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WIG&TSSIP: Plot Structure

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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.

At some point, usually early on, beginning writers stumble across the term plot structure. It’s a loaded term, a deceptive term, a deceitful term, and a necessary term.

The premise underlying most mentions of plot structure is formulaic: follow the prescribed steps and you’ll have a hit on your hands. In the first paragraph of this section Hills addresses and dispenses with that premise in exhaustive fashion, neatly demonstrating that all such formulas are of a kind:

There seems to be no limit to the formulas for the movement of fiction that can be devised: anyone can make up his own quite easily. If any one of them really means anything, then it would seem they must all mean the same thing — which strikes me as a frightening thought.

Underpinning all plot formulas is the rather inescapable truth that anything that is written (or read) must have a beginning, middle, and end. But there’s a critical difference between the beginning and end of what you write and the beginning and end of the story you’re telling. As noted in previous sections, a big part of the craft of storytelling involves deciding what to emphasize and detail and choosing what to glide over and omit.

The temptation to embrace plot structure as a storytelling template is compelling for both novices and veterans alike, in all genres. But doing so puts the writing cart before the storytelling horse. (Which is, of course, the appeal.)

Writers who cling to structure as a guide tend to invent scenes that fulfill whatever formulaic approach they’ve adopted. Scenes are filtered first through the prism of structure, then, if they pass that test, are written and riveted into place. (To be fair, the result may in fact be serviceable — although probably for reasons other than the formula employed.)

The proper approach to plot structure is to embrace the story first, even if only roughly and in your mind. Why? Because understanding what Character X or Character Z is doing during the story is necessary if you’re going to judge which moments to depict and which to elide.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Scenes

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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 short section Hills makes a simple point:

Most of what’s said about “scenes” in fiction, for instance, is derived from drama theory.

All you have to do is read Act II, Scene 3 to understand where he’s coming from. The word we use to describe a new place or time in a story comes from the world of live theater. But the mechanisms of such transitions are necessarily different for each medium.

As Hills notes, playwrights must confront the limitations of their medium, but the fiction writer faces few such obstacles. If you want your story to bounce from the mind of a woman standing on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco to a montage of repair work on a spaceship overhead you can get there and back with little effort. (And yes, I know the theater can be incredibly inventive about such things as well.)

For the most part the tendency to create scenes in theatrical chunks is no longer common, both because theater is no longer the dominant form it once was and because mature examples of how to handle scenes abound in fiction. If there’s a tendency toward mimicry today, particularly for young writers, it’s to borrow not from theater but from film, television and even the computer. Yet while the power of the camera and of interaction can be considerable, that power is still constrained by the production demands of those mediums. Because prose uses only words it faces no such limitations.

All storytellers have ideas, images, even whole sequences drop into their heads. Sometimes it’s a character that hangs around a while, sometimes it’s a clever plot twist that springs to mind. What’s important in developing a story from initiating thoughts is considering how best to exploit those ideas in the medium of choice — or better yet, recognizing which medium is inherently best for a particular idea. And how you think of and handle scenes is going to go a long way to determining your success rate.

As an aside, it’s idle speculation on my part, but while re-reading this section I wondered if the appeal of flash fiction didn’t somehow relate to the power of the quick cut, the image, and particularly the panel of the graphic novel. Audiences are always learning how to read mediums in new and more complex ways, and evolution in one medium tends to spill over into others. Flash fiction may not simply be a shorter form applicable to the attention deficits of the information age, it may be the literary expression of the faceted artistic and social conversations we have adapted to and adopted on the internet.

Next up: Plot Structure.

— Mark Barrett

WIG&TSSIP: Selection in Plot

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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.

Call this the companion chapter to Knowing a Character. Whatever you choose to relate and reveal about your plot, there’s a whole lot more you could have written…

The first thing to say is the most basic: a writer can’t help to tell the whole of what “happened” to his character. It follows then that a crucial matter in constructing the plot is the relevant selection of incidents to recount.

The obviousness of this point only serves to reassure the beginning writer that they can’t possibly make any mistakes in selection. Throw out the boring stuff, hook up some reversals, add a dash of cleverness and a back beat of violence and cruelty and voila: a rip-roaring plot.

Because any story profits in pace by having the boring bits excised — where the boring bits are those moments that do not lead to or depict an explosion (think about it) — the tendency among young writers, and particularly young writers reaching for formulas upon which to steady their shaky legs, is to reduce everything to a symphony of show-stopping twists and turns. Laced together with a minimal amount of other stuff grudgingly acknowledged as necessary, this constitutes the conventional ideal of good plotting.

