ause it "eliminates so many
quitters."

But of course it would be absurd to believe that any one with unlimited
courage and elbow grease could win at fiction, lacking all aptitude for
it. Just as there are photographers who can snap pictures for twenty
years without producing a single happy composition (except by accident),
and reporters who never develop a "nose for news," there are story
writers who can master all the mechanics of tale-telling, through sheer
drudgery, and yet continually fail to catch fiction's spark of life.
They fail, and shall always fail. Yet it is better to have strived and
failed, than never to have tried at all.

Why? For the good of their artists' consciences, in the first place.
And, in the second, because no writer can earnestly struggle with words
without learning something about them to his trade advantage.

A confession may be in order: your deponent testifies freely, knowing
that anything he may say may be used against him, that for years he has
been a tireless producer of unsuccessful fiction, yet he views his
series of rebuffs in this medium calmly and even somewhat humorously.
For, by trade, he is a writer of articles, and he earnestly believes
that the mental exercise of attempting to produce fiction acts as a
healthy influence upon a non-fictionist's style. It stimulates the
torpid imagination. It quickens the eye for the vivid touches, the
picturesque and the dramatic. It is a groping toward art.

"Art," writes one who knows, "is a mistress so beautiful, so high, so
noble, that no phrases can fitly characterize her, no service can be
wholly worthy of her."

Perhaps such art as goes into the average magazine article is not likely
to merit much high-sounding praise. In our familiar shop talk we are
prone to laugh about it. But even the most commercial-minded of our
brotherhood cherishes deep in his heart a craftsman's pride in work well
done. So your deponent testifies in his own defense that his copybook
exercises in fiction, half of which end in the wastebasket, seem well
worth the pains that they cost, so long as they help keep alive in his
non-fiction bread-winners a hankering after (if not a flavor of)
literary art.

And now must he apologize further for using a word upon which writers in
these confessedly commercial days appear to have set a _taboo_? Then a
passage from "The Study of Literature" (Arlo Bates) may serve for the
apology:

"Life is full of disappointment,