inclusion of any accidental and unessential matter must lessen by
just so much his power to awaken interest by some diversity and
complication in the real story.

When a story idea is found, the writer should determine precisely what
matters must be brought out if the fiction is to have full effect on a
reader, who will have only the writer's words to go on. The writer
should realize precisely what elements of personality are significant in
relation to the main situation, which is the story in little, and should
prepare to develop the motives and traits involved. He should determine
precisely what will be the most effective physical movement for the
story, the nature and order of events, also the setting or environment.
He should consider the essential nature of the main situation, or
climax, and, if he cannot manage that preceding events shall prepare a
reader for it, he should prepare from the beginning of the story to hint
what is to come, as Stevenson does in "Markheim." Finally, he should
grasp the developed story as a whole, and be vigilant to transcribe
nothing unessential, for if the story is real fictional knot or problem,
and worth while, he cannot do so without sacrificing essential matter or
exceeding his limits.

The physical brevity of the short story certainly has great influence in
the direction of simplicity. But its brevity does not subject the
dramatic short story to the conventions of the stage. It must be a
unity, so-called, but only in this, that every word must be necessary to
develop the story-idea, which, in itself, may be simple or somewhat
complex. The short story of atmosphere is another matter.

Coherence is a word much better than unity to express the most
significant attribute of the dramatic short story. The form is coherent
in that every word, line, and sentence has relation to the story itself.
The novel is relatively incoherent in that it often embodies whole
stories without relation to the main story, or matter without relation
to any story at all. The most pungent way to put the point of the whole
discussion is to state that the short story, viewed merely as a sequence
of words, is coherent in that each word serves to forward a single
story-idea to its conclusion. That is not to state that the story-idea
itself is coherent or a unity. It is a unity in that it is single, one
story, but the one story need not manifest unity of time, place, and
action. The sooner the short story write