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WIG&TSSIP: Moving vs. Fixed Characters

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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.

Just as Hills previously discussed fixed and moving actions, here he confronts Moving Characters, as against Fixed Characters. Where actions poorly prepared for smack of the author’s will, a change in character poorly prepared for smacks of an unconvincing shift.

The difference between the two types of characters — both in construction and in the effect they have on the reader — is found in preparation. Whether you’re writing a fifteen-page short story or a five-hundred page novel, you probably know in advance, if only at a gut level, which characters will be central to and affected by the story, and which characters will be presented only as context, backdrop, continuity and spice. The former group will necessarily need more preparation and presentation than the latter, precisely because they will change, however slightly, along the way.  [ Read more ]

The Writer You Are

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In the previous post I commented on a section of Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular in which Rust Hills differentiated between slick fiction and quality fiction. While I think Hills is unnecessarily dismissive of entertainment for entertainment’s sake, just as he is clearly invested in art for art’s sake, I think his condemnation of slick fiction is valid because slick fiction is bad craft.

Craft and Effectiveness
The problem with my own condemnation is that it’s no different from Hills’: it expresses a personal preference. Like Hills I can make a compelling case for craft (doing so is one of the missions of Ditchwalk) but at the end of the day I’m still advocating for the kind of storytelling I care about.

Despite his personal preference for literary fiction, however, Hills bases his advocacy on proven craft, not bias. By the same token, while I’m open to a wider spectrum of storytelling, I believe that craft knowledge allows authors to make conscious, informed choices about the stories they intend to write, which in turn increases the likelihood that those stories will impact readers in the intended way. To the extent that learning craft requires more effort — at least at the apprentice stage — the return on investment is an increase in the likelihood of narrative success. Whether you use craft to create better entertainment or better literature (if we really need to bifurcate), the Ditchwalk definition of better — like Hills’ definition of better — is that more readers will be pleased with, or appropriately affected by, the end result.

Still, it’s inarguable that there are plenty of readers who are perfectly happy with the effects of demonstrably bad craft. If stories premised on a character shift or deus ex machina plotting thrill you, I can’t claim you shouldn’t be thrilled. I can point out how the authors of those stories jerked you around or cheated you or gave you less than they might have, but I can’t tell you that you didn’t feel the enjoyment you felt.

So the very charge I respectfully level at Hills — that he’s unnecessarily elitist — is one that can be leveled at me. Yet even as I freely acknowledge that taste and sensibility play a part in the appreciation of storytelling, I refuse to budge from my position — which is also Hills’ position — that more knowledge of craft necessarily improves your chance of successfully telling a particular story.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Slick vs. Quality Fiction

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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 complete title of this section is Slick Fiction, as against Quality Fiction.. In it Hills presents a historical timeline, describing how slick, serialized fiction moved from magazines to television in order to follow the migrating mainstream market. And he’s not shy about characterizing that market:

What the magazine readers wanted from it was entertainment and escape, and television can do that now more mindlessly than magazine fiction ever could. As is well known, you can’t beat a skunk in a contest that involves smelling bad.

Hills’ dismissive critique seems all the more snobbish given the passage of time. But Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular was originally written in 1977, and at that time many of the complaints Hills levels against television were broadly valid. Formulaic plots and cliche characters abounded, even as some writers tried to buck the creative and cultural constraints imposed by the networks.

I’ll have more to say about TV and storytelling in response to another section of Hills’ book, but for now I want to focus on the crux of his observations and complaints:

The writers of slick fiction went along, with the audience, to television. For unlike serious fiction, which has always been written whether there was any demand for it or not, the whole point and purpose of slick fiction was that it was written to order for a market, and once the market was gone the writing ceased.

If you think about storytelling in terms of gross tonnage, there’s no question more writing is done in the service of established commercial markets than is done in the service of art. That’s neither a surprise nor a pejorative observation. I don’t know what the ratio is of visits to amusement parks and museums, but I’m fairly confident that in most locales amusement parks beat the stuffing out of museums.

