rinity. This book will confine itself to
the English-American short story.

To-day the short story is so popular that we seem to be in a new
literary epoch--the epoch of the short story--and there is no apparent
cause to expect an early diminution in the demand for such literature;
so that to the young writer the short story offers the best opportunity
to prove his mettle. Then, too, it has the additional value of being an
excellent school for the novelist. The short story and the novel have
many radical differences; but in material, treatment and aim they are
much the same, and the same general training is necessary for both. All
short story writers do not become great novelists, nor have all
novelists been short story tellers; but it is a fact that the majority
of the present day novelists served their 'prenticeship in the ranks of
the short story writers.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: "Hawthorne's 'Tales,'" by Edgar Allan Poe. _Graham's
Magazine_, May, 1842.]

SHORT STORY WRITING

I

THE SHORT STORY

There is no modern literary form which is as little understood as is the
short story. The term short story is applied to every piece of prose
writing of 30,000 words or less, without regard to its matter, aim, or
handling; but our purpose demands a definition of some accuracy.

"In the first place, then, what is, and what is _not_, a short story?
Many things a short story may be. It may be an episode, like Miss Ella
Hepworth Dixon's or like Miss Bertha Thomas'; a fairy tale, like Miss
Evelyn Sharp's; the presentation of a single character with the stage to
himself (Mr. George Gissing); a tale of the uncanny (Mr. Rudyard
Kipling); a dialogue comedy (Mr. Pett Ridge); a panorama of selected
landscape, a vision of the sordid street, a record of heroism, a remote
tradition or some old belief vitalized by its bearing on our lives
to-day, an analysis of an obscure calling, a glimpse at a forgotten
quarter ... but one thing it can never be--it can never be 'a novel in a
nutshell'."[2]

"A short story ... must lead up to something. It should have for its
structure a plot, a bit of life, an incident such as you would find in a
brief newspaper paragraph.... He (Richard Harding Davis) takes the
substance of just such a paragraph, and, with that for the meat of his
story, weaves around it details, descriptions and dialogue, until a
complete story is the result. Now, a story is something more than
incidents and desc