until we are so old that we will dry up and blow away with the
wind, or go to heaven in a 'Chariot of Fire.'" Turning to the
doctor Joe continued: "You know Will has a girl, and he is awful
pious. If one looks off his book in church, even to wink at his
best girl, he thinks it an awful sin. And that the guilty one
should be dipped in holy water, or do penitence for a week."
It is a common trick for the novice to put into the mouths of his
characters just such stale jokes and cheap jests, with the idea that he
is doing something extremely funny. He is, but his audience is laughing
at him, not at his characters.
But most exasperating of all is the author who, while making his
characters suffer the most dreadful afflictions, lets them think and
talk only commonplaces still, like the poor sawdust dolls that they
are:
"What is the matter with you, Annie?" I said one day, about five
months after she had come home....
"You will know some time, Cicely," she answered....
"Why can't you tell me now?" I asked.
"You will know soon enough," she answered. "By the by," she went
on, "I am going to Mr. Denham's to-morrow."
"Alone?"
"No, I am going with Cousin Ivan."
"When will you be back?" I asked, for Mr. Denham lived twenty
miles away.
"I don't know," she answered sadly.
The next morning I went over to see Annie off. I had been there
but a few minutes when her cousin, Ivan Carleon, came. He was
about six feet high, with dark, brown eyes, and black hair and
moustache. He was a quiet man and I liked him. When they got
ready to start, Annie came and kissed me.
"I am ready now, Ivan." And then he helped her into the buggy,
and they drove off.
Two days afterwards, as I was sitting under the shade of a tree,
where Annie and I had played when we were small, Miss Jones, an
old school fellow, came along.
"Have you heard the news?" she asked, before she had got up to
me.
"What news?"
"Why, Ivan Carleon has killed Annie."
"Explain yourself, Daisy," I answered anxiously.
"Well," she said, "we ain't sure Ivan killed her; but every one
thinks so. You know that big gate, about a mile this side of
Mr. Denham's? Well, day before yesterday Ivan came running up to
Mr. Denham, and said that Annie had shot herself, down at the
big gate. They all went down and found Annie stone dead. A note
in her pocket merely stated that she was tired of life. But
every one thinks Ivan killed her, and that he wrote the note
himself. I hope Ivan didn't do it," she said, as she started
off, "for I liked him."
The evening of the third day, as I was sitting under the same
tree, I was startled to feel a hand on my shoulder. Looking up,
I saw Ivan Carleon standing by my side. I gave a low cry, and
shrank from him. He turned pale to his lips.
"Surely you don't think I murdered her?" he said.
"I don't know what to think," I answered, bursting into tears.
"Sit down and tell me all about it," I continued, moving for him
on the bench.
He sat down beside me; and laid his head in his hands.
Imagine, if you can, the bearer of terrible news who would unburden
herself with as little excitement as Miss Jones exhibits; or a real girl
who, on hearing of the tragic death of her bosom friend, would be merely
"anxious" and bid her informant "Explain yourself!" The author of this
could not have had the slightest conception of the tragedy which he had
created, or even his poor lifeless puppets must have been galvanized
into some show of real feeling.
It is neither necessary nor desirable that you should report every
conversation at length, even though it bear upon the story. Do not
reproduce long conversations simply to say something or to air your
views on current topics. It is just as much a fault to introduce useless
chatter as it is to fill page after page with descriptions of unused
places. If the hero and the heroine, by a brief bright conversation, can
put the reader in possession of the facts concerning the course of their
true love, they should be given free speech; but if they show a tendency
to moralize or prose or talk an "infinite deal of nothing," shut them up
and give the gist of their dialogue in a few succinct sentences of your
own. Note how in ¶ 10, 11 Hawthorne has condensed the conversation which
doubtless occurred at the supper table, and has given us the salient
points without the commonplaces that it must have contained:
He was of a proud yet gentle spirit, haughty and reserved among
the rich and great, but ever ready to stoop his head to the
lowly cottage door and be like a brother or a son at the poor
man's fireside.... He had traveled far and alone; his whole
life, indeed, had been a solitary path, for, with the lofty
caution of his nature, he had kept himself apart from those who
might otherwise have been his companions....
