Types of Prose Narratives: A Text-Book for the Story Writer

by Harriott Ely Fansler

To construct a narrative of this class, you must of course first get your underlying theory. Experiments in the chemical and physical laboratory will afford many a starting point. They will at least suggest the realm in which to proceed. Astronomy, meteorology, geology, mechanics, mineralogy, geometry, optics, domestic science even,—select a simple problem in any of these and begin to imagine.

Suggestions on how to write the type

After you have the starting point, it is a good idea to fix your goal. Where should you like to go, what should you like to do, what powers should you like to have above those of your fellows? Do you wish to overcome the restrictions of distance, absence, darkness, death, birth, poverty, the past, the future, the present?

With these points of your theory settled, you must then look to the course of events. Shall the incidents befall you while discovering or while applying the scientific fact, while constructing or while working your machine? Shall you be looking forward or shall you be looking back upon the events? Next you must find the point of greatest stress. The climax of a story with the first alternative will evidently be reached at the culmination of the inventor's labors; with the second alternative, at the most exciting adventure in the use of the machine or in the direct application of the scientific fact.

The logical close of the story is in both cases the disappearance of the machine or the scientist; but you will be repaid by thinking carefully over this matter and being here as elsewhere as ingenious and original as you can.

Your deductions must appear to be sound. Of course, your reasoning may have to be largely specious and in the gross, as it were, unless you are a better inventor than the inventors. But you have this advantage over the practical man: you can avoid the greater difficulties by keeping silent about them; and for actual achievement you can substitute assertion. You must seem on the surface, however, to be perfectly logical. The reader will not question you too closely, if you are only spirited and entertaining. But the next is a point that you must note without fail.

If the reader's interest in any particular part of your narrative will depend upon an understanding of a bit of mechanism or a scientific theory, you must be careful to supply the information beforehand. However trite to a mechanic or a scientist the principle may be, you must not assume that the casual reader knows it. He probably does not know it, or if he does, more than likely he has forgotten it. On the other hand, you must not appear to be self-assertively instructing him. What you can do is this: you can politely seem to be recalling something to his memory, and can thus make the point clear, so that your future use of it will not fall flat.

To add a semblance of reality, it will be permissible to employ a few technical terms; but these also must be indisputably clear in meaning, and their use must not be pedantic. You should study, however, to put into the mouths of your characters the vocabulary that would be actually used by the kind of people you represent.

Genial humor is a fine asset to a writer of this type of narrative. If you can be artistically serious and philosophically gay at the same time you will not fail to please. The relationship of stories of scientific discovery and mechanical invention to imaginary voyages is testified to by the reader's expectation of a display of wit. But in the scientific, ridicule is softened down to genial logic. Although the aim in this kind of narrative is good construction rather than character-sketching, yet every neat touch of portraiture that you can add will help draw your composition away from the mere exercise and toward the literary production.

If you should choose your theory in the realm of art, you would by that very choice raise your story above the ordinary—I mean to say, of course, you would if you knew anything about art. Mr. Alexander Wilson Drake knows a great deal about art and has given us, besides many other beautiful surprises in Saint Nicholas and the Century, some narratives embodying exquisite theories of shadow and color.