“As a child I read everything that I could lay hands on and we always had books and magazines at home. But my reading was not guided and it was my great misfortune not to find among my teachers, either in school or college, even one with any special mental quality or deep and sound culture, or even any vital enthusiasm—with the exception of the psychology teacher at college.
“I began to write at college, the sort of imitative stuff that most college girls write—very highbrow essays on Maeterlinck, and that kind of thing. Not much fiction or poetry, as I remember. But I had my ideas of a writing career, for all that. When I was graduated from college I was just eighteen and I came home and told my father that I was going to be an author and he might as well buy me a typewriter—I was always of a severely practical turn of mind. I got the typewriter and began to write stories, first in longhand, then copying them single-spaced on the machine; they made terrifying manuscripts. One got into the Ladies’ World, and one into the Country Gentleman, and one into Truth, which was then a flourishing publication. And about that time, after I had been home for a couple of years, at the suggestion of an old friend of my father’s I went to the University of Vermont for a year of graduate work. And I began to take a special course in history there with Professor Samuel Emerson.
“I tell this with particularity, because it was the very best thing that ever happened to me. As I worked with Professor Emerson, I gradually and painfully became aware that I did not know how to use my mind, and that my education was of the most shocking superficiality. I learned that I didn’t know how to think. I will admit that I was surprised and oh, how humiliated! If I’d only thrown myself on Professor Emerson’s mercy and told him that I knew my shortcomings and asked him to help me! But I was too youthfully proud for that, and I went on, dimly trying to get at the thing myself and marking with a hopeless appreciation, which would have doubtless amazed the Professor had he guessed it, the truly wonderful way in which he used his own exceptional intellectuality.
“It is a fine thing to know what you do not know. It set me to work to try to get what I did not have—a disciplined, well-ordered, logical mind, a store of knowledge, a really broad culture. Alas, I never got any of them, and I never shall. It takes different training and environment from infancy to produce them, as well as greater capabilities than mine. But I did at least get this—the habit of thinking things out for myself, and a poor opinion, thought out by the individual, is better than a lazy acceptance of some one else’s say-so.
“Naturally, my year with Professor Emerson gave me a very low opinion of my chances to become a writer. I let writing alone for a while, and then began doing little light things for the Pittsburgh Gazette, one of whose staff I had met while on a visit to Pittsburgh. They were mostly little essays—though that word is really too dignified for them—on the foibles and fashions of the time. Sometimes a drop or two of sentiment and little amusing incidents that I gathered when visiting in Washington and Baltimore—we Southerners are great visitors, you know—occasionally a scrap of very light verse.
“But this was not enough. I got restless and I wrote to the Gazette people and asked for a job. I got it—I was to run the woman’s page of their evening paper, and do Sunday specials. After I arrived the duties of music critic were added, and later I had charge of a Sunday supplement. The people on the Gazette were very kind and patiently tutored me through my greenhorn days. The training was excellent and I worked there very happily for several years.
“But I had been trying some magazine work—more light, semi-humorous stuff, and the Woman’s Home Companion bought several of my pieces. I went to New York to see them in the spring and in the fall I asked them for a job. And got it,—assistant to Miss Gertrude B. Lane, who was then the assistant editor, and is now the editor.
“I have stayed with the Companion ever since, save for a year when I went with the ill-starred Circle, and now I am managing editor. All this covers a period of over ten years.
“After I got to New York the writing fever got me, and I tried some stories and more short articles of sentiment and humor. Some of these were published and some of them came back to me. More and more I tried to do fiction, and more and more I did it: now I have three books out—Love at Large, The Blue Envelope and The Golden Block—and another in the works, and I’ve written innumerable short stories, most of which have been published. Of course the very best story I ever wrote I cannot sell. I occasionally run across a copy of that story in my rejected manuscript drawer and I say, ‘Never mind—some day I’ll wish you on an editor, yet.’
“None of my stories are in the least autobiographical, and I rarely—almost never—put real people or incidents in my stories, and then only as a foundation on which the action of the story may go forward. My stories are built up from my imagination, character after character, plot, action and finale. I try to work out everything logically, and after I have written a story I go over it and turn the cold eye of criticism on its chronology and the convincingness of its detail. Heaven forefend that I should intimate that I make no mistakes in these,—but at least I try to get them right. That is where my long editorial training is an asset.