e writer who seeks
merely to cater to current tastes with each tale will do well to devise
fictions that will subserve his purpose naturally. Thereby he will
achieve his aim the more easily, and may spare the reading public much
inferior work. But it is always well to make quite sure that any story
cannot be begun swiftly before adopting the more leisurely approach.
Kipling's "Without Benefit of Clergy" might have been begun so much less
invitingly by one less skilled.

The more complicated the plot, the more difficult it will be to arrange
its elements justly. The events of the structurally simple story usually
can be related in chronological order; one gives place to the other
without effort or preparation. The story with a complicated plot is not
so simple to order justly. In the structurally simple story nearly all
events have a primary value; each is a definite step in the climactic
ascension of the whole. In the story of complicated plot, on the
contrary, there are a comparatively small number of events having this
primary value in that they are definite steps in the climactic
ascension, and there are also a comparatively large number of minor
events having only a secondary value in that they serve to give the
primary events naturalness, intelligibility, and effect. Thus, in the
story displaying the conflict of two characters, the chief events will
be those giving the struggle the most intense expression, and the minor
events, having only a secondary value, will be those which serve to
prepare the various conflicts and to build up and vitalize the two
opposed persons. Even if these minor events are only secondary in
intrinsic significance, they are essential to the story, and the task of
its writer--no easy one--is to order its primary events so that they
will form a climactic ascension in point of tensity and interest, and to
order its secondary events so that they will function naturally in
endowing the primary events with the fullest measure of significance to
the reader.

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 huma