The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton — Read

Nothing but deep familiarity with his subject will protect the short-story writer from another danger: that of contenting himself with a mere sketch of the episode selected. The temptation to do so is all the greater because some critics, in their resentment of the dense and the prolix, have tended to overestimate the tenuous and the tight. Mérimée's tales are often cited as models of the conte; but they are rather the breathless summaries of longer tales than the bold foreshortening of an episode from which all the significance it has to give has been adroitly extracted. It is easy to be brief and sharply outlined if one does away with one or more dimensions; the real achievement, as certain tales of Flaubert's and Turgenev's, of Stevenson's and of Maupassant's show, is to suggest illimitable air within a narrow space.

The stories of the German "romantic," Heinrich von Kleist, have likewise been praised for an extreme economy of material, but they should rather be held up as an awful warning against waste, for in their ingenious dovetailing of improbable incidents, the only economy practised is that of leaving out all that would have enriched the subject, visually or emotionally. One, indeed, "The Marquise d'O." (thrift is carried so far that the characters are known merely by their initials), has in it the making of a good novel, not unlike Goethe's "Elective Affinities"; but reduced to the limits of a short story it offers a mere skeleton of its subject.