tend to confine the writer's
appeal to the intellectuals, in the special modern sense, a matter
inimical to the pocketbook, at the least of it. Psychological analysis
is most useful in developing almost any type of story, but as the sole
theme for a fiction it has its disadvantages.

When the writer has his hands on a plot, of whatever type and however
found, his conceptive labors are by no means over. It remains to recast
and rearrange the elements of the idea, that the most effective
arrangement may be discovered. A first invention is very rarely
incapable of improvement, and in the interests of artistry the author
should exhaust all the possibilities of his idea before writing, that he
may not chance upon unsuspected potentialities in his story only when it
is half written, or not discover them at all. Within limits, of course,
any story will tend to shape itself; in particular, there is much
testimony as to the intractability of characters; but one cannot
consciously strive to do any particular thing or to produce any
particular effect without first knowing just what the thing or effect
is to be.

Possibly the most important matter is to arrange the incidents, the
separate elements of the problem or conflict which the plot presents, in
such manner as to give the progression a climactic character. Not only
should each major event be a definite step toward the conclusion,
solution, or denouement, but each succeeding event should be more
striking, significant, and tense than its predecessor. This sort of
climactic movement is not essential to a plot, but it is an essential
element of a good plot, particularly a good plot for a short story. The
short story is a much more strict and artificial type of fiction than
the novel; in other words, its writer has fewer resources to impress a
reader, and he must utilize to the full whatever is open to him. Among
his resources is the device of sensible movement to a crisis or climax.
Like the rest of fiction technique, the device is useful because it
tends to keep alive and stimulate a reader's interest. This it does
because ascending tensity suggests further struggle. Any flat incident,
on the contrary, less tense or striking than its predecessor, infallibly
suggests that the story is already falling to its end, and the end seems
dull because the problem is not fully worked out or even stated.
Psychologically, the point is delicate; it is a queer paradox that a
reader at once h