Note M — Chapter X · PORTRAYAL OF CHARACTER

A great deal of close argument might be developed here. A plot is a chain of events influencing and influenced by character, and by character is meant not persons but traits. In some story, let us say, the avarice of one man brings him into conflict with another, also impelled by avarice. The conflict, of course, is not between two disembodied attributes, but between two persons, and the writer of such a story must individualize them. He should endeavor to give a reader an idea of how they look, by describing them, and of how they talk, by individualizing their speech. But he need not emphasize nor even bring out any phase of their spiritual natures not material to the story. That is to say, the writer of a story, in order to give it the seeming of life, should make every effort and employ all means to invest each character with a definite physical presence or illusion of actuality, but he should not try to displace the inner nature of each person in like detail.