Part 25

At present a great number of Americans, both men and women, are seriously interested in business conditions and its problems. For this reason when we decided to limit our publishing to one type of story--we publish but one story a week, and that of limited length--we decided for the time being to publish only business stories. We prefer those of constructive turn or of such dramatic intensity that interest is compelled. We do not want love stories in a business setting. We do occasionally accept the humorous story, as often a writer in this guise can present a more fundamental truth or give a better picture of actual conditions than could be projected in any other way.

In asking for business stories we do not feel that we are limiting the writer. American business is so broad in scope, so diversified in character, so tied up with the every day life of all of us, it has so many facets of interest, so many angles of approach that any one who writes can surely produce a business story if he or she will. A good business story is bound to be an interesting story, and interest to my mind is after all the aim and end of all fiction writing.

PERRITON MAXWELL.

_Leslie’s._ 225 Fifth Avenue, New York City.

LIFE

_Life’s_ principal need is humor. After humor comes sentiment, and after sentiment, satire. _Life_ will consider original jokes, short (very short) dialogues, epigrams, epigrammatical comments, light verse and manuscripts up to 500 words on subjects of topical or news interest containing these three elements singly or in combination. Before submitting, it is best to make a comprehensive study of what is printed in the magazine and to model the contribution on similar lines. By reason of the seeming simplicity of its contents, _Life_ is constantly receiving contributions which make no pretense at literary preparation and are therefore unavailable.

HENRY WILLIAM HANEMANN.

_Life._ 17 West 31st Street, New York City.

LIVE STORIES

_Live Stories_ is not afraid of ideas. Outside of humor, it insists upon something more than just a good story. Humor, of course, is more than humor only when handled by a master. There are not many masters of humor in America; in fact, neither American writers nor readers have a real sense of humor. They have, mostly, a keen sense of the ridiculous and a really brilliant appreciation of wit. Doubtless the difficulty every editor experiences in getting good humorous stories is thus explained. It also accounts for _Live Stories’_ belief that it is useless to look for an idea in humorous contributions. “There ain’t no such animal” in America, and if there were it is doubtful if the public would appreciate it.

In the list of short stories memorable, one finds that each is based on an _idea_; that is, each is more than a story. “The Fall of The House of Usher,” “They,” “The Man Without a Country,” “Lear of the Steppes,” “A Bit of String,” are striking examples that come readily to mind. The list could be extended to embrace all of the great short stories. O. Henry, you will notice, is not represented here. Indeed, the bulk of O. Henry’s stories are without ideas. Have you never noticed that it is difficult to remember an O. Henry story? The explanation lies in the fact that they are _just_ stories--delightful, captivating, what you will--but they are not intense, compelling an undivided concentration.

_Live Stories_ has, deliberately, gone in for ideas. It was this policy that led it to publish Thomas Grant Springer’s, “The Blood of the Dragon,” a story that won honorable mention by the O. Henry Memorial Committee of the Society of Arts and Sciences. “The Blood of the Dragon” was rejected by a large number of New York editors who, doubtless, were entirely right in their position. Yet this study of the Chinese character will be remembered long after the _stories_ those editors published are forgotten.

To entertain and more, that is the policy of _Live Stories_. It does not want trick stories; it doesn’t want a fabricated and artificial drama; it does not want action simply for action; it does not want weeping authors. It does want the tenseness incident to an inevitable situation. It wants drama, happy or tragic, based upon a fundamental idea. In short, _Live Stories_ wants ideas, clearly, forcibly, dramatically evolved.

GROVE WILSON.

_Live Stories._ THE NEW FICTION PUBLISHING COMPANY, 35-37 West Thirty-ninth Street, New York City.

McCALL’S MAGAZINE

_McCall’s_ finds it hard to specify its standards of the perfect McCall story, because we believe a magazine should cultivate a diversity of story types. A publication with a circulation of over one million and a half, read by people scattered all over the United States, should carefully select from a wide field.

In a short story, we demand first, perhaps that it be a story; that it tell itself convincingly, and interestingly, with its due measure of plot, characterization and charm of style. Honesty and truthfulness in theme and treatment are essential. Though we are opposed to the sentimental and saccharine tale which has been the accepted convention for the woman’s magazine, we believe in romance and adventure and glamour. Life is colored with those three things, and a story is either dull or fantastic unless it bear relation to life.

Although _McCall’s_ is a woman’s magazine, we believe there is no sex in reading, that a woman is not necessarily interested in the old conventionally accepted story in which gilded heroes and heroines pranced through a hectic and golden existence, in which the heroine’s name was always Gwen or Violet, in which the desired male prize was always married off to the poor but noble girl at the consummating altar. Nor need all women’s magazine stories have to do with the abuse of the sacrificial mother or the efforts of an orphan stenographer alone in a great city. Love and money and fame may be fundamental pillars of plots, as of life; but to-day’s woman, even as to-day’s flapper, demands more than the sentimental narration of their intertwinings.

