fit. If your trade is non-fiction, and you
turn to fiction to improve your art rather than your bank account, good
counsel will admonish you not to aim at any other mark than the best
that you can produce in the way of literary art. For there lies the
deepest satisfaction a writer can ever secure--"art makes living worth
his while."

CHAPTER X

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
whic