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Now look here, my dear child, I’m going to talk to you quite plainly. You’re not a heaven-sent genius. I don’t think you’ll ever write a masterpiece. But what you certainly are is a born storyteller. You think of spiritualism and mediums and Welsh Revivalist meetings in a kind of romantic haze. You may be all wrong about them, but you see them as ninety-nine per cent of the reading public (who know nothing about them either) see them. That ninety-nine per cent won’t enjoy reading about carefully acquired facts—they want fiction—which is plausible untruth. It must be plausible, mind. You’ll find it will be the same with your Cornish fisher folk that you told me about. Write your book about them, but, for heaven’s sake, don’t go near Cornwall or fishermen until you’ve finished. Then you’ll write the kind of grimly realistic stuff that people expect when they read about Cornish fisher folk. You don’t want to go there and find out that Cornish fishermen are not a breed by themselves but something quite closely allied to a Walworth plumber. You’ll never write well about anything you really know about, because you’ve got an honest mind. You can be imaginatively dishonest but not practically dishonest. You can’t write lies about something you know, but you’ll be able to tell the most splendid lies about something you don’t know. You’ve got to write about the fabulous (fabulous to you) and not about the real. Now, go away and do it.
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