CHAPTER X
NARRATION
55. The Essentials of a Good Narrative.—In a diary you set down things that happen, for your own information. In letters you try to report events so that they will be understood by the person to whom you are writing and, more than this, so that they will be interesting. In a good narration you write an account of a series of connected events, so that it can be understood by any one at all, and will interest and please the greater number of your readers. It is of course much harder to address an audience whom you do not know than to try to interest people with whose peculiarities you are well acquainted; but, after all, people are very much the same in general likes and dislikes, and there are several broad, simple rules for constructing narrations, or stories, which apply to all readers.
The first thing that everybody wishes to have in a story is perfect clearness and good order. A story is a report of things as they happened, and every one wishes to learn the main events in the order in which they actually occurred. You have probably been annoyed by some one, who, in telling you a story, left out certain important steps, so that you could hardly understand how things came to happen as he related. Notice, for example, what has been left out in the following paragraph:—
As the soldiers were crossing the bridge, they noticed a man running down from a hill shouting to them and waving his arms. They could not hear what he was saying, because a strong wind was blowing away from them. As they were struggling in the water, one soldier noticed a large tree trunk floating down toward them and called to his fellows to try and save themselves by holding on to that.
Of course, so great an omission is rare; but in writing of one event following another, you must take care that your reader is never forced to stop and ask some such question as, "But you haven't told me how the soldiers came to be in the water," as he would on reading the paragraph above.
A well-told fable is often a model for clear and connected simple narration.
A crow sat on a tree, holding in his beak a large lump of cheese. A wily fox, attracted by the delicious smell, came to the foot of the tree and said to the crow, "How splendid you look up there, with your fine black feathers glistening in the sun! I wish I had feathers instead of fur. It is really not fair that you should have all the gifts, beauty and skill, and perhaps even talent. Do you sing as wonderfully as you fly?"
The crow was so pleased by this that he opened his beak wide to show off his voice. The cheese fell to the ground; the fox snapped it up and ate it, saying, "I never tasted such a delicious morsel!" He then ran off, laughing at the crow's vanity and calling over his shoulder, "Learn from this that a flatterer lives at the expense of those who listen to him."
Exercise 92.—Write simply and briefly some of the following fables, using as model the fable just given. Try to keep clear in your mind the exact order of events by imagining the whole story from beginning to end. There are in most of these subjects three or four separate little scenes, which you should try to bring visibly before your mind. It is a good plan to have an outline of the sequence of events, either written or in your head, and then develop each scene clearly and make it lifelike by conversation such as would naturally be used. The following is such an outline, by paragraphs, of a well-known fable:—
I. The old man has many sons who disturb him by quarreling among themselves.