As for the young author, we welcome him--or her. The famous and the arrived have their place, but the world is ever to the oncoming. If there is a germ of a story in any neophyte’s contribution, _McCall’s_ is only too glad to throw all its energies into framing for it a more effective setting.

BESSIE BEATTY.

_McCall’s Magazine._ 236-250 West Thirty-seventh Street, New York City.

McCLURE’S MAGAZINE

It is difficult to frame rigidly the deciding factors in selecting fiction for a magazine that is planned for the general reading public. Any reply that I may make must be human rather than formal.

You see, the work of buying for and making a magazine is a firing line job. Tactics and strategy go into preparation for the battle, but in the strife one does many things because they have to be done.

Reduced to practicality, I buy what I want when I get it.

You will say, to tell you what I want, since I know it. But if I did, you would be misled, for all wants are not constant.

Fundamentals, of course, are, but they are rather the fundamentals of art--an idea to convey, a picture to paint, in short, creation. A creative thought first, then an object modeled with the tools of craftsmanship. Finally, a composition (in the painting rather than the writing sense) that, when looked at from points in a sense afar, tells that the creator wants to tell.

I am trying here, perhaps indistinctly, to state that said creator has to build for perspective. He has to make things, actions and persons _seem_ real. For example, the actor is made up for the appearance he will make to you sitting on the other side of the footlights. He does not strive, in the laying on of paint, for the effect on you standing at his side, but on you more remote. Contrariwise, if he did not make up, he would seem to you in that audience as unreal, and unnatural.

There is a good lesson in this for the young writer, if I can get it over.

It is the distinction between crude photographic reality and the art of reality; it is the proof of the uselessness of writing from life alone, without the craft of employing materials so that the reader (the audience of the theatre) sees the picture not only of the actuality of life, but of the life the author meant that he should see.

Not that the author departs from the rôle of observer and picture maker. The artist is indeed the mirror of nature. That is his function--high and chosen.

He has that which is not given to us of colder blood and thought. His temperature is higher, he sees often what we do not see. Creation is fever, let us say, but after creation comes craft, and that is as cold and critical and laborious as creation is hot.

The actor must be master of himself, tiniest muscle of the finger and act of the mind, to portray the frenzy of emotion. The writer must have the craft to weave texture in sentence and word, to get clarity and simplicity, to lay tone on tone of character lineament, all the while keeping plot a-moving and reader interest unfaltering. No work can be harder than this--even where talent has been granted, and craftsmanship acquired.

Personally, I do not believe that the untalented (persons without creative imagination) should be encouraged to study the mechanics of fiction technique. The waste is in energy which might win success in some other field.

Markets may prove to be lower than the ideals of writers, but that should be the fault of the markets and not of the writers. Nor will this course of faithfulness to ideals fail in recompense in one form or another, for this is the law:

_The best art has the best chance of popularity and the only chance of long life._

Recognition often is delayed, but won in time, generally in due time.

Because, for one thing, it drives through discouragement. If the talent is not hardy enough to do so, the chances are that it is not sufficiently virile to deserve the crown.

In general, money gainful success comes to the talented American writer too soon if not too easily. If one works harder than ever after success has come, no harm is done. And if one stops working, success passes. So the situation, after all, contains its own remedy.

You ask me finally, if I have any suggestion as to what writers should send to a particular magazine. I have noticed for years, that writers study a magazine with the aim of sending it material of the order of which it appears to publish most. For convenience, we will call this a magazine major. I am quite sure the selling method is wrong, and that magazines should be studied for their minors instead. It stands to reason that editors will have more difficulty in supplying the minor balances. Mind, I do not say the lesser, for I am referring to quantity, not quality.

You see, a general magazine circulation may be likened to a circle, divided into segments. No one unit of contents will have appeal for the whole circle. That would be universality, practically impossible to achieve. But it can be aimed at. Certain basic factors are known. One kind of material can be depended upon for a larger segment than another. The smaller segments, however, are no less essential, and more effort will have to be used to fill them than will be used to supply the largest segment. Circulation comes from adding interest to interest--up to the point of harmony. Beyond, of course, lies confusion, but the problem of how far to go and when to stop is an editor’s, not a writer’s. It is sufficient for a writer to be able to know how to take market advantage of an editor’s need of maximum circulation pull from the smaller as well as the larger segments of the circle.

EDGAR SISSON.

_McClure’s Magazine._ 25 West Forty-fourth Street, New York City.

