Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

by L Rust Hills

  Writing is discovery, yes. But not just discovery of what happens next in a plot, or discovery of surprising manifestations of a created character. It is also discovering how the material of the story all works together, of how a part relates to another part, and of how suddenly both relate to the whole. The ultimate intricacy of even the simplest successful short story could never be imagined from its original conception.

  The final whole story will be the result of myriad conscious and unconscious decisions about method, made by the author. One factor, for instance, that's always present in determining method in plotting is any special aptitude or knowledge that a writer may have: if he's good at dialogue, for instance, he's unlikely to want to spend much time rendering in detail a sequence of a man alone; or if he's had experience of a certain room or city and wants to describe it, he will try to set one of his episodes in it. Any such consideration as this can easily throw any preconceived pattern of plot structure way out of whack, and it is just one of innumerable ways in which one consideration about a story may seem to be in conflict with another. Whenever it seems to a beginning writer that he himself is in conflict with his own preconceived notions about what the story should be, he's probably best advised to go along with himself, write what he "feels" like writing, and forget the preconceived plan. Chances are a new and better plan may occur to him as he proceeds. The decision can perhaps "unblock" the story for him to an extent that may astonish him.

  For when a story is "going well" under the author's pen, when it is based on the right conceptual track, everything will seem to be going as if "on rails." The story seems to grow and take form on its own. Everything "works." Scenes which promise most dramatic interest will be seen also to be those scenes which most contribute to characterization, to development of theme, to all the other aspects—and will seem as well to be just the sort of scene the writer is best equipped to do. A scene that once seemed necessary only for the sake of the pattern of the narrative will now seem necessary for many reasons and useful in many ways. Aspects which once seemed in conflict with one another will suddenly interrelate effectively and harmoniously in a way that will seem to the author almost miraculous—as if the story were somehow all on its own working toward its unique whole meaning.

  This feeling is of course illogical: it is the author's skill as well as his conception that is creating the story, and many a story has failed to find its successful whole meaning because the author hadn't the craft as well as the vision to see how the aspects of the story could be made to work together harmoniously and effectively instead of to compete and conflict. The "miraculous" way in which a story will seem all suddenly to coalesce will often be due to some adjustment of conception by the author, some perception of another technique that could be used to solve a problem that had troubled him and held the story back. If aspects are in conflict and seem awkward with one another, there will, chances are, prove to be another way, a different approach to the materials. This can be as simple as combining two scenes, or changing point of view, or omitting one character entirely. What may have been thought of as a compromise to reconcile two conflicting aspects may prove suddenly to be not just a solution, but an added value, one that will "lead" the author to additional adjustments and refinements.

  There is nothing mystical or miraculous about it at all, although it may seem so. It is "simply" the situation of an author who knows what he wants to do and has the ability to do it. But in order to have this ability to do what he wants, the author must know all the techniques available to him—or he may never have this experience of everything suddenly working. A "natural" storyteller is not likely to be able to solve the problems of the complex item which is the contemporary literary short story. The aspect of fiction technique which is plotting offers a multitude of devices and methods—and a plethora of terms for them—developed by writers and their critics down through the centuries; and although many of them are formula-istic and foolish, no writer can afford to disregard any formulation of method that may help him solve the problems presented by his story. If he is to do his own unique and original and characteristic work, a short story writer must have at his command all the methods used by others. He must be able to identify whatever problems are blocking his work's realization, must know all the alternatives available to him to solve them.

  Point-of-View Methods

  The choice of the point of view to be used in a story may be pre-made, more or less unconsciously, by the author, as being basic to his whole conception of it. Otherwise, though, choices about point of view will undoubtedly be the most important decisions about technique that he has to make.

  Point of view, of course, is in general terms how the story is told, the way in which it is narrated. Defining the term is complicated by the fact that it's sometimes used to apply to the whole of the way in which the story is presented to the reader by the author—the rhetoric and the logic of it, so to speak—and sometimes it applies to so small a reference as the name of the character who is the narrator in a particular story.

  Clearly there are many different kinds of ways that a story can be told, and anthologists and critics are always trying to sort these ways out into their different kinds, often inventing new names for techniques that overlap one another and confuse an already mind-boggling business. The question of point of view can take you right into the basic metaphysics of literature: every story has an author and a reader, and how the story gets from one to another is at the heart of the matter. Point of view may represent the whole aspect of form in fiction, some say; or it may even be the whole basis of the content, as presented; or it may represent the fusion of the two that, according to literary aesthetics, achieves the creation of literary art itself.

  Some choose to discuss point of view in terms of "authority," asking how the story is made convincing to the reader. Some emphasize "focus of narration," asking how the elements of the story are unified artistically by the telling. Some systems of categorizing point of view concentrate on the rhetoric, some on the reality. Some systemizers sort out as many as a dozen basic point-of-view methods: Interior Monologue, Dramatic Monologue, Letter Narration, Diary Narration, "Subjective," "Detached," "Memoir," and various sorts of "Anonymous Narration." For others, simply one division into two kinds is sufficient: "Internal" and "External"—in which the narrator is either "in" the story as a character, or he isn't—with variations of course.

