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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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

WIG&TSSIP: Rust Hills’ Introduction

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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.

Rust Hills comes at fiction-writing from a decidedly literary perspective. What does that mean? Well, this:

I’ve got a shelf of how-to-write books, and they all seem to me pretty much dreadful, especially the ones about the short story.

…

Then I’ve got another shelf of books, some of them seem to me great. These are college textbook anthologies of short stories, with analyses of the stories that sometimes get quite technical.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking what you really want is the how-to-write books, because you want to learn how to write, not how to read. Believe me, I understand: I’ve been there, and I”m no great fan of critical analysis. But Hills is going to throw you a curve in a minute and I don’t want you to miss it.  [ Read more ]

Ditchwalk Book Club: WIG&TSSIP Overview

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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. If you’re interested in improving your storytelling craft I encourage you to follow along. Original announcement here. Tag here.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you’re not a short story writer so this book won’t help you with your flash fiction, novellas or novels. Wrong.

Short stories are the smallest form of fiction that can be fully realized. If you can write a short story you can write anything — either by subtracting elements or by adding complexity and scale to increase the length of the work. More importantly, understanding the mechanics of this tightly-knit form exposes the mechanics of all other forms as well, meaning you can directly apply any lessons learned to your storytelling life.

I won’t promise that you’ll click with this book the way I did. For me it was a confirmation of a hundred things I’d felt and come to believe about writing, all compiled in a simple accessible volume. What I can promise is that you’ll never think of fiction writing the same way again, and you’ll have at least one ah-ha moment along the way. Worst case scenario: it won’t make your writing worse, and will almost certainly make your writing — and your writing life — better.

To make sure we’re all on the same literal page I ordered the latest version of the book: First Mariner Books edition 2000. I will be commenting on each section of the book in a separate post, but quoting sparely in order to respect fair use and copyright. While you certainly don’t need my commentary to profit from Hills’ book, you’ll need a copy of the book to fully profit from my commentary. Or the book.

First up: Rust Hills’ introduction to Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, and why it shouldn’t scare you away.

— Mark Barrett

The Ditchwalk Book Club: WIG&TSSIP

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For some time I’ve been wanting to talk about what I believe is the best book ever written on the subject of storytelling.* Rather than simply identify it and applaud, however, I’m going to walk through the entire book in a series of blog posts. If you’re interested in grounding your storytelling with a solid foundation of craft I encourage you to buy a copy of the book and follow along. I don’t promise it will change your life, but I’m confident you will profit from the discussion, and perhaps considerably so.

The author of the book is L. Rust Hills, the former long-time fiction editor at Esquire magazine. I was fortunate to meet Rust when I was a fiction writing student, and he had a profound effect on my understanding of storytelling as a craft. From him I learned more about how fiction is constructed than I did from any other source, and I remain indebted to him for that instruction. (Mr. Hills died in 2008.)

The good news is that most of what I learned from Rust Hills comes from a small book he wrote that is still in print. Titled Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular (WIG&TSSIP), Hills’ book treats every aspect of fiction writing as a craft technique, and shows how specific narrative choices create specific effects. Rather than resort to formulas, Hills focuses always on the author’s intended effect, and whether or not the author accomplished that objective. The goal is never replicating a form, but rather accomplishing the storytelling goal you intend to accomplish for your intended readers.

It’s true that Hills was a dedicated proponent of literature, so you might be worried that his book is a ponderous tome. Nothing could be further from the truth. WIG&TSSIP is plain spoken and accessible to everyone. Too, the points and observations he makes about writing literature apply to every kind of storytelling. If you’re a genre writer or tend to favor a particular formula, reading Hills’ book will improve your writing without asking you to abandon your beliefs because it will make you aware of the interconnectedness of your words on a deeper level.

If you’re interested in the craft of fiction — either as a writer or a reader — I encourage you to get a copy of Hills’ book and follow along. In order to give everyone time to find a copy or have one delivered I’ll be starting the discussion in about a week.

* Yes, that’s a bold claim. Regular readers know I don’t hype recommendations, but in this case I think the praise is warranted. I’ve read a lot of how-to books on fiction writing and nothing else has ever come close.

— Mark Barrett