DITCHWALK

A Road Less Traveled

Topics / Books / Docs

About / Archive / Contact

Copyright © 2002-2023 Mark Barrett 

Home > Archives for Fiction

2 University of Iowa Creative Writing MOOC’s

By Leave a Comment

Two free creative writing MOOC’s are now open for registration at the University of Iowa. The first course, How Writers Write Poetry, begins June 28th. The second course, How Writers Write Fiction, begins September 27th. Both courses run six weeks.

One of the great obstacles in learning to write, compared with most of the arts, is that it’s impossible to observe another writer’s process. You can watch a sculptor sculpt, you can watch a painter paint, you can follow a photographer and observe the composition of endless images, but when it comes to writing it’s all cerebral except for the tap-tap-tapping of keys. After hours you can learn to drink by hanging out with writers, you can learn to do drugs, you can even learn to be a cynical, jaded hater, but when it comes to craft and technique there’s nothing to note except perhaps a preference for hardware or software, as if that ever meant anything.

Whether you’re merely curious about how writers write or you’re worried that you’re doing it wrong, these courses are an invaluable opportunity to check in with people who, somehow, despite the odds, found their way. And as I’ve mentioned before, that’s literally — if not literarily — half the battle.

Spread the word. Enjoy.

— Mark Barrett

Mediums and Mastery

By Leave a Comment

No matter how you find your way to storytelling, your own individual authorial journey begins with the stories you have been exposed to over the course of your life. This exposure inevitably affects and informs your initial efforts as you necessarily substitute mimicry for what will later become mastery. As you grow and develop as an author, and as your skills and interests broaden, you will leave these initial anchors and points of reference behind in order to explore new narrative territory. As you become more comfortable with different aspects of craft you may even probe the complex dynamics inherent in the interplay of art, craft and commerce. You may also decide to branch out and work in different storytelling mediums such as poetry, short fiction, long fiction, screenplays, stage plays and even interactive fiction.

At some point, if you keep pushing against your limitations, you will realize that stories exist apart from the specific mediums that allow us to document and relate fiction to others. We don’t need mediums to conceive of stories, we need mediums to express and communicate stories. This means that choosing the right medium is, in the end, simply another aspect of craft — albeit one that has unparalleled importance. As you grow in mastery you may even notice that many if not most of your earlier conceptions presumed a medium, and that in some cases that medium was not the best choice. (Not only can choosing the wrong medium dull the potential of a story, leading to a less-than-satisfying result, it can lead to still-born tales that never quite work no matter how many drafts or versions you write.)

Understanding the strengths and limitations of every medium you work in is critical. As I detailed in the previous post, what the world witnessed during the first three weeks of NFL football this year was the complete collapse of an entire medium into a narrative black hole. This self-inflicted debacle was both a chilling and comical lesson in the dangers of authorial hubris, and a cautionary tale for authors who believe they have absolute power.  [ Read more ]

Mediums and Authorial Control

By Leave a Comment

The rules that define any medium at any particular point in time may vary in complexity, but they are still binding. If the medium you’re playing around in is space travel, you should probably pay strict attention to the rules we call the laws of physics. On the other hand if the medium you’re playing around in is abstract sculpture, you can pretty much do anything you want as long as it ends up being a physical object — or, if your intended audience is purely intellectual or academic, some non-physical or negative-space meta-commentary on physical objects. If you try to present an action painting as sculpture, however, you’re probably going to get confused looks, if not some serious push-back.

The tendency over time is for all mediums to become more plastic. Rules that were previously assumed to be inviolate are challenged by artists and craftspeople who chafe at those limitations, until ultimately all non-essential rules are pared away to reveal the bedrock foundation of the medium itself. Like sculpture, a painting is defined today simply as any application of paint to canvas, board or wall. It doesn’t matter whether a painting is abstract or representational: all that matters is that the materials being used are paint or some paint equivalent, but that clearly wasn’t always the case. This creative freedom for painters was hard-won over centuries, with each subsequent school balking at restrictions imposed by those who came before, until, ultimately, all rules of what defines a painting were abandoned in favor of unbridled creativity.

And yet, as with sculpture, rules still apply no matter how plastic a medium becomes. If what you call a painting is in fact a pumpkin sitting in a field then you’re objectively wrong. You can do anything you want with paint, you can paint anything you want, or paint on anything you want, but without paint (or its equivalent) you don’t have a painting.

