And how shall a story be told?

And how shall a story be told?

As a rule it should tell itself. That is, the conversation of the principal characters, together with a little explanatory narrative by the author,. should tell the story, as in "The Revolt of Mother. " The other common method is pure narration, which may be in the words of the author himself, as in "The Luck of Roaring Camp, " or in the words of a character introduced for the sole purpose of telling the story, as in "Marse Chan, " in which, after the story proper is begun, everything is in the words of an old man who had been the body servant of Marse Chan. A method not to be recommended is the use of letters and telegrams exclusively, as in "Marjorie Daw. " In this particular story the result is altogether charming, but as a rule the method has not led to satisfactory results. These are the ordinary methods. Any method, however, that will force the reader to appreciate the interpreted experience, will be satisfactory, and the more original it is, the better.

In whatever way the story is told the author should not intrude himself or his opinions on the reader. No one will question his right to an opinion about his characters and their actions, but no one is pleased to find that opinion expressed in the story. He may know that his hero is very handsome and very bold and that his heroine is most bewitching; but he must make his reader feel these facts, not force them upon him as a matter of personal opinion. So he must not turn his story into an essay by the insertion of paragraphs dealing with philosophy. When Irving halts his story in order to deal with philosophical truths, as he does, for example, in the latter half of the third paragraph of "Rip Van Winkle" and often both in that story and in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, " we cannot but feel that he does it to the detriment of the story as a story. Irving's opinions are always charming and are often flavored with a piquant humor, and his readers delight in them wherever expressed. Yet one cannot help feeling that in his stories they are somewhat out of place. A story is not of the best when it has about it the style of an essay

It is the story-writer's duty to do three things: He must so visualize the crucial test that his reader will spiritually experience it; he must present acts so suggestive that at the end of the story the reader will be thoroughly acquainted with the principal character; and he must so interweave his theme or purpose that his reader will profit by it without realizing that he is being moved by a powerful sermon. And all this must be done with the utmost conciseness; it must all be compressed into a compass of from a thousand to six or seven thousand words.

In order to accomplish this, every irrelevant act, sentence, word, must be ruthlessly cut out. The author's one duty is to lift the curtain on some bit of the great world drama and to drop it at exactly the right moment. He must present his characters doing something, and must keep them doing something all the time the curtain is up. He must consume not a single minute in telling about them or in philosophizing. He should never forget that his characters must make themselves known exclusively by their own conversation and acts.

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