| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: which is not New York is merely junk. Take Fifth Avenue as a
framework, pad it out to five thousand words, and there you have
the ideal short story.
Consequently I feel a certain timidity in confessing that I do
not know Fifth Avenue from Hester Street when I see it, because
I've never seen it. It has been said that from the latter to the
former is a ten-year journey, from which I have gathered that they
lie some miles apart. As for Forty-second Street, of which musical
comedians carol, I know not if it be a fashionable shopping
thoroughfare or a factory district.
A confession of this kind is not only good for the soul, but
Buttered Side Down |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Tapestried Chamber by Walter Scott: are made on such stories. Lord Woodville never once asked him if
he was sure he did not dream of the apparition, or suggested any
of the possibilities by which it is fashionable to explain
supernatural appearances as wild vagaries of the fancy, or
deceptions of the optic nerves, On the contrary, he seemed deeply
impressed with the truth and reality of what he had heard; and,
after a considerable pause regretted, with much appearance of
sincerity, that his early friend should in his house have
suffered so severely.
"I am the more sorry for your pain, my dear Browne," he
continued, "that it is the unhappy, though most unexpected,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: determination to gain and keep equality, even at the expense of
liberty, had been long growing up, under those influences of which I
spoke in my first lecture.
He shows, moreover, that the acquiescence in a centralised
administration; the expectation that the government should do
everything for the people, and nothing for themselves; the
consequent loss of local liberties, local peculiarities; the
helplessness of the towns and the parishes: and all which issued in
making Paris France, and subjecting the whole of a vast country to
the arbitrary dictates of a knot of despots in the capital, was not
the fruit of the Revolution, but of the Ancien Regime which preceded
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