| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: gazed in. They found themselves just outside the dining-room. It
was being swept; a waiter was eating a bunch of grapes with his leg
across the corner of a table. Next door was the kitchen, where they
were washing up; white cooks were dipping their arms into cauldrons,
while the waiters made their meal voraciously off broken meats,
sopping up the gravy with bits of crumb. Moving on, they became lost
in a plantation of bushes, and then suddenly found themselves outside
the drawing-room, where the ladies and gentlemen, having dined well,
lay back in deep arm-chairs, occasionally speaking or turning over
the pages of magazines. A thin woman was flourishing up and down
the piano.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: literature. It used to be a piece of good advice to all
young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was
sound, in so far as it prevented daubing. None the less for
that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of
those blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of
the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends
implicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance. The vowel
demands to be repeated; the consonant demands to be repeated;
and both cry aloud to be perpetually varied. You may follow
the adventures of a letter through any passage that has
particularly pleased you; find it, perhaps, denied a while,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Youth by Joseph Conrad: --the wide sweep of the bay, the glittering sands, the
wealth of green infinite and varied, the sea blue like the
sea of a dream, the crowd of attentive faces, the blaze of
vivid color--the water reflecting it all, the curve of the
shore, the jetty, the high-sterned outlandish craft float-
ing still, and the three boats with tired men from the
West sleeping unconscious of the land and the people
and of the violence of sunshine. They slept thrown
across the thwarts, curled on bottom-boards, in the care-
less attitudes of death. The head of the old skipper,
leaning back in the stern of the long-boat, had fallen on
Youth |
