The Same Concluded

( Originally Published 1944 )

To catch those goods I am not coveting;

AND NOW, to revert to business in its impure essence, it would be a good start for me to recommend that you read a book called "How to Commit a Murder," by Danny Aherne. Danny Aherne was in the murder business for years, and still is for all I know. Someone persuaded him that he ought to write a book about the whole murder, stick-up, and smash-and-grab racket before it was too late. Danny agreed with the first contention but shrugged his shoulders to the latter. It was never going to be too late for him. No one was ever going to pin anything on him. He'd committed plenty killings, still had a going concern in full swing as a cash-and-carry killer, but knew altogether too much about (a) killing for pleasure and for profit, and (b) business in its impure essence, ever to get caught.

And he was right. As a killer he was perfection. As a business man he was a towering pillar of strength and a penetrating beacon of dazzling illumination.

This is the opening sentence in the book: "Why should anyone ever go out and kill another guy for a dame when he can just as easy kill another guy for dough?"

Now that is sense. It is business in its impure essence purely comprehended.

Let's try to transpose the above priceless pearl of wisdom into a writing key: Why should anyone ever sit at his desk and write an epic poem for glory when he can just as easily write a short story for cash on the line?

You've got to think in terms of money. Remember that money never thinks in terms of you. Don't forget that every business has a different approach (although the impure essence remains a constant), and the writing business the most different of all. Thus in Danny Aherne's murder-for-cash business the operating expenses were almost nil, the initiative and time and place always remained in his own hands, and he needed to pull off only a couple of jobs a year to get by pretty comfortably. Similarly if you're a Fuller Brush Man you can knock off at any time of the day provided you've made your carfare home. If you operate a book-store you can decide to cut down on the botheration of it by abolishing the greeting-card department or alternatively increase your dollar-volume by installing a rental library in the back room. In almost no business that you can think of (and I can think of none at all) is initiative lacking in its proprietor to so complete an extent and in so devastating a manner as it is in the writing business. You think up the stuff. You sweat and strain and write the stuff. You polish up the stuff. You put the goddam stuff away for a month and come back to it and perfect the stuff. You invest in mailing expense both ways and send the stuff off. And then, from that moment on, you might as well be a dead and stuffed duck.

Then what, in Gawd's name, can a writer do to further his own cause?

Let's get back to business: begin by being cynical. If you find cynicism tough meat to chew at your first meal, persevere. You're out for your own good, and, paradoxically, against all your better instincts and my better judgment, you want to be a writer. It's going to be tough, and it's going to be long (so's almost any business). You've got to have capital, or, in place of it, staying power. You will either create capital as Martin Flavin did when he went into the wall-paper business for thirty years, or you'll substitute staying power for capital in the shape of the best conceivable job that you can get, measured in terms of maximum cash return, maximum leisure time, and maximum security. If you really can find some-thing that will keep you comfortable enough with only four or five hours' work a day, so much the better. On the other hand, if you can find something that pays off so handsomely, despite twelve hours' work a day, that you'd have enough to retire on after, say, five years slave-labor at it, think it over carefully before turning it down. I'm realist enough to know that these "jobs" are damnably difficult to ferret out, but they are not non-existent. It's up to you to ferret them out. Consider, also, the possibilities (from your newly-espoused cynical depths) of a job in a bank, a job as a school teacher, or a civil-service job. All these have comparatively short hours; in most of them you have a five-day week, and they all have infinitely more holidays with pay than any other sort of job.

Don't expect to like the job. You won't. But that doesn't matter. You want to be a writer and your ambitions and fond hopes will be, if not ample, at least adequate, solace for the boredom of counting out other people's dollars, teaching other people's brats, or filling out other people's Income Tax Returns.

In the end, when you begin to sell, and retrospect on your tribulations of the past it-depends-on-you number of years, it will all seem to have been not only well worth while, but the only thing you could have done.

So that's the first thing: get yourself set up in such a way that rejection slips can dent your morale, but only your morale. Don't let them touch your security. Don't let them cost you hunger or thirst, discomfort or humiliation. If you do you'll finish up as a bum or a genius. I have no time for bums and geniuses have no time for me..

That's what a businessman would do seek security first, and profits next.

A good profit might be defined as a maximum cash return on a minimum capital investment with all risks run by a third party who stands to lose every penny if the deal goes wrong and to make two and a half per cent on his money if the deal goes right.

