The Technique of Fiction Writing
by Robert Saunders Dowst · English · Gutenberg #32092 · 416,330 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Technique of Fiction Writing
Author: Robert Saunders Dowst
Release date: April 22, 2010 [eBook #32092]
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Language: English
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THE TECHNIQUE OF FICTION WRITING
"The one excuse and breath of art--charm."--_Stevenson._
The Technique of
Fiction Writing
By
ROBERT SAUNDERS DOWST
JAMES KNAPP REEVE
PUBLISHER
FRANKLIN, OHIO
Copyright, 1918
The Editor Company
Copyright, 1921
James Knapp Reeve
_TO
C. K. R. D._
PREFACE
Many books have been written on fiction technique, and the chief excuse
for the present addition to the number is the complexity of the subject.
Its range is so wide, it calls for so many and so different capacities
in one attempting to discuss it, that a new work has more than a chance
to meet at least two or three deficiencies in all other treatments.
I believe that the chief deficiency in most works on fiction technique
is that the author unconsciously has slipped from the viewpoint of a
writer of a story to that of a reader. Now a reader without intention to
try his own hand at the game is not playing fair in studying technique,
and a book on technique has no business to entertain him. Accordingly, I
have striven to keep to the viewpoint of one who seeks to learn how to
write stories, and have made no attempt to analyze the work of masters
of fiction for the sake of the analysis alone. Such analysis is
interesting to make, and also interesting to read, but it is not
directly profitable to the writer. It is indirectly profitable, of
course, but it will give very little direct aid to one who has a
definite story idea and wishes to be told the things he must consider in
developing it and writing the story, or to one who wishes to be told
roughly how he should go about the business of finding real stories. In
fact, I believe that discussion and analysis of perfect work has a
tendency to chill the enthusiasm of the beginning writer. What he
chiefly needs is to be told the considerations he must hold in mind in
conceiving, developing, and writing a story. The rest lies with his own
abilities and capacities to work intelligently and to take pains.
Therefore the first part of this book takes up the problems of technique
in the order in which they present themselves to the writer. Beginning
with matters of conception, the discussion passes to matters of
construction and development, and finally to matters of execution, or
rather the writing of a story considered as a bare chain of events. Then
the matters of description, dialogue, the portrayal of character, and
the precipitation of atmosphere are discussed, and lastly the short
story and novel, as distinct forms, are taken up.
Usually the propositions necessary to be laid down require no
demonstration; they are self-evident. That is why a book on technique
for the writer need not indulge in fine-spun analysis of perfect work.
Where analysis will lend point to the abstract statement, I have made
it, but my constant aim has been not to depart from the viewpoint that
the reader has in mind some idea of his own and wishes to be told how to
handle it. Unquestionably literary dissection is useful in that it gives
the beginning writer familiarity with the terminology and processes of
the art, but the main object of a book on technique is to place the
results of analysis, directly stated, in logical sequence.
I will note one other matter. A great part of the technique of fiction
writing concerns matters of conception and development which are
preliminary to actual writing. In fact they are essentially and
peculiarly the technique of fiction. The story that is not a justly
ordered whole, with each part in its due place and no part omitted,
cannot have full effect, however great the strictly executive powers of
its writer. Verbally faultless telling will not save a story which is
not logically built up and developed, either before writing or in the
process of writing. The art of telling a story is largely the art of
justly manipulating its elements. The art of telling it with verbal
perfection is not so much a part of the strict technique of fiction
writing as it is of the general technique of writing. Therefore I have
made little attempt to discuss the general art of using words. For
assistance in studying the art of expression the reader should turn to a
work on rhetoric. The subject is too inclusive for adequate treatment
here. Moreover, it is debatable whether the art of verbal expression can
be studied objectively with any great profit. But the art of putting a
story together can be studied objectively with profit, and its
principles are subject to direct statement.
I desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. William R. Kane, of The
Editor Magazine, for much helpful criticism and many valuable
suggestions.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 13
I. The Writer Himself 22
II. The Choice of Matter 30
III. Conceptive Technique: Story Types 37
IV. Conceptive Technique: Plot and Situation 48
V. Constructive Technique of Narration 64
VI. Executive Technique of Narration 80
VII. Executive Technique of Narration
(Continued) 95
VIII. Description 107
IX. Speech 121
X. Portrayal of Character 136
XI. Atmosphere 152
XII. The Short Story 165
XIII. The Novel 182
XIV. Conclusion 197
Appendix 209
INTRODUCTION
"A work of art is first cloudily conceived in the mind; during the
period of gestation it stands more clearly forward from these swaddling
mists, puts on expressive lineaments, and becomes at length that most
faultless, but also, alas! that incommunicable product of the human
mind, a perfected design. On the approach to execution all is changed.
The artist must now step down, don his working clothes, and become the
artisan. He now resolutely commits his airy conception, his delicate
Ariel, to the touch of matter; he must decide, almost in a breath, the
scale, the style, the spirit, and the particularity of execution of his
whole design."
Thus Stevenson, in "A Note on Realism," takes it for granted that the
artist in pigments, stone, or words cannot reproduce until he first has
produced, cannot show a perfect work unless he paints, builds, or writes
along the lines of a perfected design.
One cannot dabble long at architecture or the graphic arts without
gaining keen realization of the fact that conception in its elaborative
aspects is as much a part and phase of technique as the executive
handling of materials. But the art of literature, and, more narrowly,
the art of fiction, deal with materials other than those employed in the
other arts; words, not colors or marble, nor yet sounds, are the
resource of the story teller to precipitate his conception in enduring
form; and words are at once frank and mysterious things. Their primary
office is to forward the common business of life; each has some meaning
in itself, more or less definite. It results that the writer of a story
who sets out with only the merest glimmering of what he means to do in
mind can produce a superficially plausible work, a work not too
obviously misshapen, a work that means something, at any rate, although
his failure to trace a design to guide his hand almost inevitably will
prohibit his giving the basic conception most effective expression. And,
since almost any sequence of words has some significance, it also
results that the writer of fiction who works at haphazard may fail to
discover that failure in his work as a whole is due to lack of planning
rather than to defective execution. The mere grammatical coherence of a
fictionally slipshod piece of work is a shield between its writer's
inquiring eye and its essential defects.
The art of fiction is the art both of the tale and of the story,
fictions that differ radically. Their most striking difference is stated
in the following pages; here I can only remark broadly that the tale is
episodal, consisting of a fortuitous series of incidents without
essential connection or relation except that they all happened to happen
to the characters, while the story is a whole in that each incident
functions in the development of a plot or dramatic problem. If prevision
and full elaboration of his basic idea are essential to the writer of a
tale, they are doubly essential to the writer of a story, simply because
a story is a whole and the result of careful co-ordination of parts.
Even if the writer of some particular story has not worked along the
lines of a fully elaborated design, the story actually will manifest
co-ordination of parts or else be worthless. A story is more than a
series of incidents; it is a series of incidents significant in relation
to character. Its writer cannot set to work with an eye solely to the
physical spectacle and follow after with his pen; he must prepare his
people as well as the events, a task of cunning calculation. He must
have an eye to many other matters, but this is not the place to state
them. The matter of character is the matter significant here, because
the whole difference between tale and story is made by the presence or
absence of relation between events and personality. And it is certain
that the writer of a story cannot hope to do the best work if he
postpones until the moment of actual writing the task of moulding and
elaborating his basic idea with a view to giving it maximum effect. The
task to express perfectly, in a verbal sense, is difficult enough to
claim the undivided attention of the ablest artist, but undivided
attention cannot be given the matter of verbal expression by a writer
who shapes his substance and picks his words at one and the same time.
Either word or substance must suffer.
Accordingly, to emphasize the necessity that the writer of fiction give
full shape and development to his design before writing, I have stated
the necessity and discussed technique itself under two heads, conceptive
or constructive technique and executive technique. To have carried this
division rigorously through the whole book would have been neither
possible nor profitable, for it would have involved much repetition and
confusion, but the various items of technique are either largely
conceptive and constructive or largely executive, and the best place to
discuss each has not been difficult to determine. It was only necessary
to contemplate the actual process of conceiving, developing, and writing
a story, and to take up in their order the problems that confront a
writer of fiction. The only matter which found no natural place, so
approached, was that of characterization, which is almost equally a
matter of construction and of execution, so that discussion of it has
been broken up to some extent.
This approach to technique is the natural approach, and has been adopted
for that reason. The more naturally and easily any study can be
conducted, the greater the results that will be achieved. But there is a
more immediate reason for taking up the phases of technique in the order
in which they present themselves to a writer of fiction, thereby
emphasizing the existence and importance of the constructive phases of
technique. Briefly, it is that construction is at once easier and more
important to learn than execution. Perhaps a little argument in support
of the statement is called for.
It will not be questioned seriously that it is easier to learn the main
principles of construction than it is to learn or discover how to write
with finish and power. It is entirely possible to state abstractly the
principles of construction, to grasp their reasons and implications from
abstract statement, and to apply them by a mere act of the intelligence
in writing any story. But it is entirely impossible to state abstractly
the principles of writing with finish and power, or to learn to write so
from any mere discussion of the matter. The condition is illustrated by
almost any treatise on rhetoric, where half the text will be made up of
examples transcribed to lend some weight to the obviously--and
necessarily--inadequate discussion. How to write with finish and power
can be learned only by long continued and intelligent practice, if it
can be learned at all. Of course, this is not to say that constant
practice is not necessary to gain any real facility and adequacy in
applying the principles of construction.
The argument of the last paragraph is clinched by the fact that of a
thousand stories, all of which are well constructed and put together,
only a few or perhaps none will be written with any approach to real
literary power, in the verbal sense. Of all the writers of to-day who
can put together a story in workmanlike fashion how many have the power
of the telling word? how many have even a style?
I have yet to substantiate the assertion that construction is more
important for the writer of fiction to learn than execution, but the
task is easy. In the last analysis, the power of a story, that is, its
power to interest, depends upon its matter, the spectacle it presents.
If the whole conception is justly elaborated and properly put together,
it will have very nearly full effect, even though its writer does not
give it perfect verbal expression, provided the verbal precipitation of
the thing is not too shamelessly inadequate. Perfect verbal expression
is necessary to give a properly constructed story maximum effect; it is
not necessary to give it approximate effect. But perfect verbal
expression will not save a story that is misshapen and distorted through
lack of proper construction.
These considerations strongly urge the writer of fiction to master the
principles of constructing a story before he frets about the nuances of
expression, and just as strongly they impose upon a book on technique
the obligation to discuss matters of construction at length and also to
discuss them as such. The book which does not explicitly insist that
certain matters are matters of construction, therefore to be performed
before writing, is very apt to mislead. It is a defect from which too
many books on fiction technique are not free, and one that I have tried
to avoid.
How comprehensive and inclusive are the principles of construction the
first half of this book attempts to show. Here it is enough to state
that they embrace matters so different as the manipulation of possible
incidents in the interest of climax, and the preparation or building up
of the people of a story that its situations may have real dramatic
value for a reader. The writer of fiction who merely writes cannot hope
to provide by any instinct for these and the other matters of
construction, and no power in his words can fortify essential weakness
in his matter. Style, literary power, the right word in the right
place--all will resist the tooth of time, but no one will preserve a
story from the contagion of decay at the heart. Indeed, in the juster
sense, a shapely design is the necessary foundation or basis for perfect
writing, which is no mere varnish.
In this present era of magazine literature the chances are that nine out
of ten actual or prospective writers of fiction who take up a book on
technique for serious study will do so with an eye to the short story.
And since this book is for the practitioner of the art, not for the mere
reader of fiction, I have felt myself under obligation to discuss the
short story and its peculiar technique with some approach to adequacy.
Statement of the way the short story has been approached may serve to
align the reader's mind with the argument.
In the first place, the short story is yet a story, a fiction, so that
the general technique of fiction is applicable to it, with suitable
modifications here and there. In the second place, the short story is a
distinct type of fiction in that it embodies a plot or dramatic problem
and is brief enough to read at one not very prolonged sitting. It is at
once slighter and more pointed or direct than the long story of plot,
the novel or romance. The result is that all its processes, particularly
the process of characterization, must be conducted in a fashion more
swift and summary than in a long story, and the difference is the whole
of the difference in the technique of the two forms.
Unfortunately, a discussion of the peculiar technique of the short story
cannot confine itself to this difference without failing to clear away
the many misconceptions that becloud the subject. A good deal has been
written on the short story, and, since there is really not very much to
say, a good many writers have been led into nonsense. With so much
misconception in the air, I have felt that it would be useful to state a
tenable theory of the short story, and have attempted to do so in the
chapter on the form. The matter will be found there and cannot be
reproduced here, but brief statement of the argument will complete the
foretaste of the book.
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. But the truly
significant division of the short story into types, the division which
it will be most directly profitable for the writer of fiction to
realize, is twofold, not triplicate, and is the division into the
dramatic short story and the short story of atmosphere or unity of
emotional effect on a reader.
These two types are as different as black and white, and the
misconception noted above consists in confusing them. The short story of
atmosphere is Poe's sort of story; he said something definite and true
about his peculiar art; but later writers, critics rather, have padded
and distorted his words to cover the whole field of the short story. The
general result is much printed folly, and the specific result for the
short story writer is that he is continually urged, commanded,
entreated, and advised to invest his work with some mysterious "unity."
The advice is sound if the short story of atmosphere, the short story
of unity or totality of emotional effect, is meant; the short story of
atmosphere is a mysterious and subtle unity in that its people and
happenings are curiously of a piece with its setting, serving to deepen
or intensify the emotional effect of the setting on a reader. But,
applied to the dramatic short story, the advice is unsound, for the
dramatic short story may and usually does involve much diversity and
contrast in its three elements of people, events, and setting. The only
sense in which it can be said to be a unity is that it is verbally
coherent, a single story. The single story may involve radically
different people, happenings, and scenes.
The positive evil tendency in telling the short story writer to seek to
invest his work with "unity" is that if he follows the advice his
material will be restricted, and he will write stories too simple really
to interest, apart from the appeal of their characters. And this point
of interest brings up another aspect of this book which I would mention.
The last chapter states a general theory or philosophy of fiction which
it will prove most profitable for the writer of fiction to grasp,
however imperfectly I may have stated it. The theory is not profound, in
the sense that it is mysterious, being merely the theory which is
implied in the content and aim of the art of fiction itself. The content
of fiction is man and what he may possibly or even conceivably
experience; the aim of fiction is to interest, in Stevenson's words,
"the one excuse and breath of art--charm." How much is implied in the
content and aim of fiction I have tried to show in my closing pages, but
the theory there stated is the guiding principle of the whole book, and
any value it may have derives from such unforced handling of the
subject. Apart from the merit of my own work, one thing at least is
certain. If commentators on the art of fiction generally would deal
less in "isms" and seek less to display their profundity and critical
acumen, the actual writer of fiction might read them with some profit.
As it is, the greatest single danger threatening the practitioner of the
art is that his eagerness for all that pertains even remotely to his
trade may lead him to take seriously the empty thunders of the schools
and to forget that his business is to interest and captivate Mr. and
Mrs. Smith, simply that.
To sum up, my desire has been to write a book that would be of some
practical use, at least practically suggestive to the writer of fiction;
therefore the only natural way to approach technique has been adopted,
and I have indulged in analysis only when the analysis would be useful
in itself or would serve to clear away misconception. In other words,
the book has been written strictly for the writer, not the reader of
fiction, and that implies much.
CHAPTER I
THE WRITER HIMSELF
Critical Faculty--Cultivation of Genius--Observation and
Information--Open-mindedness--Attitude Toward Life--
Prejudice and Provincialism--The Social Question--Reading--
Imagination.
Accessible as are the data of the fiction writer, the facts and
possibilities of life, their very accessibility places him under strict
necessity to sift the useful from the useless in search for the pregnant
theme. For if life presents a multiplicity of events to the writer, from
which he may select some sort of story with little labor to himself,
life also presents the same multiplicity of events to the reader, who
can see the obvious as well as the lazy writer, and who will not be
pleased with a narration of which he has the beginning, middle, and end
by heart. A tale which does not interest fails essentially, and novelty,
in the undebased sense of the word, is the root of interest. Therefore
the writer of fiction who takes himself and his art seriously must
develop the open and penetrating eye and the faculty of just selection.
All is not gold that glitters, a fact that too often becomes painfully
evident only when some tale discovered with joy and developed with
eagerness lies coldly spread upon paper. The beginner who will approach
his own conceptions in a spirit of unbiased criticism and estimation
before determining to set them down will save himself useless labor,
much postage, and many secret tears. Half of the essentially feeble
work produced that has not a chance of getting published is the result
of the writer's falling in love with his own idea simply because it is
his own idea. The defect is in conception rather than in execution, and
a matter of first importance to the writer is to develop the faculty of
estimating his unelaborated ideas.
Unquestionably this faculty can be developed. The struggle for its
development is half over, in a practical sense, when the writer comes to
judge his concepts at all before writing, when he wins free of the habit
of writing just to be writing, and of choosing to work on a particular
tale because it is the best he can squeeze from his brains at the
particular moment, rather than because it is absolutely good and he
knows it to be absolutely good.
Unquestionably, too, the critical faculty is powerless to supply worthy
conceptions. But that is beside the point. If the conceptions are
worthy, the just critical faculty will recognize their merit, and give
the writer courage and confidence to send each tale across the almost
inevitable sea of rejections until it comes to port, as it surely will,
if well done. And if the conceptions are feeble, and the writer cannot
better them, it will be better for him and all concerned that he
discover the truth.
Whether the essential genius of the teller of tales, the power that
first supplies a theme of moment and then a fitting garb for it, is a
plant capable of nurture, is not for me to attempt to show, or even to
state. Fortunately, the question is academic. The dons may debate the
point, but for those who themselves labor in the literary vineyard the
thing to remember is that the same habits of observation and practice
which some claim will create the literary faculty will at least foster
its growth, if it is a gift, as others claim, and not to be
artificially cultivated. Steady hours at the desk and moments with the
notebook, the cultivation of the seeing eye, the informed mind, and the
sympathetic heart, may not be able to create the divine spark. But it
may burn within one for all that; and shall one neglect to bring it to
full flame on the mere chance that it may not exist because of the
possibility that it cannot be created? If the chance of its existence is
great enough in the individual's eyes to justify the labor of writing at
all, it is great enough to justify undertaking the correlative
activities of observation and self-culture. At the least of it, these
can result only in making one a better and more complete man or woman,
irrespective of the literary result. The writer who fancies that his
labor is but to string words, and that idea or passion come to life in
the barren mind or heart, is foredoomed to failure. No equation can be
formed between something and nothing, nor can something come from
nothing. All life and all art is a quid pro quo; the writer must barter
his time and sweat for his raw materials, ideas.
