"There is. I can buy stock in the company, identify myself with it more and more, and in twenty or thirty years, perhaps, move into a brownstone front on Easy street."
"No, you couldn't!" declared Mrs. Edwards.
"Why not?"
"Why, because your heart wouldn't be in your work. Ever since you were old enough to know your own mind you have wanted to be a writer. When you were twelve years old you were publishing a little paper for boys—"
"It was a four-page paper about the size of lady's handkerchief," laughed John Milton, "and it lasted for two issues."
"Well," insisted his wife, "you've been writing stories more or less all your life, and if you are ever a success at anything it will be in the fiction line. You are now twenty-six years old, and if you make your mark as an author it's high time you were about it. Don't you think so? If I'm willing to chance it, John, you surely ought to be."
"All right," was the answer, "it's a 'go.'"
And thus it was that John Milton Edwards reached his momentous decision. Perhaps you, who read these words, have been wrestling soulfully with the same question—vacillating between authorship as a vocation or as an avocation. Edwards made his decision eighteen years ago. At that time conditions were different; and it is doubtful whether, had he faced conditions as they are now, he would have decided to run his Fiction Factory on full time.
"An eye for an eye."
A writer whose stories have been used in the Munsey publications, Pearson's and other magazines, writes:
"How is this as an illustration of timeliness, or the personal element in writing?—I went in to see Mr. Matthew White, Jr., one day with a story and he said he couldn't read it because he had a sore eye. I had an eye for that eye as fiction, so I sat down and wrote a story in two hours' time about an editor who couldn't read any stories on account of his bum lamp, whereby he nearly missed the best story for the year. Mr. White was interested in the story mainly because he had a sore eye himself and was in full sympathy with the hero. I took the story down and read it aloud to him, selling it, of course. The story was called, 'When the Editor's Eye Struck.'"
(Talk about making the most of your opportunities!)
The Bookman, somewhere, tells of a lady in the Middle West who caught the fiction fever and wrote in asking what price was paid for stories. To the reply that "$10 a thousand was paid for good stories" she made written response: "Why, it takes me a week to write one story, and $10 for a thousand weeks' work looks so discouraging that I guess I'd better try something else."
Poeta nascitur; non fit. This has been somewhat freely translated by one who should know, as "The poet is born; not paid."