The secret of the young man's character was a high and
abstracted ambition. He could have borne to live an
undistinguished life, but not to be forgotten in the grave.
and how in ¶ 13 he has given us the trend of the young man's rhapsody,
instead of wearying us with what was probably rather a long and tiresome
speech:
There was a continual flow of natural emotion gushing forth amid
abstracted reverie which enabled the family to understand this
young man's sentiment, though so foreign from their own.
One form of the talkative short story that forms a serious stumbling
block to the novice is the dialect story. If you have an idea of trying
that style of composition, let me warn you: Don't! Dialect stories never
were very artistic, for they are a paradoxical attempt to make good
literature of poor rhetoric and worse grammar. They have never been
recognized or written by any great master of fiction. They are a sign of
a degenerate taste, and their production or perusal is a menace to the
formation and preservation of a good literary style. They are merely a
fad, which is already of the past; and to-day public and publisher turn
in nausea from a mess of dialect which yesterday they would have
greedily devoured; so that now there is even no pecuniary excuse for
dialect stories. They were doomed to an ephemeral existence, for what
little charm they ever possessed was based upon the human craving for
something odd and new; the best stories of Barrie and Maclaren live
because of their intense human feeling, and they would have succeeded as
well and endured longer if they had been clothed in literary English.
"That there is good in dialect none may deny; but that good is only when
it chances, as rarely, to be good dialect; when it is used with just
discretion and made the effect of circumstances naturally arising, not
the cause and origin of the circumstance itself. When the negro, the
'cracker' or the mountaineer dialect occurs naturally in an American
story, it often gives telling effects of local color and of shading. But
the negro or 'cracker' story _per se_ can be made bearable only by the
pen of a master; and even then it may be very doubtful if that same pen
had not proved keener in portraiture, more just to human nature in the
main, had the negro or the 'cracker' been the mere episode, acting on
the main theme, and itself reacted on by that."[30]
Study carefully, as models of good character analysis and presentation,
Stevenson's "Markheim;" Hawthorne's "The Great Stone Face;" Ichabod
Crane in Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow;" Poe's "William Wilson;"
Louisa Ellis in Wilkins' "A New England Nun;" Van Bibber in Davis' "Van
Bibber and Others;" Henry St. George in James' "The Lesson of the
Master."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 28: "Rudimentary Suggestions for Beginners in Story Writing,"
by E. F. Andrews. _Cosmopolitan._ Feb., '97.]
[Footnote 29: "Names in Fiction," by H. H. F. _Literature._ Jan. 19,
'99.]
[Footnote 30: "The Day of Dialect," by T. C. De Leon. _Lippincott's._
Nov., '97.]
VII
METHODS OF NARRATION
Not only must you have a story to tell, but you must tell it well. The
charm and interest of a story come not from the plot itself but from
your handling of it. The question of the proper method of narration is
to a considerable extent a matter of suitability--of giving the
narrative an appropriate setting; it is also a matter of the point of
view of the narrator--whether he is to tell the story as one of the
actors, or simply as an impersonal observer. A dozen master story
writers would tell the same tale in a dozen different ways, and each of
them would seem to be the right way; for each writer would view the
events from a particular angle, and would make his point of view seem
the natural one. But the novice is not always happy in his choice of a
view point; or rather, he lacks the knowledge and experience that would
teach him how to treat his subject from the particular side from which
he has chosen to consider it. Yet a capable and clever writer may
sometimes find himself puzzled to choose between a number of methods,
any one of which seems appropriate and any one of which he feels himself
competent to handle satisfactorily: the question is which one will be
for him the most successful method of exploiting his thoughts.
