ect in that motive,
purpose, and story will not have extreme effect. Nor is it to say that
the novel may not be very complicated as to any or all of its three
elements of people, events, and setting. "Anna Karenina" is complicated
enough, in all conscience, but every item of the novel has relation to
its one story either in that it serves directly to develop the horrible
tragedy of Anna's life or in that it forwards the presentment of the
society which she renounced.

The painter cannot put two different pictures side by side on the same
canvas without hampering the effect of each; still less can he commingle
the two. The architect cannot build on two designs at once. Nor can the
novelist--if he would have each story realize to the full its inherent
capacity to interest--combine different stories in the same book. He can
develop personality in great detail; he can follow by-paths of action;
he can involve his minor characters in subplots; but the main course of
the story must be single, not duplicate or triplicate, that the whole
may have point and significance.

The reader will observe that this book lays absolutely no restrictions
on the conceptive faculty. It preaches that the way to write fiction is
to look for a story, and, when it is found, to write it so as to give it
full effect. It may be a short story; it may be a novel. It may have its
genesis in a dream, in a life, in a situation, in a society. But,
whatever its nature, whatever its length, its effect on, its interest
for, a reader, can result only from itself. The story as such cannot be
fortified by the introduction of foreign matter, although the interest
of the writer's text as a mere sequence of words may be heightened
thereby. But the aim of the writer of novel or short story is to
interest through his story as such, not merely to interest. A newspaper
is interesting, yet a newspaper is not a story, however much fiction it
may embody.

The novel or long story is apt to have a strong social emphasis simply
because the interplay of society and the conflict of its members supply
much more material for stories than the more isolated phases of human
life. The novelist is under no obligation to reproduce a social
spectacle in each book, but more often than not he will find that he
must do so to bring out the full value of his conception. It follows
that he will do well to go about with an observant eye, for it is the
little details of the novel of manners