Archives for October 2011

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 a previous post I said it was a waste of time to categorize or systematize the various literary points of view. Here’s Hills explaining why:

Two of the very best books about fiction are E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction, and they differ completely on the subject of point of view.

If you buy into the premise that such discussions matter then one of these two men must be objectively wrong. There can’t be two opposing point-of-view systems that are both correct. Hills presents Lubbock’s perspective, explains Forster’s criticism of Lubbock’s views, then sides with Forster. And if I had to choose I’d side with Forster too. But I don’t buy the premise that such discussions matter.

When you go to your tool box to retrieve an open-end wrench you don’t stop to consider how all the other tools in the box relate to the one you intend to use. You don’t give any thought to the history of toolmaking, famous toolmakers or famous mechanics. You have a nut that needs turning, you know a wrench will turn the nut, and you intend to get on with it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the best wrench in the world, whether it’s hand-polished or machine-polished: the only thing that matters is whether it will do the job.

If you don’t have the right tool you might be able to get by with something else — pliers, maybe — but you’ll probably chew up the nut if you can get it off at all. As somebody who’s turned a wrench or two, I can tell you that there really is a right tool for every job, but nobody cares who made that tool or who used it in the past. If you’ve got a drawer full of gorgeous Snap-On wrenches you’ll get oohs and ahs from mechanics who know the brand, but if your grandfather’s rusty old spanner is the right size it will do the job just as well.  [ Read more ]

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.

My personal goal in taking a close look at Hills’ book is to show how the lessons it contains apply to all forms of storytelling, and how those lessons are useful to writers at all skill levels. You can follow the literary trail Hills blazes all the way to rarefied art if you want, but it’s not necessary. If you love writing genre fiction or simply want to write from the heart, nothing Hills talks about will preclude you from doing that. Yet the quality and effectiveness of your work will almost certainly improve.

This short section is a case in point. If every would-be and established writer were to read only these few pages, fictional false starts and ponderous wanderings would plummet. Here’s the first graph:

Beginning writers often choose to tell their story from the point of view of a character who is not central to the action — a “bystander,” so to speak, “a friend of the hero,” or something like that, not directly involved. This is thought to make exposition easier: the reader is able to learn the facts of the situation along with the narrator. But the need for exposition is seldom sufficient to make up for the sense of consequencelessness that often results from uninvolved narration.

There are multiple points of view you can adopt that allow readers direct access to your central character’s thoughts: first-person, third-person restricted, third-person omniscient, and so on. If you want no intermediary between reader and character, first person is the best choice. If you want to include the thoughts of others, or even your own authorial comments, a variant of third-person offers that functionality without granting point of view to an in-story intermediary. Despite all these vital choices, however, authors — and particularly novice authors — keep giving point-of-view to characters that are of little or no narrative consequence.  [ Read more ]

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.

Point of view describes not simply a type or aspect of storytelling, but the single most potent technique available for realizing your narrative goals. Nothing you decide is more important to the force and effect of your fiction that the point of view you choose for each story, and how well you execute that point of view.

In instances where I’ve actively deliberated point of view for a particular story I’ve tended to focus on authorial utility, and nothing furthers that cause more than considering the narrative territory I want to explore. While many of the words and concepts used to categorize point of view emphasize limitations and restrictions, it’s just as easy to adopt an authorial perspective that emphasizes each type’s advantages.

If you’re going camping for a week in the deep woods you’ll probably want to bring a tent. If you’re writing a story about a person’s most intimate life experiences you’ll probably want to consider first-person. If you’re off to climb a mountain you may want to bring a rope so you can go off the beaten path. If you’re writing about a decaying society you might want to consider third-person so you can freely travel throughout that world.

[ Read more ]

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.

So much has been written across all mediums about point of view in storytelling that the aggregate should be classified as a type of pollution. And all the more so because such conversations almost always reference a system of categorization rather than the act of creation. To paraphrase Hills: while it’s always useful to have something to say to an academic, getting lost in critical blather is pointless.

To begin, any story you tell will have at least one point of view. It doesn’t matter which medium you’re working in or what your objective is. You can try to entirely scrub point of view from a story as an exercise and it will still be there. Why? Because anybody who experiences your story knows that it didn’t come from their own head, which means it came from somebody else’s head, which means it has a point of view.

Point of view is inherent in storytelling. The question, then, is how you most effectively control and make use of this always-on, omnipresent aspect of fiction. Fortunately, just as audiences are open and willing to suspend disbelief in order to participate emotionally in the fiction you create, they are generally open and willing to adopt whatever point of view you want to use. If a particular point of view makes your work better or more convincing, that’s not only the point of view you should use but the point of view your audience will want you to use.  [ Read more ]