Try this, as the advertisements say, on
your favorite magazine. This formula, with variations which
readers can supply for themselves or draw from textbooks on the
short story, is not a wholly bad method of writing fiction. It is,
I venture to assert, a very good one,--if you desire merely
effective story-telling. It is probably the best way of making the
short story a thoroughly efficient tool for the presentation of
modern life. And there lies, I believe, the whole trouble. The
short story, its course plotted and its form prescribed, has
become too efficient. Now efficiency is all that we ask of a
railroad, efficiency is half at least of what we ask of
journalism; but efficiency is not the most, it is perhaps the
least, important among the undoubted elements of good literature.
In order to make the short story efficient, the dialogue, the
setting, the plot, the character development, have been squeezed
and whittled and moulded until the means of telling the story fit
the ends of the story-telling as neatly as hook fits eye. As one
writer on how to manufacture short stories tells us in discussing
character development, the aspirant must--
"Eliminate every trait or deed which does not help peculiarly to
make the character's part in the particular story either
intelligible or open to such sympathy as it merits;
"Paint in only the 'high lights,' that is.
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