  Commonly, four or five point-of-view methods are listed, the first two being used in most such schemes, the others depending more upon terminology than approach. Basically, then, we usually have:

  (1) "Omniscient"—in which the author comes on as knowing everything about everything and everybody. He can tell you the thoughts of any character; he knows the whole past. He may even comment on the story, or he may not. This method is sometimes called "Olympian," sometimes "analytic author." It's the method of Fielding in Tom Jones and of Thackeray in Vanity Fair. We can't always be sure "Fielding," the authorial voice, is Henry Fielding, the author, exactly, but with this method there is usually some sense of "authorial presence" conducting the reader, guiding his reactions to the story.

  (2) "The First Person"—in which the author comes on as if he were one of the characters in the story. Maybe he's the main character telling his own story. Maybe he's a minor character telling the main character's story. Maybe he's something in between. This is not as cut-and-dried as it seems: the form used (whether letter, interior monologue, memoir, or whatever) will create real differences, even though the story's told from some first-person basis with an "I" narrator. Distinctions are often made, too, between an "objective" or "reliable" first person narrator on the one hand, and a narrator who is "subjective" or "unreliable" on the other,

  (3) "Scenic"—in which the author comes on as almost not being there. He simply describes what happens. He gives nothing of the past, nor of any background; he is inside the mind of no character at all. He simply records dialogue and movement, depicts settin
g, makes no comment or intrusion. It's rather like the "absence" of point of view in a play, or action seen through the eye of a movie camera. This method is sometimes called "observer-author"; it remains entirely "exterior" and "objective." You can see it in absolutely pure form in the first hundred lines or so of Hemingway's "The Killers."

  (4) "Central Intelligence"—in which the author achieves the story's narration by inhabiting the mind of one of the characters. It's like the "omniscient" in that the author can give past, background, description, and so on. It's like the "scenic" in that the author pretends not to be there. And it's like the "first person" in that we are limited to what one single character can perceive of the action or feel about it. But that character is depicted, not as a first-person "I" but as a third-person "he" or "she." The implication is that "he" or "she" will be the central character, and that's usually the case. Otherwise we'd have to have still another term, like "third-person-minor," or even worse, to cover the whole method, "omniscient-limited-to-one-character."

  The fact is that trying to sort out all the point-of-view methods into types and kinds is a pretty thankless business. It's fascinating, but ultimately futile. Everyone can think of exceptions to everyone else's system, or variations, or times when an author successfully shifts from one method to another, or whatever. There seem to be almost as many "types" of point of view as there are stories, just as there seemed to be almost as many types of people as there were people. When you consider that just for the four methods described it's possible to ring in an infinitude of changes—of degrees to which the narrator is "concealed" or "anonymous," "reliable" or "subjective," of whether the point-of-view figures be "multiple" or "single" in either first person or third, of whether the whole thing is cast as memoir or lecture or whatever, totally in dialogue or without any dialogue at all, and so on—it seems a hopeless business to try to list all the possibilities.

  It seems to me that the proper attitude for the writer is to leave the systematizing to someone else and just rejoice that so many methods are available to him.

  Limitations and Advantages in Point of View

  Certain conventions, based in logic, accompany choice of point of view. The basic idea is that once an author has indicated by some statement or some construction what point of view is being used in the story, then he is committed to some extent to maintain it. From the apparent limitations of this, certain advantages occur as well.

  The limitations are most clearly seen in first-person narration, when the narrator is a character in the story. The "I" can see only what his own eyes can see, he can only know his own thoughts. He can imagine or speculate about the thoughts and motives of other characters, but the author cannot let us know for certain anything that couldn't be known by the first-person narrator.

  This is clear enough with a first-person narrator, and even beginning writers grasp the logic and necessity for maintaining point of view in this case. But with a character created by the author in the third person—as "he," "she," "Martin," "Miranda," and so on—it is often more difficult to grasp the strict limitations on perception. Nevertheless, if a story begins with a character named Martin seeing or doing something—getting up, making coffee, going down to the mailbox, or whatever—and if the reader is privy to Martin's thoughts and perceptions from the beginning, then thereafter everything he learns throughout the story must be something learned (or previously known) by Martin, unless the point of view is changed. The reader can know nothing about anyone else in the story unless it is something known by Martin; he can see nothing happen that Martin doesn't see happen; he can hear nothing Martin doesn't hear. The author is entirely bound to Martin's perceptions for what he can tell the reader. These are the "rules" of the fourth method listed, the so-called Central Intelligence, as it is understood today; it has certain advantages which offset these limitations put on it and it has certain disadvantages even beyond the limitations.

