| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac: flow of blood brought on, fearing to disturb that sleep which allowed
him time to think of some means of escape.
Twice he placed his hand on his scimiter, intending to cut off the
head of his enemy; but the difficulty of cutting the stiff short hair
compelled him to abandon this daring project. To miss would be to die
for CERTAIN, he thought; he preferred the chances of fair fight, and
made up his mind to wait till morning; the morning did not leave him
long to wait.
He could now examine the panther at ease; its muzzle was smeared with
blood.
"She's had a good dinner," he thought, without troubling himself as to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of the main intrigue;
suffer not his style to flag below the level of the argument; pitch
the key of conversation, not with any thought of how men talk in
parlours, but with a single eye to the degree of passion he may be
called on to express; and allow neither himself in the narrative
nor any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter one
sentence that is not part and parcel of the business of the story
or the discussion of the problem involved. Let him not regret if
this shortens his book; it will be better so; for to add irrelevant
matter is not to lengthen but to bury. Let him not mind if he miss
a thousand qualities, so that he keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of
Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy
brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which
I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not
why;--from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before
me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion
which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By
the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he
arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea,
that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least--in the
circumstances then surrounding me--there arose out of the pure
The Fall of the House of Usher |
