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72 . THE TRUE STORY If Aunt Jane has never read Pepys' "Diary," tlien it is new to her, but it will not be new to others, perhaps hundreds, who have had a similar experience. 7. There is another angle. It may well be that truth is stranger than fiction, so much stranger, indeed, that the average person will not accept it as even probable. We cannot illustrate this point better than to repeat the example given in the last edition. A minister sent a story to a certain company and was surprised to be told it was too improbable. It related to a medical missionary in Africa who had been seized with appendicitis. Without anesthetic or surgical assist- ance other than such as he himself could give, the wife performed the operation and he regained his health. The minister seemed to think that his honesty was in question and offered to produce the man who figured in'the story. He was assured that the truth of the incident was not in question, but merely its acceptance by an audience. No author would be likely to think so improbable a fact. He would be more likely to evolve from his imagination something more likely to be accepted as fact because more likely to have happened. 8. For all of these reasons it is well to avoid the true story. Your development should come from within. If you would be an author learn to do your own work and not trust to your friends. It is safer and better. Accept plot suggestion, if you will, but use it as material to be worked in combination with other ideas and not as a complete suggestion. Write parts of true stories, but make them so different that even tlie donors will not recognize them. 9. This is even more true of stories in which you yourself are con- cerned. To repeat an illustration already used, your own sore thumb is of greater interest to you than another man's broken leg. It in- terests you because you took a prominent part in the happening. It may not interest those who do not know you and who are paying out their money to be entertained. It is to be doubted if such a story would ever get that far, but if it did it would not be as interesting as a story purely imaginative and not hampered by recollections. Some very new authors even go so far as openly to make themselves the hero of the affair and will write "then I'" did this or "together we strolled across the lawn." This is positively fatal. No one cares what you did. What did the hero do? If you will analyze you will see that the fact that you are the creator of an idea makes it appear better to you than the idea of others. If you are also the hero, real or imaginative, then you are doubly handicapped. You cannot write about yourself as interestingly as you can of others or of imag- inary people. It is not possible. You cannot write of anything that lies too close to yourself and your interests, as well as another can. Be that other in writing your stories. Be a biographer and not an autobiographer and you are more apt to be interesting. (l.VII:3 XII:8) (4.XXTII:12^ (7.XII :3^ (9.XI :8 XXIII :37).