| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: as forcibly said in one, then it's amateur work. Then you will
bring me up with old Dumas. Nay, the object of a story is to be
long, to fill up hours; the story-teller's art of writing is to
water out by continual invention, historical and technical, and yet
not seem to water; seem on the other hand to practise that same wit
of conspicuous and declaratory condensation which is the proper art
of writing. That is one thing in which my stories fail: I am
always cutting the flesh off their bones.
I would rise from the dead to preach!
Hope all well. I think my wife better, but she's not allowed to
write; and this (only wrung from me by desire to Boss and Parsonise
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: they were more than once taken in them; but my tackle was not good,
for I had no wire, and I always found them broken and my bait
devoured. At length I resolved to try a pitfall; so I dug several
large pits in the earth, in places where I had observed the goats
used to feed, and over those pits I placed hurdles of my own making
too, with a great weight upon them; and several times I put ears of
barley and dry rice without setting the trap; and I could easily
perceive that the goats had gone in and eaten up the corn, for I
could see the marks of their feet. At length I set three traps in
one night, and going the next morning I found them, all standing,
and yet the bait eaten and gone; this was very discouraging.
Robinson Crusoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: shaped after the general pattern of the human soul, I am
inclined to suspect that we have got very near to the root of
the whole matter. We can certainly find no difficulty in
seeing why a water-spout should be described in the "Arabian
Nights" as a living demon: "The sea became troubled before
them, and there arose from it a black pillar, ascending
towards the sky, and approaching the meadow,.... and behold it
was a Jinni, of gigantic stature." We can see why the Moslem
camel-driver should find it most natural to regard the
whirling simoom as a malignant Jinni; we may understand how it
is that the Persian sees in bodily shape the scarlet fever as
Myths and Myth-Makers |
