When a writer asks me what we want for _Short Stories_, I am apt to feel a bit hopeless for, as I see it, my first duty is to seek and develop talent, and my second is to select material. I cannot feel that it is good for a fiction magazine, nor good for a fiction writer, to have the editor suggest ideas, or plots. (General magazines using non-fiction articles are different. In the nature of things they must suggest articles and ideas to their writers.) An intelligent reading of a fiction magazine will give a better idea of its aims and field than any amount of talking by the editor. We can at best, in the time at our disposal, give an idea of our field. The more important thing is the spirit of the magazine, and that can only be taken in by reading it. Once a writer gets the spirit of the magazines he wishes to write for and has determined their respective fields, it is up to him. Within the scope of his publication, and in its general spirit, what an editor wants most of all is _ideas_--something new, fresh, different. There is one more preliminary point--self-analysis. Many writers suffer from lack of understanding of their own material. The field is so large to-day that any writer can develop his own natural imaginative expression and find a market for it. If one is more interested in outdoor adventure--write it. If a writer’s mind runs to psychological problem stories--write those. There are magazines looking for adventure and others looking for psychological character analysis. But don’t, Mr. Writer, try to force yourself to write something you yourself do not like. You cannot write down to a field successfully, and you must develop into a higher literary class naturally, by hard work. As for _Short Stories_: Being primarily a magazine of adventure and the outdoors, our interest naturally lies in that field first. Our public is a wide one embracing many kinds of people. Yet, when they buy a fiction magazine like _Short Stories_, we are convinced they do so in pretty much the same frame of mind. They want to be amused. They want a good story. They want to read it in a hurry, on a railroad train, in a spare hour, or to relieve a tedious wait. We believe they do not want too much complexity, nor too highly polished a style. Literary excellence is all to the good. We want it and our readers appreciate it, but it must be within our field and done in our spirit. For example, imagine the joy of our public if we could publish as brand new to-day some of Kipling’s early short stories--“The Man That Would Be King,” “William the Conqueror,” and the rest. They fall perfectly “within our scope,” and in spite of the fact that they were done by the greatest literary craftsman of the age, they are not, like some of his later work, too subtle for our public. They are mostly on the objective plane, full of action, stories straight from the shoulder.