Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Introduction
The Short Story, as against the Novel and the Sketch
Character and Action
Fixed Action, as against Moving Action
As the Story Begins and Ends
Loss of the Last Chance to Change
Recognizing the Crucial
Naming the Moment
"Epiphany" as a Literary Term
The Inevitability of Retrospect
Enhancing the Interaction of Character and Plot
Techniques of Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing and Suspense
Techniques of Suspense
Mystery and Curiosity
Conflict and Uncertainty
Tension and Anticipation
"Agreement" in Character and Action
Movement of Character
The Character Shift, as against Movement of Character
Slick Fiction, as against Quality Fiction
Moving Characters, as against Fixed Characters
The Series Regulars, as against the Guest Stars
Types of Character
Types as Exceptions
Type Characters, as against Stock Characters
The Dichotomous Stereotype
Differentiating from Types
Knowing a Character
Motivation
The Stress Situation
The Importance and Unimportance of Plot
Plot in a Short Story, as against Plot in a Novel
Selection in Plot
Scenes
Plot Structure
Beginning
Middle
Ending
Sequence and Causality
The Frame, as against the Flashback
Pattern in Plot
Choice as Technique
Point-of-View Methods
Limitations and Advantages in Point of View
When Point of View Is "Wrong"
The "Question" of Point of View
Point of View and "Involvement"
The "Moved" Character and Point of View
The Focusing Power of Point of View
Monologues, and the Pathological First Person
Irony and Point of View
Setting
Style
Theme
The Short Story and the New Criticism
The American Short Story "Today"
Afterword: Writing in General
First Mariner Books edition 2000
Copyright © 1977, 1987 by Rust Hills
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to Permissions,
Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South,
New York, New York 10003.
Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hills, L. Rust.
Writing in general and the short story in particular.
1. Short story. 2. Fiction—Technique. I. Title.
PN3373.H47 1987 808.3'1 87-4024
ISBN 0-395-44255-9
ISBN 0-618-08234-4 (pbk.)
Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9
Introduction
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. They all seem to be written by old magazine hacks about a kind of "popular" formula fiction no one wants anymore anyway— Story Plotting Simplified, that kind of thing, complete with simple-minded examples from slick fiction.
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. Basically these are how-to-read books, like Mark Schorer's The Story: A Critical Anthology. But it seems to me that a beginning writer could learn more from any one of them—from, say, just the "Glossary of Technical Terms" at the back of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's Understanding Fiction —than he ever could from reading the whole damn shelf of the how-to-write ones.
The difference of course is that the first shelf is trying to teach you how to write lousy stories, and the second shelf is trying to teach you how to read literature. But who wants to write lousy stories anyway? What young writers want to write, or ought to want to write, is literature. Is it absurd to think of, a how-to-write book about the literary short story?
Well, yes, I guess it is, sort of. But there's all those writing courses out there, at the colleges and universities; and the young-poet English teachers and the writers-in-residence there aren't trying to teach "boy meets girl" and "know your market." They're trying to teach their kids to write short story masterpieces, like the ones they study in the anthologies. It's a hopeless job, of course, 99 percent of the time, or more—but what harm could a book do, trying to do the same hopeless thing?
Besides, I think maybe this book could possibly help some of those famous writers-in-residence. Say a kid comes to a famous writer and says, in that arrogant but not really off-putting way good young kids sometimes have, "Teach me to write great short stories." So maybe the famous writer-in-residence could now laugh and say, "Yes, well, okay, but first go read Rust Hills's book for the basics—for the essential techniques of fiction and how they function—and then come back to me and I'll teach you what I know." Also, I imagine that this book might help some person who's off by himself somewhere, if there's anyone left like that, to learn to read literary stories in such a way as to help him write them.
Of course it's a cliché that "you can't teach creative writing." Everybody seems to know that, even those thousands all across the country sitting in creative writing workshops right this minute, either being paid to do the impossible or paying to have it done to them. And of course it's another cliché that "Those who can't, teach." There you're getting personal, you know, because I'm not a fiction writer myself, have never written a short story in my life, not ever even for a moment presumed to think I could. So why and how do I think I can help?
