"Novelty and interest in the situations throughout the story, with an
_increasing_ interest in the denouement, are the essential demands of
a plot."[12]
[Footnote 12: Evelyn May Albright, _The Short Story_.]
It goes without saying that you must interest your audience, but you
must also satisfy them--gratify the curiosity you have earlier
aroused. It is all very well to write an "absorbing" story, in which
the excitement and expectation are sustained up to the very last
scene, but be sure that the theme is essentially such that _in_ the
last scenes, if not before, your action will unravel the knot that has
become so tantalizingly tangled as the play proceeded. No matter how
promising a theme may be in other respects, it is foredoomed to
failure if from it comes a plot of which the spectator will say as he
goes out, "It was a pretty picture--but I couldn't understand the
ending."
Another thing: If it is important that, in every case, the spectators
must be "shown" what happens in the working out of a plot, it is
equally important that they be shown _why_ it happens. This also has
to do with sound and comprehensible motivation. "It is not so much a
case of 'show me,' with the average American, as a common recognition
that there must be a reason for the existence of everything created.
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