Having thus explained the validity of our first rule and having insisted on strict compliance therewith, we proceed to evolve methods for a satisfactory meeting of our rule. If action must dominate a story there should be some system of capturing this indispensable ingredient, of imprisoning it within our brief literary form, of whipping it into marketable shape. We find this system and reduce it to terse understandable terms. We dig down into our bag of story-lore and lo! we flourish before the weak eyes of the uninitiate another magic commandment: Complicate! Complicate if you would have Action in your stories. Complicate if you would have Suspense. Complicate if you would exchange rejection slips for checks!
It is true that we are careful to explain our schemes of complication, lest they be taken too literally. Accompanying our commandments are various precautionary remarks about Logic and Plausibility and numerous other qualifying statements. But in the main Action and Complication are held forth as the two most important principles of sound story-writing. First of all, then, our students are urged to plot and complicate so that there be not a tedious moment in their product. Let every sentence move forward the action. Let new developments, startling in their unusualness and unexpectedness, crop up all the time. And don’t forget to keep in reserve the grandest development of all, the most surprising, for the very end. The Dénouement is the thing! Charming word—French, you know.
I remember a young girl who attended my classes but a short time. “My weakness seems to be a lack of inventiveness,” she confided to me. “My plots are too quiet.” She handed in a story and I agreed with her. Her plots were quiet, but it was the quiet of Spoon River and Winesburg and Gopher Prairie. She knew intimately the little old Southern town she hailed from, and she had the gift of making me know it. I knew it in its past and present and future, which was all of one tone and texture; I knew its proud inhabitants, patrician and plebeian; I felt its pulse. I told the girl not to attempt to infuse plot into her story and suggested a number of magazines that might accept it as it was.
“But I don’t want to write for these small publications!” she objected. “Nobody has ever heard of them. I want to get into the ‘Saturday Evening Post,’ the ‘Cosmopolitan,’ and the ‘Red Book.’ And they want more plot than I manage to put into my stories; that’s what—told me.” And she named a much advertised commercial critic.
Evidently I proved incapable of generating within her the coveted element of inventiveness, for the girl dropped out after an exceedingly brief stay and I have heard nothing from or of her since. Her name has not yet appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, nor in the Cosmopolitan, nor in the Red Book—nor, to my knowledge, in any other magazine. The eminent critic had done his work very well indeed. His teachings that every story must have an ingenious plot had seemingly struck root, and the girl with her plotless little town and its plotless little lives has probably decided, in utter despair, that her mind is hopelessly devoid of the one essential for successful story-writing—inventiveness.
Of course, she could have been made to stay and persevere a little longer, and perhaps she might have yet attained her modicum of success. If to her quiet little story a few entanglement tricks had been dexterously applied the girl would have been satisfied and probably also some editor or another of the more remunerative magazines to which she aspired. The aspect of her sleepy Southern town would have undergone a strange metamorphosis, and her lethargic hero and heroine would have been changed into inhabitants of some hectic metropolis, but that, of course, would have merely proved the magic of sound technique.
One of the surest of these tricks of ours is the introduction of a second or third line of interest. Where a story is thin and uninteresting an entirely different story can be brought in and the two skillfully connected, related and correlated. Our texts abound in geometric diagrams of lines and curves and circles, bisected and intersected, zig-zagging, up and down, rising to various points of crises and climaxes and catastrophes, and falling again with the inevitable dénouement. These diagrams look like sacred hieroglyphics to the credulous student who approaches their cryptic meaning with a reverent awe. Given a story that reads too “narrative”-like, that lacks interest because too few crises are arrived at, and its weakness can usually be traced to its single line of interest which is not thick enough to generate the necessary amount of suspense. The introduction of another line brightens it up, adds suspense, complication—Interest.
The process really is a simple one. The moving pictures employ it, invariably, with greatest effect. A young man is leading the confident life of a freshman in some Middle-Western town. The first line is started. The young man’s environment is pictured, his habits and likes and dislikes and his towering ambitions. He is a marked man. But here his line breaks. The continuity writer has become busy introducing an entirely different line of interest. Beautiful Lady Psyche has left her shire castle and is sailing for America on the Mammoth liner. The orchestra is playing, and the Lady is standing on the upper deck, her delicate white hands grasping the railing. Her eyes are deep and wistful and hopeful. We know, of course, even at this time, that she will in some fateful way meet our unsuspecting freshman. It is only a question of time. Her career and his will become entangled and merged into one. In the meantime we are watching and waiting. But at this point the continuity writer again breaks the line and begins an entirely new one. On the liner is “Taffy” Slim and he is scheming to rob Lady Psyche of her famous jewels. Now we are watching Taffy’s career. He succeeds and makes his get-away, but Lady Psyche’s jewels are known the world over, having been photographed on numerous occasions for the rotogravure supplements of our Sunday newspapers, and Taffy finds himself unable to dispose of them. He wanders through the length and breadth of our land starving, with a fortune’s worth of jewels in his pocket, until finally, he comes to our Mid-Western college town and meets our freshman. This clever hero buys the jewels for a bun and—oh, gallantry of gallantries!—undertakes to return them to their beautiful heart-broken owner. Now we see how these three lines have been crossed and recrossed and why! We don’t know yet what the gallant’s reward will consist of but we hope it will be a proposal of matrimony; in fact, we are not willing to accept anything less for our hero.
In the short story this double-or multiple-line-of-interest method was employed most successfully by O. Henry and is clung to by most of his followers. Its skillful manipulation undoubtedly results in a more marketable product. It insures a thrilling sequence of events, if not always a logical one. It is one of our most venerated tricks. We underline it in our texts. We point out its potency in unmistakable terms. We hold it up as a shining revelation to a gasping novitiate, and for revelations the timeworn practice is to demand blind, absolute acceptance.
One result of our attitude has just been traced in the experience of the girl with her sleepy little Southern town story. The incompetent who cannot think in terms of criss-cross lines is eliminated. Artificiality is not only encouraged but placed at a premium. Sincerity and that highest of artistic qualities, simplicity, are held up as baneful stumbling blocks in the way of successful authorship. We may have read Joseph Hergesheimer but we have never heard of his philosophic Chwang-Tze whose pithy sentence prefaces “Java Head,” a sentence full of illuminating words: “It is only the path of pure simplicity which guards and preserves the spirit.” By undermining the young story-teller’s faith in the path of pure simplicity we undermine his spirit; we maim it; often destroy it completely.