“I see you’ve worked that mine pretty well!” Darling laughed. “But don’t expect to get a knowledge of English literature out of the works of reference. You don’t want to be a reporter or correspondent all your life, naturally, and it is safe to assume that you will not make a great poet, though you might try your hand at some verses, provided you don’t publish them. Then the three things nearest you are plays, novels, and short stories. There is a great deal of money in a successful play; and with two or three successes a writer’s fortune is made.” “I hardly think I could make a play go,” Dick answered. “I have never taken as much interest in the theatre as a man ought who undertakes a play, though I am fond of dramatic situations in what I write. Between ourselves, Darling, I have sometimes thought of trying a novel. I could certainly do a better one than some I have read.” “The young bird flies high!” Darling laughed. “You must not ask yourself whether you can do better than a poor novel, but whether you can do as well as a good one. Don’t expect to write a Rob Roy or a Vanity Fair at the first trial. And don’t be everlastingly wondering whether you have genius. ‘Genius is talent well worked,’ Henry Ward Beecher told me one day, and I believe it. You have some talent, and certainly you have the capacity for hard work, so you need not worry about genius. If you are going to try novel-writing, there is no harm in your traveling for a while, for you must become acquainted with different people and places or your hands will always be tied. Then, if all else fails, a situation in the office is always open to a man of your sort--inside the office, I mean; reading copy or the night city editorship, or something of that sort.” “Oh, don’t mention it!” Dick exclaimed in horror. “A year ago I should have thought that grand; but now I have had a taste of the free life, of coming and going at will, of seeing new places and new people all the time, and I could not stand being shut up in an office, and having a desk that I must open at a fixed hour every day and close at another fixed hour, with a certain amount of unvarying drudgery between. I never could stand that now, Darling.” “You can stand more than you think,” Darling retorted. “It is one of the drawbacks to a reporter’s life, that it is too free. It unfits him for any indoor occupation afterward. He becomes a sort of civilized wild Indian, a gypsy in evening clothes, and longs for his imaginary forest. But never mind. If you have determined to try a novel, keep your eyes open for good characters and good situations, and read whenever you have a spare moment. And don’t be too sure that you can write a good novel because you can write a good newspaper article. There is money and fame in novels if you can reach the top notch, but not otherwise.”