There is little need to state that of writers of equal genius the one
with the deepest reservoirs of observation and information to draw upon
will produce the more significant work. In relation to expository and
argumentive writing the fact is patent; in relation to the writing of
fiction it may be less obvious, but, curiously enough, is even more
impressive when perceived. The writer of special treatise or argument
may "devil" his subject for the occasion; though the writer of fiction
may specially investigate the phase of life or society with which he
deals, his investigations will aid him only in the external matters of
dress, customs, speech, or atmosphere. For the preservation of the
essential congruity and justness of the whole as a presentation of life
he must depend solely upon his own innate familiarity with life, which
cannot be brushed up for the occasion, for it necessarily derives from
the totality of the individual's experience and the use he has made of
it.
In this connection it may be noted that above all else the writer of
fiction must be catholic in his interests and sympathies. He is the
sieve through which the motley stream of life is poured to have selected
for presentation its most significant aspects, and any unwisely
cherished aversions of his are so many gaps in the netting through
which, to his own loss, worthy matter constantly will escape. It is
difficult enough at best for even the most open-minded writer to achieve
some approach to an adequate presentation of a phase of life, and for
the writer whose vision is distorted by prejudice and predilection,
however perfect his technique, it is nearly impossible. The writer of
fiction is concerned with political, social, or religious dogmas only in
so far as they impinge upon and affect the individual life whose course
his pen is tracing, and his only proper and fruitful attitude toward
such dogmas is that of observer, not of fierce advocate or equally
fierce assailant. The heart of the people is sounder than its head,
perhaps because larger, and life is a complex of passion rather than a
complex of intellectual crusades. The writer of fiction addresses the
whole man, his emotional nature as well as his intelligence, and should
address him by presenting the whole man, instead of some feeble
counterfeit not actuated primarily by passion.
Emotion can be evoked only by the portrayal of passion, and
emotion--sympathy, disgust, admiration, any spiritual excitement--is the
root of the appeal of fiction. There are other elements of interest,
primarily intellectual, as in the detective story or any story of
ratiocination, but emotional appeal is the one essential in work of any
compass. Emotional appeal is attainable only through a just presentment
of life, and toward life the writer of fiction must preserve an attitude
of observation and ready acceptance. In the last analysis, that is his
business. The world pays its wage to the scientist for the narrow,
intensive view; it pays its wage to the teller of tales for the broad,
extensive view.
The course of letters is marked by great failures whose essential
technical powers were nullified or at least hampered by their narrow
outlook on life, and by great successes whose achievements bear the scar
of prejudice and provincialism. In our day, the multitudinous standing
controversies of the past have been reduced in bitterness by the more
general diffusion of information and by the conflicting claims of more
numerous interests that demand exercise. Nevertheless we still have the
division between rich and poor, capital and labor, conservative and
radical. For reasons immaterial here, this division and resulting social
conflict will become more complete and bitter; the writer of fiction
will face the fact and be forced to deal with it at times; and it is to
be remembered that one may be abreast or even ahead of the best thought
of the day without being hectic, and that to draw the conservative of
fiction as a fool or a villain simply because he is a conservative is
bad art. Conceivably a man may be back in the ruck of thought and belief
because he is a fool, but he is not a fool merely because he is behind
the times. He may have had no chance to learn better, and that is
precisely the story.
Besides viewing life with a sympathetic and inclusive eye, the writer of
fiction should investigate the smaller world of books. Life is
infinitely more rich in substance than the printed word, but the
observer is not a disembodied spirit, and cannot scrutinize the whole
world, cannot exhaust even his own little neighborhood. He can call to
his service the eyes of his contemporaries and of those who have gone
before, and, in a few hours reading, can live vicariously a dozen lives.
In this very real sense the world of books is practically larger than
the actual world; one can hope to exhaust its more significant matter.
By reading, the writer of fiction can gain familiarity with the actual
tissue of life, the casual relation between motives and acts--so often
obscured in real life--can mingle with nobler, baser, more significant
people than he will be apt to meet, and can estimate the efforts of
others in his own art. Reading of all sorts will yield information, and
reading of fiction will reveal the root causes of success and failure in
the difficult task to precipitate life in words.
There is little need to emphasize the difficulty of the task, twofold as
it is. One must find matter, and one must display it. Not only will
reading conduce to mental development and flexibility; it will reveal
the function of the single word. Life is seen in chiaroscuro, but words
are sharp and definite things. As Stevenson has said, the writer must
work in mosaic, with finite and quite rigid words. If he really works,
scorning to abuse a noble instrument and to prostitute a noble
profession, his difficulties will but increase with his earnestness.
Flaubert is a case in point. Only by reading can the writer discover the
resources of language, and only by reading can he find encouragement in
the spectacle of what patience and devotion have achieved.
One may employ a method of literary presentment diametrically opposite
to that of fitting the right word in the right place, the method of
taking a broad canvas, disregarding length, and, in a sort, modeling the
verbal mass, which will possess plasticity to an extent, though
composed of words intractable and rigid in themselves, like the atoms
which compose modeler's clay. But this method is open only to the writer
of a novel of epic length; the verbal economy of the short story forbids
it; and it will usually be found that the books which manifest it--"Les
Miserables," "David Copperfield," "Tom Jones," "Jean Christophe," "War
and Peace," much of Thackeray's work, for instance--owe their appeal to
the essential vitality and worth of their matter rather than to any
detailed perfection of artistry. If the story is worthy, it will not be
injured by compact and artistic expression; the function of the artist
is to select the significant from life and to present it as pungently
and as perfectly as possible; brevity in expression is as essential as
economy of line in drawing. I have read and heard it stated that
Stevenson and many others eminent for artistry are thin and
self-conscious in their work, and personally I would give much to know
whether this impression does not derive from the fact that many of the
accepted great books of the world, and most of those appearing day by
day, are negligible as examples of executive artistry, by their contrast
making the occasional work that is concisely and artistically done seem
somewhat artificial. The reader is perhaps so accustomed to imperfect
work that the perfect has a touch of artificial glitter, and seems
unreal. But this is a digression. The fact remains that the writer of
fiction who would live by his art cannot afford to go in ignorance of
what has been done before him. He should read, widely and with all his
faculties on the stretch. A vast amount of experiment lies ready on the
printed page. One may not by reading learn how to do perfect work, but
one can at least discover what cannot by any possibility be done.
The general proposition is that the writer of fiction must observe
life, must estimate it, and must express the phase that his estimation
shows to be significant. The open eye, the cultivated and able mind, and
the trained hand are all equally essential, and all must work together
in harmony. Some have the eye without the hand; some the hand without
the eye; in others the faculty of discrimination is wanting; but eye,
mind, and hand may all be trained by application. No one who has not
done his best has the right to complain of failure, and he who engages
in the difficult business of letters, and neglects to use all efforts to
equip himself, is a fool and nothing else. The writer may live in
prosaic surroundings and be repressed by daily contact with people as
dull as ditchwater; yet the world is wide and man a free agent within
limits; let him strike his tent and go elsewhere. But let him first make
quite sure that the defect is in his environment and not in himself.
Otherwise, when ensconced in a snug artistic Bohemia, he may suffer the
pain of learning that some quiet, clear-eyed seer has found rich ores in
the old home life, and has wrought them to fresh shapes of beauty. And
beyond the influence of all accidents of time and place lies the world
of imagination, instinct with austere beauty, offering escape, solace,
and rich gifts to him who has the golden key. Investigate the life that
was Hawthorne's in Salem, Massachusetts, in the thirties and forties,
then read "The Scarlet Letter," and turn your eyes within if ugliness
lies stark about you. No boor and dullard may walk with you in the
fields of fancy, alone with the night wind and the quiet stars. Dream
with sanity, live with sanity, work with sanity and purpose, and realize
that life and thought are your business, and that the stream of life as
a whole is clean and fresh and sweet and utterly interesting even if you
yourself are caught in some stagnant backwater. Open your eyes and swim
for the clear reaches of the stream.
CHAPTER II
THE CHOICE OF MATTER
Selection--Sincerity--Adventure--Common Problems of Life--
Originality--Novelty and Worth--Three Elements of Fictional
Literature--Interest--Elements of Interest.
Life is infinitely various, and the possibilities of the imagination are
even more extensive; the writer of fiction has enough material at hand.
His primary task, to pitch upon a theme, is almost wholly selective,
unless he is cursed with a paucity of observation or barrenness of
imagination, in which case he has mistaken his calling. And in this task
of selection the writer must bear in mind several considerations, his
own predilections, his own powers, the intrinsic worth of the idea,
and--last but not least--the audience he is to address. The writer
should give ear to his own personal likings because he will do better
work when he has interest in the matter under his hands; he should
consider his own powers lest he attempt too much; he must consider the
intrinsic worth of his theme lest his work be essentially feeble; and he
must ponder his audience that his work may not go for naught. As to this
last, a word of advice may not be out of place. Though the average
reader may have little power to express, he usually has a well developed
power to appreciate, and there is no need to "write down" to him.
Condescension on the part of the writer of fiction is less obtrusive
than in more directly informative writing, but it is instantly perceived
and resented when present. The best audience for the writer to imagine
is simply the best audience, alive in sensibilities and intelligence.
Stories--and therefore potential stories--may be divided roughly into
two classes, those meant frankly to entertain and those designed to
perform a higher function in addition. The line between them is not hard
and fast; the same basic idea will slip from one side to the other under
different handling by different authors. But there is a real difference,
and that difference is made by the presence or absence of sincerity in
the writer. The complete and rounded story will interest, which is the
element of bare matter, will be so perfectly told that its mere
structure will give pleasure, which is the element of artistry, and will
truly express some phase of life as the author sees it, which is the
element of sincerity. Stories may possess all, some, or none of these
elements, but no story which does not possess them all can be said to
fulfil completely the ideals of the art of fiction. There is no abstract
obligation to be sincere resting on a writer of fiction; he should be
sincere because his work will gain in power. A reader will feel the
presence or lack of the quality.
This does not mean that the writer of fiction should take himself and
life too seriously, a fault of which George Eliot is perhaps an example.
He should simply be true to his own artistic convictions. If he must
write "pot-boilers" for a living, he should refuse to let the hours so
spent dull his artistic sense. No taint attaches to writing an
entertaining story for the money in it; the elder Dumas, for instance,
was a far greater artist in letters than hosts of more sombre writers
who preceded and have succeeded him. And the writer who has Dumas'
intrinsic gaiety and verve may write adventure and write literature too.
Back of the possibility lies the fact that the more bizarre phases of
life are somewhat accidental and not very inclusive. The writer who
deals with them must draw on his imagination heavily, not only for
initial conceptions but for details. Very possibly he may miss some of
the warm verisimilitude that derives from writing of familiar things and
constitutes the keystone of the fictional arch. The strange and striking
may gain a reader's superficial interest very easily, but "easy come,
easy go" and the story of deep-rooted appeal is the story that displays
to a reader sharply individualized human beings meeting the daily
problems that are our common human lot. These problems are not dull
because they are common and universal; their universality is the source
of their interest. The writer who can reduce a general problem of love,
hate, or labor to specific terms of persons and events, and can invest
the whole with that certain momentousness, as of life raised to a higher
power, which is the hallmark of literature, fulfils the highest
possibilities of the art, whether he be as realistic in method as
Dostoievsky in "Crime and Punishment" or as romantic in spirit as
Hawthorne in "The Scarlet Letter."
Perhaps all this is somewhat repellent. We are not all Hawthornes in
embryo--worse luck!--and though a good many aspire to do something worth
while in itself some day, another good many are more humble, and incline
to view the editor's check as sufficient warranty of success. Such an
attitude is much healthier than that of the persecuted genius who
refuses to investigate present conditions in the public taste and to
coax and take advantage of them. But it may be carried to extremes. I do
not think that many deliberately write trash, but it is apparent that a
good deal of trash is written through too sedulous imitation of the
tone of current literature. There is a recognizable type of machine-made
story used by all the all-fiction magazines, and so forth. Subject to
correction, I believe that the greater part of this cut-and-dried
product is owing less to editorial conservatism than to authorial
diffidence toward truly original work. Work may be original in
substance, method, and viewpoint without being obscene or even "frank."
When they do leave trodden ways, too many young writers persist in
opposing the justifiable editorial reluctance to print anything that
might give offense in a magazine of general circulation. The sex
relation is not the whole of life, and even the sex relation may be
treated, without the conventional sugar coating, to give all essential
facts and make all essential comments and not be forbidding. We have a
great world spread before us, and there is more in it for telling than
is already printed and on the newsstands. When looking for a story, the
thing to do is to forget those that have been written, to forget
everything except the spectacle of life.
In the choice of matter the two main considerations are novelty and
worth. Freshness in substance or form will go far to stimulate the
writer and to sell the result of his labor, and essential worth is
inspiring. No man finds pleasure in trivial and useless labor, but all
normal men find pleasure and exhilaration in labor that is worth while.
The writer who has worthy matter beneath his hands, and who knows it,
will remain keyed to the requisite pitch during the labor of
composition. Numbers have testified that the truest joy of authorship is
found in conceiving and elaborating a tale before setting pen to paper,
and time spent in estimating an idea and exhausting its possibilities
and deficiencies before writing is necessary to make certain that the
idea is worth while. Moreover, it is necessary that the writer know
precisely what his idea is in order to develop it properly by excising
the superfluous and emphasizing the significant. Conscious artistry is
impossible unless the author knows definitely what he is striving to
express.
The writer of fiction should bear in mind the three elements of the
story that is literature, and should ask himself whether his projected
tale is interesting, whether it is capable of being cast in literary
form, and whether it is worth while. If the idea meets all these
requirements, any failure in the completed work will be due to defective
execution, not to deficiency in the conception. If the idea fails to
meet the test as to form and worth, it may yet be worth while to write
the story, for it may sell; if the idea is not interesting, it should be
rejected without remorse. The first and highest function of a story is
to interest and entertain; indeed, artistic form is but a means to that
end, as is essential worth; and the dull, uninteresting story--a
contradiction in terms--is the most woebegone literary failure under the
stars.
The writer who allows any discussion of the art of fiction or the
content of fiction to cloud for him the basic fact that fiction must be
interesting is on the highroad to failure. It would be better for him
had he never opened a book, except of frank adventure. Nine tenths of
the ponderous and silly comment on fiction past and fiction present is
written by critics and professors who first kick up a great dust over a
work in order to display their insight in seeing through it, and nine
tenths of that nine tenths--written purely from a reader's and not from
a writer's standpoint--consists in appraising character by conventional
ethical standards and in attributing to the writer whose work is under
examination intentions and philosophies of which he never dreamed. It is
at once very dull and very amusing, but the young writer whose
eagerness for all information about his craft leads him to take such
matter too seriously is in grave danger.
The writer of good fiction and the reader of good fiction are alike in
that they both realize that the chief end of fiction is to entertain and
interest, that perfection of form is desirable simply because it
heightens the illusion of a story, and that worth of matter is necessary
if the story is to be true literature because the cultured mind cannot
find interest in the trivial. Culture has been finely defined as "the
quality of a mind instinct with purpose, conscious of a tendency and
direction in human affairs, able and industrious in distinguishing the
great from the trivial." If this definition is valid--it bears its
credentials on its face--great fiction may be defined as fiction which
interests the cultured mind. The quality of arousing interest is the
criterion and determinant, and implies perfection of form and essential
worth of substance. The writer of fiction must never lose sight of the
fact, nor of the resulting necessity that all his work be interesting.
The fortunate thing is that fiction deals with so universal a thing as
life; it need not repel the ignorant and uneducated in order to attract
the abler mind.
The twin elements of fictional interest are the story and its people,
and here becomes apparent the essential weakness of the story of mere
incident. It cannot evoke interest as deep as that called forth by the
story having closer relation to character. The range of character
required by the story of incident is narrow; there are a thousand
pregnant human qualities which the story of incident cannot first
develop by action and then utilize to hold a reader's interest, but
which the writer of the more leisurely and inclusive tale of everyday
life can common can be truly vivified only by showing the person in
acts displaying his essential traits, and the less dependence the action
of a story has upon character, the less real to a reader will be the
persons involved. The story of complication of incident, of mere
structural ingenuity of plot, is superficially interesting, but it lacks
the deeper appeal of the story which develops its people adequately. At
any rate, it is true that a reader can love or hate characters, beside
being interested in them; he can only be interested in an event. The
people of a story are not to be neglected as sources of interest. They
are harder to display than mere events, but they are infinitely more
compelling. A bare series of events may interest, but the interest and
appeal of what happens will be doubled if the observer is a friend of
the persons affected, that is, if he knows them. The same is true in the
case of a story. Its reader stands in the position of observer of events
and people. The only trouble is that some stories have little action
significant in relation to character, and when that is the case the
writer loses one means to make his people real for a reader. The point
to remember in searching for an interesting story is that the people are
as influential an element as the events.
CHAPTER III
CONCEPTIVE TECHNIQUE: STORY TYPES
Conception and Execution--Utility to Know Types--Novel and
Romance--Short Story--The Three Types--Emphasis--Three
Elements of Any Story--Story of Character--Character and
Action--Story of Incident--Archetypal Character--Short
Story and Fallacy of Compression--Story of Atmosphere--Other
Types.
The labors of the fiction writer are of two sorts, conceptive and
executive. In actual practice, of course, the writer may have only the
faintest glimmering of his story when he begins to write, and may
simultaneously conceive, elaborate, and express as he goes along; but
that is not the method of the conscious literary artist. An
understanding adaptation of means to ends is impossible unless the
writer has a definite purpose fixed in mind from the first moment of
execution. And in writing on technique it is necessary to assume the
natural order of the total artistic or creative process, whether the
actual practice of any writer coincides with it or not. Therefore the
body of conceptive technique first calls for treatment. Strict executive
technique and also the technique of construction--which is both
conceptive and executive--will be taken up after dealing with the matter
of story types and the matter of plot.