  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Plot in Short Story vs. Novel

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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 Plot in a Short Story, as against Plot in a Novel. Having elbowed himself ample room to ignore plot in the previous section, Hills returns to the question of plot and his definition of a story as “something that happens to someone”:

What “happens” in a story, the real meaning, is seldom much concerned with the plot.

By ‘story’ here Hills means a short story. Novels, of course, are rife with plot, even if they aspire to literary goals — as Hills notes in comparing the two forms:

But at any rate it [plot] is of very great interest to even the literary novelist: after all, he’s got to get the reader through four hundred pages somehow.

The point remains, however, that meaning and plot are not the same thing. The vast literary real estate of the novel almost necessarily demands that plot act like a kind of superstructure, bridging and supporting the literary points an author wants to make on the road to meaning. For this reason novels lend themselves to a kind of separateness that is the antithesis of the literary short story.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Importance & Unimportance of Plot

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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 pushes back hard against conventional terminology. His goal, as always, is making a place for art at the storytelling table:

Plot is just one of a number of aspects of the short story; and if it is the only aspect a reader looks for, all that means is that plot is all he gets. The modern literary short story must seem very dull to him.

And of course it does seem dull because it’s very seldom (outside of Hemingway) that someone actually punches somebody in the mouth, let alone shepherds the reader through a thrill-a-minute amusement ride.

Much if not most storytelling is defined by plot, and as Hills notes that’s even how we speak of stories when we relate them to others. But it’s possible to do a great deal more in every medium, and that’s what Hills is arguing for. Not as a requirement, but as a right.

To make his point Hills includes a hilarious example about a caveman named Og, as well as other arguments, and in the end I think anyone — particularly in this day and age — would conceded his point. Writers have the right to write whatever they want, including works that minimize plotting to an extreme degree.

I think this caution applies to all storytelling, however, even of the most commercial nature. Plot, as Hills makes clear, is simply one element of a story. Depth of storytelling — impact, effect, resonance — comes from crafting all elements in a manner befitting both the story you want to tell and the intended audience. Clinging to plot, emphasizing plot, driving plot relentlessly only serves to reveal it as a structural element.

Nothing is served by overemphasis of plot. It’s easy to do, it favors cleverness, and it will hold attention in the moment, but only in the moment. Like sex, it’s no substitute for intimacy or a relationship.

Next up: Plot in a Short Story, as against Plot in a Novel.

— Mark Barrett

WIG&TSSIP: The Stress Situation

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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 I first began thinking seriously about how stories are told I came up with a metaphor that helped me see plot and character as a functional model. My idea what that a character is like a pressure cooker. With no heat under it a pressure cooker is static, stable, unmoved. But add heat and the pressure begins to build. Subject the cooker to enough energy and at some point the release valve is going to be triggered or the cooker will explode.

Granted that’s a bit dramatic, but it worked for me because it had all the necessary parts. A vessel (character), energy affecting the vessel (plot), and a predictable, inevitable outcome (change/revelation) determined by mixing the two.

Because I was writing literary fiction at the time I knew any movement of character resulting from the build up of pressure might be subtle or slight, and preferably ought to be. In practice I fumbled the ball plenty, variously understating to the point of uncertainty and overstating to the point of melodrama, but in general I felt the model held up.

When I first read Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular I was pleased how my own model fit with Hills’ belief that tension is the best method of creating suspense. The pressure-cooker metaphor says nothing about surprising revelations or twists or formulaic models, but simply posits an inevitable progression. Take a character as they are when the story begins and subject them to stress. At some point any character, no matter how resolute or stoic, is going to show the effects of that stress.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Motivation

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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 section is one of the reasons why every fiction writer should read this book. It cleaves craft from formula so deftly, so convincingly, that it cannot be refuted. Hills:

Motivation seems to have a key role in creating sequential, causal action, and formulas of fiction and drama speak of it as the “mainspring” of the action. Writers are always being urged to “establish motivation,” to make each character’s motivation as clear as possible, this seeming to be a good way of establishing both characterization and conflict.

Every writer confronts this kind of thinking at some point. It’s impossible to avoid. I was fortunate never to be exposed to formula as craft, but that doesn’t mean the issue of character motivation didn’t come up.

When I was in college I took multiple workshops in short fiction, playwriting and screenwriting. Concerns about character motivation came up most often in playwriting, less so in screenwriting, and least frequently in fiction workshops. While it’s possible my experience was the result of chance I don’t think that’s the case. Rather, I think it was influenced by the degree to which characterization dominates each medium.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Knowing a 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.

