Source: The stories editors buy and why, Ed. Jean Wick, Publisher: Small, Maynard and Company, 1921
THE best, indeed the only reply to
the question as to the needs of a magazine that I can think of is — read it. That
is the answer for Short Stories.
When a writer asks me what we want
for Short Stories, I am apt to feel a
bit hopeless for, as I see it, my first duty is to seek and develop talent, and
my second is to select material. I cannot feel that it is good for a fiction
magazine, nor good for a fiction writer, to have the editor suggest ideas, or
plots. (General magazines using non-fiction articles are different. In the
nature of things they must suggest articles and ideas to their writers.) An
intelligent reading of a fiction magazine will give a better idea of its aims
and field than any amount of talking by the editor. We can at best, in the time
at our disposal, give an idea of our field. The more important thing is the
spirit of the magazine, and that can only be taken in by reading it.
Once a writer gets the spirit of
the magazines he wishes to write for and has determined their respective
fields, it is up to him.
Within the scope of his
publication, and in its general spirit, what an editor wants most of all is
ideas — something new, fresh, different.
There is one more preliminary
point — self-analysis. Many writers suffer from lack of understanding of their
own material. The field is so large to-day that any writer can develop his own natural
imaginative expression and find a market for it. If one is more interested in
outdoor adventure — write it. If a writer's mind runs to psychological problem
stories — write those. There are magazines looking for adventure and others looking
for psychological character analysis. But don't, Mr. Writer, try to force
yourself to write something you yourself do not like. You cannot write down to
a field successfully, and you must develop into a higher literary class
naturally, by hard work.
As for Short Stories: Being primarily a magazine of adventure and the
outdoors, our interest naturally lies in that field first. Our public is, a
wide one embracing many kinds of people. Yet, when they buy a fiction magazine
like Short Stories, we are convinced
they do so in pretty much the same frame of mind. They want to be amused. They
want a good story. They want to read it in a hurry, on a railroad train, in a
spare hour, or to relieve a tedious wait. We believe they do not want too much
complexity, nor too highly polished a style. Literary excellence is all to the
good. We want it and our readers appreciate it, but it must be within our field
and done in our spirit. For example, imagine the joy of our public if we could
publish as brand new to-day some of Kipling's early short stories — "The Man
That Would Be King." "William
the Conqueror," and the rest. They fall perfectly "within our
scope," and in spite of the fact that they were done by the greatest
literary craftsman of the age, they are not, like some of his later work, too
subtle for our public. They are mostly on the objective plane, full of action,
stories straight from the shoulder.
Of course, our public like stories
of the far places, of the West, both old and new, of the North and the Tropics.
Yet, even to these there are some strange exceptions such as the question of
remoteness from the reader's understanding. Miles are nothing to the author or
to the reader of the printed page, but unless the author succeeds in making the
reader feel his locality, the sense of remoteness creeps in and the story
fails. Naturally, with this small world and the fairly limited number of
situations possible to a human being in adventure, variety becomes a very
desirable thing with us — variety, remember, within our field.
The public that reads Short Stories likes mystery stories. That
in itself is a broad field and includes the tales of the tracking down of the
perpetrators of crime — detective stories. We have mighty few hard and fast
rules, but we never use a story in which we make crime and criminals heroic. If
the hero of a story is a burglar, we want the story to show his redemption, the
failure of crime with its ultimate punishment, or we want his actions within
the story to be for a laudable purpose. Our attitude may best be summed up by
the phrase, "the effect on the young." We want no story which will
have an evil effect on any reader.
Mystery stories tend to run along
conventional lines. We would like some variety there. The playwrights have
accomplished something new and thrilling in pieces such as: "The Unknown
Purple," "The 13th Chair," "The Alibi" with excellent
results. Why cannot some equally ingenious writers work out mystery tales as
far from the ordinary murder or jewel mysteries as these?
And humor! Oh, give us humor! Not
too subtle, nor too rough. But give us a laugh. Human interest stories too.
Business stories and the sports interest our readers. They are fairly scarce,
the good ones, so we are always on the lookout for them.
Short Stories, like its contemporaries, including The Saturday
Evening Post, was created by a reading public's demand. Therefore, with the
exception of the purely love stories and speaking quite generally, any story
that would hit The Saturday Evening Post would hit us. Many and many a writer
appearing regularly in that great weekly has found himself through the medium
of Short Stories and similar
magazines.
The love theme is desirable in our
field. Our public, we believe, likes it, but only as a normal motive in a plot.
We do not use love stories, as such, but love naturally enters into and strengthens
any story, adventure, mystery, business, humor, sports, or what not.
We are not squeamish, yet we never
forget that phrase, "the influence on the young." We do not want to
print any story that leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Our public do not want nor
expect that in Short Stories. Hence,
the so-called sex story is not for us.
A word as to dialect. We try to
print stories that read easily and smoothly. Too hard or too consistent a
dialect repels readers. Likewise, the widely popular slang
"roughneck" story. We use 'em of course, but we do not want 'em too
rough. Every reader likes the relief of straight English rather than to go through
page after page of dialect or slangy misspelling.
But, read the magazine, and then
within our scope give us something different.
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