u have gained some real
facility in writing in accordance with the canons of art. That is true
of all arts, of course. No tool can be used properly without practice.

Perhaps you may desire to submit your practice work to magazines and
publishers as you go along, and if you mean to have a serious try at the
game it is advisable that you do so. The fact that you are writing for
submission will serve as a stimulus; you will receive helpful incidental
criticisms from editors, if your work shows promise; and, above all, you
will gradually acquire the necessary knowledge of the market, its needs,
tendencies, and desires. However, I do not believe it advisable for one
who is trying to learn to write to ape deliberately the tone of
particular magazines, with an eye to possible sales. That is a trick of
the trade--and permissible enough--but it is no way to learn to write
fiction. The skilled hand can direct his efforts so, but the apprentice
had better center his efforts upon finding some good story and upon
writing it to the best he knows how.

A few specific bits of advice as to how to go about practicing the art
of fiction may not be useless. Technique is conceptive, constructive,
and executive, and the beginner should exercise his latent powers in
each department.

The technique of conception is practiced unconsciously by anyone who
seeks to find a story for writing, but exercise of the conceptive
faculty should not be limited to the times when you desire actually to
write. You should form a habit of thinking creatively, of mentally
shaping into stories the material offered by observation, thought, and
reading. If this is done, and notes kept of your promising ideas, you
will have on hand constantly considerable amount of material, and you
will not be forced to waste time in casting about for an idea when the
spirit moves you to write. Moreover, I think most essentially feeble
stories are stories conceived and thrown together on the spur of the
moment as the writer sits and looks at a sheet of white paper, and if
you have five, ten, or a hundred stories more or less completely blocked
out in your files or in your mind, you can choose for writing one fitted
to your mood and also worth the writing. It is almost impossible to
judge the worth of an idea immediately after it is conceived; by
separating the conceptive and executive processes you will be led to
avoid much waste labor in developing what is essentially weak.

A