Compared to painting, storytelling as a medium — even in the rarefied air of experimental literature — is and will always remain constrained by complex rules. Some of these rules are a result of the way human brains take in and process narrative information. Some are cultural rules that define the meaning of objects and people and places before they are redefined or repurposed by authors. Some are logical rules having to do with time and place and order, which can only be broken when some plausible new rule (time travel, say) replaces the assumed rules so the reader does not become lost. And there are of course rules defined by language.

When authors say of literature that there are no rules, what they mean is that you can write about anything in any manner you see fit, as long as it pays off in the way you intend. If you see a literary objective and you need to break a specific rule to reach that goal you’re allowed to do it. What you’re not allowed to do is put ten thousand words in a blender, hit puree, and call that a story, or literature, or even a dictionary mash-up. If you do that with paint people may actually pay you for the result if you spew it on a canvas or sell it in gallon cans, but nobody is going to pay you for pureed words.

— Mark Barrett

Revisiting the Book Review Problem

By 12 Comments

A few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece on the inherently dubious business of paid book reviews. If you’re an independent author or are writing a book for any reason other than personal interest the article is a must-read, but not for the reasons you might think.

As anyone knows who’s ever tried to search the internet for the best spatula or best toaster, finding credible reviews on the internet is impossible. No amount of persistence and no set of keywords will ever produce what you’re looking for because keywords are the life blood of both search engines and the soulless, SEO-driven marketing weasels who exploit them. The only chance you have of getting an unbiased opinion about anything is to already know sources you trust, and to hope they’ve reviewed the product you’re interested in. For many products ConsumerReports provides that kind of objective, metric-driven coverage, but when it comes to books there’s little chance a title you’re considering will have been reviewed by someone who doesn’t have a personal axe to grind or who isn’t part of the publisher’s own extended marketing effort. Worse, if you’re an independent author there’s almost no chance that you’ll be able to have your book reviewed by a reviewer who has established their own credibility.

The internet workaround for this problem has been to allow customers to post reviews of products they’ve used. The practical result of this workaround in the book world is that authors and their friends and family salt and sock-puppet their own positive reviews when a book comes out, while competitors and griefers and put-upon students post scathing negative reviews about books they have often never read. The resulting noise can be sifted through endlessly or judged in the aggregate, but even then it tends only to reinforce whatever sense of the work the prospective customer already had.

As the article notes, almost all of the current paid-review options are not in fact reviews at all, but sponsorship and marketing. And consumers of reviews are not confused about this transactional relationship. In fact, whether you pay for a review or not, the default assumption by the public is and must be that your review is corrupt. And since it doesn’t matter how sincere a paid reviewer is, that consumer bias only corrupts the process that much faster, with the lion’s share of the paid-review business going to the most corrupt reviewers. (What authors are paying for when they buy a reviews is a positive review, and paid reviewers know this.) I have no doubt that the best of paid reviews are better than the worst, cleverly avoiding, for example, over-the-top claims of grandeur, but the goal is always the same: to help sell, rather than to independently judge.

Made almost comically explicit in the article is the idea that traditional arms-length reviewers do not have this credibility problem because they do not participate in the review process as adjuncts to marketing and sales. But that assertion is patently false. It’s true that the New York Times Review of Books doesn’t take checks or cash up front, but they certainly take phone calls from publishers, and it’s a fair bet that the people at the highest levels of the traditional publishing industry all know each other and how business is done. If the good friend of an editor writes a book it somehow ends up on the top of that editor’s stack. If a book is written by a despised peer the title somehow gets lost, or savaged by a hostile reviewer chosen for exactly that purpose. If there are humans involved, and money and power hanging in the balance, you can be certain that the process is inherently corrupt no matter how squeaky clean the press releases are.

[ Read more ]

Social Networks and Self-Inficted Storytelling

By 4 Comments

There’s no question that the internet has changed the world for the better. Individual voices now have as much reach as the dominant political and cultural voices had when every broadcast medium was controlled by gatekeepers. Aggregate enough individual voices and the power to dispute if not disrupt corporations or governments anywhere on the planet becomes real, in real time.

This feeling of empowerment was a critical factor in mass adoption of the internet. For the first time in history individuals were no longer limited to yelling back at their televisions and radios, but could immediately broadcast their own responses. While most such responses proved to be inane, some were, shockingly, no less informative or entertaining than what the cultural gatekeepers were shoveling. In short order these unknown but insightful individual voices validated the internet not simply as an email delivery system but as a democratic medium of mass communication. If you wanted incisive commentary on the web about anything from a film to a political battle you were as likely to find it on an obscure blog as you were on the website of a mainstream media outlet. Those mainstream voices, saddled as they were with bureaucratic restrictions and marketing directives, were outgunned by individuals who had no axe to grind except the facts of a matter and no audience to pander to but themselves.