As a writer who with good sense has first sought and achieved security of livelihood you are not over-much concerned with a "maximum" cash return. The fact that it doesn't have to be "maximum" just yet simplifies matters somewhat.

A writer's tools can all be purchased for a couple of hundred dollars from any bookshop if you feel you want to own them, or borrowed gratis from any library if you are lucky enough to be immune to the itch of possession. At most you ought to have a good dictionary and, of course, a typewriter. But that's all. Everything else is a luxury, including this book which I daresay my publisher will charge you plenty for. Similarly a writer's incidental expenses, such as paper, an occasional new ribbon, envelopes, stamps, and other trifles, are almost negligible. What remains then is: your time, and pro rata with it your-call it morale, call it stamina, call it staying power, call it unbeatable determination to fulfill an ambition. It doesn't matter a damn now if you average only ten bucks a year clear for your first few years because you've got your salary to live on.

Think up all the magazines you really like to buy and read for your own profit or pleasure. There won't be many. If you're a man you'll probably like Esquire, and if you're a woman you'll probably like Vogue (of course the reverse may be true, as I know lots of men who can't resist Vogue and lots of women who regard Esquire as their secret sin). Be honest about it, strictly honest, and see just how few there really are.

These are the magazines, and these alone, that you should stage combat with-your whittled-down-asfar-as-you-sincerely-can list of magazines you really admire and like reading and think enough of to pay.

The rest is simple. You are already familiar with the content and other psychological and mechanical features of the chosen, say, three magazines.

Although the fact is never publicized, much of the copy is staff-written. This is not a general statement.

It is meant to refer to certain popular magazines, most technical magazines, almost all trade magazines, papers, and periodicals. These media have no aversion at all to thumbing over unsolicited material. lt came to them free of cost and obligation, and will be returned to sender only if accompanied by a stamped addressed envelope. Very, very rarely something turns up that's really interesting.

Your stuff is damned good. It sparkles. It has all it takes and all it needs. It is perfectly tailored for height and girth, is custom-made throughout and must, for every reason on earth except the one I give you right here, click on sight. But, as previously explained, the Saturday Evening Post gets in excess of 80,000 unsolicited stories per year. This appalling mass of 250 words to a page cerebration does not include, nor has the figure been made public, the number of solicited stories they get (and publish!) per year. Anyway, when the battery of readers has got to the end of that week's quota of fifteen hundred, they have found, say, fourteen hundred and forty that stink outright (these were dropped down the mail chute with all speed if accompanied by stamped addressed envelopes), thirty that were malodorous but only faintly so (these, too, have been returned, albeit with a certain lack of justice, jointly with the outright stinkers), fifteen more that don't stink at all, and fifteen damn good ones (perfectly tailored for height and girth and custom-made throughout).

They can't buy all of them. Long, long ago, in a dim and distant past, editorial departments of wealthy publications started to lay in material for months ahead partly as policy and partly as a form of insurance against their ever striking a bald patch on the free-lance head. If every free-lance writer on earth were suddenly to go on strike and threaten thus to hold up publication of the nation's magazine output they could be starved out without question whether they clung together a month, a year, or a decade. All good magazines have plenty of backlog in their bottom drawers.

The above is in no sense intended to be discouraging. It is meant simply to explain not why magazines don't buy any stories at all, because they do; but why magazines don't buy, simply can't buy, all the absolutely good and suitable and perfectly-tailored-custom-made ones that do come their way.

So that's another reason why your story may come back because it is nothing but one more very excellent short story in a world not lacking in excellent short stories.

And now the scientific approach.

Study with an eye as sharp as a dissecting knife the three magazines you have set your heart on. Master the mechanical requirements, analyze the appearance-frequency of the different features, take careful note (by studying back issues for the last ten years) which names appear most frequently do this accurately and list them in order. There are 120 issues per ten years of any monthly. If Gregor Rumpov has made thirty of these and the next follower-up is Agatha Milkimdry with only a dozen credits then it's Mr. Rumpov who will be your model. In all probability you will find a startling similarity not only between the Rumpov and Milkimdry techniques, but between the techniques of every contributor whose name recurs. Now master that technique. Take a year to do it, or ten years. But master it. Whether you break in or not will depend entirely on whether or not you have mastered it. If you do master it, you will, sooner or later, inevitably break in. If you do not break in you have not mastered it.