Samuel Clemens was a great storyteller. He even created a character named Mark Twain to play in his life. Mark Twain knew a lot about how lives change when stories change…
Tom Sawyer had to paint a fence with white paint, a task he hated. The automatic story at the time was “Poor Tom, he has to paint a fence!” was in the form. huh. But Tom (and Mark Twain) knew how to change the meaning of things. So Tom started telling his friends how fun it was to paint and how much better it was than fishing or anything else. The story got so good that his friends began begging Tom to finish painting the fence.
Tom withdrew from this adventure with a newly found wisdom about life. He decided that this world wasn’t such a pointless place after all. Unknowingly, he discovered a great law of human action—to make a man or a child envy something, it is only necessary to make that thing hard to get. At this point, Mark Twain added his own observation. “Work consists of everything a body has to do, and play is everything that a body does not have to do.”
The story of Tom Sawyer and the painting of the fence within the story has lasted for years and has survived to the present day. Even today you can look in your local paper and see events where some people are throwing a “Tom Sawyer Party” to help people paint something.
Steve Chandler, “The Story of You”
