inners try to do,
attempt to make his story up as he goes along; for unless he holds the
culmination of his series constantly in mind, he will not be able to
decide whether any event that suggests itself during the progress of
his composition does or does not form a logical factor in the series.

The preliminary process of construction may be accomplished in either
of two ways. Authors with synthetic minds will more naturally reason
from causes to effects; and authors with analytic minds will more
naturally reason from effects to causes. The former will construct
forward through time, the latter backward. Standing at the outset of a
narrative, it is possible to imagine forward along a series of
events until the logical culmination is divined; or standing at the
culmination, it is possible to imagine backward along the series
to its far-away beginnings. Thackeray apparently constructed in the
former manner; Guy de Maupassant apparently constructed in the
latter. The latter method--the method of building backward from the
culmination--is perhaps more efficacious toward the conservation of
the strictest unity. It seems on the whole a little easier to exclude
the extraneous in thinking from effects to causes than in thinking
from causes to effects, because analysis is a stricter and more
focused mood of mind than synthesis.

But in whichever way the process of construction be accomplished, the
best stories are always built before they are written; and that is
the reason why, in reading them, we feel at every point that we are
getting somewhere, and that the author is leading us step by step
toward a definite culmination. Although, as is usually the case, we
cannot, even midway through the story, foresee what the culmination is
to be, we feel a certain reassurance in the knowledge that the author
has foreseen it from the start. This feeling is one of the main
sources of interest in reading narrative. In looking on at life
itself, we are baffled by a muddle of events leading everywhither;
their succession is chaotic and lacking in design; they are not
marshaled and processional; and we have an uncomfortable feeling
that no mind but that of God can foresee their veiled and hidden
culminations. But in reading a narrative arrangement of life, we have
a comfortable sense of order, which comes of our knowledge that the
author knows beforehand whither the events are tending and can make us
understand the sequence of causation thr