"The first essential in a short-story is the power of interesting sentence by sentence."
Unlike the novelist, the short-story writer cannot rely on the cumulative effect of chapter after chapter. His writing, for this reason, must be more taut, highly charged, and rigorously controlled.
The other principle has been voiced by Somerset Maugham. "To my mind," he writes in the preface to Cosmopolitans, "it is not enough when the writer gives you the plain facts through his own eyes (which means, of course, that they are not plain facts, but facts distorted by his own idiosyncrasy); I think he should impose upon them a design."
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