uce as effective a thing from such materials
as did the author. The very great value of this sort of practice work
lies in the fact that you have a positive standard of comparison ready
for your story when it is written. Place yours and the original side by
side, and you can see precisely where you have failed, if you feel that
you have. In examining your own work, look to the matter of expression
less than to the matter of construction; see if you have realized the
necessity to build character here, to touch in setting there, even if
your attempt to do so has failed in a degree through lack of executive
deftness.

In the third place, the faculty of construction can be exercised in
original work, and to do so does not necessarily involve writing a
complete story. Ten stories can be blocked out and roughly shaped in the
time it would take to write one, and the more rapid process is
preferable for the beginner because it will teach him that the first
conception is not usually the best conception. Write thousand-word
outlines of ten stories as you have opportunity, put them aside for a
while, and then see if you cannot re-shape their people, re-devise and
re-order their events, to make them more effective, more interesting
fictions. In blocking out a story do not state happenings merely;
indicate your people's natures, their looks, their speech, and indicate
where you would touch in setting, depict character by action, speech, or
description, or hint to a reader the emotional quality of what is to
come.

It will take a very real degree of courage and perseverance to carry out
a course of practice in conceptive and constructive technique long
enough to accomplish its end. But if you will lay out for yourself along
the lines indicated here such a course of study and practice, and then
will perform the necessary work, you will certainly gain more insight
into the essential processes of fiction than you can acquire merely by
accepting at face value such story-ideas as may come to you and by
writing them out one after the other. In particular, you will acquire
the faculty to re-mould and re-shape your material, instead of seizing
each idea too uncritically. And that is half the battle, for it is
precisely the attitude and habit of the professional as contrasted with
the attitude and habit of the amateur.

Little need be said as to the best way to practice the technique of
execution. When you find or devise a story that you f