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.

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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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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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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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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We’ve been having a great time talking about Deb Olin Unferth’s story “The First Full Thought of Her Life,” over beyond the paywall. On Sunday, Deb answered our questions about the story. I asked if she had any images of the real-life model for the story and she, showing her characteristic generosity, sent me these:

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In February, we lost a great one - Michael Silverblatt, who, for many years, hosted the podcast “Bookworm.” I’ve been meaning to write something about this loss but I’ve found it hard - he was, simply put, the best and deepest interviewer I’ve ever encountered.

I always felt like we had a special relationship, although I suspect anyone he ever interviewed felt that way. He told me once that, before he interviewed someone, he would read or re-read their entire output. I could certainly feel that level of care on the other side of the desk. He was always generous and courteous - if he had a problem with something you’d written, he would approach this as if it had been a deliberate choice on your end, and it was up to him to try to reconcile it with his esthetic belief system. He was also a holder of strong opinions, developed over thousands of hours of deep reading. He had the confidence of someone who has done the work, for an entire, beautifully spent, life.

We always had great, jovial talks but then - every time I was there, save one - afterwards, in the hall, he’d say something that was on a slightly deeper, less public level, something that would, in some way, large or small, inflect the next book, something that, on two occasions, brought tears to my eyes. These weren’t tears of hurt, but the kind that can come when a person feels he’s been recognized, his work truly seen. He just was…making an observation, about the work, or about its relation to the person I seemed, to him, to be - but I could feel all of his intense reading of my work behind the observation.

So, thank you, Michael. You were huge in my writing life. As I wrote, I was always thinking, somewhere in my mind, of how much fun it would be to talk with you about the book, and how much I would benefit from it. And, weirdly, I find that I still feel that way.

You can find all of the conversations I had with Michael here. And - this is a treasure trove - ALL of Michael’s interviews here, on the KCRW website. And the guy interviewed some giants…Toni Morrison, Tobias Wolff, Zadie Smith, and Kazuo Ishiguro…and the list goes on and on.

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Now for our question of the week.

But actually, there are two questions, and I’ll offer a combined answer regarding something the two have in common.

So, Question One is:

Sorry to bombard you with some (and quite extensive) writing questions, but truth-be-told, it’s hard to find good advice about these sorts of things without (1) knowing a good author friend or (2) having a circle of author-friends, and Story Club is, for me, just like it is for a lot of good folks here, the closest thing to a good circle of author-friends I have.

I also apologize in advance for just the sheer amount of questions that turn into more questions here.

Just for some context, I’m a younger writer, so I know that a lot of people (rightly so) will say—and they have said—I don’t have the experience to publish. But, as I write and keep improving, I want to start improving in the way that only occurs once you share work and people tear it to shreds (just like a writing course I took one time), all the while making somewhat of a name for myself. So, to the absolute harm of my ego, I’ve begun to submit my work to short story lit mags; however, with each decline, I realize this is not leading me anywhere either. I’m stuck, I’ve realized.

So, here are my questions: I definitely have put in the work so far of writing and reading every day, but how can I find an editor to force me into the next phase of my writing, so it can be good enough? And then, when the time comes, how can I find an agent to help me publish in the scary lit mag world? Is there anything I need to do in the meanwhile to better myself and my chances, like apply for a short story contest or something or that nature?

Thank you very much. I know you are very busy! Sorry for all the questions; I wish very badly to share my work with people one day (I know you understand the feeling).

And Question 2 is:

I’ve lately been working on a novel and have been editing the first 50 pages before moving on to the rest. A few friends have read them and have noted something that I think I’ve always struggled with in the back of my mind as a writer: trusting the reader. In this case, it’s manifesting as a number of asides and parentheticals that explain a character’s motivations a little more or their thoughts or even the world around them. Part of the reason I think I’m inclined to do this is because I’m building this world from a slightly fantastical premise (not unlike your own works) and want to sell it more. It’s not that I don’t trust the reader’s intelligence, but I believe it’s that I’m not fully trusting my writing to guide the reader to where I want them to go. So I guess my question is: how do you toe the line between (over)explaining story, motivations, world, etc. and trusting the reader to fill in the blanks?

Thank you for your questions, you two dear SC members.

I felt the urge to combine these because both involve the question of taking ownership of one’s work.

There’s a natural tendency - in the context of Story Club, in the context of the larger how-to-write complex - to adapt the idea that if we just “do it right,” all will be well.

But isn’t it true that what we really want from the writers we read is some sense that the person, inspired by their buffeting trip through life, has grabbed the reins? And is doing it their own damn way? That they are working out of what thrills them, rather than what they think might pass for good, evaluated by some outside jury?

Sometimes, doing it the wrong way - understanding but then denying “authority” can convey a sense of originality.

Over the revising life of one of my stories, there’s always a moment when, having been a good literary citizen (knowing the meaning I’m trying to convey, being sure of how the story is doing its work) I get discontent with the part of me that only wants to placate and please some imaginary (and not very friendly) panel of experts, and another part of me appears, sort of defiantly, that doesn’t care what they think (and also secretly knows that this not-caring is ultimately going to produce a work that will win those grouches over).

So, Questioner One, you ask: “How can I find an editor to force me into the next phase of my writing, so it can be good enough?”

The simple answer is: you have to become that editor.

I think we all know the feeling, when locked into The Story That Won’t Be Finished, of wanting to turn to some outside authority who can sanely, methodically, tell us how to get out of it.

When I’m there, these days, I start seeking another (familiar) feeling: the “Oh, God, no one is coming to save me from this story” feeling. Terrifying! But true.

