Page:The Modern Writer.pdf/36

 Believe in your heroic cowboys and lumberjacks. Go to the movies all you can. Read the magazines. Go to the short story schools and learn the bag of tricks. Spend your time thinking up plots for stories and never by any chance let the plots grow naturally out of the lives and the hopes, joys and the sufferings of the people you are writing about. That is the road to success.

And now, men and women, I am afraid you will think me an ill-natured fellow. I have spent so large a part of my allotted time here in speaking of what in my opinion is tending to make writing in America so bad. It doesn't seem right. I must remember that I am from Chicago—a highly cultured center, surely—and that in Chicago we have a motto. Our city mayor got it up several years ago, and for a year or two it was plastered about everywhere on the walls and billboards of the city. "Put away your ham-