| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: Saying this, the old woman poked with her staff in the river,
as if to find the safest place in its rocky bed where she might
make the first step. But Jason, by this time, had grown ashamed
of his reluctance to help her. He felt that he could never
forgive himself, if this poor feeble creature should come to
any harm in attempting to wrestle against the headlong current.
The good Chiron, whether half horse or no, had taught him that
the noblest use of his strength was to assist the weak; and
also that he must treat every young woman as if she were his
sister, and every old one like a mother. Remembering these
maxims, the vigorous and beautiful young man knelt down, and
Tanglewood Tales |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott: to attribute some censure to the conduct of the officer, as
having been unnecessarily irritating.
These were the contents of his public despatches. The letters
which he wrote to those private friends into whose management the
matter was likely to fall were of a yet more favourable tenor.
He represented that lenity in this case would be equally politic
and popular, whereas, considering the high respect with which the
rites of interment are regarded in
Scotland, any severity exercised against the Master of Ravenswood
for protecting those of his father from interruption, would be on
all sides most unfavourably construed. And, finally, assuming
The Bride of Lammermoor |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: infinitely various; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise,
and yet still to gratify; to be ever changing, as it were,
the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of an ingenious
neatness.
The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and our pleasure in
beholding him springs from this, that neither is for an
instant overlooked or sacrificed. So with the writer. His
pattern, which is to please the supersensual ear, is yet
addressed, throughout and first of all, to the demands of
logic. Whatever be the obscurities, whatever the intricacies
of the argument, the neatness of the fabric must not suffer,
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