The only antidote, in that moment, in my experience, is a stronger belief in one’s own esthetic. A more defiant seeking of one’s own opinion. What pleases you? Delights you? What gives you a slightly naughty, defying-the-rules feeling that, secretly, however you know, is right?

And when I say “a stronger belief in one’s own esthetic,” this means: feeling free to look deeper for what pleases and delights you. To look past what you’ve been told to what you can really feel. Let that internal list you have (of what should please, should delight) fall away and listen for the quiet voice of your own true taste.

It’s there, but it’s shy.

Questioner Two: same answer, really. You asked: How do you toe the line between (over)explaining story, motivations, world, etc. and trusting the reader to fill in the blanks?

When I was on tour just now, I noticed something: so many good writing questions (questions that, like yours, come out of the questioner’s genuine perplexity, borne out of many hours of writing) can be answered like this: “Yes, good question.”

And then…silence.

That is: the question is the one that you, the questioner, have chosen to ask, of all the questions you might have asked, and that means it’s likely the question, for you, at this moment. (The key to whatever’s obstructing your progress)

The asking itself is of some benefit.

If I wasn’t on tour, in public, but in a class or office hours, I’d respond: “That is a great question, that can only be answered by you, and not theoretically, from above, but only line-by-line, by the decisions you make at specific places in your story.

But the fact that that was the question you chose to ask, tells me that it’s a live question for you and central to your progress.

There’s always, of course, trial advice to give, locally. “Don’t worry about an agent or contests just yet, Questioner One. Come to a place where you really feel you are owning your own work first,” for example.

Or, “Questioner Two: do two radical edits of the same story; in one put in all the asides and, in the other, cut anything even vaguely resembling as aside out - that is, don’t trust the reader at all in the first version and trust her completely in the second. Then read both back-to-back and let something wash over you. (Something will.)

But I think it’s good, now and then, to remind ourselves that art isn’t a job we do well - it’s a job we do uniquely, as only we could do it.

It’s a yelp, it’s discretionary, the world can (maybe) live without it but it doesn’t want to. It’s your offering and your job (your vocation) is to get as much YOU in it as you can…and someone else’s advice, no matter how well-intended, can only take you so far.

Thoughts, Story Club?

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Finalizing this post in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where I just had the honor of participating in the University of North Dakota Writers Conference - which was founded in 1970 and has been happening continuously ever since.

Someone gave me a record of the writers who’ve attended over the years, and the entry for 1975 caught my eye: John Barth, Wendell Berry, William Gass, Ken Kesey, N. Scott Momaday, Ismael Reed, and Alice Walker (!). And 1978 wasn’t bad either: John Ashberry, Amiri Baraka, William Burroughs, Ring Lardner, Jr., and Story Club favorites Tillie Olsen, and Eudora Welty.

A great privilege to attend, meet so many nice people, and be interviewed by the wonderful Amber Sparks, author of (among other books) Happy People Don’t Live Here.

I will now sleep for three hours, and get (I hope) on the 5 am flight back home.

But first, our question of the week!

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Q.

My question is thus: are we finally allowed to drop the quotation marks? (which remind me of prison bars). After reading Vigil and Prophet Song by Paul Lynch I can’t help but notice that the bars have been taken off. In the case of Prophet Song even the “He said, She said,” is gone. In Vigil you are necessarily stuck with Mel G and Mel R and a cast of thousands so perhaps there’s no way around it. Dialog can create nice space on the page (except in P Song where the intended effect is claustrophobic). But I always hate having to load “he said, she saids” into the flow of my dialog or having to come up with some clever workaround like - “You are completely to blame for my confusion,” he vocalized while reading his mental etch-a-sketch. “You are a pain in the…”, Susan slammed the door.

It seems you were dealing with these questions while writing and at the readings. What do you think? Are the rules loosening? Are we finding our way to a bright new dawn? Will the editors let us go there?

A.

I think we are allowed to do whatever we want, no exceptions.

Of course, we have to deal with the fallout from that. And we might want to have some rationale for any sort of departure from convention – not a logical, articulated rationale, but even just a hunch – a hunch that this will be better than that.

Part of the fun, with art, is to do something a little verboten or naughty and then make it work – the reader feels that, I think, and likes the panache of it, especially if that departure isn’t just random.

In my case, I make the “quotation marks or not” decision on a case-by-case basis, truly. It’s just a decision I make as I get to the first bit of talking. My “rationale” is just that it feels right, whichever way that decision goes. Vigil has none; a recent story, “Thursday,” does use quotation marks. There’s probably some deep rationale but I don’t know what it is.

But let’s talk “fallout.”

I don’t think editors generally object to the no-quote-mark convention, which has been around since at least the stories in Dubliners by James Joyce, and probably long before that.

The advantage of not using quote marks has something to do with the non-interruptive nature of that convention. Because the spoken words aren’t announcing themselves as such, they are just one more component of the visual, on-page, presentation…or of the associated verbalism that occurs there in our head, as we read, which sometimes feels right.

I personally don’t mind the “he said/she saids” (and don’t love it when I can’t figure out who is saying a line) but am not crazy about adding things to them….you know: “Get thee behind me,” he exclaimed/ejaculated/burst out.

I feel that the tone of a statement should be implied by the words themselves. I don’t mind the repetition of the identifiers and, in fact, I think these can be part of the larger poetry of a dialogue section – we just have to take them into account, treating them as of equal sonic value as the spoken bit. (Hemingway is a master of this, by the way.)

