CHAPTER IX
AND IF YOU DO—
Something in the misty sunshine this morning made you restless. Vague longings, born of springtime mystery, stirred your blood, quickened the imagination. Roads that never were, and mayhap never will be, beckoned you with their sinuous curves and graceful shade trees toward velvety fields beyond the city's skyline. The sweet fragrance of blossoming orchards tingled in your nostrils and thrilled you with wanderlust. Haunting melodies quavered in your ears. Your old briar pipe never tasted so sweet before. Adventure never seemed so imminent. A golden day. What will you do with it?
You could write to-day, but if you did, you know you could support no patience for prosy facts, statistics and photographs. Whatever urge you feel appears to be toward verse or fiction. Well, why not? Try it! You never know what you might do in writing until you dare.
Verse is largely its own reward.
Fiction, when it turns out successfully, fetches a double reward. It pays both in personal satisfaction, as a form of creative art, and also as a marketable commodity, which always is in great demand, and which can be cashed in to meet house rent and grocers' bills.
It is not within the scope of this little book—nor of its author's abilities—to attempt a discussion of fiction methods. Too many other writers, better qualified to speak, have dealt with fiction in scores of worth while volumes. Too many successful story tellers have related their experiences and treated, with authority, of the short story, the novelette and the long novel.
The purpose here can be only to urge that an attempt to write fiction is a logical step ahead for any scribbler who has won a moderate degree of success in selling newspaper copy and magazine articles. The eye that can perceive the dramatic and put it into non-fiction, the heart that knows human interest, the understanding that can tell a symbol, the artist-instinct that can catch characteristic colors, scents and sounds, all should aid a skilled writer of articles to turn his energies, with some hope of achievement, toward producing fiction. The hand that can fashion a really vivid article holds out promise of being able to compose a convincing short story, if grit and ambition help push the pen.