The Technique of Fiction Writing

by Robert Saunders Dowst

Each story is unique and characteristic, and of course very little specific advice can be given as to the just ordering of events, primary and secondary. There are two main necessities; the story must be told, and it must be told plausibly. The first necessity, that the story be told, requires that the writer take care, not only to set forth its primary events with due elaboration, but also to develop its characters into individualized human beings—an office chiefly performed by the secondary events—and to make due preparation for each successive primary event, that the reader may fully understand its import. The second necessity, that the story be told plausibly, requires that the events be ordered naturally as well as climactically, be told in accordance with the canons of life as well as of art. The difficult task of the writer is to picture his single phase of life so deftly and with so little apparent forcing of his matter that the whole will be endowed with the significant simplicity of art and yet have the naturalness of life. Of course it is hard, and of course it takes long and patient practice to conquer the secret. That is why the writer who has full command of technique is so rare.

The story itself largely determines the order of its primary events, for their succession is the story. But the secondary events are as largely subject to the control of the writer, who may devise, adapt, and order them almost at will, and in just and natural ordering of them lies much of the secret of verisimilitude. They are the mortar that binds the stones of the edifice, and by slighting them many a fine initial conception has been rendered feeble in execution. They need not be elaborately treated; in fact, the technique to be acquired is to relate them in due subordination to events intrinsically more important, though giving them an easy and natural flow and succession. But the minor events must be ordered justly, that the story may march becomingly from major event to major event, and therefore the writer must struggle with their ordering. No rules capable of statement regulate the matter; the writer can only be told its importance and urged not to consider his story fully developed and ready for writing simply because he has determined the order of its main events.

Perhaps the whole philosophy of the ordering of events, major and minor, can be stated broadly to be that in ordering the more important events of a story the writer must regard chiefly the necessities of climax, that is, of art, while in ordering the secondary events he must regard chiefly the necessity to be natural, that is, to achieve verisimilitude. Art is life raised to a higher power, and the struggle of the artist is to present his phase of life as simply and pungently as can be done without entirely severing the relation between his conception and life itself.

One function of the secondary events of a story is to prepare the elements of the main events. In the love story, John meets Joan that he may subsequently make love to her. Another function of the secondary events is to develop character. In London's "The Sea Wolf" most of the earlier episodes and many of the later are narrated to build up the impression of Wolf Larsen's ruthlessness.[D] It follows that any minor event will serve a double purpose when devised and placed so that it will forward the mechanical progress of the story and also illustrate character. Tarkington, in "Monsieur Beaucaire," begins the story with a scene over the card table which not only gives the barber-prince his necessary introduction to society but also shows the stuff of which he is made. In constructing his story before writing, the author should select and place each incident with an eye to its serving as many purposes as possible. The story will gain thereby in compactness and uniformity of interest. It is golden advice to urge the writer not to accept the secondary events of a story as they first come to mind, but to re-arrange and re-devise until each happening performs as many functions as the necessities of the story permit.

There is nothing particularly new and striking about the main events and situations of many stories that not only are getting published to-day, but are truly interesting and worth while. Their interest—and therefore their worth—derives from their writers' management of secondary events. By varying the nature and succession of minor events, any fundamental plot theme, such as the "eternal triangle" of two men and a woman, may be utilized a thousand times without essential loss of interest. As has been stated, the naturalness and plausibility of a story depend largely upon just selection and ordering of its secondary events, and, curiously enough, in a very real sense the reader's interest depends on the minor happenings. The plot must be a real plot and an interesting one, but, at the last of it, the plot is only the skeleton. The minor events of the story are the comely flesh that gives the conception the attraction and interest of life. The figure may be grewsome, but it is accurate. A thousand skulls look much alike, but no face is precisely the same as another, even to the casual eye. The flesh makes the difference, and the minor events of a story are its flesh.

The chief necessity in beginning a story is to begin it interestingly, if its nature permits; the chief necessity in ending a story is to end it—and there is no proviso as to its nature. A story is a fiction with a plot, and a plot is a chain of events with a definite and significant ending. The writer who has discovered or devised a true plot upon which to hang his fiction will not struggle on aimlessly after narrating the climax, for there will be nothing more to relate. I believe that absence of true plot is most often responsible for the story that stumbles to a lame and inconclusive halt—not an end—rather than executive inaptitude on the writer's part, for the climax of a true plot is a hard thing not to feel and realize. At any rate, when the climax is reached and the story told it must be ended, justly but finally. There is nothing more for the reader, unless the characters are caught in another chain of significant events. "But that is another story."

To recapitulate, a story is a progression of events, major and minor. The story largely determines the character and order of its main events, for they are the story itself; nevertheless the writer should give them climactic arrangement, as far as possible. The minor events are more subject to his control, and he should devise and order them chiefly with an eye to verisimilitude and plausibility, not forgetting that each should serve some definite purpose and will be the more useful if it can be made to serve more than one.

PREPARATION

Two sorts of preparation must engage the attention of the writer of a story. The first is purely mechanical, and is the result of the writer's realization of the physical necessities of his story. If at some definite point the hero is to be found in some definite place by other characters, the writer must prepare to place him there. The necessity is obvious, and this sort of preparation requires little discussion, except the warning that in the complicated story it will demand close attention. But the second sort of preparation is a much more delicate matter, and in a sense is a great part of the art of fiction. I have reference to the necessity that the writer individualize and vitalize the people of his story so that the significant situations of the fiction may have maximum effect on a reader. The problem is not so much how to delineate character, which will be taken up later, as to plan the whole story so that it will have body and not be a mere report.

There are three fundamental types of story, it is true, in that a story may emphasize any one of its elements of character, of complication of incident, or of atmosphere. But the story which depends for its appeal on the novelty or intrinsic significance of the bare succession of its events is somewhat rare; at least it is true that fiction concerns man primarily, and in the normal story, or, better, in the story which the necessities of plot-structure most frequently produce,[E] the man is as important as the event. Since the person is as important as the event, the persons involved in any significant situation of a story must be developed as well as the situation itself. The aim is to give the situation maximum effect, and the concern of the writer is not so much to develop character, strictly, as to give the body of reality to the whole story. It is about human beings, and, however novel and interesting the plot, unless they are given some of the vivacity and concreteness of real men and women the fiction will be devoid of the breath of life. The first sort of preparation builds up the physical situations of a story; the preparation now under discussion builds up its people.