Page:The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909).djvu/278

 making headway. Put into those letters your impressions of events and people. Divide your hours of reading between the works of standard English writers, like Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens, Scott and Washington Irving, the books which are making the success of the moment, and the best current magazines. This last is important because you must know the trend of literary taste, the sort of fiction, special article or poetry that editors are buying.

If you seriously contemplate writing for a living, you must make a business of reading regularly at your public library or subscribing for the current magazines. If you have written a tale to entertain children, buy or borrow at the library every magazine you can find for juvenile readers, and decide which editor is using stories such as you have to offer. If you are offering practical suggestions for the housewife, make a list of magazines published especially for women, and send your script to each one, until many rejections have proven that it is not salable. A woman told me the other day that she had sent one story to twenty-nine magazines before she sold it.

If you have a love-story, study the magazines which publish fiction before sending forth the tale. Do not send it to The Review of Reviews or The Scientific American simply because your