Editor, THE WRITER:

The meetings of the Scribes' Club of Spokane have been uniformly interesting and well attended for nine years, in spite of the fact that we have no system of fines or penalties for non-attendance or for non-participation. We find that the writing bug compels its victims to scratch, even though they have to drop everything to do so. There are eighteen of us with the bug, all women but one.

We meet every Thursday afternoon, and whenever a fifth Thursday occurs in the month, we have a social meeting with refreshments and literary stunts at the home of one of the members. Business is attended to briefly at the regular meetings, and most mat

ters of that nature are referred to a committee appointed by the leader elected from our number to preside at the sessions. The other officer is a treasurer who keeps a list of the members and collects from each the sum of twenty-five cents a month. This money is used to buy books or periodicals of reference.

We have no requirements for admission except the will to write, and those who are interested and really desirous of criticism attend as regularly as possible. We welcome authors of all classes. It makes no difference what sort of manuscripts they write, nor

whether they are successful or not. Contrary to the opinion of A. C. L. we think that a short-story creator may be a good writer and critic of poetry, and vice versa.

We have no trouble with levity nor the discussion of extraneous topics. Assignments are made occasionally to ensure full programs, but as a rule there is no lack of material for criticism.

When the meeting opens, the members announce, in turn, whether there have been any acceptances or checks during the week. This encouraging part of the program is followed by the presentation of new material. The author reads her manuscript without interruption. We think that is a matter of courtesy as well as of expediency. The club members use notebooks to jot down criticisms of all sorts, and are not backward in picking things to pieces without regard for the author's feelings, when we think it necessary, nor do we spare the praise when we are held spellbound by a heart-stirring verse or story. Often the manuscript is rewritten and reread at a later meeting and sold the first time out.

The most convincing proof of our success is the fact that we have been the inspiration for the formation of four or five similar clubs in the city.

Spokane, Washington

B. H. G.

JOHN GALLISHAW

WILLIAM H. HILLS, Consulting Editor

MARGARET GORDON
BERTHA W. SMITH

ROBERT HILLYER BURGES JOHNSON

To be helpful, interesting, and instructive to all literary workers.

To give plain and practical hints, helps, and suggestions about preparing and editing manuscript. To collect and publish the experiences, experiments, and observations of literary people, for the benefit of all writers.

To note improved methods and labor-saving devices for literary workers.

To discuss in a practical way interesting questions of etymology, grammar, rhetoric, or verse-making. To print entertaining personal articles by and about noted literary people.

To record the important news of the literary world.

To aid young writers in reaching the public by advising them how to make their copy salable. To be of value to the writers of sermons, lectures, letters; to the student of language; to the lover of literature; to all, in brief, who write for the newspaper, the magazine, or the book-publisher.

Mr. Hills, still a member of the editorial staff, was one of the original editors. His service has been one of the longest in magazine history and few can boast that theirs has been more conscientiously devoted to the interests of readers. Independence has been the solid foundation of success.

On this occasion, marking the end of two decades of successful publication, it is fitting that the new members of the board should extend to Mr. Hills and Miss Gordon their congratulations, in which many of the old readers of THE WRITER will most heartily join.

Editor, the Forum:

I am an English Journalist and it has often occurred to me that the American writer is missing a whale-load of opportunity by not becoming acquainted with English markets for his work. The standard of writing in your country is higher and I imagine the competition is incredibly fierce. There must be many struggling "sophomores" way over who are not just good enough at the moment to win entry to your markets, but who might succeed in passing our barriers. The English editors do not demand English atmosphere; in fact they grab eagerly at anything in an American Wild West setting, because they know that the English public is keen on that sort of thing. One English magazine in particular and there are many more publishes practically nothing else but the work of Americans (handled, of course, by your literary agents and syndicates). They love 'em.

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So why don't your young writers learn the English markets on their own account and do the syndicates, etc., out of a job of money? This is

where your own Journal would come in. You would engage an English journalist, somebody authoritative in England, to write up the English markets for you from an American angle. I think that your readers would say it's a "wow."

We, in England, find it exceedingly hard to break into your markets and although your editors are far more courteous than ours, they do demand the goods. Give them the goods, however, and they sing like a fish, but ours will sometimes take any old dope for want of better.

Your writers must not expect a munificent rate of pay in our markets; indeed it is poor compared with yours. Still I think your writers will say any payment is better than none at all, and, in any case, the market will doubtless be regular, for there is an "American" craze on, here just now. Our public regards your writers heroically, ours are nothing, yours are bathed in glamour. and so on. My advice to you all is to leap in while the going's good. T. H. Fisker.

