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WIG&TSSIP: Choice as Technique

October 10, 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.

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 ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, Fiction, plot, Rust Hills, story, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Pattern in Plot

October 3, 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.

Contemplating the structural symmetry of a narrative frame leads to the more general question of pattern in plot. To the extent that all art forms have been deconstructed to the point of pure abstraction it’s fair to allow for any pattern on a theoretical level. But as with all the other elements of fiction, the test is not what’s possible, but what’s appropriate to the whole of a work.

Here’s Hills defining the phrase:

What I mean by pattern in plot is the effect achieved by having the sequences of the action arranged in a way that establishes a certain “order” or “architecture — of balance, of symmetry, even asymmetry — in the narrative structure.

Hills gives a series of examples and they’re all worth considering. But the appropriateness of any particular approach relates not to pattern itself, but to the story you intend to tell:

…an author could pattern his plot, for any wild reason of his own, on the shape of a tree, or imitating the layout of a formal garden, or according to the episodes of Cold War, or following the same sequence of episodes as Homer’s Odyssey. Any pattern is possible, and it’s equally possible that a story’s plot have no pattern at all. Pattern in plot is probably not a subject for a beginning writer to concern himself with much, but he should certainly know that it exists.

It’s easy to see the appeal of introducing a pattern: it provides a framework that defines itself. If you’re not sure what to do in scene three, or chapter twenty-seven, the right pattern may handle some of the decision making for you. But without fully integrating the pattern into your story it’s really only another way of sneaking formula into your fiction.

For Hills, pattern is meant to be fully integrated if it’s used at all. And as with most other aspects of fiction, Hills sees pattern as most easily realized not in the novel, but the short story. From the point of view of art I agree with Hills. From the point of view of authorship, however, I see pattern as having practical utility in longer works. (This echoes my views on theme, which I see as a useful editorial tool and an almost worthless analytical tool.)

Because of the craft complexity of my short story collection, The Year of the Elm, I used multiple patterns during the writing process to keep myself on target. Without those patterns to reference I would have been adrift in ways that may have negatively affected the whole of the work. I did not intend, however, for those patterns to be observed by the reader, even as I hoped they would have a subtle positive effect.

Hills gives an example of pattern in Anna Karenina, but it’s a simple example that relates more to analysis than conception. (He doesn’t claim Tolstoy engineered the story to fit a pattern; only that it can be read that way.) A better example of the practical utility of pattern is Hills’ example of the Parthenon, and how subtleties in its design affect the eye. Using a pattern (or patterns) in your fiction should produce the same benefits, even if most readers will never specifically notice those effects. Otherwise what’s the point?

Next up: Choice as Technique.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: plot, Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Sequence and Causality

September 23, 2011 By Mark 4 Comments

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 runs a page and a half at most, and on first reading the content seems obvious. On closer reading, however, I think some of the terminology Hills uses gets in the way. There’s a lot here, particularly for storytellers just starting out, so let’s do a little unpacking.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

Sequential causality is generally considered to be very important in plotting. It is often thought to be the difference between a simple story, which just presents events as arranged in their time sequence, and a true plot, in which one scene prepares for and leads into and causes the scene that comes after it.

The section is titled Sequence and Causality, suggesting two distinct aspects, yet the first two words in the section are sequential causality, implying some sort of combined effect. On the face of it the first sentence in the quote seems undeniably true, and I don’t know any writers who would bother to contest the point. But agreeing with the premise doesn’t make clear what Hills means by sequence, causality, and sequential causality.

In the second sentence I think Hills muddies the waters a bit more when he uses phrases like “in their time sequence” and “a true plot”. The problem is that any scene which “prepares for and leads into” another scene will also necessarily be “in sequence” in some sense. (I can’t imagine a scene that “leads into” another scene in a non-sequential way.)  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: plot, Rust Hills, story, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Plot Structure

September 1, 2011 By Mark 3 Comments

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 ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: plot, Rust Hills, structure, WIG&TSSIP, William Goldman

WIG&TSSIP: Scenes

August 29, 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.

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

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: plot, Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Selection in Plot

August 16, 2011 By Mark 7 Comments

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 ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: plot, Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Plot in Short Story vs. Novel

August 7, 2011 By Mark 4 Comments

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 ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: novel, plot, Rust Hills, short story, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Importance & Unimportance of Plot

August 4, 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.

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

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: plot, Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Motivation

July 27, 2011 By Mark 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.

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 ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, motivation, motive, plot, Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

The Writer You Are

June 15, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

In the previous post I commented on a section of Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular in which Rust Hills differentiated between slick fiction and quality fiction. While I think Hills is unnecessarily dismissive of entertainment for entertainment’s sake, just as he is clearly invested in art for art’s sake, I think his condemnation of slick fiction is valid because slick fiction is bad craft.

Craft and Effectiveness
The problem with my own condemnation is that it’s no different from Hills’: it expresses a personal preference. Like Hills I can make a compelling case for craft (doing so is one of the missions of Ditchwalk) but at the end of the day I’m still advocating for the kind of storytelling I care about.

Despite his personal preference for literary fiction, however, Hills bases his advocacy on proven craft, not bias. By the same token, while I’m open to a wider spectrum of storytelling, I believe that craft knowledge allows authors to make conscious, informed choices about the stories they intend to write, which in turn increases the likelihood that those stories will impact readers in the intended way. To the extent that learning craft requires more effort — at least at the apprentice stage — the return on investment is an increase in the likelihood of narrative success. Whether you use craft to create better entertainment or better literature (if we really need to bifurcate), the Ditchwalk definition of better — like Hills’ definition of better — is that more readers will be pleased with, or appropriately affected by, the end result.

Still, it’s inarguable that there are plenty of readers who are perfectly happy with the effects of demonstrably bad craft. If stories premised on a character shift or deus ex machina plotting thrill you, I can’t claim you shouldn’t be thrilled. I can point out how the authors of those stories jerked you around or cheated you or gave you less than they might have, but I can’t tell you that you didn’t feel the enjoyment you felt.

So the very charge I respectfully level at Hills — that he’s unnecessarily elitist — is one that can be leveled at me. Yet even as I freely acknowledge that taste and sensibility play a part in the appreciation of storytelling, I refuse to budge from my position — which is also Hills’ position — that more knowledge of craft necessarily improves your chance of successfully telling a particular story.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, humor, plot, poetry, prose, Rust Hills, Steinbeck, style, WIG&TSSIP

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