Some realistic writers
When "Daisy Miller" was written a few decades ago, the Americans were incensed. Henry James did not care, however. Just so we appear abroad, he said, among the more restrained and more cultivated peoples. Howells's "Lady of the Aroostook" seemed a kinder if similar and no less true picture. These brief narratives are hardly novels; and though they are more than tales, they yet are not what we technically call the artistic short-story; they are surely, however, studies in realism.
It is upon this distinction,—namely, that absolute realism would naturally preclude even the slight artificiality that there must be about the truly technical short-story—that we make two divisions in our study of such work as that of Howells, James, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. The point is, realism may be as long-drawn out or as brief as life. The technical short-story, however, has a limit on both sides. So has the novel. Each of our great realists has attempted novels; all have written exquisite short stories.
Suggestions on characters to treat
To write a present-day realistic sketch you will not need to look far for a subject. Just divest yourself of preconceived ideas of the romantic in fiction, and begin anywhere. Everything is of interest to the realist. A butcher's boy; an octogenarian millionaire; a petty thief; a plodding, respectable, humdrum government clerk; an ordinary mother with her ordinary baby on an ordinary day; a flighty society belle, and a society belle who is not flighty; a sensible matron; an idiot child,—all are his. The interest of your sketch will be in the particularity and niceness of details. You will need to be more truthful than a camera, which always makes people and surroundings look either better or worse than they are. Color and sound and smell and atmosphere and temperature, and temperament, gesture and thought, passing impression and settled purpose, you can record. If any of your characters succeeds, it must be as in life—with half defeat; if any one is defeated, it must be as in life—with half success and a conflicting sense of shame and of relief. You must have something happening, however slight, and thus avoid a mere enumeration of characteristics. You are to show us the person in action. A mere analysis of his vices and virtues, his general mental attitude, would be pure exposition, when you want narrative.
Your diction should be as good as you can make it by care and revision. Howells and James are both stylists of the most polished kind; though Tolstoy, whom Howells recognizes as master, thirty years ago left off any concern for sentence effect. He repeats or reiterates at will. You, however, cannot afford to disregard the rules of the rhetoricians—not until you have become as famous as the Russian count or have a message as distinct as his.
Remember, then, that a good realistic sketch demands on your part an honest, and truthful purpose, a mind freed from the glamor of romance or climax, a sure eye, and exquisite workmanship, in the relation of an ordinary, every-day event.
The Piece of String
On all the roads leading to Goderville the peasants and their wives were coming to town for market day. The men shambled along at an easy-going gait, with bodies bent forward. Their long legs were deformed and twisted through hard work—from the weight of the plough, which at the same time throws the left shoulder too high and ruins the figure; from mowing the grain, which effort causes the knees to spread too far apart; and from all the other slow and painful labours of country life. Their blue blouses, starched to a sheenlike varnish and finished at collar and waistbands with little designs in white stitching, stood from their bony bodies like balloons ready for flight, with a head, two arms and two feet protruding.