Three requisites
Equally silly are the writers who choose hackneyed topics that have been discussed and worn threadbare years ago. Such is the writer who offers a series of twelve Papers on the Higher Education of Women, or Woman’s Suffrage, or the Poetry of Wordsworth. The Papers that find favour with Editors must first be fresh as regards Subject, second, be fresh as regards Style, third, fresh as regards Idea. The writer who possesses this triple gift, requires no further hints to tell him how and where to succeed. Success with him is a certainty.
What not to do
Perhaps the best way to emphasise the above remarks is to tell my readers what to do and what not to do.
Do not send an article to a magazine until you have first looked through at least one of its numbers; carefully observe its tone, try to gather for yourself what its motive is, and to what sort of public it appeals. If after a short or a long perusal you discover that you and it are not in touch—that its scope is too wide for you, or your thoughts are too big for its limits, leave it alone, and try your luck somewhere else.
When you write, don’t fly too high. Get a subject into your head and feel that, small as this subject may be, you have something either useful or amusing to say about it.
Do not write a poem on April, and send it for insertion in the April number of a magazine on the day that number issues from the press. This has been a constant experience in my Editorial life. Try to remember, if you know it already, and try to learn the fact if you do not, that magazines take a certain number of days to print, and that, as a rule, the number is practically made up weeks, and sometimes months before publication.
False humility
When you offer a contribution to sin Editor, do not have resource to a sort of false humility, which some writers are fond of adopting. For instance, I have received letters with offers of verses which the writer deprecates as “unworthy of publication, and only fit for the waste-paper basket,” nevertheless, I am expected to read them, and give a critical opinion, because the friends of the writer in question have urged him or her as the case may be, to forward them. This false humility is always prejudicial to the would-be contributor.
Be business-like