"I certainly believe that a writer should devote himself to writing," said Mr. Beach. "This is an age of specialization, and literature is no exception to the general rule. Literature is like everything else--you must specialize in it to be successful." "This has not always been the case, has it?" I asked. "Has literature been produced by people who made writing only an avocation?" "Surely," said Mr. Beach. "It is only within the last few years that writers have been able to write for a living and make enough to keep the fringe off their cuffs." I asked what had caused this change. "It has been caused chiefly by the magazines. The modern magazines have done two important things for fiction--they have brought it within every one's reach, and they have increased the prices paid to the authors, thus enabling them to make a living by devoting themselves exclusively to writing." "But it has been said," I ventured, "that a writer, no matter how talented he may be, cannot make a comfortable living out of writing fiction unless he is most extraordinarily gifted with ideas, and that, therefore, a writer takes a tremendous risk if he throws himself upon literature for support." "How is a writer going to get ideas for stories," asked Mr. Beach, in turn, "unless he uses ideas? The more ideas a man uses, the more ideas will come to him. "The imaginative quality in a man is like any other quality; the more it is functioned the better it is functioned. If you fail to use any organ of your body, nature will in time let that organ go out of commission. "It is just the same with imagination as with any organ of the body. If a writer waits for ideas to come to him and ceases to exercise his imagination, his imagination will become atrophied. But if he uses his imagination it will grow stronger and ideas will come to him with increasing frequency." Mr. Beach is an enthusiastic advocate of the moving picture. In the course of his discussion of it he advanced an interesting theory as to the next stage of its development. "The next use of the moving picture," he said, "will be the editorial use. We have had the moving picture used as a comic device, as a device to spread news, and as an interpreter of fiction. But as yet no one has endeavored to use it as a means to mold public opinion in great vital issues of the day. "Of course, it has been used educationally, and as part of various propaganda schemes. But it will be used in connection with great political problems. It will become the most powerful of all influences for directing public opinion in politics and in everything else. "It will play a mighty part in the thought of the country and of the world. "I have seen men and women coming from a great moving-picture show almost hysterical with emotion. I have heard them shout and stamp and whistle at what they saw flashed before them on a white sheet as they never did in any theater.