12.Practice.Tests.for.the.SAT_2015-2016_1128p

Section 81
Practice Test Eight
713
Directions: The passages below are followed by questions based on their content; questions follog a pair of relted
passages may also be based on the relationship between the paired pasages. Answer the qụestJons on the basis of
what is stated or implied in the passages and in any introductory matenal that may be provided.
Questions 7-19 are based on the following passages.
Passage I
Writing is among the most mysterious of
human activities. Every writer can testify that the
Muses* once invoked by the poets are a reality.
Line Unless he is writing mechanically, the writer does
(5) not experience his writing as an act of creation;
he experiences it as an act of discovery: it comes
or happens or is given to him, and when it does,
he recognizes it at once for his own. It is not
within the power of his will to summon it forth if
(10) it refuses to come; nor is he capable of resisting it
for long when it starts to demand release.
The key to unlocking the floodgates, I believe, is
a key in that it is musical: it is finding the tone of
voice, the only tone of voice, in which the particu-
(15) lar piece of writing will permit itself to be written.
Once this key is found, the author will enter a
state of bliss such as exists nowhere else on Earth.
He will sit at his typewriter and watch, in delight
and amazement, as sentences mysteriously shape
(20) themselves into rhythms he knows to be right,
and paragraphs begin to shape themselves into
an organically coherent pattern that miraculously
corresponds only better, much better to the dim
vision which had driven him to his desk in the
(25) first place.
Finished, he will be exhausted and exhilarated,
all anxieties gone; he will feel that everything in
the world makes sense after all, that there is an
order to things, and that he himself is part of that
(30) order. At root, it is the writer's search for order
that gives successful writing the quality of organic
imagination, and which exists not only in poems
and stories, but in any form of writing, however
humble or trivial.
(35) Writing always involves someone sitting with
an implement and an inchoate idea before a blank
sheet of paper and in terror at the answering
blankness of his or her own mind. Consequently,
if one is speaking of the experience of being a
( 40) writer, the only meaningful distinction is between
writers who are willing to accept the risks of
suffering entailed by the effort to tap their own
inner potentialities of organic coherence, and
those who are unable or unwilling to take such
(45) risks.
* Muses: supernatural powers believed by the
ancient poets to be the source of artistic inspiration
Passage 2
Personally, I find writing a very difficult process
indeed, a task requiring enormous discipline.
The only way I can ensure a consistent output
is to approach writing as if it were a job like any
(50) other and turn in a forty-hour week. Essentially,
you could say that I've chosen to adopt a professional
attitude to writing, rather than an artistic
one. There are a great many young writers around
who believe the popular myth that great novels
(55) are written by strokes of divine inspiration, rather
than hard work. Unfortunately, experience has
taught me not only that this isn't necessarily true,
but also that there are a host of dangerous misconceptions
that go along with it. The problem is
(60) that in our society today, whether we're thinking
about the creative process, the role of the artist,
or indeed the nature of art itself, we're still laboring
under fanciful notions inherited from the
Romantic movement in the nineteenth century.
( 65) Since Coleridge wrote on the power of the imagination,
there has been this belief that the creation
of art is unlike every other form of human productivity.
Since great art is by definition extraordinary,
people assume that it must be produced
(70) by a solitary genius, a Wordsworth, in a state of
mystical insight into the nature of things.
The reality, at least as far as writing novels is
concerned, is that the creative process is often a
lot more like breaking rocks to look for gold: hard
(75) labor with no guaranteed reward. I wouldn't deny
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