The Writing of the Short Story :: The Complete Story

The Complete Story

The invention of situations and plots can hardly be a matter of class-room instruction. If stories come to one, it is well. Study of the detailed means of making them living for the reader will then be worth while. The student should be encouraged to invent plots of his own, but as a simplification of this difficulty, to the end that some exercise in the writing of a complete story may be had, plots of some successful published stories are here given with suggestions regarding methods of treatment.

I

Scene, a saloon where both men and women are drinking. One of them, a girl, thinks she sees at the window the face of Christ with his tender eyes. She leaves and will not permit the others to go with her.

At a little distance she comes upon the stranger waiting for her. He tells her that when she wakes it will be to a new life and she will be his, bidding her go to a house he points out and remain for the night. She obeys, and the man passes into the shadow.

Introductory sentence in the original, giving the atmosphere of the story: "This was the story the mystic told." Concluding sentence in the original, connecting it with our sense of unfathomable mysteries: "And this the listener gravely asked, 'One was chosen, the others left. Were the others less in need of grace?'"

Divisions of the story. 1. Visualizing description of the saloon and of the street outside through which the stranger passes.

2. Appearance of the face at the pane and its effect on the young girl (m₃ "effect"). This is the difficult part of the story, and the reader can be made to believe in it only through sympathy with the girl's feeling.

3. The talk of her companions and her answers (m₃).

4. Her search for the stranger in the night (m₃).

5. His talk to her when she finds him.

This story in the original contains a little less than two thousand words. It will be seen at once that unless handled in such fashion as to appeal vividly to the imagination, a story with this for its theme will seem weak and unreal. It must be made as suggestive as possible or it will fail. It preaches, but it must avoid the air of preaching. Consider carefully how you would present the stranger—whether first at the window or before—so as to affect the reader with a sense of something more than human in him.

II

Scene of the story is the prairie desert of the West in time of drouth. A party of men, including two who are not yet through their work in an eastern college, are riding in search of water, having had none for two days. Water is found, but shortly afterwards one of the two young men is missing. The talk of the others reveals the absent one's unselfishness and friendly devotion to his chum. Soon he is seen riding up excitedly and beckoning. The others follow him to a rough eminence, where he stops and listens, imploring them to tell him whether they can hear a voice calling. When they hear it too, he is assured that he has not lost his reason from the thirst, and together they begin a search which results in their discerning a cavern in the side of an embankment where a man lies on a couch moaning for water. As they try to enter, he warns them away with the cry of "smallpox."

The story is told to a group of friends gathered together of an evening, and the narrator draws from among his books a copy of Shakespeare found in the cavern by one of the men, bearing on its fly leaf, in addition to the owner's name, the word Brasenose, the name of one of the colleges at Oxford. The pathos of the story is in this last touch, an Oxford student dying so loathsome a death in a strange and desert land, and dying so heroically.

Divisions of the story. 1. Visualization of the desert and the men. The scent of water. Drinking from the muddied stream.

2. One of the young men starts off alone in a delirium of pain (m₃). He returns suffering from the fear that he has lost his reason (m₃).

3. The discovery of the cave (V₃ and F_2b). The delirious talk of the sick man. His sudden joy in the unexpected presence of human beings (V₃ and m₃). His final "G'way! G'way! Smallpox!"

4. The narrator of the story shows the copy of Shakespeare and the inscription on the fly leaf.

The story in the original contains about three thousand words. It is important that the suffering of the men be developed at some length in a convincing fashion. It serves as a preparation for the more terrible suffering of the one man who moans for water as he tears the foul smallpox sores. This should be presented in as visualizing a way as possible and with as full showing of mood as may be. The conclusion in division 4 must be altogether different in tone from the preceding. Narrator and listeners are in a world of ease and comfort, and their interest in the story is an interest in something pathetically remote.

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