Writing for the Syndicates

HAVING failed to sell to the magazines certain short stories of my own manufacture, I appealed to what is known as The Press. There I was advised to try the syndicates, as the Press purchased most of its fiction from these concerns because it came cheaper. The syndicate in turn failing to respond to my overtures, I complained of this fact to a newspaper friend, who told me that unless I could write perfect thrillers in the way of detective stories, bulging out with murder and mystery, then my tales must have a heart interest, and should end happily. There are so many different ideas of happiness that I was bothered to know whether I should end the story with a marriage or not. Hence I was forced to make a study of the short story of the syndicate, and think it only right and proper to make known the result of such study for the benefit of beginners in the short story line.

The most acceptable story that can be written for a syndicate, the one above all others for which the syndicate yearns, and for which the appetite grows with feeding, is the one in which the eccentric uncle leaves his money with a proviso attachment. Either she must marry him or he gets the wealth, or he must marry her or she gets it; or they must marry each other to prevent being cut off without a shilling. I have been told by a wellknown statistician that this story is capable of four million variations. This sounds big,but when we recall the astonishing results of arithmetical and geometrical progressions we have no reason to doubt the assertion. This astonishing mobility accounts for its prominence among syndicate stories. It is impossible to make a failure of it. There is but one thing important to remember, and that is, the couple foreordained to wed must be strangers up to the time of the reading of the will. It is a fatal, an unheard-of mistake to have it otherwise.

A close second in the favor of the syndicate is the story of the woman who places ambition above love. She longs to be an actress, a writer, a singer, or a wife of a millionaire; but concludes finally that love is best. Since first Aurora Leigh set the fashion, this yarn has been a steady perennial bloomer. From time to time there have been rumors that this story has suffered an eclipse, but just then it invariably looms up again livelier than ever. It is an immortal story, and will never die.

Then there is the story of the grave man whose hair is streaked with gray, — the guardian of the fair young woman who sat on his lap in childhood, but now is surrounded by youthful adorers and holds her court like a queen, dazzling like the fair Inez when she went into the West. The guardian who —but why repeat a household story ?

There is the story of the man who meets the wrong girl at the railway station or some other place, and finds out afterward that she is the right one for him after all, — though really this story may be considered an adaptation of the story of the uncle of the freaky will.

There is a new story that goes with the syndicate. That is, it is only some thousand times old. It is that of the man who takes the fair female out in the boat, the carriage, the automobile, or in something else, and refuses to restore her to civilization and chaperonage till she has promised to become his bride. He seems, at first, a refreshing daredevil of the Mr. Rochester type; but alas! how he wilts at the end of the yarn and tells her, after the manner of the model parent of other days, how it hurt him more than it did her, but that he was obliged to do it for her own good.

One other story there is that the syndicate purchaseth, — the one modeled after the Dolly Dialogues, in which a married woman, sometimes a widow, and a bachelor man converse in cabalistic terms. Originally this conversation was supposed to contain a pinch of the spice of wickedness, but all this has been carefully eliminated till now it is as harmless as a dish of dried apples, and of somewhat the same flavor.

Occasionally we see these stories somewhere else, than in the syndicate columns, but they look out of place; and likewise any other manner of story looks queer in the syndicate provinces.

For comment on the contributors to this number, see advertising pages 33 and 34.