It stands to reason that if you want to present a fully-developed character you need to know something about her. Whether you’re individualizing from a type or you have a specific trait or aspect you want to build on, you have to add detail.

What’s interesting about this process is that it’s less about technique than about authorial preference. Hills acknowledges as much by beginning the section as follows:

Who knows how well a fiction writer should know his characters? How much need he know about them?

There’s no right answer. As Hills points out, you only need to know enough to get the job done. If it helps you to work up a comprehensive backstory, then go for it. If you don’t need it, you don’t need it.

Beginning writers wrestle with these questions because they don’t know their own process. There’s no harm in experimenting, unless you write so much about your character that you kill the story you wanted to tell.

It’s tempting to think that writers who tend to start with a character in mind tend to explore character histories more, but I’m not sure. Whether a writer starts with plot or character, that says nothing about that author’s need for pre-planning as part of their own storytelling process. Some writers need to do a lot; some prefer to jump right in and discover what they need along the way.

Some writers develop a drawn out character-discovery process as a means of putting off or becoming comfortable with the harrowing act of authorial commitment — as if rewriting is not also a part of the writing process. If you’re a perfectionist or afraid of failure, beating a backstory to death is one of the best ways to put off that first sentence. Nobody — including you — can ever say you don’t need to know everything you’re discovering about your characters.

Hills spends the bulk of this section asking questions that a writer might ask in order to fully know a character. Here’s an small sample:

Where was he born? Father’s occupation? Mother’s disposition? As a child, did he have no friends, lots of friends, or just one good friend? How was he educated? You know the total effect of his rural or urban upbringing, don’t you? Of his lonely or happy childhood? Okay — then how does he feel about money now, and why?

Hills goes on like that for pages, and I get a sense that much of it is tongue in cheek. Or worse, taken from firsthand experience working with neurotic writers.

Next up: Motivation.

— Mark Barrett

WIG&TSSIP: Differentiating From Types

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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.

Hills opens this section by acknowledging the utility of types. Between the inherent drama, clear distinctions and time savings gained by using types as templates, there’s a lot to recommend them. But as noted in previous sections types must be individualized.

How is that done? Here’s Hills, making overt what he earlier implied:

In differentiating a main character from a type, the problem is whittling the extravagant back toward the average, a process of individualization.

No matter how many times I read that sentence the same image comes to mind. It is a literal metaphor of an actor leaving the stage through the wings. On stage the actor played a type — an exaggerated character — but offstage the actor moves toward the norm, individualizing from the role they just played. (I would suggest this is one of the fascinations we all have with actors, both as performers-in-character and in real life.)

I am not suggesting that you actually present a type and then attempt to reveal more. I think that’s a mistake and leads to the kind of weak characterization discussed in the previous post. Rather, I think you should contemplate your characters in an offstage context before you begin to write, asking questions that go beyond, but are related to, type. What kind of person would adopt such an on-stage type/role? Who might adapt such a type/role to their own use?  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: The Dichotomous Stereotype

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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.

It’s generally understood even by nascent storytellers that writing cliche or stereotyped characters is bad. Being able to recognize such weaknesses in the work of others is useful, but ultimately says little about how to construct complex, believable characters in one’s own stories.

For writers struggling to find their way, the dichotomous stereotype represents a logical step in adding dimension to a character, but it’s still premised on writing from types. Like multiplying an equation by zero, it doesn’t matter how complicated the rest of the formula is. The answer is always going to be zero.

Here’s Hills:

The second-generation Italian-American gangster has always been a nationality-group stereotype, the opposite of which is the warm-hearted boy who works hard, plays the violin and loves his mother’s spaghetti. Extremes — opposites — like this can be found within any grouping. Just put the mother’s picture in the gangster’s pocket and you think you’ve achieved some depth of characterization, but all you’ve got is flip-flop typing.

The impulse to go down this road is obvious. Writing from types saves time and makes everything blindingly (if not insultingly) obvious. Television excels at this kind of characterization, but movies and novels are not immune.

I’ve never enjoyed the Godfather movies or the Sopranos for exactly the reason Hills outlines above: I can never get away from the feeling that what I’m watching is a dichotomous stereotype rather than a convincing depiction of character. I also can’t shake the feeling that the world would be a better place if everyone just got thrown in jail or whacked. (Goodfellas is the only mob movie I’ve ever seen that worked for me.)  [ Read more ]