Short story

“ I have defined the short-story, and this statement may serve to crystallize the foregoing. “A short-story is a brief, imaginative narrative, unfolding a single predominating incident and a single chief character; it contains a plot, the details of which are so compressed, and the whole treatment so organized, as to produce a single impression.” ”

“ The short-story is, of course, the recountal of some struggle or complication so artistically told as to leave upon the reader one dominant impression. Perhaps the ‘artistic’ is redundant, for can a story leave such an impression unless it be artistically told? Even geniuses must master their vehicle of expression or remain dumb. To win the sought for reaction to a short-story, painting, play or oratorio, one learns either in the hard, blind school of ‘rejection slips’ or by the intelligent method of skilled critic and master, but learn one must. ”

“ The psychological study is the most difficult because the most penetrating of all short-story forms, and in consequence the most rare in its perfect presentation. To show the processes of reasoning, the interplay of motive, the power of feeling acting upon feeling, and the intricate combinations of these, calls for the most clear-sighted understanding of man, and the utmost skill in literary art, lest the story be lost in a fog of tiresome analysis and discussion. ”

“ THE STORY PROPER
The ideal short story is the relation of an isolated incident. In a novel you may introduce your heroine in one chapter and your hero in another, and then shift scenes and seasons with bewildering rapidity to the very end. There is a runaway, perhaps, in which the man saves the girl's life. There is a forest in which the lovers get lost together. There is an automobile wreck that drives them to a farmer's house for supper. But each of these leads up to the climax the inevitable marriage of the two. ”

“ It seems to me that there is a tendency, in discussing the art of short story writing, to confuse manner and matter, and to conclude that the story with a big, sombre theme must necessarily be superior, as a work of art, to the story which is lighter in subject and treatment. ”

“ Since the short story is a story, at least, it may be divided and classified, like all stories, into stories of character, stories of complication of incident, and stories of atmosphere, that is, into stories which emphasize or stress the element of personality, the element of incident, or the element of setting. ”

“ They compose the story, they represent the human race, and if they fail us we are in sad straits. They must be individual; they must stand out sharply from the page, clear and attractive, and leave no doubt of their personalities. More than any other form of fiction, the short story depends upon its hero and heroine, who have "star parts" and monopolize the stage of action. ”

“ Our modern attraction to short stories is not an accident of form; it is the sign of a real sense of fleetingness and fragility; it means that existence is only an impression, and, perhaps, only an illusion. A short story of to-day has the air of a dream; it has the irrevocable beauty of a falsehood; we get a glimpse of grey streets of London or red plains of India, as in an opium vision; we see people,—arresting people, with fiery and appealing faces. ”

“ "Ah, surely the short story should end with tragedy, for only sorrow swoops upon you with a sudden blow. But happiness is built up from long years of small delightful things. You can't put them into a short story." ”

“ By its nature it can be finished before the impulse is over. There is time to weigh every word of it, attend to the rhythm of every sentence, adjust the delicate balance of the various parts, and there is the thrilling consciousness of unity. Instead of the climax being months off, there it is at hand to be reached in a few glad hours. So, far from being an unconsidered trifle, the short story is a work of intense consideration, and as far as our poor words can matter, of profound importance. ”

“ The tale differs from the short-story in that it is merely a succession of incidents without any real sense of climax other, for example, than might be given by the close of a man’s life, the ending of a journey, or the closing of the day. ”

“ But, just like the short story, a human interest story must begin in an attractive way. In the study of short story writing almost half of the study is devoted to learning how to begin the story, on the theory that the reader is some sort of a fugitive animal that must be lassoed by an attractive and interesting beginning. ”

“ Perhaps the most common error of the young writer is the unconscious padding by the use of remarks, comments, stray bits of information, or morals entirely foreign to the plot. The proper way to tell a short story is to draw a line from the striking introductory sentence straight to the climax, and never, by a hair's breadth, deviate from that line. ”

“ Why not have the girl watching her faithless lover, ten miles away, through a telescope? Why not have the heroine dressed in brightest crimson and living in a convent? Why not have the girl wondering if the man she just pushed in the cistern is dead? All these are far-fetched and extravagant, I admit, but they illustrate the point I would make: that you must begin your story in a manner novel and original. ”

“ Those who study these selections with a view to writing the short-story will do well to bear in mind that fiction of gloomy tone must be very well written and on themes of unusual power to atone for their depressing qualities. ”

“ Technically, the plot is the underlying plan “of which no part can be removed without ruin to the whole”; it is the development of the struggle or conflict which every “short-story” possesses in common with the drama.
What in “The Excursion” is the struggle? What part does the dialogue between the two sisters play in the revelation of the struggle? If the struggle were made dominant, what lamentable result would follow for the “situation” value of the whole narrative? Is there a hint near the conclusion that the struggle may have an outcome? ”

“ As a short-story of situation, this narrative achieves that concentration found in Barrie’s “Half Hour” Plays. It may be studied as all the preceding examples have been studied, but attention is called to
Skill in Presentation.
1. In the suspense, (a) the reader senses a tragedy, but has not all the details until the end of the first seven or eight hundred words, (b) the reader waits the news of Jim’s death. ”

“ Of such is the American short story of to-day—the germ of American literature to come.—Bret Harte, The Rise of the Short Story, Cornhill Magazine, July, 1899.
He expounds an important half-truth which has been too much neglected: that as being is greater than seeming, appearances are often deceitful; under the most repellent exterior a soul of goodness may exist. ”

“ SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS FOR STUDY
1. Briefly write out the plot of the story.
2. Which incidents are essential to the story (plot incidents) ?
3. Which incidents could be altered without vitally changing the story (developing incidents) ? For a discussion of these types of incidents see the present author’s Writing the Short-Story, pp. 174-181.
4. Show how one such change could be made.
5. Does the external (visible or bodily) action stand out as clearly as the internal (invisible or soul) action? ”

“ But if we can neither find nor invent a new story we can at least ring the changes on the old ones, and in this lies our hope to-day. Each one of these old plots is capable of an infinite variety of phases, and what we are constantly hailing as an original story is merely one of our old friends looked at from a different point of view. How many good, fresh stories have you read that were based on the ancient elemental plot of two men in love with one woman, or on that equally hoary one of fond lovers severed by disapproving parents? ”

“ Further, as the lives of all men and women are more or less conditioned by their surroundings and circumstance, any story will require more or less description. Incidents are of but little moment, character showing may have but slight interest, description is purposeless, unless the happenings of the story develop in the characters feelings toward which we assume some attitude of sympathy or opposition. Including this fourth element of the story, we shall then have [2] incident, description, character, mood, as the first elements of the narrative form. ”

“ Studying The Short-Story STORIES OF ACTION AND ADVENTURE
Few words are needed to set forth the meaning of this caption, for the designation is sufficiently explicit. One point, however, it will be well to emphasize: In fiction all action worthy of the name is the outward manifestation of an inward condition. There is a sense, therefore, in which all stories that are not mere pictures of internal states are stories of action; just as it may be said that all stories are stories of thought, feeling, and resolve. ”

“ Though ordinary dramatic short stories do not have a moral which shows itself, still under the surface in every story is something which corresponds to the moral, and which we shall call the soul of the story. ”

“ The dramatic trend of the short story is responsi [107] ble for its tendency to advance action by speech. Good short stories have been written and will be written which contain little or no dialogue; they succeed through vividness of plot, skill in character depiction, ingenuity of construction, or some such quality; but they would be more interesting and more natural if they held more conversation. ”

“ The first requisite of a short story is that the writer have a story to tell—that is, a plot. He may present pretty scenes and word pictures if he will, but he must vivify and humanize them by the introduction of certain characters, patterned after the people of real life; and these characters must move and act and live. The presentation of "still life" pure and simple is not in the province of the short story. ”

“ The artistry of the author has worked consciously or unconsciously to create a finished piece of work. Told as a single episode in the experience of a traveler, it has the magnitude of the short-story. ”

“ One story may begin with soul action, then proceed to show us bodily action with great vividness, and end by taking us back into the man’s inner life. Another may progress on contrary lines; and so on, in wide variety. The final test as to what is the predominating type lies in the appeal to the interest of the reader: is it based chiefly on what the characters are or on what they do? Is it the why, or the how, the motive or the happening, that is most absorbing? The best stories, even the best action and adventure yarns, are likely to show a fair proportion of both. ”

“ Comment. This, then, is a narrative the mystery of which must be explained by each reader to his own satisfaction. If the reader “believes” in the supernatural, he will take the whole thing, ghostly scene and all, as somehow occurring. If he does not “believe,” he will then accept the scene as the obsession of a sick man—with a few details left in mystery. I should class it as a story of the supernatural, wherein the appearance is visible to the sick or the clairvoyant mind. ”

“ With the form of the short-story fairly worked out, the next development is to be noted in the tone and subject matter. Local color became particularly evident, humor became constantly more prominent, and then the analysis of the working of the human mind, psychologic analysis, held the interest of some foremost writers. ”

“ Common again to both short and long stories, evidently, is a form which, in skilled hands, and used only for those subjects to which it is most appropriate, may give strange reality to the matter presented—the form, I mean, in which the story is told in the first person, as the experience and the sentiment of one character who runs throughout the whole. ”

“ It should be added for the benefit of the student who resents, or finds hampering, an insistence on short-story type, that Mr. Donn Byrne believes there isn’t any such thing as the short-story. “A story is a story whether it’s a novel of 100,000 words or a short magazine affair. There is no difference in technic between a 4,000 word writing, like ‘The Wake’ and any of my big 15,000 worders—‘Sargasso Sea,’ for example, or ‘A Treasure upon Earth.’ Get a worth while idea and make your narrative interesting. That’s the only formula for any piece of fiction. ”

“ If these moods are not made clear to us or we cannot see that they are natural, definite reactions from previous happenings in accord with character, we do not have a sense of organic unity in the narrative. We become confused in trying to establish the dependence of incident and feeling upon something preceding, and our interest flags. Everything that happens in a well-told story gives us feelings which we look to find in those whom the happenings affect in the tale, feelings which should call forth some sort of responsive action for our satisfaction. ”

“ Elements of the Story.—This little volume is meant to be a discussion of but one of the various forms that literature takes, and it will be first in order to see what are the elements that go to the making of a narrative having literary quality. A story may be true or false, but we shall here be concerned primarily with fiction, and with fiction of no great length. In writing of this sort the first essential is that something shall happen; a story without a succession of incidents of some kind is inconceivable. We may then settle upon incident as a first element. ”

“ You may get your suggestion as you will, in the night-time staring hard into the darkness, from a stray paragraph in a paper, from a scene on the street, or in any other way; but you must dress it up, and smooth off the corners that are impossible, and the edges that are not to be told, and build up the hollow places, all with your imagination. ”