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Excerpt from The Art and the Business of Story Writing This book is an outgrowth of the belief that fiction has a technique no less definite, though much less rigid, than the technique of perspective drawing or of harmony and counterpoint in music. Such a conviction is not easily reached, for the laws of story construction elude their many searchers with a persistence most exasperating. The long-discouraged investigator naturally falls into the thought that pure anarchy reigns in the domain of fantasy; and he disguises the absurdity of this thought under the hypothesis that a story is the free creation of mind, spontaneous in origin and in manner of outworking. Unfortunately for the development of fictional technique, the half-truth of the hypothesis helps to conceal the flaw in his argument. There is no doubt that, in some sense, a story is a free creation and spontaneous; and freedom seems to connote a certain emancipation from law: hence the plausibility of saying that the fiction writer works without rule or principle, following only the caprice of his imagination. The inference, however, is only plausible. There is no soundness in it; and, were we here discussing ethics or metaphysics, we might demonstrate this assertion by pointing out that free creation and spontaneity do not involve unpatterned behavior nor blind, impulsive fashioning. If chaos lurks anywhere in the whole performance, it lurks only in the primitive uprush of fleeting, disjointed imageries which precede, suggest, and inspire the work of art. The work of art, as Poe and many another have said, is a piece of cunning and calculation no less deliberate than the selling-price of umbrellas; and, once more like this computation, the artistry of the fiction writer is regulated by two elemental factors, his own purposes and his material. If he has not discovered the principles in these which direct his choice, it is because they are prodigiously intricate. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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