eel is truly worth
the writing, write it as best you can, after careful and directed
planning. You can also try to reproduce the work of others, and again
the great value of this sort of practice lies in your having a positive
standard of comparison ready for your work when it is written. Or you
can practice piecemeal, if you have the necessary enthusiasm, can go
about with a notebook in your pocket, as did Stevenson, and try to
precipitate in telling words the casual impressions that come to you. At
all events, write from a primary spectacle, whether of the imagination
or of actuality, and try to reproduce something definite in your words
rather than to string together vociferous but meaningless phrases.

APPENDIX B

SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS

The instructor in fiction technique has my hearty sympathy. His must be
all the woes of manuscript reader, editor, and friend of the author
rolled into one.

It would serve no purpose to list here the inherent difficulties of the
business of teaching the art of the story, such as that made by the fact
that the instructor must deal with a number of individuals differing not
only in point of powers but in point of earnestness. But there is reason
to note one thing. The aim of the course should not be academic. It
should not be allowed to degenerate into a course in the appreciation of
fiction, the most constant danger to which lecturing and abstract
discussion on fiction technique is subject. The student should not be
permitted for a moment, even, to become merely the appraising
connoisseur rather than the humble practitioner of the art. Such
shifting of viewpoint is fatal.

History can be taught piecemeal; so can mathematics and a hundred other
subjects; but the art of fiction cannot, even if it is teachable at all.
The one great secret of the art of fiction is the art of construction,
and it will profit a class little to assign short exercises in handling
specific elements of a story, the elements of personality, event, or
setting. The whole secret of fiction writing is to blend all these
matters into an interesting and significant whole, and the only way to
seek or impart it is to construct and write or to require the class to
construct and write whole stories. And the proper use of a text-book,
aside from general study by the class and the discussion of
reading-assignments, is for reference in criticising the stories that
have been written by and read before the cl