ition exist largely for the sake
of the reader. Such events prepare the characters, for instance, that
the main situations may have true and full dramatic value to the reader,
while the general matter of transition serves to give the main events
spacing and the story plausibility. And in narrating secondary events,
and writing matter of transition, the writer cannot have an eye solely
to imagining the procession of little happenings and to reproducing them
in detail. If he wrote so they would bulk as large as the main events,
and the short story would fill a novel and the novel an encyclopaedia.
Instead, the writer must realize the reasons that led him to choose or
devise each secondary event while constructing the story, and must
narrate each minor event so that it will just perform its designed
function and no more. The major events of a story are primarily
significant, and it is sufficient to narrate them so as to counterfeit
them as they would be in reality. The minor events of a story are not
significant in themselves, but only in relation to something else, and
in narrating them the writer should develop only their significant
phases. They must be given reality and verisimilitude, but their aspects
and implications unimportant to the story should not be detailed and
thereby stressed. All aspects of the main events are to be detailed
simply because all aspects of the main events are important to the
story. They are the story.

The discussion is somewhat abstract and involved, but necessarily so.
The technique will be easier to practice than it sounds, much easier,
for instance, than to narrate the simple but important event with due
emphasis through vividness. That necessity is supremely easy to state or
realize, but supremely hard to meet in writing a story. The technique of
handling secondary events and matter of transition is hard to state
abstractly and to grasp from mere discussion, but when it is grasped it
is comparatively easy to apply in writing, for it calls for no executive
power, merely the negative power to leave out the insignificant.

It will be seen that the process of narrating the minor events of a
story is not natural, but highly artificial. The process of narrating
the main events is natural; it consists merely in imagining and
reproducing them with as much body and color as possible. Where
undivided attention to phrasing is most essential, the writer can give
it; where it is least essential, i