| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: Newman felt as if he had been reading by starlight the report
of highly important evidence in a great murder case.
"And the paper--the paper!" he said, excitedly. "What was
written upon it?"
"I can't tell you, sir," answered Mrs. Bread. "I couldn't read it;
it was in French."
"But could no one else read it?"
"I never asked a human creature."
"No one has ever seen it?"
"If you see it you'll be the first."
Newman seized the old woman's hand in both his own and pressed
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voice of the City by O. Henry: it should be of interest to every author within a 20-
mile radius of Gosport, Ind., whose desk holds a MS.
story beginning thus: "While the cheers following
his nomination were still ringing through the old
courthouse, Harwood broke away from the congrat-
ulating handclasps of his henchmen and hurried to
Judge Creswell's house to find Ida."
Pettit came up out of Alabama to write fiction.
The Southern papers had printed eight of his stories
under an editorial caption identifying the author as
the son of "the gallant Major Pettingill Pettit, our
The Voice of the City |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Selected Writings of Guy De Maupassant by Guy De Maupassant: sherry-colored silk dress, sat by the side of her husband.
The old grandmother and the daughter were accommodated with two
chairs, and a yellow-haired youth, of whom, however, nothing was
to be seen except his head, lay at the bottom of the trap.
When they got to the bridge of Neuilly, Monsieur Dufour said:
"Here we are in the country at last!" At that warning, his wife
grew sentimental about the beauties of nature. When they got to
the crossroads at Courbevoie, they were seized with admiration
for the tremendous view down there: on the right was the spire of
Argenteuil church, above it rose the hills of Sannois and the
mill of Orgemont, while on the left, the aqueduct of Marly stood
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