  The "rules" can be broken, of course, if the violation isn't noticeable, or if enough is achieved by doing so; but to break the rules of point of view unwittingly, with nothing accomplished by it, is to harm the story foolishly—for if the reader is sophisticated, he will see the error and discount the work, and even if he is so innocent of fiction techniques as not to notice it consciously, he will have an uneasy feeling, vague as it might be, that something has gone a bit wrong.

  In a short story correct choice and use of point of view is tremendously important as a unifying device, for "how the story is seen" will so focus the felt consequences of the action as virtually to become "what the story is." The angle of narration will determine, in most cases, both the nature of the movement of character through action and the identity of that character. By focusing the reporting of action it both determines what it is that has happened and also makes clear who it is that it has happened to.

  Point of view is important in focusing the consequences of action in a novel, too; but in a novel many things may happen to many people, and a "big" novel like Middlemarch or War and Peace will be "told" or "seen" through a multitude of points of view. Several sequences of the action may be "seen" by one character; then the novelist may shift the telling to another character altogether. Or he may play omniscient author and recount directly to the reader the significance of an event to several of his characters, not using a first-person narrator or a central intelligence point-of-view figure at all. Or he may alternate or jumble or balance these methods howsoever he wants. The novelist may use point of view to focus first here and then there; he does not necessarily use it as the short story writer does, to keep the whole of his story in focus.

  Because it is often the voice in which the story is told, point of view also controls a good deal of the style and language used, the nature of the perception in passages of description, and it has a necessary, close relation to the author's tone.

  Point of view also has a determining effect on the "closeness" and "distance" with which a story is re-counted. Each of the four methods is thought to provide a different degree of closeness and distance—first-person narration supposedly having most closeness, because of its immediacy, intimacy, and authority, and the scenic method having most distance, because it enters the mind of no one, merely reports the action descriptively, at what seems a great remove.

  But it is possible to move "in" and "out" wonderfully effectively if you know what you want to do and set up the point of view so as to achieve it. In Faulkner's The Reivers, for instance, just to take one example, he tells the story of a young boy as remembered by that boy as an old man. When he wants to move in close on the experience, he puts us into the mind of the boy directly and achieves immediacy, humor, and irony from the boy's misconceptions; when he wants to get some distance and accuracy or make some comment, he moves back into the perceptions of the older man remembering the action. But again, this is just one example of how the limitations of point-of-view method can be manipulated to become advantages. Every successful work provides other examples.

  When Point of View Is "Wrong"

  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 someone 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.

  Beginning writers also sometimes find it is difficult to supply background material when they are using the circumscribed first-person or central-intelligence methods, so they turn to the omniscient method, ease of exposition being one of the traditional advantages assigned to that method, since the author can just forthrightly step forward and provide whatever information is necessary. But the need for exposition is as a rule much overemphasized by new writers. If a reader is at all interested by a situation, he will add little bits and piece
s together, like a stranger at a party, and he'll soon gather what it's all about.

  Similarly, the beginning writer should realize that in some of those cases where his point-of-view character isn't in a position to know certain details of the situation, there may often lie an interesting enhancement of the story. For instance, just how much one character is able to deduce or perceive of another character's feelings may very well become virtually the subject of a story. Thus, the limitations put on the point-of-view character's perceptions by strictly maintaining either first-person or central-intelligence method can become an aspect of the plot itself. Suspense, irony—all sorts of effects—can be achieved by keeping a character from knowing some part of the true situation or by misunderstanding the true motives of other characters. It's often true that the advantages of any of these methods are implicit in their supposed limitations.

  When an irritable editor or a kindly writing teacher first points out to the beginning writer the careless way in which he has handled point of view, there is likely to be either a cry of outrage or an immediate capitulation. The young author may be very angry at the idea of his style being cramped by what he calls "a silly rule"; or he may submissively revise his work in slavish obedience to "the way things are done." Both reactions are of course wrong.

  First of all, there are no "rules" of writing. Things are "done" the way they are done for reasons, and if the reasons don't exist and if there are better reasons not to, then they aren't done that way. Correct maintenance of point of view, as we've seen, is an aid to the successful focusing and organizing of a story. Choice of point of view may ultimately determine many other decisions regarding character, plot, style, and so forth. It may be the central way of achieving the desired unified effect of the story. The potential to do all this is there. If maintaining point of view in a story seems to be hampering or handcuffing the author in some way, then perhaps he should look again and see if he's using the correct point of view. Changing point of view can often unblock all the other aspects of a story. But if changing point of view entirely is not the solution, then let the author violate the one he's using or shift it in any way he wants. Even the beginning writer may mix up point of view all he wants, but he should know what he's doing, and why —and he should realize that he's losing certain other effects that would have been available to him had he decided to keep a tighter focus on his story. If the author gains by violating point of view so as to make a situation clear, or if he shifts point of view from one character to another for whatever reason—if the author gains by it, if there is in fact a reason, then the reader gains by it too.