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WIG&TSSIP: Monologues

December 14, 2011 By Mark 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 full title of this section is Monologues, and the Pathological First Person. If you’re like me you’d be hard pressed to cite an example of a fictional monologue, let alone one you found compelling as literature or art. This section explains why.

Stories told in the monologue form would seem to be exceptions to our “rule” that the point-of-view character is the character moved by action or will become so. The monologist, after all, is presumed to be the same after he ends his harangue as he was before he began it.

For Hills the relevant literary question is not whether something can be done, but whether it can be done well. His standard is, in the end, qualitative, not dogmatic. If breaking a rule increases the power of your fiction then by all means break it. As Hills notes, however, the inherent problem with monologues is that they decrease power by promoting uncertainty:

Who is it exactly that is talking? And then, is the reader being addressed directly? Or is a captive “visitor” there, in the barber chair or whatever, just somehow listening?

Hills piles on, but you get the point. It’s the point I made in an earlier post in this series, when I said, “Point of view is inherent in storytelling.” If you don’t provide a point of view, or you keep the point of view a secret, your readers, consciously or subconsciously, are going to provide an answer themselves.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: First Person, monologue, point of view, pov, Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

Proofreading Scripts vs. Fiction

June 28, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

In the previous post, which also concerned proofreading, I said this:

While I certainly don’t want typos in my milestone drafts, a typo in a script feels like less of a crime simply because a script is a blueprint, not a finished work. When I really came to terms with the fact that I would be producing a finished product with my name on it, my level of concern (and vanity) about typos markedly increased. Where I previously felt that typos in a script were unprofessional, I suddenly felt as if typos in my short story collection would be a personal criticism of me.

I don’t disagree with those statements, but in the intervening days I’ve come to realize that I completely missed the main difference between proofreading a script (screenplay, stage play, interactive script) and proofing prose fiction. It’s not simply that scripts are blueprints while fiction is finished work. It’s that the density and complexity of fiction is infinitely greater than anything you will find in a script, precisely because the availability of techniques is so much greater.   [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction, Publishing Tagged With: difference, Fiction, monologue, point of view, prose