The Project Gutenberg EBook of Short Stories Old and New
Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith

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Title: Short Stories Old and New

Author: Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith

Release Date: December 17, 2003 [EBook #10483]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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SHORT STORIES

OLD AND NEW

SELECTED AND EDITED

BY

C. ALPHONSO SMITH

EDGAR ALLAN POE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, AUTHOR OF
"THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY," ETC.

1916

INTRODUCTION

Every short story has three parts, which may be called Setting or
Background, Plot or Plan, and Characters or Character. If you are going
to write a short story, as I hope you are, you will find it necessary to
think through these three parts so as to relate them interestingly and
naturally one to the other; and if you want to assimilate the best that
is in the following stories, you will do well to approach them by the
same three routes.

The Setting or Background gives us the time and the place of the story
with such details of custom, scenery, and dialect as time and place
imply. It answers the questions _When? Where?_ The Plot tells us what
happened. It gives us the incidents and events, the haps or mishaps,
that are interwoven to make up the warp and woof of the story. Sometimes
there is hardly any interweaving; just a plain plan or simple outline is
followed, as in "The Christmas Carol" or "The Great Stone Face." We may
still call the core of these two stories the Plot, if we want to, but
Plan would be the more accurate. This part of the story answers the
question _What_? Under the heading Characters or Character we study the
personalities of the men and women who move through the story and give
it unity and coherence. Sometimes, as in "The Christmas Carol" or
"Markheim," one character so dominates the others that they are mere
spokes in his hub or incidents in his career. But in "The Gift of the
Magi," though more space is given to Della, she and Jim act from the
same motive and contr