THE WRITING OF THE
SHORT STORY



BY

LEWIS WORTHINGTON SMITH, A.M.

DRAKE UNIVERSITY, DES MOINES, IOWA




D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO

Copyright, 1902,
By D. C. Heath & Co.

It is a pleasure
to be permitted to associate
with this little book
the name of my friend
Professor L. A. Sherman
of the University of Nebraska.

SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS

In the author's classes the three stories in the volume entitled "Three Hundred Dollars" are first studied because of their simplicity, and these are followed by parts of "The Bonnie Brier Bush," and then by the stories from Bret Harte. Mrs. Phelps Ward's "Loveliness" is especially valuable for illustrating methods and devices for making a simple theme dramatically interesting. Students are required to mark stories with the symbols and discuss them with reference to the principles of which this little book is an exposition, but no recitation on the book itself is required. Perhaps one-third of the time in the class-room is spent in discussion of the short themes written by the class, and when convenient these are placed on the board before the class for that purpose. In the theme work following the suggested subjects the effort is made to confine instruction and practice to one thing at a time, but at the conclusion of the work of the term each member of the class is required to hand in a complete original story.

WRITING OF THE SHORT STORY

Narrative Forms

1. Elements of the Story.—This little volume is meant to be a discussion of but one of the various forms that literature takes, and it will be first in order to see what are the elements that go to the making of a narrative having literary quality. A story may be true or false, but we shall here be concerned primarily with fiction, and with fiction of no great length. In writing of this sort the first essential is that something shall happen; a story without a succession of incidents of some kind is inconceivable. We may then settle upon incident as a first element. As a mere matter of possibility a story may be written without any interest other than that of incident, but a story dealing with men will not have much interest for thoughtful readers unless it also includes some showing of character. Further, as the lives of all men and women are more or less conditioned by their surroundings and circumstance, any story will require more or less description. Incidents are of but little moment, character showing may have but slight interest, description is purposeless, unless the happenings of the story develop in the characters feelings toward which we assume some attitude of sympathy or opposition. Including this fourth element of the story, we shall then have incident, description, character, mood, as the first elements of the narrative form.

2. A Succession of Incidents Required.—A series of unconnected happenings may be interesting merely from the unexpectedness—or the hurry and movement of the events, but ordinarily a story gains greatly in its appeal to the reader through having its separate incidents developed in some sort of organic unity. The handling of incidents for a definite effect gives what we call plot. A plot should work steadily forward to the end or dénouement, and should yet conceal that end in order that interest may be maintained to the close. Evidently a writer who from the first has in mind the outcome of his story will subordinate the separate incidents to that main purpose and so in that controlling motive give unity to the whole plot. Further, the interest in the plot will be put on a higher plane, if in the transition from incident to incident there is seen, not chance simply, but some relation of cause and effect. When the unfolding of the plot is thus orderly in its development, the reader feels his kindling interest going forward to the outcome with a keener relish because of the quickening of thought, as well as of emotion, in piecing together the details that arouse a glow of satisfaction.

3. The Character Interest.—We can hardly have any vital interest in a story apart from an interest in the characters. It is because things happen to them, because we are glad of their good fortune or apprehensive of evil for them, that the incidents in their succession gain importance in our emotions. We are concerned with things that affect our lives, and secondarily with things that affect the lives of others, since what touches the fortunes of others is but a part of that complex web of destiny and environment in which our own lives are enmeshed. In the story it is not so true as in the drama that, for the going out of our sympathies toward the hero or the heroine, there should be other contrasting characters; but a story gains color and movement from having a variety of individualities. Especially if the story is one of action, definite sympathies are heightened when they are accompanied by emotional antagonisms. In "The Master of Ballantrae," we come to take sides with Henry Durrie almost wholly through having found his rival, the Master, so black a monster. Such establishment of a common bond of interest between us and the character with whom our sympathies are to be engaged is a most effective means of holding us to a personal involvement in the development of the plot. There must not be too many characters shown, the relations between them must not be too various or too complexly conflicting, but where the interplay of feeling and clashing motives is not too hard to grasp, a variety of characters gives life and warmth of human interest to a story.

4. Uses of Description.—Inasmuch as there are other interests in our lives than those which are established by our relations with our fellows, interests connected with the material world about us, any narrative will probably have occasion to include some description. It may be necessary merely as an aid to our understanding of some of the details upon which the plot turns, it may help us to realize the personalities of the characters, and it is often useful in creating background and atmosphere, giving us some of the feelings of those with whom the story deals as they look upon the beauty, or the gray dullness, of the changing panorama of their lives. Stevenson's description of the "old sea-dog" in "Treasure Island" is an excellent illustration of the effectiveness of a few lines of description in making us know something very definite in the man.

5. Rossetti in "The Bride's Prelude," a story in verse, after merely glancing at the opening of the tale, devotes eight stanzas to description introduced for the purpose of background and atmosphere. Two of them are given here.