Preface No one is able to produce a great work without experience, nor fill an influential position immediately. In the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish to be one day and who we are at present, conflicts and setbacks are hardly avoidable. The tempting belief that achievement must come easily or not at all needs to be corrected because it is ruinous in its effect. It can lead to premature withdrawal from challenging, but worthwhile and

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... able objectives. Eventually, almost everything valuable legitimately demands endurance and superior effort. Knowing that this idea is anything but banal, Friedrich Nietzsche made a couple of helpful recommendations for writing novels: "The recipe for becoming a good novelist...is easy to give, but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says "I do not have enough talent." One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctiveness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes every day until one has learnt how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one's eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present, one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost for instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise for some ten years; what is then created in the workshop...will be fit to go out into the world." 1