Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

Rust Hills

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780547526300
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

The American Short Story “Today”

It’s never really convincingly clear in any given decade whether the American short story “today” is “in decline” or “having a renaissance”—although there are always a lot of spokespeople around who see and say clearly that it is definitely doing either one thing or the other. Sometimes it seems this must have been going on since Edgar Allan Poe invented the form. We may look back on the 1920s or 1930s as a sort of golden age, when Scribners would alternate a novel by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Wolfe with a collection of the author’s stories, or when Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, and all the others were writing the short story masterpieces that now appear in our college textbook anthologies. But one doubts that the critics or editors or publishers of the time saw it as being all that golden. “Where’s the new Washington Irving?” they probably asked.

And anyway it wasn’t really golden for the writers either—at least not for the serious ones, the ones we admire and remember and read now. Reading fiction was as popular with the public as television is now, and for the same dumb reasons (entertainment and escape), but the fiction the public read then was just as bad as the television they watch now, and the literary writers of the time had very little to do with the popular fiction of the time. The reading public still (that is, “today”) reads big popular novels, but the big audience for reading short stories disappeared along with the big slick magazines that published “popular” fiction. In America at least, the sad truth probably is that there has never been a true popular readership for the literary short story. Any discussion of whether there’s a “decline” or a “renaissance” in the American short story “today” has got to be considered in terms of that basic bleak fact.

To acknowledge the lack of popularity of the literary short story is not to say that today we don’t have in this country a great many fine writers of distinctive talent writing in a wide range of fictional modes. That there’s no particular method that can be pointed to as representing “American fiction today” is a great indication of its present strength. We have not only the strongly individual voices of our major, internationally recognized “name” authors, but also a great variety of others. Some of our best authors write in different sorts of “high-comic” modes, finding deadly serious humor the best way to depict contemporary American life; some are in the American tradition of “romantic hard-guy” writers, who show that adventure is still part of literature; some are “postmodernists,” who often use the strategy of “meta-fiction,” fiction that by being about fiction takes on an added dimension; some are “downside neorealists,” reinvigorating the strain of American naturalism; some are at work on monumental “Proustian” novels; some are creating mini-masterpieces of minimalism. We appear to be in a fantastically rich and varied period in American literary history.

Is this generally recognized? Well, sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. The variousness of the contemporary American achievement militates against the recognition of it. It’s as if we can’t see all those trees, just because there isn’t one central forest. Not only is there no central tendency in American writing, there is also no central place where it occurs. Whenever there is a little cluster of writers—as sometimes happens in Key West or in Montana or on the South Fork of Long Island—one is almost startled to see five or ten of them together. We have no equivalent of eighteenth-century London or Paris in the twenties. New York City is not a congenial place for writers to live and work, despite the fact that the publishing industry is centered there.

Book publishing has come to be a very tough business, for everyone concerned. Art in other forms also is involved with business, of course, but the relationship between book and magazine publishing on the one hand, and literary fiction writing on the other, is an especially peculiar one, because the publishing business is also involved with writing that is not fiction and with fiction that is not art. Publishing literary fiction is, in terms of making money, the least important part of most book publishers’ business; yet for the writer, getting published is very important indeed. This situation is to some extent as it has always been, but recent events have aggravated matters.

What has happened to American book publishing in the last twenty-five years is amazing, but it is so well known it can be recounted in a series of catch phrases. First came the mergers, so there were fewer “houses.” Then the corporate takeovers. The unknowing, uncaring absentee owners interested only in profits. No longer a family business. No longer a gentleman’s profession. Good editors promoted to be bad business executives. The demise of the small bookstore. The blockbuster principle—going for the big best seller at the expense of the promising first novel. The mass-market paperback tail wagging the hardcover dog. Hardcover and paperback houses buying one another out to make publishing a single process. Editors going from house to house. No loyalty to authors anymore. No loyalty back from the big authors who go where the big bucks are. Too many titles published each year, too few novels. Absurdly large advances to “name” authors. Absurdly small advances to new ones.

