Apply to these primary and secondary characters the tests suggested in previous exercises. Do they live?
Setting. What does “Stony Brook, New York” suggest by way of physical and spiritual conditions? How is the locality an integral part of the atmosphere?
Details. The “human appeal” in this narrative will make it hard for any reader, however crusty, to refrain from tears or an awakened sense of pity. By what measures has the author brought about this desired result? The list should be long. After you have made it, see how far you can generalize from it as to provocation of emotional reaction.
“What I like in reading a story,” Mrs. Pulver says, “is a simple gracious English, a shade whimsical perhaps, that concerns itself with a situation and people who palpitate, in whose fate you become sincerely interested, as humans, not merely a clever bit of literary bridge. And the whole must be laced for me with a dash of humor, that tender fun-poking that will save the written human appeal from being heart-throb stuff or the handiwork of a sob-sister.”
Some examples of contrast have already been offered. Point out others, even stronger.
In Division II (pages 421-425) the focus is on Nat, the action seemingly held up, meanwhile. Did you, in reading, feel this long delay to be irksome, or were you compensated by the matter itself and the vision of its promise?
In Division IV, what intensifying value has the rain?
In Division V, what intensifying value has the first sentence?—“It was dusk when Maw came back; dusk of a clear day, with a rosy sunset off behind the hills.”
General. Mary Brecht Pulver declares she is afraid she is that “hooted-at and disbelieved-in thing,” an inspirational writer. “Given a major premise, an argument, some slight flash of idea, for a chart and I am ready to sail over the smooth white main. My crew will come to me ready named, ready behavioured, and will navigate my bark for me.... All of my stories are pictures. They unroll like a cinema in colors just off my left shoulder. They move so fast my wrist aches to keep up with them. I never rewrite anything unless an editor requests it. My first draft is the only one. As you see, this is not intellectual but emotional work. I can do only a thousand words at a sitting because of the emotional strain. This seems deplorable, considering the product but it seems necessary. Like the Jap in the legend, I must mix a little blood with my clay to get any kind of pottery.”
At first, this passage would seem to say, “There’s no use trying to learn to write.” And it may be urged here that the young fiction aspirant who feels impelled to create, and according to his own bent, should give his genius a full chance. Any student may glean this, however, from the words of Mrs. Pulver: Without emotion of one’s own, success is impossible.