It doesn’t take a fiction editor to note that much of commercial storytelling is derivative, redundant, formulaic and, too often, just plain bad. Like anything that’s mass produced — and here you should be thinking of the corporate hot dog — the emphasis in commercial works is generally on satisfying demand as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Great writing is as necessary to the average commercial story in any medium as great cuts of meat are to commercial hot dogs. The difference might be noticeable, but neither the manufacturer nor the customer is willing to pay for that difference.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Character Shift vs. Movement

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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 complete title of this section is, The Character Shift, as against Movement of Character. The premise, as suggested in the previous section, is that merely demonstrating change in a character is not enough. On some level, for the intended audience, that change also needs to be convincing.

For Hills, however, that distinction is just the starting point:

One way of detecting the difference between the character shift and movement of character is by considering the function the character change performs in the narrative. A character shift usually permits, rather than causes, something to happen.

This may seem a rather banal observation. In fact, I think it’s one of the most useful observations anyone could make about storytelling, and particularly so for people who are new to the craft. Not only does this distinction generally cleave bad writing from good by simple rule, it provides an equally simple test for detecting the problem. Does your character change as a result of what happens, or to facilitate what happens?  [ Read more ]

The Next Three Days

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If you want to see a good example of how tension and anticipation can be used to effectively create suspense, I recommend a movie called The Next Three Days. It was written and directed by Paul Haggis, who also wrote Million Dollar Baby and Crash.

Because every person’s emotional response to a work is different, I’ll leave it to you to analyze how the movie generates the suspense and emotion you feel. If you want to talk about your response to the story, and how Haggis’ craft choices created that effects you felt, I’d be glad to do so in the comments.

— Mark Barrett

WIG&TSSIP: Movement of Character

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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.

Sooner or later every how-to book about fiction talks about movement of character. The specific word used to describe the concept varies — growth, change, development — but they all spring from the same source: the idea that a character (most commonly the main character) will evolve as events unfold.

In previous sections Hills has talked about the idea and importance of change over the course of a story, but here he drills down to a more basic question. Is change in a character actual change, or simply the revelation of some “‘side’ of the personality” that has been previously unacknowledged? From the reader’s point of view it may not matter, but from the author’s point of view the question is far from academic.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: “Agreement” in Character and Action

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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 this section Hills makes an extended analogy between the structure of a sentence and the structure of a story. I think the analogy is useful, but particularly so because Hills himself doesn’t lose sight of the objective:

Here I want to stress only the idea of agreement. There is agreement between all the parts of a sentence…

In the previous sections Hills acknowledged that mystery and conflict as methods will create suspense for the reader. His concern is that they do so in a way that negatively impacts other aspects of the story. Tension, as a method of suspense, supports agreement.

This is the crux of everything Hills has to say about writing fiction. There are ways to write that damage agreement among the parts of your story, and there are ways to write that enhance agreement. In all cases enhancing agreement produces a qualitative improvement that directly impacts reader enjoyment of your work.

To use a fixed action instead of a moving action as the plot of a story would be like using a participle instead of a verb in a sentence.

Hills closes the section by bridging from plot/action to character. Just as there must be agreement in action, and in the methods used to relate moving action, so too must there be agreement in character, and in the potential of a character to be moved.

Next up: Movement of Character.

— Mark Barrett

WIG&TSSIP: Tension and Anticipation

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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.

As agents of suspense, mystery and conflict have something in common: they prompt anticipation. But anticipation is not inherently good. Problems arise when what’s anticipated works against other aspects of an intended experience.

Imagine it’s your birthday. You’re so excited and focused on your presents that you are oblivious to the people in attendance, the food, the cake, the ice cream, the decorations and the effort others have made on your behalf. When you open your presents your are rewarded for your anticipation, but at what cost?

