CHAPTER VII
SOMETHING TO SELL
Six months back home, toiling like a galley slave, furnished requisite funds for another fling at New York. If ever a writer burned with zeal, this one did. Mississippi Valley summers often approach the torrid; this one was a record breaker; and I never shall forget how often that summer, after a hard day's work as a reporter, I stripped to the waist like a stoker and scribbled and typed until my eyes and fingers ached.
It was wise—and foolish. Wise, because it furnished the capital with which every free lance ought to be well supplied before he attempts to operate from a New York headquarters. Foolish, because it took all joy of life out of my manuscripts while the session of strenuousness lasted and left me wavering at the end almost on the verge of a physical breakdown. Nights, Sundays and holidays I plugged and slogged, nor did I relent even when vacation time came round. I sojourned to the Michigan pine woods, but took along my typewriter and kept it singing half of every day.
The new year found me in New York again, alone this time and installed in a comfortable two-room suite instead of an attic. A reassuring bank account bolstered up my courage while the work was getting under way.
This time I made a go of it; and such ups and downs as have followed in the ten years succeeding have not been much more dramatic than the mild adventures that befall the everyday business man. "Danger is past and now troubles begin." That phrase of Gambetta's aptly describes the situation of the average free lance when, after the first desperate struggles, he has managed to gain a reasonable assurance of independence.
Confidence comes with experience, and when you no longer have any grave fears about your ability to make a living at the trade, your mind turns from elementary problems to the less distracting task of finding out how to make your discovered degree of talent count for all that it may be worth. After trying your hand at a variety of subjects, you will find your forte. But take your time about it. Every adventure in composition teaches you something new about yourself, your art and the markets wherein you gain your daily bread. The way to learn to write—the only way—is by writing, and you never will know what you might do unless you dare and try.
Both as a matter of expediency and of getting as much fun out of the work as possible, it is well in the beginning to be versatile. Eventually, the free lance faces two choices: He may become a specialist and put in the remainder of his life writing solely about railroads, or about finance, or about the drama. Or he may, as Robert Louis Stevenson did, turn his hand as the mood moves him, to fiction, verse, fables, biography, criticism, drama or journalism—a little of everything. For my own part, I have always had something akin to pity for the fellow who is bound hand and foot to one interest. Let the fame and the greater profits of specialization go hang; "an able bodied writin' man" can best possess his soul if he does not harness Pegasus to plow forever in one cabbage patch.