conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled Come Along with Me about Lottery, Beautiful, Stranger with the genre: Literature & Fiction, United States.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: If you were thrilled by the author's "The Lottery" but aren't familiar with her other stories, don't miss the chance to pick up this important collection edited by the author's husband. In addition to "The Lottery," it includes classics like "The Beautiful Stranger" (body snatcher theme with a twist), "The Summer People" (a tale of sinister villagers), "A Visit" (a lyrical ghost story), "The Rock" (where death is a short, shy gentleman), and "The Bus" (the author's most overtly ghoulish and frightening story of all). The unfinished novel Come Along with Me is mesmerizing, and the author's "Biography of a Story" is an utterly hilarious account of readers' reactions when "The Lottery" was first published in the New Yorker in 1948. As the New York Times said, "Everything this author... has in it the dignity and plausibility of myth... the author knew better than any writer since Hawthorne the value of haunted things."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: If you were thrilled by the author's "The Lottery" but aren't familiar with her other stories, don't miss the chance to pick up this important collection edited by the author's husband. In addition to "The Lottery," it includes classics like "The Beautiful Stranger" (body snatcher theme with a twist), "The Summer People" (a tale of sinister villagers), "A Visit" (a lyrical ghost story), "The Rock" (where death is a short, shy gentleman), and "The Bus" (the author's most overtly ghoulish and frightening story of all). The unfinished novel Come Along with Me is mesmerizing, and the author's "Biography of a Story" is an utterly hilarious account of readers' reactions when "The Lottery" was first published in the New Yorker in 1948. As the New York Times said, "Everything this author... has in it the dignity and plausibility of myth... the author knew better than any writer since Hawthorne the value of haunted things.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Come Along with Me
  In part due to "The Lottery," Jackson was and is sometimes referred to as a horror writer. The Shirley Jackson Awards, founded in 2007, honor "outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic" published the preceding year. Stephen King lists Jackson as a major influence on his own work, although their approaches to the supernatural are very different; where King writes epics, Jackson carved exquisite cameos. Jackson, for her part, clearly believed that fear should sneak up on a reader from behind and manifest itself as quietly as a discreet tap on the shoulder. The hauntings in her fiction aren't often recognizable as such until the end, and only after you think about it a bit. In this, she's the link between Henry James, who pioneered the same type of highly psychologized ghost story, and contemporary writers as diverse and unclassifiable as Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem, and Neil Gaiman. It is her ability to link the homely and the uncanny, the cozy and merciless, that has made her literary vision unforgettable.
  Then there are the houses: Jackson's women are always arriving at a big house, or trying to get out of one. Angela Motorman may have jettisoned the place she lived with Hughie, but in no time she's ensconced a new establishment, the boardinghouse presided over by the simultaneously hospitable and mercenary Mrs. Faun. Like Louisa in "Louisa, Please Come Home," Angela seems more comfortable with the transactional relationship between landlady and tenant than she is with family ties—those, in Jackson's fiction, always seem to be secured with razor wire.
  I always believe in eating when I can. I had plenty of money and no name when I got off the train and even though I had had lunch in the dining car I liked the idea of stopping off for coffee and a doughnut while I decided exactly which way I intended to go, or which way I was intended to go. I do not believe in turning one way or another without consideration, but then neither do I believe that anything is positively necessary at any given time. I got off the train with plenty of money; I needed a name and a place to go; enjoyment and excitement and a fine high gleefulness I knew I could provide on my own.
  A woman said to me in the train station, "My sister might want to rent a room to a nice lady; she's got this little crippled kid."
  I am not a callous person and no one Hughie ever knew could possibly call me practical, but I had waited long enough. I knew I could sell the house. The furniture went to everyone, and I did think that was funny. They came up to me at the auction, people I had known for years, people who had come to the funeral, people who had sat on the chairs and eaten at the dining-room table and sometimes passed out on the beds, if the truth were known, and they said things like "I bought your little maple desk and anytime you want it back it's waiting for you," and "Listen, we picked up the silver service, but it's nothing personal," and "You know the piano will find a happy home with us," and "We are grieving with you today"—no, that one they said at the funeral. In any case, all the people I had known for years came to the auction and the ones who had the nerve came up and spoke to me, sometimes embarrassed because here they were peeking at the undersprings of my sofa, and sometimes just plain brazen because they had gotten something of mine they wanted. I heard one woman—no names, of course; no one has a name yet—saying to another woman that the dining-room breakfront had always been wasted on me, which was true; I only kept it at all because I was afraid my dead grandmother would come around asking. Actually, almost all of it was wasted on me. It was Hughie's idea. "You come of such a nice family," he used to say to me, "your people were all such cultivated educated people; try to remember."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: After dinner they played charades, and even Mrs. Rhodes did Achilles with Mr. Rhodes, holding his heel and both of them laughing and glancing at Carla and Margaret and the captain. Carla's brother leaned on the back of Margaret's chair and once she looked up at him and said, "No one ever calls you by name. Do you actually have a name?"
