your first concern must be to study life, in the hope of finding there a story.

The Method. Now life is full of plots, but they are usually not on the surface. A cause appears, or a result, or a chain of events, but rarely all three elements at once. You must seize the plot by one end, and try to drag out the story as one would drag out an angleworm from the clay. If you were acting as a detective or writing as a historian, your lot might be a hard one, for unless all of the story were found, your efforts would be thrown away. In other words, you would not be allowed to guess at a conclusion, having found a cause, or to fit a probable cause and effect to a chain of events; you would have to get things as they actually happened, or give up.

But the story-teller is favored. He is allowed to invent, to make fiction, provided his invention is probable, provided it might have happened in real or imagined life. Of course, he may invent the whole of his story. But we are speaking now of the best and easiest way of making stories, and undoubtedly that way is to find part of your story and invent the rest.

This is the easiest way, because it is the safest. Every one knows some life well; the power of invention, of using your imagination to create the whole story, is not so common. It is the easiest way, again, because it gives the best results. If you study part of your story from life, the part you have to invent in order to fill up the gaps in the plot will probably be lifelike also.

Illustration. Let us try this out in the laboratory of practical experience. I wish to write a story how do I go about it? Well, perhaps a character interests me; perhaps a place; perhaps an event which I have seen, or in which I have taken part. Let us take the first instance,

and suppose that it is the character of old Jonathan Dickon, who for thirty years has driven a mail stage between the railroad and his hill town. I have no story here, as yet. But suppose I ask, what would happen to Jonathan if, after a lifetime spent in driving, he should be forced to retire to the poorhouse because a rival put an automobile on the route? Work out the results of that, and the chances are that you will get a plot; and if you really know old Jonathan, your story will be lifelike and probably a good one.

Take the second case, which was a favorite with Robert Louis Stevenson. You have seen a shabby frame cottage in the midst of a great business block in the heart of the city. Why is that building left there? What happened to its owners? What event will make it disappear as all its neighbors have long since disappeared? Such questions will stimulate your imagination. They may give you a cause, and a chain of events leading up to a result; that is, they may give you a plot; and your vivid memory of that strangely placed cottage will make the story real.

But the most profitable source for good new stories is in action. You saw two foreigners rush from opposite pavements yesterday, and embrace each other in the middle of the street. Evidently it was a reunion, and, judging from the tears in their eyes, an impressive one. What was the remote cause; what has led up to the meeting? Your imagination is free to discover; and this is the way that fiction is made. Or again, a girl whom you had always despised as rather poor-spirited takes the blame for another's fault upon her shoulders. You see that the good deed gives her more self-confidence, and you wonder whether this self-sacrifice may not be a turning point in the development of her character. Well, work it out - make a plot, and then a story of it.

No one who sees life need lack for good subjects for stories, although it should be added, that it takes skill, and power, and work to draw the good stories from them. But for those who do not find story subjects readily, there is a constant resort always open, the newspaper. The newspaper does not try to make plotted stories. It deals, or should deal, with facts, not with imagined causes or results of facts. But the newspaper is keenly alive to the interesting, the striking, the significant, facts of life, and with such it fills its columns. Hardly a day goes by that your paper will not contain some news item that with a little imagination may be developed into a "plotted story."

EXERCISES

I. Make plots for each of the stories suggested above.

II. Make a collection of suggestive clippings from newspapers, and work as many as possible into plots.

III. Make a list of events which you have seen, or in which you have taken part, that may be worked up into stories.

Let your imagination play upon these events, and see how many plots you can draw from them.

IV. Make plots with characters or places which you know well as foundations.

V. Read the stories in the current number of any magazine. Test the stories (a) for excellence of plot, (b) for truth to life and experience.

CONSTRUCTING AND OUTLINING THE STORY

A story is a composition, like an essay or an argument or a description. Therefore, it too must be planned in advance, if you hope for easy writing and good results. Let us suppose that you have secured your plot, and the life which you are to put into it is clear and vivid in your mind.

Unity. Before you begin you must unify your story.

First, be sure that you have one story and not several in loose combination. If you are ambitious enough to try a novel, you may, it is true, have several plots; but even so, one of these must be major, the others strictly subordinate. Such an arrangement you will find in Dickens' novels and Shakespeare's plays. If you are writing a shorter story, your secondary plots must be still more rigidly subordinated. But if, as will probably be the case, you are writing a short story, then one single plot is sufficient. If there are more, write two stories instead of one.

Next, the time and place of your story should be unified as much as your subject allows. When you write fiction you are a master of life; you may do anything with life except make it unlifelike. Therefore, you may manage your action so as to keep it as nearly as possible in one place. This will be far better than to scatter a short story over a dozen localities. And you may arrange your time so as to keep your action as nearly continuous as possible. You cannot often keep your story to a single hour and a single place, indeed, it is not often desirable to do so; but it will ruin your narrative if you spend half of it in filling gaps of time and in moving your characters.

Let us take the case of the two foreigners who embraced in the street. Clearly the story you make from that cannot all take place in the street! But neither is it requisite to detail all the times and all the places of their wanderings since these let us say long-lost brothers were parted by a religious persecution in Russia. You will need, of course, two places the scene of their parting, the scene of their reunion and two equivalent times, in your narrative. As much as possible of the action which you invent should be grouped about these two times and places. This will give unity to your story.

Coherence.

--

Coherence is also a matter of plan.

Your

story must run naturally from event to event, and if it does not follow chronological order, the departure should be clearly indicated. It sometimes happens that the latter part of a story is told first. Well and good, but make the time relations clear by explanatory sentences unless you wish your reader to be puzzled when he should be interested.

However, one precaution will help more than any other toward coherence in a story. There must be a certain amount of explanation in any tale. You must explain the situation, the nature of the characters, the scene, perhaps, or something which happened before the story began. The art of the good story-teller best shows itself in the handling of this exposition, this introductory material of the story. He must do this explaining easily and naturally without too much delaying of the action. And he must also get all of it tucked away in the beginning before the coherent development of the narrative begins. Do this, and it will be easy to make your story coherent. Fail to do it, and you will have to interrupt your story to explain that "the man who now appeared was a half-brother of Jones, who was present at the conference described at the beginning of my story." This will check the flow of your narrative, and interfere with its coherence. Examine the openings of all the good stories you can find, and see how skillfully the exposition is handled, and how much this skill contributes to the excellence of the stories.

Emphasis and Climax.-Emphasis in your story will come when you have a good climax, properly led up to, and properly placed. When in planning your story you see ahead a point at which the result of the action is suddenly reached, then you have seen the climax of your story. It is the "highest step" in narrative, as described in Chapter IX.