In other words, we try to make the whole dialogue swath, identifiers included, read with good rhythm and sound, including the identifiers.

With Vigil, I could make the case that most, nearly all, of the “talking” isn’t talking at all but a sort of psychic mental exchange between different dead characters and sometimes KJ Boone. But that argument doesn’t hold up, since the speech of the living characters isn’t indicated with quotation marks either. (I think I tried that, at one point, but it felt intrusive and off.)

With any departure from the norm, we want to think, as courteously as possible, about its effect on the reader.

I’ve read a good number of student stories in which the writer has decided to eschew quote marks. My job there, as I edit, is to identify places where the convention is making it unnecessarily hard on the reader, usually by not making it clear where the talking starts and ends. (Sometimes this might be the intention but I think usually not).

So, say we have:

I never want to see you again, Rick said. You’re always borrowing money and not paying it back. A dog across the street turned around in three quick circles. And it’s not like I’m made of money. The dog barked, sat, began to whine. That’s it.

Well, to my ear, the writer is making it hard for no payoff. If he’d just said:

I never want to see you again, Rick said. You’re always borrowing money and not paying it back.

A dog across the street turned around in three quick circles.

And it’s not like I’m made of money.

The dog barked, sat, began to whine.

That’s it.

…is that better? A little. But for clarity, I’d do it with the speech identifiers (the “he said/she said” part).

I never want to see you again, Rick said. You’re always borrowing money and not paying it back.

A dog across the street turned around in three quick circles.

And it’s not like I’m made of money, Rick said.

The dog barked, sat, began to whine.

That’s it, Rick said.

But, truly: it’s up to us.

The larger principle is this: we are allowed to do anything. Will there sometimes be a cost (to clarity, to readerly engagement, to our publication prospects). There will! Should we take these into account? I think we should, especially if clarity, readerly engagement, and/or our publication prospects matter to us.

I remember once seeing Frank Conroy teach a class. He drew this big arc on the board with a “W” on one end (for WRITER) and an “R” on the other (for READER) and he said that any work is going to fall somewhere on the arc - either trying to please the writer (maybe a difficult, self-referring work like, say, Finnegan’s Wake) or the reader (an easy, popular, very accessible airport read). Conroy then said, “You might be thinking you should split the difference, and put your book right in the middle of the arc.” But no: he wasn’t suggesting that but, rather, saying that, you could put your book wherever you liked, only you had to accept the consequences. If you put it way over on the W side - don’t complain when no one else but you can make sense of it and it doesn’t sell. If you opt to put it way over on the R side - don’t complain if you fail to get high-end literary cred.

But you, the writer, get to choose. Period.

Often, when I’ve done something odd in a story, I just say, “OK, oddness – you’re in for now. But I’m going to have to ask you to justify your existence.” That is, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing that “just because” or to distinguish myself as an edgy, rebel-of-a-writer who doesn’t care about what anyone thinks of him. No: I am someone who is working hard to use the entire pallet of effects available to me, in order to make my story more special and original.

I can give a quick example. When I first started Vigil, I had the book in the same format as Lincoln in the Bardo and there were two ghosts in attendance at the bedside of: a dead guy from the 19^th Century (who could have stepped right out of Lincoln in the Bardo) and a younger, working-class woman who’d died in the 1970s.

After working on this model for a few weeks, it finally dawned on me that the book didn’t require that structure (it hadn’t “asked for it” in the way that LitB had). And it felt very slow in that format.

So I decided to choose one narrator and stick with that person.

I chose the woman – Jill “Doll” Blaine. But then I found I was having trouble cutting certain bits of the male dialogue – I liked the sound of it and it did a perfect job of setting certain things up.

So (and here’s the accommodation of the non-normal mode): I just dropped the bits I liked from the male speaker into the female speaker. And made a note: That’s weird and will eventually have to go, unless it earns its keep.

I left it like that for quite awhile, always softly asking myself, “Why is she talking so weird?”

In time – spoiler alert – it became clear that she herself contained two consciousnesses – one from her actual (now ended) life, one from her current state (angelic/ghostly/”elevated.”)

That development in the book was suggested by the anomaly in the prose, in other words.

So: excess that occurs to us by way of feeling….and then some textual reason for that excess to be there (which makes it not an excess).

So, I don’t know about that “bright new dawn” but I think that, if we believe in the choice we’ve made, and accept all of its consequences, editors will, yes, happily go there with us.

Thoughts about this, Story Club?

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A few quick announcements - first, of this interesting event happening in D.C. on Saturday, April 25, 2026 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM:

More details here.

I won’t be there except in spirit but have lots of affection and admiration for the organizers - and love anything that honors Oak Hill (where Lincoln in the Bardo was set) and Mt. Zion.

Some of you may have noticed that the short film The Singers, based on the Turgenev story featured in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, won an Oscar last week. It’s a lovely film and congrats to everyone involved.

Just a reminder that over beyond the very low, really quite minor paywall, we’re going to be discussing a Chekhov story that, in my view, is in the mid-range of his brilliance - it isn’t quite as great as his best. We can, of course, disagree on this (and I suspect some of you will) but the point is to consider that any writer is going to exhibit a range in quality, and looking at which distinguishes his (say) B-minus stories from his A-pluses will tell us important things about, not only the flavor of that writer’s approach, but also about the story form itself.

Join us over there for what I’m sure will be a lively discussion on Sunday.

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Now for our question of the week:

Q.

