How to study "The best short stories"

Chapter 60: IN BERLIN

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About This Book

A practical handbook analyzes a series of annual best-short-story anthologies and extracts the editorial values and technical habits behind successful short fiction. It surveys selected pieces to illustrate structure, point of view, unity, and regional color, and supplements close readings with author testimony and classroom experience. The work supplies study questions, exercises, and concrete advice on revision, pacing, and economy of form while stressing the need to balance artistic aims with the business realities of publication. Its aim is to train critical reading and disciplined practice for aspiring writers and students.

IN BERLIN

“In Berlin” is a tour de force of short-story construction. Miss O’Reilly has followed the well-known principle of beginning near the climax, that the story may gain intensity. The result is excellent for this one principle. But the whole composition of 125 or 150 words in reality plays up a single dramatic moment—not a single Incident.

The advantage to the student in reproducing similar “dramatic moment” stories will be to show the value of material in magnitude and worth, to teach him to appreciate climax, and to feel the advantages—and the disadvantages—of economy.

Read Chapter III in “A Handbook on Story Writing,” describing and illustrating the Anecdote and the Incident.