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WIG&TSSIP: POV and “Involvement”

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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.

Storytelling as a discipline seems to have a permanence about it. Most people, particularly most authors, would probably agree that stories are inherent in the life experience of human beings. We embrace fiction so completely and effortlessly that suspension of disbelief may someday be defined as a brain state akin to hypnosis or meditation.

This sense of permanence affects how we innately relate to fiction, but it is also possible to advance one’s knowledge as a practitioner. Folk tales spun by people in all cultures around the globe can be shaped, improved and expanded by craft, whether the intended objective is entertainment, education or propaganda. And it’s possible to go even farther.

Painting, music, food, movement, storytelling — all of these things have practical applications, but can also be turned to purely creative ends. If aspiring to art is a bit more vague than aiming for income, or at least harder to quantify, I think most people still understand the impetus. Whatever form means, whatever composition means, whatever context and content mean, all of them (and more) can be treated as ends in themselves, and subsequently explored on that basis alone. Art for art’s sake.

It is the eternal and intrinsic potential for making art that compels Hills (and me, and others) to insist that there are no rules in fiction writing. To many would-be storytellers this seems utterly preposterous: if there are no rules then what can be known? But knowledge is not what rules define. Rules work because they impose order through constraints and controls. When you drive across town you knowingly subject yourself (or not, as the case may be) to dozens if not hundreds of traffic and motor-vehicle laws and customs. But if those rules didn’t exist, or you simply decided to ignore all of them, you wouldn’t suddenly be oblivious to where you were or wanted to go.

What Hills says, what artists say, is that if your goal (art) puts you at odds with a rule or convention, then you ignore the rule and stay true to your artistic pursuit. There are no rules so inviolate that you cannot break them for sufficient cause. And yet we also know that certain methods in fiction (and other mediums) achieve certain effects: that relationships hold despite our aversion to calling them rules.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: The “Question” of POV

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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 a previous post I said it was a waste of time to categorize or systematize the various literary points of view. Here’s Hills explaining why:

Two of the very best books about fiction are E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction, and they differ completely on the subject of point of view.

If you buy into the premise that such discussions matter then one of these two men must be objectively wrong. There can’t be two opposing point-of-view systems that are both correct. Hills presents Lubbock’s perspective, explains Forster’s criticism of Lubbock’s views, then sides with Forster. And if I had to choose I’d side with Forster too. But I don’t buy the premise that such discussions matter.

When you go to your tool box to retrieve an open-end wrench you don’t stop to consider how all the other tools in the box relate to the one you intend to use. You don’t give any thought to the history of toolmaking, famous toolmakers or famous mechanics. You have a nut that needs turning, you know a wrench will turn the nut, and you intend to get on with it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the best wrench in the world, whether it’s hand-polished or machine-polished: the only thing that matters is whether it will do the job.

If you don’t have the right tool you might be able to get by with something else — pliers, maybe — but you’ll probably chew up the nut if you can get it off at all. As somebody who’s turned a wrench or two, I can tell you that there really is a right tool for every job, but nobody cares who made that tool or who used it in the past. If you’ve got a drawer full of gorgeous Snap-On wrenches you’ll get oohs and ahs from mechanics who know the brand, but if your grandfather’s rusty old spanner is the right size it will do the job just as well.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: When POV is “Wrong”

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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.

My personal goal in taking a close look at Hills’ book is to show how the lessons it contains apply to all forms of storytelling, and how those lessons are useful to writers at all skill levels. You can follow the literary trail Hills blazes all the way to rarefied art if you want, but it’s not necessary. If you love writing genre fiction or simply want to write from the heart, nothing Hills talks about will preclude you from doing that. Yet the quality and effectiveness of your work will almost certainly improve.

This short section is a case in point. If every would-be and established writer were to read only these few pages, fictional false starts and ponderous wanderings would plummet. Here’s the first graph:

Beginning writers often choose to tell their story from the point of view of a character who is not central to the action — a “bystander,” so to speak, “a friend of the hero,” or something like that, not directly involved. This is thought to make exposition easier: the reader is able to learn the facts of the situation along with the narrator. But the need for exposition is seldom sufficient to make up for the sense of consequencelessness that often results from uninvolved narration.

There are multiple points of view you can adopt that allow readers direct access to your central character’s thoughts: first-person, third-person restricted, third-person omniscient, and so on. If you want no intermediary between reader and character, first person is the best choice. If you want to include the thoughts of others, or even your own authorial comments, a variant of third-person offers that functionality without granting point of view to an in-story intermediary. Despite all these vital choices, however, authors — and particularly novice authors — keep giving point-of-view to characters that are of little or no narrative consequence.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: POV Limitations and Advantages

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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.

Point of view describes not simply a type or aspect of storytelling, but the single most potent technique available for realizing your narrative goals. Nothing you decide is more important to the force and effect of your fiction that the point of view you choose for each story, and how well you execute that point of view.

