One thing I like to do between big projects is find ways to ask myself, “What is a story, anyway?”

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Well, I’m back home, feeling healthy again, looking at a relatively quiet summer, during which I plan to rest up while getting back to work – these two things go hand-in-hand for me. It will be a busy fall, with teaching, and lots of writing-related travel in September (schedule to come), and the opera in October, but I’m looking forward to it all.

Now, on to today’s question…

Q.

Hi George,

I have a theoretical question more than a craft question. I have always assumed that there was such thing as a natural-born artist, someone who from their early years either yearns to or does express themselves in one or more creative fields. I’m not just thinking about prodigies like Rimbaud, Mozart, Picasso, Nick Drake etc., but those who begin writing in college, get an MFA in their 20’s etc. I’m of course aware of famous late bloomers but have always considered them the exceptions that prove the rule.

I have always taken it for granted that although I have always loved books (and music), I am not a natural artist. I didn’t even attempt to write a story until my 30’s. I remember when I was about 14 my guitar teacher encouraged me to write my own songs with lyrics. I went through the motions but really didn’t have the slightest interest in writing a song - clearly not the attitude of a natural artist. But lately I have started to rethink my assumptions. The more I write and the better I get at it, I wonder if I have been selling myself short and that I may be a natural artist who just took a very long time to discover it.

So, my question is, what is your view on whether for most artistically successful writers (and I know “artistically successful” is subjective, but whatever that means to you), the yearning to express oneself creatively is manifest from a relatively young age? And how does that relate to the question of talent (you have often spoken about “running up against the limits of our talent”)?

Lastly, and I hope you don’t get tired of hearing it, but thank you for Story Club and the community surrounding it. It really is a minor miracle that it exists.

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A.

What a deeply interesting question. Thank you so much for it.

I think of it like this: any person has an innate curiosity about life, and an energy toward it, that may manifest itself in all kinds of ways throughout the course of their life. They’re interested in the world, they get involved in things (even if those “things” are purely interior, by the way), they connect with other people, they get in over their heads, are passionate, make fools of themselves (if only quietly), they attempt big things, abandon them, move on to other things.

And then each of us, at some time or another, to a greater or lesser extent, might look around and wonder, “O.K., what the heck is all of this about, anyway?”

And that’s the artistic impulse.

Now, certain of us have some early experience of art and think, “I’d like to try to induce that feeling in someone else. There’s power in that.”

In other words (and this was the case for me) they discover an artistic ambition by noting, even dimly, the way that some works of art affected them. But they might just store that notion away, thinking, “Oh, I could never do that,” even as they’re thinking, “It would be so cool to do that someday.”

Three examples from my life, that I’ve written about here before:

1) Watching my father fall off the couch with laughter during an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

2) Feeling the incredible community tension in a theater while watching Jaws.

3) My internal reaction while reading the Hemingway stories in In Our Time – an intense desire to find Nick Adams-like overtones in my own life.

But I was not an early writer, and I didn’t go into stand-up, and didn’t have an aspiration to become a film director – these experiences just kind of swam around in my head powerfully while I went to engineering school, with a little tag on them that said, “Maybe someday.” I was “treasuring them up in my heart,” quietly, because I didn’t know where to start, and, to tell the truth, was afraid to start, because I was afraid I might screw it up.

But was I an artist all those years?

Well, I think so. My mind was behaving like the mind of an artist – observing, categorizing, dreaming, preferring this to that, trying to understand everything by making a story out of it.

Was I a working artist?

Sort of. I was playing a lot of guitar, exerting my taste in that way, sporadically sitting down to write “stories,” which were really just soppy, shapeless prose poems. And I was reading, although badly, in a way that was limited by my lack of self-confidence, i.e., I tended to read what I already knew I liked, instead of exploratorily.

So, I was definitely not one of those “natural writers” our Questioner describes. No one, I promise, would have talked to me or read my writing and thought: “Someday, this guy is going to publish.”

I wasn’t confidently writing every day, didn’t identify as a writer. Wasn’t a prodigy of any kind, was far from the best-read person in my peer group.

But I will say – I had a certain something. It was an energy, for sure, that, at that point was manifesting in ways that I now find kind of embarrassing. I had, uh, a zest for life. (Here, I could insert some photos of myself at the Colorado School of Mines, living it up, cracking jokes, lifting weights, earnestly playing Dan Fogelberg songs at a coffeehouse, confidently sporting a proto-mullet. Could, but I won’t, but…trust me.)

There was something happening there, but no one could have said just what. 😊

I’ve mentioned this here before but I always loved this slogan used by the New York State Lotto: “Hey, you never know.”

As someone who’s taught writing for many years, I don’t know a better mantra for anyone involved in the arts.

Why do we need to know? To know if we’re approaching writing correctly? To know if we started too late (or too early)? To know who is going to make it or isn’t, to know if so-and-so “has it” or doesn’t?

The more we know – the more we insist on being sure – the more doors we close.

For example, if we have too many ideas about how a story we’re working on should be, or must be, or is intended to be, we might miss out on what the story itself has in mind for us.

