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WIG&TSSIP: Techniques of Foreshadowing

May 10, 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.

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 ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: foreshadowing, preparation, Rust Hills, setting, Theme, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Character and Plot Interaction

May 8, 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: Enhancing the Interaction of Character and Plot. It’s a shortish section that builds on the idea of the inevitability of retrospect, but I encourage you to focus here on the idea of interaction.

Plot and character can certainly be talked about as separate elements, but it is through their interaction that an author’s intended effects are achieved. To treat character and plot as separate elements is to see them as components in the alloy critics and academics call story. Treating plot and character as water and seed sees them as essential components giving life to the reader’s emotional and intellectual experience. It is that experience — that life — that we are after when we write.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, plot, Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: The Inevitability of Retrospect

May 5, 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.

Through the first eight sections of his book Rust Hills illuminates ways in which character and action are interconnected. He doesn’t say, “Here’s how you nail them together.” Instead, he says, “Here’s how these things relate to each other.”

How you connect character and action in any story is up to you. Hills doesn’t care what words you use for the two concepts, or how you go about integrating them through the specific details of the stories you have to tell. What he does want you to do is create a kind of seamless integration that goes well past the put-tab-A-in-slot-B construction that so many storytelling gurus and how-to-write authors champion.

Here Hills explains the effect of this kind of seamless integration on the reader:

The action of a story, then, takes a character past a decisive point down into one or another of the forks in the road. As a result of “what happens” there is one chance less that he can become anything other than what it is inevitable he will become.

The simple graphic in this section does a great job of explaining how this feeling of inevitability comes about in a story. Apart from specific choices and motivations, how a character responds to each crossroad or fork says something definitive about that character, and that’s what you want to dramatize for the reader.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

The Ditchwalk Self-Publishing Scale

April 30, 2011 By Mark 18 Comments

Independent authors believe every self-publisher is a revolutionary. Gatekeepers in traditional publishing think self-publishers are losers, at least until those same losers use their self-publishing success to humbly petition for a book deal. Vanity publishers insist all self-publishers are overlooked geniuses, and happily back up that assertion with high-priced services and promises they never intend to keep.

All of these definitions are unhelpful at best, self-serving at worst. In order to talk about self-publishing with any legitimacy we need a way to differentiate among self-publishers that is meaningful and objective. For that reason I created the Ditchwalk Self-Publishing Scale, which uses rising levels of production complexity to categorize self-published authors.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com, Publishing Tagged With: Ditchwalk, scale, self-publishing

WIG&TSSIP: “Epiphany” as a Literary Term

April 28, 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.

If you’re a James Joyce fan you’re in for a treat in this section. If not, you may be tempted to blow past the historical footnotes, but that would be a mistake.

Hills does spend time framing the roots of the word ‘epiphany’ and explaining how it came to be used in literary circles. But he also makes an important point about epiphany as a literary objective:

The epiphany (whether considered as a technique or an effect or a theory or a genre) is a much more useful concept for the short story than it is for the novel.

In this case the technique Hills is talking about is not directly portable to larger works. But what about flash fiction? I don’t write flash myself, but if the whole point of a literary epiphany is the realization and illumination of a single condensed moment, doesn’t that objective fits perfectly within the constraints of the flash form? (Given Joyce’s original literary goals for his epiphanies he might even be considered the father of flash fiction.)

[ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: epiphany, Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Naming the Moment

April 25, 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.

Whether you’ve been writing for years or you’re thinking about storytelling for the first time, you’ve undoubtedly heard the words ‘climax’ or ‘crisis’ used to describe the moment in a story when all of an author’s efforts are brought into dramatic tension. These words (and others like them) are commonly used by storytelling gurus who teach formulaic paradigms, as well as by critics and scholars analyzing an author’s work.

While we obviously need common terms to talk about fiction, it’s a mistake to allow the name of a thing to obscure your authorial goals. In this section Hills does a brilliant job of exploring the full implications of this dramatic moment, and shows how any name ascribed to such moments woefully understates their full power and potential.

Defining things by their schematic or logical structure is fine for storytelling gurus, critics and academics, but it’s a mistake if you’re actually trying to create the thing being described. We can all agree where Los Angeles is on a map, but that says little about what Los Angeles is like as a city. We can all agree about the structure of a suspension bridge and how the load is distributed, but that tells us almost nothing about the complexity of building such a bridge.

It’s relatively easy to come up with a crisis or climax when you’re tinkering with a story. That central, focusing moment may even be the thing you first imagined. But there’s a big difference between rigging two-dimensional transitions that meet a minimal definition of ‘crisis’ or ‘climax’, and fully integrating such transitions throughout the entirety of a fictional work.

