And it is the longest distance in the world between the artist and the near-artist. It is up to the writer and no one else. He must spend thousands of uncounted hours at work. He must strive untiringly while others eat and sleep and play. Some people are more gifted than others, but it takes brains in the most gifted to make a success.
Writing has to be gone at like any other trade.
They have such queer ways of keeping half-done things stored by and inconsistently saying to themselves that they will finish them after a while, and never admitting they shrink from that work because they are not qualified for it. Ninety-nine out of every hundred stories received by magazines are imitations of some former success. This is a natural mistake for young people to make. The girl or boy of 24 or 25 is not strong enough to digest experiences in the raw, therefore they take them pre-digested from things they read. That is why young writing does not as a rule amount to much.