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Updated: May 1, 2025
If we turn from the novel to the short-story, we shall notice that certain themes are in themselves so interesting that the resultant story could not fail to be effective even were it badly told. It is perhaps unfair to take as an example Mr. F. J. Stimson's tale called "Mrs.
There was a notice of a short-story competition, stories not to exceed 5000 words; another of a short-sketch competition, sketches not to exceed 1200 words. Apparently I was prepared to write you anything in those days.
I've had palpitations on a college campus myself; and I want to tell you right here that it beats having them at a stage door, or at a summer resort, or in a parlor just around the corner from nine relatives, or in one of those short-story conservatories, or in the United States mails, forty ways for Sunday; and, besides, it's educational.
Thus the short-story has, what the novel cannot have, the effect of 'totality, as Poe called it, the unity of impression.
The element of style, which has just been touched upon in reference to the short-story, must now be considered in its broader aspect as a factor of fiction in general. Hitherto, in examining the methods of fiction, we have confined our attention for the most part to the study of structural expedients.
The materials of a short-story, or of a chapter of narrative, should in nearly every case be assembled in an ascending order of importance, each incident carrying the interest to a higher level than that of the preceding.
In such stories as Björnson's The Father and Maupassant's The Piece of String this simplicity is equal to that of the anecdote, but in no case can an anecdote possess the dramatic possibilities of these simple short-stories; for a short-story must always have that tensity of emotion that comes only in the crucial tests of life.
When Mr. Davis wrote the story of "The Deserter," he could not possibly have foreseen that it was to be his last story the last of those short stories which gave him such eminence as a short-story writer. He apparently was as rugged and as vigorous as ever.
Therefore, it is necessary in the short-story, and advisable in the chapters of a novel, to reserve for the ultimate position one of the most inherently important features of the narrative; for surely it is bad art to waste the natural emphasis of position by casting it upon a subsidiary feature.
Many tales spring from a loathsome filth that is extremely obnoxious to our present day tastes. The remarkable and gratifying truth is, however, that the short-story, beginning in the crude and brutal stages of man's development, has gradually unfolded to greater and more useful possibilities, until in our own time it is a most flexible and moral literary form.
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