e wishes to produce than it is for the writer of
the short story of a few thousand words. The potential and usual effects
of the novel are many; it may and usually does contain chapters or
passages emphasizing all three story elements of character, complication
of incident, and atmosphere; but the short story is limited by its
brevity to the creation of a single effect, and any touch of emphasis
looking elsewhere usually will detract from the power of the whole.
Therefore it is in short story writing that a firm preliminary grasp
upon all the implications and connotations of the basic idea is most
essential, also most attainable, and therefore a discussion of
fundamental story types concerns itself largely with the short story.
But much the same principles of constructive analysis utilized by the
writer of the short story may be profitably employed in developing the
various but more or less unified episodes of the novel.

The three fundamental types of story have a perfectly natural origin. A
story is the relation of what (1) certain persons (2) did (3) in a
certain place and under certain conditions of existence. Accordingly, as
the elements of personality, action, or surrounding conditions are
emphasized, we have the story of character, of incident, or of
atmosphere. As Stevenson has said, there are but three ways to create a
story, to conceive characters and select and devise incidents to develop
them, to take a plot--a climactic series of incidents--and devise
characters to enact it, or to take an atmosphere and precipitate it as
best the writer may.

There is, however, an obvious fact to remember. These several types of
story differ from one another only in point of emphasis; in each case an
element possessed by all is stressed; no type is entirely devoid of the
elements emphasized in the other two. An intended story lacking any one
of the three elements of character, of complication of incident, or of
setting is not a story, but something else. The most common example is
the composition portraying character without any plot or complication of
incident, which is not a character story, but a character sketch. It
cannot be too strongly insisted that a story is a story, consisting of a
climactic series of incidents, as distinguished from a tale, which is a
level series of incidents, unrelated save in that all happen to the same
group of characters. Plot is a matter not specifically under discussion
as yet, but half t