Vheissu

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten on writing is also one of the simplest: let your fiction sit in a drawer (or hard drive) before reading it again. Here is Gardner’s version: “when the manuscript is ‘cold’ […] the faults stand plain” ( On Becoming a Novelist , p. 65). The most savory variant went like this: writing is like cooking a stew; if you want to remove the fat, you have to allow the stew to cool off so that the fat will rise to the surface (I owe that one to Rafael Reig). The impression I got upon reading Hobart 11 (Spring 2010) was that it wasn’t allowed to cool off, and thus the undesirable ingredients were mixed in with the good stuff. That’s probably because it was a themed issue, so most contributors likely wrote their pieces according to the theme (the outdoors), and had to cut back on revisions in order to submit them on time. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good elements in the issue. There are. Last time I commented on Hobart ( here ), I referred to ...

There’s quite a few good stories in Hobart 10, which was a nice surprise, as this was my first Hobart . The contents of the volume are varied: it includes comics (all of them flimsy), short short stories (none worth commenting on, honestly), and short stories. Looked at from another angle, kudos to the staff for the publication itself, which was nice and robust, but there is some carelessness in copy editing the stories (it gets better toward the end, but some have a heavy helping of typos). Here are brief comments on each of the short stories. Daniel Nester’s “Mooning: A Short Cultural History” is a dreadful piece that the editors must have considered funny and clever. It gathers random thoughts on mooning: lists, dictionary definitions, etcetera. They’re numbered. I found it insufferably dull. Claire Vaye Watkins’s “Graceland” may be the best story of the bunch. It’s about a woman who copes with grief about her mother’s death by worrying immensely about the fate of the wo...

Plot is one of those things readers of fiction are very familiar with. It’s probably what got us to read fiction in the first place. Besides, everyone with a sense of sequence will have a sense of plot, so it’s not just something habitual readers of fiction will feel close to home. Here’s a fairly simple definition: according to the Norton Introduction to Fiction , the plot is “the arrangement of the action” (p. 71). There’s a nice take on this subject in chapter 6 of Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction . He says that the “theory of narrative postulates the existence of a level of structure—what we generally call ‘plot’—independent of any particular language or representational medium. Unlike poetry, which gets lost in translation, plot can be preserved in translation from one language or one medium into another: a silent film or a comic strip can have the same plot as a short story” (p. 84). A plot is never wholly in the story. It is an abstraction, a sum...