Features of a Successful Story: English Essay for Literature Students

This essay delves into the key features that define a successful story, focusing on elements such as theme, characters, conflict, and setting. It begins by defining fiction and its various forms, including short stories, novels, and novellas, and then highlights the essential components of a short story, such as theme, characters (protagonist and antagonist), conflict, and setting. The essay uses Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a case study, demonstrating how the story incorporates these features to create a compelling narrative. It analyzes the story's theme of women's roles, its characters, and its setting to illustrate the elements of a successful short story, concluding by emphasizing the story's fulfillment of the criteria for a well-crafted narrative.

Running Head: ENGLISH ESSAY
English Essay
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1ENGLISH ESSAY
Topic –Features of a successful story
Fiction is something that is created by the imagination of the author. A story is invented
or formed by the author, characters are sketched, the plot and the dialogues are set and a work of
fiction is ready to be read (Boyd). However, a fictional work does not tell a true story. Rather, it
immerses people in experiences which might never happen in the practical world. A particular
story introduces people with many types of characters and new types of places too where the
reader can never go actually. A work of fiction inspires people, intrigues them, scares them and
engages them with new ideas. It further helps to see the world in an interesting way.
Usually, there are three types of fiction such as the short story, the novel and the novella.
As per the views of the famous short story writer Edgar Allan Poe, a short story is rather a piece
of fiction which can be finished within half an hour to two hours. Ort short story hardly runs
more than 20- 30 pages (Eisenberg). Since a short story has a limited length, it focuses more on
the plot with minimum characters. A short story is formed of few essential elements such as
theme, characters, conflict, and setting. Theme is the controlling idea which is desired by the
author to be understood by the reader. It is often the author’s own view of a subject. The
characters are the heart of a story and in every story, there are two primary characters such as
antagonist and protagonist. Conflict can be referred to as the problem around which the whole
story revolves (Somasundaran). On the other hand, setting is that element which refers to the
time and place of the story. However, there are more aspect of the story but these are the basic
and intricate ones.
As an example of a successful story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “ The Yellow Wallpaper
“ can be taken into account. The story is based on the author’s own experiences with the
postpartum depression. The story can be considered as a successful short story because it

2ENGLISH ESSAY
consists of all the essential features of a good story. It has a practical theme that is the role of
women in the nineteenth century American society. It is the story of a woman who suffers from
depression and indirect oppression too. She gradually becomes obsessed with the yellow
wallpaper which decorates the place where she is confined. There are fewer characters which is
an inseparable feature of a story. The story hovers around Jennie, John and the unnamed narrator.
The anonymous narrator of the story accentuates the mystery of the story. The main conflict in
the story is the mental illness and the setting is early Victorian period (Shumaker). The story
begins by giving a detailed overview of the place where the narrator and her husband stay.
Hence, in this manner the story fulfills the criteria required for a short story and ends on an
ambiguous note.

3ENGLISH ESSAY
Reference
Boyd, Brian. "The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction." Wiley
Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 9.1 (2018): e1444.
Eisenberg, Joshua, and Mark Finlayson. "A Simpler and More Generalizable Story Detector
using Verb and Character Features." Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical
Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2017.
Shumaker, Conrad. "Too terribly good to be printed": Charlotte Gilman's" The Yellow
Wallpaper." American Literature 57.4 (1985): 588-599.
Somasundaran, Swapna, et al. "Automated scoring of picture-based story
narration." Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building
Educational Applications. 2015.