The important points to be noticed are that only characteristic and
significant speeches are reproduced. When the conversation gives only
facts that should be known to the reader it is thrown into the indirect
or narrative form, and frequently when the impression that a conversation
makes is all that is important, this impression is described in general
terms instead of in a detailed report of the conversation itself.
So much for the three different modes of writing individually
considered. The important and difficult point comes in the balanced
combination of the three, not in the various parts of the story,
but in each single paragraph. Henry James in his paper on
"The Art of Fiction," says very truly that every descriptive passage is
at the same time narrative, and every dialogue is in its essence also
descriptive. The truth is, the writer of stories has a style of his
own, which we may call the narrative-descriptive-dialogue style,
which is a union in one and the same sentence of all three sorts of
writing. In each sentence, to be sure, narrative or description or
dialogue will predominate; but still the narrative is always present in
the description, and the description in the dialogue, as Mr.
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