I need not state that there is no technique of conception, mastery of
which will yield the writer the golden secret of how to create or find a
good story. That depends strictly on personal ability, and not on any
objective knowledge of the mechanics of the art of fiction. But a
knowledge of the several fundamental types of story, and of the how and
why of the differences between them, cannot fail to aid the writer in
estimating and realizing the potentialities and deficiencies of a
particular idea. The writer who knows precisely where his story idea
will classify under analysis has a standard that will prove most useful
in the work of development. If it classifies as a story of atmosphere,
rather than of plot or of character, the writer will be led to
concentrate upon his proper task of creating the atmospheric illusion,
and will not dissipate his energies and spoil the effect of the finished
work by interpolating unnecessary touches of emphasis upon character or
incident.
Another preliminary word may not be out of place. A story is a story,
whether long or short; but the novel or lengthy romance is so much more
inclusive in matter and complicated in structure than the short
story--viewing the latter as a distinct literary type--that it is less
essential for the writer of fiction of book length to know with exact
definition the effect he wishes to produce than it is for the writer of
the short story of a few thousand words. The potential and usual effects
of the novel are many; it may and usually does contain chapters or
passages emphasizing all three story elements of character, complication
of incident, and atmosphere; but the short story is limited by its
brevity to the creation of a single effect, and any touch of emphasis
looking elsewhere usually will detract from the power of the whole.
Therefore it is in short story writing that a firm preliminary grasp
upon all the implications and connotations of the basic idea is most
essential, also most attainable, and therefore a discussion of
fundamental story types concerns itself largely with the short story.
But much the same principles of constructive analysis utilized by the
writer of the short story may be profitably employed in developing the
various but more or less unified episodes of the novel.
The three fundamental types of story have a perfectly natural origin. A
story is the relation of what (1) certain persons (2) did (3) in a
certain place and under certain conditions of existence. Accordingly, as
the elements of personality, action, or surrounding conditions are
emphasized, we have the story of character, of incident, or of
atmosphere. As Stevenson has said, there are but three ways to create a
story, to conceive characters and select and devise incidents to develop
them, to take a plot--a climactic series of incidents--and devise
characters to enact it, or to take an atmosphere and precipitate it as
best the writer may.
There is, however, an obvious fact to remember. These several types of
story differ from one another only in point of emphasis; in each case an
element possessed by all is stressed; no type is entirely devoid of the
elements emphasized in the other two. An intended story lacking any one
of the three elements of character, of complication of incident, or of
setting is not a story, but something else. The most common example is
the composition portraying character without any plot or complication of
incident, which is not a character story, but a character sketch. It
cannot be too strongly insisted that a story is a story, consisting of a
climactic series of incidents, as distinguished from a tale, which is a
level series of incidents, unrelated save in that all happen to the same
group of characters. Plot is a matter not specifically under discussion
as yet, but half the difficulty and most of the inutility in writing on
fiction technique reside in the fact that one must treat in isolation
matters which are but elements of a unified artistic synthesis. A story
is a story; its people do not merely exist, they live and act. In the
case of the story of complication of incident, the complication supplies
the story-element of the fiction; in the case of character story, the
evolution or degeneration of character supplies the story-element; while
in the case of the story of atmosphere, the climactic progression of the
particular emotional impression to the point of highest intensity in
itself supplies much of the plot- or story-element of the conception.
Another qualification should be stated. The normal story, written for
its own sake, is emphatic in that it stresses some one of its three
elements. But there is also the thematic story, written to vivify an
abstract proposition or to point a moral. The type lays no special
emphasis on character, incident, or setting, and is written with an eye
to an ulterior purpose beyond the mere sake of the story. It is not a
natural type, and may be disregarded here. Incidentally, it is not a
very successful type, and of course any success it may achieve as a work
of art cannot derive from the truth or weight of the proposition or
moral behind it.
Starting from the proposition that there are three normal story types,
it may be profitable to examine them in detail. I am not yet concerned
with the technical devices whereby character may be drawn, a plot
devised and narrated, or atmosphere created; my sole purpose is to
suggest how the writer may recognize the true character of his idea,
that in developing it he may know exactly what he is trying to do.
The story of character is concerned with the infinitely diverse traits
of our common human nature as manifested by the people of a story. The
single trait or few traits, rather than the totality of each person's
nature, should be sought to be developed, for reasons that a moment's
thought will render apparent. Character can be truly realized only by
showing the person in characteristic actions and, unless the writer
desires to extend his work to a great length, he can formulate no course
of action which will illustrate a complete personality. In all its
aspects, fiction is a matter of selection, and the writer of a story of
character should concentrate his powers of description and exposition
upon the traits of personality involved in the acts of the persons. The
short story must present a relatively incomplete picture of each
character's soul; the novel may approach each person from a number of
angles; but even the novelist should consider whether he cannot give
maximum reality and vivacity to his people by not attempting a too
complete presentation of each.
If, then, the initial conception of a story involves or suggests true
traits of character, it may be advisable to develop the story so as to
throw into strong relief the quality or qualities involved. The
possibility of the wisdom of such development becomes a probability if
the traits are somewhat novel and not those possessed in common by all
men to some extent, such as the capacity to love, to hate, to sacrifice
self, ambition, the fear of death, and so forth.
It should be remembered that the hallmark of the true character story is
its progression; the persons of the story grow stronger or weaker in
their respective traits under the pressure of events. There is a
climactic moment of indecision and suspense when it is doubtful whether
the character will shape circumstances or circumstances the character.
This distinguishing attribute of the character story is its essential
quality as a story; the strict type is debarred from recourse to
complication of incident to save it from being a mere sketch; change or
progression in the characters is itself the story or plot element of the
fiction. Realization of the fact will give the writer a firmer grasp on
the truth that characters and events must be developed in strict
concert and harmony. Anticipating later statement a trifle, let me say
that portrayal of the actions of a character is portrayal of the
character himself, so that his actions must be characteristic, or two
elements of the story will be at cross purposes. In setting out to write
a character story, the author deliberately chooses to emphasize
character and to depend for interest on the spectacle of its evolution
or degeneration. Since he is after all writing a story--though of one
type--the author must devise some climactic series of incidents. But the
character element is the preponderant strain of the fiction, and each
successive incident should be chosen with an eye to that element, and
its climactic value should inhere in its being climactic and progressive
in relation to the trait of character sought to be developed.
This is all somewhat abstract, but the test is much easier to apply to a
concrete story idea than it is to formulate in terms. If the idea
consists of a tentative grouping of incidents which suggests an
interesting phase of character in an interesting phase of development,
the conception may be elaborated into the story which emphasizes
character. On the other hand, if the initial idea is simply of a phase
of character which can be adequately shown in progression by a series of
incidents devised to that end, the same treatment is advisable. In each
case it is possible that such treatment will give maximum effect to the
conception.
The story of complication of incident interests primarily because of its
plot, and not because of its people or the totality of its emotional
effect.[A] It is more than a type of story; in a way it is really the
archetype of all stories. An historical analysis will show the truth of
the statement. First came the tale, a chain of incidents having no
essential connection except that they all happened to the characters.
Then came the story, a chain of incidents which are not fortuitous and
accidental, but each essential to the whole design. And from the story
have sprung such variations as the character story, which emphasizes the
element of personality, and the story of atmosphere, which emphasizes
the setting, spiritual or material. But the story of plot, which
stresses the bare incident, is archetypal of all fiction in that
interest centers in the story rather than in the persons or their
environment. Perhaps the French conte, or brief dramatic narrative, is
the strictest story type of all.
I have chosen to touch upon the character story first, rather than the
more fundamental and inclusive story of plot, simply because the
potential story of plot is easily recognizable, and my sole aim here is
to state some of the tests which the writer may apply to his idea after
conception to discover its true character, that he may know how to
handle it. The germ of a plot can be distinguished at a glance, while
the question of what a plot really is requires separate treatment.
If the writer would produce a strict short story, he cannot rest content
with the apparent fact that his initial conception is the germ of a
story plot, that being the case. The story of plot may be easy to
recognize as a genre, but not all stories of plot are potential short
stories. All plot germs are not susceptible of adequate development
within the narrow limits of the short story. Ten thousand words is
probably the extreme limit of the type as a commercial possibility, and,
in a space so brief, if the chain of events is at all complicated or
lengthy, it is impossible to bring out all its nuances and implications.
Too many critics and writers seem to entertain the idea that the short
story is the result of compression, but emphatically that is not true.
The synopsis of previous chapters before an instalment of a serial novel
is an example of compression, and a most repellent one. A short story is
the result of its own inherent brevity. A naturally long story, it is
true, may be shortened materially by mere rhetorical compression, but it
cannot be rendered a short story thereby, for the short story develops
its fewer incidents with as much rhetorical elaboration as the novel or
romance develops its many happenings. The short story that is a short
story--such as Kipling's "Without Benefit of Clergy," Stevenson's
"Markheim," or Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher"--gives off no
impression of verbal bareness. The short story is a literary form, with
all the elaboration of expression that the term implies. Its brevity
results from careful selection of the incidents to be set forth, and not
from concise expression of an indiscriminate welter of incidents.
Undoubtedly the matter requires emphasis. Too much has been written and
said as to the necessity of compression in short story writing. If what
is meant is rhetorical compression, bare statement without verbal
elaboration, no such necessity exists. What is necessary is care in
making certain that the story is a short story, and care to relate
nothing not essential to its development.
The French type of short story in general, and Maupassant's work in
particular, are often cited to illustrate the need for compression. In
the first place, the essential genius of the French language is such
that in translations, to English or American apprehension, fully
elaborated statement often seems somewhat bare. Moreover, I cannot
admit that Maupassant's best work is equal in rounded artistry and
appeal to that of others who have chosen to write less barely and
mathematically. If compression means anything, it means squeezing
something into less space than it would normally occupy, which is not
artistry, but an attempt to do in execution the proper work of
conception and construction, to devise a story which can be given
adequate literary expression in a limited number of words.
A critical reading of almost any successful short story will disclose
that the manner of its telling is as truly the source of its interest
and appeal as is the novelty or human importance of the naked story
idea. The difference between a recital of facts and a work of fiction is
the difference between mere reporting and true literature. The writer
who strives to compress in expression, instead of carefully selecting
the matter for expression, deliberately rejects his only means to
produce a sufficiently full and rounded presentment of the particular
phase of life he seeks to depict. That means is to write with due
elaboration, lest the phrasing seem stark and flat in comparison with
the softly moulded contours of life itself. There are two elements in
literature, the fact and the form; they are equally important and should
be equally complete. When considering the fitness of a plot to serve as
the skeleton for a short story, remember that in execution the thing
must be written with due verbal elaboration, else it will be angular and
unattractive, and that the idea of many incidents, people, or places
cannot be so written in the space available. In execution, write
adequately, and in conception and construction, select.
The story of atmosphere, which emphasizes the setting in which its
people move, and seeks to bring out the emotional value of the physical
or spiritual environment, is not difficult to recognize, being like the
story of plot in this respect. But it is most difficult to do well. The
story of character deals with concrete people, and the story of plot
deals with concrete events; the story of atmosphere deals with these and
something more, an intangible sensual or emotional impression, as of
beauty or horror, correspondingly more difficult to create. It demands
imaginative powers of the highest order, and perfect technical powers.
Within limits, the unimaginative author may write effectively of
characters and events, for he can see and study them objectively in
daily life, and, again within limits, they may also be presented
effectively by matter of fact phrasing. But atmosphere cannot be
seen--even physical atmosphere must be felt, or there is no emotional
effect--and all the resources of language at times become pitifully
inadequate to precipitate an emotion. It is all a matter of clear
conception and careful design, and the secret cannot be stated, but must
be learned, each for himself. However, I am not concerned in this place
with executive technique, or even with constructive technique, and
whatever hints can be given as to the creation of atmosphere would be
out of place. My object is merely to state the fundamental types of
story and the necessity that the writer recognize the true character of
his conception, that he may develop it with emphasis properly laid.
Other types of story exist, but the lines between them are not drawn by
the inherent character of the art of fiction. The love story, for
instance, may be told with emphasis on character, on incident, or on
atmosphere, and the placing of emphasis determines its artistic
character. The technique of conception is concerned only with
fundamental types, and the sole object of its mastery is to give the
writer knowledge of the essential artistic character of each of his
conceptions, that he may work with a definite aim in development. My
object is not to discuss or analyze pedantically, for the sake of the
analysis itself, but simply to state the importance of discovering the
basic fictional character of the idea, that it may be properly expanded.
Strict constructive and executive technique of course require separate
treatment.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] One might expand here on the distinction that in the story stressing
character it is the particular persons who interest the reader, while in
the story of plot his interest centers in the events, and the people of
the story are followed less as individuals than as the human focal
points whereon the events take effect. Such fine analysis is tempting,
but of little use, for any story is a compact unity of the three
elements.
CHAPTER IV
CONCEPTIVE TECHNIQUE: PLOT AND SITUATION
Definition of Plot--Character and Plot--Dramatic Value of
Plot--Complication--Interest--Plot as Problem--Three
Basic Themes--Conflict Between Man and Nature--Conflict
Between Man and Man--Conflict Within the Same Man--
Arrangement of Elements of Plot--Climax--Major Situations--
Situation and Plot.
The plot of a story is its heart and essence. This is obviously true in
the case of the strict story of plot, and it is very curiously true in
the case of the story of character or of atmosphere. For in the story
which lays emphasis on personality, the evolution or degeneration of the
particular trait which has been selected for presentation is the real
story-element of the fiction. The fact is the root of the necessity that
the action develop in concert with the trait of character, giving it
opportunity for expression. And in the story which lays emphasis on
atmosphere, the climactic progression of the particular atmosphere to
the point of highest intensity is the real story-element, which is the
root of the necessity that the action develop in strict keeping with the
atmosphere, that the effect may not be spoiled.
What is a plot? Many attempts at definition have been made, and the
results have not been illuminating. Everyone has an idea of what a plot
is, but those who have attempted to state their conception briefly have
encountered difficulties. Perhaps an indirect approach to the problem
will yield results.
A tale is not a story, for a tale is a relation of events which happened
to happen to the characters. It is episodal, and the interest of the
thing inheres in each episode separately, not in the whole. There is no
essential connection between the incidents, except that they all
happened to the same group of characters. The contrary is true of a
story, interest in which is in the whole, as a progression, and, since
the difference between tale and story is made by the presence or absence
of plot, it appears that a distinguishing mark of a plot is that its
events function together as a unit. There is some connection between
them other than chance, and that connection lies in the intimate
relation between the events of a story and its characters. Event and
personality each influence or even determine each other simultaneously.
Incidentally, realization of the fact will free the writer from any
misconception that the action and the characters are separable elements
of a story. For instance, jealousy, a trait of character, may cause a
murder, an event, and a husband's chance opening of a letter addressed
to his wife, an event, may give rise to Jealousy, the trait of
character. Or the husband's loyalty will be strengthened in the fiction
if he refuses to credit appearances.
Interaction, then, between incidents and characters, arising from the
unity of the whole conception, is the first essential element of a plot.
The second essential element--and there are but two--is that the several
incidents of the story possess climactic value, not necessarily
climactic value in the sense of ascending tensity--though that is most
desirable--but climactic value in that each event should have influence
in forwarding the story to a definite end, that state of quiescence
which is not attainable in real life short of the grave, but which
fiction must postulate. In other words, since a plot is made up of
incidents which influence and are influenced by the characters, and
since the story must move to an end, a plot presents a problem. What
will the persons do? if the emphasis is on personality; and what will
happen? if the emphasis is on the event.
To state it in the form of a definition, a plot is a series of events
which influence and are influenced by traits of personality, and which
are climactic in that they move to a definite conclusion, so that the
series embodies some problem of life brought to solution.
I state this merely for what it may be worth, which possibly is no great
matter to the writer of fiction. Plots are not to be found by vivifying
a definition, but a definition may prove useful in testing a story idea
when it is found, and the object of the whole discussion is merely to
give the writer some aid in appraising the essential fictional value of
his conceptions.
The fact that a plot is a problem gives the several events their
climactic value. They are steps and approaches to the solution. And a
plot is a problem simply because fiction concerns man, while man is a
free agent, in possibility at least. Given certain characters and an
event bearing upon them, and the problem of what they will do instantly
arises, and the problem of the ultimate result of their actions. Given
certain events, to reverse the emphasis, and characters on whom they
bear, and the same problems arise. A plot is question and solution in
one, and the solution must inevitably follow from the characters and
events.
It will be perceived that the distinguishing quality of a plot is its
dramatic value. A plot is a problem of life, and a problem is a conflict
between opposing forces. Event and character wrestle with one another,
and the outcome is doubtful, wherein lies the interest of the story. It
is accurate to state that the conflict is between event and character,
for though character may struggle with character, nevertheless the
struggle is operative only in action, and the opposed persons struggle
with the doings, not the naked souls, of each other.
It will be perceived also that the element of complication is not
essential to a plot, as Poe has pointed out. Of course, in the story of
incident, where the reader's interest centers chiefly in the events, not
in the characters or atmosphere, complication is most useful, and in
fact supplies much of the problem- or plot-element of the fiction. But
complication is not a sine qua non, and should not be so regarded.
Complication of incident, indeed, in the story which is fundamentally of
character or atmosphere, may prove a positive handicap, adding to the
difficulties of execution and spoiling the unity of effect, if the
fiction is a short story. As has been stated, the novel is a broader
canvas, without a single emphasis if the writer wills, and here, within
the limits of naturalness, complication of plot is thoroughly desirable.
Any bid for a reader's interest is of use, only in the short story the
writer must necessarily limit himself to one sort of bid.
At that last of it, pretty nearly all of the technique of fiction
writing has root in the necessity first to gain the reader's interest
and then to hold it. That is the real object of perfection of form,
even, and the device of plot has root in the same object. In simpler and
more unsophisticated ages the stage presented not drama but mere
spectacles, as the tale did in the spoken word or printed page; the
plot, lending to the play its dramatic character and to the fiction its
story character, developed only when audience and readers lost the
child's vivid interest in whatever he sees, and began to yawn at the
episodal. Pageantry and the unrelated event became stale, in comparison
with the spectacle of life itself, and then plot was found, a method of
isolating a single one of life's strands, and, by showing it in high
relief, lending it an added dignity and appeal.