I was listening to your interview with Ezra Klein, and I’m most of the way through “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.” The question I have is not a writing-related question, I realize, but I’m asking anyway. In “A Swim...” you told the mesmerizing story of flying in a plane that was being tossed around and was plummeting at one point and seemed certain to crash, and a boy sitting near you asked if this was normal, and you lied and said yes. I may have gotten the details a bit off, but I remember the story because, in the discussion of “Master and Man,” you brought it up, to expand on the theme of a “better death”--that Vasily is terrified when he sees the wormwood and realizes nothing is left but death, but when he comes upon the freezing Nikita, Vasily feels emboldened--there is something he can control, after all--and he lies on top of Nikita, thereby saving him. You said that telling the boy calming words also calmed you, and if the plane had crashed, it would have been a “better death” for you--whatever that means (a death as a human who has shown his humanity one last time).

In contrast, at around 40:00 of the interview, you discuss the nature of comfort, and you say comfort is truth. You give the example of being stuck in a cabin and the wolves are outside. Comfort is not found in failing to acknowledge the danger, but in admitting it; there are wolves, and that’s awful.

I was trying to reconcile the seemingly opposite thoughts: is comfort telling the lie or the truth? But I realized it’s a matter of context, right? For adults, who fear the unknown more than anything, comfort is knowing the truth, and knowing that it’s bad (when it is), and having their fear accepted and acknowledged. Maybe because, when we know the worst, we see that we can stop trying for better, and it’s a relief. But comforting a child may be in lying to them: especially if the situation is dire, allowing them to believe that things will improve is best--because this lie will work, if told by a trustworthy-seeming adult, and since the future (in the case of your near-crash) was only minutes long (or, at least, that seemed likely), there was no point in making it a harrowing one for the child.

In a way, then, Vasily took the truth of being about to freeze to death upon himself, but at the same time, he gave the possibility of life to Nikita. So the lie became true, for Nikita.

Thank you.

A:

How interesting. I think part of the reason I felt all right telling that kid that everything was fine was because – well, at that point, it wasn’t a given that we would, for sure, die. Things were looking bad but we weren’t exactly plummeting earthward quite yet. So for me to say, “We’re about to die,” wouldn’t have been true.

I also suspect that I tell that story in a pithier way than it actually happened. I may have said, “Yes, it’s supposed to be like this,” or I might have said “I’m not sure but I think it will be fine.” I like to think that if it had become more dire, I would, in fact, have leveled with him – but I can’t say for sure. I can imagine a world where, had things got worse, and he’d started screaming or something, that might have pushed me into a more honest mode (assuming I wasn’t screaming myself, in that conjectural future.)

**

I know that the struggle for me in that moment was trying to get myself squared away with the truth that it might go very badly. That was a lot. And I didn’t get there, because the true pre-crash moment didn’t come. I only got as far as the denial step – basically my mental tapeloop was just going, “No, no, no, not yet, no.”

What I remember most from that moment was that, as soon as I noticed that kid there beside me, and became aware of how scared he was, and turned my mind toward him, some old instincts took over – teaching, parenting. This gave me some relief, stepping outside of my own fear like that, being drawn out by old and good habits.

The comfort for me consisted in the fact that I turned my energy outward and, in that process, remembered who I was – or who I had been in my better moments (who I had tried to be all my life).

For the kid, I imagine that if there was any comfort, it was just the fact that I’d heard his question and responded and so now we were in it together – he wasn’t just sitting on that plane, that might be crashing, all alone.

**

Speaking for myself, I know I experience more anxiety when I’m trying to keep a truth from myself and, conversely, less anxiety in that moment when I’m able to turn and look at what the truth really is.

This is true in writing too. I think we all know that feeling when part of the mind realizes something isn’t right in our story or novel, while another part of the mind frantically defends the thing. (“It’s been good for many months now!”) That tension makes for anxiety and unpleasantness – but these are probably necessary, because, in time, the unbearability of it all might make us consider a new path, or a solution we hadn’t considered might come into sight, just from the sheer discomfort of trying to maintain a conflicted mind.

I’ve had some very good experiences in that holy moment when you turn to yourself and go, “Yeah, this really isn’t working.” What a weight gets lifted! Everything is possible again.

So, I do think that truth is comfort – but I think Ezra’s question was coming out of some issues raised in my recent novel, Vigil, specifically if I thought Jill was good at comforting Boone (I think she was not) and, if not, what such comfort might have looked like. We might say that the Frenchman was closer to the mark – he was trying, it could be said, to shock Boone into taking some responsibility for his actions, in the “wrathful deity” tradition, in which a teacher can be rough and crude and even insulting, if this is what it takes to dislodge a student from a harmful habit of way of thinking.

Anyway, thanks for the question.

I find myself thinking of a great story by Robert Stone, called “Helping,” that ran in The New Yorker back in 1987, and takes up the question of if one person can ever really help another, and, if so, how, exactly. It’s a classic - so deep, funny, and tightly written.

Story Club, any thoughts on this question of comfort and truth? Examples from your life, when telling the truth felt like comfort (and when it might not have)?

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Hi everyone,

First, two quick announcements, one sad, one happy.

Sad: someone has created a fake Instagram account called @georgesaunders_author. It’s not me, I’m not on Instagram at all, and I will never contact you in any way except, rarely, from my Story Club email account.

Happy: I had the honor of being asked to write an afterword to a new book of photos by George Harrison. It was announced by Random House a few days ago, here. It will be out in October 6, 2026.

As you read this, I am HOME, done with the tour. So grateful that I was able to go and that it all went so well. A few weeks before I left, my dad was in and out of the ER a couple of times, our dog Guin wasn’t doing so well, my wife Paula’s back was out and mine was on the way, and I thought I might have to cancel.

