Choose your Topic from your own Environment
You cannot write convincingly on topics about which you know little. You can cover reams of paper—amateurs are doing it every day of the year!—with descriptions of people, and houses, and scenes, and walks of life with which you have only a hearsay acquaintance; but such writing is scarcely likely to be worth printing and paying for.
If the schoolgirl, instead of wasting her time on something that reads like a washedout réchauffé of The Scarlet Pimpernel, would try her hand at a story of schoolgirl life, she might produce something really bright and alive, even though it lacked the symmetry and finish that years of practice bring to a writer. And though the MS. did not find a market at the time, on account of immaturity of style, it might prove valuable later on when the writer had gained experience. It would give her data she had forgotten in the intervening years.
And the girl who spends her ink on the philanderings of the faithless wife (a species, by the way, that she has probably never set eyes on, having been brought up like most of the rest of us in a decent circle of sane relations and friends) might, perhaps, have done some charming pictures of domestic life, as did the authors of Cranford and Little Women in their day.
If the aunt, instead of hoping to influence factory girls of whom she knows absolutely nothing, and whose conversation, could she but hear it, would be an unintelligible language to her, had turned her invalidism to practical account, and passed on useful hints and ideas to other invalids, she might have written something that would have been welcomed by others similarly handicapped.
And so on, down to the city clerk, who never can be made to realise that a type of story most difficult to lay hands on is the one that deals, accurately, with the inside of that world peopled by the bankers and stockbrokers and money magnates. The detective tracking Sleuth-hound Bill has the tamest walk-over in comparison with the daring, and tense excitement, surrounding some financial deals.
Original Work is rare: the Universal Tendency is to Copy
I do not say that these writers would necessarily have placed their MSS. had they written on the lines suggested; it takes something besides the theme and background to make a good story. But I do say that they would have been many degrees nearer publication, had they dealt with types and circumstances that had come within their personal cognisance, rather than with those they only knew by hearsay.
The outsider would scarcely credit how rare it is for an editor to receive a piece of really original work; the universal tendency is to copy other people's productions rather than trouble to discover original models.
The schoolgirl, studying water-colour drawing, prefers to work from a "copy," showing some other person's painting of a vase of flowers, rather than have her own vase filled with real flowers before her. Some one else's work saves the inexperienced the responsibility of selection—and selection is always a difficult point for the beginner, who finds it hard to decide what to include in, and what to leave out of, a picture.