From Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, edited by Harriet Elinor Smith
A BROOK
"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 narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important so that the trip is made."
From Here begin the Florentine Dictations
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