That question should be settled with regard to the suitability of the
method to the matter of the story--and here suitability is synonymous
with naturalness. It must not be forgotten that story writing is only a
modern phase of the world-old custom of story telling, and that the
printed page should appear as natural and easy to the eye as the voice
would to the ear. When in the twilight the grandmother gathers the
children about her knee for a story, whether it be a bit of her own life
or a tale from a book, she does not strive after effect, but tells the
story simply and naturally, just as she knows it will best suit the
children. And so the story writer should tell his tale--so naturally and
easily that the reader will forget that he is gazing at the printed
page, and will believe himself a spectator at an actual scene in real
life.
The great difficulty of the novice is to subordinate his own
personality. He knows that he must individualize his story, and that
that is best done by putting something of himself into it; and he does
not always understand that it is only his spirit that is wanted, and
that his body will be very much in the way. Then, too, he is apt to be a
little self-conscious, if not actually self-conceited, and he rather
likes the idea of putting himself into his work so thoroughly that the
reader must always be conscious of his presence. He likes to show his
superior knowledge and to take the reader into his confidence; so he
indulges in side remarks, and criticisms, and bits of moralizing, and in
general exhibits an exasperating tendency to consider himself and his
personal opinion of far greater importance than the story which he is
expected to tell.
But above all things else the author must keep himself out of sight, and
must refrain from interpolating his opinions. He is supposed to be an
impersonal person, a human machine through the medium of which the story
is preserved, and he has no proper place in his narrative. One no more
expects or desires a speech from him than a sermon from a
penny-in-the-slot phonograph which has been paid for a comic song. He
may stand behind the scenes and manipulate the puppets and speak for
them, but his hand must be unseen, his voice carefully disguised, and
his personality imperceptible; no one cares for the man who makes the
Punch and Judy show--he is judged by the success of his imitation of
life, and his own appearance will speedily disillusionize his public.
Every time you address your public as "dear reader," "gentle
reader,"--or, as Mark Twain has it, "savage reader"--you force upon that
public a realization of your presence which is as disagreeable and
inartistic as the appearance of the Punch and Judy man, hat in hand,
seeking a few coppers in payment of the amusement he has provided.
In the short story no personal confidences, moralizing comments, or
confessions are allowed. If you must express your opinions and make
your personality felt, write lectures, sermons, essays, books, letters
for the public press--but _don't_ write short stories. Men read short
stories to be amused, not instructed; and they will quickly revolt at
any attempt on your part to introduce into your narrative a sugar-coated
argument or sermon.
There are certain methods of story telling much affected by the amateur
which are particularly difficult to do well. He should especially
eschew stories related in the first person, those told by letters, and
those in the form of a diary. Notice, I do not say that these methods
are absolutely bad: they have been successfully used by masters; but
they are at least questionable, and they contain so many pitfalls for
the unwary that it is far better for the uninitiated to let them
severely alone.
Narrative in the first person gives a certain realism through the mere
use of the pronoun "I," and so excites some measure of the desired
personal interest; but the same result may be secured, without the
accompanying disadvantages, by making the characters do a good deal of
talking. That method escapes the danger of getting the narrator between
the story and the reader; for the puppet who "I's" his way through the
narrative is apt to be rather an important fellow, who intrudes on the
most private scenes, and who prefers moralizing and philosophizing to
the legitimate furthering of the plot; thus he runs no small risk of
making himself unpopular with the reader, and so proving of detriment
to the success of the story and of the author.
Then, too, when the author is speaking in his own proper person the
reader cannot help wondering at times how one man could know so much
about what was going on, even if he were a veritable Paul Pry; while we
have become so used to granting the omniscience and omnipresence of the
invisible third person author that we never question his knowledge. If,
however, the hero-narrator attempt natural modesty and profess to but
slight information concerning the story, he is usually a most dull and
uninteresting fellow, who is endeavoring to relate a matter of which he
has missed the most essential parts. And at all times, though he be a
model in all other respects, the very fact that the hero is telling the
story lessens its interest, since no matter what harrowing experiences
he has suffered, he has come safely through; thus the narrative lacks
that anxiety for the hero's welfare which is so large a factor in the
delights of fiction.
