EXERCISES BASED ON PICTURES

Street Scene, Cairo. Cairo, the capital of Egypt, is the largest city of Africa. Its Arab quarters retain their Oriental character. The streets are narrow and crooked, and very few of them are paved. Its mosques are among the best specimens of Arabic architecture, and it is one of the great capitals of Islam. Life within these walls represents a blend of buoyant European civilization with the dreamy mysticism of the Oriental world.

Study the scene. Consider yourself a young American traveler, boy or girl, and think out a story of original adventure suited to the scene. Let all that happens in your tale occur on the street here shown, and let it be such as could easily happen. Here is a good test for your ingenuity. Tell your story as effectively as you can.

CHAPTER X

EFFECTIVE REVISION

The young writer can solidly pack his meaning within manageable compass and get an audience for it, or he can spread it thinly over a vast area and let it go unread.

- Editorial, July 19, 1913, The Saturday Evening Post.

What to Omit. So far you have studied effective expression; you are now to take up effective suppression. You secure effectiveness fully as often by what you omit as by what you say. Walter Pater sums up this fact in a few words when he says that all art consists simply in the removal of surplusage, and that the writer dreads surplusage in his work as the runner dreads it in his muscles.1

You have seen throughout your English work that you should omit everything that interferes with unity or coherence. But emphasis especially is best secured by the judicious suppression of unimportant matter.

Revising. There is no practical English work more constantly applied in the business world than restating or reshaping material.

Nearly all successful writers of English have perfected their style by constant revision. Many of them have told how they went to work, and you will find their statements in the following pages. Read them carefully; they contain rules of rhetoric written by men who know.

1 Compare this with the statement of Schiller, p. 18.

William Cowper

To touch and retouch is the secret of almost all good writing. I never suffer a line to pass until I have made it as good as I can. (29)

Robert Louis Stevenson

All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for a pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words. When I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and book would be in hand to note down the features of the scene. Thus I lived with words. And what I wrote was for no ulterior use. It was written consciously for practice. (111)

Guy de Maupassant

Flaubert, a great French writer, conceived a friendship for me. I ventured to submit to him some of my attempts. The master criticized them and enforced upon me, little by little, two or three principles which were the pith of his long and perfect teaching. "If one has not originality," he said, "it is necessary to acquire it. Talent is long patience. Work." It is a question of regarding whatever one desires to express long enough and with attention close enough to discover a side which no one has seen and which has been expressed by nobody. In everything there is something of the unexplored. The smallest thing has in it a grain of the unknown. Discover it. In order to describe a fire that flames or a tree in the plain, we must remain face to face with that fire or that tree until for us they no longer resemble any other tree or any other fire. That is the way to become original. (165)

Benjamin Franklin

About this time I met with the third volume of the Spectator. I bought it, read it over, and was much delighted

with it. I thought the writing excellent and wished if possible to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and making short hints of the sentiments,1 laid them by for a few days and then, without looking at the book, tried to complete the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my "Spectator" with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. I also sometimes jumbled my collection of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and complete the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of my thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them. (207)

F. Hopkinson Smith

The only inspiration I know of in writing is days and nights of the labor called thought. I wrote the first chapter of Colonel Carter of Cartersville nine times and corrected the proofs until the printer refused to send any more.

I am conscious that I cannot do very much, but the little I do is done the very best I know how. I write very large and heavy, and when the words necessary to make the proper swing or rhythm will not come, I make dashes representing the length of the missing words, and fill them in when revising. And I never rise from my chair until the work I have laid out is done. (116)

Elbert Hubbard

Now in reference to writing, it may not be amiss to explain that no one ever said, "Now then, I'll write a story!" and sitting down at table took up pen and dipping it in ink

1 Compare this excellent plan with that of Barrett Wendell, detailed in chapter viii of this book, "How to Use Material."

wrote. Stories don't come that way. Stories take possession of one, incident after incident, and you write in order to get rid of them, with a few other reasons mixed in. Whether the story is good or not depends upon what you leave out. The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed.

To present a situation, an emotion, so that it will catch and hold the attention of others, is largely a knack. You practise on the thing until you do it well. Even Kipling's art is a knack practised to a point that gives facility. (143)

Arlo Bates

I have had well educated and cultivated men come into my office when I was an editor, and spend an hour in trying satisfactorily to phrase some simple announcement which they wished printed. All that there was to do was to say that such a charity needed funds, that a subscription had been opened, or some learned society was to meet at such a time or place. Yet the amateur would struggle with the paragraph in an agony of ineptitude which was alike pathetic and farcical.

When at last the conflict between mind and matter ended from the sheer exhaustion of the mind, there would be handed to me a scrawled sheet, recrossed and rewritten, and in the end a miracle of obscurity and awkwardness, the art of how not to say it illustrated to perfection. Then after the writer had taken himself off, in a condition not far from nervous exhaustion, it was only necessary to say to a reporter, "Make a paragraph of these facts." In a couple of minutes the slip would be ready to send to the printer, written in English not elegant but easy and above all clear.

The reporter had very likely not the hundredth part of the information or the experience of life of the amateur, but he had had a continued business-like drill. He had written as a matter of steady work, with the improving consciousness of an editorial blue pencil ever before his mind.

(240)