Well, I'm not "teaching writing" as such in this book, just showing something about how short stories work. And I've been thinking fiction for a long time, too, maybe twenty years off and on, mostly off, probably, but never really ever getting away from it either, always taking notes and collecting examples and making false starts as described in the Afterword ("Writing in General," [>]). I began it when I first went to work at Esquire magazine as fiction editor, which was some time around 1956, I think, the exact date being lost in the mists of antiquity. Appalling as it may be to think of, I've been fiction editor at Esquire off and on ever since then, mostly on, actually. Even during those times when I wasn't at Esquire I was usually just being a fiction editor somewhere else—at the Saturday Evening Post for a couple of years before it folded, and then for a hardcover magazine called Audience. Or I was doing that column called "Writing" for Esquire, thinking fiction like mad, or I was assembling still another anthology of contemporary American fiction — I must have done a dozen of them in all, shame on me.
At the same time—and by "the same time" I mean off and on occasionally over the last thirty years or so — I've run a writers' conference or two and taught literature or writing around and about. Teaching fiction writing and editing magazine fiction have many odd differences (which we won't go into), but they do have the same rather odd ultimate purpose in common: trying to get someone else to produce a fine short story. At
various colleges and universities across the country, writing teachers have often told me they find WIGSSIP useful as a textbook in their beginning short fiction classes, and that pleases me, of course. I myself have used the precepts of this book in teaching and they certainly transmit into lessons well enough, although the transmuting of students' work into literature may be a bit more problematical.
For, let's admit it, there's got to be a minimum basic kind of competence before you can even begin to think of writing, and there's got to be a whole hell of a lot more than that before you can even dream of being one of those writers who appear in the how-to-read anthologies. I don't say it can't happen. It can happen. You don't even have to be a better person. All you have to do is have that twist of the mind that is true talent. You have to see everything in a way that's not just accurate but peculiar—that's all, just have an originality of perception and utterance.
But granted that, and if you want to know how short stories work, what the particular dynamics of short fiction are, then I think maybe my book can help you. I really do. I'm amazed at it myself. But I've been messing around with other people's fiction for so long—working on short stories and novel sections and getting them into magazines, tinkering with work by established authors and trying to bring work by new writers into focus, and living with fiction all this long life—that I really do think I know something about it now.
All you have to have is originality of perception and utterance; and if you've actually got that, you're the kind of person who could possibly really use this book, without probably really needing it in the first place, if you see what I mean.
R.H.
The Short Story, as against the Novel and the Sketch
This book implies that some techniques of fiction tend to have absolute effects, and tries to explain what they are.
As far as the short story itself is concerned, I won't even attempt a definition. Everyone knows what a short story is anyway—whether it be a prose narrative glibly described as "shorter than a novel" or as the first commentator on the form, Edgar Allan Poe, specified, "no longer than can be read in a single sitting." And I'm taking for granted the distinction between the literary short story and what used to be called the "slick" story—both the soupy, romantic fiction once found in ladies' magazines and the adventury, fantasying, apparently-hard-boiled-but-at-bottom-sentimental stories of sports or crime or outdoor life that passed as "man's" fiction. My distinction, then, is prose narrative of a certain quality as well as not beyond a certain length.
Beyond that, I believe that only two things can be said about the nature of the short story, and these statements seem at first so different from each other and so unrelated as to appear random. First, a short story tells of something that happened to someone. Second, the successful contemporary short story will demonstrate a more harmonious relationship of all its aspects than will any other literary art form, excepting perhaps lyric poetry. In fact, these two statements are quite a lot to say. The first statement distinguishes the story from the sketch, the second distinguishes it from the novel.
A short story is different from a sketch because "a short story tells of something that happened to somebody." A sketch is by definition a static description of a character or a place or whatever. In character sketches, the character described remains constant. If there is passage of time in a character sketch—for instance, if we are shown the sequence of the character's day, from morning until night—the character is assumed to be the same each morning, each noon, each night. If there is action or episode, it is used merely to illustrate the character's character, not to develop it; he learns nothing from it, changes not a whit. Any incident in a sketch is rendered as an example of a character's behavior, not as the account of something that happened to him that moved or altered him, as it is in a story. It's assumed that confronted with the same situation on another occasion, the character in a sketch would react in exactly the same way again, no matter how many times the action was repeated.
A story, however, is dynamic rather than static: the same thing cannot happen again. A character is capable of being moved, and is moved, no matter in how slight a way.
