Perfect blocks
of wood are rare, and so are perfect stories in real life. The carver
cuts out the imperfect part and fits in a new piece of wood. Perhaps
the whole base of his vase must be made of another piece and screwed on.
It is quite usual that the whole setting of a story must come from
another source. One has observed life in a thousand different phases,
just as a carver has accumulated about him scores of different pieces
of wood varying in shape and size to suit almost any possible need.
When a carver makes a vase he takes one block for the main portion,
the starting point in his work, and builds up the rest from that.
The writer takes one real incident as the chief one, and perfects it
artistically by adding dozens of other incidents that he has observed.
The writer creates only in the sense that the wood carver creates his
vase. He does not create ideas cut of nothing, any more than the carver
creates the separate blocks of wood. The writer may coin his own soul
into substance for his stories, but creating out of one's mind and
creating out of nothing are two very different things. The writer
observes himself, notices how his mind works, how it behaves under given
circumstances, and that gives him material exactly the same in kind as
that which he gains from observing the working of other people's mind.
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