writer may be newspaper work, or some other form of dealing with words. It may mean hard, lean evenings after trying days of earning your living in some less congenial occupation. People don't become writers by wishing to be, and some even who labor long and hard can never succeed.

Who is to be the judge as to whether you who read this article can succeed? You are. But you must be honest about it. The failure loves to blame the editor. His manuscripts aren't read, he complains. It is easy to say that one can't sell anything unless one has a reputation or a pull, and that one can't acquire a reputation unless one sells something. But many reputations are made in a year. There is much less pull in the literary world than you imagine. The editor has too many other things to consider. He can't buy a story just because he likes the looks of the fellow who brought it in, or because he received a letter from a friend of his about it.

First of all, then, be honest and decide whether you have anything to say. Then go about learning how to say it. You will get a sympathetic reading from us. We read many stories which have ideas, but are badly handled. Why, then, don't we tell the author how to handle them? Sometimes we do. More often we have n't time, due partly to the fact that we have to give a fair reading to many who should n't be writing at all. Then, too, the editor knows that in most cases it is useless to advise. Members of the "know-youreditor" school merely use it to catalog him. In the long run, the writer must save himself. The editor is not running a literary bureau. He knows that if the author is going to amount to anything it will be largely through effort and not through advice. By this, I do not mean to say that authors should n't know something about the magazine to which they submit material. But, if you value the friendship of Scribner's, don't send us a story made after the pattern of one you've read in the magazine. Nor do I mean to say that there is no place for helpful criti

If the keen eye and understanding mind are there, you have the great essentials. Don't be too eager to turn your impressions into stories. It is not often that you can turn out tonight a story of a picturesque person you saw this afternoon. Don't scour the highways and byways for "ideas for stories." Scour them if they interest you, but let the impressions soak.

One aspiring youth came to me a few weeks ago. He was almost desperate. He said he had been writing for a long time. He had a truck full of stories. He had traveled widely. He had been all over the United States and her island possessions. I asked him if he had been traveling only or if he had lived and worked in these places. He answered rather apologetically that it had been necessary to work some of the time. "But" he added hopefully, "there was n't a library in any of these places that I did n't spend hours in." He left five stories with me. They proved what he said. Each had a different setting. But all had been written in a library. The young man had seen little in these places save certain obvious features of landscape. He had learned little save certain phrases which seemed to him peculiar to the locality. He had felt little save certain differences in climate. Travel is fine as a broadening influence. But it furnishes little literary material. One can't live in a place a week and write a decent story about it. One writes best about what one knows intimately. The locale of your stories should be the place where your roots are deepest.

This brings me to another point. Most young people, when they set out to write, immediately take up fiction. There is just as good a market for brief and penetrating articles. Often you can put your knowledge and observation into the form of an article where you would fail utterly with a story. Only about twenty per cent of the editorial contents of Scribner's is fiction. Of course, many of our non-fiction contributors are authorities

who are not professional writers. We make a point of having big movements and events reported by the principal actors in them. But there is always room for brief essays, human, humorous, or satirical. Will Rose, editor of the Cambridge Springs, Pa., Enterprise-News, contributed a highly successful series of "small-town" articles to the March, April, and May numbers. Edward Rexford conceived an idea that the instalment plan was making for religious tolerance and community churches and has an article in the April number on it. Mary Alice Barrows, supervisor of public dance halls for a group of clubs in San Francisco, wrote "Heartbreak Dance" in the November number. Carol Park saw chances for excellent satire in a college president and a minister that she knew.

As to technical requirements, there is little to be said save that brevity is the key to success where Scribner's is concerned. The shorter the story or article the better. Due to physical limitations, we rarely publish a story of more than 7,000 words. Thomas Boyd has been doing some highly successful stories in 3,000 words or less. Manuscripts must of course be legible (typewritten and doublespaced preferably), and probably the editor's attitude toward them is a little more favorable if they do not look as though the author had taken a list of magazines and begun with the "A's" and after many rejections was just getting down to the "S's." Beyond that nothing, save the usual stamped and self-addressed envelope.

of a new writer. A year ago John W. Thomason, Jr., was unknown as a writer save to a few enthusiastic critics such as Laurence Stallings and Alexander Woollcott who had read his manuscript. At the time this article is written, he has published six pieces in Scribner's Magazine, a book which is already in its third edition and selling surprisingly well for a work which may be thought to have little appeal to the feminine reading taste, he has been signed on by the Cosmopolitan Magazine for twelve pieces during the next two years, has illustrated a story for Liberty and two for Scribner's and created more than a little stir in the Literary world.

What is the hint in that for the young writer? He besieged no editors, he studied no magazines to find out the peculiarities of its editors. He pursued no study of the public taste, had no philosophy of "give the public what it wants." Alexander Woollcott has told the story of how Thomason's writing came to light in Vanity Fair for June, 1925. Laurence Stallings has also related it in McCall's Magazine for April. Briefly, it is this. Stallings had observed him sketching one day (they were both in the Marine Corps). During the hottest of the fighting, Stallings kept hearing of this excellent soldier who got his fighting done and had time to draw pictures of men in action. After the war, Stallings persuaded Thomason to let him see a collection of the sketches. He was so much struck by them that he hurried Captain Thomason off to Neysa McMein to get her artistic opinion. She also was enthusiastic, suggested that they ought to be published, and said that Joseph Chapin, art director of Scribner's Magazine, was the man to see. This proved to be correct. Chapin recognized the quality of the sketches immediately. The question arose as to text. It was suggested that Mr. Stallings might write an article to go with them. Stallings had consented, when Captain Thomason modestly said he had written a couple of things himself which he would leave with us, although he had no idea whether they would be suitable. It took the editors only a little while

There are no limitations as to material. We are continually looking for stories, articles and essays on topics that will be of interest to intelligent people. We have no predilections. We only ask that it be good honest stuff, not done in imitation of any one, not constructed after any pattern which you have not made your own.

