Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

Rating:
Summary: An informative read.
Review: This book puts to shame much of what's out there in terms of "self-help" writers books. It elaborates on the shortcmings of "slick fiction" as well as outlines the essential ingredients for quality literature.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: This really is the best book on short story writing out of the couple of dozen I've read. Lucidly explains what makes a good short story. It's more of an examination of good fiction than a how-to, but it's incisive and valuable. If I could have only one book on writing, this would be the one.

Rating:
Summary: Clearly explains what makes a good short story
Review: This really is the best book on short story writing out of the couple of dozen I've read. Lucidly explains what makes a good short story. It's more of an examination of good fiction than a how-to, but it's incisive and valuable. If I could have only one book on writing, this would be the one.

Rating:
Summary: A book worthy of review.
Review: Tools of the Muse

In his informative and entertaining book,Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, Rust Hills sets out to reach a broad range of potential writers. He attempts to establish a basic guide, useful to the nascent writer working in a workshop environment and to the solitary writer, who wishes "to learn to read literary stories in such a way as to help...write them." Hills' main idea that he stresses throughout the book revolves around the interrelation of every element within a short story. He writes: "A successful short story will thus necessarily show a more harmonious relationship of part to whole, and part to part...Everything must work with everything else. Everything enhances everything else, interrelates with everything else, is inseparable with everything else- and all this is done with a necessary and perfect economy." Hills formats the book so that each of the major literary terms and devices, essential to the short story writer, receive its own section for deeper analysis. Within these ongoing essays he often uses simplified fictional characters of his own invention to illuminate the discussion at hand. The characters, "Martin" and "Miranda," grow irksome at times, but his point is to make sure the reader unquestionably comprehends. Most of the sections close with a statement that reiterates how the specific device or term fits into the overall design of the whole. He pounds this notion of interrelation into the reader's head. Hills presents a vast array of useful literary terms and devices in a manner that never hinders the logical sequence of the book. His witticisms and fresh style of economic prose help to maintain the momentum and readability through the weighty, technical material. He differentiates the short story from the novel or the sketch. He touches upon the spectrum of characterization: the type as opposed to the stock character, the fixed compared to the moving character. He spends a great length discussing the origin, the meaning, and the contemporary interpretation of every beginning writer's worst enemy, that ill-fated, e-word, "epiphany." Point-of -view, "the most important decisions about techniques" that a writer has to make also receives extensive attention in the book. Hidden within Hills' rich sea of information are some tidbits and treasures from the great masters of the profession. He cites Edgar Allen Poe in the analysis of the short story versus the sketch or novel. Poe writes of a " single and unique effect" to which every word of a short story should lead: "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." To shed light on the discussion of the epiphany, Hills relies upon the man who originated the term's contemporary meaning, James Joyce, "This is the moment which I call epiphany...when the relations of the parts is exquisite...its soul, its whatness leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany." Hills does not hold the fallacious belief that he can ultimately teach one to write, rather he states that he's "just showing something of how short stories work." The objective in Hills', Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, is to equip the potential writer with the necessary tools to create the most incisive and well-crafted fiction possible. As Hills suggests, "All you have to have is originality of perception and utterance."