I sold my first story when I was 18, because I had a wonderful teacher in high school. His name was Father Becker, and he was an English teacher. And he took me aside and said if I wanted to get an “A” in his course, I had to get something accepted by a national magazine. And I rolled my eyes, but I had no choice, because you couldn’t argue with a Jesuit priest because you never win those kinds of arguments.
And so I kept trying. And I got a lot of rejection letters, and he retracted the threat. I only had to show him my letters. But after that, I kept trying.
And so what happened was those very first stories I was trying to write stories for Look magazine, which was still in existence and even Cosmopolitan God forgive me. And I wasn’t really writing about what I knew. When I was in Milwaukee at Marquette, I was feeling so terribly homesick, and so I began writing about San Francisco. But it was a San Francisco in my imagination, so it was a San Francisco that had sunk underneath the ocean during an earthquake. And that’s the story that actually sold.
But I sold it for a penny a word, which is what Dickens was getting in the 1840s. But pennies went a lot further. So, I never really expected to make a living as a writer.
