A GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL MAGAZINE WRITING

A slightly different approach to the problem from the many other books on writing, this reprints the work of several successful magazine writers in various nonfiction fields together with personal accounts of how the stories were written. An Introduction by Morton Sontheimer sets up the field, the tasks involved to break it and some of the criteria for saleable writing- a sense of article value and what people are interested in, thorough research and good reportorial style. Then personality profiles, foreign affairs, crime, medicine etc. are just a few of the categories, each represented by one or more writers- with articles and explanations. Dickson Hartwell writes on Winchell for Collier's and says that the more outstanding the personality the easier it is to put him down on paper; Richard L. Frey writes on Baby Sitters and tells how the idea popped when he was driving one home in the evening so that he barely escaped an accident, and so forth. For reading and study, here are some valuable hints and instigators for hopefuls.