| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Contrast by Royall Tyler: give me a distaste for my native country.
DIMPLE
Well, Colonel, though you have not travelled, you
have read.
MANLY
I have, a little; and by it have discovered that
there is a laudable partiality which ignorant, untrav-
elled men entertain for everything that belongs to their
native country. I call it laudable; it injures no one;
adds to their own happiness; and, when extended, be-
comes the noble principle of patriotism. Travelled
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: companion lodged at a wayside inn. The surroundings were suggestive,
and after supper they agreed to tell robber stories in turn. "Once
there was a Farmer-General of the Revenues." Saying nothing more, he
was encouraged to continue. "That," he said, "is the story."
ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as
They Are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to
probability, as a domestic horse to the hitching-post, but in romance
it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination -- free,
lawless, immune to bit and rein. Your novelist is a poor creature, as
Carlyle might say -- a mere reporter. He may invent his characters
and plot, but he must not imagine anything taking place that might not
The Devil's Dictionary |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis: Each little lyric interval
Timed to her pulse's rise and fall;--
Or when he cried out wearily
That all things end in vanity
Did he mean that Sabean girl?
The bright barbaric opulence,
The sun-kist Temple, Kedar's tents,--
How many a careless caravan
'Twixt Beersheba and ruined Dan,
Within these forty centuries,
Has flung their dust to many a breeze,
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