But I didn’t have to: my dad got better, and Guin did too, and had a really nice time in Pasadena, and Paula’s back improved and so did mine.

So I want to just spend a moment contemplating the wonder of that: things went well, they actually did.

Because sometimes they do. 😊

And thanks again, to all of you who came out to the events – your support meant the world to me, every night. It’s pretty fun, going on book tour, but it’s not without challenges – it can get lonely, and one is constantly made aware of the fragility of the ego (reviews come in and aren’t always good – you’re in some strange new place and begin doubting yourself, your book, your shtick) and there’s nothing like a friendly crowd to push those feelings back.

So, again: thanks.

I want us to get back to reading some new work soon but I hope you’ll allow me one more Office Hours-type session while I settle in back home…

Q.

First off, thank you, George.

I remember learning so much from your craft talk at the Vermont Studio Center between the publication of “Civil War Land In Bad Decline” and “Pastoralia.” All these years later, your metaphor of “Hank the dock worker,” to explain the blue collar strain of your writing personality, still lives in my mind rent free. And now to have you on Substack sharing your insights weekly - what a generous public service to anyone who cares deeply about literature and the creative process. Thank you.

In your recent interview with Rick Rubin you shared an anecdote of a music teacher who pulled a Rilke on you by saying you must change your life. There was something very chilling in your memory of that admonishment, especially in contrast to the non-judgmentalness of the two teachers who separately fostered your love of literature and led you to the Colorado School of Mines. I wondered if you could unpack the exchange for us and how it might have impacted your evolution as a writer since I sensed the exchange incited a deep self-knowledge. And since your guidance on writing is very much ways in which we can all cultivate a deep self-knowledge from an awareness of our particular taste to the condition of our mind and body when we’re writing well, I wonder what that moment did for you as a writer and teacher? My hunch is there is a powerful lesson in that moment for anyone pursuing a particular path and the necessity of cultivating self-knowledge in order to avoid bullshit, which will lead to both bad writing and unhappiness. I couldn’t help to see another parallel with the friend’s father from your intro to “Civil War Land In Bad Decline,” who saved you a lot of hurt with his no-bullshit wisdom.

Long time listener, first time caller.

A.

Yes, that was a deep and, well, lightly shaming experience… :)

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Writing this early Wednesday morning from Austin, where I had a fun event last night with Judy Maggio, Texas broadcasting legend - thank you, Judy. I’m on to Houston today, then Dallas on Thursday, San Diego on Friday - and home, tour done.

Thanks, so much, to all of you who’ve come out to these events - it’s all been so much fun and so inspiring. Judy closed last night with a beautiful question about what these events do for me. And the simple answer was: they confirm what I’ve always said about imagining my reader. Turns out, my readers are generous, full of life, vastly intelligent and compassionate, and very much on my side. Thank you all, so much.

I wanted to let you all know about this urgent situation in Iran, involving the incarceration of the poet Ali Asadollahi, one of many writers jailed for peaceful expression and dissent. My friends at PEN ask that we amplify this in any way we can, and that our “solidarity is incredibly meaningful and appreciated by his family as they work to try and get Ali released as soon as possible.”

Now on to our Office Hours question for this week:

Q.

Hi George,

I’m writing to ask about the theme parks in your writing. We have Pastoralia, CivilWarLand, My Chivalric Fiasco, Bounty, Ghoul, Joysticks in Sea Oak, maybe some I’m forgetting about. So many parks! I also get the sense in several that these places—decrepit though they may be—are refuges from an even more f’d up world outside their boundaries.

I don’t know if this is something you would be up to addressing on Story Club. I’m just interested in what these settings do for you & why you gravitate to them.

Thanks for your work!

A.

And thank you for the question, which fits in nicely with our ongoing discussion of “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” as well as with a question I’m getting a lot on this tour for “Vigil,” i.e., “What’s up with all the ghosts?”

Often, people ask these questions with a thematic answer in mind: “The theme parks are meant to permit some commentary on capitalism and our entertainment/profit complex.” Or: “The ghosts are a gateway into thinking about death (but also life!).”

But I want to answer a little more honestly, by saying that, for me, these elements are not really there to make a story “about” something, but simply to give it energy.

The first theme-park story I ever wrote was called (as I’ve mentioned here before) “A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room.” It literally came to me in a dream, at a low/transitional moment in my life, when I was working as a groundsman at an apartment complex in Amarillo, Texas and wondering what the heck was next for me.

In that dream, I heard a distinctive voice in my head, quite different from the faux-Hemingway voice I’d been using, and I got up and wrote the first five lines of it down, and then, over the next week or so, grew the story out from the voice.

I believe it was my subconscious throwing me a life raft – sort of saying, “You’re never going to figure this out on your own. Hear: grab on to this.” (Not the last time such a thing would happen to me.)

So, that story got accepted by The Northwest Review and (I would later find out) was the story that got me into the Syracuse program and thereby literally changed my life.

But I ignored the lesson it was trying to teach me (about humor and voice) and before long, feeling validated by my acceptance at Syracuse, retreated back into HemingwayLand.

And I stayed there for about three years.

Fast forward to that perhaps-too-often told “La Boda de Eduardo/conference room breakthrough” story (see page 107 of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, or scroll down a bit in this post from a few years ago.

Having seen the light (“Be fast, funny, and entertaining! Cease all planning!” I needed….well, I needed something to work on.

So, I very frankly decided to knock off my own earlier story, but set in a different theme park…and that became “The Wavemaker Falters,” the first of this new breed of story that would end up making up the book CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.