The months before the August number appeared, one of the most sensational finds of year had broken into print with a crashing narrative called "Fix Bayonets." It led the June Scribner's, a rare position for the work

to see that his writing was even better than his drawings. These two articles which he so diffidently submitted led the June and September numbers of Scribner's and formed the basis of his book "Fix Bayonets!" which was published in March. "Monkey Meat," a story of the war, appeared in November, "The Conquest of Mike," a tale of the Marines in Central America, was featured on the January cover. "Into Belleau Wood" was similarly honored in March, and "Mail Day" a sketch of life on board the U. S. S. Rochester lying off the coast of Chile waiting for General Pershing to do something about the Tacna-Arica dispute, appeared the following month. Two other pieces by him are scheduled for early numbers.

The number in which "Mail Day" was published had a cover by another Scribner's "find," Will James, the cowboy-artist who also provoked a literary explosion when his first work appeared in Scribner's Magazine about three years ago. His stories of "Smoky - A One-Man Horse" began in that number and run through July.

What is the secret of their success? They write well-nigh perfect prose in that it is perfectly fitted to express the vivid lives they have led. The fact that they draw as well as write indicates chiefly that they "know their stuff" so well that it bubbles out in picture as well as word. There are others who have submitted their work to Scribner's without so much as an accompanying letter, and have been accepted. George S. Brooks is one of the unheralded. McCready Huston is another. Edwin Dial Torgerson, Clarke Knowlton, Ed

ward L. Strater, Valma Clark, Leigh Morton, Reuben Maury, Walter Edmonds are still others. The single feature common to the work of this group is that the authors have something to say, and, through hard work, have found a way to say it. Both James and Thomason might seem to contradict the “hard work" theory. James writes in the cowboy vernacular. He talks and writes letters in the same language. His singular success may be attributed to his apprenticeship in living the life about which he writes. It began when he was born in an overland wagon somewhere in Montana, the son of a Texas cowboy. His father and mother died shortly after and a trapper took care of him until he, too, disappeared, leaving James at 14 with two horses and a winter's catch. From then until too many fighting broncs incapacitated him he lived and worked with horse and cow outfits.

Thomason, on the other hand, had newspaper experience before he went into the Marines. He was on the staff of the Houston, Texas, Chronicle. Heywood Broun of the New York World said in his column of April 22 that he resented the perfect prose of Thomason's book because it seemed to come to him so easily, while his brothers of the writing craft had to labor so long. Undoubtedly Thomason's apprenticeship was comparatively short, but it was nevertheless served. But he may be put down as another example of the material making the style. Cases of this are rare, particularly with young writers.

ROM a quiet, bright eyed, little old man,

FROM

who had been a great pickpocket in his day, I once heard a nice little story about a box in a theatre, and of a dream there enacted, in which Nat Goodwin played a part. It was in a city of the West, where lived a man whom we'll call McCrea. This gentleman owned a newspaper, and he had such a dislike of all crooks that he made his police reporter write up each prominent criminal as soon as he arrived in town, and warn the public against his crimes. This annoyed not only the visiting crooks but the local chief of police as well, for it reduced his perquisites. So he went to McCrea one day as a friend and warned him that if he persisted in his Puritanical career, some deft offended "dip" might come and take a large part of his wealth away. Said McCrea, "I'd like to see the crook who could ever take anything off of me!"

Soon after this, my little friend, who was then a celebrity in his profession, arrived in town, and on learning from the chief of the cops of the obstinate virtue of McCrea, volunteered to give him a lesson. Nat Goodwin, as it happened, arrived in town that afternoon, with "The American Citizen". and put up at the same hotel with my friend. And Nat Goodwin was a man who had been a great mixer, all his life; he liked to swap stories at hotel bars with all kinds and conditions of men; so my friend and he had met before. The two soon got together now, and a most nefarious plot was hatched with the result that Goodwin sent a note to McCrea, offering him a box at the theatre for that evening. Only three tickets were en

closed and a half hour later another note, of profuse apology, was sent. Through a stupid mistake at the box office, the other three tickets, said this note, had been sold, and so were the other boxes. But would McCrea bring his wife and daughter a few minutes early that night, and take the three front seats in the box. McCrea did this, and a little later, one by one, the three rear seats were taken by the chief of police, my little friend, and a tall wise crook from Tennessee, all of them in evening clothes.

At the end of the performance, in the narrow passage way where coats were hung, behind the box, the voluble cop and the southerner engaged the attention of Mr. McCrea. He was a stout man, and they wedged him in. They held his coat for him- had a good laugh over some joke from Tennessee. In short, as my friend expressed it, "I felt like a singer with two Paderewski's playing my accompaniments!" And while they played, he did his part. First he took McCrea's gold watch and then his diamond shirt studs. Then, as Goodwin burst cordially in and still further increased the jam, my quiet dexterous little friend removed the publisher's pocket book, and after that his cuff buttons, and then undid his white tie and then coughed. At which signal, Goodwin turned, and with dramatic suddenness exclaimed:

"My God, McCrea, look what you've lost!" Out marched the virtuous publisher then, enraged, with his restored possessions in his clinched and angry hands, while Goodwin and the chief of police, and my friend and the man from Tennessee, went chuckling back to the hotel, to celebrate the outrage.