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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: schooner without public shame. And then I had an idea for
John Silver from which I promised myself funds of
entertainment; to take an admired friend of mine (whom the
reader very likely knows and admires as much as I do), to
deprive him of all his finer qualities and higher graces of
temperament, to leave him with nothing but his strength, his
courage, his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to
try to express these in terms of the culture of a raw
tarpaulin. Such psychical surgery is, I think, a common way
of 'making character'; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way.
We can put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred words
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