The basis of the more intense appeal of the plot over that of the
episode is psychological. The hardest thing in the world to do is to
make a reader think, but the reader who does think is interested. That
is why he is thinking. Since a plot is a problem, the reader of a story
of plot is made to think, and the matter impinges upon him with some
force. To repeat former phraseology, if the emphasis is on the events,
he tries to figure out what will happen, at least wonders about it; if
the emphasis is on the characters, he tries to foresee what they will
do. Incidentally, the reader of to-day is habituated to the story of
plot. If nothing happens he will chalk a black mark against author and
magazine, as the editor knows.
As has been said--and emphasis is not out of place--a plot is a problem.
Problem, in this connection, means conflict between opposing forces,
which gives the various events and situations of a story any dramatic
value they may possess. It follows that there are three basic
plot-themes, conflict between man and his environment or Nature,
conflict between man and man, and conflict between opposed traits in the
same man. It will be profitable for the writer to bear this in mind when
combing the world for his story.
In his essay on Victor Hugo's romances, Stevenson has touched upon the
emergence in fiction of the conflict between man and Nature. Briefly,
his argument is that in the works of such a one as Scott the world and
natural forces serve but as stage and stage devices for man and his
doings, while Hugo, particularly in "The Toilers of the Sea," draws
storm, cold, and heat as man's active enemies, almost endowing Nature
with a vindictive personality. Whatever the fact as to Hugo, it is
certain that to those who meet her face to face on sea and land Nature
is a somewhat stony-hearted mother, yielding food and shelter only at
the pistol-point of toil and struggle. To those of us who live in
cities, and whose concerns are mainly social, the constant struggle
of mankind against drought and flood, storm and cold, fire and famine
is obscured, but it is a living reality, nevertheless, and a rich
source of fiction that will get under the skin of the most pampered
apartment-dweller. The roots of our lives stretch far into the dim past,
when the unending struggle with natural forces was a bitter reality to
all, and adequate fictional presentment of the struggle with Nature
often proves to have an incisive appeal wanting in less fundamental
themes. Particularly, the writer may rely upon such a story's appealing
to the cultured and the uncultured mind alike, for the intrinsic human
importance of its theme is felt by all. The elements of the dramatic
problem presented are so simple that previous familiarity with them in
personal experience is not essential to their understanding.
A fine example of this theme given short story treatment is Bret Harte's
"The Outcasts of Poker Flat," while the portions of Stevenson's
"Kidnapped" dealing with David's experience on the Isle of Earraid and
his flight through the heather with Alan Breck find their dramatic
quality largely in the same theme. It is interesting to note that Harte,
however, does not emphasize the conflict between man and Nature to the
utmost of possibility, for in his story there is much emphasis on
character and the struggle of man with man. Whether the story gains or
loses in total effect thereby is immaterial; it will prove an
interesting experience for the writer to recast the tale so as to bring
out more exclusively the theme of conflict with Nature. In connection
with the general discussion as to plot, I will state that if Harte had
entirely excised the theft of the party's horses by the treacherous
member, and had not brought out the contrast between the gambler, the
prostitutes, and the innocents, the story still would have been
adequately plotted. The bare situation of men and women snowbound in a
mountain cabin is a plot germ, for it suggests the problem whether they
will survive or perish.
The plot which presents conflict between man and man is distinctly
social in nature. The possibilities for the writer of fiction in the
general scramble for the almighty dollar, the rivalry of love, the
desire for revenge, and a thousand other passions and ambitions that
bring man into conflict with his fellows, are practically infinite.
Three minutes spent in running over this field for plots will
demonstrate the folly of bewailing the lack of something fresh to write
about. Perhaps some ingenious mathematician, given the data that there
are a hundred million men and women in the United States, and that each
one has some small number of desires and passions active or dormant,
will calculate the potential conflicts resulting. Each conflict is the
seed of a plot, and each plot may be written a hundred times, each story
being made different from the last by varying the manner of treatment.
There is not too little to write about; there is so very much that keen
selection is essential.
Any magazine offers examples of the exploitation, by short story
writers, of the conflict between man and man, while to portray the
conflict is peculiarly the field of the novel, with its social emphasis.
Balzac and Thackeray are supreme masters in presenting a slice of the
social spectacle; "Vanity Fair" and "Cousin Pons" depict struggle
between their people, and but little else. At the top of the social
ladder the struggle is carried on by intrigue and sugared words, at the
bottom with the knife and naked fist, but the struggle is the same in
essence, and of enthralling interest to a reader. All the world loves a
winner, and all the world wants to find out whom it is to love. The mere
mechanical details wherein the struggle finds expression and operation
are the least of the plot, which is indebted for its dramatic quality to
the bare fact of struggle. Doubtless the girl who runs daily to the
public library for a novel would be shocked to be told that she is
impelled by the same human quality that makes street-loafers and
passersby gather about two fighting boys, but she is, nevertheless. The
writer who would please her--and her father, mother, and brothers--will
do well to remember the fact.
The story which seeks to present conflict between two opposed traits in
the same man or woman is most difficult to write so as to create any
fictional illusion. It deals almost exclusively with psychological data,
of the facts of the soul, and requires knowledge and imaginative insight
as well as verbal dexterity. It is supremely easy to conceive a plot
involving struggle of the man with himself, but it is supremely hard to
give such a struggle objectivity, to expand it into a fiction operative
in action and yet developing the internal conflict. I cannot think of a
finer example than Stevenson's "Markheim." A close and critical study of
this story by one who is qualified to taste its full flavor will reveal
at once the great difficulties that face the writer who chooses such a
theme, and the high pitch of achievement attainable through proper
handling of material.
The greatest practical drawback to the giving of much time to mastering
the technique of soul-analysis lies in the narrow appeal of such a
story even when perfectly conceived and written. To recur to the always
apposite Stevenson, it is safe to say that his "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"
is a thousand times more interesting to the average reader than
"Markheim," simply because the soul-struggle is so much more completely
made objective and given expression in action in the first fiction than
in the second. This is done so very emphatically that nine readers out
of ten entirely miss the point of "Jekyll and Hyde," and fail to realize
that the struggle is between two tendencies in the same man, who is
split into his good and bad selves merely for the sake of concreteness.
Most fiction readers have little love for abstractions and fine spun
analysis--witness the common repute of Henry James, to an extent
undeserved, it may be said in passing. Exclusive emphasis upon the
struggle of the man with himself will tend to confine the writer's
appeal to the intellectuals, in the special modern sense, a matter
inimical to the pocketbook, at the least of it. Psychological analysis
is most useful in developing almost any type of story, but as the sole
theme for a fiction it has its disadvantages.
When the writer has his hands on a plot, of whatever type and however
found, his conceptive labors are by no means over. It remains to recast
and rearrange the elements of the idea, that the most effective
arrangement may be discovered. A first invention is very rarely
incapable of improvement, and in the interests of artistry the author
should exhaust all the possibilities of his idea before writing, that he
may not chance upon unsuspected potentialities in his story only when it
is half written, or not discover them at all. Within limits, of course,
any story will tend to shape itself; in particular, there is much
testimony as to the intractability of characters; but one cannot
consciously strive to do any particular thing or to produce any
particular effect without first knowing just what the thing or effect
is to be.
Possibly the most important matter is to arrange the incidents, the
separate elements of the problem or conflict which the plot presents, in
such manner as to give the progression a climactic character. Not only
should each major event be a definite step toward the conclusion,
solution, or denouement, but each succeeding event should be more
striking, significant, and tense than its predecessor. This sort of
climactic movement is not essential to a plot, but it is an essential
element of a good plot, particularly a good plot for a short story. The
short story is a much more strict and artificial type of fiction than
the novel; in other words, its writer has fewer resources to impress a
reader, and he must utilize to the full whatever is open to him. Among
his resources is the device of sensible movement to a crisis or climax.
Like the rest of fiction technique, the device is useful because it
tends to keep alive and stimulate a reader's interest. This it does
because ascending tensity suggests further struggle. Any flat incident,
on the contrary, less tense or striking than its predecessor, infallibly
suggests that the story is already falling to its end, and the end seems
dull because the problem is not fully worked out or even stated.
Psychologically, the point is delicate; it is a queer paradox that a
reader at once hates to think and yet wants to be made to think. But
that is a reader's condition. With equal readiness he will welcome
climactic movement and continue to read, or welcome any premature fall
in tensity and throw the story aside.
To show by example the results that may be achieved by use of the device
of movement to a climax is impracticable; these matters that cannot be
displayed by pungent quotation the student must dig out for himself by
intelligent reading. Almost any successful story will display climactic
arrangement of its major events. I cannot forbear to mention the
ascension whereby Thackeray leads a reader of "Vanity Fair" up to Rawdon
Crawley's confrontation of Becky and Lord Steyne. Hawthorne's "The House
of the Seven Gables," a book in most respects so totally dissimilar,
shows a like process in leading up to the death of Judge Pyncheon.
George Douglas's "The House With the Green Shutters," less widely known,
is strongly climactic in its latter part. But examples, in short story
and novel, are infinite in number and sort.
To recapitulate, a plot is a problem of human life brought to a fitting
and convincing solution, and consists of a series of events which
displays the fact and result of a conflict between opposing forces,
spiritual and material, actuating and affecting men and women. Therefore
the chief characteristic of a plot is its dramatic value. The definition
may be turned to use not so much in the discovery of plots as in
appraising their fictional value, their power to arouse and hold a
reader's interest, after they have been found or invented.
Since a plot is a conflict between opposing forces, and since fiction
deals with man, the three fundamental plot-themes are conflict between
man and his environment, conflict between man and man, and conflict in
the soul of the same man. Realization of the fact will serve to give
point and definition to the writer's search for the idea.
Finally, a just regard for his readers will lead the writer to cast his
incidents into some climactic arrangement. The first, last, and only
proper aim of a story is to interest, and break in the expected movement
to a climax is fatal to interest.
It would be interesting to go into the matter of plot-analysis at some
length--I have in mind particularly the deficiencies of Poe's
definition that a plot is a series of incidents contrived to produce a
single effect--but this book is for the writer. I shall try throughout
to keep to the writer's viewpoint and to develop nothing not of
practical utility in the work of conception, elaboration, and execution.
Thus far the discussion has been concerned with plot as a whole; it
remains to consider the events, incidents, or situations which compose a
plot. The situations of the plot or story are what its writer must cast
into a climactic consequence, and he must have some standard to measure
each before he can determine its proper place.
The fictionally significant aspect of a plot is that it embodies a
conflict between opposing forces, that is, it is dramatic. Likewise, the
fictionally significant aspect of a situation is that it displays
opposed persons--or at least opposed forces--in conflict. The writer
manipulates his material--preferably before writing--so that two or more
persons, actuated by incompatible motives, are brought into conflict;
there is a moment of indecision; then some person bends the other or
others to his will; and the situation determines. Or the writer brings a
character or group of characters into conflict with Nature, as did Harte
in "The Outcasts of Poker Flat." Here, also, there is a period of
indecision, and then either the human force or the natural force
triumphs.
The dramatic quality of any situation inheres in the struggle between
opposing forces which each presents, and rises or falls with the
essential strength of such forces. Take two instances of conflict
between opposed motives in the same person. In some humorous story a
character may be unable to decide which of two women he wants to marry.
One can cook, let us say, and he is a gourmand; the other is pretty,
and he has leanings that way, too. The dramatic quality in such a story
will be slight, because the motives involved are relatively weak, yet it
will be present. But take the story of a French girl who is outraged by
a German soldier and gives birth to a child by him. Her quality of
patriotism can be built up to great intensity, if the writer wills, even
to the point where the reader will accept an impulse on her part to kill
her child. Her quality as a mother can be built up likewise. It would be
a most effective touch to have her hate the unborn child furiously, then
to arrange matters so that she should be unable to carry out her first
impulse to kill it and be forced to care for it, giving it opportunity
to awaken her dormant maternal instinct. Finally, love for France and
hatred for Germany can be stimulated again, so that she is shown veering
between the impulse to kill and the impulse to cherish. Such a situation
is intensely dramatic, for it involves conflict between two of the most
intense human qualities, love of one's country and love of one's child.
The more terrific the opposed forces in any situation, the higher its
dramatic value.
At first glance it may seem that the relative position in a story of
each of its various major situations is determined by the plot itself,
but that is not the case. It appears to be the case because it is usual
to regard the plot of a story as the entire mechanical arrangement of
the fiction, including the nature and order of the situations, which is
a false view of plot. As the previous discussion has attempted to
demonstrate, plot is merely the conflict between opposed forces of
personality and environment, at least one of the forces being of
personality. Any two stories which display conflict between the same
forces have the same plot, though one may vary widely from the other in
the means employed to give the struggle objectivity and expression in
action.
The writer of fiction should realize the point. The imagination produces
concrete pictures and conceptions, and, when a story is imagined, it
will come to life in terms of concrete people and events, more or less
definitely ordered and determined. But the writer should not stop there.
He should ascertain just what opposed forces of personality or
environment give the story and its situations plot and dramatic value,
and then should seek to find whether he cannot give the basic conflict
involved more effective presentment than will be given by the persons
and situations which he has already conceived. An essentially weak
conception may offer a clue to a dramatic conflict that will have
fictional power if properly developed by persons and situations
different from those first conceived.
It will be perceived how far it is within the writer's power to
manipulate situation in the interests of art, which, in this connection,
means climax. Starting with some basic conflict, which will be his plot,
the writer can devise situation after situation in which the struggle
will become more and more acute, until, finally, it will become so
serious as to involve all the elements of the story. And with the
determination of the dramatic situation which involves all the elements
of the story, the story itself will terminate, for the struggle which it
embodies will have been settled one way or the other. This final
situation will be the climax of the story, and its outcome or result
will be the denouement. The story will be ended because the struggle or
conflict it serves to embody will have ended. One force or the other
will have triumphed.
In considering the question of situation, the writer of fiction is
considering a more specific aspect of the question of plot. Usually he
desires to find a plot of real dramatic value, and likewise he usually
desires to find a situation or situations of real dramatic value. The
dramatic value of plot and of situation resides in the struggle between
the opposed forces which it presents. The more powerful the forces
involved in either case, the greater the dramatic value of the
conception. Each major situation of a story derives its dramatic quality
from the opposition of incompatible motives or forces that endows the
story's plot with its dramatic quality. In fact, it is not too loose to
say that the situation of a story is its plot, provided the main
situation or climax is meant.[B]
The purpose of the action or incidents of a story is to give the
dramatic struggle it embodies concrete expression. That is to say, the
dramatic quality of a story is specific in relation to certain persons
and certain events. Two definite men, for instance, will engage in a
definite fight over a definite woman. The writer will seek to
individualize the persons involved, which is a matter of description and
characterization, and he will seek also to picture the physical struggle
as definitely as possible, which is a matter of descriptive narration.
It is not enough to conceive a plot or dramatic situation; the writer
must also expand it into a story, which should be as concrete and
specific as its nature permits. Only thus can a reader be made to feel
the essential power of the whole conception. It follows that the action
or incidents of a story should be devised with a view to express the
dynamic elements of the plot and that no incident should be
incorporated in the story unless it will serve to build up some one of
the forces involved or else serve to illustrate the conflict of forces
that have been built up previously.
FOOTNOTES:
[B] Polti, in "The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations," uses the word
"situation" in a sense practically inclusive of plot. Plot is a word so
abused that it even might be advisable to abandon it in discussion in
favor of situation. The latter suggests more nearly the requisite idea
of persons keyed for struggle. In particular, plot carries too many
connotations of mere complication, which is not one of its essential
qualities.
CHAPTER V
CONSTRUCTIVE TECHNIQUE OF NARRATION[C]
Importance--Plot and Situation--Spiritual Values of Story--
Order of Events--Introduction--Primary and Secondary Events--
Climax--Naturalness--The End--Preparation--Proportion--
General Considerations.
A story is the relation of what certain persons did in certain places
and under certain conditions of existence, and in its broadest aspect
the art of narration includes the description of persons and delineation
of character, the depiction of scenes, and the suggestion of atmosphere.
But these matters bulk so large in themselves as to call for separate
treatment. My purpose here is to discuss constructive technique, how the
bare story, a succession and progression of events, should be planned
and built up before writing. The problem is constructive, not executive,
and should be considered and settled, within limits, before setting pen
to paper.
In fact, much of the technique of fiction writing concerns matters of
conception and construction. Giving the story its verbal flesh after it
is thoroughly mapped out in mind in accord with the canons of the art is
in truth a more or less simple matter to the writer who has any command
of language and literary facility. The result may not be a
masterpiece--which is a significant idea, justly elaborated, and
perfectly told--but it will possess one of the elements of a story
worthy to live. The trouble is that so many writers set about the task
of expression when all they have in mind is the merest germ of an
undeveloped idea or story, and then are forced to wrestle with
construction and with language at one and the same time. Each task is
great enough for the undivided attention of the ablest artist. I believe
that in the end the constructive task is pretty well done, but that the
more strictly literary task to give the conception verbally perfect
expression is usually somewhat slighted. We have so many well conceived
and elaborated stories, and so very few so perfect in expression that
they deserve to live, a fact indicating that construction can be learned
by nearly all, though literary power seems to be incommunicable. The
proper attitude for the beginner, who has not the facile practice of his
art at his fingers' ends, is to treat the first draft of his story as
merely tentative and an aid to development.
ORDER OF EVENTS
The discussion of plot and situation in the preceding chapter was
pointed to emphasize the importance of the constructive phases of
technique. A plot is not merely a climactic sequence of events or
happenings; a plot is some human struggle, some conflict between opposed
forces, that finds concrete expression in a climactic sequence of
events; and an infinite number of persons and incidents may be devised
to give specific expression to a single fundamental plot idea. Having
fixed upon a plot, the writer of fiction should realize precisely what
is the human problem or struggle involved, and should consider just what
sort of characters and just what sort of incidents will give most
effective, most interesting expression to the particular story idea.
This he should be the more ready to do because a story usually comes to
mind ready formed as a series of events, and only infrequently is the
first combination the best, that is, the one which will present most
forcefully the underlying plot, struggle, problem, or essential story
idea. The writer of fiction has for material vast infinity of imaginable
characters and imaginable events; he should manipulate that material to
a narrowly specific end, the end of giving most effective expression to
his particular story idea or plot. In other words, he is an artist, and
must devise and re-devise, select and reject, arrange and re-arrange
that with which he deals.
