of ink. It is also difficult to narrate the man's
actions with some of the vividness of reality, or to touch in a real
world for him to move in. But note this. Where the novelist must deal
with a large number of events and scenes, the short story writer has
only a few to handle; he has about as many words available for each of
his few as the novelist has for his many. That is not the case in
creating characters. The process of characterization must permeate any
fiction, forwarded by the narrative matter, the dialogue, the
expository matter, and the descriptive matter alike. And the novelist
has five hundred pages to initiate, reinforce, and complete the illusion
of personality where the short story writer has but five thousand words.
The novelist has more people to vivify, it is true, but not enough more
than the short story writer to give the latter an equal chance if he
follows the same technique.

It all comes down to this: a story, long or short, can be broken up into
its several episodes and scenes, which are mechanically separable, but
its people move through the whole. Since any event or any scene is in a
sense a mere item of a story, not universally influential, the technique
of handling event or scene simply as such is much the same, whatever the
type of story. But since the element of personality is universally
present and influential in a story, the technique of characterization
varies with the essential nature of the story as a whole.

The result of the condition upon the general technique of
characterization as applied in the short story must now be stated.

I have said already that the whole process must be swifter, but that is
not very definite. Expanded, the statement amounts to saying that the
short story writer cannot develop personality with the fullness and
diversity of the novelist; he must concentrate his verbal resources upon
the trait developed by the few events of the story and upon a few
striking peculiarities of appearance and speech. As to the strict trait
of character, the story itself will point the way. It will have one main
situation, and probably that one will be of such a nature as to involve
relatively simple attributes of soul in the persons concerned. As to the
more superficial matter of making the persons seem real and lifelike,
the writer must describe sharply, rather than at length--as Stevenson
did in "A Lodging for the Night"--and must make his people talk as
individually as p