tly in mind,
he will not be able to decide whether any event that suggests itself
during the progress of his composition does or does not form a logical
factor in the series.

=Construction, Analytic and Synthetic.=--The preliminary process of
construction may be accomplished in either of two ways. Authors with
synthetic minds will more naturally reason from causes to effects;
and authors with analytic minds will more naturally reason from
effects to causes. The former will construct forward through time, the
latter backward. Standing at the outset of a narrative, it is possible
to imagine forward along a series of events until the logical
culmination is divined; or standing at the culmination, it is possible
to imagine backward along the series to its far-away beginnings.
Thackeray apparently constructed in the former manner; Guy de
Maupassant apparently constructed in the latter. The latter
method--the method of building backward from the culmination--is
perhaps more efficacious toward the conservation of the strictest
unity. It seems on the whole a little easier to exclude the extraneous
in thinking from effects to causes than in thinking from causes to
effects, because analysis is a stricter and more focussed mood of mind
than synthesis.

=The Importance of Structure.=--But in whichever way the process of
construction be accomplished, the best stories are always built before
they are written; and that is the reason why, in reading them, we feel
at every point that we are getting somewhere, and that the author is
leading us step by step toward a definite culmination. Although, as is
usually the case, we cannot, even midway through the story, foresee
what the culmination is to be, we feel a certain reassurance in the
knowledge that the author has foreseen it from the start. This feeling
is one of the main sources of interest in reading narrative. In
looking on at life itself, we are baffled by a muddle of events
leading every whither; their succession is chaotic and lacking in
design; they are not marshaled and processional; and we have an
uncomfortable feeling that no mind but that of God can foresee their
veiled and hidden culminations. But in reading a narrative arrangement
of life, we have a comfortable sense of order, which comes of our
knowledge that the author knows beforehand whither the events are
tending and can make us understand the sequence of causation through
which they are moving to their ultimate r