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WIG&TSSIP: The Inevitability of Retrospect

May 5, 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.

Through the first eight sections of his book Rust Hills illuminates ways in which character and action are interconnected. He doesn’t say, “Here’s how you nail them together.” Instead, he says, “Here’s how these things relate to each other.”

How you connect character and action in any story is up to you. Hills doesn’t care what words you use for the two concepts, or how you go about integrating them through the specific details of the stories you have to tell. What he does want you to do is create a kind of seamless integration that goes well past the put-tab-A-in-slot-B construction that so many storytelling gurus and how-to-write authors champion.

Here Hills explains the effect of this kind of seamless integration on the reader:

The action of a story, then, takes a character past a decisive point down into one or another of the forks in the road. As a result of “what happens” there is one chance less that he can become anything other than what it is inevitable he will become.

The simple graphic in this section does a great job of explaining how this feeling of inevitability comes about in a story. Apart from specific choices and motivations, how a character responds to each crossroad or fork says something definitive about that character, and that’s what you want to dramatize for the reader.  [ Read more ]

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

WIG&TSSIP: “Epiphany” as a Literary Term

April 28, 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 you’re a James Joyce fan you’re in for a treat in this section. If not, you may be tempted to blow past the historical footnotes, but that would be a mistake.

Hills does spend time framing the roots of the word ‘epiphany’ and explaining how it came to be used in literary circles. But he also makes an important point about epiphany as a literary objective:

The epiphany (whether considered as a technique or an effect or a theory or a genre) is a much more useful concept for the short story than it is for the novel.

In this case the technique Hills is talking about is not directly portable to larger works. But what about flash fiction? I don’t write flash myself, but if the whole point of a literary epiphany is the realization and illumination of a single condensed moment, doesn’t that objective fits perfectly within the constraints of the flash form? (Given Joyce’s original literary goals for his epiphanies he might even be considered the father of flash fiction.)

[ Read more ]

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

WIG&TSSIP: Naming the Moment

April 25, 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.

Whether you’ve been writing for years or you’re thinking about storytelling for the first time, you’ve undoubtedly heard the words ‘climax’ or ‘crisis’ used to describe the moment in a story when all of an author’s efforts are brought into dramatic tension. These words (and others like them) are commonly used by storytelling gurus who teach formulaic paradigms, as well as by critics and scholars analyzing an author’s work.

While we obviously need common terms to talk about fiction, it’s a mistake to allow the name of a thing to obscure your authorial goals. In this section Hills does a brilliant job of exploring the full implications of this dramatic moment, and shows how any name ascribed to such moments woefully understates their full power and potential.

Defining things by their schematic or logical structure is fine for storytelling gurus, critics and academics, but it’s a mistake if you’re actually trying to create the thing being described. We can all agree where Los Angeles is on a map, but that says little about what Los Angeles is like as a city. We can all agree about the structure of a suspension bridge and how the load is distributed, but that tells us almost nothing about the complexity of building such a bridge.

It’s relatively easy to come up with a crisis or climax when you’re tinkering with a story. That central, focusing moment may even be the thing you first imagined. But there’s a big difference between rigging two-dimensional transitions that meet a minimal definition of ‘crisis’ or ‘climax’, and fully integrating such transitions throughout the entirety of a fictional work.

Again, it’s the difference between drawing a map of Los Angeles and bringing Los Angeles to life. Your job, as an author, is not simply to satisfy some formulaic or structural requirement, it’s to bring your story world to life. Treating the climax or crisis of your story as a structural goal, and meeting that requirement, almost certainly means falling short of your story’s potential.

It’s not the name of the thing that matters, it’s the thing.

Next up: “Epiphany” as a Literary Term.

— Mark Barrett

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

WIG&TSSIP: Recognizing the Crucial

April 23, 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.

When you’re writing a short story you obviously have to limit your focus compared to what you might explore in a longer work. While it’s always possible to cover ground quickly — “The Wilson family lived in New England for seven generations” — at some point you to have to dramatize specific scenes and populate them with fully realized characters. In a short story there’s only so much room to do so.

In this section Hills is concerned with the focusing power that comes from authorial clarity. He doesn’t argue that authors should have everything nailed down before they start writing, or even that authors will have clarity about their own work as they write. Rather, he simply encourages writers to recognize that the limited literary real estate of a short story requires focusing on aspects that are crucial:

A short story writer seeks to isolate those events that are most significant and then focus on them. The sequences that are most important he’ll render in detail, dramatizing them in scenes so as to bring them to life.

