this on a small country paper) when I was twenty-seven, yet during that interval there was never a day, whether I was teaching school or cooking for hired men or catering to summer boarders, that I did not renew my determination, ofttimes buried deep beneath piles of unwashed dishes and unironed clothes, that one day I would be financially independent through my writings.
I make this question of financial independence the goal toward which most writers work because it is their real object, and because most of the women who write to me mention financial burdens which they hope to lighten by the aid of their pens. This introduction has been made strongly personal because I know that many of my readers will say that I paint too disheartening a picture for the girl with the pen. I want each one of these critics to know that I understand not only just how she feels in her ambitious, hopeful moments, but just how she will feel when manuscript after manuscript comes back—"Returned with thanks."
If the wolf is very close to your door, do not try to fight him with your pen. Better select for your weapon the needle, the frying-pan or the iron. He recognizes the power of the pen only when it is wielded by an experienced hand. If you are willing to wait and work patiently and to live frugally, then find some regular occupation that will occupy half or three-fourths of the day, and devote the other half or fourth to writing, giving the early part of the day to your pen-work if possible. Depend upon serving or teaching or nursing, or whatever you can do well, to keep body and soul together, and do not expect your pen to yield returns for many weeks or months, perhaps years. But, on the other hand, if you keep the steadfast faith within yourself that some day you will reach your goal, your more practical work will be made lighter by your hours of writing, and life will be worth while.
First, cultivate your powers of observation. Keep your eyes open at home and abroad. Note what people around you are doing, their peculiarities of speech and their mannerisms. Study changes in nature's panorama. Open your mind to outside influences, to the happiness and the sorrow of those with whom you come in contact, so that in time you may express these emotions in such clear fashion that the world of readers will say: "Yes, I know a woman who acts just that way when she is frightened," or "Why, I have felt just like that ever so many times." You cannot picture human nature until you know it. The painter transfers to his canvas the thrush tilting on the swaying branch; the writer must transfer to his sheet of paper the soul swaying under emotions.
Two home-going stenographers from a newspaper office passed a forlorn little figure sitting on the edge of the curbing of a city fountain. The girl's thin shoulders were shaken by silent sobs Her mouse-like teeth were set hard in her thin, colorless lips. The first stenographer who passed did not notice that the child was crying. In fact, she was thinking what a hot day it had been, and how hard it was to work in a great office amid the clickety-click of typewriters. The second girl, her eyes open to all that went on around her, despite the heat, spied the heaving shoulders, unlocked the hard-set lips and heard a story which led to the exposure of a great wrong, which placed the girl on the staff of a big paper, and which lifted her protége above want and misery.
Which one of those two girls hurrying away from the same office was the born writer? Fine phrases alone will not make a writer. You must cultivate the knowledge of human nature, the power of observation and the ability to put this combination of knowledge and observation into a word form which will reach the hearts of your readers.
Write every day. Write of everything you see. Cultivate the letter habit. If your friends enjoy your letters and beg for more, you are making headway. Put into those letters your impressions of events and people. Divide your hours of reading between the works of standard English writers, like Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens, Scott and Washington Irving, the books which are making the success of the moment, and the best current magazines. This last is important because you must know the trend of literary taste, the sort of fiction, special article or poetry that editors are buying.
If you seriously contemplate writing for a living, you must make a business of reading regularly at your public library or subscribing for the current magazines. If you have written a tale to entertain children, buy or borrow at the library every magazine you can find for juvenile readers, and decide which editor is using stories such as you have to offer. If you are offering practical suggestions for the housewife, make a list of magazines published especially for women, and send your script to each one, until many rejections have proven that it is not salable. A woman told me the other day that she had sent one story to twenty-nine magazines before she sold it.
If you have a love-story, study the magazines which publish fiction before sending forth the tale. Do not send it to The Review of Reviews or The Scientific American simply because your brother happens to be a subscriber to one of these excellent but fictionless magazines.
The mechanical preparation of a manuscript is the simplest part of your work. Unless you write an extremely legible and uniform hand, have your script typewritten. The usual charge is ten cents per page, folio size. In the upper left-hand corner of the first page write your name and address in full. In the upper right-hand corner, write: "Submitted at your regular rates." Every publication has its rate for unknown authors. Only the established author names his own price. In the center of the sheet, below these corner inscriptions, write the title of your story.
Tell the typist who copies your story to double-space it. This leaves room for editorial corrections if your story is accepted. On the last page, four or five spaces below the last line, have your address and name written again. If you send out two or a dozen poems in the same envelope, put your name and address on each and every one. Do not trust that the typewriting or the long hand or the general style will identify them. If you send out a novel, mark each chapter with the full title and your name and address. If you could see the mail unloaded on the desk of a sorting clerk in a magazine office some morning you would understand this caution.
