he events. The single concern of the writer
of fiction is to lay on his page a picture of a phase of life that is
effective because it is plausible, and he must give equal attention to
the persons of the story and to what they do, both in construction and
execution.[F]

PROPORTION

In planning his story with an eye to giving it the greatest semblance
of reality, the writer has one means ready to his hand which is the more
useful because somewhat mechanical. I have reference to the preservation
of proportion.

Fundamentally, proportion is a mere matter of space or length. In real
life events vary in point of the time they take to happen, and in the
story proportion may be preserved by dividing the available space justly
between the several events. Normally a love scene will take longer to
happen than a murder, which is an affair of one high-pitched moment, and
in planning and writing a story which contains both a love scene and a
murder a proper amount of space should be assigned to each. In the story
the reader passes through days in an hour and through hours in a minute;
he must not be made to pass through minutes in an hour, and through
hours of events as important to the story in a minute. A murder may be
more important in the story than a love scene, and so require emphasis,
but it cannot be stressed by great expansion without violating
proportion. Emphasis must be laid by narrating vividly, a matter to be
taken up in its proper place when discussing executive technique.

The mere fact that the writer must narrate the main events of his story
in some detail usually will lead him unconsciously to preserve
proportion so far as they are concerned. The space necessary to develop
a murder will have roughly the same relation to the space necessary to
develop a love scene as the duration of a real murder has to the
duration of a real love scene. But the minor events of a story function
on a different plane from its major happenings, and so cannot be
proportioned similarly. If a murderer must sail from London to New York
to reach his victim--either on account of the place necessities of the
story, or to fasten an impression of his animosity on the reader--the
minutes of the days of the voyage cannot be related with as much detail
as the minutes of the actual killing. In planning a story, the writer
should make provision for the secondary events and the strict matter of
transition, as well as for the main events, but h