METROPOLITAN

In choosing fiction for a popular magazine one must be sure first of all that the story will appeal to a large audience of readers. It must have the essential quality of holding the attention. A story which the Editor has to make an effort to read is not very likely to receive much attention from any one else. On the other hand, if a story, through qualities of form, construction, style and the needed element of suspense, literally carries one along from page to page, it has at least the first essential quality of a popular magazine story.

Every Editor, of course, will tell you this. We shall not differ a great deal, either, I imagine, in what we say afterward. Every Editor likes dramatic suspense, every Editor likes naturalness and humor in the characters when he can get it.

But when you apply yourself to the practical task of selecting manuscripts for your own publication you do consciously or unconsciously evolve a set of rules by which the final verdict of yes or no is governed. We buy eight or ten short stories a month for the _Metropolitan_ in addition to an occasional serial. Naturally these stories are not to be all of one kind. I should say, however, that there is a sort of category into which we prefer our stories to fall. It is perhaps somewhat the same with magazine editors as with other persons such as painters and musicians who manifest their tastes more directly--we go in for very different degrees of intensity in the portrayal of a life, and so on. I can think of Editors who pin their faith, because they like it, to clever, thin, mauvish specimens of the art of fiction; of others who love the middle register of common life; and still others who go in for the heights and depths of emotion, the passionate crises which after all do enter into the lives of practically all people. There are many ways of interesting the public; our way in the _Metropolitan_ lies a good deal in the field last mentioned. We believe in dynamic fiction, we like it so much that we would rather have a crudely done but expressive story from a new hand than a manufactured, tepid yarn from the best of practiced writers. Manufactured stuff in general we abhor, although we do not fail to see that many of our contemporaries do quite well with it. But stop, there is a kind of manufactured story which we welcome; detective stories, night life adventures, the thriller which produces a murder of the unpopular character and skilful escape of the hero,--we like these in spite of the fact that the whole thing is a frame. Of this class of stories it is to be said that they resemble a play in which you take for granted a good deal of unreality without which the thing could not take place at all, and lend yourself to the breathless character of the performance.

We care nothing about happy or unhappy endings. Of course when the only thing a writer really has to offer you as a reward for reading a lot of pages is a peculiarly lugubrious finish we decline to be enthusiastic. But there are many stories which are far better for having sad endings. And if we think so we are confident that the public, which is also human, thinks so too. But there is one thing we have strong convictions about; namely, length. Ten years ago five thousand words was a good length for a short story. Since that time, unhappily, writers have become so proficient on the typewriter, that they pour out eight, ten and twelve thousand words without being able to stop. In most cases this is utterly unnecessary and spoils the performance for any purpose except filling space, or encouraging a siesta on the part of the reader. Conditions of magazine publication have encouraged authors to write at length instead of compressing and intensifying their work. We do not hold with this school. For the _Metropolitan_ we want short stories--the shorter the better, provided everything is put in that should be. No master of the short story has made a practice of writing the long, ungainly things which are commonly produced nowadays. Poe didn’t. Maupassant didn’t. O. Henry and Kipling didn’t. It is not to the point to argue that all of these men wrote at times lengthy tales; when they did there was some excuse for it; but their finest work was always short. When we begin to receive in our office a flood of manuscripts ranging from two to five thousand words, then we shall think a new inspiration has come to the great benefit of the whole writing profession.

In this connection note the work of Booth Tarkington. The best short stories we have ever published came from his pen and they filled no more than from fifteen to twenty pages of typewritten paper. There is a man who builds up a short story piece by piece, every word, every sentence counts. And this reminds us to say that the William Sylvanus Baxter stories may not be supposed to fall quite in the circle which we drew a little way above to mark our special _Metropolitan_ field. But they do. Intense reality may quite as readily, though by no means so easily, appear in the form of humor as along lines of emotional stress. Moreover, the great humanity and genius of Booth Tarkington place him beyond the need of classification of any sort. He is a great writer in any style he chooses, and for example of another style of his writing we refer to “The Magnificent Ambersons,” that pointed and tragic novel of real life which appeared as a serial in the _Metropolitan_.

If we looked for eight or ten Booth Tarkington’s a month we would very quickly enter a padded cell, although we may confide that the Circulation Manager will have no objections if we describe each one of our writers in terms just as superlative. Let us hasten to say, then, without raking up a list of famous names, as we might do, that we are extremely enthusiastic about many, many authors who do not perhaps sell us more than one story apiece a year. There are exceptions like Elinor Mordaunt, whose remarkable tale-telling talent, whose romantic flair for the picturesque and dramatic, whose love of the salt sea and strange adventures and adventurers, have been deeply appreciated in the _Metropolitan_ many times in the last few years. But as a rule we do not harry and pursue one author. We want the fresh and new, the deeply felt, the sincere, the genuine effort, wherever we can find it. We look for it continually.

