Although _McCall’s_ is a woman’s magazine, we believe there is no sex in reading, that a woman is not necessarily interested in the old conventionally accepted story in which gilded heroes and heroines pranced through a hectic and golden existence, in which the heroine’s name was always Gwen or Violet, in which the desired male prize was always married off to the poor but noble girl at the consummating altar. Nor need all women’s magazine stories have to do with the abuse of the sacrificial mother or the efforts of an orphan stenographer alone in a great city. Love and money and fame may be fundamental pillars of plots, as of life; but to-day’s woman, even as to-day’s flapper, demands more than the sentimental narration of their intertwinings. As for the young author, we welcome him--or her. The famous and the arrived have their place, but the world is ever to the oncoming. If there is a germ of a story in any neophyte’s contribution, _McCall’s_ is only too glad to throw all its energies into framing for it a more effective setting. BESSIE BEATTY. _McCall’s Magazine._ 236-250 West Thirty-seventh Street, New York City. McCLURE’S MAGAZINE It is difficult to frame rigidly the deciding factors in selecting fiction for a magazine that is planned for the general reading public. Any reply that I may make must be human rather than formal. You see, the work of buying for and making a magazine is a firing line job. Tactics and strategy go into preparation for the battle, but in the strife one does many things because they have to be done. Reduced to practicality, I buy what I want when I get it. You will say, to tell you what I want, since I know it. But if I did, you would be misled, for all wants are not constant. Fundamentals, of course, are, but they are rather the fundamentals of art--an idea to convey, a picture to paint, in short, creation. A creative thought first, then an object modeled with the tools of craftsmanship. Finally, a composition (in the painting rather than the writing sense) that, when looked at from points in a sense afar, tells that the creator wants to tell. I am trying here, perhaps indistinctly, to state that said creator has to build for perspective. He has to make things, actions and persons _seem_ real. For example, the actor is made up for the appearance he will make to you sitting on the other side of the footlights. He does not strive, in the laying on of paint, for the effect on you standing at his side, but on you more remote. Contrariwise, if he did not make up, he would seem to you in that audience as unreal, and unnatural. There is a good lesson in this for the young writer, if I can get it over.