London, England.

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Editor, the Forum:

One of the finest constructive ideas was that in the WRITER relative to local manuscript clubs, which would assume local, verbal, constructive criticism. A manuscript in the library and the same manuscript in a club during an evening session are two different things. The glamor is taken away. It loses that hypnotic effect on the writer that it possesses magically in the library. This is hard, and even painful, on the author. It shows new angles, and jolts the writer out of his attitude toward his own fiction. Honest constructive criticism in an informal way is very enlightening, and very, very helpful. All grow as they are in turn critics and criticized. Every town has several individuals of culture who can lend their aid and judgment without themselves being authors, such being often the

librarian, teachers of literature and moderns in the high school, often an editor on the local newspaper. For some reason a manuscript has a most uncanny power to conceal its blemishes and sins from the eyes of the one who wrote it, not to lose that until months of time have wasted themselves. The Manuscript Club will save that lost motion, and develop the author as well. Manuscripts, bunched or singly, sent in to an editor with the endorsement of a Manuscript Club will be not only very apt to have special favorable attention, but probably open to the Club special facilities for placing material that is a reflection of the taste of the Club, as proved by the manuscripts that are allowed to receive the endorsements. Louis Duncan Ray.

Detroit, Mich.

Editor, the Forum:

We tyros are constantly being admonished by those who have "arrived" that persistence in writing is the keynote of success. Therefore, we should write and write and keep on writing; send off Manuscripts that are unsalable, and keep on sending them off, regardless of the constant quantity of rejection slips received.

A letter which I have just received from Robert Whitaker, a writer and editor, may furnish a few pertinent suggestions to beginners who, like myself, have enjoyed the experience of writing numerous short stories that keep on coming back.

I quote verbatim from the letter:

"First let me say emphatically that, great as persistence is, just sticking to it is in itself no promise whatever of success in the literary field. I have watched a big house-fly butt his head against a window pane, persistently enough, and quite vainly, because he did not get far enough away to see the open window space above him. I saw a quail in a cage, running most persistently back and forth, and getting only exercise out of it, though it was freedom he sought. Just writing stuff and sending it off and getting it back without any explanation is a painfully ineffective way of making a success of writing.

"Jack London once told me, early in his career, just after he had won fame, 'I used to send out all manner of manuscripts, stories, essays, verse, epigrams, jokes, and they all came back as regularly as they went out. But after I discovered what was wrong with my stuff, I made my hit with my Alaska stories.'

"An ounce of understanding is worth a pound of mere stick-to-it-iveness, valuable as that last-named quality is.

"Three things I would advise you to do. First, get hold of some books that have to do with the literary market, and study them carefully. Second, leave yourself open to discover the field in which

you are going to win. And third, study the work of others who have arrived, and do not rush your own production too much. Study, I say, and I mean that word, STUDY! Take their articles and stories to pieces, and put them together again. Study their titles, their introductions. Study their whole mechanism. Take yourself, and your work, seriously."

The tyro is just as likely to persist in making the same mistakes by merely "keeping on keeping on," as he is to discover the weaknesses and faults of his work.

No one can be taught to write who cannot write. Neither can anyone be taught to speak in public who is not a born speaker. But, as a professional lecturer, I know that the art of oratory may be greatly enhanced by proper attention being paid to certain fundamental "Dos" and "Don'ts," proper beginnings, outlines, developments, and perorations.

One may be a born musician, painter, actor, but he will not get far commercially until he learns and applies certain "Dos" and "Don'ts" of his particular craft. Hence, the writer may learn how to avoid certain errors of story construction, and to observe certain recognized rules, by submitting his work to the analysis of some trained critic for criticism; and by reading and studying recognized text-books on writing.

An old deacon in a country church that had been afflicted by supply-preachers of mediocre ability from the theological seminary, once said to me:

"God don't call no man to preach who cain't preach; but if the man whom God has called simply waits fer th' Lord to fill his mouth - an' is too durn lazy to prepare fer his ministry, he will find that th' Lord will never fill his mouth with nothin' but hot air."

May not the old deacon's conclusion be applied with equal force to the business of writing salable material? Charles S. Mundell.