So, “hey, you never know” is a form of admitting that there might exist a potential within something that we put at risk by overmanaging things.

This can be true, as well, about a person’s artistic path.

We “never know” how an artist might suddenly appear in the world.

Someone can nurture a desire to write something for a long time and then suddenly, all of that percolation time creates a magnificent result; someone can delay writing because the current manifestation of their talent is disappointing to them and then can suddenly erupt, out of sheer frustration, into some new mode. All that waiting might have felt, in real-time, like the result of some core inadequacy: they couldn’t, just couldn’t, work within the conventional form, and this felt, from inside, like failing. But in fact, the conventional form wasn’t sufficient, and the new form hadn’t arrived for them yet, and the “artistic work” was exactly equal to waiting, and all of the discomfort and even shame they might have felt while waiting was exactly what “being an artist” required of them, at that time. Someone might have to live a long time before the thing they were born to say becomes fully formed and accessible to them.

Next time you get stuck, or feel like a fraud, or that you’re wasting your time, try it: just say to yourself, very kindly, “Hey, you never know.”

This is a statement of faith in the process.

For me, “faith in the process” means trying to nurture a positive, hopeful feeling about whatever it is my artistic self seems to be up to, no matter how wacky or blurry or puzzling or inept it may seem at the time - believing that my artistic self is on to something, and that part of my role might be to stay out of the way and trust/be patient.

So: I try to go easy on my artistic self, treat it as a friend, not judge it too harshly, give it permission to wander off the path, make a mess. I am, in effect, saying to my artistic self, “Oh, you poor little guy. You are not me. You are your own separate entity. And you are trying so hard. I wish you well, and I’m going to try to be a good friend to you.”

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Remember those detective shows, where there’s a gifted, crazy detective, who’s always racing off after a wild hunch, and there’s an assistant, who does a lot of shrugging and following?

I think of myself, artistically, as both of those people.

There’s the playful “detective” side – intuitive, goofy, non-judgmental – that creates the text, and knows things he shouldn’t, by rights, know. And there’s the assistant, responsible for keeping some semblance of order, and ensuring that some kind of progress is being made…the part of myself that is always auditing and assessing, asking, “How am I doing? Is this a waste of time? Should I change course?”

But we can coach that assistant, make that entity kinder and, therefore, more helpful.

Ideally, the assistant is going to be doing a lot of – well, not only shrugging and following – but also encouraging. “You want to try that? Go for it. You’re probably exactly right. And if not – I still support you.”

Kind of like that.

A kinder assistant makes for a more daring detective.

Or, to go deeper into the woods/say it another way: what if we tried to believe that everything we did and felt (and avoided, and screwed up) was, not only part of our long artistic journey, but was the journey? (Even the embarrassing old drafts we can’t bear to read now, even that stupid wasted summer where we wrote a whole novel from the point-of-view of a twig, for God’s sake.)

A corollary of “Hey, you never know” is: try to be at peace with whatever you’re doing. Trust that something is working itself out, even through your errors (especially through your errors).

What if whatever approach you’re taking is exactly right? What if your subconscious is incredibly bright, and is leading you – has always been leading you – in the right direction?

Or: what if you just tried to assume that this was the case?

This can be a weirdly powerful thing.

For some reason, this image comes to mind: a friend is very hungry, for a specific thing, but she can’t say what, exactly. You are in a new city, where there’s a sprawling food court.

You very patiently let your friend wander around, confident that, in time, her good sense will lead her to exactly the right meal for her

You are showing trust in the food court (all those cooks, doing their best), and in your friend (there she is, alive and smart and attentive to her own desire). All will be well, because both the food court and your friend, as you are visualizing them, are good and adequate and even brilliant.

The food court is the vast expanse of artistic potential (or, we might say, the incredible range possible within the short story form); your friend is your artistic self.

And (to come somewhat back to the question), one form of this generosity is to say to ourselves: “However I got here, I am in the perfect place to do beautiful work. No conventional wisdom, no forbidding idea about what an artist’s life should look like, or the path an artist “must” or “should” take, can interfere with that perfect placement, if only I believe in it.”

So, anyway, my hunch, dear Questioner, is that, yes, you are “a natural artist who just took a very long time to discover it.”

There’s a comfort and a confidence in your tone that tells me that you’ve largely answered this question for yourself already. What kept you from discovering that you were an artist, it sounds like, might well have been some preconceived notions about how an artist is supposed to feel or behave. And that’s O.K., actually – my guess is, your practice and dedication have been informed positively by that delay.

I wish you the very best with your work, and thanks for the question.

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P.S. I want to offer a recommendation from a long-time Story Club member Rosanne Scott: the beloved writer and teacher Garth Greenwell is offering a seminar on the novels of Henry James, based on a class he has taught for many years in the MFA program at NYU. Sounds like it would be an amazing experience. You can read more about it here.

Hi everyone,

As I mentioned last time, I flew out to L.A. this week and had to put some things in order there, including picking up a car I’m going to need for this busy fall. I was also looking forward to the drive as a chance to relax a little and see what I could absorb of this wacky place called America. Also, to be honest, I’m still wrecked from our loss of our dear dog, Guin, and was hoping this trip might help with that a little, too.

