Thus far the discussion has been concerned with plot as a whole; it remains to consider the events, incidents, or situations which compose a plot. The situations of the plot or story are what its writer must cast into a climactic consequence, and he must have some standard to measure each before he can determine its proper place.
The fictionally significant aspect of a plot is that it embodies a conflict between opposing forces, that is, it is dramatic. Likewise, the fictionally significant aspect of a situation is that it displays opposed persons—or at least opposed forces—in conflict. The writer manipulates his material—preferably before writing—so that two or more persons, actuated by incompatible motives, are brought into conflict; there is a moment of indecision; then some person bends the other or others to his will; and the situation determines. Or the writer brings a character or group of characters into conflict with Nature, as did Harte in "The Outcasts of Poker Flat." Here, also, there is a period of indecision, and then either the human force or the natural force triumphs.
The dramatic quality of any situation inheres in the struggle between opposing forces which each presents, and rises or falls with the essential strength of such forces. Take two instances of conflict between opposed motives in the same person. In some humorous story a character may be unable to decide which of two women he wants to marry. One can cook, let us say, and he is a gourmand; the other is pretty, and he has leanings that way, too. The dramatic quality in such a story will be slight, because the motives involved are relatively weak, yet it will be present. But take the story of a French girl who is outraged by a German soldier and gives birth to a child by him. Her quality of patriotism can be built up to great intensity, if the writer wills, even to the point where the reader will accept an impulse on her part to kill her child. Her quality as a mother can be built up likewise. It would be a most effective touch to have her hate the unborn child furiously, then to arrange matters so that she should be unable to carry out her first impulse to kill it and be forced to care for it, giving it opportunity to awaken her dormant maternal instinct. Finally, love for France and hatred for Germany can be stimulated again, so that she is shown veering between the impulse to kill and the impulse to cherish. Such a situation is intensely dramatic, for it involves conflict between two of the most intense human qualities, love of one's country and love of one's child. The more terrific the opposed forces in any situation, the higher its dramatic value.
At first glance it may seem that the relative position in a story of each of its various major situations is determined by the plot itself, but that is not the case. It appears to be the case because it is usual to regard the plot of a story as the entire mechanical arrangement of the fiction, including the nature and order of the situations, which is a false view of plot. As the previous discussion has attempted to demonstrate, plot is merely the conflict between opposed forces of personality and environment, at least one of the forces being of personality. Any two stories which display conflict between the same forces have the same plot, though one may vary widely from the other in the means employed to give the struggle objectivity and expression in action.
The writer of fiction should realize the point. The imagination produces concrete pictures and conceptions, and, when a story is imagined, it will come to life in terms of concrete people and events, more or less definitely ordered and determined. But the writer should not stop there. He should ascertain just what opposed forces of personality or environment give the story and its situations plot and dramatic value, and then should seek to find whether he cannot give the basic conflict involved more effective presentment than will be given by the persons and situations which he has already conceived. An essentially weak conception may offer a clue to a dramatic conflict that will have fictional power if properly developed by persons and situations different from those first conceived.
It will be perceived how far it is within the writer's power to manipulate situation in the interests of art, which, in this connection, means climax. Starting with some basic conflict, which will be his plot, the writer can devise situation after situation in which the struggle will become more and more acute, until, finally, it will become so serious as to involve all the elements of the story. And with the determination of the dramatic situation which involves all the elements of the story, the story itself will terminate, for the struggle which it embodies will have been settled one way or the other. This final situation will be the climax of the story, and its outcome or result will be the denouement. The story will be ended because the struggle or conflict it serves to embody will have ended. One force or the other will have triumphed.
In considering the question of situation, the writer of fiction is considering a more specific aspect of the question of plot. Usually he desires to find a plot of real dramatic value, and likewise he usually desires to find a situation or situations of real dramatic value. The dramatic value of plot and of situation resides in the struggle between the opposed forces which it presents. The more powerful the forces involved in either case, the greater the dramatic value of the conception. Each major situation of a story derives its dramatic quality from the opposition of incompatible motives or forces that endows the story's plot with its dramatic quality. In fact, it is not too loose to say that the situation of a story is its plot, provided the main situation or climax is meant.[B]
The purpose of the action or incidents of a story is to give the dramatic struggle it embodies concrete expression. That is to say, the dramatic quality of a story is specific in relation to certain persons and certain events. Two definite men, for instance, will engage in a definite fight over a definite woman. The writer will seek to individualize the persons involved, which is a matter of description and characterization, and he will seek also to picture the physical struggle as definitely as possible, which is a matter of descriptive narration. It is not enough to conceive a plot or dramatic situation; the writer must also expand it into a story, which should be as concrete and specific as its nature permits. Only thus can a reader be made to feel the essential power of the whole conception. It follows that the action or incidents of a story should be devised with a view to express the dynamic elements of the plot and that no incident should be incorporated in the story unless it will serve to build up some one of the forces involved or else serve to illustrate the conflict of forces that have been built up previously.