Lanoe Falconer
The art of writing a short story
The art of writing a short story is like the art of managing a small allowance. It requires the same care, self-restraint, and ingenuity, and, like the small allowance, it affords excellent practice for the beginner, as by the very limitations it imposes on her ambition, it preserves her from errors of judgment and tastes into which she might be hurried by fancy or fashion.
What to avoid
There are many things lawful, if not expedient, in the three-volume novel that in the short story are forbidden—moralising, for instance, or comments of any kind, personal confidences or confessions. These can indeed be made so entrancing that the narrative itself may be willingly foregone. The wit of a Thackeray, the wisdom of a George Eliot, has done as much: but these gifts are rare, so rare that the beginner will do well to assume that she has them not, and to stick fast to her story, especially if it be a short one; since on that tiny stage where there is hardly room for the puppets and their manœuvres, there is plainly no space for the wire-puller.
Explanations
Even more cheerfully may be renounced those dreary addenda called explanations. Nowhere in a story can they possibly be welcome. At the end they would be preposterous; at the beginning they scare away the reader; in the middle they exasperate him. Who does not know the chill of disappointment with which, having finished one lively and promising chapter, one reads at the beginning of the next, “And now we must retrace our steps a little to explain,” or words to the same depressing effect? Explain what?—the situation? That should have explained itself. Or the relation of the actors? A word or two in the dialogue might do as much. More I, as the reader, do not wish to learn. I am fully interested, I am caught in the current of the tale, I am burning to know if the hero recovered, if the heroine forgave, if the parents at last consented: I am in no mood to listen to a précis—for it is never more—of the past events that prepared this dilemma, or of the legal, financial, or genealogical complications by which it is prolonged. With these dry details the author may do well to be acquainted, for the due direction and confirmation of his plot; but the reader has nothing to do with them, and in a work of art they are as needless and as unsightly as the scaffolding round a completed building, or the tacking threads in a piece of finished needlework.
Redundancy
Equally incompatible with the short story is that fertile source of tedium, redundancy. “The secret of being wearisome,” says the French proverb, “is to tell everything.” What then is the end of those who tell not merely everything, but—if an Irish turn of expression may be permitted—a great deal more? It is to encourage the practice of skipping in the general reader, and—much to the detriment of more parsimonious writers—in the reviewers as well. A large number of novels picturesquely described as weak and washy, might be converted into very readable stories by the simple process of leaving out about two volumes and a half of entirely superfluous and unentertaining matter.
“Phillup Bosch.”