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Am just about to fly back to L.A., so I can drive back across the country again (long story), so I thought it might be a good time to revisit a Story Club favorite activity….

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So, I am happy to deliver the glad tidings that tickets for the opera of Lincoln in the Bardo (composed by Missy Mazzoli, with libretto by Royce Vavrek, based on the book by yours truly), are on sale now, here:

https://www.metopera.org/season/2026-27-season/lincoln-in-the-bardo/.

Let’s sell this baby out, with the special power of Story Club. (Also, it’s really good.) :)

The link above has info about the schedule and cast and so on. The premier is October 19, 2026.

You can buy as many tickets as needed for any date, but if there is a group of 10 or more it will go through group sales, with a 10% discount.

Also, as appropriate, you might consider the Met Under 40 program: a pre-show party at the Met ninety minutes before curtain and very reasonably priced orchestra seats. This is scheduled for Thursday, Oct 26 for Bardo:

https://www.metopera.org/season/tickets/met-under-40/

I just received this magnificent, almost unimaginably generous response to your questions, from Ruth Ozeki. What a person! THANK YOU, RUTH!

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Dear friends,

Because you’ve all been so kind about our dear Guin, I’m just writing to let you know that she passed on Thursday evening, peacefully, beautifully, radiating so much love and patience, inspiring us….just the way she lived.

So much to say about this dear being but I’m wrecked by this and can’t manage it right now.

Just….thank you all so much for your support and for being such a beautiful community.

I’m going to turn the comments off but just please take a moment for a warm thought of Guin and of all the pets we love so much.

Love,

George

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First, thanks for all of the warm wishes for Guin, who is having a pretty good week, all things considered. She’s fourteen and, a little over a year ago, had a blood clot in her lungs, and developed pulmonary hypertension. She sends her love and thanks. She is a real fighter, with a truly gentle heart. We are doing our very best for her, and so is she, for us.

Second, I wanted to let you all know that I’ll be posting a link here on June 22 for single-show purchase of tickets for the Met Opera’s production of Lincoln in the Bardo. The opening is October 19 – would love to see and meet some of you there. It should be a great party.

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Third, a few months back I had the privilege of reading a galley copy of Ann Patchett’s new novel, Whistler , out this week. And it is a beauty.

The critics agree:

A rave by Helen Schulman in the New York Times..

Another here by Priscilla Gilman in the Boston Globe.….

And yet another here, by Ron Charles, at his excellent Substack.

What these reviews both pick up on, and what makes Ann’s work so rare and indispensable, is her unparalleled ability to represent human decency – to write entire books that feel accurately scaled to what real life feels like – no easy villains, no cynicism, lots of beautiful things (nature, emotion, friendship, humor) and characters intelligent enough to notice, and be grateful for, these gifts of grace.

The books are laced with gratitude, but it’s a realistic, non-soppy gratitude – the kind we all feel when, now and then, things go right, and we feel a beneficence acting in the universe that can’t be denied. The books also show hardship, and regret, and loss, all of that but, for my money, there’s nobody who suffuses those representations with more adult human functionality, more compassion, than Ann does. It takes a monumental spirit to write about the genuinely good, in a time when the superficial bad can sometimes seem to be winning. When I finish one of Ann’s books, I feel challenged to be more open to positive phenomenon – more open, that is, to the potential within me, more in touch with the things in life that are good and beneficial – less auto-snarky, let’s say.

In Whistler, I feel like Ann has done what great artists do – take the thing that only they can do and do it more purely. It’s a gorgeous story of friendship and recovery of affection, and it’s also a page-turner, in which the drama, for me, was all about tracking the author to see if she could make tension with such benevolent materials (she could) and about watching that sort of shadow-of-the-author emerge on the wall as the story was told.

Every novel is really the author making a claim about the way the world is, and the way we might exist in it, and how we might live in authentic relation to its truth; the shadow Ann’s author-self makes on the wall is one if immense confidence, and love, and faith that a person can indeed go through life loving the people and things of this world, and there is no weakness in that position, only the most profound strength.

The triumph of the novel is that there is nowhere in it in which the book or author strains to be uplifting or good – it just is, she just is.

It’s a perfect, artfully minimal expression of a current that has been running through Ann’s work since the beginning, here realized so beautifully that it makes me grateful to be alive in the same artistic world as her.

In other words: I recommend it with all my heart.

One thing I try to do to improve my teaching is to watch myself as I work, and then, in the classroom, be completely honest about what I found back at the work table.

This week, I noticed something that I thought I’d share, that might have to do especially with stories that are weird – that are non-realistic and require an additional level of buy-in from the reader.

What I noticed was that many (most) of my edits were in the service of simple believability – to make it so that the reader didn’t flinch or withdraw belief at that image or phrase. I found myself going through my text-in-progress again and again, as usual, but this week I noticed that mostly what I was asking myself was, “Would I believe it?” That is: “After reading this sentence, am I still under the spell of the story? Or am I beginning to smell “author at work?”

