Archives for May 2011

WIG&TSSIP: Movement of Character

May 30, 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.

Sooner or later every how-to book about fiction talks about movement of character. The specific word used to describe the concept varies — growth, change, development — but they all spring from the same source: the idea that a character (most commonly the main character) will evolve as events unfold.

In previous sections Hills has talked about the idea and importance of change over the course of a story, but here he drills down to a more basic question. Is change in a character actual change, or simply the revelation of some “‘side’ of the personality” that has been previously unacknowledged? From the reader’s point of view it may not matter, but from the author’s point of view the question is far from academic. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: “Agreement” in Character and Action

May 27, 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.

In this section Hills makes an extended analogy between the structure of a sentence and the structure of a story. I think the analogy is useful, but particularly so because Hills himself doesn’t lose sight of the objective:

Here I want to stress only the idea of agreement. There is agreement between all the parts of a sentence…

In the previous sections Hills acknowledged that mystery and conflict as methods will create suspense for the reader. His concern is that they do so in a way that negatively impacts other aspects of the story. Tension, as a method of suspense, supports agreement.

This is the crux of everything Hills has to say about writing fiction. There are ways to write that damage agreement among the parts of your story, and there are ways to write that enhance agreement. In all cases enhancing agreement produces a qualitative improvement that directly impacts reader enjoyment of your work.

To use a fixed action instead of a moving action as the plot of a story would be like using a participle instead of a verb in a sentence.

Hills closes the section by bridging from plot/action to character. Just as there must be agreement in action, and in the methods used to relate moving action, so too must there be agreement in character, and in the potential of a character to be moved.

Next up: Movement of Character.

— Mark Barrett

WIG&TSSIP: Tension and Anticipation

May 25, 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.

As agents of suspense, mystery and conflict have something in common: they prompt anticipation. But anticipation is not inherently good. Problems arise when what’s anticipated works against other aspects of an intended experience.

Imagine it’s your birthday. You’re so excited and focused on your presents that you are oblivious to the people in attendance, the food, the cake, the ice cream, the decorations and the effort others have made on your behalf. When you open your presents your are rewarded for your anticipation, but at what cost?

Now imagine you were raised to be less of a self-centered jerk. At your birthday party you greet and spend time with each guest. You taste and savor the food, you appreciate the effort made by all, and you recognize the compliment of the party itself. By the time you open your gifts you are overflowing with feelings of love, friendship and family.

In each example the event is the same. But because of preparation (in the way your parents raised you) the experience is completely different. In the first example you have a shallow, vain, dismissive, two-dimensional experience that can only be measured by the value (economic and otherwise) of the items you accumulate. In the second example you have a deep, rich, full, inclusive experience that also infuses each gift with meaning beyond its value or utility.

The lesson, again, is that successful storytelling is always about preparation. Preparation that narrowly focuses reader anticipation should generally be avoided, while preparation that broadens and harmonizes reader anticipation should be pursued. [ Read more ]

E-books Outselling Print On Amazon

May 20, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

It was inevitable, but the speed of the transition is impressive:

In July 2010, Amazon announced that sales of electronic books for its Kindle e-book reader surpassed sales of hardcover books on the site. Six months later, sales of Kindle books surpassed that of paperbacks. Now, customers are downloading Kindle books more than hardcovers and paperbacks combined.

Having built their businesses on the production and distribution of physical books, traditional (legacy) publishers are in big trouble. The cash crop of seasonal, celebrity and cyclical titles that annually supported publishing’s administrative and production overhead is rapidly disappearing. The same information is either readily available for free on the internet, or more quickly and easily produced as an e-book or subscription service. Customers can still get what they want, but publisher are no longer critical to that process.

Attempts by publishers to control (if not fix) the price of e-books have also failed. Even with a lower cost of production, e-books must still provide revenue that offsets the loss of print sales or publishers will necessarily have to reduce those costs — including employment costs devoted to print. Whether Amazon’s numbers are consistent with other retail channels, the trend seems clear: the profitability of e-books will determine the viability of any publisher going forward. (There are probably very real implications for the paper industry as well. Adjust your portfolio accordingly.)

The good news is that content and books as valued objects are not under siege. If anything, many of the books previously sold in physical form and now sold in digital form had little or no value as objects — and probably little or no value after a year on the shelves. Clearing big-box stores of titles that existed only by virtue of a constricted distribution channel obviously means adjustment, but I see no downside for the reader. Physical books will still be available, and probably in better-quality editions. It may also be that independent bookstores will thrive because of their smaller footprint and more intimate knowledge of local reading habits.

Update: The New York Times has more here.

WIG&TSSIP: Conflict and Uncertainty

May 19, 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.

I’ve read a lot of how-to books about storytelling. Back when I was devouring such works on a daily basis, but before I ran across Hills’ book, I developed a dull negative reaction to the topic of conflict. The more a book talked about conflict as being central to drama, the less interested I generally was in that author’s storytelling advice.

