- a believable and sympathetic central character
- his urgent and difficult problem
- his attempts to resolve the problem, which fail and make the situation more desperate
- the crisis, his last chance to win
- the successful resolution, brought about by means of the central character's own courage, ingenuity, etc.
Example: Roald Dahl's "Man from the South", Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", Joseph Conrad's "Youth", Nathaniel Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"
Example: O. Henry stories, Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace"
Example: John Collier's "The Steel Cat"
Example: Lord Dunsany's "The Two Bottles of Relish"
Examples: Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall", JG Ballard's "Billenium"
Examples: Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River", Willa Cather's "Neighbor Rosicky"
A final note: "The story forms we have been discussing are not rigid little boxes into which every work of fiction must be crammed; they are ideal categories. In practice, elements of these forms are mixed in all kinds of ways. When you understand the simple forms, you can mix and combine them to form more sophisticated ones."