A few closer, frank, unrefined observations about this mode of editing:

1) It has everything to do with the feeling I have as I read, rather than with rational thought.

2) The solution is often omission – if a bit is proving hard to sell, I’ll try to cut it or go around it – this might indicate that the story wants to go in a simpler, easier-to-swallow direction.

3) Likewise on the sentence level: simpler “sells” better (sometimes). I’ll sometimes find that I’ve tried to cram too much into a sentence, which causes the CLEVER! Indicator to shoot way up, which causes the BELIEF! indicator to drop like a stone.

4) Sometimes I can distract from an unlikely event or image by way of humor. Or, sometimes a particularly good sentence – lyrical or original – will do the trick. If this happens – if the reader (that is, me, as I re-read) is charmed enough to accept the new fact or image because of its nice packaging – that new sentence or phrase is in (in the story).

5) I am always looking for something elemental (of a sentence, a scene, a plot development)…a simple version, that the reader will accept rather automatically, because it feels correct/mythic/unadorned. Not embellished or heavily ornamented but just sort of “first-order there.” Reading it, the reader just goes, “Oh, wow, that just happened, oh boy!” instead of “Wait, could that even happen?”

6) In that same spirit, I always try to make things happen in the most quotidian or logical way. I try to make characters do things for the obvious reasons, or react realistically to events. And this seems especially true for stories with especially strange premises. It’s sort of a strategy of limiting the weirdness in a story. (If there are flying rabbits, let everything else in the story be just like our world – something like that – the reader will only accept so much non-normative stuff, maybe?)

7) Sometimes belief is engendered by letting the story and its characters express resistance, and then having the story rise to meet it. (If the reader is doubting Assertion A, let another character challenge Assertion A.) There are some giant ants the size of skyscrapers in your story. You fear the reader may resist, since ants that big don’t exist in the world. Have one character says, “But giant ants don’t exist!” Then, even if another character just says, “I know, right?” the reader feels that their resistance has been noted.

8) The main thing is to see, as I’m re-reading, if I would believe it. If I don’t, I don’t. It’s visceral – the same kind of assessing-for-truth one does in a real conversation. Disbelief is indicated by this slight internal wince as I’m reading, like…”Nah. Nope. No, it didn’t. No, it wouldn’t.” Another way of saying this: I imagine my reader going, “Ech, that’s bullshit,” and closing the book.

9) This feeling I’m calling disbelief can also be associated with a moment when my agenda is suddenly showing. Suddenly there’s the author and their Big Plan, sticking out like a sore thumb. And I see that the event didn’t organically, “really” happen – the author just needed it to happen. (Even if that author was me).

10) If something can’t be told in such a way that the reader will believe it, then it’s not allowed in the story. The events that end up in a story are the ones that survived the believability test – they also, for reasons I can’t explain, tend to be, in the end, the ones that guide the story to its highest meaning.

There’s nothing fancy about this process, at least not for me. It’s just trying out a sentence that indicates an event and then either 1) believing it or 2) recoiling because I don’t believe it/some resistance has arisen. Then I try to say it in another way – more subtle, less showy. I will try to cut the offending words (the ones that made my resistance rise). I might find myself looking askance at the larger structural unit that led to this moment. Then, eventually, if there’s no fixing it (no making it so that I would believe it) – I cut it and make way for something else (or sometimes that whole section has to be reconsidered, or moved, or set aside for later).

The idea, I guess, is that by the time I’m done, there should be no, uh, Belief Bumps, let’s call them, in the whole story.

Allow me to close with a specific example, from my story “CommComm” (which we’ve discussed here at length before ).

There is a moment on page 205 of the collection the story appears in, which is called In Persuasion Nation.

The first-person narrator works in an Air Force office which has been filled for a day or two with a bad and mysterious odor. We’re about to find out that the smell is coming from two dead bodies hidden in a closet.

Now that’s a tough sell. Why? Well, one, it’s unlikely, doesn’t happen much, etc. Two, because it feels sort of movie-esque, you know? DEAD BODIES! It feels like the author is trying to ratchet up the import of the story (which, believe me, he was).

So here’s the bit. (Rimney, by the way, is the first-person narrator’s boss, and we’ll soon find out that he’s the one who found the bodies and hid them in the closet. Rimney’s been under a lot of pressure to report this bad smell to a department called Odors and he has been resisting, to the extent that, earlier in the story, he pretends to call them.)

Beginning of story text:

“You might have noticed earlier that I was not actually calling Odors,” Rimney says.

“I did notice that,” I say.

“Thing I like about you, you’re a guy who understands life gets complicated,” he says. “Got a minute? I need to show you something.”

I follow him back to CommComm. Which still stinks I follow him into the copier closer, which stinks even worse.

In the closet is something big, in bubble-wrap.

“Not to self,” he says. “Bubble-wrap? Not smell-preventing.”

End of story text.

I’d say that, by this point, as a reader, my resistance to belief has been surmounted. I just want to know what’s inside the bubble-wrap.