Why? Because equating conflict to drama always struck me as meaningless. It’s like equating water to melted ice. What in life isn’t about conflict? Dog. Cat. Mouse. Fleas. Plague. Death. Culture. Religion. Life. Gravity. Comet. Fire. Water. Ice. Is it really saying something insightful to say that drama is about conflict? Or is saying something easy and obvious?

When I finally did come across Hills’ book the first paragraph in this section brought my dull discomforts into focus:

Conflict is thought by many to be a basic element in fiction, and certainly it is true that conflict of some sort is present in most stories.

…

Considered for the moment, however, purely as a plot device, conflict leaves a good deal to be desired when it is made the main structure of a story.

Hills goes on to talk about external conflict, how external conflict must sooner or later be realized as internal conflict, and how internal conflict necessarily devolves into some sort of “willy wonty” choice. While this admittedly creates suspense, at what cost?

Storytelling gurus would have you believe the agonizing characters go through when trying to decide which fork in the road to take necessarily fuels a big payoff initiated by conflict. To tell any story, then, all you have to do is A) set up a conflict and B) flog that conflict until the main character chooses one fork or the other, cliffhanger style, often at the point of a gun. But again, is that really useful information? [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Mystery and Curiosity

May 16, 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.

Mystery is the first of three types of suspense that Hills analyzes, and I think it’s fair to say he’s dismissive of mystery as a technique. Despite my own life-long enjoyment of mysteries as a genre, I don’t disagree with his reasoning:

Stories where mystery is deliberately the method, and curiosity about the ending is the whole desired effect, are usually trick stories with wow endings.

Even as you may be bristling at Hills’ highbrow perspective, you probably know exactly what he’s talking about. Mystery can become an all-consuming, story-obliterating objective. As Hills himself notes, everyone has read a book in which the only reason for turning the page sprang from a singular desire — curiosity — to find out the answer to a mystery. Works in which mystery is the “whole desired effect” cannot help be feel insubstantial, if not insincere.

Yet: like sex, mystery does attract attention in fiction. It’s often meaningless attention, resolved by some equally meaningless bit of cleverness, but it works.

To see the raw effect of mystery and curiosity, think about any magazine headline with the word ‘secret’ on it. For a certain percentage of the human species that’s all that’s needed to invoke curiosity, prompting the reader to investigate further. It’s simplistic, even idiotic, but it works. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Techniques of Suspense

May 13, 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.

This entire section is one paragraph. In the paragraph Hills describes three different types of suspense that he intends to discuss in the next three sections.

While Hills has a preference as to which type of suspense is best, it should be noted that they’re not mutually exclusive. In novel-length works it’s possible to use all three types over and over again, in layers, in parallel and in combination, to drive reader interest and promote a full and satisfying experience.

So again we return to a central point: it doesn’t matter whether you’re writing literary works or mainstream fiction. Learning how to control the storytelling process empowers you as a writer.

Did you know that suspense comes in different flavors? Me either.

Next up: Mystery and Curiosity.

— Mark Barrett

WIG&TSSIP: Foreshadowing and Suspense

May 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.

Most writers and readers have at least a passing familiarity with suspense as a fiction technique, as an effect and as a genre. Hills addresses all of these aspects of suspense in this section, and in doing so makes some value judgments you may or may not agree with.

What I think you will agree with is that suspense can be a powerful aspect of foreshadowing, however you choose to approach it. I tend to agree with Hills’ assessment of the pitfalls of suspense, but it’s important to stress that this is not akin to authorial fraud. Suspense, like sex, sells. It has a reliable, predictable effect on the reader, and in a craft driven by the need to attract and hold interest it does both.

The main problem with suspense is that, like sex, it quite often obliterates all other aspects of a work, no matter how well they might have been implemented. Unbridled, suspense has the power to overwhelm any story, becoming not simply an engine of interest, but the only interest. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Techniques of Foreshadowing

May 10, 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.

At a little over seven pages this is one of the longest sections in the book. In it Hills lays out all the techniques that can be used to foreshadow the events of a story, and in so doing provides a checklist by which any author might plan and execute a story so as to increase both a sense of uncertainty and inevitability in the reader.

For example:

in description. A passage describing the place where action in a story is about to take place establishes the setting, but the description can also be colored so as to evoke a mood appropriate to the action that follows.

So: description of setting + mood = foreshadowing of action. Is this not a good thing to know? Is this not exactly the kind of thing you might want to think about when you’re conceptualizing a story, or revising your first draft? I’ll grant that technical relationships like this are often acted on at a subconscious level, but wouldn’t it be great to be able to consciously appeal to aspects of craft like this when you get into trouble? [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Character and Plot Interaction

May 8, 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 full title of this section is: Enhancing the Interaction of Character and Plot. It’s a shortish section that builds on the idea of the inevitability of retrospect, but I encourage you to focus here on the idea of interaction.

Plot and character can certainly be talked about as separate elements, but it is through their interaction that an author’s intended effects are achieved. To treat character and plot as separate elements is to see them as components in the alloy critics and academics call story. Treating plot and character as water and seed sees them as essential components giving life to the reader’s emotional and intellectual experience. It is that experience — that life — that we are after when we write. [ Read more ]