The true northerner. [volume] (Paw Paw, Mich.) 1855-1920, 1888-01-04

IL believe would rather work on the
aqueduct than write books for living,
looking at it merely rs u matter OF
manual labor" said a Broadway book
seller, whose experience runs back
quarter of a century. ''Did you ever
think of what the labors of writing
merely moving the pen over the paper.
10 say nothing of the mental strain
must be i'm writing an ordinary book?
Take "a novel like one of Mr.. Howclls',
for instance IL contains say $50 pages.
with an average of 400 words to the
page, or 10000 words. How many
hours of composition do you suppose
that means? Well, l,400 words an hour
is considered a pretty good gait even II
you know exactly what you want to say
and can clip along without stopping to
study construction. That would mean,
at least, under the most favorable cir
cumstances Imaginable, one hundred
hours of writing. Now, few authors
can compose steadily more than two
hours a day. Surprising, therefore,
that the author knows exactly what he
wants to write every day and can pillow
on without interruption, IL would take
| fifty days TO grind out a book like one
of Mr.. Howells'. But many authors
have assured me that on an average
| they write each book over three times
before they are satisfied to leave il.
| When you consider, besides this, that
tho labor of writing is. of course, the
merest triile compared with the other
labors of authorship, you can see that
there is no picnic about it,
when you think of ali these things
the amount of work done by some of
our leading noveiists seems prodigIous,
There is Miss Braddon, for instance.
Her tireless pen has already raced
through fifty complete works of fiction,
and there is no probablity-hope, some
people might say-that her supply will
run short for twenty years 10 come.
Probably there are 100000 printed
words in these books, and to write them
her hand must have travelled over 3d.
600 or 10000 sheets of paper. even on
the supposition that she never tore up
or rewrote sheet. Sixty thousand
sheets of manuscript paper would make
\ pile rs high as this room. Surprising
that Miss Braddon labors under the
same limitations as other writer's, she
has probably written over three or four
such piles in the past fifteen or twenty
years. To do that is no joke, can tell
YOU. Yet there are others who have
done nearly rs much. The works of
| The Duchess are numbered in the for
ties. The author of 'Dora Thorne" has
written thiry-nine. Mr.. Black has
written twenty-five novels; Besant and
Rice turned out twenty-rhree, and
Wilkie Collins has published thirty
two. Dickens works, including his
sketches collected into volumes and the
story that he wrote with Willlie Collins
make thirtv-five books. Nobody knows
how many Miss Holmes has turned out
but some persons think there are 4
hundred of them at least. Then look at
the way Oliver Optic. Mrs. Southworth.
and others have reeled out story after
story. year IN and year out. The man
who makes any money with his pen is
no sluggard, you can be sure.
Hard as these writers work, how
ever the serial story-writers for the
weekly papers 90 much better Cor
worse) than any of them. The serials
they put forth average about 10000
words in length. One writer OF this
kind of trash made So. 900 from It's pro-
duction last year. lie received only
$3.50 for each serial. Consequently he
must have written in single year twen-
" serials. or l.200.0 600 words-nearly
ten times the quantity of matter pro-
duced in a year By the most prolific
novelist The late Ned Buntlino is said
to have made 100000 by writing this
class OF literature. 70 Go so he must
have ground out during his lifetime not
less than 100000 900 words of copy,
which means an almost incalcuabie
amount of labor that. devoted TO almost
any other occupation. would have made
him millionaire. "-NeW York. Mail
and ErpyeSS.