duality and
life to the people of a story is based on the necessity to achieve
verisimilitude and interest. Human life is a great complex of millions
of men and women doing certain things, and in a story, which is a
picture of a phase of life, the people must be drawn with as much
definition and detail as the events, or the reader will not accept the
fiction as fictional truth.

In great part, the matter of developing the human elements of a story is
a problem of construction, as is the matter of preparing a natural
succession of events. The writer first must order his main events as
interestingly and plausibly as possible. He then must devise and order
his secondary events as to give the requisite spacing and naturalness to
the whole, and he also must take care to provide for such action on the
part of the characters that when they come to the main events they will
be something more than named abstractions. Of course, the writer has
means at command to vitalize his people other than to draw them in
actions illustrating their peculiarities, but it is difficult enough at
best to vivify a character, and the writer who depends solely on his
powers of direct description will achieve very meager results. I have
already referred to the part the secondary events of a story play in
developing character, and have cited London's "The Sea Wolf" as an
instance. A great part of the book is devoted to a succession of
episodes which develop Larsen's striking personality. It is very
skillfully done in this respect, and the result is as memorable a figure
as exists in recent fiction. The beginning writer and even the more
practiced hand will do well to note the great part that just
construction must have played in producing the impression of the Wolf's
virility and ruthlessness.

It all may be termed a matter of drawing character, but the necessity is
to realize that in constructing his story before writing an author must
prepare for the development of its people as well as for the development
of its events. The work will have to be done sometime, if the story is
to be more than a report, and it should be done before writing, so far
as it is a matter of construction. The writer who has conceived a plot
of real merit has done much, but he has not done all. The striking
events of a plot are significant only in relation to the people of the
story, and a reader must be made to feel the reality of the characters
as well as the reality of t