Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time. Less frequent practitioners — the job applicant; the business executive with an annual report to get out: the high school senior with a Faulkner assignment | For more material and information please visit Tai Lieu Du Hoc at concrete. The greatest writers Homer Dante Shakespeare are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures. Jean Stafford to cite a more modern author demonstrates in her short story In the Zoo how prose is made vivid by the use of words that evoke images and sensations . Daisy and I in time found asylum in a small menagerie down by the railroad tracks. It belonged to a gentle alcoholic ne er-do- well who did nothing all day long but drink bathtub gin in rickeys and play solitaire and smile to himself and talk to his animals. He had a little stunted red vixen and a deodorized skunk a parrot from Tahiti that spoke Parisian French a woebegone coyote and two capuchin monkeys so serious and humanized so small and sad and sweet and so religious-looking with their tonsured heads that it was impossible not to think their gibberish was really an ordered language with a grammar that someday some philologist would understand. Gran knew about our visits to Mr. Murphy and she did not object for it gave her keen pleasure to excoriate him when we came home. His vice was not a matter of guesswork it was an established fact that he was half-seas over from dawn till midnight. With the black Irish said Gran the taste for drink is taken in with the mother s milk and is never mastered. Oh I know all about those promises to join the temperance movement and not to touch another drop. The way to Hell is paved with good intentions. Excerpt from In the Zoo from Bad Characters by Jean Stafford. Copyright 1964 by Jean Stafford. Copyright renewed 1992 by Nora Cosgrove. Reprinted by permission of Farrar Straus Giroux Inc. Also copyright 1969 by Jean Stafford reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd. If the experiences of Walter Mitty of Molly Bloom of Rabbit Angstrom have seemed for the moment real to countless readers if in reading .