Another condition of his art requires the fiction writer to master the
technique of construction and always to practice it before approaching
his strictly executive task of writing. A story is usually more that a
mere physical spectacle, more than a sequence of physical happenings.
Each event, each situation is fictionally significant or interesting by
virtue of its relation to the natures or spirits of the persons
involved. Through the physical tissue of what happens runs the psychical
thread of personality, relating part to part and rendering the whole
indeed one story. A story is a thing of spiritual values as well as a
physical spectacle, and it cannot be written adequately by visualizing
its events and following them with the pen. Some part of its spiritual
value rests in necessary implication from what happens, but not all. The
rest must be brought out deliberately by the writer, and he cannot hope
to do so to the full unless before writing he realizes the necessity and
shapes his work accordingly. The point is of very great importance. It
would be hard to overestimate the number of potentially fine stories
that have been ruined through failure to realize that the main
situations or happenings of each fiction could not have full effect on a
reader unless many subtle matters of personality and spirit were
deliberately brought out in advance.
The first concern of the writer who has found his bare story is to
determine the order in which to cast both its major and minor events.
The necessity that the more important happenings of the story be given
some climactic arrangement, to hold and stimulate the reader's initial
interest, has been touched upon before, but the general ordering of
events is a matter of such importance that it will be discussed at
length.
The aim of any story is to interest, and the writer should endeavor to
touch his reader's interest as quickly as possible. Long, purposeless,
and therefore dull introductions--usually the result of the writer's
having set to work with no very definite idea of what he has to
do--should be avoided; the writer should consider precisely what his
story is, and then how he may best set it in motion without delay. The
technique is easy to state but hard to meet. Perhaps it may be possible
to set off with a happening sufficiently unique and striking in itself
to arouse a reader's interest; descriptive touches as to setting or as
to a character may be employed; or--after the fashion of some modern
writers--one may indulge in a little philosophical overture forecasting
the nature of the tale. A classification of the several ways to open a
story might be made, but it would not be useful. In the first place,
each good story is perfectly unique; in the second place, independent
reading of fiction will show the ways much more completely than mere
statement. One slight matter is perhaps worth noting. Often inherently
dull introductory matter can be given piquancy on the lips of a
narrating character.
The writer should not distort his story merely to begin it
interestingly. The aim of fiction is to interest, but the person to be
interested is the cultured reader, not the mere sensation-sop. If a
particular story is forbidden by its content to begin with a rush, it
should not be wrenched and distorted to that end. The writer who seeks
merely to cater to current tastes with each tale will do well to devise
fictions that will subserve his purpose naturally. Thereby he will
achieve his aim the more easily, and may spare the reading public much
inferior work. But it is always well to make quite sure that any story
cannot be begun swiftly before adopting the more leisurely approach.
Kipling's "Without Benefit of Clergy" might have been begun so much less
invitingly by one less skilled.
The more complicated the plot, the more difficult it will be to arrange
its elements justly. The events of the structurally simple story usually
can be related in chronological order; one gives place to the other
without effort or preparation. The story with a complicated plot is not
so simple to order justly. In the structurally simple story nearly all
events have a primary value; each is a definite step in the climactic
ascension of the whole. In the story of complicated plot, on the
contrary, there are a comparatively small number of events having this
primary value in that they are definite steps in the climactic
ascension, and there are also a comparatively large number of minor
events having only a secondary value in that they serve to give the
primary events naturalness, intelligibility, and effect. Thus, in the
story displaying the conflict of two characters, the chief events will
be those giving the struggle the most intense expression, and the minor
events, having only a secondary value, will be those which serve to
prepare the various conflicts and to build up and vitalize the two
opposed persons. Even if these minor events are only secondary in
intrinsic significance, they are essential to the story, and the task of
its writer--no easy one--is to order its primary events so that they
will form a climactic ascension in point of tensity and interest, and to
order its secondary events so that they will function naturally in
endowing the primary events with the fullest measure of significance to
the reader.
Each story is unique and characteristic, and of course very little
specific advice can be given as to the just ordering of events, primary
and secondary. There are two main necessities; the story must be told,
and it must be told plausibly. The first necessity, that the story be
told, requires that the writer take care, not only to set forth its
primary events with due elaboration, but also to develop its characters
into individualized human beings--an office chiefly performed by the
secondary events--and to make due preparation for each successive
primary event, that the reader may fully understand its import. The
second necessity, that the story be told plausibly, requires that the
events be ordered naturally as well as climactically, be told in
accordance with the canons of life as well as of art. The difficult task
of the writer is to picture his single phase of life so deftly and with
so little apparent forcing of his matter that the whole will be endowed
with the significant simplicity of art and yet have the naturalness of
life. Of course it is hard, and of course it takes long and patient
practice to conquer the secret. That is why the writer who has full
command of technique is so rare.
The story itself largely determines the order of its primary events, for
their succession is the story. But the secondary events are as largely
subject to the control of the writer, who may devise, adapt, and order
them almost at will, and in just and natural ordering of them lies much
of the secret of verisimilitude. They are the mortar that binds the
stones of the edifice, and by slighting them many a fine initial
conception has been rendered feeble in execution. They need not be
elaborately treated; in fact, the technique to be acquired is to relate
them in due subordination to events intrinsically more important, though
giving them an easy and natural flow and succession. But the minor
events must be ordered justly, that the story may march becomingly from
major event to major event, and therefore the writer must struggle with
their ordering. No rules capable of statement regulate the matter; the
writer can only be told its importance and urged not to consider his
story fully developed and ready for writing simply because he has
determined the order of its main events.
Perhaps the whole philosophy of the ordering of events, major and minor,
can be stated broadly to be that in ordering the more important events
of a story the writer must regard chiefly the necessities of climax,
that is, of art, while in ordering the secondary events he must regard
chiefly the necessity to be natural, that is, to achieve verisimilitude.
Art is life raised to a higher power, and the struggle of the artist is
to present his phase of life as simply and pungently as can be done
without entirely severing the relation between his conception and life
itself.
One function of the secondary events of a story is to prepare the
elements of the main events. In the love story, John meets Joan that he
may subsequently make love to her. Another function of the secondary
events is to develop character. In London's "The Sea Wolf" most of the
earlier episodes and many of the later are narrated to build up the
impression of Wolf Larsen's ruthlessness.[D] It follows that any minor
event will serve a double purpose when devised and placed so that it
will forward the mechanical progress of the story and also illustrate
character. Tarkington, in "Monsieur Beaucaire," begins the story with a
scene over the card table which not only gives the barber-prince his
necessary introduction to society but also shows the stuff of which he
is made. In constructing his story before writing, the author should
select and place each incident with an eye to its serving as many
purposes as possible. The story will gain thereby in compactness and
uniformity of interest. It is golden advice to urge the writer not to
accept the secondary events of a story as they first come to mind, but
to re-arrange and re-devise until each happening performs as many
functions as the necessities of the story permit.
There is nothing particularly new and striking about the main events and
situations of many stories that not only are getting published to-day,
but are truly interesting and worth while. Their interest--and therefore
their worth--derives from their writers' management of secondary events.
By varying the nature and succession of minor events, any fundamental
plot theme, such as the "eternal triangle" of two men and a woman, may
be utilized a thousand times without essential loss of interest. As has
been stated, the naturalness and plausibility of a story depend largely
upon just selection and ordering of its secondary events, and, curiously
enough, in a very real sense the reader's interest depends on the minor
happenings. The plot must be a real plot and an interesting one, but, at
the last of it, the plot is only the skeleton. The minor events of the
story are the comely flesh that gives the conception the attraction and
interest of life. The figure may be grewsome, but it is accurate. A
thousand skulls look much alike, but no face is precisely the same as
another, even to the casual eye. The flesh makes the difference, and the
minor events of a story are its flesh.
The chief necessity in beginning a story is to begin it interestingly,
if its nature permits; the chief necessity in ending a story is to end
it--and there is no proviso as to its nature. A story is a fiction with
a plot, and a plot is a chain of events with a definite and significant
ending. The writer who has discovered or devised a true plot upon which
to hang his fiction will not struggle on aimlessly after narrating the
climax, for there will be nothing more to relate. I believe that absence
of true plot is most often responsible for the story that stumbles to a
lame and inconclusive halt--not an end--rather than executive inaptitude
on the writer's part, for the climax of a true plot is a hard thing not
to feel and realize. At any rate, when the climax is reached and the
story told it must be ended, justly but finally. There is nothing more
for the reader, unless the characters are caught in another chain of
significant events. "But that is another story."
To recapitulate, a story is a progression of events, major and minor.
The story largely determines the character and order of its main
events, for they are the story itself; nevertheless the writer should
give them climactic arrangement, as far as possible. The minor events
are more subject to his control, and he should devise and order them
chiefly with an eye to verisimilitude and plausibility, not forgetting
that each should serve some definite purpose and will be the more useful
if it can be made to serve more than one.
PREPARATION
Two sorts of preparation must engage the attention of the writer of a
story. The first is purely mechanical, and is the result of the writer's
realization of the physical necessities of his story. If at some
definite point the hero is to be found in some definite place by other
characters, the writer must prepare to place him there. The necessity is
obvious, and this sort of preparation requires little discussion, except
the warning that in the complicated story it will demand close
attention. But the second sort of preparation is a much more delicate
matter, and in a sense is a great part of the art of fiction. I have
reference to the necessity that the writer individualize and vitalize
the people of his story so that the significant situations of the
fiction may have maximum effect on a reader. The problem is not so much
how to delineate character, which will be taken up later, as to plan the
whole story so that it will have body and not be a mere report.
There are three fundamental types of story, it is true, in that a story
may emphasize any one of its elements of character, of complication of
incident, or of atmosphere. But the story which depends for its appeal
on the novelty or intrinsic significance of the bare succession of its
events is somewhat rare; at least it is true that fiction concerns man
primarily, and in the normal story, or, better, in the story which the
necessities of plot-structure most frequently produce,[E] the man is as
important as the event. Since the person is as important as the event,
the persons involved in any significant situation of a story must be
developed as well as the situation itself. The aim is to give the
situation maximum effect, and the concern of the writer is not so much
to develop character, strictly, as to give the body of reality to the
whole story. It is about human beings, and, however novel and
interesting the plot, unless they are given some of the vivacity and
concreteness of real men and women the fiction will be devoid of the
breath of life. The first sort of preparation builds up the physical
situations of a story; the preparation now under discussion builds up
its people.
Nothing is more common than for the beginning writer to devise or
discover an eminently worthy plot idea, and nothing is more uncommon
than for him to utilize it to the full and develop it adequately. The
reason for the failure is simple. The better the plot, the more humanly
significant its situations. They are so very significant, in the case of
the fine plot, that the beginning writer is led to think that his only
task is to outline them. But merely to outline a significant situation
or event will not give it the emotional force that fiction must possess,
otherwise the newspaper would be read in tears. The event must involve
real people, if the emotion of a reader is to be aroused. A newspaper
item may state that Mary Smith has committed suicide because deserted by
her lover, but though the casual reader will realize intellectually and
abstractly the pathos of the situation, his emotion will not be stirred
unless he is a more sensitive human precipitate than most readers. To
move his heart, rather than his mind, some particular Mary Smith, like
no one else in the world, must walk a living presence through the story
built about such a theme. The difference is between merely reporting
events and picturing life.
Like most other matters of technique, this of giving individuality and
life to the people of a story is based on the necessity to achieve
verisimilitude and interest. Human life is a great complex of millions
of men and women doing certain things, and in a story, which is a
picture of a phase of life, the people must be drawn with as much
definition and detail as the events, or the reader will not accept the
fiction as fictional truth.
In great part, the matter of developing the human elements of a story is
a problem of construction, as is the matter of preparing a natural
succession of events. The writer first must order his main events as
interestingly and plausibly as possible. He then must devise and order
his secondary events as to give the requisite spacing and naturalness to
the whole, and he also must take care to provide for such action on the
part of the characters that when they come to the main events they will
be something more than named abstractions. Of course, the writer has
means at command to vitalize his people other than to draw them in
actions illustrating their peculiarities, but it is difficult enough at
best to vivify a character, and the writer who depends solely on his
powers of direct description will achieve very meager results. I have
already referred to the part the secondary events of a story play in
developing character, and have cited London's "The Sea Wolf" as an
instance. A great part of the book is devoted to a succession of
episodes which develop Larsen's striking personality. It is very
skillfully done in this respect, and the result is as memorable a figure
as exists in recent fiction. The beginning writer and even the more
practiced hand will do well to note the great part that just
construction must have played in producing the impression of the Wolf's
virility and ruthlessness.
It all may be termed a matter of drawing character, but the necessity is
to realize that in constructing his story before writing an author must
prepare for the development of its people as well as for the development
of its events. The work will have to be done sometime, if the story is
to be more than a report, and it should be done before writing, so far
as it is a matter of construction. The writer who has conceived a plot
of real merit has done much, but he has not done all. The striking
events of a plot are significant only in relation to the people of the
story, and a reader must be made to feel the reality of the characters
as well as the reality of the events. The single concern of the writer
of fiction is to lay on his page a picture of a phase of life that is
effective because it is plausible, and he must give equal attention to
the persons of the story and to what they do, both in construction and
execution.[F]
PROPORTION
In planning his story with an eye to giving it the greatest semblance
of reality, the writer has one means ready to his hand which is the more
useful because somewhat mechanical. I have reference to the preservation
of proportion.
Fundamentally, proportion is a mere matter of space or length. In real
life events vary in point of the time they take to happen, and in the
story proportion may be preserved by dividing the available space justly
between the several events. Normally a love scene will take longer to
happen than a murder, which is an affair of one high-pitched moment, and
in planning and writing a story which contains both a love scene and a
murder a proper amount of space should be assigned to each. In the story
the reader passes through days in an hour and through hours in a minute;
he must not be made to pass through minutes in an hour, and through
hours of events as important to the story in a minute. A murder may be
more important in the story than a love scene, and so require emphasis,
but it cannot be stressed by great expansion without violating
proportion. Emphasis must be laid by narrating vividly, a matter to be
taken up in its proper place when discussing executive technique.
The mere fact that the writer must narrate the main events of his story
in some detail usually will lead him unconsciously to preserve
proportion so far as they are concerned. The space necessary to develop
a murder will have roughly the same relation to the space necessary to
develop a love scene as the duration of a real murder has to the
duration of a real love scene. But the minor events of a story function
on a different plane from its major happenings, and so cannot be
proportioned similarly. If a murderer must sail from London to New York
to reach his victim--either on account of the place necessities of the
story, or to fasten an impression of his animosity on the reader--the
minutes of the days of the voyage cannot be related with as much detail
as the minutes of the actual killing. In planning a story, the writer
should make provision for the secondary events and the strict matter of
transition, as well as for the main events, but he should not plan to
narrate in detail until a main event is reached. The beginning writer
seems very often to be afraid to narrate in general terms, even where
the story demands no detail, and the fault probably arises from a vague
feeling that the reader will not accept the author's say-so, but must be
"shown." To an extent, that is true. However, where the matter is of
transition, merely to forward the mechanical progress of the story,
detailed narration is distortion. It will inevitably cause loss of
suspense and interest.
Realization of the relative importance to the story of each of its parts
will give the writer the standard whereby to distribute its space. In
writing the short story the preservation of proportion is most
essential; there is so little space at hand that two words cannot be
wasted in detailed narration where more general narration will suffice,
and it all comes under the reader's eye so nearly at one moment that any
disproportion in the treatment of events of equal importance will be
detected. In the novel, lack of proportion may be a more secret fault,
but it will have its effect.
GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
In casting about for a story the writer should regard chiefly the
intrinsic merits of each idea that comes to him. But when he has pitched
upon his theme or plot, and approaches the task of construction and
elaboration, he should change his viewpoint and strive to view his
conception with the cold eye of a reader. A reader has nothing to go
upon except what the writer sets down, and realization of the fact will
lead the writer in construction to provide for every matter essential to
give the story full appeal. Unless it is developed completely, it will
fail to impress one who has no knowledge of the conception except that
imparted by the writer's words. Nothing essential can be omitted or
slighted without risking failure. On the other hand, nothing unessential
can be brought out without obscuring the real story. Careful
construction and elaboration of the initial idea is necessary before
writing, that the author may have his hands free for the difficult task
of execution, and in construction the writer should occupy the detached
position of a reader when estimating what should be developed and what
suppressed.
FOOTNOTES:
[C] In discussing the principles of construction it is obviously
impossible to illustrate the text by quotation, for just construction
could be shown only by reprinting an entire story. The reader must
supplement what is said here by independent analytical reading. The only
fortunate thing about the situation is that the matters which can be
adequately illustrated by brief quotations--such as vividness in
narrating--are chiefly matters of execution and least subject to
profitable objective study.
[D] This story is a particularly instructive instance of how much the
secondary events are within the writer's control, and also of how much
depends on their just selection and ordering. The twin plot themes of
the book are the struggle of man with man and the struggle of man with
nature; they are developed almost entirely without aid from the
superficially main events of the story, Maud's coming aboard the
schooner and what follows. That is precisely the artistic defect of the
work.
[E] The three fundamental plot themes are man's struggle with nature,
man's struggle with man, and man's struggle with himself. The human
element is inherently a part of any plot.
[F] It would be difficult to overstate how much of its appeal such a
story as Fannie Hurst's "T. B.," reprinted in "The Best Short Stories of
1915," owes to its author's careful development of the personality of
Sara Juke. Yet the story is not strictly a character story. In less
competent hands the bare story would have been nothing; as it is, it is
a fiction of real worth and significance.
CHAPTER VI
EXECUTIVE TECHNIQUE OF NARRATION
Mode of Narration--First Person Narration--Variation--
Advantages--Disadvantages--Plausibility--Third Person
Narration--Advantages--Avoidance of Artificiality--
Consideration of Length--Maintenance and Shifting of Viewpoint
--Attitude of Author--Style--Product of Technique--
Congruity of Manner--Story of Action--Fantasy--Story of
Character.
After conceiving and elaborating his story, the writer must approach the
task of expression. The two preliminary matters to be settled are the
mode of narration and the manner or style for which the story calls.
