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 ]