Seven Plots from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Note-Books

1. An article to be made of telling the stories of the tiles of an old-fashioned chimney-piece to a child.
2. A person conscious that he was soon to die, the humor in which he would pay his last visit to familiar persons and things.
3. A description of the various classes of hotels and taverns, and the prominent personages in each. There should be some story connected with it,–as of a person commencing with boarding at a great hotel, and gradually, as his means grew less, descending in life, till he got below ground into a cellar.
4. A person to be in the possession of something as perfect as mortal man has a right to demand; he tries to make it better, and ruins it entirely.
5. A person to spend all his life and splendid talents in trying to achieve something naturally impossible,–as to make a conquest over Nature.
6. Meditations about the main gas-pipe of a great city,–if the supply were to be stopped, what would happen? How many different scenes it sheds light on? It might be made emblematical of something.
7. A fairy tale about chasing Echo to her hiding-place. Echo is the voice of a reflection in a mirror.

from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Note-Books.