A Handbook on Story Writing Author:Blanche Colton Williams Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III PLOT: PRELIMINARIES Inductive method; review of anecdote and Incident; definition of anecdote; class divisions; examples of typical anecdotes; ... more »structure; rules; relation to short-story; definition of Incident; distinctions between it and anecdote; illustration; analysis; relation to short-story; dividing line sometimes erased; unmistakable distinction between Incident and story of two lines of interest. "The most important of the constitutive elements is the Plot, the organisation of the incidents of the story. . . . The Plot is the First Principle, and, as it were, the very Soul of Tragedy."—Aristotle's "The Art of Poetry." After finding the story, after the characters and main action appear, the next step is that of constructing a plot. It is the purpose of this section to induct the student into the principles of plot making by a brief review of two simple narrative forms, the anecdote and the Incident. Each is built on a ground plan which has features in common with that of the short-story. The writer who is familiar with plot origins may pass on to the next chapter;but the novice who desires plot instruction from the beginning should linger here. By anecdote, I mean the briefest form of narrative built according to a plan. The anecdote presents a trait of character, a situation for eliciting or displaying the trait, and a dramatic moment in which it appears. The dramatic moment is frequently termed the point, nub or snapper. Reduced to formula, Trait + situation -j- dramatic moment = anecdote. The characteristic trait may be mentioned in the beginning or it may be held in reserve up to the dramatic moment. As Mark Twain comments,1 any one may learn to tell this story with a point, typically French, as opposed to the more difficult and typicall...« less