In a somewhat different way, with just as much realism maybe, but surely with a large dash of romance, Bret Harte pre-empted California as a literary land two decades before these younger writers staked out their claims. "Tennessee's Partner" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" are perfect in their way, and their way is this way: the place-character narrative.
Suggestions and precautions
To write such a narrative, you must have vividly and accurately in mind your selected environment. It is to form the color of your picture. If you do not think you know thus intimately any locality, open your eyes. The beautiful fact about living is, that we all always live somewhere, and that same somewhere is full of a number of things, and of nothing more surely than of local color. It is your business as a writer to add this color constantly to your stories; but the best way to proceed is not to attempt to spread it on from the outside, but to let it shine through from within. To be sure, it must be on the valleys and hills, the streets and the houses and the window curtains; but it must also be in the speech of your peoples, in their notions, their attitude toward each other and toward the great and little questions of human relationship. Besides knowing the environment, you must know indisputably some individuals of the place. You can not draw a life-like sketch from an abstraction. The canvas painters have taught us that truth, and so have the sculptors. For every figure they have a living model. They must know where the bones and sinews are, even if they mean to etherealize. So must you, and you have a harder problem; your figure must speak. One false tone, and you mar the impression. Mary E. Wilkins, excellent artist that she is, has impaired one of her strongest stories, "The Revolt of Mother," by a lapse of art in respect to two of her characters. The girl and boy are not old enough for the age the author intimates; or what she says that they are is too old for what they prove that they are when they speak and when they keep silent even,—especially the girl. Moreover, we feel that the mother is ten or fifteen years younger, than the age given her. These are minor points, one admits, and, as we say, the story is excellent; but in so far as it fails in little ways it is not superfine, though one of the most lovable and dramatic, of Miss Wilkins's productions. In art you must not make this mistake; it is no answer to assert that in life the woman was sixty and the boy and girl fourteen and twenty. On the basis of the character-drawing the woman is forty-five or fifty and the children are twins, less than sixteen years old. In other words, a realist that is an artist as well selects not only what is true but also what will immediately without argument seem true. Miss Wilkins usually is convincing.
In addition to an unmistakably clear knowledge of place and personality, you must know both local dialect and family vernacular. The various individuals of your sketch, if they happen to belong to the same household, must speak as if they so belonged. In actual life when you converse with a company of persons, you can pick out two members of the same family as readily as you can pick out two members of the same community. Your character-narrative must reveal this likeness, not by declaration especially, but by a subtle unity of vocabulary that does not at the same time preclude individuality.
The character Overbury and Hall
The writers of this kind of short-story owe much to the past. We are inclined to think of quiet and truthful character sketchers, who reveal an appreciative knowledge of the influence of environment, as distinctly a late nineteenth century brotherhood; but the fact is that while moderate realism is undoubtedly the last artistic word on the subject of effective character-revelation, it is also the first. The modern novel of manners (and the artistic short-story of the same class as an offshoot of it) drew from a full stream of realism. As far back as the age of Overbury and Bishop Hall the public was interested in prose character-sketches. The fact that essays could have such names as "The Tinker" and "The Milkmaid" was a promise of the light of common day. Then the gentle de Coverley papers came on with their slight narrative and continued portrait, their delightful skits on class environment and tradition;The novel of manners then, Tristram Shandy's frank shamelessness about familiar things; then the Vicar of Wakefield's struggling poverty; and finally the women entered—Evelina, Belinda, Emma, Mary Barton, and the gentle ladies of Cranford, bringing with them the tea-table and the trials of the parlor and of factory life. The only thing that was needed to make the archetype complete by the middle of the nineteenth century was for some one to take persistently the same large yet specific environment. Trollope's Cathedral Town Studies Anthony Trollope did so in his Cathedral Town Studies. What ran parallel for a time with the novel of manners, but had a later and fuller development, is the psychological problem novel, begun by Richardson and Fielding and handed over to the late nineteenth century writers by Charlotte Brontë. This psychological problem novel bears the same relation to the novel of manners as the character-events short-story bears to the character-environment one.
You doubtless realize, as every one realizes, that a good short-story is hard to write, but in the hardness comes the inspiration. If you succeed, you have scored a triumph. But for your comfort, be assured that the possibility is not beyond even a high-school student. The attempt in very instructive at least.
Remember that you are not writing a biography, but a place-character narrative in the short-story form. You are not called on to record every incident in the life of your subject or even every important incident. The happenings may all be minor, in fact. The only essential thing is that you reveal the indissoluble connection between environment and characteristics. The person is what he is because he has lived at that place with those habitual surroundings.
There is this precaution, however, that you must take; you must not let your narrative degenerate into a mere analysis and enumeration of qualities. You are to write a story. And to write a story you must have a happening or a series of happenings, however mild. Usually one of these should be of more importance than the others, and the others should be related to it as subordinates, in order that the effect may be single. Any part of the life of your people that lies behind the day of your revelation, if mentioned at all, should be told in retrospect; whatever lies ahead, if mentioned at all, can be only prophecy. And, finally, here is a little secret, an open one among artists, but one shut away from the herd of common scribblers; what you do not tell but only skilfully suggest is what makes for excellence and immortality.