A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.
Interpretation
Edgar Allan Poe emphasizes the importance of maintaining a consistent mood in a short story.
This quote by Edgar Allan Poe underlines the significance of coherence in storytelling, particularly in short fiction. Poe suggests that a successful short story should evoke a single mood or emotional response, and every sentence should contribute to reinforcing that mood, thereby creating a focused and immersive experience for the reader.
In practice
An author discussing the principles of short story writing in a workshop.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him desolate!) And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed, Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed.
Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.
...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.
I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?
In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Art is violent. To be decisive is violent. ... To place a chair at a partial angle on the stage destroys every other possible choice, every other option.
A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it.
If you have the opportunity for your art to meet activism, you shouldn't pass that up when it comes your way.
Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.
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