How to write short stories by Josephine Bridgart
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| How to write short stories |
WRITING for publication is a business. If the new writer accepts this fact he will have laid a foundation upon which, if he has the necessary natural ability, he can build success.
If a young woman tells you that she intends to take up nursing, and later reveals that her chief reason for doing so is that the uniforms in a certain hospital have attracted her, or that she enjoys reading to the sick, -or dislikes the business life her father has suggested for her, or has heard that nurses make a great deal of money, you immediately feel that her nursing will not be a great success. You reason that nursing involves some very hard and disagreeable duties., and that a girl who thinks only of the incidental pleasures or the monetary rewards is pretty sure to fail. It is not common business sense to enter a profession without taking into consideration the requirements of that profession.
I have read this lack of common business sense between the lines of many a first story. Some of these stories tell how a young girl with no experience won a prize in a short story or novel contest; often the prize-winning story was written in an afternoon, an evening
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