While this revolution prompted a virtual land-grab by individuals eager to set themselves up as online experts, watchdogs or counter-culture trendsetters, not everyone wanted to manage their own site. What the revolution did confirm for everyone, however, was something that had long been suspected. In the media universe of programs and publications authored by other people, each of us was the content we’d been waiting for.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Afterword: Writing in General

By 1 Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club has been reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

The final section of Hill’s book is also the most personal. Departing from the twin subjects of fiction and craft that bound the rest of the work, Hills writes of his own experience with nonfiction and of the eternal self-abuse that is any kind of authorship.

If you are serious about making writing an ongoing part of you life, sooner or later you’re going to find yourself sitting in a dusty corner, staring across the room at your desk, wondering if you’ve lost your mind. You’re going to experience a crisis of faith that has no bottom. You’re going to think that you’re doing it all wrong while every other writer is doing it with ease.

When you do, this chapter will remind you how wrong you are:

If the way my mind works when I’m trying to write has any resemblance to the way real writers’ minds work, then I pity them all. When I have time to write the ideas aren’t there — or if the ideas, then not the words. Forcing myself to put the words on paper helps not at all: insights become platitudes as phrased when under self-imposed duress. You see?!

I’ve long been thankful that someone had the guts to admit that writing is a nightmare. Not a sexy, drunken-binge nightmare or a death-tempting, drug-addled nightmare or an artistically obsessed, relationship-killing nightmare, but a self-imposed, lost-at-sea nightmare. Because the romantic, angst-ridden writing process portrayed in the movies, and often by authors themselves, is a fraud. Writing is hard even when it’s going well, and most of the time it’s not going well.

Hills ends the chapter in a two-page-long, single-paragraph monologue that I reread whenever I feel like banging my head on my desk or taking an axe to my computer. And every time I read it I laugh and am reminded that I am not alone.

Whether you write fiction or nonfiction your success will be determined by your ability to merge multiple, fragmented lines of thought into a coherent and focused whole. Whether writing about the actions of imaginary characters or addressing a real-world subject you’re going to lean heavily on reason and logic to find your way, and sooner or later you will get lost. At that moment the best thing you can do for your sanity is remind yourself that what you’re trying to do is really, really hard, and all the more so if you’re trying to do it well.

As a fiction writer I find Rust Hills’ book to be an invaluable aid. As a writer I find this chapter to be soul-sustaining.

Writing is a solitary pursuit that routinely destroys good people. I want you to have your dreams but I don’t want them to break you. Whenever you run aground, this chapter will make you laugh and remind you that you are not alone.

— Mark Barrett

WIG&TSSIP: Choice as Technique

By 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 I had to pick a single reason why I think Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular is the best book ever written about storytelling, it would be that Rust Hills is entirely focused on liberating writers through craft. You can have all the talent in the world, but if you bungle the manner in which you tell a story it’s not going to have the intended effect. If what you ultimately want to do is express yourself Hills would never stand in the way of that goal, but he would expect you to master technique and craft as a means to that end. Simply gutting yourself on a blank page doesn’t cut it, no matter how vital the experience might feel or how much attention you might get as a result. (Rubbernecking isn’t only for car wrecks.)

In practice, however, I don’t think most writers start with a desire to make art. They begin, rather, with the humble objective of exploring the medium, while perhaps also harboring dreams of critical or commercial success. As with any craft or profession, what most students want are hard and fast rules that lead to success. And while Hills (and I) would say there are no rules, it’s understandable that many if not most beginning writers would like a few guideposts and markers to follow — if only to keep from getting lost.

My grandmother was a teacher for fifty years, mostly in junior high. One of her favorite stories concerned assigning a short paper on any topic students wanted to write about. Within minutes, she said, her desk was always surrounded by students looking for topic suggestions. If that’s where you’re at with fiction, that’s okay. It’s understandable the you might like some rules to follow until you decide to break them yourself. And if what you’re looking for is a step-by-step guide that’s okay, too. Whatever it takes to get you writing and exploring the craft of fiction is the right way to go.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Slick vs. Quality Fiction

By 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 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

By 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.

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 ]