I wrote this story a long time ago, so I can look at it pretty objectively now, and say that the work of softening the reader’s resistance is done by way of a few discrete steps:

First, Rimney (at “You might have noticed earlier….”) brings the reader’s attention back to the smell. (He’s enacting #6, above.). And we understand that, whatever happens next, is going to be about that – his way of directly addressing this issue.

Second, there are a series of facts, having to do with the smell, that are facts, and are therefore hard to resist: CommComm does stink, it still stinks, the stink gets worse as we follow Rimney, to what he seems to be claiming is the source of the stink.

Then there’s this: “In the closet is something big, in bubble-wrap,” that, and the associated joke about bubble-wrap not being smell-preventing, are somehow mundane and real enough (and the slightly odd look of the word “bubble-wrap” on the page is also doing some work) to make me open up to whatever’s coming next (whatever turns out to be inside that bubble-wrap). It’s almost as if the surprise of that word makes me believe in the reality of that “something big” in there, and suddenly I’ve gone past doubting it exists, to wanting to know what’s inside it.

Then we’re going to get the news that there are bodies in there.

Now, to my ear, if the next bit goes:

“He slits open the bubble-wrap. Inside are two dead bodies,”….my belief slightly tails off. I feel, “Ah, this writer is trying to make his story more intense by way of introducing a murder” or something like that.

Whereas, if I say it this way:

“He slits open the bubble-wrap. Inside is this giant dirt clod” (I’m wondering what this clod is). “Sticking out of the clod is a shoe.” (OK, well, I see, and can accept, a shoe.) “In the shoe is a foot” (Yep, I see it.) And it’s a “rotting foot” which makes me see it (believe in it) that much more and ditto that “rotted sock.”

Also, the rhythm of the paragraph is somehow convincing:

“He slits open the bubble-wrap. Inside is this giant dirt clod. Sticking out of the clod is a shoe. In the shoe is a foot, a rooted foot, in a rotted sock.”

And then, there’s something about this next line that’s belief-enhancing:

“I don’t get it,” I say.

I think that’s because the reader does get it. (It’s dead bodies, stupid!) This also gives Rimney a chance to quickly provide an explanation (the bodies were found down in a construction site):

“Found down in the Dirksen excavation,” he says. “Thought I could stash them in here a few days, but phew.”

Again – that “phew” does a lot of work for me, somehow. (See #4 in the list above). It’s almost as if, re a hard-to-sell bit, there’s a spoonful-of-sugar aspect – a funny or particularly witty/unusual word choice is the sugar, for the medicine that is the hard-to-believe factoid you are trying to get the reader to swallow.

Compare this to:

In the copier closet were two dead bodies.

“From the Dirksen excavation,” he says.

I feel the authorial agenda lurking there, somehow.

Anyway, that passage goes on, and if you find it you’ll see that I’m using this same ethos throughout – hard-to-buy factoid gets softened with surprising word choice. On the next page, for example, the two men agree that the two corpses “look old-timey.”

All of this just to introduce this concept of believability as one aspect (dominant, I realized this week) of my editing process. And also to introduce the idea that….well, we all have our secrets. Sometimes we think “editing” just means “making something more true” or “introducing more of my own hard-won, real-life wisdom.”

But this belief thing is, for me, not that…and it’s deep. It has something to do with my choice of stories (I somehow find that I often want to tell big, exceptional, funny, genre-laced stories) but also with my personality – I’ve always been a people-pleaser and I feel that I intuitively know how to make you believe me, even if (God forbid) what I’m telling you isn’t true. That’s a life-skill I developed, for better or worse, that is (I think and hope) being used for good in my stories (while I try to expunge it in real life).

I’d love to hear similar thoughts from you on the deep, hidden, perhaps shameful, private methods and feelings you apply when you are editing, i.e., facing down a sentence that you wrote yesterday, that is subject to being changed today, in our continual pursuit of excellence. 😊

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Oh, and finally (sorry for the long post): a reminder that, over beyond the negligible paywall, we are engaged in a great discussion of a story called “Feelings,” by the marvelous Ruth Ozeki. The story is from her new collection, The Typing Lady, which just came out last week. Join us for some great talk about compassion in writing, and sympathy, and point-of-view, among many other things. We got a beautiful note from Ruth last time, about the genesis of the story, and on Sunday she’ll be answering some of our Story Club-generated questions on the craft of the story.

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So, today we’ll start working on Ruth Ozeki’s wonderful story, “Feelings.” I’ll have a few thoughts at the end of the post, but first I’m very happy and grateful to offer you an essay Ruth wrote just for Story Club, in which she discusses the genesis of the story.

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So, today we have the privilege of beginning work on a new story (“Feelings”) by the wonderful Ruth Ozeki. Ruth is a Booker Prize Finalist, who Dave Eggers has called, “One of our era’s most compassionate and original minds.”

A novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, Ruth is also a distinctive and soulful short story writer, as evidenced in her new (and first) collection, The Typing Lady and Other Fictions, just published earlier this week by Viking in June 2026.

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Hello, beloved Story Club,

I had an interesting experience this week.

