Mark – Page 23

WIG&TSSIP: Monologues

December 14, 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 Monologues, and the Pathological First Person. If you’re like me you’d be hard pressed to cite an example of a fictional monologue, let alone one you found compelling as literature or art. This section explains why.

Stories told in the monologue form would seem to be exceptions to our “rule” that the point-of-view character is the character moved by action or will become so. The monologist, after all, is presumed to be the same after he ends his harangue as he was before he began it.

For Hills the relevant literary question is not whether something can be done, but whether it can be done well. His standard is, in the end, qualitative, not dogmatic. If breaking a rule increases the power of your fiction then by all means break it. As Hills notes, however, the inherent problem with monologues is that they decrease power by promoting uncertainty:

Who is it exactly that is talking? And then, is the reader being addressed directly? Or is a captive “visitor” there, in the barber chair or whatever, just somehow listening?

Hills piles on, but you get the point. It’s the point I made in an earlier post in this series, when I said, “Point of view is inherent in storytelling.” If you don’t provide a point of view, or you keep the point of view a secret, your readers, consciously or subconsciously, are going to provide an answer themselves. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: The Focusing Power of POV

December 12, 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.

Given the relationship between point of view and movement of character that Hills pointed out in the previous section, it may seem as if a rule has been laid down. In a sense I guess that’s true, but I think it’s less a rule of fiction than a fact. In any case, just because there’s an inviolate relationship between point of view and character movement, that doesn’t mean you have to slave your stories to that relationship from the get-go. As Hills notes:

But then, in good stories by good writers, one often sees a point-of-view method that started off “wrong” — or at least indirectly — being worked around to focus on the real consequences of the action.

Hills gives excellent examples from Hemingway’s The Killers, and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, and D.H. Lawrence’s The Horse Dealer’s Daughter. If you want to see the focusing power of point of view first hand, it’s worth reading those stories and comparing his notes with your own experience as a reader.

Whether those particular authors specifically thought about exploiting the focusing power of point of view or not, the effect is still there because the point of view character is necessarily the vessel for movement that defines any story. You can fight it or go with it, but you can’t change that fact:

And as far as the writer is concerned, we’ve seen that even when an author has misconceived his story, and attempted to tell it from the point of view on an unmoved character, he often finds that things begin to change on him. Despite the author’s intentions, the point-of-view character will tend to occupy the center of his stage…

As a practical matter, the focusing power of point of view in fiction seems to be an artifact of fiction’s point-of-view flexibility. In first-person fiction, where the point of view is fixed to and never shifts from the narrator, the moved character and the point of view character are necessarily the same. It’s only when the multiplicity of third-person points of view come into play that the moved character and the point of view character have the potential to be confused by the author — particularly if there is a central character (Gatsby, say) who occupies neither role.

What’s at stake in all this is not simply the coherence of your work, but its force and effectiveness. If you want to write an epic third-person story that “bounces” between characters all over the globe you can do so with full confidence that story and reader will converge at the end on the point-of-view character. You can even write a “scenic” epic that avoids a point-of-view character or narrator all together, but in choosing to do so you leave storytelling power and effectiveness on the table. If storytelling is about movement of character, and movement of character is tied to point of view, and if the reader is going to impute point of view even if you try to withhold it, then you’re probably better off — particularly as a beginning writer — not fighting those connections.

Craft is not a constraint. As a writer you can always do what you want to do, but part of doing what you want to do is knowing the effect of the choices you make. In the same way that learning to draw cubes and spheres and perspective lines augments an artist’s work, even if that artist chooses to focus on pure abstraction, mastering storytelling craft gives you more ability to flex your writing muscles.

Next up: Monologues, and the Pathological First Person.

— Mark Barrett

Post Mortem: Two Publishing Start-Ups

December 7, 2011 By Mark 2 Comments

Guy Gonzalez had a post up recently about the Domino Project, which Seth Godin is closing down. Included in the post was a link to a talk by Richard Nash, ruminating about what did and didn’t work at Red Lemonade, Nash’s web startup.