These circumstances are very disheartening to an author of literary fiction. Assume you work for two or three years on a first novel and an editor at a commercial publisher so admires your talent that he persuades his editorial board to take a chance on it. Actually there’s no risk involved in the board’s decision: up front they have to be reconciled to losing a more or less calculable amount of money. The amount they’ll lose is far more than the few thousand dollars they might pay you for your three years’ work. Office rent, paper costs, typesetting, warehouse space, and overhead of all sorts go into their figures — their accountants will be appalled. The more copies they print of your book, the more they push it (much less advertise it, forget that), the more they’ll lose; they know that. So they don’t push it, and they do lose, and it’ll be that much harder to convince the editorial board to take a chance next time. It would have been worse if it had been a collection of stories; publishers traditionally refuse to publish a collection until an author has done a novel, although things have changed a bit recently in this regard, perhaps because sales are so nearly equally bad in either case.

And yet somehow, in the face of it all, literary stories and promising first novels still manage to get published. At virtually every publishing company there are editors — some young, some old—who believe in serious fiction and contrive ways to get around this system: reissuing neglected contemporary novels or story collections in “trade-quality” paperback series of classics; energetically soliciting jacket blurbs and in-house sales enthusiasm for a new novel of merit, or for a short story author they believe in; working with writers to improve their manuscripts, keeping them lunched and encouraged despite everything.

In fact, everyone involved in the qual-lit game is as supportive as possible; in the business of art there is always dedication and caring. Individual literary agents, whether on their own or as part of the big bicoastal agencies, will work hard to develop interest in new young clients’ work, even though there is often no opportunity for them to place it profitably. Magazine publishing is especially discouraging in this regard: few new magazines publish fiction, and the older ones abandon it. There are now not enough commercial magazines regularly publishing literary fiction to count on the fingers of a single hand. Editors of literary quarterlies and little magazines work ceaselessly and without reward to try to take up the slack. State and national governments supply grants-in-aid to help these magazines both directly and through agencies like the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. And there are grants for writers from the National Endowment for the Arts and foundations like the Guggenheim Fellowships and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Individuals and institutions are always establishing prizes, grants, awards.

But the real money and the exciting action are clearly elsewhere—in television and especially in films—and good writers are always being enticed away from what they should be doing by producers and directors who “love” their work. Their offers are made with the best will in the world, but they usually end with the worst results—nothing ever finally comes of it. Movies are an even bigger enemy to the literary writer than hangovers.

So, despite all the good efforts and good will, the literary publishing business has become increasingly difficult for writer and publisher alike. Journalists writing about the writer’s life usually single out an author who has already attained a certain degree of celebrity. The picture is misleading: farms in Connecticut, ranches in the West, movie stars living in or dropping in, agents phoning in deals with big numbers, trips back and forth to Europe, and so on. There are actually no more than a dozen literary writers who live this traditional romantic “writer’s life.” For all the others there’s scarcely a living in literature. Yet there continue to be more new writers developing than ever before, and none of them are starving in garrets. That is due to patronage from another quarter.

Almost unperceived in all these events of the last quarter-century has been the rise of a countervailing force, one that is almost entirely beneficial to the cause of modern literary fiction. I am speaking of the growing role in all the processes of contemporary literature of the colleges and universities of America. If one but stands back a bit and looks, one sees that it is no longer the book publishers and magazines, but rather the colleges and universities, that support the entire structure of the American literary establishment—and, moreover, essentially determine the nature and shape of that structure.

First of all, it should be recognized that our colleges and universities provide the major financial support for the great majority of American writers today. The teaching of writing—something that many still doubt can actually be done—has grown from an occasional course-offering twenty-five years ago to one of the most-taught subjects on campuses now. Courses in writing have become so large that at some universities enrollment in the writing program exceeds enrollment in the entire English department. Students now may take creative writing courses for all four of their undergraduate years and then go on to graduate school in writing.