I’d requested, from Substack, a way of putting all of my posts here, going back to the very first one (on my birthday, Dec 2, back in 2021 (!)), into a single word processing file. They kindly sent me a link and I spent a good solid day doing the conversion, which resulted in a single (mammoth) Word file of some 1288 single-spaced pages, containing every post I’ve ever made here.

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Some of them, as I read back through, I literally had no memory of writing. Others I remember with such fondness and a remembered sense of collective discovery - when we all turned a corner together on a story or an aspect of writing.

Here’s a list of all the stories we’ve covered, to the best of my knowledge:

1. Cat in the Rain – Ernest Hemingway (US)

2. An Incident - Lu Hsun (China)

3. The Stone Boy – Gina Berriault (US)

4. My First Goose – Isaac Babel (Russia)

5. I Stand Here Ironing – Tillie Olsen (US)

6. The Doll’s House – Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand)

7. The Gilded Six Bits – Zora Neale Hurston (US)

8. In the Basement – Isaac Babel (Russia)

9. Anyone Can Do It – Manuel Munoz (US)

10. Flowering Judas – Katherine Anne Porter (US)

11. The Lady with the Dog – Anton Chekhov (Russia)

12. CommComm – George Saunders (US)

13. Twenty Minutes – James Salter (US)

14. Her Father’s House – Maria Messian (Italy)

15. An Honest Thief – Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russia)

16. The Overcoat – Nikolai Gogol (Russia)

17. August – Bruno Schulz (Poland)

18. The Devil – Leo Tolstoy (Russia)

19. The Jilting of Granny Wetherall – Katherine Anne Porter (US)

20. Boule de Suif – Guy de Mauppasant (France)

21. The Child – Bobbie Louise Hawkins (US)

22. The Rockpile – James Baldwin (US)

23. Guy de Mauppasant – Isaac Babel (Russia)

24. Enemies – Anton Chekhov (Russia)

25. A Conversation with My Father – Grace Paley (US)

26. Light Breathing – Ivan Bunin (Russia)

27. Clay – James Joyce (Ireland)

28. Miss Furr and Miss Skeene – Gertrude Stein (US)

29. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (England)

30. After the Ball – Leo Tolstoy (Russia)

31. Death of Ivan Illych – Leo Tolstoy (Russia)

32. The Whistle – Eudora Welty (US)

33. The Dwarf Pine – Varlam Shalamov (Russia)

34. Paper Pills – Sherwood Anderson (US)

35. Young Goodman Brown – Nathaniel Hawthorne (US)

36. A Fabulous Animal – Samanta Schweblin (Argentina)

37. The Coffin Maker – Alexander Pushkin (Russia)

38. The First Full Thought of Her Life – Deb Olin Unferth (US)

39. Indian Camp – Ernest Hemingway (US)

    (If I’ve missed any, please let me know.)

The 1288-page document also contains every one of our “Office Hours” sessions (where I respond to your questions) and numerous entries in another, sort of miscellaneous, category called “Essays on Craft and Writing,” where we’ve talked about, among many other things, revision, the art of the short-short story, Orwell, my stories “The Falls” and “Sparrow, “ AI, some epic reader-recommendation lists, prompt-building….and much, much more.

I mention this partly because I was astonished to see how many pages had accrued, just through writing a few pages a couple of times a week, quickly, with some, but not much, revision.

Also, just to remind you all that this resource exists. If a person is a Paid subscriber, he or she can go back into these discussions at any time, review them, print them out, etc.

As I read through my file, I felt something was missing, and that was: your Comments. I suspect that if I included these, the page count would have been driven up into the tens of thousands. (But your Comments are preserved in the archive.)

Reading through my posts only made me realize just how essential the Comment aspect is to this whole Story Club enterprise. I mean, my essays are good, perfectly fine…but the Comment portion radically widens our explorations and takes us off in interesting directions that may or may not have much to do with the story in question.

It’s a living, breathing, evolving community, characterized by (as I heard again and again on my latest book tour, from journalists and other observers) its convivial and tolerant nature - a place that is rigorous and firm, where people stand their ground, and vigorously debate…but always (well, mostly always) in a civil and respectful way.

This, in my mind, is the real vocation of Story Club: to give us all a chance to practice, every day, that lost art of having a free, opinionated mind and putting that mind into play with other free, opinionated mind, in a way that says not, “I thought this and I am right,” but “I thought this; am I right?”

Believing that this can be done, and practicing it on other, living people is, I’m coming to believe, the great challenge of our time - to continue to be human and prefer being human and honor that which only humans can do, and, therefore, strive to get better at believing that other people are every bit as real as we are.

I particularly love (and often brag about) the fact that, if I ask, say, “Any Russian speakers out there, who can re-translate this passage?” or “Any neuroscientists, who might fact-check me on this?” I will always get a rich response from what I sometimes think of as The Story Club Braintrust.

What a resource!

Being part of this has also produced, for me, a much richer portrait of that mysterious entity called “My Readership.” I find that I start a new story now with a much more generous idea of who I’m writing to and for, made more confident by our interactions here that risk and difficulty will be tolerated and met and rewarded, as long as I remember to respect my audience - and getting to know you here has made that very easy to do.

