The characters, then, in this kind of narrative are often more or less fictitious, being a combination of traits well-known to the author—traits of different individuals of the type displayed; while in the other kind of artistic short-story, it is the slight course of events that is made up, to fit the actual character and the actual place.
A scrap-book suggestion
Whatever else you do as a writer—even as an amateur one in school—it will surely repay you to keep a scrap-book. The very old adage that facts are stranger than fiction is indisputably true. When in your newspaper reading you run across a fine course of events that is character-revealing, or ought to be, just cut out the report and paste it in your book. Think upon the case leisurely and let the personages develop; then write up the events as simply and swiftly as you can consistent with the effect you mean to produce. Hawthorne's "Ambitious Guest" originated thus.
Other suggestions
If at present you have in mind no series of happenings, suppose you ask some acquaintance what is the strangest course of actual events he ever personally knew about. When he answers you, then question him on the actors concerned, remembering that this time you are going to write not a pure plot story but one that will express the conjunction of character and events. Keep in mind also your present limitations. You do not need to tell everything that might be told about your protagonists; you do not have to follow them from the baptismal font to the marriage altar and from the marriage altar to the grave. You may not know the facts about them connected therewith; you may know only a small portion of their lives; but ten to one you will know more incidents than it is necessary to mention. What you do tell, however, must be absolutely clear. The actual events may have been but a string of episodes in real life, but when you relate them they must appear like a full, round period. Look carefully after your connectives; on them hangs largely the success of your story. It goes without saying that you must have a climax, or highest point. Every sentence that you write before it, even the first, must lead toward it; every sentence that you write after it, even the last, must lead from it. You must ruthlessly suppress any phrase that does not add strength to your chosen scene. Be sure your story has totality.
The Necklace
She was one of those pretty, charming girls who are sometimes, as if through the irony of fate, born into a family of clerks. She was without dowry or expectations, and had no means of becoming known, appreciated, loved, wedded, by any rich or influential man; so she allowed herself to be married to a small clerk belonging to the Ministry of Public Instruction. She dressed plainly because she could not afford to dress well, and was unhappy because she felt she had dropped from her proper station, which for women is a matter of attractiveness, beauty, and grace, rather than of family descent. Good manners, an intuitive knowledge of what is elegant, nimbleness of wit, are the only requirements necessary to place a woman of the people on an equality with one of the aristocracy.
She fretted constantly, feeling all things delicate and luxurious to be her birthright. She suffered on account of the meagreness of her surroundings, the bareness of the walls, the tarnished furniture, the ugly curtains; deficiencies which would have left any other woman of her class untouched, irritated and tormented her. The sight of the little Breton peasant who did her humble housework engendered hopeless regrets followed by fantastic dreams. She thought of a noiseless, hallowed anteroom, with Oriental carpets, lighted with tall branching candlesticks of bronze and of two big, knee-breeched footmen, drowsy from the stove-heated air, dozing in great armchairs. She thought of a long drawing-room hung with ancient brocade, of a beautiful cabinet holding priceless curios, of an alluring, scented boudoir intended for five o'clock chats with intimates, with men famous and courted, and whose acquaintance is longed for by all women.
When she sat down to dinner, at the round table spread with a cloth three days old, opposite her husband, who uncovered the tureen, and exclaimed with ecstasy, "Ah, I like a good stew! I know nothing to beat this!" she thought of dainty dinners, of shining plate, of tapestry which peopled the walls with human shapes, and with strange birds flying among fairy trees. And then she thought of delicious viands served in costly dishes, and of murmured gallantries which you listen to with a comfortable smile while you are eating the rose-tinted flesh of a trout or the wing of a quail.
She had no handsome gowns, no jewels—nothing, though these were her whole life; it was these that meant existence to her. She would so have liked to please, to be thought fascinating, to be envied, to be sought out. She had a friend, a former schoolmate at the convent, who was very rich, but whom she did not like to go to see any more because she would come home jealous, covetous.