If You Don't Write Fiction

by Charles Phelps Cushing

FEBRUARY—$50.46. Seven dollars of this was for the magazine article. No other magazine acceptances had followed the Wedge. I had not yet caught the national viewpoint, nor had I picked up much practical information about the magazine markets.

By March it was becoming painfully evident that a fledgling free lance should, if he is wise, depend for a while upon a local newspaper for the larger part of his income. In a school of hard knocks I learned to sell "stories" of purely local interest to the Kansas City market, topics of state-wide interest to the St. Louis Sunday editors, and contributions whose appeal was as wide as the Gulf of Mexico to newspapers in Chicago and New York.

Also I learned that if the free lance hopes to make any of these markets take a lively interest in him, he will introduce his manuscripts with interesting photographs. I rented a little black cube of a camera for twenty-five cents a day. It had a universal focus and nothing to bother about in the way of adjustments. To operate it you peeked into the range finder, then threw a lever. Its lens was so slow that no pictures could be taken with it except in bright sunlight.

I wrote about motor cars, willow farms, celebrities, freaks of nature in the city parks, catfish and junk heaps—anything of which I could snap interesting photographs and find enough text to "carry" the picture.

March saw me earn $126.00 by doing assignments for the city editor in the mornings and "stories" at space rates in the afternoons for the Sunday section. At night I plugged away at manuscripts hopefully intended for national periodicals. But not until late in September did I "land" in a big magazine. Then—the thrill that comes once in a lifetime—I sold an article to Collier's. It required tremendous energy to keep up such a pace, but there was sweet comfort in the thought that, technically at least, I was now my own boss. Gradually, I broke away from assignment work until I was free to write what I liked and to go where I pleased.

From finding material in the city, I adventured into some of the near-by towns in Missouri and Kansas, and soon was arguing a theory that in every small town the local correspondents of big city newspapers are constantly overlooking pay streaks of good "feature stories." Usually I would start out with twenty-five dollars and keep moving until I went broke. A railway journey no longer meant, as in reportorial days, a banquet in the dining-car and a chair on the observation platform, charged up on an expense account. Often enough I slept in a day coach, my head pillowed on a kodak wrapped in a sweater vest. The elevation was just right for a pillow; and at the same time the traveler was insured against theft of his most precious possession, a brand new folding camera of post card size.

For the little snapshot box soon showed its weakness in an emergency and had to be replaced with a better machine which had an adjustable diaphragm, a timing apparatus, a focusing scale and a front like an accordion. One afternoon it had happened that while two hundred miles from a city and twenty from the nearest railroad, the snapshot box had been useless baggage for two hours, while an anxious free lance sat perched on the crest of an Ozark mountain studying an overcast sky and praying for some sunlight. At last the sun blazed out for half a minute and the lever clicked in exultation.

This experience enforced a lesson: "Learn to take any sort of picture, indoors or out, on land or water, in any sort of weather." After I got the new machine, with a tripod to insure stability and consequent sharpness of outline, a piece of lemon-colored glass for cloud photography and another extra lens for portrait work, I began snapping at anything that held out even the faintest promise of allowing me to clear expenses in the course of acquiring needed experience. I photographed the neighbors' children, houses offered for sale, downtown street scenes and any number of x-marks-the-spot-of-the-accident.

When a cyclone cut a swath through one of our suburbs, I rushed half-a-dozen photographs to Leslie's, feeling again some of the same thrilling sort of confidence that had accompanied the first Irresistible Wedge. Back came three dollars for a single print. Rather a proud day, that! Never before had one of my prints sold for more than fifty cents.

There were evenings after that when I meditated giving the writing game good-by in favor of photography; and many a time since then the old temptation has recurred. The wonder of catching lovely scenery in a box and of watching film and print reproduce it in black and white keeps ever fresh and fascinating to me, gratifying an instinct for composition in one whose fingers are too clumsy to attempt to draw or paint. In those early days of my adventures in photography an editor came very near the literal truth when he sarcastically observed: "Young man, life to you seems to be just one long undeveloped film."