ssly, but just as they happened, and this
gives me a record which I could not reproduce for any other story I ever
wrote. These notes are here published on the chance that such a truthful
record of the growth of one short story, may have some general
suggestiveness for students.

No two of my stories are ever constructed in the same way, but broadly
viewed they all have exactly the same genesis, and I confess I cannot
conceive of any creative fiction written from any other beginning ...
that of a generally intensified emotional sensibility, such as every
human being experiences with more or less frequency. Everybody knows
such occasional hours or days of freshened emotional responses when
events that usually pass almost unnoticed, suddenly move you deeply,
when a sunset lifts you to exaltation, when a squeaking door throws you
into a fit of exasperation, when a clear look of trust in a child's eyes
moves you to tears, or an injustice reported in the newspapers to
flaming indignation, a good action to a sunny warm love of human nature,
a discovered meanness in yourself or another, to despair.

I have no idea whence this tide comes, or where it goes, but when it
begins to rise in my heart, I know that a story is hovering in the
offing. It does not always come safely to port. The daily routine of
ordinary life kills off many a vagrant emotion. Or if daily humdrum
occupation does not stifle it, perhaps this saturated solution of
feeling does not happen to crystallize about any concrete fact, episode,
word or phrase. In my own case, it is far more likely to seize on some
slight trifle, the shade of expression on somebody's face, or the tone
of somebody's voice, than to accept a more complete, ready-made episode.
Especially this emotion refuses to crystallize about, or to have
anything to do with those narrations of our actual life, offered by
friends who are sure that such-and-such a happening is so strange or
interesting that "it ought to go in a story."

The beginning of a story is then for me in more than usual sensitiveness
to emotion. If this encounters the right focus (and heaven only knows
why it is the "right" one) I get simultaneously a strong thrill of
intense feeling, and an intense desire to pass it on to other people.
This emotion may be any one of the infinitely varied ones which life
affords, laughter, sorrow, indignation, gayety, admiration, scorn,
pleasure. I recognize it for the "right" one when it brings