our blood, quickened the
imagination. Roads that never were, and mayhap never will be, beckoned
you with their sinuous curves and graceful shade trees toward velvety
fields beyond the city's skyline. The sweet fragrance of blossoming
orchards tingled in your nostrils and thrilled you with wanderlust.
Haunting melodies quavered in your ears. Your old briar pipe never
tasted so sweet before. Adventure never seemed so imminent. A golden
day. What will you do with it?

You could write to-day, but if you did, you know you could support no
patience for prosy facts, statistics and photographs. Whatever urge you
feel appears to be toward verse or fiction. Well, why not? Try it! You
never know what you might do in writing until you dare.

Verse is largely its own reward.

Fiction, when it turns out successfully, fetches a double reward. It
pays both in personal satisfaction, as a form of creative art, and also
as a marketable commodity, which always is in great demand, and which
can be cashed in to meet house rent and grocers' bills.

It is not within the scope of this little book--nor of its author's
abilities--to attempt a discussion of fiction methods. Too many other
writers, better qualified to speak, have dealt with fiction in scores of
worth while volumes. Too many successful story tellers have related
their experiences and treated, with authority, of the short story, the
novelette and the long novel.

The purpose here can be only to urge that an attempt to write fiction is
a logical step ahead for any scribbler who has won a moderate degree of
success in selling newspaper copy and magazine articles. The eye that
can perceive the dramatic and put it into non-fiction, the heart that
knows human interest, the understanding that can tell a symbol, the
artist-instinct that can catch characteristic colors, scents and sounds,
all should aid a skilled writer of articles to turn his energies, with
some hope of achievement, toward producing fiction. The hand that can
fashion a really vivid article holds out promise of being able to
compose a convincing short story, if grit and ambition help push the
pen.

The temptation to dogmatize here is strong, for the witness can testify
that he has seen enviable success crown many a fiction writer who,
apparently, possessed small native talent for story telling, and who won
his laurels through sheer pluck and persistence. One of these pluggers
declares he blesses the rejection slip bec