Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

L. Rust Hills

Description

Wise advice on plot, character, and style from a legendary Esquire editor: “Every aspiring fiction writer ought to read this.” —Writer’s Digest

Over the course of his long and colorful career as fiction editor for Esquire magazine, L. Rust Hills championed the early work of literary luminaries such as Norman Mailer, John Cheever, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, and E. Annie Proulx. His skill at identifying talent and understanding story made him a legend within the industry as an unparalleled editor of short fiction.
 
Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular is a master class in writing—especially short story writing—from the master himself. Drawing on a lifetime of experience and success, this practical guide explains essential techniques of writing fiction—from developing character to crafting plots to effectively employing literary techniques. Clear and concise enough for any beginner but wise and powerful enough for any pro, Writing in General is a classic to be savored by both aspiring and seasoned writers.

Sujets

• NaNoWriMo
• Creativity
• Creative writing
• Character development
• Fiction writing
• Writing process
• Employabilité, métiers et formations

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 06 septembre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 4
• EAN13: 9780547526300
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contents
Title Page
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 [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.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.)

ISBN 978-0-618-08234-6 paperback

eISBN 978-0-547-52630-0 v2.1017
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,” page 191 ). 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’