The novel differs from the short story in more than just length, but they both share this quality of character-moved-by-plot. But the difference is, that on the long trip the novel provides, there is space/time for a quantity of incidents and effects. Edgar Allan Poe spoke of the short story as providing "a single and unique effect" toward which every word contributes: "If his [the author's] very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design." Poe's famous "unique effect" dictum can of course be taken too strictly, but it does seem to be the case that there is a degree of unity in a well-wrought story—what we have called an "harmonious relationship of all its aspects"—that isn't necessarily found in a good novel, that isn't perhaps even desirable in a novel.
Each aspect of fiction technique—characterization, plot, point of view, theme, style or language, setting, symbol or imagery; "divide" them as you will—will be used in subtly different fashion by the short story writer and the novelist, though the same man be the one one morning and the other the next. The story writer will not usually elaborate secondary characters, won't usually mess much with subplots. Where the novelist may bounce around in point of view, shifting the angle of narration from one character to another, to focus first here, then there, the short story writer will usually maintain a single point of view, so as to keep the whole of his story in focus.
The story writer won't use any of the aspects of fiction technique loosely, the way a novelist may. In a story everything's bound together tightly. The theme in a successful story is inseparably embedded in the action taken by the characters—and indeed is implicit in all the other aspects, even the language. In density of language, in multiple use of the sound and sense of words, the short story is comparable to lyric poetry. Eudora Welty's short story "Livvie" has a complex and intricate system of imagery, from fable, myth, and fairy tale, that reminds one of Eliot or Pound. Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" has a sustained poetic metaphor, on death and light and sex, that recalls a Shakespeare sonnet or a Donne lyric. Even so long a story as Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" can be read as a poem; for the richness of phrase and symbol elaborating the angelic-diabolic conflict, although it may go all-but-unnoticed by a reader caught in the grip of the story, enhances the aura and meaning marvelously.
In the short story, language has a multitude of other roles, beyond simply achieving the narration. For instance, in any description of the setting—and the setting, whether it be lonely room or crowded city, will be chosen carefully for its connections with the theme as well as the action—the language (enhanced by symbol and imagery) will have the theme implicit in it. And language will also create style, will imply the author's tone, will be used for atmosphere or mood, may be a foreshadowing device of the plot, will certainly depend on the point of view from which the story is told (for language and style and tone are entirely interpendent with the angle of narration, the point of view chosen), and may contribute to the characterization of the point-of-view figure.
A successful short story will thus necessarily show a more harmonious relationship of part to whole, and part to part, than it is usual ever to find in a novel. Everything must work with everything else. Everything enhances everything else, interrelates with everything else, is inseparable from everything else—and all this is done with a necessary and perfect economy.
Character and Action
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
"The Road Not Taken"<
br />
Nothing can happen again. If we accept the non-uncommon metaphor implied in Frost's poem that Life is a journey, then the road not taken can never be taken. Confronted with a choice that seems important to him, a person may use the outright cliché: "My life's at a crossroads." But the fork in the road is more diagramatically accurate of what he's faced with. A man often finds himself in a situation where he feels he must "go one way or the other." Sometimes he seems to have a choice of which way to go; sometimes he feels he has no choice, but is "pushed into it." Other times he may not even be aware that he's taken one path instead of another, but just "follows his nose," blindly.
In any event, there is only one road a person can take, only one way anyone can ever be. How much choice he ever had is a matter for the philosophers and psychologists who debate about free will versus various sorts of determinism. If we are all being pushed around by an omnipotent omniscient God or by psychologically predetermined behavior patterns or by mechanistic socioeconomic forces—if so, we are not much aware of it. Perhaps our lives are analogous to those of characters in fiction whose nature and fate is in the hands of an author. 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.
But the author is ultimately responsible to the reader, although this responsibility is often denied. The author must explain to the reader why a character took one road instead of the other—must explain or show by the action of the plot why the character chose a particular road or how he was forced into it by circumstances or other characters—and the author must make clear that it was a significantly different road.
In every short story a fork in the road is encountered. The author can show the character taking a new road or show him passing it by. In either case "something has happened to someone." As a result of the action of the story—as a result of what "happens" in the story—a way that the character could have taken, a way he could have been, is no longer possible for him. Or his life has taken a new direction, however slight the change may be.