So….thank you.

This resource will, I hope, continue to exist and be accessible for many years to come (and we will keep growing it for many years, too, I hope).

If nothing else, it will exist for future historians as a way of understanding that even in a harsh, violent time, characterized by aggressive public discourse, there was something else going on under the surface, that was thoughtful and kind, rigorous and curious.

And that thing was what was actually keeping the boat afloat.

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On Sunday, behind the paywall, a new story by a contemporary writer, who has a new book about to be released and has been kind enough to let us run one of her stories here, so we can all discuss it.

I won’t name her yet but…Sunday, you’ll know. And the story is a beauty.

P.S. Wanted to let you know that (speaking of the history of Story Club) a story by one of our most beloved members, Mary G. has just taken first place in a competition at Writer’s House Magazine…and here it is. Congrats, Mary, way to go!

Writers' Hour Magazine

[Fiction] Poof!

Poof! By Mary Guterson…

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2 months ago · 8 likes

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Courtesy of SC member LB - thank you!

Three Shots

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Today we wrap up “Indian Camp” - apologies for the long post. Lots to say about this one…

So, congratulations and thanks to all of you for making this journey through “Indian Camp” so epic and insightful.

Today, I’d like to share a few of my thoughts on this last section and the ending.

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Reminder: We’re discussing “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway, in four parts. Catch up with our discussion: Part 1 and Part 2. Today we’re discussing Part 3. Sunday, we’ll talk about Part 4.

So, right: escalation galore in Part 3.

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In case you missed it, we’re reading “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway, in four parts. Today we start Part 2. If you haven’t read part 1 you can go back here for the discussion. It’s a good one. Next week we’ll read Parts 3 (starting today) and 4 (on Wednesday).

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Over beyond the paywall, we’re in the middle of an epic discussion of Hemingway’s “Indian Camp.” Join us for some great talk about an escalatory masterpiece. Close-reading a story like this is a great way of calibrating one’s sense of pace and coming to a new understanding of what actually happens in a short story (how much, how quickly). We’re on an unusual and intense Wednesday/Sunday schedule, so no Office Hours question today…

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Also wanted to let you know about this podcast, hosted by John Spong, called One by Willie, on which I had the honor of appearing - the episode dropped yesterday. Each episode, John talks with one Willie Nelson fan about one Willie song. We talk about my early (very early) exposure to Willie’s music and then we hone in on one song associated with Willie, namely the great “Pancho and Lefty”, written by Townes Van Zandt.

The podcast - an evolving national treasure/archive - lives more generally here. It starts with Willie and his work and goes…everywhere.

John has featured folks from the music world (Bonnie Raitt, Lyle Lovett), but also Lawrence Wright, Brené Brown, and Ethan Hawke.

In other news, we made the trip across the country safely and are now in our new place. Guin is doing pretty well, with some ups and downs, and I am just getting my writing area set up, with lots of ambition (my reliable old pal) welling up. Always interesting to travel, see the world, come home and go, “Wait, what? I’m supposed to say something about all of that? But it’s so vast!”

But I will try.

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The story, “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway, was written when Hemingway was in his early 20s, describing the time of his childhood – so, say, around 1910. His family had a summer camp in Michigan. During that time, the word “Indian” would not have been considered pejorative (at least by the white culture). I’m going to use it in what follows, just in keeping with its usage in the story.

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So, I’d like to try an experiment here, a version of the “page at a time” exercise I offered in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. The story is “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway, a story that was very important to me as a young writer, just in terms of the sheer escalation within it.

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Thanks to TIME Magazine for including two of my books on their list of “25 Books That Capture This American Moment,” and especially for letting me praise Dispatches, by my friend and hero (may he rest in peace), the great Michael Herr.

Special thanks to Amanda Gorman for selecting Lincoln in the Bardo and to R.J. Palacio for selecting Vigil.

There’s a nice video here.

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Over beyond the (really quite low!) paywall, we’ve been discussing style.

One of the questions that’s come up is about the difference between voice and style. And I have to admit that I use these two absolutely interchangeably: to me, voice is style and vice versa.

This maybe demonstrates one difference between a theorist and a practitioner. I strongly consider myself the latter. I don’t know the difference and it doesn’t bother me not to know; it’s not a productive distinction for me.

Although there might be one way that I understand these terms as having slightly different meanings.

In stories like Elliot Spencer” or Fox 8,” I spent a lot of time working with the way the prose looked on the page. In the former, I used inter-sentence spacing to communicate the narrator’s struggle to speak and think after his brain had been wiped clean, and in the latter….well, the narrator is a fox who can’t spell very well.

Neither of those choices would be noticed if those stories were read aloud.

So, maybe, in my esthetic world, the way the language sounds when read aloud is “voice” and the way it reads on the page is “style?”

But honestly: to me, they’re the same. 😊

When editing, I think a lot about a quality I’d describe as looksound. How does the prose strike me as I silently (but not really silently) read it in my head, in terms of the way its sonic aspects intersect with its visual aspects?

