Books

CINCINNATI – Emma Gary Wallace, professional author, had more than a few notions about the business of writing.

With a résumé that included essays in housekeeping and cooking magazines, she was able and ready to share tips with readers of a new monthly magazine called Successful Writing.

"Writers waste a great deal of postage sending stuff around the country to impossible markets," she observed. "Don't carry coals to Newcastle or offer jewelry in a blacksmith shop. Every magazine has its own policy and makes a definite appeal to a certain clientele."

The year was 1921, and advice about writing was – and remains – a market itself.

The timeless cry for help as one makes the great leap from the desire to write to actual writing to published writing has inspired countless books, magazines, classes and Web sites. Successful Writing, now Writer's Digest, is one of the oldest players in the business. Based in Cincinnati at the corporate headquarters of F&W Publications, it still enjoys a circulation of more than 100,000.

For anyone who wonders what the emerging writer has faced over the decades, the magazine's files – preserved in bulky, bound volumes – tell a dual history. Evolution is constant, as technologies from airplanes to computers, and historical events from the Great Depression to the sexual revolution, bring on new markets and genres. But at the heart of the game, the riddle remains: How does one write, and write well? How do you get your writing noticed and sold?

Like the best epics, reading through the pages of Writer's Digest is less about finding the answer than enjoying the questions.

When the magazine debuted, "crook stories" were in, dialect was out and the great new draw was "motion pictures," or photoplays.

The marketplace belonged to the straight and the simple.

"A readable, lucid style is far preferable to what is called a 'literary style' ... a complicated method of expression which confuses rather than clarifies thought," one columnist advised. A suggestion for nonfiction writers: "One of the surest ways to please editors is for the writer to prove himself accurate."

The market danced to the tune of current events. In the '20s, the rise of commercial flights resulted in "airplane fiction," adventure stories set in the skies. The repeal of Prohibition, in 1933, led to opportunities in beer-industry journals.

During World War II, romance writers were urged to forget those Depression-era tales of financial peril and were reminded that if a young man wasn't in uniform, the writer had to explain why. At the end of 1945, correspondent Sgt. Donn Hale Munson reported that the "war market" was "shot" and that it was time to "take your hero out of uniform ... and put him back in civic clothes." The famous offered advice. Somerset Maugham, in 1942, thought doctors were ideal writers because they have seen human nature "bare" and frightened. Fifty years later, Stephen King urged against writing outlines, even as the magazine touted a system of plotting with index cards.

All agreed that the only way to become a writer was to write. John Updike recommended steady work habits, while Michael Chabon said nothing was possible without "talent," "luck" and "discipline."

And in the early 1920s, a promising young short-story writer offered a terse formula for success after a less fortunate peer sought help on how to develop a plot.

"Your letter was very vague as to what you wanted to know," the author scolded. "Study Kipling and O. Henry, and work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story."

The author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was not easily discouraged.

Hillel Italie,

The Associated Press

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