In nearly every story in that book, I grafted in some sort of theme park – not for thematic reasons but to destabilize that Hemingway-imitating part of myself.

And it worked, I found; as soon as I set a story in some strange theme park, it de facto became a comic story. And that meant….freedom. My static ideas about what a story should do (be serious, teach a lesson, demonstrate the writer’s direct experience) got undercut by the difficulty (and by the fun, too) of trying to think up examples of what such a theme park would be like. And the language also had to be new. It would just sort of appear in front of me, now that I’d given myself permission (by way of the theme park addition) to be silly.

Silly, in pursuit of the serious.

And with the conscious, planning mind disabled in this way, surprising things started to come out, telling me what I really thought about the working life I was living and about the system I had been raised in, and maybe hadn’t really ever noticed before.

So, there was “theme” and all of that but only because I hadn’t gone looking for it. Or, rather, I hadn’t “decided” my theme and then tried to illustrate it. I had just started dancing, for fun, and theme…showed up.

Sometimes I think that the hardest thing we writers have to do is get out of our own way – that is, get clear of all those IDEAS that are always causing us to dictate a story instead of getting well and truly lost in it.

That lostness is felt, by the reader, as openness, and as connection – reader and writer become fellow-travelers in the unfolding adventure of the story.

And craft, for each one of us, might just be the answer to: “How do I get myself profitably lost? Really free of those “must” and “should” voices in my head, and of my plan?”

One such answer might be, for some of us: the juxtaposition of random, or difficult-to-resolve, elements. (in this case, realist efficiency + theme park).

The mind, temporarily, doesn’t know what to do with that juxtaposition and (glory, glory) has to proceed by some other method.

We might say that when we put the mind to the task of reconciling elements that we can’t rationally reconcile – well, that’s craft.

And the mind will reconcile those elements, if we give it time - it’s very strange.

For example: I had written the opening sections of the story “Liberation Day,” and had introduced the idea of these people hanging on a wall, whose job it was to dramatize whatever story was input into them…and I needed a new story for them to tell, something bigger than I’d given them so far. And, just by chance, I’d been researching the Battle of the Little Big Horn (for years, for fun) and, because it was the pandemic, I had the notion to just…make it that.

Of course, my mind recoiled a bit and wanted a say in it. “Why that story? What’s the relevance to the first bit?” But I answered: “Don’t know. If that came into my head, there must be a reason.”

Or, more honestly, I thought: the story will find a reason, through my planned massive rewriting of same.

There was no relation between the plight of those people on the way and the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and then, with each new draft, there started to be one, but it was subtle and even now I can’t say exactly what it is - except that the rewriting put the two in relation in a way that, it seems to me, is not trivial.

In a sense what happens is that the story grows and changes to accommodate the “intrusion” of the random element, and the random element does the same, and thereby becomes not so random.

And the result doesn’t have that distinctive smell of something predetermined and then imposed on the reader.

Imagine two columns of “elements” and the job is to randomly select two and drop them into the same story. That would, theoretically, dislodge whatever habitual story-making tendency is enslaving you.

But I’ve noticed that, as soon as we do that (and decide, say, to write a story that has both “bears” and “adultery” in it, for example)…we will tend to start trying to “resolve” those elements too neatly. A female bear cheats on a male bear in a zoo. A couple, in the wild, menaced by a bear, confess to each having had an affair.

And so on, and we’re back to the same “I am overdetermining my story” problem.

So whatever this “getting out of our own way” move is, it’s not simple. Writing is such a subjective thing and we long for formulas and mantras that let us switch off the constant doubt and just get to it.

But, it’s starting to seem to me, the constant doubt is art - being in relation to our ever-blooming doubt at every moment of the process.

Anyway, for me, for awhile there, if I set a story in an exaggerated theme park (and that element of purposeful exaggeration was really important), something fun would happen. Is it still true? I’m not sure. I did this with “ Ghoul” a few years back and liked the result but I also know that “deciding” to do something like this, that I’ve done so many times before, for reasons I’m well aware of, is fraught. (It can, alas, become another formula).

The ghosts in Lincoln in the Bardo and Vigil (and many of the stories) work in a similar way. If I put a ghost in, something too-knowing in me gets destabilized.

In other stories, the destabilizing/enlivening thing has been some concession I make to allow myself to depart from “normal” language. “ The Falls” might be an example, as well as most of the stories in Tenth of December. Often, this concession is that “third-person ventriloquist” voice I’ve talked about here before - putting myself so deep into a character’s voice and diction that the language goes satisfyingly (destabilizingly) overboard.

The idea, I think, is that I want to urge myself into a zone where I don’t know what’s happening next or what the criterion for that determination might be. For me it tends to be a verbal zone – the language feels new, which makes everything else underdetermined and new as well.

What do you think Story Club? Am I ringing any bells here?

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P.S. I really enjoyed this tweet from The New Yorker film critic Richard Brody.

P.P.S Here’s a beautiful photo of Brooklyn in the storm, from your beloved SC editor, Samantha Storey:

Hi everyone,

What a thrill, to be meeting so many of you on the road. And friends from high school (hi Paul P.)! And grade school (hi Joanne D.)!

Since my last post, I’ve been in Chicago, Madison, and St. Louis. I’ll be in Baltimore tonight (Thursday) and then on to New Orleans to spend a few days with my parents.

Then on to London.

Speaking of London, tickets are still available for my event with the brilliant Richard Ayoade, and you can get them here. Richard and I have been working on a film adaptation of The Semplica Girl Diaries and that has been a great occasion to get to know him and have access to his kind spirit and his deep knowledge of cinema.

