Plotting a Short Story for Beginner Writers
By Robert Wilson Neal (1914)
Excerpt from Short Stories in the Making: A Writers' and Students' Introduction to the Technique and Practical Composition of Short Stories, Including an Adaptation of the Principles of the Stage Plot to Short Story Writing
To the beginner, one caution must be emphatically given about the plot in the plot story. It must not be overcrowded with either incident or action. True, it will be complicated; but all plots are that. This means no more than that it includes some element that checks, or stops, or changes, the otherwise plain course of the action. Without such an obstacle, there could be no conflict, no crisis, no uncertainty about outcome and result. In the short story that emphasizes plot, the number of such complicating influences tends to increase rapidly. But at their most numerous, they must not be so many that they congest the story, cramp the action, interfere with the just development of characterization, or require a total amount of setting out of proportion to the other narrative elements. Nor must ancillary incident overflow either the plot it supplements or the other bounds of proportion. In other words, even the plot story must not be all plot and incident; there must be an adequate proportion of the other fiction elements.
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