Is it unusual? Is it cool? Does it have some “me” in it? Does it challenge the reader to rise up out of the plane of normal thinking and have a new look at life, on my terms?

My goal is to make the language seem like normal language, mostly, but supercharged. I suppose the underlying idea is that normal, everyday speech isn’t quite sufficient to represent what’s happening down here on Earth, not really, and so I have an urge to stylize it – organize it, speed it up, compress it, make it denser – rarefy it, essentially – not to be fancy or show off, but to make an experience for the reader that mimics or evokes the experience of being alive. (I’ve sometimes described this as “freakifying” the language.)

We have a language in which we do business (“The hospital? It’s at the corner of Main and 3^rd”) but that language only scratches the surface of what it means and feels like to exist in this world.

Maybe a swath of literary prose has the same relation to normal speech as a swath of music has to ambient sound. It’s a rarefication of the natural.

Now, why would a person want to do that? Why can’t we be satisfied describing things in “regular,” everyday, language? (Why can’t we be satisfied to just step outside and listen to street sounds?) Where’s the value in this “super-charging?”

The answer, I think, is: a non-normative style is somehow more ultimately truthful; more faithful to the reality of an actual lived moment.

In its departure from normal speech, it at least acknowledges the limitations of language and the fact that language is always a tool, that produces a mere approximation of truth.

Imagine a man walking into a Home Depot. On the banal, everyday level, we might just write: “Scott walked into the Home Depot, looking for nails.” That’s a perfectly good sentence, and a good example of the way much literary fiction is written these days, on the assumption that the meaning of the story comes from event, recounted simply, in plain, everyday language.

But is that it? Is that a true statement of that moment? Is that what that moment – that moment when one walks into a Home Depot – feels like from inside?

Anyway, I think that’s where style begins: in an attempt to do justice to a moment.

Now, many great stories operate within the “normal voice” convention. I mean, most do. That’s one way mystery is created – by omission. And we all know that dazzling stories (like Chekhov’s, say) can be built out of very simple language.

What I found out, years ago, is that I, personally, can’t make very good stories out of simple, or first-order-realistic, language. What I need to do is get the surface of the story jangly and energetic, and then everything else comes out of that. And to make a jangly, energetic surface, I have…well, I have to make myself believe in the character’s reality – I have to believe he or she is as real as me.

Just as we are always trying to do in real life.

And, just as in life, this begins in specificity.

If our story continues, “Having recently been laid off from his job at the steel mill, Scott wondered if Home Depot was hiring,” I recognize this as a thought someone (me, even) might have, while, at the same time, feeling somehow let down by the banality of that expression of the though – the way it only distantly approximates the way having a thought feels as one has it (which would be full of character, really: in the form of specifics, things specific to Scott’s way of thinking and speaking and so on, things that would render Scott more particular and vulnerable).

Whereas, if we consent to heighten the language, making it more specific and dense and atypical, we might get something like…

“Moving through the just-sprung-up Halloween section (the upblowing plastic ghosts, the baying werewolves in price-tagged tophats), Scott didn’t feel the old autumn-is-here joy, as he could still hear the attempted kindness in Miss Smelting’s voice as she said they were “letting him go to pursue bigger things,” and here, now, as he moved down the unending aisle of cleaning products (madly expensive-seeming now that he had no (zero) income), he imagined himself working here, orange-vested, competence-exuding, although, in truth, he knew nothing at all about tools and once, in fact, had nailgunned his left hand to a piece of drywall.”

Well, that’s not quite it. Although there’s something intriguing and promising (for me) about the sudden reveal of his incompetence there at the end.

But, if nothing else, we’ve got more of Scott now and I am starting to feel a little sympathy toward him.

Anyway, that’s an approximation of how I work – although the next step would be to do, like, a hundred rewrites of the above until it started to be good – that is, until it started to really sound like “me.”

And the trick is to keep my standards up (truly up) until that happens.

There are, of course, other ways of freakifying prose. Cutting is good: omitting everything we can that might be even slightly implied and thereby redundant. A story compressed in this way starts to feel strange and surprising, like life – it has that slightly malformed quality that tells us something is working besides the author’s intention.

One of the deepest truths I’ve come to realize over my nine million years of living is this: other people are just as real as I am. They really are, even though it doesn’t always feel that way.

Literature helps me feel this truth more viscerally, somehow. Seeking a less normative style is a form of enforced moving beyond my received understanding of the world, into something fresher.

Language always fails us. But literature can be a chance for it to fail with more embedded sympathy.

Thoughts, Story Club?

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Thank you for your robust response to my questions about style and Henry Green.

When some people hear “style,” they may think, “high style” - that is, they think of prose that operates in the upper/unnatural register, in order to be more expressive (prose that may be, purposely or otherwise, difficult to parse). So: Henry Green, Henry James, James Joyce, the Faulkner of “Absalom, Absalom,” and so on.

Of course, any piece of writing has style. Sometimes the style is simply a style that tries to vanish, so there’s just world there, no words - we might think of Hemingway at his best.

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