Archives for January 2012

WIG&TSSIP: Style

January 27, 2012 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.

Style can be thought of in two ways: as an aspect of fiction and as a technique. When I talk about style as an aspect of fiction I tend to use the word voice — which Hills recognizes as synonymous in that context:

To some extent, obviously, theme and tone and style — as well as “voice” and “vision” and “world view” and so on — all overlap one another so much in meaning that they can be thought of as all meaning pretty much the same thing.

Voice (style) to me is inherent. To speak of Hemingway’s voice or Fitzgerald’s is to speak of the way they wrote apart from what they wrote; their distinctive use of language and phrasing. Voice in that sense passively reveals something of the author, in the same way that a person’s accent or speaking cadence may affect how you perceive them no matter what they are talking about.

I don’t think authors should try to manage or shape their voice. I think it should evolve organically as a writer learns to tell stories. There is always some mimicry in any author’s early writing — an inevitable influence either by passive preference or intentional emulation — but over time such affectations tend to fade. Writers establish a voice not in the way retailers establish a brand, but in the way friends establish trust. Voice (style) is organic in that sense, and I think it should be. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Setting

January 23, 2012 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 all the books ever written about storytelling I think the subject of setting probably appears fairly early in most texts. It’s such an essential building block it’s hard to imagine thinking about a story without already having a setting in mind.

When Rust Hills finally gets around to the subject of setting there are only a few chapters remaining in his book. The difference, I think, is that Hills isn’t trying to coach writers through the process of generating and developing a specific idea. Rather, he’s trying to explain how the various aspects of fiction, including setting, fit together and function in all stories. It’s a grasp of craft I think many writers remain oblivious to as they get each new story underway.

As with all other aspects of a successful story, the setting may be basic to the original conception or may be the result of conscious and deliberate choice in the course of composition.

This statement is so obvious as to seem almost meaningless, yet it forces the issue: making a choice about setting is making a choice. It may be an instinctive choice, it may be a deliberate choice, but it is not without implication. No matter how you arrive at the setting for a story the test is whether that setting and story become more than the sum of the parts.

In my own writing life I’ve imagined everything from an individual scene to an entire epic simply because of the impact a particular place had on me, and I always enjoy such moments of inspiration. But absent a story that truly demands that location I know I have nothing special. Because it is almost impossible to write authentically and in an integrated way about places one has encountered only briefly, the choice of setting should involve more than postcard interest or the possibility of exotic complications.

If you’re fortunate enough to conceive an entire story from a particular setting, or to have a specific setting accompany a new story idea, there’s nothing wrong with taking a moment to question that original conception. I know how exciting and affirming it can be to have a fully formed story drop into the mind, but I also know that such gifts often lose their luster upon implementation. What seems at first blush to be essential can turn out to be full of holes on closer inspection — and good craft always demands closer inspection. [ Read more ]

Point of View and Power

January 14, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

Before finishing up the last few sections of Rust Hill’s book I want to put a bow on the previous extended discussion of point of view. We’ve already seen that the focusing power of point of view is inevitable, and therein lies a great deal of power. Characters you choose to relate a story through will necessarily come to the fore and grow in prominence and meaning, while other characters will recede.

Just as history is written by victors, and biased as a result, stories are told by biased despots we call authors. While most authors see themselves as benevolent, the fact remains that authorship is unchecked power. To be an author is to be a god.

Whether you tell a literary story in third-person or first-person point of view, whether you focus on a single character or present various points of view concerning a central event — a la Rashomon — you alone have the power to decide what will and will not be told. Stories structured like Rashomon have unique power precisely because they force us to confront and acknowledge subjectivity in a narrative context, but they are still subjective because somebody decides what will and will not be included.

Authors get to determine who has a voice, and as in life that power is everything. If you can’t speak and there is no one to speak for you, you don’t exist. Without veering too far afield, I think it’s a useful exercise for writers to consider the points of view inherent in everything they come in contact with over the course of a day or a week. What is the point of view behind the commercials you see and hear? Behind the news? Behind the politics of the day? Who is being spoken for? Who is not being heard?

If authors have absolute power, and they do, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and it does, then authors need to be particularly vigilant about their own abuses of power. And that includes making sure that point of view is not used to limit or omit voices that ought to be present in a story. It’s hard to disprove a negative so most readers will never notice such an omission, but it will have an effect on your work, and not necessarily the effect you intend.

Whether writing for art, entertainment or both, the best authors aspire to and attain balance between the fantasy of their fiction and the truth of the human experience. If a story is about something that happens to someone, then the lens we experience that story through is point of view. Its a microscope, a telescope, a prism and a mirror, and it’s your responsibility to make sure that lens not only brings the power and poetry of your words into focus, but to life.

— Mark Barrett

Network Solutions Fails Again

January 1, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

Last year I wrote a couple of posts about the tech support hell I ended up in with my internet service provider (ISP), Network Solutions. I also wrote a post explaining the tech-support process and how to navigate some of the obstacles you’ll encounter. I stated at the time that I would look for a new ISP, but NetSol performed well until the renewal of my service contract seven months later, so I opted to go with the devil I knew.

That devil has now failed to get one of my sites up and running for an entire week. During that week I’ve been told the problem was related to a denial-of-service attack, and that it was related to an error in the configuration of my WordPress settings, but neither of those knee-jerk diagnoses were true. When tech support came to the same conclusion — after multiple calls from me — they escalated the issue to engineering. My site is still unavailable after seven days.

I understand that Network Solutions can’t provide free tech support to every site owner who uses WordPress. And I have no doubt that they are constantly badgered by users seeking exactly that: free service for problems those users created. So when the NetSol techs told me there was a configuration problem with my WordPress settings I took ownership of the problem. (They stressed that they weren’t even supposed to do that much, and I’m grateful they tried to help within the confines of their internal directives.) In looking into the issue, however, I realized not only that I didn’t cause that problem, but there was clear evidence to suggest the configuration issue was not the cause of the problem I was having. [ Read more ]