Though preliminary, they are most properly treated as part of executive
technique.
MODE OF NARRATION
The question of how the story may be told most easily and effectively is
much more delicate than merely to choose between narration in the first
or third person, for numerous variations in these two basic methods are
open to adoption. Each method or viewpoint has its advantages and
disadvantages, and that method should be chosen which most nearly suits
the particular story.
Variation in first person narration--the typical form of which is to
have a chief character tell his own story--is possible by shifting the
story from the lips of a major character to those of a less important
personage, who is often little more than an animated mouthpiece. The
device is really an attempt to escape from the inherent disadvantages of
typical first person narration. A just regard for the reader often
requires that more be set forth than any major character could naturally
know, but some minor character may be made to pass ubiquitously through
the whole tale, viewing the essential acts of all the major characters
and relating them to the reader. Or the device may be carried farther,
and the story told in the first person by a succession of characters.
The chief advantage in first person narration by an important or the
most important character lies in the fact that the reader is accustomed
to a more or less one-sided presentation of events. That is the way he
sees things himself, as a bare succession of happenings springing from
the conflict of human motives of which he can be sure only of his own.
Something happens, and he knows within limits why he did his part in
bringing it about, but the part of the other man is obscure to him, and
he can go only on conjecture and inference. So the story told in the
first person has perhaps a slightly greater flavor of plausibility than
that told in the third person.
There is another advantage in first person narration. Some stories
cannot be launched with a rush; the significant action must be prefaced
by a considerable mass of introductory matter that is essential to full
understanding of subsequent events; and this introductory matter can
often be made less repellent to the reader when it is artfully
introduced by a narrating character. The speaking character can be made
to tell his story with a smack of personality that appears somewhat
affected and flippant when the writer employs the third person. This
flippancy and affectation is apparent is some of Kipling's and O.
Henry's work, and probably repels as many as it attracts.
Generally, throughout a story, first person narration makes easier the
attainment of uniformity of style, if that be a merit in the case of all
stories as it unquestionably is in the case of the short story, with its
necessary emphasis on all formal unities. During the vogue of the
historical novel some years ago this mode of narration was ridden to
death simply because it lessens for the writer the labor of catching
what he conceives to be the tone of the particular society he is
portraying. As to the general matter of tone, Stevenson refers, in a
letter, to "The Ebb Tide," as "a dreadful, grimy business in the third
person, where the strain between a vilely realistic dialogue and a
narrative style pitched about (in phrase) 'four notes higher' than it
should have been has sown my head with grey hairs." Had the story been
told by one of the characters there would have been no difficulty of the
sort.
"The Ebb Tide" probably could not have been told effectively in the
first person, for much of its power derives from the way in which
Stevenson limns the lovely South Pacific scenes through which its poor
lost derelicts of people move. Their speech is "vilely realistic"
because they are common men, sea captain and clerk and middle-class
Englishman, and the lips of no one of them could have been made to state
effectively without distortion what his eyes saw. Any story has certain
matters which must be brought out justly if the whole is to have due
effect, and if first person narration renders it impossible to treat
such matters justly that mode of narration cannot be used. The example
of "The Ebb Tide" shows that in estimating the availability of narration
in the first person the writer must consider that the very nature and
being of a character may seal his eyes to many matters. Moreover, the
reader will not readily accept in a narrating character the literary
power that is even expected in the author writing in the third person. A
story is a whole, its people existing subject to the limitations of its
necessities, and the mode of narration must function naturally with the
rest, and not demand impossibilities.
One difficulty of first person narration is not so much fictional as
psychological. If the story demands emphasis upon the good qualities of
the narrator, his bravery, devotion, love, generosity, or a thousand
others, a reader will soon weary of the eternal I. It is safe to say
that if a character must be shown in a strongly favorable light, let it
be done by the author or some other character, not by himself, unless
the moral perfection of the person is a matter solely of inference from
his acts.
The very complicated plot can rarely be handled well in the first
person, particularly if the events cannot be cast in chronological
order. On the other hand, first person narration is often a useful
device to keep from the reader's knowledge, unobtrusively and without
seeming effort, matters which he must not learn prematurely. Conan
Doyle's Watson is an instance. Thus the chief disadvantage in employing
the narrating character, that he cannot be made omniscient, may be
turned to advantage. The whole question is one to be determined only
after careful consideration of the demands of a particular story, and
the chief need is not so much to state rules for its solution as to
point out the real necessity that the writer know what he is about
before pitching on a mode of narration. It is a prevalent habit, and a
bad one, to accept a story as it first takes shape in the mind,
narrative, point of view, and all.
There is a tendency among writers of fiction, particularly those who are
just beginning, to narrate in the first person, perhaps because they
feel that the reader will accept the story more readily in such shape.
Other things being equal, first person narration is a trifle more
natural and plausible than narration in the third person, but its
limitations are much more strict. At the last of it, readers are so
thoroughly habituated to the impersonal viewpoint that a writer does not
gain much in power to convince by adoption of the other. A story is
taken up because a story is wanted, and a reader is willing to accept
the conventions of the art. So incredible a fiction as Poe's "A Descent
into the Maelstrom" was probably best told in the first person, but the
average story need not strain so sedulously for verisimilitude so far as
the mechanics of narration are concerned.
Typical third person narration is illustrated by the story of action,
the wholly objective story, told in the third person. The impersonal
relator is omniscient, but his omniscience is not so obtrusive as in the
story that touches on the facts of the soul. This omniscience of the
relator is the chief advantage of third person narration, but the writer
will only infrequently find it advisable to assume omniscience absolute
and entire, involving knowledge of all the objective acts and the
subjective motives of all the characters. If the story is largely
analytical of more than one character the writer may be forced to "know
it all" in order to display his material. But omniscience carried to
such a point tends to be over-artificial, the underlying cause of much
of the artistic weakness of the story which lays bare the souls of all
characters instead of one or two of the most significant. In his own
daily life the reader is accustomed to a one-sided presentation of the
social spectacle, and complete omniscience on the part of the
impersonal relator of a fiction has the taint of artificiality, or even
of bare exposition. And exposition, which implies a mathematically
complete presentation, is not fiction, which implies shading and
suppression, absolute or temporary.
Any suggestion of artificiality may be entirely avoided, and the
frequently necessary advantages of third person narration retained, by
assuming omniscience as to all the physical facts or events of the story
while rejecting omniscience as to the souls of the characters, except
the souls of one or a few. Thus the writer may escape the inherent
limitation of first person narration, that the story is told by a
character of definite powers and knowledge, and retain the chief
advantage of that mode of narration, the more or less single viewpoint,
corresponding with a reader's own outlook on life and its happenings.
This hybrid method of narration utilizes the virtues and rejects the
vices of the two strict types. By telling his story in the third person,
but from the viewpoint of one or two of the chief characters, an author
may assume the desirable omniscience as to objective facts and the
desirable limitation upon knowledge as to subjective motives. This is
not to say that the nature of a particular story may not call for strict
first or third person narration; it is merely a suggestion that the
virtue of each type may be utilized at once. Each story makes certain
demands, and the writer is not confined to two means of satisfying them.
A reader of any catholicity of taste can recall numerous examples of the
various modes of narration, and in future reading it will be directly
profitable for the writer to note the narrative device employed, and how
it has aided or hampered the development of the fiction.
More extreme devices have been, and may be employed, such as
Richardson's of telling a story in a series of letters. They are curious
rather than important.
In estimating the availability of a mode of narration the writer should
consider the matter of length. The adoption of the omniscient viewpoint
may carry the story unnecessarily beyond due limits, for the writer who
has taken to himself the privilege to know all facts and motives may be
led into depicting events or analyzing character for his own pleasure,
rather than because the story demands it. If a story demands space,
space it must have, but the essence of literary power and artistry is to
write with the utmost brevity and pungency compatible with adequate
expression. The story must be told; every essential phase must be
brought out; but unsignificant words can only do their bit toward
spoiling the desired effect. The adoption of a too inclusive mode of
narration may lead the writer astray; conversely, the mode of narration
most nearly suited to the necessities of his story will aid in holding
his pen to the line. If the story is of action, unconcerned with motives
save by implication, and the writer tells it in the first person, or in
the third person from the viewpoint of a single character, he will be
led to confine himself to the depiction of the panorama of events, which
is the work in hand. Yet, if the story requires that the reader be given
a direct view of the spiritual workings of large numbers of characters,
the writer must tell it in the third person and assume universal
knowledge as to event and spirit. A mode of narration must be
deliberately selected for each new story with due regard to its
idiosyncrasies, and to make the choice correctly cannot fail to be of
great advantage.
It is often stated that having settled upon what is most narrowly termed
a mode of narration and most broadly a viewpoint the writer should be
sedulous not to depart from it. The writer of the short story should not
alter the narrative point of view, for obvious reasons. The short story
is short; it depends for its power upon dramatic effect; and in writing
it there is no occasion or excuse for any shifting of outlook. The short
story is artistically the strictest form of prose fiction, that is, it
is most strictly subject to the conventions of the art of fiction, of
which maintenance of the point of view is one. But the novel is a much
looser form, and unless the particular story is uniquely uniform in
texture, as the frank tale of adventure, shifting the point of view
often will prove necessary.
If the author of a novel has chosen to write with knowledge of the inner
workings of more than one of the characters, but not with knowledge of
all, so that he relates from the viewpoint of several characters, rather
than the viewpoint of some impersonal observer to whom the souls of all
are open, numerous shifts of viewpoint will be necessary. They are
implied in the mode of narration itself. The world cannot be looked at
through the eyes and souls of a succession of characters without a
succession of shifts. All this merely amounts to saying that certain
modes of narration which cannot be employed in writing the strict short
story may be freely employed in writing the novel. In the case of the
novel, or of the story that is somewhat brief without being a strict
short story, the task is not so much never to shift the viewpoint,
rather always to indicate the shift with clearness. Just as the reader's
interest should be the first consideration in choosing matter and
devising a plot, clarity to the reader must be considered when any shift
in the narrative point of view becomes necessary. Let the shift be
avowed and obvious; any uncertainty can lead only to confusion.
It follows that writers who have chosen to tell their stories from the
viewpoints of several characters will prove the most profitable for
study as to how to shift viewpoint without confusing a reader. Chiefly,
of course, they are novelists, Eliot, Balzac, Hardy, Scott, and an
infinity of lesser lights. Galsworthy, for instance, in each of his
chapters succeeds in producing a singular unity of effect, with
corresponding clarity for the reader, chiefly by making his shifts of
viewpoint coincide with shifts of scene and person.[G]
Inextricably bound up with the mode of narration and the general
narrative viewpoint of the story is the matter of the author's own
attitude toward the story. The distinction between these matters is
fine, but real. It is possible that a given story may be told,
adequately so far as the bare story is concerned, in any one of several
different ways. Narration in the first person by a major or a minor
character may be employed, or the author may write in the third person,
assuming knowledge of all events and of the inner workings of one, some,
or all of the characters. But there is another consideration. The whole
conception may depend for its appeal upon what I am forced to call very
roughly sympathy for a character or group of characters, and a mode of
narration must be employed which will enable the author to express his
sympathy that he may evoke the reader's.
I do not wish to shift the discussion into the field of ethics, but the
point is that any chain of events may be colored in the telling
favorably or unfavorably to the persons concerned. A coarse instance is
afforded by a prosecution for crime. In making their final arguments to
the jury, prosecuting attorney and attorney for the defense alike deal
with the same facts in evidence, but on the lips of one the defendant
will be a glorified and persecuted saint. A more delicate instance is
afforded by Stevenson's "The Ebb Tide," previously mentioned. Robert
Herrick commits all the criminal acts committed by Huish, the cockney
clerk, except to attempt murder, but the reader pities Herrick while
hating Huish. This is so because Stevenson writes of Herrick with a
measure of sympathy, and tells the story, though in the third person,
almost entirely from his point of view. But of Huish we have only his
acts and words. The treatment of him is wholly objective.
The story which develops a chain of events tending to show a character
or group of characters in a strongly unfavorable light should not be
told too objectively, or the reader will be repelled by its uniform
ugliness, a matter which must be considered in choosing a mode of
narration. It is not a point of morals, but one of contrast. If the
writer has no sympathy for one or some of his people, or writes in such
manner that he cannot express any predilection, they will appear all of
a piece to a reader, with a consequent loss of interest. In this very
real sense the story whose characters are uniformly repellent may be
said to be bad art.
Generally, therefore, the writer must consider the necessities of his
story in determining the mode of narration, and must also consider his
own attitude toward its people and their doings. Its appeal to him may
lie in his sympathy for some person or persons, and unless that sympathy
be given expression in some way the story may not have an equal appeal
to a reader. The perfect fiction is a congruous expression of a phase of
life, and in it the more subtle matters of life, sympathy and
predilection have their place.
STYLE
The term style has been so exclusively used to denote an author's style
in general, rather than the style of some particular work, unlike the
styles of others by the same hand, that it is apt to suggest something
different from what is meant by its use here. To show the distinction I
cannot do better than to quote from Stevenson's "A Note on Realism."
"Usually in all works of art that have been conceived from within
outwards, and generously nourished from the author's mind, the moment in
which he begins to execute is one of extreme perplexity and strain.
Artists of indifferent energy and an imperfect devotion to their own
ideal make this ungrateful effort once for all; and, having formed a
style, adhere to it through life. But those of a higher order cannot
rest content with a process which, as they continue to employ it, must
infallibly degenerate towards the academic and the cut-and-dried. Every
fresh war in which they embark is the signal for a fresh engagement of
the whole forces of their mind; and the changing views which accompany
the growth of their experience are marked by still more sweeping
alterations in the manner of their art. So that criticism loves to dwell
upon and distinguish the varying periods of a Raphael, a Shakespeare, or
a Beethoven."
In the case of Stevenson himself this process is especially manifest.
With a unique earnestness he sought from the first to adapt his manner
to his matter, and, since he grew with the years, each new tale concerns
itself with matter a little more humanly significant than its
predecessor, and is told in keeping therewith. The result is that such
stories as "The New Arabian Nights" series, fantastically conceived,
fantastically told, give place to "The Master of Ballentrae," "The Ebb
Tide," and "Weir of Hermiston," fictions worthy in every sense, the
last, indeed, an unfinished masterpiece. And with each new story the
author's style gains in dignity and restraint, in the process of
adaptation to the work. I mention Stevenson in this connection not
because he is greater than many others, nor his work finer, but because
its range was so wide that it called for many manners or styles. All
will prove a profitable study, for they are all Stevenson's and yet all
different. Writers who have been somewhat more narrow in choice of
matter have not been under so pressing a necessity to vary their manner
with each new work.
Possibly it is unwise to emphasize the matter of style at all when
writing for the apprentice author. Telling the story is usually task
enough, and style in general is a product rather than an item of
technique, therefore best sought indirectly. But even if the more
delicate tones and shadings possible in writing are beyond the reach of
all save the most skilled, preservation of the broader congruities of
manner is possible by the beginner, and must be achieved if his work is
to be even passable. Such a story as "The Scarlet Letter" could not have
been told in Dickens' usual manner, nor could "The Pickwick Papers" have
been written in the style of Meredith. The manner of telling any story
must be reasonably adapted to its content, or the whole will be a shabby
burlesque, destined never to achieve the laurel of print. The writer
need not fret about his individual style, but he should ponder seriously
the manner for which each story calls.
The story chiefly of action is best told without great verbal
elaboration, which is unnecessary and tends only to hinder the march of
events. The whole thing is an objective presentation, and the open
character of its elements renders unnecessary laborious and involved
explanation. The bare facts carry their own warrant openly displayed,
and when they are shown the task is done. Sentences will tend to be a
trifle shorter than in other work, and paragraphs likewise. The writer's
chief aim will be to write not only clearly but vividly, for the story
of action must depend chiefly upon vividness for its verisimilitude. The
simpler figures will be profitable to employ, provided they are not too
good and do not call attention to themselves rather than the image they
are used to precipitate. The writer's general endeavor will be to follow
stylistically the rapid movement of events. A reading of Dumas will show
this method in use.
If there is a touch of fantasy about the tale, greater elaboration in
sentence structure and some freakishness in the choice of words will be
permissible and even desirable, for true verisimilitude lies in the
accordance of manner and matter. The story with a thread of unreality in
its essential composition will not gain in power by matter of fact
telling; the measure of verisimilitude which it can attain is strictly
limited by its very nature, and can be gained to the full only by
frankly and avowedly making it what it is.[H] An instance is afforded by
Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights" series or Hawthorne's "Tanglewood
Tales."
The story placing emphasis on character, or the story of atmosphere,
unless the atmosphere itself be the onrush of events, will normally
demand more leisurely treatment than the story of action. The movement
of the story will be slower, and the style will be correspondingly
affected. Dealing with motives directly will force the writer to qualify
and distinguish, adding to length of sentences, while to precipitate an
atmosphere in words is a matter of such delicacy that the writer will be
forced to employ every resource of language, with a consequent
complication in structure. The necessity is to hold the tale in mind
before writing until its totality of character is realized, then to
strive to commit no gaucheries in execution. The right word for the
right place must be sought, indefinite advice which will prove of little
aid in writing a single story, but which will yield ample returns if
followed through careful and intelligent writing of many stories. In
dealing with this matter of manner or style, and the necessity that it
be in keeping with the particular story in hand, it is impossible to
give examples on account of lack of space. I can only refer the reader
to almost any fiction that has resisted the tooth of time. To leave
prose for a moment and turn to poetry, a reading of Milton's "L'Allegro"
and "Il Penseroso" will demonstrate the possibility and display the
result of adapting the manner to the matter. The style of both is
unmistakably Milton's alone, marked by his dignity and elevation of
tone, yet one is as sweet and light as a summer breeze, the other as
grave and sombre as a minor chord.
A reading of Jane Austen will prove profitable in this connection. Her
books are all of a piece in manner and matter. Perhaps the writer who
must please the somewhat hectic modern market will find little profit in
imitating her choice of matter, but the skill with which she weaves her
pattern will be instructive. Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights"
perfectly fits the garment to the body. The story is wild and its style
is wild. George Douglas's "The House With the Green Shutters," a more
recent book and one of singular power, is well done in this respect. It
is essentially rugged and bitter, and the author, though without
particular distinction of individual style, strikes no note not in
keeping with the general conception.