It’s the growth of the graduate programs that is both most remarkable and most unremarked. Where there was once only the Stanford writing fellowships and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop twenty-odd years ago, now there must be at least a hundred such programs, of various sizes, ranging from the giant urban universities that service a whole cityful of would-be writers on an unmatriculated basis down to the new ones just getting started.

How it works typically is that twenty or more graduate students are enrolled in a two-or three-year course of instruction, primarily in writing, but also including literature courses and other requirements that vary from place to place. At the end, the student will have an M.F.A.—Master of Fine Arts—which, because it is a “terminal” degree (unlike the ordinary M.A., which is considered a step toward the Ph.D.), is considered sufficient accreditation (with some publications) for him to apply for a full-time job teaching elsewhere. Instead of the standard M.A. thesis, he will have submitted for departmental approval a collection of stories or a novel. Specially typed and bound, this “book” is deposited in the university library, where it exists in a strange limbo, accepted but not published.

The way writing is actually “taught” or “learned” is by the workshop method. The writers gather in a seminar room for three hours, usually, Wednesday afternoon or evening, say, with the tenured staff writer or the visiting one-term writer—whoever’s handling the class. The writer whose work is on the table that week gets an hour and a half of intense discussion—an immediate individual and group reaction to what he’s just been working on. Sometimes the advice he gets will be conflicting; he’ll have to weigh it. But usually the group will see what’s good and ought to be developed, and what is weak and ought to be dropped or fixed. If the writer-teacher is conscientious, further discussion of the work can follow during office hours. When you consider how writers heretofore composed more or less in a vacuum—without encouragement or criticism—you’d have to say this is all helpful. Students learn how to criticize tactfully and constructively, and they are virtually forced to produce work for their own turn in the workshop process. Sometimes this pressure causes submission of work that is tentative, and criticism by the group can discourage a writer, but that happens rarely and may be part of a weeding-out process.

During the period of his graduate fellowship the student will usually—as a “T.A.,” or teaching assistant — teach freshman comp and perhaps introductory creative writing. For this he will be paid enough to live on — and that is how he’s supported during these developing years as a young writer writing, studying writings, and teaching writing. There must be a thousand or more aspiring young American writers in some variation of this situation now. It is an extent and degree of support for new talent that is unprecedented.

So attractive is this sort of apprenticeship that directors of the elite programs—with a dozen or a dozen and a half places to be filled each year—can accept only about one in six of the applications they receive. In addition to the usual vitae, transcripts, and letters of recommendation, applicants send manuscripts. Most program directors feel an important part of their role is sifting through these manuscripts to select who will be in the workshop the following year. In a way, these are the people—the directors and the faculties of the writing programs—who are now not just doing the first sorting out, but making the first determination of who the American writers of the future are to be.

Moreover, these program directors, and the visiting writers who teach intermittently, are in the front ranks inadvertently scouting, on a simple good-will basis, for the agents and publishers of their acquaintance who are looking for talented new writers. This is really how a new writer is first “discovered” now, through the process of recognition and recommendation by the writing programs.

Because these programs are sensible and successful, as far as writing goes—and because they throw off as a sort of by-product great numbers of qualified writing teachers—they grow and they proliferate. No one escapes this now. This system is totally unknown in Europe but is pervasive here. There can scarcely be an American writer in his thirties who hasn’t been involved in a university writing program somewhere, some time in his life.

There is an additional way—perhaps ultimately an even more important way—that academia affects the structure of the American literary establishment. I refer to the process of “canonization,” the way in which a work of fiction or an author of fiction comes to be established as a classic. This process used to take time, but now the universities, which in recent memory scarcely considered a work of literature until fifty or a hundred years after its creation, are infatuated with what’s new. Contemporary lit courses have tremendous draw for all students, whether writers or not, and they attract far greater enrollment than any other literature courses. Course titles vary—Structure and Symbol in the Modern American Novel, The Woman’s Voice in Contemporary Fiction, Vietnam in Literature, and so on—according to the instructor’s approach. It is what is chosen to be taught in these classes that determines a living writer’s chances of entering the canon. Similarly important to him is being included in one or another of the big anthologies that are used as texts in Introduction to Literature courses for thousands of first-year students. When a modern author’s work is alongside short stories by Chekhov, Joyce, Mann, Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, and the rest, it is not just with the classics, but has become a classic in the minds of a new generation of readers.

