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

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

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.

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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