until he first has
produced, cannot show a perfect work unless he paints, builds, or writes
along the lines of a perfected design.

One cannot dabble long at architecture or the graphic arts without
gaining keen realization of the fact that conception in its elaborative
aspects is as much a part and phase of technique as the executive
handling of materials. But the art of literature, and, more narrowly,
the art of fiction, deal with materials other than those employed in the
other arts; words, not colors or marble, nor yet sounds, are the
resource of the story teller to precipitate his conception in enduring
form; and words are at once frank and mysterious things. Their primary
office is to forward the common business of life; each has some meaning
in itself, more or less definite. It results that the writer of a story
who sets out with only the merest glimmering of what he means to do in
mind can produce a superficially plausible work, a work not too
obviously misshapen, a work that means something, at any rate, although
his failure to trace a design to guide his hand almost inevitably will
prohibit his giving the basic conception most effective expression. And,
since almost any sequence of words has some significance, it also
results that the writer of fiction who works at haphazard may fail to
discover that failure in his work as a whole is due to lack of planning
rather than to defective execution. The mere grammatical coherence of a
fictionally slipshod piece of work is a shield between its writer's
inquiring eye and its essential defects.

The art of fiction is the art both of the tale and of the story,
fictions that differ radically. Their most striking difference is stated
in the following pages; here I can only remark broadly that the tale is
episodal, consisting of a fortuitous series of incidents without
essential connection or relation except that they all happened to happen
to the characters, while the story is a whole in that each incident
functions in the development of a plot or dramatic problem. If prevision
and full elaboration of his basic idea are essential to the writer of a
tale, they are doubly essential to the writer of a story, simply because
a story is a whole and the result of careful co-ordination of parts.
Even if the writer of some particular story has not worked along the
lines of a fully elaborated design, the story actually will manifest
co-ordination of parts or else be worthless. A s