Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/160

Rh point of time as well as space. There are a hundred ways of telling any story. Don't make the mistake of assuming that the author has necessarily chosen the best way. You are entitled to your own opinion; try to find out for yourself just why he began his story where he did, why he spread it over a certain range of days and of miles, why he had nine characters instead of eleven, or fifty-seven instead of forty-three,—in other words, when dealing with a modern novel by an author whose technique is supposedly good, cultivate the habit of assuming that the novel contains nothing, not even of the most trivial character, that was not the result of some deliberate purpose, carefully calculated to play its part in the design of the book as a whole. Unfortunately, you will run across many things in the novels of even the best craftsmen that are not the result of any such careful planning; and you will even