Oakland, Calif.

literature. It is only for the philosophers and the scientists to dig into the depths that reveal sordidness, anyhow. Life may not be, was not intended to be, solved by the average man. Men may not penetrate life; consequently they should all join in the worship of the sun, 'without whose golden magic things would be no more than what they are.' There is a dark side - dear, yes - but do you admire the suicides? What do you want from life? Take it through vicarious experience; look at these people, not so unlike yourself, that we will create for you." And so the "life is thorny, give me the roses in

literature" school has been formed. Men and women consider it their duty to look for an escape from life in the books they read. They attempt to lose their very identities in pictures of the world as it ought to be.

No wonder the happy ending has come to be considered practically inevitable. Writers are forced to be controlled by the commercial law of demand. And yet is the happy ending as inevitable as it is thought to be? The "Let me escape! - a story, quick!" plan has worked, it is true. But as any stimulant, it brings its reaction. Rationalization is second nature to a man's thought processes, but the very man for whom the happy endings are being written will tell you the second he closes the book that he has been hiding his head in the sand. He knows it, and is secretly ashamed of himself. Then he starts rationalizing again -"It rests me; it gives me courage." And the writers turn out more happy endings.

Now, as a matter of fact, the man does not care a hang about the happy endings. His words are truer than he knows-it is the rest he wants, the courage. He thinks that these are inseparable from the happy ending, and the author has believed him. But look once at the literature of the ages. When men are really suffering they do not go to comedy,

to society verse, to the poetry that would make them forget. They find comfort, if it is given to them to find it, in works such as "Oedipus," and "Prometheus Bound." These characters suffered as few men do in our work-a-day world. And where are the Pollyanna stories in comparison, where is the significance of the final clinch, of the It-just-wasbound-to-come-out-all-right attitude? Which type of literature better prepares a man to face life? Which comes the nearer actually to giving him rest, to giving him the courage that is needed for a good fight?

For after all, it is meeting life bravely that counts, not deceiving oneself as to what life actually is. The reading public is intelligent enough to understand this. The man most insistent upon having everything in literature all peaches and cream would not, when it came right down to it, exchange a family reconciliation and worldly fame for the vision of living life with courage as it comes to the hero of such a novel as Mr. Hugh Walpole's "Fortitude." Glowing pictures and happy endings are as fairy stories compared with a complete edition of Shakspere's works when it comes to fulfiling the real function of literature. The public will recognize this when authors do. Alice Wildey. Chicago, Illinois

Editor, the Forum:

The idea that you bear and lose always seems so much finer and more important than the one you capture and keep that it is little less than tragedy to sit down and try vainly to recall the thought that you were too busy to write down at the time and have now-alas! - forgotten. After having had that experience time and time again, I set my wits to work to try to prevent its repetition.

With few absolutely leisure hours at my disposal I learned as has every other woman who tries to write in addition to fulfilling her immediate duties as a house-wife- that much of my thinking and planning must be done while my hands were busy with the routine of daily housework. There lay the difficulty. The new idea invariably flashes upon my mind, or the phrase over which I have struggled vainly at last rearranges itself gracefully, just at the inopportune moment when my hands are wet and soapy with dish-water (Has n't it happened to you a hundred times in just that way?). If I wait until the dishes are done, and my hands are dried and ready for a pencil, I find that the precious thought has escaped, and I must spend hours trying to recapture it again and sometimes never to succeed. Then, too, if I allow myself to stop and dry my hands for the purpose of just jotting it down, I

usually succumb to the temptation to write on and on, and by the time I again become aware of the interrupted task, I find a pan full of uninviting cold dish-water, and lunch-time fairly upon my heels. Then comes a breath-taking scramble to over-take the precious moments I have allowed to slip by. It was really a puzzle.

So I worked out a plan which saves the day. Wet hands work havoc on a paper pad, but are powerless to ruin a slate. So now there is hanging, right beside the sink, a slate with a piece of chalk attached and when ideas come flocking through the bubbling suds it is not necessary even to wipe my hands before I catch the chalk and jot down the word or phrase that will clench the idea and keep it safe for future, more leisurely, reference.

That, however, still left the other problem unsolved, of how to keep the ones which burst upon me when I am in the other end of the house with hands all oily from the dust-rag. One just can't bear to spoil a note-book to which one must refer again and again, by covering its pages with greasy smears. But, ah! one does n't mind any number of spots on a scratch-pad. So now my apron pocket always carries a pencil and cheap pad upon which I note all the dust-rag thoughts, and there they rest peacefully until the moment comes when I can transfer