Manchester Evening News, 11 JANUARY 1945
It is said to be the practice of the sterner religious orders to discourage proselytes, and Mr. L. A. G. Strong goes on rather the same principle in his advice to aspiring authors. Himself a highly successful writer of novels, short stories and radio scripts and with experience as a teacher in a school of journalism, he makes it clear from the outset that this profession is not an easy one. It has to be learned like any other, it entails endless work, and you are unlikely ever to make very much money out of it.
Indeed, Mr. Strong records that he himself was writing for fifteen years before literature became his main source of livelihood, and of the first forty manuscripts he sent out thirty-nine came back.
Most of the books (and they are numberless) on ‘How To Become An Author’ are quite worthless. They are worthless because they are written by people who regard writing simply as a way of making money. Everything is wrong in this approach.
To begin with, writing is not a lucrative profession (a novelist who made as much as the average country doctor would be doing very well indeed), and even on its lowest levels it has to be practised for its own sake.
And secondly most of the self-styled teachers of journalism are the worst possible guides, even from a commercial point of view, because they are unable to put their own precepts into practice. If they really knew how to make money out of journalism they would be doing it, instead of selling their secret to others.
However Mr. Strong is a very exceptional man, and his advice is well worth listening to. He is a successful writer, but he happens to be such a fast worker that he has time to run journalistic courses as a side-line.
He knows that literature is a trade as well as an art, but, unlike the vast majority of teachers, he also understands the nature of creation and realises that even hack journalism needs sincerity as well as competence. Over and over again he says in different ways, ‘don’t falsify. Even from a financial point of view it doesn’t pay.’
In his early days one of those kind friends who take it upon them to advise young writers said to him, ‘Write what they want first. Then, when you have made a name, write what you want.’
Mr. Strong adds, ‘I repudiated the advice as damnable, and I repudiate it even more passionately to-day … my own experience is all on the side of honesty. Once, for a short time, when I was very hard up, I tried desperately to write what I thought the public wanted.
‘The result was a disastrous failure. I never sold a line of it … insincerity is no substitute for talent.
‘The sincere writer, however small his gift, has a better chance of success than the faker.’
In these and other similar passages, Mr. Strong is not referring merely to æsthetic faking. There is also the political pressure that is put so strongly upon many journalists to-day. Some topics are practically unmentionable, and the cult of the ‘happy ending’ is mixed up with the desire to present society in the rosiest possible light.
The correspondence tutors employed by schools of journalism frequently warn their pupils that anything ‘unpleasant’ or ‘controversial’ is difficult to sell. Mr. Strong’s comment on all such false counsellors is ‘tell them to go where they belong.’
But this is not to say that he despises or ignores the business side of the writing profession.
To begin with, every writer, however unusual his gifts may be, must learn to be readable. He must learn, by practice and apprenticeship, how to arrange his material and make his meaning unmistakably clear.
Mr Strong insists, and perhaps over-insists, that in a short article or story it is better to ‘concentrate on one point only and never attempt to make more.’
Again, a writer must be ready to fall in with the wishes of editors and publishers on any question where his intellectual honesty is not involved. He must submit to having his articles cut when they are too long, and he must realise that one cannot write in the same style for a daily paper, a weekly review, and a technical magazine.
And he must study his market and not, for instance, ‘send a women’s magazine an article about Rugby football, or a yachting magazine an article on white mice.’
Submissions quite as silly as this are made every day, and many a promising novel has found its way to the dustbin because its author sent it to the wrong kind of publisher and then gave up hope when it came back to him.
Mr Strong gives some useful technical notes on the novel, the article, and the short story, and advises the budding writer not to despise that thankless and ill-paid job, lecturing.
He does, however, discourage the beginner from attempting the play or the film. There is, he considers, not one chance in ten thousand that a play written by a beginner will be produced.
Whereas a publisher risks a few hundred pounds on a book, a theatrical manager has to risk tens of thousands, and naturally he prefers to deal with writers who have already made a name for themselves in some other way.
The films are even more inaccessible. Indeed, the biggest film companies, it seems, make a practice of returning all unsolicited manuscripts unopened.
The radio is a much more promising field for the beginner. Its special technique, different from that of ordinary writing, has to be learned, but the demand for scripts is so large that there is comparatively little prejudice against newcomers.
Mr Strong ends with some notes on literary agents (useful to the writer of books, but less so to the free-lance journalist), schools of journalism, publishers, honest and otherwise, and contracts.
This is a useful little book. No book can teach you to write if you have not the initial gift, but at least you can learn how to use language simply, how to avoid unnecessary technical errors, how to market your writings, and how to dodge the innumerable crooks who haunt the fringes of the literary profession.
Mr. Strong never loses sight of the need to make a living but his advice carries all the more weight because he knows that the desire for money is not the ultimate motive of any writer worth reading.