In other book-related news…

I had a mind-blowingly good talk with Sam Fragoso on his podcast Talk Easy about the book and many other things. Sam and I have talked several times before and he always, somehow, gets me going a little deeper into things than I’m expecting, which is a tribute to his interviewing skills, and also to his deep sense of curiosity. You can listen here:

And you can watch my interview with Sam here.

I also had the pleasure of a revelatory conversation with Ezra Klein when I was in New York a few weeks ago. He is a great mind and we were able to talk deeply about Vigil and what it really means (which, in truth, I am only gradually discovering). You can find that interview here.

Vigil was NPR’s Book of the Day on Tuesday and they’ve featured a replay of my All Things Considered interview.

I also wanted to share two interesting essays on the book that have made their way to me.

I really appreciated this take on the book by Tess Callahan, at Electric Literature…(I shared this last time too but just in case it got lost).

And this one (below), by Myles Werntz, associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University, at The Metropolitan Review:

The Metropolitan Review

How to Love a Monster

George Saunders has spent a career unpacking one of the central contradictions of life: that we are loving creatures capable of creating monstrous worlds. Since his debut collection in 1996, Saunders has become something of a secular saint, a writer whose sense of the world’s abounding horrors is balanced with…

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5 months ago · 44 likes · 3 comments · Myles Werntz and The Metropolitan Review

This book has had the widest range of reviews any of my books has ever had, from the ecstatic to the dismal, and I’m coming to like this (sort of, ha ha). I’ve always had a feeling that the role of a book is to make sparks, and that seems to be happening.

***

Finally, on the book front, I thought this was interesting: In Honolulu, Huntsville, AL, Denver, Tampa, and Atlanta, folks have come together to read Vigil silently in different venues (see photos below). Also, two Silent Book Clubs of Death (!), in NYC and LA, held an Instagram live chat with a death doula.

Now, back to work.

I’ve still got another 18 days of travel left on this tour. It’s kind of hard for me to do our Sunday work of reading and analyzing a published story - but I think it’s time we got back to it. So, I thought I’d do an Office Hours question (below) and then, on Sunday, for our paid subscribers, send out a story for us all to work on together. It’s been awhile and we don’t want to let our minds get out of shape, ha ha.

So, our question for the day:

Q.

Dear George,

I recently wrote the first draft of a novel in less than a year. This thing tore out of me — it kind of felt like screaming onto the page. But once it was written, I felt a little uneasy about it, so I put it aside. And the more that I reflected on it, the more resolute I was that I didn’t want to go back to it.

You see this novel, unlike most of my fiction, came from my real-life experience of having had breast cancer. It’s about a character who goes through the experience of being treated for breast cancer — though with a few fictional confabulations that helped to ‘contain’ some of the extremities of the experience. But the thing was, as time went on, six months, a year I found I had very little desire to return to the draft.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret writing it. I think it was a deeply therapeutic thing to do — by narrativizing it, I think it allowed me to give structure to an experience that felt chaotic and beyond my control. But when I reflected on the draft, although it made a passable narrative and featured some interesting stylistic elements, it seemed somehow thin and superficial. It did not seem to have the depth of meaning, or potential depth of meaning, that a novel requires. It was like the draft was racing across the surface of something, but not through or into something deep if that makes sense.

Sorry for the long-winded question, but I’m wondering if you have ever had a similar experience? If there have been any times when you have just known that a draft does not have what it needs to be taken further? I think what I’m particularly interested in is the feeling that this draft did not have the ‘depth’ it seemed to need — does that concur with anything you’ve experienced?

By the way I adore Story Club — the practical and honest way you write about craft really makes a lot of sense to me, particularly the idea that a story is a system for the transfer of energy. Also the acknowledgment that there is no one ‘right’ way of writing — it’s very liberating.

Dear Questioner,

So, first, I’m so sorry you had to go through that and I hope all is well now. This life - when things are good, we think they will be forever so, and then that curtain parts, and we see that a good day, without worry, is an utter miracle. We are all sending our very best wishes.

And thank you for the question.

I, yes, have had that exact experience. When Paula and I were first married, I wrote a 700-page book after returning home from a friend’s wedding. I’ve told this story a lot before so I’ll just say that…it didn’t work. And I abandoned it, after Paula tried and failed to read it. It, too, was from life (it was “about” that wedding), and had the quality you mentioned above – it seemed to exist to document the event. It didn’t have any dramatic shape and didn’t involve any significant invention. I made a little something up at the end, in an attempt to give it some shape, but that event felt tacked on and out of relation with everything that had come before.

I still have that draft. But I would never (ever) go back to it.

Well, why not?

It’s not that the draft is un-revisable. I don’t actually think anything is un-revisable, if the desire to revise it is there. But that’s just the point: I have no desire to revise it, at all. It feels like it would be a terrible chore.

And that, for me, is a deal-breaker. Fun, I have found, is a big and necessary part of my process. What I’m calling “fun” entails a sense of exploration and experiment. I feel like I have to get into a state of, let’s call it, “merry befuddlement.” I have to feel that I’m not at all sure what I’m doing, other than steering toward the fun. There can also be an element of fear there: “This might be really terrible.” There might be a feeling of not being able to see how the thing could ever resolve - which is good, because that means the reader can’t see it either. So the reader and writer are both merrily befuddled together - yoked together in that noble cause of trying to figure out what the book is trying to say.

But, for me, the driver - the only driver - is a sense of fun - or what we might call “forward-propelling confidence.”

