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WIG&TSSIP: Naming the Moment

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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.

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

WIG&TSSIP: Recognizing the Crucial

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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.

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 ]

WIG&TSSIP: Loss of Last Chance to Change

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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.

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 ]

WIG&TSSIP: As the Story Begins and Ends

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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 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 ]

E-Book Library Loans for Kindle

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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

WIG&TSSIP: Fixed Action vs. Moving 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.

The full title of this section is Fixed Action, as against Moving Action. The premise of the section is that human behavior patterns are revealing, and I think everyone would agree with that. In fact, whenever I read this section I find my head bobbing happily along in agreement for the first two pages, even as I feel a bit of discomfort that Hills seems to know me too well. Then, suddenly, I’m brought up short by the following sentence:

But just the opposite is true in fiction.

As many times as I’ve read Hills’ book you would think I wouldn’t have the same ‘Wait…what?’ moment, but I do. The reason for the disconnect is that after Hills spends two pages talking about reality he suddenly switches point of view to talk about the contrivance we call fiction. In order to make the same point-of-view switch I remind myself that looking at life and drawing lessons from life requires observation, while creating fiction requires construction. As a fiction writer it’s not enough to notice that something exists or that it’s true, you have to know how to evoke and shape that aspect of reality through craft and technique.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: 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.

If a story is “something that happened to someone,” then it should be no surprise that action (the something) and character (the someone) are central to storytelling. Ask a child of any age to tell you a story and you will instantly be bombarded with character and action. The character may be a person, an animal, a toy or an object; the action may be possible, fanciful, reasoned, chaotic — it doesn’t matter. Character and action will be there, always.

Hills introduces character and action in this section, but he will come back to each again and again. In fact, this section is more preface than anything else. You’ve thought about character and action before, Hills is saying, but I’m going to lead you somewhere new, grounding the journey in craft and technique. Consider:

In fiction, an author sets a character out on the road in the first place and then within certain limitations, shoves him down whatever paths the author wants him to take for as long as he wants him to go.

This is author-as-God, author-as-artist. This is character and action as personal expression. It is the assertion of freedom and imagination as rights in keeping with the greatest literary traditions. It is the creed of the MFA writer and workshop.  [ Read more ]

The Adman Cometh

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If advertising was a villain, it would be a Terminator:

It’s no surprise then that ads have come to the Kindle. The good news — relatively speaking — is that you can save a few bucks by purchasing an ad-enabled machine:

Although the hardware is identical to the standard $139 Kindle, the new Kindle with “Special Offers” will feature advertisements and deals as its screen saver and on the bottom of its home screen. But for that added distraction, the company will take $25 off the price—dropping it to $114.

If ads on the Kindle are inevitable — and they are, as are ads on every imaginable surface and device — I think this is a smart way to introduce them. Rather than inject ads into every Kindle, thereby infuriating all those nice people who helped make the Kindle a success, Amazon is giving the customer a choice and motivating that choice with savings.

  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Short Story vs. Novel and Sketch

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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 first section of Hills’ book is titled The Short Story, as against the Novel and the Sketch. It runs four pages. In those four pages you will find Hills’ overarching thesis, a detailed explanation of what a story is and isn’t, a paradigm by which language can be mapped to every aspect of fiction technique, and an explanation of how short stories achieve a unity of purpose and focus unlike any other written form. It is the densest, most informative four pages ever written about fiction writing, and if you read the section ten times you will learn something new each time.

The single most important sentence in the whole section, however, is the first:

This book implies that some techniques in fiction tend to have absolute effects, and tries to explain what they are.

For all the disdain Hills directed at how-to-write books in the Introduction, here he is letting you know that Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular is a how-to-write book. Note also that he uses the word ‘fiction’ above and not the phrase ‘short fiction’. The techniques that Hills describes in his book are not unique to short stories, they are simply intensified and concentrated in short stories. Everything that he talks about — every technique — is portable to every kind of fiction.

What Hills is saying, here and throughout his book, is that ably doing X will necessarily cause the reader to think/feel Y. He’s not saying this might happen, he’s saying that these relationships are “absolute” in storytelling. The implied obverse of this claim is that your inability to do X — even if driven only by ignorance — will keep the reader from thinking/feeling Y. Bold claims to be sure, but what if he’s right?  [ Read more ]

The Website Platform Advantage

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While writing my Platform Evolution post I gave some thought to commenting on an excellent Infographic about content farms. No sooner did I decide against it than I ran across this excellent post on Publishing Trends about content farms. Then, a day later, a good friend sent me an unbidden and timely link to a post on Making Light, which, among other things, talks about — wait for it! — content farms.

If you’re not familiar with content farms you can get a quick overview here. As a writer, what concerns me most about content farms is that they are to writing and publishing what Ebola is to the human body. If I was an astrophysicist I would also add that content farms are to information and knowledge what solar storms are to communications. And if I was a logician I would say that content farms are to accuracy and reliability what tsunamis are to fishing villages.

Which is to say that everything about content farms is bad, but not equally bad. The worst aspect of content farms is not that they’re the new frontier for spammers and swindlers, it’s that producing so much crap at such an incredible rate renders every single aggregating and filtering mechanism useless.

Google as a search engine for retail products and reviews has been beyond broken for years. (Try searching for “best _____”, where the blank is any product you’re interested in.) Amazon is currently the default search for products, but it’s starting to fall apart as well. (Am I looking at the latest version of the CD/DVD/book I want to order? Is it new or used? Does it ship free or for a fee? Is it shipping from Amazon or some fly-by-night third-party reseller?) And of course the idea that all that ballyhooed user-generated social-media content is pretty much crap is also nothing new.

What content farms do that’s new is automate the production of internet crap by exploiting free labor and making liberal use of other people’s content in a plausibly deniable way. For independent writers trying to attract attention, fighting through the noise pollution generated by content farms may seem impossible, and all the more so as content farms begin to pollute e-book retailers like Amazon. The antidote to this virulent hemorrhage of obfuscating web text may seem to be a gated social networking community, but I think the opposite is true.  [ Read more ]