You have a
dark, wicked man on one side, and a fair, sunny, sweet woman on the
other. These are two extremes, a contrast, and they include all
between. If a writer understands these extremes he understands all
between, and if in a story he sets up one type against another he in a
way marks out those extremes as the boundaries of his intellectual
field, and he claims all within them. If the contrast is great,
he claims a great field; if feeble, then he has only a narrow field.
Contrast and one's power of mastering it indicate one's breadth of
thought and especially the breadth of one's thinking in a particular
creative attempt. Every writer should strive for the greatest possible
breadth, for the greater his breadth the more people there are who will
be interested in his work. Narrow minds interest a few people, and
broad minds interest correspondingly many. The best way to cultivate
breadth is to cultivate the use of contrast in your writing.
But to assume a breadth which one does not have, to pass from one
extreme to another without perfect mastery of all that lies between,
results in being ridiculous.
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