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Archives for April 2011

WIG&TSSIP: Short Story vs. Novel and Sketch

April 11, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

The first section of Hills’ book is titled The Short Story, as against the Novel and the Sketch. It runs four pages. In those four pages you will find Hills’ overarching thesis, a detailed explanation of what a story is and isn’t, a paradigm by which language can be mapped to every aspect of fiction technique, and an explanation of how short stories achieve a unity of purpose and focus unlike any other written form. It is the densest, most informative four pages ever written about fiction writing, and if you read the section ten times you will learn something new each time.

The single most important sentence in the whole section, however, is the first:

This book implies that some techniques in fiction tend to have absolute effects, and tries to explain what they are.

For all the disdain Hills directed at how-to-write books in the Introduction, here he is letting you know that Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular is a how-to-write book. Note also that he uses the word ‘fiction’ above and not the phrase ‘short fiction’. The techniques that Hills describes in his book are not unique to short stories, they are simply intensified and concentrated in short stories. Everything that he talks about — every technique — is portable to every kind of fiction.

What Hills is saying, here and throughout his book, is that ably doing X will necessarily cause the reader to think/feel Y. He’s not saying this might happen, he’s saying that these relationships are “absolute” in storytelling. The implied obverse of this claim is that your inability to do X — even if driven only by ignorance — will keep the reader from thinking/feeling Y. Bold claims to be sure, but what if he’s right?  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Fiction, novel, Rust Hills, short story, WIG&TSSIP

The Website Platform Advantage

April 8, 2011 By Mark 3 Comments

While writing my Platform Evolution post I gave some thought to commenting on an excellent Infographic about content farms. No sooner did I decide against it than I ran across this excellent post on Publishing Trends about content farms. Then, a day later, a good friend sent me an unbidden and timely link to a post on Making Light, which, among other things, talks about — wait for it! — content farms.

If you’re not familiar with content farms you can get a quick overview here. As a writer, what concerns me most about content farms is that they are to writing and publishing what Ebola is to the human body. If I was an astrophysicist I would also add that content farms are to information and knowledge what solar storms are to communications. And if I was a logician I would say that content farms are to accuracy and reliability what tsunamis are to fishing villages.

Which is to say that everything about content farms is bad, but not equally bad. The worst aspect of content farms is not that they’re the new frontier for spammers and swindlers, it’s that producing so much crap at such an incredible rate renders every single aggregating and filtering mechanism useless.

Google as a search engine for retail products and reviews has been beyond broken for years. (Try searching for “best _____”, where the blank is any product you’re interested in.) Amazon is currently the default search for products, but it’s starting to fall apart as well. (Am I looking at the latest version of the CD/DVD/book I want to order? Is it new or used? Does it ship free or for a fee? Is it shipping from Amazon or some fly-by-night third-party reseller?) And of course the idea that all that ballyhooed user-generated social-media content is pretty much crap is also nothing new.

What content farms do that’s new is automate the production of internet crap by exploiting free labor and making liberal use of other people’s content in a plausibly deniable way. For independent writers trying to attract attention, fighting through the noise pollution generated by content farms may seem impossible, and all the more so as content farms begin to pollute e-book retailers like Amazon. The antidote to this virulent hemorrhage of obfuscating web text may seem to be a gated social networking community, but I think the opposite is true.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com, Publishing Tagged With: author, Facebook, Google, platform, SEO, Twitter, writer

WIG&TSSIP: Rust Hills’ Introduction

April 7, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

Rust Hills comes at fiction-writing from a decidedly literary perspective. What does that mean? Well, this:

I’ve got a shelf of how-to-write books, and they all seem to me pretty much dreadful, especially the ones about the short story.

…

Then I’ve got another shelf of books, some of them seem to me great. These are college textbook anthologies of short stories, with analyses of the stories that sometimes get quite technical.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking what you really want is the how-to-write books, because you want to learn how to write, not how to read. Believe me, I understand: I’ve been there, and I”m no great fan of critical analysis. But Hills is going to throw you a curve in a minute and I don’t want you to miss it.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Fiction, Rust Hills, short story, WIG&TSSIP, writing

Ditchwalk Book Club: WIG&TSSIP Overview

April 4, 2011 By Mark 8 Comments

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. If you’re interested in improving your storytelling craft I encourage you to follow along. Original announcement here. Tag here.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you’re not a short story writer so this book won’t help you with your flash fiction, novellas or novels. Wrong.

Short stories are the smallest form of fiction that can be fully realized. If you can write a short story you can write anything — either by subtracting elements or by adding complexity and scale to increase the length of the work. More importantly, understanding the mechanics of this tightly-knit form exposes the mechanics of all other forms as well, meaning you can directly apply any lessons learned to your storytelling life.

I won’t promise that you’ll click with this book the way I did. For me it was a confirmation of a hundred things I’d felt and come to believe about writing, all compiled in a simple accessible volume. What I can promise is that you’ll never think of fiction writing the same way again, and you’ll have at least one ah-ha moment along the way. Worst case scenario: it won’t make your writing worse, and will almost certainly make your writing — and your writing life — better.

To make sure we’re all on the same literal page I ordered the latest version of the book: First Mariner Books edition 2000. I will be commenting on each section of the book in a separate post, but quoting sparely in order to respect fair use and copyright. While you certainly don’t need my commentary to profit from Hills’ book, you’ll need a copy of the book to fully profit from my commentary. Or the book.

First up: Rust Hills’ introduction to Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, and why it shouldn’t scare you away.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Rust Hills, short story, WIG&TSSIP, writing

The Book as Burden

April 4, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

Hilarious:

This is going to sound incredibly lazy, like someone who gets in their car to drive a few blocks rather than walk, but the physicality of the book, having to hold it open then lift and turn each page, was a lot more exhausting than I remembered. All of that holding and lifting and turning distracted me from the act of reading, took me out of the story if you will. A few pages into it I gave up, logged in to Amazon, and bought the Kindle book.

I agree that the revolution has already taken place. But I still think books will always have their place.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: e-books

Alone in the Wild

April 2, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

I happened on a documentary yesterday on the National Geographic channel that I feel compelled to recommend. Called Alone in the Wild, it documents Ed Wardle’s attempt to spend ninety solitary days in the Yukon wilderness. Putting the challenge in context, Wardle has twice summited Everest. (You can see a page about the show here. I haven’t been able to locate a DVD, and the documentary doesn’t seem to be available on Netflix.)

If the title or subject matter evokes anything for you it will probably be the similar story of Christopher McCandless, whose fatal journey Into the Wild was turned into a book and subsequent movie. By absurd chance I happened to read the original magazine article about McCandless when it first came out in 1993, and my reaction then is the same as my reaction now: I’m not surprised that someone who knew little or nothing about surviving in the wilderness died after only cursory study and inadequate planning.

I want to stress that I take no satisfaction in the fact that McCandless died. The arrogance and ignorance he displayed is the flip side of adventurism and daring, and had he lived he might have profited from the experience both personally and financially. I do think, though, that there is a human tendency to perceive conception as the greatest obstacle to attainment. It’s not the doing that’s the hard part, it’s thinking of something to do that takes real ingenuity.

Over the course of my life I’ve come to believe that this is exactly backwards. In the storytelling world it doesn’t take long to realize that great ideas really are a dime a dozen — or a gross. It’s execution over the long haul, draft after draft, and the realization of detail in the final polish that makes any idea shine. But that’s not fun to contemplate because it presupposes a life of hard work and apprenticeship, when what everybody wants to do is fall out of bed and land on fame and fortune.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: writing

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