“I wish,” said Lucile that night as she lay curled up in her favorite chair, “that I could create something. I wish I could write a story—a real story.”
Then, for a long time she was silent. “Professor Storris,” she began again, “told us just how a short story ought to be done. First you find an unusual setting for your story; something that hasn’t been described before; then you imagine some very unusual events occurring in that setting. That makes a story, only you need a little technique. There must be three parts to the story. You look about in the story and find the very most dramatic point in the narrative—fearfully exciting and dramatic. You begin the story right there; don’t tell how things come to be happening so, nor why the hero was there or anything; just plunge right into it like: ‘Cold perspiration stood out upon his brow; a chill ran down his spine. His eyes were glued upon the two burning orbs of fire. He was paralyzed with fear’.”
Florence looked up and laughed. “That ought to get them interested.”
“Trouble is,” said Lucile thoughtfully, “it’s hard to find an unusual setting and the unusual incidents.
“After you’ve done two or three hundred words of thrill,” she went on, “then you keep the hero in a most horrible plight while his mind runs like lightning back over the events which brought him to this dramatic moment in his career. Then you suddenly take up the thrill again and bring the story up to the climax with a bang. Simple, isn’t it? All you have to do is do it; only you must concentrate, concentrate tremendously, all the while you’re doing it.”
For a long while after that she lay back in her chair quite silent, so silent indeed that her companions thought her asleep. But after nearly an hour she sprang to her feet with sudden enthusiasm.
“I have it. Three girls living in a yacht in dry dock. That’s an unusual setting. And the unusual incident, I have that too but I shan’t tell it. That’s to be the surprise.”
The other girls were preparing to retire. Lucile took down her hair, slipped on a loose dressing-gown, arranged a dark shade over her lamp, then, having taken a quantity of paper from a drawer and sharpened six pencils, she sat down to write.
When she commenced it was ten by the clock built into the running board at the end of the cabin. When she came to an end and threw the last dulled pencil from her it was one o’clock.
For a moment she shuffled the papers into an oblong heap, then, throwing aside her dressing-gown and snapping off the light, she climbed to her berth and was soon fast asleep.