Archives for June 2011

WIG&TSSIP: Series Regulars vs. Guest Stars

June 22, 2011 By Mark 1 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 The Series Regulars, as against the Guest Stars. As you might suspect, the title references television drama, and advances the assault Hills began two sections earlier. Continuing the discussion of characterization forward from the previous section, Hills states:

You can perhaps see better how it ought to work by looking at television series dramas, which have got it all just exactly backwards.

As I said in response to the aforementioned section on slick fiction, it’s important to remember that Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular was originally written in 1977. Television has changed a lot since then, but at the time Hills’ criticisms were accurate. Continuing from the above quote:

The regulars in the classic TV series never change. They are the fixed characters. The doctors, sheriffs, private detectives and police chiefs, who are the central figures of these programs, always remain the same. If they are shown falling in love, you know the girl’s got to be done away with….

Hills goes on to explain how guest stars in circa-1977 television dramas were the characters who ended up changing or being moved by the story, and as a first-hand witness to television of that era I can tell you he’s right. That’s pretty much what TV was like, and I’ll have more to say about that in the next post. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Moving vs. Fixed Characters

June 20, 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.

Just as Hills previously discussed fixed and moving actions, here he confronts Moving Characters, as against Fixed Characters. Where actions poorly prepared for smack of the author’s will, a change in character poorly prepared for smacks of an unconvincing shift.

The difference between the two types of characters — both in construction and in the effect they have on the reader — is found in preparation. Whether you’re writing a fifteen-page short story or a five-hundred page novel, you probably know in advance, if only at a gut level, which characters will be central to and affected by the story, and which characters will be presented only as context, backdrop, continuity and spice. The former group will necessarily need more preparation and presentation than the latter, precisely because they will change, however slightly, along the way. [ Read more ]

The Writer You Are

June 15, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

In the previous post I commented on a section of Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular in which Rust Hills differentiated between slick fiction and quality fiction. While I think Hills is unnecessarily dismissive of entertainment for entertainment’s sake, just as he is clearly invested in art for art’s sake, I think his condemnation of slick fiction is valid because slick fiction is bad craft.

Craft and Effectiveness
The problem with my own condemnation is that it’s no different from Hills’: it expresses a personal preference. Like Hills I can make a compelling case for craft (doing so is one of the missions of Ditchwalk) but at the end of the day I’m still advocating for the kind of storytelling I care about.

Despite his personal preference for literary fiction, however, Hills bases his advocacy on proven craft, not bias. By the same token, while I’m open to a wider spectrum of storytelling, I believe that craft knowledge allows authors to make conscious, informed choices about the stories they intend to write, which in turn increases the likelihood that those stories will impact readers in the intended way. To the extent that learning craft requires more effort — at least at the apprentice stage — the return on investment is an increase in the likelihood of narrative success. Whether you use craft to create better entertainment or better literature (if we really need to bifurcate), the Ditchwalk definition of better — like Hills’ definition of better — is that more readers will be pleased with, or appropriately affected by, the end result.

Still, it’s inarguable that there are plenty of readers who are perfectly happy with the effects of demonstrably bad craft. If stories premised on a character shift or deus ex machina plotting thrill you, I can’t claim you shouldn’t be thrilled. I can point out how the authors of those stories jerked you around or cheated you or gave you less than they might have, but I can’t tell you that you didn’t feel the enjoyment you felt.

So the very charge I respectfully level at Hills — that he’s unnecessarily elitist — is one that can be leveled at me. Yet even as I freely acknowledge that taste and sensibility play a part in the appreciation of storytelling, I refuse to budge from my position — which is also Hills’ position — that more knowledge of craft necessarily improves your chance of successfully telling a particular story. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Slick vs. Quality Fiction

June 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.

The complete title of this section is Slick Fiction, as against Quality Fiction.. In it Hills presents a historical timeline, describing how slick, serialized fiction moved from magazines to television in order to follow the migrating mainstream market. And he’s not shy about characterizing that market:

What the magazine readers wanted from it was entertainment and escape, and television can do that now more mindlessly than magazine fiction ever could. As is well known, you can’t beat a skunk in a contest that involves smelling bad.

Hills’ dismissive critique seems all the more snobbish given the passage of time. But Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular was originally written in 1977, and at that time many of the complaints Hills levels against television were broadly valid. Formulaic plots and cliche characters abounded, even as some writers tried to buck the creative and cultural constraints imposed by the networks.

I’ll have more to say about TV and storytelling in response to another section of Hills’ book, but for now I want to focus on the crux of his observations and complaints:

The writers of slick fiction went along, with the audience, to television. For unlike serious fiction, which has always been written whether there was any demand for it or not, the whole point and purpose of slick fiction was that it was written to order for a market, and once the market was gone the writing ceased.

If you think about storytelling in terms of gross tonnage, there’s no question more writing is done in the service of established commercial markets than is done in the service of art. That’s neither a surprise nor a pejorative observation. I don’t know what the ratio is of visits to amusement parks and museums, but I’m fairly confident that in most locales amusement parks beat the stuffing out of museums.

It doesn’t take a fiction editor to note that much of commercial storytelling is derivative, redundant, formulaic and, too often, just plain bad. Like anything that’s mass produced — and here you should be thinking of the corporate hot dog — the emphasis in commercial works is generally on satisfying demand as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Great writing is as necessary to the average commercial story in any medium as great cuts of meat are to commercial hot dogs. The difference might be noticeable, but neither the manufacturer nor the customer is willing to pay for that difference. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Character Shift vs. Movement

June 4, 2011 By Mark 1 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 complete title of this section is, The Character Shift, as against Movement of Character. The premise, as suggested in the previous section, is that merely demonstrating change in a character is not enough. On some level, for the intended audience, that change also needs to be convincing.

For Hills, however, that distinction is just the starting point:

One way of detecting the difference between the character shift and movement of character is by considering the function the character change performs in the narrative. A character shift usually permits, rather than causes, something to happen.

This may seem a rather banal observation. In fact, I think it’s one of the most useful observations anyone could make about storytelling, and particularly so for people who are new to the craft. Not only does this distinction generally cleave bad writing from good by simple rule, it provides an equally simple test for detecting the problem. Does your character change as a result of what happens, or to facilitate what happens? [ Read more ]

The Next Three Days

June 2, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

If you want to see a good example of how tension and anticipation can be used to effectively create suspense, I recommend a movie called The Next Three Days. It was written and directed by Paul Haggis, who also wrote Million Dollar Baby and Crash.

Because every person’s emotional response to a work is different, I’ll leave it to you to analyze how the movie generates the suspense and emotion you feel. If you want to talk about your response to the story, and how Haggis’ craft choices created that effects you felt, I’d be glad to do so in the comments.

— Mark Barrett