FOOTNOTES:
[G] I will note here a matter suggested rather than stated by the
general discussion, which is intended to be practical rather than
philosophical. Narration must be in the first or third person, but the
two fundamental types are personal and impersonal narration, and the
line between them is not drawn by the pronouns I and he. Truly, when the
story is told in the first person, the writer adopts the personal
viewpoint of the narrating character, but when the writer chooses to
write in the third person he also adopts the personal viewpoint of the
character of whose soul he assumes knowledge, if he does so as to the
soul of only one. This is the case, with a shifting personal viewpoint,
when the writer assumes knowledge of the minds and souls of several
characters, but not of all. Assuming knowledge of the soul of a
character necessarily involves looking at the world through his eyes. It
results that the only real impersonal viewpoint is to write in the third
person and either to renounce all knowledge of motives or to assume
knowledge of all events and the spirits of all the characters, when the
reader will gain the impression of an impersonal relator rather than of
a shifting personal viewpoint. The point is of no great importance, but
realization of it may be of some slight service. In particular, if the
story is told in the third person, but from the viewpoint of a single
major character, universal knowledge of events cannot be assumed.
[H] The writer should strive to realize this fact. The necessity is not
to make the reader accept a story as literal truth, but to make him
accept it as fictional truth. Many of Poe's stories are unbelievable,
but their power is felt to the full though they are not believed. In
other words, the reader will grant the author his premises.
CHAPTER VII
EXECUTIVE TECHNIQUE OF NARRATION
Narration Method--Story of the Commonplace--Story of the
Bizarre--Vividness--Suspense--Emphasis and Suppression--
Matter of Weight--Expansion and Vividness--Primary and
Secondary Events--Transition--General Narration--Blending
of Elements.
The writer who has discovered a good plot, so that his interest will not
flag in writing, and who has fully developed the conception, so that he
can have a single eye to execution, will meet few obstacles in setting
down the whole story. Difficulties there will be in plenty, but they
will be self-imposed. That is to say, it will be very easy to give the
justly elaborated conception expression approximately adequate, but it
will be very hard to give the conception verbally faultless expression.
If the writer strives merely to tell the story, the labor of writing
will be slight; if he strives to write with artistry and power, it will
be infinitely great.
This book is on the technique of fiction writing, not on the technique
of writing; my aim is to discuss only the matters of technique peculiar
to the art of fiction. Thus, in this chapter I shall have occasion to
state that the important event should be emphasized, and that vividness
in narration is a means to that end, but how to narrate vividly is a
question of rhetoric generally, and it is not my purpose to discuss it.
Moreover, it is emphatically true that the capacity to narrate vividly
cannot be attained by the mere study of examples, the only way in which
the matter can be studied. The writer can only strive constantly in his
work to write with definition and force. It is all a matter of practice,
whether or not the capacity must be inborn. But the principle of fiction
technique, that the important event should be emphasized in some way,
whether by vividness or expansion, is subject to direct statement and to
assimulation from the direct statement. Therefore statement of the
principle is all that a work on fiction technique need attempt. The rest
lies with the writer himself.[I]
The first chapter on the executive technique of narration took up the
two preliminary problems of the mode of narration and of manner or
style; this second chapter has to do with certain other matters that
must be considered in writing a story, viewed as a chain of events.
Character, atmosphere, and dialogue will receive separate treatment, and
for discussion of the strict technique of expression the reader is
referred to works on rhetoric, except that in discussing the technique
of description in the next chapter I shall have occasion to touch upon
nicety of expression.
METHOD
The method of narration is necessarily influenced somewhat by the style
the writer of a story strives first to find and then to maintain, but
the style does not entirely determine the method, or the method the
style. The matters are distinct, though mutually influential.
There are two kinds of lives, or at least two kinds of incidents, the
humdrum and the bizarre. Likewise and consequently there are two kinds
of stories to be told, the humdrum and the bizarre. Each may be
fashioned into something worth while. Whether the matter of a story is
worth while depends on the significance of the phase of life involved;
whether the story itself is worth while depends on its plausibility or
verisimilitude, which depends on the way it is constructed and told.
The humdrum story, that deals with the more common actualities of life,
the little details that are significant only in combination or in
relation to certain characters, can be told as simply as the writer
desires. He has only to set down the succession of details that
constitutes the story. Each new incident will not only advance the
narrative progress of the story, but the commonplace nature of each
incident in itself will tend to give the fiction its necessary
plausibility. Simply because each incident is common and of universal
occurrence the reader will accept it and the story compounded of such
elements. Matter of fact phrasing, not phrasing too "literary" in spots,
is most suitable.[J] Such a story does not require high lights of
expression, and they should not be interpolated.
The story dealing with the strange and wonderful is another matter. In
writing it the author's aim is the same as in writing the commonplace
story, to give it plausibility and verisimilitude, but the task is
infinitely more difficult. Proper construction will aid greatly, and in
execution the writer has two resources.
The first is the method of Defoe, and consists in showing the reader the
strange course of events through a lattice of familiar thoughts and
things. It is an attempt to give the essentially bizarre story something
of the plausibility and power of the story of the commonplace by
interpolating universally familiar matters of detail. They are
unnecessary to the bare story, but they are useful to give the reader a
thread of connection between his own experience and the strange fiction.
The method is persuasive, and requires a high degree of craftsmanship to
employ well. Familiar and unfamiliar must be woven together with a
careful and skilful hand. And obviously it requires space. Examples are
Defoe's work--often cited--such as "Robinson Crusoe" or "A Journal of
the Plague Year," or Balzac's "Peau de Chagrin."
The second method to give to the strange and wonderful verisimilitude
and plausibility is not persuasive, but consists in writing with such
vividness, definition, and force that the verbal picture will be
accepted without question as visual evidence. Seeing is believing. In
fact, the more strange or wild any chain of events, the deeper their
impression on a reader, provided always that he be made to see them.
Obviously, to the use of this method the highest powers are necessary,
the power to select the salient and distinctive points of the thing to
be drawn, excising all superfluous matters, the power to choose the
exact and vivid word, and, finally, the power--more, seemingly, than
that of mere word-selection--to precipitate reality in words, one
sometimes manifested by works the diction of which is not particularly
dynamic. It is the method of Stevenson and Kipling, among others, and to
the author who can employ it no degree of novelty in the physical
conditions of a story is a deterrent. He can show the thing like a
painting or a stage scene, and his reader runs breathlessly with him,
caught up in the race of events. The method demands the highest
imaginative powers in the author, that he may actually see the matter he
is depicting, in detail and in the mass, and the highest executive
powers, that he may fix its living image with his pen.
This method to present the bizarre event with all the color and body of
reality--of course it may be employed in depicting the commonplace as
well, though expression of the commonplace should not be too
heightened--is the method of the severe literary artist, because it is
compatible with the most perfect unity and the greatest brevity. To
arouse emotion in a reader the writer must have something more than mere
color in his work, but to make a reader see anything it is only
necessary always to search for the right word, which is the word both
exact and dynamic. Yet if this is the sole condition, it is a doubly
hard one. The perfectly exact word is so elusive, and, when discovered,
it is so often lacking in the requisite force. Exactness is not enough;
the needful word is the one that not only will fit the author's vision,
but give it life; and it is here that figurative language finds its
office. "I saw a fleet," is exact. "I saw a hundred sail," is equally
exact, and much more vivid.
Vivid, direct writing, which does not depend on connection with his own
experience to hold the reader, is the most practicable narrative method
for use in the short story or novel of incident, that is, in the typical
fiction, where interest centers in the course of events. In other words,
it is the typical narrative method; the method of coaxing the reader
into believing the strange by showing it in juxtaposition with the
familiar is a variation from type. Narration consists in stating what
happened. If what happened was commonplace, the reader need only be told
it; if what happened was strange, the reader must be coaxed or forced to
believe it, and the writer must either coax him or narrate with such
vividness and power that the word will have the body and reality of the
fact.
SUSPENSE
The term suspense is often misused to characterize a quality of
narration supposed to result from the employment of some technical
device. What is meant, of course, is that a good story, involving real
people, justly related, will hold its reader's interest until the
denouement is reached. Suspense means continued interest, and can result
only from sound conception, careful elaboration, and adequate narration
of a story. The reader who is shown real people in an interesting
situation will be in a state of suspense through his curiosity and
desire to learn what happened next. There is no technical device to
create suspense, for suspense can result only from the worth of the
whole story. I mention the matter thus briefly on account of the misuse
of the term. If there is any technique to create suspense, it is the
technique to order a story's events in a climactic ascension, and is not
an executive device.
EMPHASIS AND SUPPRESSION
A story is made up of a succession of happenings, some of major and many
of minor importance, and in telling it the writer must emphasize the
most important events to impress their significance upon a reader. It
will not do to relate the whole, indiscriminately, with as much
vividness as the writer can command, for the fictional value of the
whole necessarily resides in the relation between its chief events, and
that relation can be made apparent only by showing them in high relief.
The most important events of a story must be emphasized; events of some
but not of controlling importance must not be stressed too much; and the
very trivial events, which are usually matter of transition, necessary
only to the mechanical progress of the story, should be suppressed by
narrating without detail and in general terms.
Fundamentally, emphasis and suppression are matters of weight, while
proportion is a matter of space. There is a real relation between
preserving proportion and laying emphasis, but it is accidental. When an
important event is somewhat complicated, as a love scene, proportion
requires that it be narrated in detail, for it would take some time to
happen in reality; and due emphasis will be secured by detailed
narration. But when an important event is inherently simple in character
and brief in the time it would take to happen, proportion requires that
it be given not too much space, while emphasis requires that it be
stressed. To stress such an event, the writer's sole recourse is
vividness in narration. The physical details are few, but they must be
made strikingly impressive. Where an event is essentially complicated,
a knot of many details, emphasis may be laid by detailed narration, by
expansion, and proportion will not be violated. In the case of the
important but inherently simple event there are no great number of
details to be marshalled on the page, and the writer can only strive to
invest his few words with power.
The writer should consider the matter of proportion in allotting the
space of a story before writing, as has been stated. In writing, the
mere fact that he follows events in detail with his pen will lead him to
emphasize by expansion, where the subject matter naturally calls for
that mode of securing emphasis. Where expansion is impossible on account
of the absence of details to be narrated, the writer's realization of
the importance of the event will lead him to cast about for the vivid
word. That is to say, in dealing with the important events of a story
the way to write is to visualize the procession of happenings and to
follow them with the pen in detail, seeking the vivid and emphatic word
where the event is vivid and emphatic. When the event is a bundle of
many details, setting them down will emphasize the episode by expansion;
and where the event is simple, and a mere detail in itself, as a blow,
vividness in narration will counterfeit the force of the episode.
Normally, the succession of chief events will take up the greater part
of the space available for a story, and, if the work of construction has
been done properly before writing, the writer will have his attention
free to visualize each successive happening and to picture it. The
difficulty will be to express perfectly. The process is natural. It
cannot be too strongly insisted that the way to write the strict story
part of a story is to strive to see the thing in imagination and to get
it on paper with the breath of life in it. By following his vision with
his pen the writer will take care of the matters of proportion and
emphasis without detached calculation looking to that end.
But that is not quite true in narrating secondary events and writing
general matter of transition, the part of a story that gives the main
events a natural sequence and proper spacing, or that develops
character. The main events exist only for the story; they are the story.
The secondary events and matter of transition exist largely for the sake
of the reader. Such events prepare the characters, for instance, that
the main situations may have true and full dramatic value to the reader,
while the general matter of transition serves to give the main events
spacing and the story plausibility. And in narrating secondary events,
and writing matter of transition, the writer cannot have an eye solely
to imagining the procession of little happenings and to reproducing them
in detail. If he wrote so they would bulk as large as the main events,
and the short story would fill a novel and the novel an encyclopaedia.
Instead, the writer must realize the reasons that led him to choose or
devise each secondary event while constructing the story, and must
narrate each minor event so that it will just perform its designed
function and no more. The major events of a story are primarily
significant, and it is sufficient to narrate them so as to counterfeit
them as they would be in reality. The minor events of a story are not
significant in themselves, but only in relation to something else, and
in narrating them the writer should develop only their significant
phases. They must be given reality and verisimilitude, but their aspects
and implications unimportant to the story should not be detailed and
thereby stressed. All aspects of the main events are to be detailed
simply because all aspects of the main events are important to the
story. They are the story.
The discussion is somewhat abstract and involved, but necessarily so.
The technique will be easier to practice than it sounds, much easier,
for instance, than to narrate the simple but important event with due
emphasis through vividness. That necessity is supremely easy to state or
realize, but supremely hard to meet in writing a story. The technique of
handling secondary events and matter of transition is hard to state
abstractly and to grasp from mere discussion, but when it is grasped it
is comparatively easy to apply in writing, for it calls for no executive
power, merely the negative power to leave out the insignificant.
It will be seen that the process of narrating the minor events of a
story is not natural, but highly artificial. The process of narrating
the main events is natural; it consists merely in imagining and
reproducing them with as much body and color as possible. Where
undivided attention to phrasing is most essential, the writer can give
it; where it is least essential, in setting out a minor event, the
writer must give much attention to what aspects of the episode he should
emphasize. He cannot reproduce it in full detail simply for what it is
in itself. Just narration of secondary episodes and transitional
passages is a matter of calculation; just narration of the more
important events of a story is a matter of warm creation and verbal
power.
TRANSITION
In a sense, all events of a story may be said to have a primary value,
for an event is at least a happening and has some interest for a reader.
But the people of a story must be carried on from event to event, major
or minor, and the story with them. The necessity causes the insertion of
transitional matter in any story that has more than a single episode.
Transitional matter has no capacity to evoke interest in itself, unless
it be so detailed as to form a succession of petty happenings, in which
case it ceases to be strictly transitional. Therefore it should be
gotten over with as quickly as possible. The writer should narrate in
general terms, as has been stated in discussing proportion, the only end
being to forward the mechanical progress of the story. No emphasis need
be laid on such matter. A frequent fault in beginning writers is lack of
capacity to pass from one event to another smoothly and swiftly. Many
seem unable to step from detailed to general narration where the story
demands it, and as a result their stories lose interest. The details of
important events are the breath of life to a story, but details without
fictional purpose only clog the action and discourage the reader's
interest. Matter of transition should be handled as swiftly as can be
done without rendering the whole story jerky and unbalanced. It may be
noted that transitional matter on the lips of a narrating character can
be given piquancy and made interesting in itself, like introductory
matter.
Often transitional matter may be entirely omitted. Thus Maupassant, in
"The Necklace," does not attempt to make the story an unbroken
chronological progression. The nature of each particular story
determines its content, of course, and where matter of transition is
necessary or desirable the writer should realize its nature and handle
it accordingly.
BLENDING OF ELEMENTS
Each story has two primary fictional elements, the people and the
events, but it has three mechanical elements, the action, the speech of
the characters, and the matter descriptive of persons or places. And
while each tale is unique, and any one of these mechanical elements may
largely preponderate over the others, nevertheless the normal fiction
will devote a substantial amount of space to each. If the story
permits--a proviso implied in discussing any matter of technique--it
will be well for the writer to strive to distribute and intermingle its
action, dialogue, and descriptive matter in a texture pleasing because
varied. The whole should not be built of unwieldy chunks of description,
speech, and action succeeding one another with monotonous regularity,
but descriptive touches should be intermingled with the dialogue, and
narrative matter with word-painting and the speech of characters.
Obviously this is no absolute rule, and is perhaps not ever a matter of
strict art, but it is true that a reader quickly wearies of much of the
same thing, and a story is for its reader. Moreover, a story as a whole
will gain in verisimilitude by judicious distribution of its mechanical
elements. The matter is merely another phase of the necessity to give a
fiction the seeming of life, and should not be neglected, the more so
because it is easy and a mechanical matter. The beginner can afford to
neglect no chance for success.
FOOTNOTES:
[I] In connection with the subject of vivid narration of an important
event I might illustrate the text by brief quotation. Unlike matters of
construction, matters of strict execution can be shown by pungent
quotation. The question is not whether it is possible, but whether it is
useful. Take this sentence from Stevenson's "Kidnapped": "His sword
flashed like quicksilver into the huddle of his fleeing enemies." It is
perfectly descriptive, alive as the sword was alive in the hand of Alan
Breck. But no one by reading it can learn to write like it, a capacity
to be gained only by long and arduous practice, such as Stevenson's. A
good many books on technique have more quotation than text, and while
free quotation lends a superficial weight to the whole, it is not of
much practical use to one seeking to learn how to write. His own reading
will offer him examples in plenty, and the most or even the only useful
thing a work on technique can do for him is to state the principles he
should try to follow in his own work.
[J] I once read a story in manuscript wherein a character related a
commonplace tale of woe to another, with the result that the other's
eyes "glistened with hot tears." Not only has the expression been worked
to death, so that it has no primary freshness for a reader, but it is
too artificial and strained for a story of the commonplace.
CHAPTER VIII
DESCRIPTION
Interest--Secondary Function of Description--Distribution--
Story of Atmosphere--Effectiveness of Distributed Description
--Description of Persons--Example--Analysis--Accuracy--
Mechanical Limitations of Story--Use of All Senses--
Description of Setting--Two Objects--To Clarify Course of
Events--To Create Illusion of Reality--Use of All Senses
Order of Details--Contrast.
All writing is descriptive, in a sense; narration, for instance, is
simply the picturing of shifting physical conditions in a state of
fluxation. But description is usually taken to mean the picturing of
physical conditions more or less static. The term is used so here, for
the technique of describing persons, scenes, and objects generally
requires treatment separate from the description or narration of bare
events. In describing a happening of his story, and in describing one of
the characters, the writer's general object is the same, to show the
person or event with the vivacity of life, but the conditions to which
the writer is subject are somewhat different in each case. To mention
but one difference, normally much more space is available for pure
narration than for pure description. The events of a story are the
story; its people and its setting are drawn only to give the fiction the
highest attainable degree of verisimilitude. And, since the space
available for description in the normal story is somewhat limited, the
writer is under stringent necessity to make each word tell. In narrating
an event, the matter has an interest of its own for a reader apart from
the manner of telling, but in describing a person, scene, or object, the
word is all in all. If the picture is not effective, nothing is
achieved.
