"The Secrets of Mental Supremacy.."

Smell again in imagination the odor of the earth, the trees, the wild flowers, the fresh cut hay in the near-by meadow. Go through it all minutely, resolutely. Don't omit any detail.

Then begin on the creative phase of the imagination. Paint a picture in your mind, first, say a landscapea view of a high mountain on the right, a great tree on the left, between the two a verdure clad hillside, beyond a lake, above a blue sky, low upon which hangs the setting sun. Add all the details which I have not space to enumerate.

Compose many pictures like this, taking time to put in every little bush and rock and cloud. Unless you make the picture vivid and complete, you will miss the real benefit of the exercise. Every picture ever painted has been thus elaborated in the imagination of the artist before it was objectified upon the canvas.

Next add action to your picture.

Upon the lake is a little sailboat containing a merry party. How many? How do they look? How are they dressed, etc.? Suddenly a squall comes up. The boat capsizes. Another boat puts out from shore and rescues the unfortunates. And so on.

One of the most interesting and valuable of exercises for the imagination is this: You are reading a book of fiction, and have reached, let us say, the end of the third chapter. Now sit down and write out of your own imagination a sequel to the story from the point at which you stopped reading. Who is going to marry whom? How is the villain to be punished? What is to become of the adventuress and so on. Write another sequel at the end of the fourth chapter. At the end of the fifth, the eighth, the tenth chapters do the same thing.

Now in this exercise, while the incidental literary practice is most valuable, the main point is to train the imagination. You should therefore think, imagine more than you write, setting out the rest of the story as you imagine it in brief simple terms and yet extended enough to be clear. Take much time. Better to work out one good, ingenious sequel in five hours than to spend twice that amount of time in doing hurried, blurred and incomplete work.

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