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WIG&TSSIP: The American Short Story “Today”

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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 commenting on the previous section I noted that I’m personally not interested in belonging to any literary movement or critical school. I have my own literary perspective, certainly, but if I belong to any literary tradition it’s the one that puts human experience and truth ahead of everything else.

My complaint about literary movements and schools is that they are inevitably temporary and almost always fad-driven. This section of Hills’ book unintentionally proves the merit of that perspective in that it replaces two sections that appeared in the original 1977 printing. Those sections were, in order, Fiction and the New Journalism and Real Fiction, as against the New Fiction.

In the late 1970’s New Journalism and New Fiction were hot literary topics. Like all hot literary topics they faded soon afterward, rendering Hills’ own commentary effectively meaningless except for historical value. In reading those sections again I think the current narrative non-fiction movement owes a debt to New Journalism, while flash fiction and other current experimental forms owe a debt to New Fiction. But it also seems, at least to me, that these movements are part of a never-ending effort to make fiction be somehow more than fiction. Whether the hot literary topic is meta-fiction or anti-fiction or hyper-fiction, the aim is always to make plain-old fiction do more, when plain-old fiction does what it does better than any trendy variant ever will.

As Hills wrote in the section on New Journalism:

Imagination is anyway implicit in the very definition of “fiction,” as distinguished from its opposite in the absurd term “nonfiction.” And fiction and nonfiction are, again anyway, both perfectly good things in themselves — there doesn’t seem to be any point in mixing them. The resultant hybrids aren’t a new strain of literary art at all. They’re just intermittently useful, futureless one-timers, as unaesthetic and recalcitrant as mules.

In removing those two sections and replacing them Hills demonstrates the merit of his own words and the futility of embracing fad as craft. If you really feel the need to write from the crest of every literary wave I support you in that pursuit. Not only is it not for me, however, I don’t think it’s a particularly good way to become one with the ocean.

  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Plot in Short Story vs. Novel

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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 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 ]

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

A Fiction Workshop Primer

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In the previous post I said the entire point of a writing workshop is that it provides the best means by which an author can determine whether or not they’re hitting the literary target they’re aiming at. Because it’s so easy to go blind to one’s own work there is nothing more useful between conception and publication than feedback that tells a writer whether they are on or off their intended course. A workshop can provide that feedback.

The mechanics of the standard fiction/writing workshop are simple. There are variations and permutations, of course — some of which I comment on below, or will deal with in later posts — but the basics have been remarkably consistent over time.

Workshop Mechanics and Process
The general idea in a fiction workshop is that members take turns submitting (or ‘putting up’) stories for review by the workshop as a whole. The expectation is that each author will do as much as they can to perfect the story they’re working on before it reaches the workshop. In this way the workshop’s feedback advances the author’s knowledge as much as possible.

In advance of each meeting the leader of the workshop asks for volunteers to put up stories for the next gathering. Because writers are a skittish lot, and because fiction often dictates its own pace, trying to schedule individuals into slots that will be available weeks or months ahead usually does not work.  [ Read more ]

Understanding Fiction Workshops

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There is so much cultural lore and publishing cachet attached to fiction workshops these days it’s hard to remember that workshops exist to server a utilitarian, craft-driven purpose. Leaving aside questions about the quality of a particular workshop, the history of a given program, or any famous alumni or participants who attended or currently participate, workshops as a process are important to writers because they provide useful and timely feedback that cannot be replicated in any other way.

Again, with emphasis: a fiction workshop is a tool that has proven useful to authors. Workshops exist to serve the needs of writers at a critical time, often at the end of a first, full, good-as-you-can-get-it draft, and not the other way around. If you are smart — and by smart I mean genuinely committed to learning your craft as a means of expressing your art — you will never, ever forget that. If you are not smart you will embrace workshops as a social destination, as an artistic echo chamber, as a church, or as a market. (I’ll have more to say about all that in a subsequent post.)

Just as a ratchet both solves and speeds the problem of turning a nut or bolt, a writing workshop is, in theory, the best possible way for a writer to determine if the words they wrote hit or missed the literary target they were aiming at. I say “in theory” because there are always ways in which a workshop can fail a writer in this quest. I say “best possible” because any other mechanism (and believe me, they’ve all been tried) inevitably introduces even more potential for confusion, error and abuse.

The reason a fiction workshop works, and generally works better than any other method of settling the question of authorial intent and accuracy, is the same reason that any broad-based sampling works. By providing more responses to the author, outliers are marginalized and there is at least the possibility that an informative consensus may emerge. As it was put to me in my very first workshop (paraphrasing):

If ten people (out a workshop-normal fifteen or sixteen) agree on a particular concern, it’s probably something you should take a look at.

And that’s it. The super-mystical reason why workshops are valuable is because they help authors focus on what worked and what didn’t work, and no other process provides the same kind of debate and response. The best you might do otherwise would be to send your work to fifteen people yourself, then compare the responses, but that would cost you considerably more time while precluding any discussion among the respondents.

Obviously, frequent participation in writing workshops may help speed the overall development of a writer simply because feedback can be delivered and processed faster and in a more concentrated way. This does not mean, however, that workshop-centric writers are better, or that participating in workshops is necessary for a writer to be able to grow.

The only way to know if a writing workshop will be helpful to you is to try one. In the next post I’ll talk about how workshops work and how you can get the most out of one.

— Mark Barrett