Again, it’s the difference between drawing a map of Los Angeles and bringing Los Angeles to life. Your job, as an author, is not simply to satisfy some formulaic or structural requirement, it’s to bring your story world to life. Treating the climax or crisis of your story as a structural goal, and meeting that requirement, almost certainly means falling short of your story’s potential.

It’s not the name of the thing that matters, it’s the thing.

Next up: “Epiphany” as a Literary Term.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Recognizing the Crucial

April 23, 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.

When you’re writing a short story you obviously have to limit your focus compared to what you might explore in a longer work. While it’s always possible to cover ground quickly — “The Wilson family lived in New England for seven generations” — at some point you to have to dramatize specific scenes and populate them with fully realized characters. In a short story there’s only so much room to do so.

In this section Hills is concerned with the focusing power that comes from authorial clarity. He doesn’t argue that authors should have everything nailed down before they start writing, or even that authors will have clarity about their own work as they write. Rather, he simply encourages writers to recognize that the limited literary real estate of a short story requires focusing on aspects that are crucial:

A short story writer seeks to isolate those events that are most significant and then focus on them. The sequences that are most important he’ll render in detail, dramatizing them in scenes so as to bring them to life.

From this you might conclude that short stories are limiting while novels are liberating. In a sense you’re right. Novels have more pages, and more pages equals more drama if only in a quantitative sense. But quality counts in fiction, and giving an author more pages doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get a better story. A longer story, yes, but not necessarily a better one.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Rust Hills, story, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Loss of Last Chance to Change

April 22, 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.

This is a short section — less than a page. The point Hills makes is a simple one but it has important implications.

All stories show a moment of transformation from who a character is to who that character becomes. There is one kind of story, however, in which nothing seems to happen, yet such stories also depict a critical moment:

The reader is to understand as the story ends that Martin has lost his last chance to change and will now stay “forever” as he was.

Not only is this “loss of the last chance to change” potent in fiction, we’ve all met people whose lives have been defined by an inability to evolve. I tend to describe people like this as unable to get out of their own way, but that’s probably too harsh. The forces that variously compel a person to action or immobility are complex and often subconscious.

While stories of this type often resolve as tragedies, that’s only a function of context. A character who resists every entreaty to change — perhaps in some dark or destructive way — may actually be heroic or courageous. Depicting the loss of the last change to change is one way of showing a critical moment in the life of a character: how you dramatize that moment is up to you.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: action, Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: As the Story Begins and Ends

April 20, 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.

In the previous section Hills established the relationship between fixed action and moving action. Here Hills elaborates with examples and notes a basic difference between short fiction and longer forms of storytelling:

There may, of course, be several moved characters in a novel, but in the short story there is usually just one character on whom matters focus.

Again the practical benefit of knowing how to write a short story should be obvious. If you can tell a story that focuses all of its effects through one character, all of that skill is directly portable to the orchestral nature of the novel — no matter what kind of novels you write. If you don’t know how to hone your storytelling skills to their sharpest point you may get away with clever plotting or lots of shrieking drama, but you will fail to achieve the emotional potential of your work.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: action, beginning, character, ending, plot, Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

E-Book Library Loans for Kindle

April 20, 2011 By Mark 1 Comment

Kindle users have been kind’a-sort’a able to loan e-books to each other for a while. Today Amazon announced that the Kindle is making a bigger leap in the near future:

Amazon said the library books will be available on the Kindle “later this year,” but the company did not specify a launch date. The free e-books will be available though Kindle apps on smartphones and on the Kindle e-reader device, which can download books over Wi-Fi or 3G internet connections.

The service will work only in the United States.

I’m not sure why the reporter used the word ‘free’ to describe the financial impact of taking out a library book, unless it was to clarify the terms of such a transaction for those who have never had a library card. In any case, the basics of the deal strike me as almost banal in the way they replicate the loaning of physical books. (Libraries will purchase and loan limited copies. Copies loaned out will not be available until returned.)

The one glitch I can imagine is allowing loans via the internet. Libraries have always required that patrons present themselves physically, with allowances made in some municipalities for the physically disabled. Allowing people to download content from anywhere is obviously problematic, but can be mitigated to a great degree by only allowing people who qualify for local membership (meaning they reside in the library’s district) to access content from that library’s site.

How long will it take for somebody to download and pirate/market content from a library system? Well, I have to believe that’s already been done, and will be done again. (If I understand the piracy argument correctly, everything’s already on the web anyway, so why would pirates bother — unless they like the clean, device-ready formatting.)

Interesting times.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: e-books, Kindle

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