Do not ask for an immediate decision, nor acknowledgment by return mail. Simply enclose a self-addressed and stamped envelope for the return of your story if not available, and do not write a letter detailing the story of your own life and the reasons why you need the money this story is worth. The busy editor has no time to read this letter, neither is he conducting a charity bureau. His readers demand good, readable stories, not a poorly-written story, bought because you needed the money. Be sure to pay postage on your script in full, and fold it as few times as possible, using a large envelope for this mailing. Never roll a script.
When your story reaches the editorial offices in some far-away city, it will be sorted with dozens of others and recorded in a great book, then passed on to the young man or woman who is known as the first reader. If hopeless in style or unsuited to this particular magazine, it will be returned to you at once, with a printed slip of rejection. If it seems promising, it is passed, on to the second reader, or the editor for whose department it seems best fitted. He reads it, and, if favorably inclined, holds it for an editorial council, provided the magazine staff is large, or he sends it on the editor-in-chief. With hundreds of manuscripts pouring in every morning, you must understand that this process will take time. If you hear nothing after your manuscript has been in the office a month, write a polite note of inquiry.
To the average woman who wants to write at home I would say: "Start with what are known as 'fillers,' little stories which are sandwiched in between the big features of a magazine for women readers." Perhaps you have found some method of lightening your housework, some new way of correcting a fault common to childhood; perhaps you have been to a lunch or tea and seen some novel decorations or enjoyed a novel game; perhaps your church society has given a new entertainment. Write of any of these matters, briefly and clearly, so that some other woman could lighten her housework, correct her child, give a pretty luncheon or plan a profitable church entertainment. Then look over the magazines for women and send this "story" to the one who seems to give considerable space to such matters. If the matter is used, you will be paid for it. Reputable editors never stoop to filching ideas, as some outof-town writers think.
Now for the would-be newspaper girl, "the journalist," as she would call herself.
The way to become a newspaper reporter is to report. Begin right where you are, where you will have friends to help you to gather news, and parents to provide you with a home until you learn whether newspaper work is all that you have pictured it, and until the editor has learned that you have the true newspaper instinct. This will not take long. Here is one of the joys of newspaper work. You are not kept in suspense.
Remember the newspaper world wants facts, not phrases, and plan your interview accordingly. Do not take the editor an essay on "Architects of Fate." Tell him rather that Mrs. Brown had a tea-party the other night and his paper ought to publish the news about it; that the Smithson domicile is harboring brandnew twins, and that Jennie Piper is entertaining two pretty girls from St. Joe. He will ask you the girls' names, and if you do not know, he will say then and there that you are not so much of a newspaper woman as he thought you were. Tell him you know everybody and go everywhere and hear many, many things that somehow never get into his weekly paper, or, if you are fortunate enough to live in a town which supports a daily, that you think you could run a daily column or half column of society and personal news. That is the opening wedge for you girls with the pen—personalities, gossip, if you will. You cannot start by reporting murders or conducting household departments. You must begin by giving the editor something his older, more blase reporters have failed to give him, the small trifling items that make a paper gossipy and readable.
If you are a newspaper woman born, you will succeed in your home town, I do not care what the size of the paper. You will create a demand for your services. If you cannot please the editor there, if you cannot induce your neighbors to give you news, what do you expect to do in a strange city with women to interview who place implacable butlers between you and the news you would learn?
By all means beg the editor of your home paper to try you out; and then make yourself invaluable to him before you try your wings in the great city.
You may have influential letters, you may have diplomas and pretty frocks and a prettier smile, but in a great city where you think there must be hundreds of openings you will find other girls with the same influential letters, good frocks, and pleasing smiles already on the ground, a hundred to every opening. And when you tell the city editor that you have had no experience but are willing to learn, he will inform you that he does not run a kindergarten for reporters.
Get your training near home, if you have to work months for nothing. I did this, and I have never regretted it, and just to clinch my argument I beg leave to drop into personalities once more.
Years ago in a mid-West city of 20,000 inhabitants and one daily paper, I found that I had to put my ability as a writer to more regular and better financial account. I called to see the editor of the one daily paper. He said his staff was complete, but I insisted on having something to do—just to show him that I could write. He said: "Go write up the squirrels in the park."
Now, natural history was so much Greek to me, but I had to convince him. I spent a morning in the park, watched the squirrels and talked with the watchman. The next Sunday that paper printed a column about the habits and tricks of the park squirrels—for which I never received a cent.
The staff was still full. If I had any new department or idea to suggest, "perhaps," said the editor vaguely.
