If You Don't Write Fiction

by Charles Phelps Cushing

The temptation to dogmatize here is strong, for the witness can testify that he has seen enviable success crown many a fiction writer who, apparently, possessed small native talent for story telling, and who won his laurels through sheer pluck and persistence. One of these pluggers declares he blesses the rejection slip because it "eliminates so many quitters."

But of course it would be absurd to believe that any one with unlimited courage and elbow grease could win at fiction, lacking all aptitude for it. Just as there are photographers who can snap pictures for twenty years without producing a single happy composition (except by accident), and reporters who never develop a "nose for news," there are story writers who can master all the mechanics of tale-telling, through sheer drudgery, and yet continually fail to catch fiction's spark of life. They fail, and shall always fail. Yet it is better to have strived and failed, than never to have tried at all.

Why? For the good of their artists' consciences, in the first place. And, in the second, because no writer can earnestly struggle with words without learning something about them to his trade advantage.

A confession may be in order: your deponent testifies freely, knowing that anything he may say may be used against him, that for years he has been a tireless producer of unsuccessful fiction, yet he views his series of rebuffs in this medium calmly and even somewhat humorously. For, by trade, he is a writer of articles, and he earnestly believes that the mental exercise of attempting to produce fiction acts as a healthy influence upon a non-fictionist's style. It stimulates the torpid imagination. It quickens the eye for the vivid touches, the picturesque and the dramatic. It is a groping toward art.

"Art," writes one who knows, "is a mistress so beautiful, so high, so noble, that no phrases can fitly characterize her, no service can be wholly worthy of her."

Perhaps such art as goes into the average magazine article is not likely to merit much high-sounding praise. In our familiar shop talk we are prone to laugh about it. But even the most commercial-minded of our brotherhood cherishes deep in his heart a craftsman's pride in work well done. So your deponent testifies in his own defense that his copybook exercises in fiction, half of which end in the wastebasket, seem well worth the pains that they cost, so long as they help keep alive in his non-fiction bread-winners a hankering after (if not a flavor of) literary art.

And now must he apologize further for using a word upon which writers in these confessedly commercial days appear to have set a taboo? Then a passage from "The Study of Literature" (Arlo Bates) may serve for the apology:

"Life is full of disappointment, and pain, and bitterness, and that sense of futility in which all of these evils are summed up; and yet were there no other alleviation, he who knows and truly loves literature finds here a sufficient reason to be glad he lives. Science may show a man how to live; art makes living worth his while. Existence to-day without literature would be a failure and a despair; and if we cannot satisfactorily define our art, we at least are aware how it enriches and ennobles the life of every human being who comes within the sphere of its gracious influence."

So, we repeat: for the good of the artist's self-respect as well as for his craftsmanship it is worth while to attempt fiction. If only as a tonic! If only to jog himself out of a rut of habit!

If he succeeds with fiction he has bright hopes of winning much larger financial rewards for his labor than he is likely to gain by writing articles. Non-fiction rarely brings in more than one return upon the investment, but a good short story or novel may fetch several. First, his yarn sells to the magazine. Then it may be re-sold ("second serial rights") to the newspapers. Finally, it may fetch the largest cash return of all by being marketed to a motion picture corporation as the plot for a scenario. In some instances even this does not exhaust all the possibilities, for if British magazines and bookmen are interested in the tale, the "English rights" of publication may add another payment to the total.