"It (first person narrative) is better adapted, no doubt, to adventure
than to analysis, and better to the expression of humour than to the
realization of tragedy. As far as the presentation of _character_ is
concerned, what it is usual for it to achieve ... is this: a life size,
full length, generally too flattering portrait of the hero of the
story--a personage who has the limelight all to himself--on whom no
inconvenient shadows are ever thrown; ... and then a further graceful
idealization, an attractive pastel, you may call it, the lady he most
frequently admired, and, of the remainder, two or three Kit-Cat
portraits, a head and shoulders here, and there a stray face."[31]
Stories written in the epistolary or diary form suffer all the
disadvantages of first person narrative; but they are also liable to
others, equally serious, which are peculiarly their own. They are seldom
natural, in the first place, for granted that people really do keep
interesting diaries or write literary letters, it is rare in either case
that a story would be told with technical correctness. And such
narratives are usually poor in technique, for their form necessitates
the introduction of much that is commonplace or irrelevant, and it also
requires the passage of time and causes breaks in the thread of the
plot. These forms are favorites with the inexperienced because they seem
to dodge some of the difficulties that beset the way of the literary
aspirant. Their form is necessarily loose and disjointed, and their
style rambling and conversational, and these qualities are
characteristic of the work of novices.
"But if fictitious letters are so seldom anything but tiresome, is this
because 'the age of letter writing is past?'... The unpopularity of the
epistolary form as a method of authorship is, in fact, due quite as much
to a change of taste as to the decay of letter writing. The old practice
was of a piece with the unrealities of the eighteenth century, both in
art and letters. It necessitated an abundance of superfluous detail, and
it was a roundabout, artificial way of doing what the true artist could
do much better, simply and directly. It gave, of course, an opportunity
of exhibiting subjectively many 'fine shades' of feeling. But it is
certainly much more difficult to carry conviction in inventing letters
for fictitious persons than in making them converse. In the latter case
there is a background; there is the life and movement of the various
characters, the spontaneity of question and reply, and the running
interchange of talk, all helping to keep a spell upon the reader. The
letter gives much less chance of illusion, and we may very soon become
conscious of the author--instead of the suffered correspondent--beating
his brains for something to say next."[32]
Another poor method, indicative of callowness, is making the hero, so
to speak, an animal or a thing, and permitting it to tell its own
story. This has peculiar charm for the tyro because of its supposed
originality, but it is really as old as story telling itself. It
offends greatly against naturalness, for however one may believe in
the story of Balaam's ass, or delight in Æsop's talking brutes or
Greece's talking statues, one cannot restrain a feeling of skepticism
when a dog or a coin is put forward, given human attributes, and made
to view the world through man's eyes. On the other hand, if the
writer attempts to read the thoughts of the brute or the thing, the
difficulty at once presents itself that he can only guess at the
mental processes of the one, and that the other is incapable of
thought; so that in either case the result is unsatisfactory. One
exception to this statement must be made: Kipling, in his "Jungle
Book" stories, seems to have achieved the impossible and read for us
the very thoughts of the brute creation. Unfortunately it is not
given us to know how nearly he has hit their mental processes; but
his animals certainly do not think with the thoughts of men and their
cogitations, as he interprets them, appear to us perfectly logical
and natural. Yet the success of Kipling does not at all lessen the
force of my general statement, for there are few writers who would
care to cross pens with him here. Even our own Joel Chandler Harris,
in his delightful Uncle Remus stories, has succeeded only in giving
his animals human ideas and attributes. The whole endeavor to endow
the rest of creation with man's intelligence is too thoroughly
artificial to offer a profitable field to the short story writer.