  The next morning they walked on the lawn, Carla with the captain and Margaret with Paul. They stood by the lake, and Margaret looked at the pure reflection of the house and said, "It almost seems as though we could open a door and go in."
  They played croquet, and Paul hit Margaret's ball toward a wicket, and the captain accused her of cheating prettily. And they played word games in the evening, and Margaret and Paul won, and everyone said Margaret was so clever. And they walked endlessly on the lawns before the house, and looked into the still lake, and watched the reflection of the house in the water, and Margaret chose a room in the reflected house for her own, and Paul said she should have it.
  Margaret started across the lawn with him, and Carla called to her, "Where are you off to now, Margaret?"
  The small thread of days and sunlight, then, that bound Margaret to the house, was woven here as she watched. And Carla, lifting her head to look over, might say, "Margaret, do come and look, here. Mother is always at her work, but my brother is rarely home."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Rhodes did Achilles with Mr. Rhodes, holding his heel and both of them laughing and glancing at Carla and Margaret and the captain. Carla's brother leaned on the back of Margaret's chair and once she looked up at him and said, "No one ever calls you by name. Do you actually have a name?"
  The next morning they walked on the lawn, Carla with the captain and Margaret with Paul. They stood by the lake, and Margaret looked at the pure reflection of the house and said, "It almost seems as though we could open a door and go in."
  They played croquet, and Paul hit Margaret's ball toward a wicket, and the captain accused her of cheating prettily. And they played word games in the evening, and Margaret and Paul won, and everyone said Margaret was so clever. And they walked endlessly on the lawns before the house, and looked into the still lake, and watched the reflection of the house in the water, and Margaret chose a room in the reflected house for her own, and Paul said she should have it.
  Margaret started across the lawn with him, and Carla called to her, "Where are you off to now, Margaret?"
  The small thread of days and sunlight, then, that bound Margaret to the house, was woven here as she watched. And Carla, lifting her head to look over, might say, "Margaret, do come and look, here. Mother is always at her work, but my brother is rarely home."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Your coloring words, particularly adjectives and adverbs, must be used where they will do the most good. Not every action needs a qualifying adverb, not every object needs a qualifying adjective. Your reader probably has a perfectly serviceable mental picture of a lion; when a lion comes into your story you need not burden him with adjectives unless it is necessary, for instance, to point out that he is a green lion, something of which your reader might not have a very vivid mental picture.
  Use all the tools at your disposal. The language is infinitely flexible, and your use of it should be completely deliberate. Never forget the grotesque effect of the absolutely wrong words: "He swept her into his arms; 'I will always love you,' he giggled." "Top the finished cake with a smear of whipped cream." "'I am not afraid of anything in the world,' he said thinly."
  Remember, too, that words on a page have several dimensions: they are seen, they are partially heard, particularly if they seem to suggest a sound, and they have a kind of tangible quality—think of the depressing sight of a whole great paragraph ahead of you, solidly black with huge heavy-sounding words. Moreover, some words seem soft and some hard, some liquid, some warm, some cold; your reader will respond to "soft laughter" but not to "striped laughter"; he will respond more readily to "soft laughter" than to "sweet laughter," because he can hear it more easily. There are also words like "itchy" and "greasy" and "smelly" and "scratchy" that evoke an almost physical response in the reader; use these only if you need them. Exclamation points, italics, capitals, and, most particularly, dialect, should all be used with extreme caution. Consider them as like garlic, and use them accordingly.
  Do not try to puzzle your reader unnecessarily; a puzzled reader is an antagonistic reader. Do not expect him to guess why a character does something or how it happens that some remark is made; it may be that you want him to stop and wonder for a minute; if so, make it perfectly clear that everything is going to be all right later on. If you want the reader to be troubled by a nagging question, and go through a part of your story with a kind of expectancy, let one of your characters do something outrageous—turn, perhaps, and throw an apple core through an open window. But then be sure that before your story is finished you explain in some manner that inside the open window lives the character's great-uncle, who keeps a monkey who devours apple cores and catches them on the fly as they come through the window. The reader brings with him a great body of knowledge which you may assume, but he must rely on you for all information necessary to the understanding of this story which, after all, you have written.
  And if you want your reader to go faster and faster make your writing go faster and faster. "The room was dark. The windows were shaded, the furniture invisible. The door was shut and yet from somewhere, some small hidden precious casket of light buried deep in the darkness of the room, a spark came, moving in mad colored circles up and down, around and in and out and over and under and lighting everything it saw." (Those adjectives are unspeakable in every sense of the word, and wholly unnecessary; this is an example, not a model.) If you want your reader to go slower and slower make your writing go slower and slower: "After a wild rush of water and noise the fountain was at last turned off and the water was gone. Only one drop hung poised and then fell, and fell with a small musical touch. Now, it rang. Now."