He tells himself: "I've written that
same story half a dozen times before."

Then is the time for him to settle himself to do some serious thinking
about his future. Does he have it in him to become an executive? Or does
he discover a special taste, worth cultivating, for finance, or sport,
or editorial writing? If so, he has something like a future in the
newspaper office.

But if what he really longs to do is to contribute to the magazines or
to write books, he is at the parting of the ways. He should seize now
upon every opportunity to discover topics of wide interest, and in his
spare time he should attempt to write articles on these topics and ship
them off to market.

He has laid the first solid foundation of successful freelancing, for if
he has been able to survive as long as six months in the competition of
the local room he has a nose for what constitutes a "story."

The next thing he has to learn is that an article for a magazine differs
chiefly from a newspaper story in that the magazine must make a wider
appeal--to a national rather than to a local interest. The successful
magazine writer is simply a reporter who knows what the general public
likes to read, and who has learned when and where and how to market what
he produces. Timeliness is as important as ever, so he must look to his
tenses. The magazine article will not appear until from ten days to six
months or more after it is accepted. Some of our magazines begin making
up their Christmas numbers in July, so he must learn to sweat to the
tinkle of sleigh bells.

I wonder how many hundreds of ambitious newspaper reporters are at this
very minute urging themselves to extra effort after hours and on their
precious holidays and Sundays to test their luck in the magazine
markets? The number must be considerable if my experience as a member of
the editorial staff of a big national magazine allows me to make a
surmise. I have read through bushels of manuscripts that had the ear
marks of the newspaper office all over them. They were typed on the
cheap kind of "copy paper" that is used only in "city rooms." The first
sheet rarely had a title, for the newspaper reporter's habit is to leave
headline writing to a "copy reader." Ink and dust had filled in such
letters as "a" and "e" and "o." Most of the manuscripts were done with
characteristic newspaper office haste, and gave indication somewhere in
the text that the author had not the faintest notion of how