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.