The women's clubs were just then coming into prominence. I begged space for a department devoted to club meetings—and got it, with a salary of five dollars a week, providing the department made good. Can you imagine, you girls who want to write up sensational murders, the mad excitement of reporting a dozen or more literary meetings a week, and trying to make the matter readable?
My next assignment consisted of going from pastor to pastor each Sunday afternoon and finding church news for Monday morning's paper, sorting out routine announcements and digging relentlessly for some bit of real religious news. Next I was sent down on what was known as Implement Row, where agricultural machinery was handled, there to climb for one whole long day in each week over platforms and trucks and under freight-cars, often to be rewarded with less than a column of personal items about traveling men or out-of-town visitors. I worked so hard I scarcely had time to eat. And all the while that staff remained full! Men had the police run, the postoffice, the federal courthouse and the theaters—all of which I felt I could do, oh, so very well!
Those were shoe-destroying, soul-wearing days, but when I finally came to New York and was told by the city editor on a large paper to go down to the Battery and get a certain emigrant story, I thanked the good old mid-West paper and its patient staff of editors who had trained me to start for the Battery without asking the irritable city editor where the Battery was, how much copy he wanted, what I should ask the emigrant, etc. Those early days when I had had to squeeze news from the mere leavings of news-sources had taught me how to get a story—and that is what makes a newspaper woman.
Now supposing that you have served your apprenticeship on a daily paper in a small inland city, how shall you approach the city editor in a large city, perhaps in Chicago, Philadelphia or New York?
First, you must have funds on which to live while seeking work in the city. It may be weeks or months before you secure a salaried position, and while you are doing space work at four or five dollars per column you must have money for board, room and earfare, to say nothing of the shoe-leather, on which reporting is merciless. Unless you have strong letters of personal introduction to city editors and have made a record for clever, not mediocre, work in your home town, never start for a strange city and a new, as yet unassured position, without at least enough money to meet your current expenses for two months.
Second, take with you every letter of introduction or recommendation that you can muster. Also carry a number of newspaper clippings, as evidence of the good work you have done on the home paper.
Third, be wise in selecting the season of your flight. Do not seek work in a large city during mid-summer. The reportorial force is generally cut down during the summer season, and much of the space given during the rest of the year to articles on the various phases of city life is filled with correspondence from summer resorts. September is perhaps the best month in which to seek work in a city newspaper office, for at that time editors look kindly on new blood for their staffs.
Fourth, do not rush from the depot to the editorial sanctum. Study the city a bit and get your bearings. Incidentally, you may pick up some idea for a story which you can present to the editor during your first call. The girl who comes to the editor with an idea has ten chances where the girl who merely asks for work, for an assignment suggested by the editor, has one. The girl with ideas or suggestions for good stories is in demand.
A few words about the income of the young writer. Put out of your mind the fabulous earnings credited to novelists and playwrights. Remember that you are serving a literary apprenticeship, not writing the one "best seller."
If you are writing "fillers" for ten-cent magazines, you will be paid from a half to one cent per word. If you are writing little love stories, from 1,200 to 1,500 words, for the syndicates which supply fiction to the daily papers, you will receive about ten dollars per story. If you receive twenty-five or thirty dollars for your first 3,000-word fiction tale, you will be doing well. Later, when you acquire style and reputation, you will be paid from seventy-five to two hundred dollars for a strong, telling story of action or psychological analysis. The income of the magazine writer is as uncertain as her moods. A period of great mental activity, which yields large financial returns, is generally followed by a mental reaction and a falling off of cash returns.
The income of the newspaper woman is more certain. In large cities the editor of the Sunday magazine section, first hope of the newly-arrived writer, pays five dollars a column for general material, more for special stories along exclusive lines with good illustrations. What is known as an exclusive special, not a news story, for a Sunday paper, the sort that will fill a page with text and illustrations, is sure to bring from thirty to fifty dollars.
A woman reporter without city experience may be asked to start at fifteen dollars a week. If she has good letters, or shows marked ability, or if her work in her home paper has attracted the attention of the city editor, she may be offered twenty dollars a week. From this point her salary is raised, according to her usefulness and efficiency, to thirty-five dollars a week. When she is worth this to the city editor, she generally asks to be put on space instead of salary, and then she earns, according to her physical strength, working capacity and keenness of observation, from fifty dollars a week up.
In large cities the field of the newspaper woman is unlimited, for she soon finds openings in magazines for her keen stories of city life. But her daily life is not easy. It is strenuous, nerve-straining and harsh. Her hours are irregular, her work will not wait for a more propitious day or better weather, and the excuse has not yet been invented which will soften the heart or lighten the criticism of the editor when she scores failure.