Is there a way to set the value of an variable by the bits to comprise it?

I am trying to make a hamming code decoder and encoder in C and I cannot find a way to set the bits of a variable individually.

For example, I am trying to somehow do the following:

#include "stdio.h"

int main () {
    short block = 0010101110001110; // variable to contain the bits to decode
}

Clearly this will not work but I am wondering if there is a way to do this or will I have to define it as the actual number this represents?

>Solution :

You can use hexadecimal representation, where each digit represents exactly 4 bits.

unsigned short block = 0x2b8e;