The Fiction Factory / Being the experience of a writer who, for twenty-two years, has kept a story-mill grinding successfully

By John Milton Edwards
¶ Being the Experience of a Writer who, for Twenty-two Years, has kept a Story-mill Grinding Successfully....
The Editor Company
RIDGEWOOD, NEW JERSEY
Copyright 1912 by The Editor Company.

THE WRITER TO THE READER
It was in 1893 that John Milton Edwards (who sets his hand to this book of experiences and prefers using the third person to overworking the egotistical pronoun) turned wholly to his pen as a means of livelihood. In this connection, of course, the word pen is figurative. What he really turned to was his good friend, the Typewriter.
For two years previous to this (to him) momentous event he had hearkened earnestly to the counsel that literature is a good stick but a poor crutch, and had cleaved to a position as paymaster for a firm of contractors solely because of the pay envelope that insured food and raiment. Spare hours alone were spent in his Fiction Factory. In the summer of 1893, however, when his evening and Sunday work brought returns that dwarfed his salary as paymaster, he had a heart to heart talk with Mrs. John Milton Edwards, and, as a result, the paymaster-crutch was dropped by the wayside. This came to pass not without many fears and anxieties, and later there arrived gray days when the literary pace became unsteady and John Milton turned wistful eyes backward in the direction of his discarded crutch. But he never returned to pick it up.
From then till now John Milton Edwards has worked early and late in his Factory, and his output has supported himself and wife and enabled him to bear a number of other financial responsibilities. There have been fat years and lean—years when plenty invited foolish extravagance and years when poverty compelled painful sacrifices—yet John Milton Edwards can truly say that the work has been its own exceeding great reward.
With never a best seller nor a successful play to run up his income, John Milton has, in a score and two years of work, wrested more than $100,000 from the tills of the publishers. Short stories, novelettes, serials, books, a few moving picture scenarios and a little verse have all contributed to the sum total. Industry was rowelled by necessity, and when a short story must fill the flour barrel, a poem buy a pair of shoes or a serial take up a note at the bank, the muse is provided with an atmosphere at which genius balks. True, Genius has emerged triumphant from many a Grub street attic, but that was in another day when conditions were different from what they are now. In these twentieth century times the writer must give the public what the publisher thinks the public wants. Although the element of quality is a sine qua non , it seems not to be incompatible with the element of quantity.