Again, novices err frequently through introducing a multiplicity of
narrators, either writing a patchwork story in which all take a hand,
or placing narration within narration as in the "Arabian Nights." The
method of allowing a number of persons consecutively to carry on the
plot is very attractive, since it offers a way of introducing a
personally interested narrator without making him preternaturally
wise; and it also affords opportunity for the author to exhibit his
skill in viewing events from all sides and through the minds of
several very different persons. It is, however, open to most of the
first person objections, and it is liable to produce a disjointed
narrative; but it is particularly unhappy in the short story because
it necessitates the introduction and disposition of a number of
important people.
The use of narration within narration is more objectionable. It is of
little importance who tells the story, or how it came to be told; the
less the narrator appears the better. It is seldom that more than
one narrator is necessary, yet two, three, or even more are often
introduced, with full descriptions of persons and circumstances. "It
is a frequent device of the unpractised to cover pages with useless
explanations of how they heard a tale which is thus elaborately put
too far off from the reader to appeal to his sympathies. One writer,
after describing a rural station, his waiting for the train, its
appearance when it arrives, the companions of his journey, and so on,
is wrecked, and spends the night on a log with an old farmer, who
spins him a domestic yarn that has nothing to do with what went
before. Why not give the tale direct, in the character of the old
farmer? There is no law against that."[33]
This practice is due to the fact that amateurs usually begin by writing
strictly true stories, and they always consider it of prime importance
that they had the tale from grandmother, or that it actually occurred
to John's wife's second cousin's great aunt; forgetting, in their
unconscious egotism, that the reader cares only for the narrative, and
nothing for the narrator. Stories told to interested listeners by
"grandma," an "old hunter," or some loquacious "stranger," usually need
to be so revised that the intrusive relater will disappear, merged in
the unobtrusive author. Indeed, it is policy so to revise them, for the
editor usually considers the author who begins thus too amateurish for
him:
"Your turn now, Captain," was the exclamation of several
gentlemen who were seated around a table, telling stories,
narrating adventures, playing cards and drinking each others'
healths.
"What will you have, gentlemen?" inquired Captain R----, a tall,
handsome man of middle age, who had been in command of a large
ocean steamer many years.
"Oh, one of your adventures," said one of the party; "for surely
you must have had some."
"Ah, very well, gentlemen--I remember one that will no doubt
interest you; here it is:"
For at the outset he knows, and he knows that his readers will know,
that the tale ends thus:
"So ends my story, gentlemen; now let us have a drink to the
health of the young sailor's wife, the dearest woman in the
world."
"And why not the sailor's health, too?" asked one of the
gentlemen.
"All right, sir, just as you please, gentlemen, for I was
that sailor."
and that the intervening story is apt to be every whit as stale and
conventional as its beginning and its end. Irving's "Tales of a
Traveller" show how this method may be used successfully; yet it
required all of Irving's art to make the extra-narrative passages
readable, and it is an open question if the stories would not have
been improved by isolation.
The best method of narration, the simplest and most natural, is to tell
the story in the third person, as if you were a passive observer; to
make the characters active and conversational; and to permit nothing,
not even your own personality, to get between the reader and the story.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 31: "The Short Story," by Frederick Wedmore. _Nineteenth
Century._ Mar., '98.]
[Footnote 32: "The Epistolary Form." _Literature._ Apr. 7, '99.]
[Footnote 33: "Magazine Fiction and How Not to Write It," by Frederick
M. Bird. _Lippincott's._ Nov., '94.]
VIII
THE BEGINNING
The crucial test of the short story is the manner in which it begins. Of
three-fourths of the MSS. submitted to him the editor seldom reads more
than the first page, for he has learned by experience that if the story
lacks interest there, it will in all probability be lacking throughout.
Therefore it behooves you to make the beginning as attractive and
correct as possible.
The beginning of a good short story will seldom comprise more than two
or three paragraphs, and often it can be compressed into one. If it
cannot get to the story proper in that space there is something
radically wrong--probably in the plot; for the conventional brevity of
the short story requires particular conciseness in the introduction.