rmany can be stimulated again, so that she is shown veering
between the impulse to kill and the impulse to cherish. Such a situation
is intensely dramatic, for it involves conflict between two of the most
intense human qualities, love of one's country and love of one's child.
The more terrific the opposed forces in any situation, the higher its
dramatic value.

At first glance it may seem that the relative position in a story of
each of its various major situations is determined by the plot itself,
but that is not the case. It appears to be the case because it is usual
to regard the plot of a story as the entire mechanical arrangement of
the fiction, including the nature and order of the situations, which is
a false view of plot. As the previous discussion has attempted to
demonstrate, plot is merely the conflict between opposed forces of
personality and environment, at least one of the forces being of
personality. Any two stories which display conflict between the same
forces have the same plot, though one may vary widely from the other in
the means employed to give the struggle objectivity and expression in
action.

The writer of fiction should realize the point. The imagination produces
concrete pictures and conceptions, and, when a story is imagined, it
will come to life in terms of concrete people and events, more or less
definitely ordered and determined. But the writer should not stop there.
He should ascertain just what opposed forces of personality or
environment give the story and its situations plot and dramatic value,
and then should seek to find whether he cannot give the basic conflict
involved more effective presentment than will be given by the persons
and situations which he has already conceived. An essentially weak
conception may offer a clue to a dramatic conflict that will have
fictional power if properly developed by persons and situations
different from those first conceived.

It will be perceived how far it is within the writer's power to
manipulate situation in the interests of art, which, in this connection,
means climax. Starting with some basic conflict, which will be his plot,
the writer can devise situation after situation in which the struggle
will become more and more acute, until, finally, it will become so
serious as to involve all the elements of the story. And with the
determination of the dramatic situation which involves all the elements
of the story, the story itself will termin