I generally agree with Guy’s take about both projects. Before I throw in my two cents, however, I want to state without reservation that both men deserve credit for putting their time and money where their mouths were. In a world of wall-to-wall pundits and doomsaying snipers with no skin in the game, we need all the people we can get who are willing to step in the arena and risk being humbled. It’s the only way progress will be made. Having said that, I have my own thoughts on what the end of these initiatives means. (Previous posts mentioning Seth Godin here, Richard Nash here.)

Both Godin and Nash garnered a great deal of interest a year ago as a cresting wave of change and doubt swept through the traditional publishing industry. Capitalizing on their celebrity and showmanship, both men looked into the future, saw a way forward, and acted on it. Godin, by partnering with Amazon in a publishing venture; Nash by creating and launching Red Lemonade, the first of an anticipated series of sites under the Cursor brand. Each project, at root, envisioned a new way of publishing content outside the traditional publishing paradigm.

So what can authors learn from their efforts? Well, given that most writers will never publish the work of others, probably not much. Unless you’ve a mind to become a publisher — whatever that elastic term means to you these days — most of what Godin and Nash have been through is probably inessential, however interesting it might otherwise be. Still, I think it’s possible to see connections to authorship in these ventures — if not directly, then indirectly, as confirmation of other truths. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: The “Moved” Character and POV

November 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.

It is a premise of Hills’ book that movement of character is synonymous with story. The degree of demonstrated movement may be momentous or barely a whisper, but through this change we perceive that something has happened in a work of fiction. It stands to reason, then, that if authors want to generate as much artistic and emotional power as possible from movement of character, they will probably give the genesis and resolution of that movement considerable authorial attention.

Of all the attention-focusing techniques available to you as a storyteller, none is greater than point of view. Scene selection, setting, tone and any other aspect of story — including even characterization itself — can be emphasized or minimized in service of your authorial goals, but point of view is global. Where all other aspects of story, in proportion, affect the unity and effectiveness of a work, point of view determines how we perceive that unity and effectiveness. Choose the wrong setting and you may dampen the effect of your story. Choose the wrong point of view and you may destroy it completely.

[ Read more ]

Publishing is for Professionals

November 18, 2011 By Mark 3 Comments

When we last checked in on the tattered integrity of the publishing industry, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Review of Books, was reminding us that good writers will never need to self-publish:

Our thinking, which may be old-fashioned, is that with so great a volume of books being published each year by traditional publishers, and with so many imprints available, every book of merit is almost certain to find a home at one or another of those presses.

It would be a fallacy to suggest that all books published by mainstream publishers are works of merit, and someone with Sam Tanenhaus’s privileged industry access would never suggest otherwise. Rather, he’s simply asserting that there are no self-published works of merit anywhere in the known universe, and never will be.

I was reminded of this bit of expert analysis recently while reading about the first novel written by the Kardashian sisters, apparently in tag-team fashion:

“As wild as our real lives may seem on TV, just wait to read what we’ve dreamed up to deliver between the covers of our first novel,” Kourtney, Kim and Khloé said in a statement last week, announcing that William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, would publish a novel they had written.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s unlikely anyone who wrote a train-wreck sentence like that is capable of writing an entire book. But you might also be thinking it’s a bit unfair that the Kardashian sisters have a book deal with HarperCollins, while Sam Tanenhaus is crapping all over your writing life by summarily defining you as a failure because your mother didn’t pimp you out for a TV series. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: POV and “Involvement”

November 16, 2011 By Mark 2 Comments

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.

Storytelling as a discipline seems to have a permanence about it. Most people, particularly most authors, would probably agree that stories are inherent in the life experience of human beings. We embrace fiction so completely and effortlessly that suspension of disbelief may someday be defined as a brain state akin to hypnosis or meditation.

This sense of permanence affects how we innately relate to fiction, but it is also possible to advance one’s knowledge as a practitioner. Folk tales spun by people in all cultures around the globe can be shaped, improved and expanded by craft, whether the intended objective is entertainment, education or propaganda. And it’s possible to go even farther.