Oddly, to be eligible for the canonization that ensures posterity’s regard, a work has to be published in paperback, in days gone by considered the transient format. An original hardcover publication has some value initially because newspapers and magazines traditionally review only books that appear in hardcover, and some value ultimately because libraries preserve hardcover copies. But availability in paper is now the important thing—not just a mass-market paperback edition that is on and off the racks in a matter of months, but in “trade paper,” part of a regular backlist that’s kept in stock. This is because the professor listing books for his course cannot expect students to pay hardcover prices. To become part of the contemporary canon, a work has to be taught; and to be taught it has to be in paper.

But there are still more ways colleges and universities affect the literary establishment. They provide the otherwise missing dimension of “community” for America’s widespread authors, through the system of visiting writer-teachers, the circuit of reading programs, and the summer writing conferences—virtually all of which are sponsored by campuses and held on them. And through college and university support of literary quarterlies (almost all are edited from a campus) and little magazines, they provide a far broader market for short stories than the national magazines can. This publication is continually necessary for writing teachers to be hired in the first place, then kept on, promoted, granted tenure, and so on. It is an example of the universities providing one another with the accreditation-publication that they themselves require of their faculty. The same is true of the way that university presses, which once published only scholarly works not attractive to commercial publishers, will now publish novels by faculty members (usually from other schools) if a regular publisher can’t be found. The colleges and universities now—by first finding writers, then supporting them, and now beginning to publish them, as well as making the ultimate judgment on them—seem just about ready to take over the entire “business” of literature itself.

One other major contribution made by the colleges and universities is in providing what modern fiction really seems to need most: readers. Gore Vidal once said something to the effect that Americans now read serious fiction only when they are required to, in college; and there is, sadly, truth in that. And there is especially truth in that when it comes to the short story. More readers probably read contemporary literary short stories now (“today”) than ever have before, but that’s just because there are so many readers who are studying them now, whether as literature students or as aspiring writers themselves. More short stories are being written than ever before—that’s clearly true, because the story is the basic workshop entry and there are now all those thousands of young writers all across the country having to produce for their workshops and theses.

Now, because the creation of the American short story takes place by and large and on the whole “today” in an academic setting and for academic reasons, you’d think we’d all be reading academic stories. That doesn’t seem to be the case. People have been decrying “workshop fiction” in America for decades, but no one has been able to describe just what a workshop story is, or even could be. The complaints come anyway from people who haven’t had much experience of the workshop process and don’t realize how freewheeling and nonproscriptive it is. In fact in the workshop anything original or unusual is specially prized and encouraged.

But what does happen in a situation where stories are written in academia by proto-academics partially at least to satisfy academic-bureaucratic requirements is a kind of wavering of judgment. I’m not speaking of inaccurate literary evaluation, but of a lack of sense of proportion. It’s not just possible but likely that all these students/ writers/teachers, awash in short fiction for the big years of their lives—fiction of their own, of their friends, of their teachers, of their students—it’s not just possible but likely that they’d feel the American short story today is “having a renaissance.” And of course there are more collections of stories and anthologies being published all the time to service the university’s needs, and more grants and more awards and more short story contests and so on, and my God, it does seem like a renaissance. Writers, editors, publishers, teachers, agents, grad students of writing by the programful—to everyone involved in the qual-lit game it’s clearly a renaissance. And anyone not involved in it doesn’t care in the least anyway.

The American short story today—or yesterday for that matter—could be having a huge renaissance or be in massive, virtually terminal, decline and the bleak sad fact is that the public as a whole would have no knowledge or interest either way. You can say, who cares that practically no one cares; but actually, faced with so much that’s fine so utterly neglected, it’s hard not to care at least...