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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
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