Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue, Keep probability–some say–in view.
But my advice to story-tellers is: Weigh out no gross of probabilities,
Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of Known instances of virtue, crime or love.
To forge a picture that will pass for true, Do conscientiously what liars do—
Born liars, not the lesser sort that raid The mouths of others for their stock-in-trade:
Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps That may shake down into a world perhaps;
People this world, by chance created so, With random persons whom you do not know—
The teashop sort, or travelers in a train Seen once, guessed idly at, not seen again;
Let the erratic course they steer surprise Their own and your own and your reader’s eyes;
Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair) Motive and end and moral in the air;
Nice contradiction between fact and fact Will make the whole read human and exact—Robert Graves
