That every articulately-speaking human being has in him stuff for
one novel in three volumes duodecimo has long been with me a
cherished belief. It has been maintained, on the other hand, that
many persons cannot write more than one novel,--that all after that
are likely to be failures.--Life is so much more tremendous a thing
in its heights and depths than any transcript of it can be, that all
records of human experience are as so many bound _herbaria_ to the
innumerable glowing, glistening, rustling, breathing, fragrance-laden,
poison-sucking, life-giving, death-distilling leaves and flowers of
the forest and the prairies. All we can do with books of human
experience is to make them alive again with something borrowed from
our own lives. We can make a book alive for us just in proportion to
its resemblance in essence or in form to our own experience. Now an
author's first novel is naturally drawn, to a great extent, from his
personal experiences; that is, is a literal copy of nature under
various slight disguises. But the moment the author gets out of his
personality, he must have the creative power, as well as the
narrative art and the sentiment, in order to tell a living story;
and this is rare.
Besides, there is great danger that a man's first life-story shall
clean him out, so to speak, of his best thoughts.
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