From this you might conclude that short stories are limiting while novels are liberating. In a sense you’re right. Novels have more pages, and more pages equals more drama if only in a quantitative sense. But quality counts in fiction, and giving an author more pages doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get a better story. A longer story, yes, but not necessarily a better one.  [ Read more ]

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

WIG&TSSIP: Loss of Last Chance to Change

April 22, 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.

This is a short section — less than a page. The point Hills makes is a simple one but it has important implications.

All stories show a moment of transformation from who a character is to who that character becomes. There is one kind of story, however, in which nothing seems to happen, yet such stories also depict a critical moment:

The reader is to understand as the story ends that Martin has lost his last chance to change and will now stay “forever” as he was.

Not only is this “loss of the last chance to change” potent in fiction, we’ve all met people whose lives have been defined by an inability to evolve. I tend to describe people like this as unable to get out of their own way, but that’s probably too harsh. The forces that variously compel a person to action or immobility are complex and often subconscious.

While stories of this type often resolve as tragedies, that’s only a function of context. A character who resists every entreaty to change — perhaps in some dark or destructive way — may actually be heroic or courageous. Depicting the loss of the last change to change is one way of showing a critical moment in the life of a character: how you dramatize that moment is up to you.  [ Read more ]

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

WIG&TSSIP: As the Story Begins and Ends

April 20, 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.

In the previous section Hills established the relationship between fixed action and moving action. Here Hills elaborates with examples and notes a basic difference between short fiction and longer forms of storytelling:

There may, of course, be several moved characters in a novel, but in the short story there is usually just one character on whom matters focus.

Again the practical benefit of knowing how to write a short story should be obvious. If you can tell a story that focuses all of its effects through one character, all of that skill is directly portable to the orchestral nature of the novel — no matter what kind of novels you write. If you don’t know how to hone your storytelling skills to their sharpest point you may get away with clever plotting or lots of shrieking drama, but you will fail to achieve the emotional potential of your work.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: action, beginning, character, ending, plot, Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Fixed Action vs. Moving Action

April 18, 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 Fixed Action, as against Moving Action. The premise of the section is that human behavior patterns are revealing, and I think everyone would agree with that. In fact, whenever I read this section I find my head bobbing happily along in agreement for the first two pages, even as I feel a bit of discomfort that Hills seems to know me too well. Then, suddenly, I’m brought up short by the following sentence:

But just the opposite is true in fiction.

As many times as I’ve read Hills’ book you would think I wouldn’t have the same ‘Wait…what?’ moment, but I do. The reason for the disconnect is that after Hills spends two pages talking about reality he suddenly switches point of view to talk about the contrivance we call fiction. In order to make the same point-of-view switch I remind myself that looking at life and drawing lessons from life requires observation, while creating fiction requires construction. As a fiction writer it’s not enough to notice that something exists or that it’s true, you have to know how to evoke and shape that aspect of reality through craft and technique.  [ Read more ]

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

WIG&TSSIP: Character and Action

April 15, 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 a story is “something that happened to someone,” then it should be no surprise that action (the something) and character (the someone) are central to storytelling. Ask a child of any age to tell you a story and you will instantly be bombarded with character and action. The character may be a person, an animal, a toy or an object; the action may be possible, fanciful, reasoned, chaotic — it doesn’t matter. Character and action will be there, always.

Hills introduces character and action in this section, but he will come back to each again and again. In fact, this section is more preface than anything else. You’ve thought about character and action before, Hills is saying, but I’m going to lead you somewhere new, grounding the journey in craft and technique. Consider:

In fiction, an author sets a character out on the road in the first place and then within certain limitations, shoves him down whatever paths the author wants him to take for as long as he wants him to go.

This is author-as-God, author-as-artist. This is character and action as personal expression. It is the assertion of freedom and imagination as rights in keeping with the greatest literary traditions. It is the creed of the MFA writer and workshop.  [ Read more ]

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

WIG&TSSIP: Short Story vs. Novel and Sketch

April 11, 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 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 ]

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

WIG&TSSIP: Rust Hills’ Introduction

April 7, 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.

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 ]

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

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