With the pen in one's hand, narrative is a difficult art; narrative should
flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands, its
course changed by every boulder it comes across and by every grass-clad gravelly
spur that projects into its path; its surface broken, but its course not stayed
by rocks and gravel on the bottom in the shoal places; a brook that never goes
straight for a minute, but goes, and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically,
and sometimes fetching a horseshoe three quarters of a mile around, and at the
end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path it traversed an hour before;
but always going, and always following at least one law, always loyal to that
law, the law of the narrative, which has no law.
With a pen in hand the narrative stream is a canal; it moves slowly, smoothly,
decorously, sleepily, it has no blemish except that it is all blemish. It is
too literary, too prim, too nice; the gait and style and movement are not suited
to narrative. That canal stream is always reflecting; it is its nature, it can't
help it. Its slick shiny surface is interested in everything it passes along
the banks--cows, foliage, flowers, everything. And so it wastes a lot of time
in reflections.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
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