| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: little, and then stopped inexorably like a schoolboy's watch.
I might be compared to a cricketer of many years' standing
who should never have made a run. Anybody can write a short
story - a bad one, I mean - who has industry and paper and
time enough; but not every one may hope to write even a bad
novel. It is the length that kills.
The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down,
spend days upon it in vain, and write not any more than he
makes haste to blot. Not so the beginner. Human nature has
certain rights; instinct - the instinct of self-preservation
- forbids that any man (cheered and supported by the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: horses up these horrid little hills." She spoke of the Seven Hills
of Rome as "horrid little hills!"
And the day they went on the Palatine--though Miss Winchelsea
did not know of this--she remarked suddenly to Fanny, "Don't hurry
like that, my dear; THEY don't want us to overtake them. And we
don't say the right things for them when we DO get near."
"I wasn't trying to overtake them," said Fanny, slackening her
excessive pace; "I wasn't indeed." And for a minute she was short of
breath.
But Miss Winchelsea had come upon happiness. It was only when she
came to look back across an intervening tragedy that she quite
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: sister could have been so wicked.
His mother took a drink from a squdgy bottle that sat on the
table. She continued her lament.
"She had a bad heart, dat girl did, Jimmie. She was wicked
teh deh heart an' we never knowed it."
Jimmie nodded, admitting the fact.
"We lived in deh same house wid her an' I brought her up an'
we never knowed how bad she was."
Jimmie nodded again.
"Wid a home like dis an' a mudder like me, she went teh deh
bad," cried the mother, raising her eyes.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