SONYA LEVIEN.

_Metropolitan._ 432 Fourth Avenue, New York City.

THE MODERN PRISCILLA

_The Modern Priscilla_ finds its readers among the highly intelligent home-abiding women of the country, and in the choice of suitable fiction for them, stories of dramatic interest having to do with the affairs of real people are what is most desired.

We do not want sapless stories, but those that are vital, colorful, interesting, and concerned with the actual problems of to-day.

We plan always to publish two stories a month, not over four thousand words in length.

THE EDITORS.

_Modern Priscilla._ 85 Broad Street, Boston, Mass.

MUNSEY’S MAGAZINE

At the time of the compilation of this book there had been a recent change in editorial management. The editors in charge said that they were constantly on the look out for good short stories, the kind that were being published in The Red Book, The Saturday Evening Post and The Cosmopolitan. As a matter of fact the stories that are usually published in Munsey’s Magazine are generally shorter; another point of differentiation that might be brought out is that they are lighter in manner of treatment if not in actual theme. This though is only a generalization and many exceptions can immediately be pointed out for they have in the past published stories by men like Cobb and Abdullah that the other editors had feared as too extreme.

_Munsey’s Magazine._ THE FRANK A. MUNSEY CO., 280 Broadway, New York City.

MYSTERY MAGAZINE

The first requirement for stories in _Mystery Magazine_, is interest. Literary style is of no consequence if the stories arouse and hold our readers’ interest from beginning to end. The types required, are detective stories and mystery stories. In the former we must have plots containing absorbing mysteries, with few principal characters, a pretty love theme, plenty relevant dialogue, lively action, and local color pertaining to the police department. A slight touch of comedy is permissible, but dramatic climaxes are the rule. Long drawn descriptions tire. Large numbers of characters confuse, and too much dialogue is irksome. These romances must be distinctly, as their name implies, detective stories, and they must cater to girls as well as to men.

The mystery stories must be based upon popular occult theories, with lucid and logical explanations of the phenomena, or they can be mere mysteries of a material nature. In short we only purchase good wholesome stories, with gripping interest, tense situations and powerful, mystifying plots, having a simple explanation. Sex problems and stories of loose morals are not wanted.

LU SENARENS.

_Mystery Magazine._ FRANK TOUSEY, Publisher, 168 West 23rd Street, New York City.

THE OUTLOOK

_The Outlook_ has only a limited space available for the publication of fiction, and therefore there are certain arbitrary bounds which we must set, bounds which have little or no relation to literary merit. We do not use continued stories and we practically never accept single stories of more than five thousand words in length, and seldom stories of more than three or four thousand words.

Within this rather narrow limit we are anxious to secure stories which show that the author has a background or experience and a knowledge of human nature. Fiction which indicates the fact that its author has a sense of form, as well as an idea to express, is doubly welcome. Stories which are sentimental do not appeal to us, but we are also convinced that stories with real strength can be written which are not raw, crude, or offensive to good taste. We do not think that the adjective “strong” and the adjective “unpleasant” are necessarily synonymous.

After all, the editorial selection of fiction depends so much upon the personal equation and upon the immediate needs of a journal that it is difficult to give any more definite guide than that we have presented here to those who desire to submit fiction to _The Outlook_.

THE EDITORS OF _The Outlook_.

_The Outlook Company._ 381 Fourth Avenue, New York City.

THE PARISIENNE

The following is in response to your question about what kind of fiction we want for _The Parisienne_ and _Saucy Stories_:

_The Parisienne_ and _Saucy Stories_ differ only very slightly in type of fiction. Both want stories with very rapid action and strong, novel plots. _The Parisienne_ wants romance, gaiety, adventure, mystery, in the foreign and society setting. _Saucy Stories_ wants melodrama, adventure, mystery, romance, preferably in an American setting. Both prefer the sex element, though this is not absolutely essential. We want, however, to emphasize especially that neither magazine wants stories that are unpleasantly risqué. Occult stories are acceptable but nothing horrible.

But, as a matter of fact, it is easier to say what we do not want than what we do want--here are some of the constant rejections:

First and last, nothing that is risqué.

Fillers in which the mysterious he, she or it turns out to be a cat, dog or baby.

Stories in which the husband, wife or fiancé fails to recognize wife, husband or fiancée masquerading in any guise.

Stories in which the mysterious man whom husband suspects turns out to be the brother, or the unknown lady whom wife suspects turns out to be the sister.

Stories in which the denouement explains that the entire plot is merely a rehearsal for the movies or a play.

Stories in which the supposed farmer’s daughter turns out to be a famous movie star.

Stories in which the starving heroine is persuaded to play the part of an imaginary wife in order that the rich relative will leave his money to the nephew whom he wanted to see marry before passing on.