In addition to an unmistakably clear knowledge of place and personality, you must know both local dialect and family vernacular. The various individuals of your sketch, if they happen to belong to the same household, must speak as if they so belonged. In actual life when you converse with a company of persons, you can pick out two members of the same family as readily as you can pick out two members of the same community. Your character-narrative must reveal this likeness, not by declaration especially, but by a subtle unity of vocabulary that does not at the same time preclude individuality. [The character Overbury and Hall] The writers of this kind of short-story owe much to the past. We are inclined to think of quiet and truthful character sketchers, who reveal an appreciative knowledge of the influence of environment, as distinctly a late nineteenth century brotherhood; but the fact is that while moderate realism is undoubtedly the last artistic word on the subject of effective character-revelation, it is also the first. The modern novel of manners (and the artistic short-story of the same class as an offshoot of it) drew from a full stream of realism. As far back as the age of Overbury and Bishop Hall the public was interested in prose character-sketches. The fact that essays could have such names as "The Tinker" and "The Milkmaid" was a promise of the light of common day. Then the gentle de Coverley papers came on with their slight narrative and continued portrait, their delightful skits on class environment and tradition; [The novel of manners] then, Tristram Shandy's frank shamelessness about familiar things; then the Vicar of Wakefield's struggling poverty; and finally the women entered--Evelina, Belinda, Emma, Mary Barton, and the gentle ladies of Cranford, bringing with them the tea-table and the trials of the parlor and of factory life. The only thing that was needed to make the archetype complete by the middle of the nineteenth century was for some one to take persistently the same large yet specific environment. [Trollope's Cathedral Town Studies] Anthony Trollope did so in his Cathedral Town Studies. What ran parallel for a time with the novel of manners, but had a later and fuller development, is the psychological problem novel, begun by Richardson and Fielding and handed over to the late nineteenth century writers by Charlotte Brontë. This psychological problem novel bears the same relation to the novel of manners as the character-events short-story bears to the character-environment one. You doubtless realize, as every one realizes, that a good short-story is hard to write, but in the hardness comes the inspiration. If you succeed, you have scored a triumph. But for your comfort, be assured that the possibility is not beyond even a high-school student. The attempt in very instructive at least.