In instances where I’ve actively deliberated point of view for a particular story I’ve tended to focus on authorial utility, and nothing furthers that cause more than considering the narrative territory I want to explore. While many of the words and concepts used to categorize point of view emphasize limitations and restrictions, it’s just as easy to adopt an authorial perspective that emphasizes each type’s advantages.

If you’re going camping for a week in the deep woods you’ll probably want to bring a tent. If you’re writing a story about a person’s most intimate life experiences you’ll probably want to consider first-person. If you’re off to climb a mountain you may want to bring a rope so you can go off the beaten path. If you’re writing about a decaying society you might want to consider third-person so you can freely travel throughout that world.

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WIG&TSSIP: Point-of-View Methods

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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.

So much has been written across all mediums about point of view in storytelling that the aggregate should be classified as a type of pollution. And all the more so because such conversations almost always reference a system of categorization rather than the act of creation. To paraphrase Hills: while it’s always useful to have something to say to an academic, getting lost in critical blather is pointless.

To begin, any story you tell will have at least one point of view. It doesn’t matter which medium you’re working in or what your objective is. You can try to entirely scrub point of view from a story as an exercise and it will still be there. Why? Because anybody who experiences your story knows that it didn’t come from their own head, which means it came from somebody else’s head, which means it has a point of view.

Point of view is inherent in storytelling. The question, then, is how you most effectively control and make use of this always-on, omnipresent aspect of fiction. Fortunately, just as audiences are open and willing to suspend disbelief in order to participate emotionally in the fiction you create, they are generally open and willing to adopt whatever point of view you want to use. If a particular point of view makes your work better or more convincing, that’s not only the point of view you should use but the point of view your audience will want you to use.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Choice as Technique

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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.

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: Pattern in Plot

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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.

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

WIG&TSSIP: The Frame vs. the Flashback

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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 The Frame, as against the Flashback. Following up on the previous section, Hills demonstrates how two different techniques — the fame and the flashback — relate to sequence, causality and juxtaposition.

As Hills notes, everyone knows what a flashback is from watching movies:

The screen ripples over, music ripples up, and we drop back in time for a sequence of action that “explains” why a character is the way he is or gives the “background” of the situation that exists “now” in the movie.

A flashback can function in one of two ways: as an explanation of something already disclosed, or as foreshadowing of something yet to come. Conceivably both goals can be met in an artful flashback, where the sequence both resolves and introduces elements of a story. Billy is forty years old and hates dogs: flash back to Billy as a boy being terrorized by his grandmother’s Poodle. Here an aspect of character is the motivation for the flashback, but that aspect could spill over into plot (Billy is a burglar regularly confronted by guard dogs), or introduce new characters or plot elements (the grandmother, who owns a warehouse Billy intends to rob).

In every story aspects of plot and character are expressed in cause-and-effect fashion. Flashbacks are useful in explaining the cause of an effect that is presented in the ‘now’ of a story. By the same token, a flashforward treats an event in the ‘now’ of a story as the cause, then flashes forward to show the effect. Driving home drunk one evening Billy intentionally swerves to hit a dog being walked by a young boy. Flashforward to Billy in prison, where one of the guards is the now-adult owner of the dog he hit.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Sequence and Causality

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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.

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 ]

WIG&TSSIP: Ending

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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.

If, as Hills stated in the previous section, the middle of a story ends with movement of the main character, then what defines the ending? And how does a writer know when to bring the ending to a close?

The first question is one of scale, and the answer for any narrative form can be found by focusing on the relationship between preparation and effect. The second question concerns sensibility, because ending a story is as much about being a good host as it is about tying up loose ends.

As should be clear by now, Rust Hills believes the short story is the shortest literary form that supports convincing movement of character. Compared with the epic scope of a novel, a short story is a literary close-up focused tightly on a moment of change. It is this close focus that allows the short story to illuminate subtle or delicate moments of transition that might be overwhelmed by a more complicated tableau.

Here’s Hills on the ending of a novel:

After having spent so long with the characters, the reader of a novel has become so interested in them, almost fond of them as acquaintance, that he is not adverse to a long “afterward” or “conclusion” that tells how they married, settled down at Milltown Manor and raised children and grew old together.

And here’s Hills on the ending of a short story:

The short story need only tell us what happened in the story itself, need only make clear the slight movement that has taken place. A lot of modern short stories don’t seem to have much of an end at all, really, not in terms of old-fashioned plotting….

In order to fully realize subtleties in such a limited form, the short story truncates both the beginning and end, concentrating on those elements that are critical to providing convincing movement of character. By doing so the short story not only limits possibilities, it also omits considerable authorial obligation. If you establish almost nothing at the beginning of your story, how much can there be to resolve at the end?  [ Read more ]