In coming to the writing of a descriptive passage, the writer should
realize its secondary function in the story. Except in the case of the
story of atmosphere, and perhaps of the story of character, a reader's
interest will focus in the progression of happenings as such, and the
sole object of strictly descriptive matter is to give maximum
concreteness to the events by depicting their setting and
individualizing the persons concerned. What happens is the first
consideration, not where it happens nor whom it affects. Most stories
might be told without a single word of strict description, and no such
word should be given place in any story unless it will forward the
fiction to a higher degree of verisimilitude.
It follows that descriptive matter should not be written pages at a
time. Its function is to lend body and color to the whole course of
events, therefore descriptive touches should be inserted throughout the
whole course of a story. To give an itemized description of a character
at the start, or to picture the whole countryside through which the
story is to move, is a poor, because ineffective, way to write. Not only
will the reader be repelled by great spaces of description, but he will
forget the attempted picture with speed. The thing to do is to insert a
vivid word here and there where it will do the most good as the story
progresses. Description is for the story, not to give the writer a
chance to heap words.
Numerous successful authors have indulged in lengthy descriptions, but
the worth of their books does not result from the indulgence. Hugo's
description of mediaeval Paris in "Notre Dame" is an example so extreme
as almost not to be in point, but most of the elder generation of
writers hampered the march of their stories by describing at inordinate
length. No matter what the eminence of those who have written so, it is
a technical fault, for it tends to render the story stiff and mechanical
and unnatural. Lengthy description is not only inimical to a reader's
interest; it is perfectly useless in a fictional sense. The sole
function of description is to give body and reality to the story, and
that function cannot be performed unless the descriptive quality runs
through the whole, and the descriptive matter is not gathered into
stagnant pools of words.
Much of the effect of the story of atmosphere may depend upon its
descriptive matter, which may constitute a great part of the whole text.
The fact does not invalidate the general proposition. In discussing the
various aspects of technique, such as this matter of description, the
initial assumption is that only the technique of the normal story will
be stated. The normal story is the story of complication of incident,
where interest centers in the course of events rather than in the people
or the setting. Variants from it, the story emphasizing character and
the story stressing atmosphere, by their very difference call for a
different handling of elements.
Aside from the fact that a single lengthy description of a person
usually will have less effect on a reader than the same amount of
descriptive matter deftly interpolated throughout the whole story, or
the fact that recurrent descriptive touches as to setting will do more
to give body to the fiction than a single lengthy description, the
writer should consider the mere rhetorical difficulty of descriptive
writing. He must stand or fall by the picture he creates. In narrating,
he has another resource than perfection in expression, for the bare
event, apart from the way it is told, will interest a reader. But a
picture will not interest unless it is a picture. Rhetorical skill is
the sole determinant between absolute success and flat failure in
describing. And it is hard enough to find one or two telling descriptive
phrases without contracting with the reader to supply several pages of
them. Not only is a long descriptive passage of questionable value in
the normal story, even when well done, but very few can write a long
descriptive passage well. The matter of emphasis here comes up again for
consideration. Vividness is not absolute, but relative. One vivid phrase
will seem vivid to a reader, but fifty or a hundred together will not.
The reader will become accustomed to the higher level of expression, and
the whole will fail of its object.
In the course of a story the writer will have occasion to describe
persons and--roughly--things. Descriptive writing is descriptive
writing, but the matters for consideration in describing a man or woman
and a countryside are somewhat different, and will be taken up
separately.
DESCRIPTION OF PERSONS
As I have stated in another place, the writer cannot gain much in
capacity to express through the objective study of examples. He can only
practice the art, seriously and intelligently. But Stevenson's brief
story of an episode in the life of Master Francois Villon of Paris,
poet, master of arts, and house-breaker, "A Lodging for the Night," so
perfectly describes the persons involved that it calls for quotation.
The object is not to display perfect use of epithet, rather to
demonstrate the entire adequacy of brief and pungent description.
Villon, after a short introduction, is discovered in a small house with
"some of the thievish crew with whom he consorted."
"A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from the
arched chimney. Before this straddled Dom Nicholas, the Picardy monk,
with his skirts tucked up and his fat legs bared to the comfortable
warmth. His dilated shadow cut the room in half; and the firelight only
escaped on either side of his broad person, and in a little pool between
his outspread feet. His face had the beery, bruised appearance of the
continual drinker's; it was covered with a network of congested veins,
purple in ordinary circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his
back to the fire the cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had
half fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his
bull neck. So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half with the
shadow of his portly frame.
"On the right, Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled together over a scrap
of parchment; Villon making a ballade which he was to call the 'Ballade
of Roast Fish,' and Tabary spluttering admiration at his shoulder. The
poet was a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean, with hollow cheeks and
thin black locks. He carried his four-and-twenty years with feverish
animation. Greed had made folds about his eyes, evil smiles had puckered
his mouth. The wolf and pig struggled together in his face. It was an
eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthly countenance. His hands were small and
prehensile, with fingers knotted like a cord; and they were continually
flickering in front of him in violent and excessive pantomime. As for
Tabary, a broad, complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his
squash nose and slobbering lips; he had become a thief, just as he
might have become the most decent of burgesses, by the imperious chance
that rules the lives of human geese and human donkeys.
"At the monk's other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a game
of chance. About the first there clung some flavor of good birth and
training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in
the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin, poor
soul, was in great feather; he had done a good stroke of knavery that
afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining
from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald head shone
rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant stomach shook
with silent chucklings as he swept in his gains."
The first thing to note about this fine descriptive fragment is that the
persons are definitely placed in the room. The monk before the fire is
the focal point; the others are placed in groups on his right and left
hand. Two objects are achieved thereby; not only does the picture gain
in definition, but it is given a closer relation to the story, which is
partly concerned with what happens in the room. In other words,
Stevenson describes his characters in relation to the story, and does
not merely describe each one as he has occasion to name him, in
isolation, and merely to give a reader a photograph with the name. Each
is described in relation to the story and as he comes up in it.
The second thing to note is the extreme brevity and yet the complete
adequacy of the description of each person. There is no itemizing of
physical details; Stevenson has visualized not so much each man as the
most striking characteristic of each man, and has used all resources of
language to precipitate that characteristic in words. The result is
impressive. A reader gains a clear and definite impression of the
individual personality of each character, his spiritual nature as well
as his physical aspect. The definition of the impression in each case
results from the author's having described nothing possessed by any two
in common. He has shown the unique quality of each person, which is all
that is necessary.
This point of the technique of describing persons is nine-tenths of the
whole technique. The fiction writer's proper aim is not so much to build
up a physical picture of a character by itemizing the details of hair,
complexion, stature, and so forth, as it is to reproduce the person's
unique quality as an individual human being. Whether the character is an
individual depends on the writer's creative genius, but whether he seems
individual depends on his actions and the way he is described. Stevenson
states Villon's salient physical characteristics, then remarks that the
wolf and pig struggled together in his face, and a reader has the man,
soul and body. The same method, though with less emphasis, is employed
in picturing the others of the group.
A fundamental philosophical truth is that all knowledge is relative; we
know things only in comparison with things previously encountered and
classified. It follows that the difference between objects or persons is
the ultimate factor that determines the character of each. The single
unique quality of any character in a story is what the author must bring
out in describing him if he is to have on paper the vivacity and
distinction of the author's mental conception. In real life a reader
meets many men and women; he does not take trouble to phrase the
individual peculiarity of each, but he is acutely conscious of it. Each
acquaintance stands for something unique and distinctive in his eyes,
though he does not and perhaps could not state the essential difference
from all others. And, in describing a person in his story, the writer
must state that person's essential difference from all others, if the
person is to have the reality of life for a reader, for the reader's
only contact with the person is through the writer's words. In life, a
reader will eliminate unconsciously from his mental representation of an
acquaintance all qualities which the latter has in common with others,
but verbal representation of a human being is shadowy enough at best,
and in a story the writer himself must eliminate his characters'
undistinctive qualities for the reader, or the persons will lack
definition and concreteness.
The third thing to note about this example of the description of persons
is a matter which it really does not illustrate, because it is perfect.
My statement is at once obscure and paradoxical, but what is meant is
that in describing a person it is possible to give so sharp a verbal
etching that the reader will believe from the word itself. It is the
descriptive aspect of narrating with such vividness that the word will
be accepted as visual evidence. As it happens, in describing Villon and
his fellows, Stevenson has found a combination of words which not only
constitutes a vivid picture but is one that a reader may realize in
imagination without loss of definition. Yet take such a touch as
Balzac's in stating that a character had a face like a glass of dirty
water. It is extremely vivid, but its vividness is somewhat superficial,
that is, if a reader dwells on it, and tries to realize the image in
thought, it will lose much of its definition. I have first-hand
knowledge of the effect on only one reader, of course, myself, but
others have confessed when questioned the same inability to realize this
particular figure without loss of definition. The important point for
the writer of fiction is that a reader will not pause to scrutinize too
closely an image verbally definite and striking; such a descriptive
touch as to a minor character will perform its office of giving the
person vivacity and reality better than a more accurate but less
heightened itemization of details. In a sense, Stevenson's passage is an
example of this matter. It happens that his description can be realized
without loss of definition. That is why it is perfect. But the same
method may be employed less justly and yet have more effect than any
mere itemization of physical details.
In picturing his chief characters the writer should not rely solely upon
mere verbal sharpness. If the story is worth while they will have
saliences that should be stated as well as exemplified in action. But
the minor characters are shadowy enough at best, and any verbal
definition that can be given them will lend concreteness to the story.
If an image is not only striking, but also subject to realization
without loss, so much the better. If an image is verbally happy, but not
intrinsically perfect, it may be better to employ it than to write with
just accuracy, but flatly. I believe that accuracy should be sacrificed
to verbal felicity in no other place than in describing a minor
character. It is an aspect of the general fictional necessity that mere
literalness be sacrificed to verisimilitude, and, in describing a minor
character, verisimilitude requires that a reader be faced by what will
seem to him to be a definite person rather than some particular definite
person. Strictly speaking, a minor character need not be individualized,
but he must be drawn with the nearest possible approach to the sharp
outlines of life. A major character must be drawn definite and unique; a
minor character need only be drawn definite, though the more individual
he is made the better. It follows that any sharp verbal image applied to
a minor character will help the story, though it is within limits
meretricious.
The three matters here discussed are the main considerations to be held
in mind in describing the persons of a story. They should be described
in relation to the story, as they are placed by their actions in the
physical setting. In describing the chief characters, the persons whose
personalities have significant relation to the course of events, the
writer should endeavor to bring out with maximum definition and
vividness the single unique quality of each person. In describing minor
characters, the chief necessity is to give each person as much as
possible of the definition and concreteness of life. Little space is
available, and the writer may be driven to the use of somewhat
meretricious figures. The perfect figure should always be sought, but,
if the writer cannot discover it, the literally inaccurate figure may be
better than flat writing. The general aim in describing persons is to
give maximum concreteness to the whole story, and seeming definition
will sometimes serve as well as actual definition.
The necessity that the persons of a story be described in relation to
it, as they are placed in the physical setting, requires the writer to
realize and regard the mechanical limitations of the story. If it is
told in the first person, and the narrating character perceives another
in the distance, a description of such other must confine itself to
matters apparent at a distance, until the persons approach one another
more nearly. The same necessity obtains where the story is told in the
third person, from the viewpoint of a character who perceives another at
a distance. Likewise, a character cannot be made to see through a house
or a mountain, or into the next room. A good deal has been written on
this matter, but from the wrong angle. The writer should not seek to
master any abstract rule, rather should he strive to visualize his
story as he writes it from the viewpoint from which he has chosen to
tell it. If he thus gets into his story--so to speak--in describing he
will unconsciously respect the mechanical limitations of the tale.
Moreover, his attention will be free for the severe task of expression,
undistracted by any eye to precepts. The way to write a story is to
picture it in imagination and then follow it with the pen. That is why
the unpracticed writer of high imaginative powers so often writes with a
strict if unconscious regard for the laws of technique.
Another matter as to the description of persons is worth noting. The
normal human being has more than the sense of sight; he can also hear,
feel, and smell; and verbal appeals to these other senses may be
effective. The timbre of a character's voice or sound of his step, the
feel of his hand when shaken, an odor about him or her, as of liquor,
tobacco, or perfume, may be stated in describing the person. Such a
descriptive touch will often prove most useful, the more so because it
gives another dimension to the person, so to speak. A very
characteristic and impressive thing about Uriah Heep is his handshake,
as Copperfield felt it. The matter will be taken up again in discussing
the technique of describing setting, where it necessarily bulks
larger.[K]
DESCRIPTION OF SETTING
The fiction writer is a dramatist in a very real sense, but he cannot
depend for verisimilitude on flesh-and-blood actors, painted scenery,
and actual properties. He must describe all these to give his narrative
verisimilitude and concreteness. The technique of describing persons has
been discussed, and the technique of describing mere objects, the
properties of the piece, as the dagger in the hand of an assassin, is
not so much a part of the technique of fiction writing as of the
technique of writing generally. It is a question of rhetoric. But the
technique of describing setting is fictional as well as rhetorical, that
is, the writer of a story must consider what he should describe as well
as how he should describe it. His task is more highly selective than the
task of describing the persons or properties of a story. They, with the
events involving them, are the story itself; the setting or environment
of a story is not, but merely a background or stage. Yet sometimes, as
in the story of atmosphere, the setting is an integral and necessary
part of the fiction. One can only say that it all depends.
The fact that the setting is sometimes an integral part of the story and
sometimes not requires the writer to set to work differently in each
case. In writing the story of atmosphere, he must regard the setting as
matter for reproduction for its own sake; in writing the normal story,
he must regard the setting as only incidental, and should not reproduce
it unless it will clarify the course of events for a reader or serve to
give the story its necessary body and verisimilitude. The story of
atmosphere requires separate treatment; here only the technique of
describing the setting or settings of the normal story will be
discussed.
As stated, in writing the normal story, the story where interest centers
in the course of events, the writer should not describe setting unless
it will clarify the course of events or lend body to the fiction in the
eyes of a reader. General descriptive writing has no other function to
perform. Realization of the truth will lead the writer to avoid writing
great wastes of description. If a particular story requires that the
physical conformation of a neighborhood be brought out, a few words will
serve better than many, which will be apt to confuse a reader, at least
to distract his attention. And when the writer describes setting to give
body to the story, scattered descriptive touches will have more effect
than a single isolated block of description. It is another aspect of the
matter touched upon in relation to the description of persons. If a
story is to have the concreteness, definition, and vivacity of life, the
descriptive quality must permeate the whole, both as to the persons and
their environment. The descriptive task cannot be performed once and for
all, either as to the persons or the setting, any more than can the
narrative task. Narration continues throughout the whole story, for it
is the story; and likewise description must accompany each item of
narration, for description is a part or quality of the whole story.
Where the course of events is rapid, their quick succession itself will
counterfeit a like phase of life, for an observer would note the events
as such rather than the setting. But where the course of events is more
leisurely, descriptive touches as to setting will be necessary to
counterfeit such a phase of life, for an observer would note not only
the happenings but the environment. A story is a reproduction of a phase
of life; a reader is its observer; and the whole must be made to stand
forth for him as a like spectacle would show in actuality.
The other necessity, to describe setting to give the story
verisimilitude and concreteness, is not so easy to state or to meet.
This sort of descriptive quality must permeate the whole story, as has
been stated, and its introduction or creation is a matter of difficulty.
The natural and best way to conquer the secret is to imagine the course
of events while standing in the shoes of the person from whose viewpoint
the story is told, then to follow them with the pen. Where the character
would see, feel, hear, or smell something, state the impression upon
him. Thus Kipling, in "Without Benefit of Clergy": "... Old Pir Khan
squatted at the head of Holden's horse, his police sabre across his
knees, pulling drowsily at a big water-pipe that croaked like a
bull-frog in a pond. Ameera's mother sat spinning in the lower veranda,
and the wooden gate was shut and barred. The music of a marriage
procession came to the roof above the gentle hum of the city, and a
string of flying-foxes crossed the face of the low moon." Kipling has
imagined his story as Holden would have lived it; not only has he seen
through Holden's eyes--he has heard with Holden's ears. In this short
passage there are three appeals to the sense of sight, and two to the
sense of hearing, and the fragment gains by stating more than visual
impressions.
The point has been noted in discussing the description of persons, but
is worth enlarging upon. The task to give body to a story is difficult
enough at best, and the writer can afford to neglect no resource. Of
the five senses whereby man grasps his surroundings, that of taste is
probably of the least use to the writer of fiction, but the senses of
sight, hearing, smell, and touch can all be utilized on occasion. A
character at sea can be stated to have seen the waves of a storm, felt
the force of the gale and the sting of driven raindrops, and tasted the
salt spray, also to have smelt the musty fo'c'sle when he went below.
Each touch will give the whole picture added reality for a reader. The
beginning writer is too apt to rely solely upon what a character might
have seen. A deserted house has a smell as characteristic as its look,
and the fragrance of violets is as impressive as their visual beauty.
Night can be told from day by its odor, and the rattle of typewriter
keys in an office is as suggestive of modern industry as a serenade is
of other days and other loves. A hero can feel his sweetheart's soft or
toil-roughened fingers as well as see her expensive silks and furs or
cheap and much worn dress. Life is a complex of many sense-perceptions,
and the more numerous and varied the fleeting impressions a character is
stated to have caught, the more concrete and real the story will be for
a reader.
Description is the usual but not the happiest term to denote the general
process of giving a story a setting and environment of its own. It
is--or should be--more than a process of picturing scenes. All pertinent
and striking sense-impressions received by the characters should be
stated, for only thus can the nearest approach to a just representation
of life be made. The writer's sole object is to give the fiction the
concreteness of life; it cannot be achieved by painting verbal pictures
for a reader, but it can be achieved by stating justly the ways in which
the totality of the environment affected the characters. Just
description of the characters will make them real men and women for a
reader, and just statement of the effects of their environment upon them
will make them real people in a real world.
The strictly executive technique of descriptive writing is not hard to
grasp, however hard it may be to find the desired word. The impression
that the character involved would receive first should be stated first,
and the less striking details should follow in the order of their
impressiveness. Thus, in describing a skating scene, the observant
character should be made to see the interweaving skaters and to hear the
peculiar whinnying ring of the skates before he sees individuals. It is
all a matter of visualizing, or, better, visualizing and living th
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