Now imagine you were raised to be less of a self-centered jerk. At your birthday party you greet and spend time with each guest. You taste and savor the food, you appreciate the effort made by all, and you recognize the compliment of the party itself. By the time you open your gifts you are overflowing with feelings of love, friendship and family.

In each example the event is the same. But because of preparation (in the way your parents raised you) the experience is completely different. In the first example you have a shallow, vain, dismissive, two-dimensional experience that can only be measured by the value (economic and otherwise) of the items you accumulate. In the second example you have a deep, rich, full, inclusive experience that also infuses each gift with meaning beyond its value or utility.

The lesson, again, is that successful storytelling is always about preparation. Preparation that narrowly focuses reader anticipation should generally be avoided, while preparation that broadens and harmonizes reader anticipation should be pursued.  [ Read more ]

E-books Outselling Print On Amazon

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It was inevitable, but the speed of the transition is impressive:

In July 2010, Amazon announced that sales of electronic books for its Kindle e-book reader surpassed sales of hardcover books on the site. Six months later, sales of Kindle books surpassed that of paperbacks. Now, customers are downloading Kindle books more than hardcovers and paperbacks combined.

Having built their businesses on the production and distribution of physical books, traditional (legacy) publishers are in big trouble. The cash crop of seasonal, celebrity and cyclical titles that annually supported publishing’s administrative and production overhead is rapidly disappearing. The same information is either readily available for free on the internet, or more quickly and easily produced as an e-book or subscription service. Customers can still get what they want, but publisher are no longer critical to that process.

Attempts by publishers to control (if not fix) the price of e-books have also failed. Even with a lower cost of production, e-books must still provide revenue that offsets the loss of print sales or publishers will necessarily have to reduce those costs — including employment costs devoted to print. Whether Amazon’s numbers are consistent with other retail channels, the trend seems clear: the profitability of e-books will determine the viability of any publisher going forward. (There are probably very real implications for the paper industry as well. Adjust your portfolio accordingly.)

The good news is that content and books as valued objects are not under siege. If anything, many of the books previously sold in physical form and now sold in digital form had little or no value as objects — and probably little or no value after a year on the shelves. Clearing big-box stores of titles that existed only by virtue of a constricted distribution channel obviously means adjustment, but I see no downside for the reader. Physical books will still be available, and probably in better-quality editions. It may also be that independent bookstores will thrive because of their smaller footprint and more intimate knowledge of local reading habits.

Update: The New York Times has more here.

WIG&TSSIP: Conflict and Uncertainty

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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.

I’ve read a lot of how-to books about storytelling. Back when I was devouring such works on a daily basis, but before I ran across Hills’ book, I developed a dull negative reaction to the topic of conflict. The more a book talked about conflict as being central to drama, the less interested I generally was in that author’s storytelling advice.

Why? Because equating conflict to drama always struck me as meaningless. It’s like equating water to melted ice. What in life isn’t about conflict? Dog. Cat. Mouse. Fleas. Plague. Death. Culture. Religion. Life. Gravity. Comet. Fire. Water. Ice. Is it really saying something insightful to say that drama is about conflict? Or is saying something easy and obvious?

When I finally did come across Hills’ book the first paragraph in this section brought my dull discomforts into focus:

Conflict is thought by many to be a basic element in fiction, and certainly it is true that conflict of some sort is present in most stories.

…

Considered for the moment, however, purely as a plot device, conflict leaves a good deal to be desired when it is made the main structure of a story.

Hills goes on to talk about external conflict, how external conflict must sooner or later be realized as internal conflict, and how internal conflict necessarily devolves into some sort of “willy wonty” choice. While this admittedly creates suspense, at what cost?

Storytelling gurus would have you believe the agonizing characters go through when trying to decide which fork in the road to take necessarily fuels a big payoff initiated by conflict. To tell any story, then, all you have to do is A) set up a conflict and B) flog that conflict until the main character chooses one fork or the other, cliffhanger style, often at the point of a gun. But again, is that really useful information?  [ Read more ]