and have defined a
plot as a dramatic problem, that is, a course of events which function
together as a whole in that they influence and are influenced by
character or personality. And nine-tenths of the technique of fiction
is concerned with the object to develop a plot. To develop a tale, a
fiction, long or short, without a plot, only direct narrative and
descriptive writing is requisite; it is the plot-element of a fiction,
with all its implications as to personality, that forces the writer of a
story--a fiction with a plot--to weave together cunningly each strand of
his matter, narrative, exposition, dialogue, description, that the whole
pattern may show fictionally real people doing in a fictionally real
world what one might naturally expect from their natures and the
circumstances of their lives. The task is infinitely more difficult and
delicate than to take a Sinbad the Sailor or a Cinderella through a
course of happenings without essential relation to the nature of either
person, who is, in each case, a mere human focal point for the events to
be precipitated upon. Accordingly, this book concentrates upon the
fiction of plot, or story, rather than the fiction without plot, or
tale. The technique of the fiction of plot comprehends and includes the
technique of the tale, which could be ignored here without loss.

Whether or not a fiction possess a plot, and is a story, or lacks a
plot, and is a tale, it will be concerned with people and what they do,
the man and his acts. Long or short, a fiction must deal with man, at
least with personality, as do London's "The Call of the Wild" and
Kipling's "The Ship That Found Herself." Since fiction deals with man,
it deals both with physical and spiritual facts, with the facts of the
soul and the more tangible things of the body and the earth. It results
that either the spiritual or physical element of any fiction may largely
outweigh the other, at least, preponderate over it. That is, the long
story may be what is known as a novel or what is known as a romance,
and the brief story may reveal the fate of the spirit rather than the
fate of the body and mind.[T]

Precisely at this point one encounters a difficulty raised by critical
comment on fiction, the whole complex of obscurantism about "realism"
and "romanticism." Instead of wasting space in trying to unravel the
threads of the tangle as stated by those who have knotted it, it will be
much easier and much more profita