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Lesson
Not everything that the imagination may furnish is equally worth expressing.
If you choose to write about something for which imagination supplies the ideas, you may create for yourself such ideas as you wish.
Their order of occurrence and their time and place are not determined by outward events, but solely by the mind itself.
The events are no longer real and actual, but may be changed and rearranged without limit.
An imaginative series of events may conform closely to the real and probable, or it may be manifestly improbable.
Which will be of greatest interest will depend upon the reader, but it will be found that generally that story is most satisfactory which comes nearest to reality.
In fairy tales we confessedly attempt to tell of events not possible in the real world, but tales of real life, however imaginary, should be so told that everything seems both possible and probable.
An imaginative story, in which the persons seem to be real persons who do and say the things that real persons do and say, will be found much more satisfactory than a story that depends for its outcome on something manifestly impossible.
From this it appears that he who really does the best in imaginative writing is the one who has most closely observed the real events of everyday life, and states his imaginary ones so that they seem real.
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