Self-pity? I See No Moral Objections To

Suspense: The Only Literary Tool That Has Any Effect Upon Tyrants And Savages.

The Novel Is A Formidable Mass, And It Is So Amorphous - No Mountain In It To Climb, No Parnassus Or Helicon, Not Even A Pisgah. It Is Most Distinctly One Of The Moister Areas Of Literature - Irrigated By A Hundred Rills And Occasionally Degenerating Into A Swamp. I Do Not Wonder That The Poets Despise It, Though They Sometimes Find Themselves In It By Accident. And I Am Not Surprised At The Annoyance Of The Historians When By Accident It Finds Itself Among Them.

This Element Of Surprise Or Mystery — The Detective Element As It Is Sometimes Rather Emptily Called — Is Of Great Importance In A Plot. It Occurs Through A Suspension Of The Time-sequence; A Mystery Is A Pocket In Time, And It Occurs Crudely, As In "why Did The Queen Die?" And More Subtly In Half-explained Gestures And Words, The True Meaning Of Which Only Dawns Pages Ahead. Mystery Is Essential To A Plot, And Cannot Be Appreciated Without Intelligence.

It Is The Vice Of A Vulgar Mind To Be Thrilled By Bigness.

Characters Must Not Brood Too Long. They Must Not Waste Time Running Up And Down Ladders In Their Own Insides.