nows from its subject
he cannot use.

This, of course, applies more to articles than to other forms of
literary work, although unsuitability in a poem is naturally as quickly
detected. Stories, no matter how unpromising they may appear at the
beginning, are generally read through, since gold in a piece of fiction
has often been found almost at the close. This careful attention to
manuscripts in editorial offices is fixed by rules, and an author's
indorsement or a friend's judgment never affects the custom.

At no time does the fallacy hold in a magazine office that "a big name
counts for everything and an unknown name for nothing." There can be no
denial of the fact that where a name of repute is attached to a
meritorious story or article the combination is ideal. But as between an
indifferent story and a well-known name and a good story with an unknown
name the editor may be depended upon to accept the latter. Editors are
very careful nowadays to avoid the public impatience that invariably
follows upon publishing material simply on account of the name attached
to it. Nothing so quickly injures the reputation of a magazine in the
estimation of its readers. If a person, taking up a magazine, reads a
story attracted by a famous name, and the story disappoints, the editor
has a doubly disappointed reader on his hands: a reader whose high
expectations from the name have not been realized and who is
disappointed with the story.

It is a well-known fact among successful magazine editors that their
most striking successes have been made by material to which unknown
names were attached, where the material was fresh, the approach new, the
note different. That is what builds up a magazine; the reader learns to
have confidence in what he finds in the periodical, whether it bears a
famous name or not.

Nor must the young author believe that the best work in modern magazine
literature "is dashed off at white heat." What is dashed off reads
dashed off, and one does not come across it in the well-edited magazine,
because it is never accepted. Good writing is laborious writing, the
result of revision upon revision. The work of masters such as Robert
Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling represents never less than eight or
ten revisions, and often a far greater number. It was Stevenson who once
said to Edward Bok, after a laborious correction of certain proofs: "My
boy, I could be a healthy man, I think, if I did something else than