Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/184

 All this is given here not as an example to be imitated by the young literary craftsman but as a sort of ultimate standard by which to measure the extent and the earnestness of his own efforts. Your latest story, perhaps, came back this morning accompanied by its third rejection slip. In writing that story did you take the trouble to work it over for the third or fourth time? Did you erase and rearrange the opening sentence endlessly until you knew all its possible variations by heart? Did you wake up suddenly in the night with a happy idea that would just fit into page seventeen and could not wait till morning?—or did you on the other hand, simply sit down quite comfortably one day, possessed only of pen, ink and paper and a good working idea, and dash off your five thousand words at top speed while the heat that Thoreau speaks of was still in you? And, as you