We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
ENVIRONMENT MOST IMPORTANT When we speak of heredity we mean racial inheritance — the slow welding processes of the ages — rather than what one immediately inherits from his father and mother. This latter is very slight. So slight, in fact, as to be almost negligible. A child develops its parents' traits because it is imitative, not because it inherited those traits. In the last analysis it is environment that carries the burden of shaping character.
A man, therefore, being the result of racial inheritance and environment is both good and bad. If you make him all good, or all bad, you have not made him true to life. The best men have their evil impulses, and the worst have their good ones. The hero who is all heroic is absurd ; so is the thoroughly villainous-villain. Sometimes the man who has led an evil life will perform an act of great generosity, sacrifice or courage. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote:
"The habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with his wife and friends. Another man who never told a formal falsehood in his life may yet be himself one lie — heart and face from top to bottom."
CHARACTERS MUST BE HUMAN We want our students to get away from the conventional all-good heroes and all-bad villains. Make your characters human. This has been the charm of the Charles Ray characterizations. They have their moments of human weakness as well as their moments of strength. And this contrast, as our students will learn, serves to intensify greatly their dramatic appeal.
We must emphasize this point. So many stories come to us written around the good hero and the bad villain. We know stories with such characterizations are hopeless. Your dramatic foundation has crumbled before you have begun to build your plot. Remember that your characters build their own plot. The plot and the characters exist for each other.
Of course, while all men are both good and bad, there are those who are cast in bigger molds, who dominate because of greater force of character. There are the ones, too, of finer sensibilities who possess more of ideality. For drama — for conflict— these finer characters are brought into contact and contrast with those of coarser grain.
[36]