No, thank you; if I have to write rot, I prefer to do it for the newspapers, which make no false pretences and are frankly rotten, and in which the badness of a bad thing escapes detection or is forgotten as soon as it is cold.
I know how to write a story (of the "happy ending" sort) for magazine readers for whom literature is too good, but I will not do so so long as stealing is more honorable and interesting.
I've offered you the best stuff to be had—Sterling's poem—and the best that I am able to make; and now you must excuse me. I do not doubt that you really think that you would take "the kind of fiction that made 'Soldiers and Civilians' the most readable book of its kind in this country," and it is nice of you to put it that way; but neither do I doubt that you would find the story sent a different kind of fiction and, like the satire which you return to me, "out of the question." An editor who has a preformed opinion of the kind of stuff that he is going to get will always be disappointed with the stuff that he does get.
I know this from my early experience as an editor—before I learned that what I needed was, not any particular kind of stuff, but just the stuff of a particular kind of writer.
All this without any feeling, and only by way of explaining why I must ask you to excuse me.
Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.
Washington, D. C.,
December 6,
1904.
Dear George,
* * *