This week I received a great message from an attendee of the Sacramento State Workshop, where I was a workshop presenter a few weeks ago. (You can find my recap of the workshop here.) Teresa Fleming says:

… please don't apologize for the times you have to be discouraging. It's for the best, you know. Of course, you should also know this is coming from someone who: (1) has no memoir plans, and (2) spent a couple of decades in the banking business. (Really, Ms. Smith, I am doing you a favor declining your million-dollar request for a loan to open a fuzzy-cheese-head-car-airfreshener-thingy business.)
 
To close, here are a few quotes for fun. I do a bit of volunteer smoothreading (sort of like proofreading but more relaxed) for Distributed Proofreaders / Project Gutenberg. The day before your presentation, I finished a smoothy on a short book titled If You Don't Write Fiction by Charles Phelps Cushing (1920). Here are a couple of my favorites—some things don't change much, huh?

A huge army of disappointed scribblers have followed that haphazard plan of battle. They would know better than to try to market crates of eggs to a shoe store, but they see nothing equally absurd in shipping a popular science article to the Atlantic Monthly or an "uplift" essay to the Smart Set. They paper their walls with rejection slips, fill up a trunk with returned manuscripts and pose before their sympathetic friends as martyrs.
 
… Which is to say that novelists and magazine fiction writers are accused of becoming more concerned about how their stories will film than about how the manuscripts will grade as pieces of literature. To get a yarn into print is still worth while because this enhances its value in the eyes of the  producers of motion pictures. But the author's real goal is "no longer good writing, so much as remunerative picture possibilities."

Many thanks to Teresa for sharing a little bit of the 1920's writing advice! (You can download the entire text from Google.)

Stay tuned for a few excerpts from Writer's Digest titles from that era. (Yes, Writer's Digest did exist in the Roaring Twenties, and much of the advice we give has remained the same!)