The newspaper office files of clippings gave me all the information necessary for a brief biography; the lithograph should serve for an illustration. By midnight that Irresistible Wedge for entering the magazines was in the mails.... Sure enough, the editors of Human Life bought it. And, by some miracle of speed in magazine making never explained to this day, they printed it in their next month's issue.
The moral of this was obvious—that in the proper market a real "story," even though it be somewhat hastily written, will receive a sincere welcome. The week after this Irresistible Wedge appeared in print I threw up my job as a reporter and dived off of the springboard into free lancing. A small bank account gave me assurance that there was no immediate peril of starving, and I wisely kept a connection with the local newspaper. In case disaster overtook me, I knew where I could find a job again.
CHAPTER V
A BEGINNER'S FIRST ADVENTURES
What happened to me in making a beginning as a free lance producer of non-fiction might happen to any one else of an equal amount of inexperience. My home town had no professional magazine writer to whom I could turn for advice; and though I devoured scores of books about writing, they were chiefly concerned either with the newspaper business or with the technique of fiction, and they all failed to get down to brass tacks about my own pressing problem, which was how to write and sell magazine articles. I was not seeking any more ABC advice about newspaper "stories," nor did I feel the least urge toward producing fiction. I thirsted to find out how to prepare and market a manuscript to The Saturday Evening Post or Collier's, but the books in the public library were all about the short story and the novel, Sunday "features," the evolution of the printing press or the adventures of a sob sister on an afternoon daily.
So I had to go out and get my education as a magazine writer in a school of tough experiences. A few of these experiences are here recorded, in the hope that some of the lessons that were enforced upon me may be of help to other beginners.
The immediate results of my plunge into free lancing were:
JANUARY—not one cent.