There seems to be little to be said as to plot. I note that the books
of instruction, weighty affairs some of them, more than a third of
which seems to be badly assimilated from some handbook of grammar,
lay great emphasis on plot. I hold that the first and most important
thing is to create a character. You will naturally create secondary
characters and out of them a situation will grow, and the situation
is the plot. But for the rest of it, I believe that an imaginative
man will find ideas for stories in all kinds of odd and unsuspected
little things. H. G. Wells has told us somewhere how he saw a leaf
floating on a little pool and that leaf suggested a canoe, the canoe
again suggesting a lone man. From that grew the story of Æpyornis
Island. Turning to other of his stories, you can certainly discover for
yourself what may have been the germ of the idea. There is his fine
“Country of the Blind,” which every ambitious writer should read. You
easily see that the tale grew out of a pondering over the saying, “In
the country of the blind, the one-eyed is king.” Again, thousands of
men have watched hens scratching in a yard and to them has come the
thought of wonder as to what would happen were men creatures of but an
inch in stature, with other birds and beasts their present size. But it
was Wells who conceived the notion of making a story out of it, and a
gorgeous story it is, as any one who has read “The Food of the Gods”
will admit.
Then there is R. B. Cunninghame Grahame, king of short story writers,
as I believe. I pick up a book of his tales. It is “Brought Forward.”
More properly they might be called sketches. I turn to the first at
which the book opens. It is “With the North-East Wind,” a brief but
tremendously vivid account of the funeral of Keir Hardie. I wish you
would read it for yourself. Grahame is a wonder. Never did a mind
figure to itself with more exact detail or greater energy all the parts
and tints of a picture. Read this, which is the opening paragraph:
“A northeast haar had hung the city with a pall of gray. It gave an
air of hardness to the stone-built houses, blending them with the
stone-paved streets, till you could scarcely see where the houses
ended and the street began. A thin gray dust hung in the air. It
colored everything, and people’s faces all looked pinched with the
first touch of autumn cold. The wind, boisterous and gusty, whisked
the soot-grimed city leaves about in the high suburb at the foot of a
long range of hills, making one think it would be easy to have done
with life on such an uncongenial day.”
And, while I promised to refrain from long quotations, I cannot but
help giving you this from the same sketch, for it seems to me a
remarkable description of a crowd of men. I call your attention to
Grahame’s way of doing it:
“John Ferguson was there, the old time Irish leader, the friend of
Davitt and of Butt. Tall and erect he stood, dressed in his long
frock coat, his roll of papers in one hand, and with the other
stuck in his breast, with all the air of being the last Roman left
alive. Tom Mann, with his black hair, his flashing eyes, and his
tumultuous speech peppered with expletives. Behind him, Sandy Haddow
of Parkhead, massive and Doric in his speech, with a gray woolen
comforter rolled round his neck, and hands like the panel of a door.
Champion, pale, slight and interesting, still the artillery officer
in spite of socialism. John Burns; and Small, the miners’ agent, with
his close brown beard and taste for literature. Smilie stood near,
he of the seven elections, and then check weigher at a pit. There
too, was silver-tongued Shaw Maxwell and Chisholm Robertson looking
out darkly on the world through tinted spectacles; with him Bruce
Glasier, girt with a red sash and with an aureole of fair curly hair
around his head, half poet and half revolutionary.”
If you do not see that what I am insisting on is, after all, the main
thing, that is the portrayal of character even in those few light
touches, then my time is wasted writing this essay.
I turn to another page and find the sketch, “A Minor Prophet.” It is
the tale of a man moved to preach his gospel of Love and Fellowship,
and he preaches on, enwrapped in his subject, quite oblivious of the
fact that one by one his little audience leaves, and then:
“He paused, and, looking round, saw he was all alone. The boys had
stolen away, and the last workman’s sturdy back could be just seen as
it was vanishing towards the public house.
“The speaker sighed, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead
with a soiled handkerchief.
“Then, picking up his hat and his umbrella, a far-off look came into
his blue eyes as he walked homewards almost jauntily, conscious that
the inner fire had got the better of the fleshly tenement, and that
his work was done.”
A fine ending to a fine piece of writing, indeed. Yet for “plot” the
story has nothing but a man moved to preach and finding no hearers.
Again, in “The Bathers,” by H. G. Dwight, you have a first class piece
of work, but nothing happens except a brief wrestle. Yet the story is
both stirring and dramatic. A hundred delicate shades of character and
temperament are shown us. But set before the reader is the invisible
world of inward inclinations and dispositions.
As for probability, or, if you will, plausibility, about both of
which the instructors are anxiously concerned, I do not believe that
consideration of either enters into the matter of acceptance by
editors. Tell a good story, and whether it deals with pterodactyls or
fays, devils or angels, it will stand on its own merits as a story. You
have seen Wells bringing the world to an end in many different ways:
you have seen him carving animals into the shapes of men (Island of
Dr. Moreau), or causing angels to be shot (The Wonderful Visit), or
leaping into the Fourth Dimension (The Story of Mr. Davidson’s Eyes),
or travelling into the year 30,000 (Time Machine), but always there is
verisimilitude. We know that it cannot be true, the tale he tells, but
we are willing to believe with him that it is true. For romance is a
legitimate field. If you can imagine a rattling good fairy story, go to
it. Mark Twain wrote a good tale about a microbe and Verne wrote a good
one about a trip on a meteor to the farthest edge of the solar system.
There is plenty of room in between these for you. True, just at this
present moment the pendulum swings toward realism, or, if it has not
swung, at any rate there is a mountain of realistic stuff on hand,
but at any moment a fantastic romance may leap into favor. So close
your ears to the short story professors with their warnings against
improbability and all that kind of thing. Write what you feel you must
write, for if you must write, you must, and if you are not impelled to
writing, not all the reading of books, nor listening to lectures will
aid you one whit.