Painting, music, food, movement, storytelling — all of these things have practical applications, but can also be turned to purely creative ends. If aspiring to art is a bit more vague than aiming for income, or at least harder to quantify, I think most people still understand the impetus. Whatever form means, whatever composition means, whatever context and content mean, all of them (and more) can be treated as ends in themselves, and subsequently explored on that basis alone. Art for art’s sake.

It is the eternal and intrinsic potential for making art that compels Hills (and me, and others) to insist that there are no rules in fiction writing. To many would-be storytellers this seems utterly preposterous: if there are no rules then what can be known? But knowledge is not what rules define. Rules work because they impose order through constraints and controls. When you drive across town you knowingly subject yourself (or not, as the case may be) to dozens if not hundreds of traffic and motor-vehicle laws and customs. But if those rules didn’t exist, or you simply decided to ignore all of them, you wouldn’t suddenly be oblivious to where you were or wanted to go.

What Hills says, what artists say, is that if your goal (art) puts you at odds with a rule or convention, then you ignore the rule and stay true to your artistic pursuit. There are no rules so inviolate that you cannot break them for sufficient cause. And yet we also know that certain methods in fiction (and other mediums) achieve certain effects: that relationships hold despite our aversion to calling them rules. [ Read more ]

Interactive Intransigence

November 4, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

We are now well past two solid decades of creating interactive entertainment for commercial markets. If some hurdles have yet to be surmounted there’s still a great deal we do know about the design and execution of various genre types, and this knowledge should — at least in theory — help us hold down costs and avoid making the same stupid mistakes again and again.

If you don’t know about id Software they’re one of the storied companies in interactive gaming. Led by tech wiz John Carmack, id defined and dominated the first-person shooter genre with games like Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake and others. If there’s anything to be known about how these games work and don’t work — and how the technology behind these games can most effectively be mated to design — that knowledge should have so permeated the culture at id as to be part of its DNA.

In keeping with its fetish for cuddly titles, id’s latest first-person shooter is called Rage. GameRankings.com pegs the aggregate review score at about 80%, and most review sites are giving it 7 of 10. Not bad as these things go. But what, specifically, are the complaints?

Here’s Jim Rossignol from RPS, prefacing his final take:

What this is really about is how I feel after playing Rage, which is a feeling not uncommon to gaming throughout the ages: the feeling that the options a game presents are actually an illusion.

Now, what you need to know here is that this is A) a problem in all mediums and B) the single biggest problem in interactive entertainment. Every storytelling and entertainment medium must protect itself from outside intrusions, internal inconsistencies, and technical failings. If you’ve ever been engrossed in a movie when the projector fails you know what I mean. If you’ve ever read a novel where the author leaves a critical logical thread unresolved you know what I mean. If you’ve ever had a moron behind you at a concert sing along, off-key, with the performer you paid to hear you know what I mean. In entertainment there is nothing more important than maintaining the illusion of whatever experience you’ve created.

In interactive entertainment this obligation is magnified by the fact that the audience has expectations that literally cannot be fulfilled. What every interactive user wants is full-blown, AI-driven language, plot and character interaction. This is the famous promise of the holodeck, and its academic spawn. Unfortunately, that’s never, ever going to happen. So everything that logically spills from that incapacity — including audience expectation — has to be anticipated and managed from the get-go. And everybody knows this. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: The “Question” of POV

October 31, 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 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 ]

WIG&TSSIP: When POV is “Wrong”

October 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.

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 ]

Self-publishing Revolution Update

October 21, 2011 By Mark 16 Comments

No surprises, plenty of confirmation:

Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.

Several large publishers declined to speak on the record about Amazon’s efforts. “Publishers are terrified and don’t know what to do,” said Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, who is known for speaking his mind.

“Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,” said Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. “If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.

As regular readers know I’m no fan of Amazon. But if the choice is between a provider who charges up-front fees for a-la-carte services and an industry that demands editorial control while banking unsubstantiated percentages, I’ll have to go with the former.

It’s also worth noting, again, how intimately related the industry’s gatekeeping practices and economic stability were. Controlling access to publication and stigmatizing self-published writers created an industry that could dictate terms like a price-fixing cartel. At least until the entire question of self-publishing was revealed to be an industry-perpetuated fraud. [ Read more ]