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Even when you begin with an abstract idea, you must follow it to a character, a setting, a situation, and an emotion before there can be a story.
Creating Short Fiction
Damon Knight
Ilya Mechnikov, the wild Russian ‘demon of science’ whom Pasteur had brought to his institute in Paris, even blamed them for old age. Mechnikov had won a Nobel Prize in 1908 for his discovery of phagocytosis – the mechanism by which immune cells in human blood swallow up harmful bacteria and destroy them. But he also suspected bacteria in the human intestine of releasing toxins that harden the arteries, contributing to the body’s ageing – a belief that brought a certain amount of ridicule down on his head. He became obsessed with villages in Bulgaria where people reputedly lived to be more than a hundred, attributing their longevity to the sour milk they drank – and in particular, to the ‘good’ bacteria that soured it. In the last years of his life, he drank huge quantities of sour milk, before dying in 1916 at the age of seventy-one.1
Alexander von Humboldt, put it, the professor is not there for the student and the student not for the professor. Both are only there for the truth.
How to Take Smart Notes
Sönke Ahrens
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