I can’t overemphasize how important this feeling of anticipatory joy is for me.

No doubt, dear Questioner, your novel must entail a lot of unpleasant memories, and it makes complete sense that you might not want to go back to it for that reason alone.

But I suspect your artistic self is reacting a bit, also, to the overdetermined nature of it. You didn’t write that first draft to interrogate a mystery, it doesn’t sound like, but to document, or otherwise be in relation to, a thing you lived through.

Which is wonderful, and valid - but it sounds like the idea of going back to it, to find out what else might be in there, doesn’t interest you.

Which is also wonderful and valid.

I had a very rich experience in the days following Paula’s read of my novel – I was bummed-out but with a dawning feeling of euphoria. I didn’t have to be wedded to that book anymore! I could walk away and start something fresh, with a suddenly-unhandcuffed feeling!

I could do what I liked, rather than what I felt I must.

And I started my first published book a few days later, in that flood of relief and freedom.

So, the issue might not be that your draft doesn’t have depth, but that your interest in it is not sufficient to find sufficient further depth in the next revision, if you see what I mean.

And I think that feeling is to be respected. What we do takes all of our energy and even the slightest withholding can be costly.

I wonder if you might want to say something to yourself like, “That is really good that you wrote that draft. No doubt, you learned a lot by doing it. And rest assured that all of that technical knowledge, as well as the emotional knowledge you gained by going through that difficult life experience, will be contained in whatever you try next. It will! How could it NOT? Therefore, take heart and DO WHAT YOU WANT. Because nothing in art is ever lost.”

Something like that might make it easier to walk away from that draft, if this is what you decide to do – it might serve as a a ritual blessing of (and “thank you” to) all of the hard work you put into the draft, a form of self-consolation, a self-reminder that no part of our hard work is ever wasted - never.

All of our work is perfectly conserved and we benefit from it in the next thing.

Is this strictly true? I’m not sure - I only know that it helps me if I imagine that it is so.

What do you think, Story Club? Any good abandonment stories? When, if ever, do YOU cut and run?

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Now, for some tour thanks and photos…

Thanks to Peter Sagal, my gracious host and dear pal, for the Chicago event…Peter is, of course, the beloved host of “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me” and is such a funny, natural interviewer. I always love being with him.

In Chicago, I was also happy to see my friend Daniel Weinberg, the owner of the legendary Abraham Lincoln Book Shop who, years ago, took me on a day-long walking tour of the Gettysburg battlefield that I’ll never forget.

Also, it was good to see Susan Swearingen, who I’ve known since sixth grade (!) (when we were classmates at St. Damian’s, in Oak Forest) backstage with friends from her book club.

Before the event in Chicago, I got to have lunch with Rae Gray, one of the most talented actors of her generation, who I first got to know through her amazing work on the pilot we made of “Sea Oak” a few years ago.

Here she is, on the left, with Jane Levy (and Glenn Close, taking a tumble in the background):

Rae is a lovely soul and a true artist, who also appeared in this (very dark, strangely funny) short film, Robbery (which has the shape and energy of a good short story). It’s always great to talk craft with her and find out that acting and writing aren’t really so different - we are both fans of purity, rigor, and discipline.

Also, huge thanks to Amy Quan Barry, who, for the Madison event, not only prepared a really funny Power Point for the interview, and did a generous and masterful interview, but hosted a beautiful dinner afterwards at her home with six of her MFA students, who were an inspiration. Amy is the author of several books, including, most recently, We Ride Upon Sticks.

OK, onward! I feel very fortunate to be able to be out here doing this.

If I ever needed proof that books matter, this tour is it - so many people in the signing lines sharing stories about the effects of my and other writer’s books on their actual daily lives. And the palpable generosity and kindness in the rooms and in the signing lines is…well, it’s tangible, and I feel it as an active counterweight to all of the stupidity and cruelty being rained down on decent people in this country from above. It’s quiet resistance and, actually, it’s not all that quiet. It’s intelligent and fierce and I really believe that if anything will get us through this, it’s this thing, which, really, is: community.

And I’m so happy to be part of it.

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P.S. Ah, one more thing. Some of you will remember the Turgenev story “The Singers,” that I wrote about in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Check out the trailer for a new and very charming Oscar-nominated film, directed by Sam Davis, that riffs on that story, here.

P.S.S. Ah, one more thing: I was very sorry to hear of the passing of James Van Der Beek. I got a chance to work with him on the above-mentioned pilot of Sea Oak. He played the boss in that story, Mr. Frendt. I have a lot of nonsense-talking bosses in my stories and James found the perfect voice and pace. He was one of the most present and kind people I’ve ever met, who made everyone feel at home. I remember especially how warmly he spoke of his family. Rest easy, James, and thank you for making our lives better.

Hi all, from S.F.

Just writing to say that this morning I got two emails from people who received emails from a Gmail account, in which the sender claimed to be me.

It was not. It is not. I will never write to you from any account but the Story Club one and….I will basically never do that.

If you got one of these, don’t reply, delete it, accept my apologies. Although why am I apologizing!? The idiot impersonating me should be apologizing. But, knowing him, he likely won’t. :) He’s too busy trying to make money by being a BIG FAKER!

Having a great time out here, will tell you all about it come Sunday.

Peace and thanks,

George

I just got my first look at the finished U.K. edition of Vigil and it looks gorgeous:

You can pre-order a signed copy from my friends at Waterstones here.

Really looking forward to coming over to the U.K. in February and to my conversation with Richard Ayoade in London (on 2/17) and with Heather Parry in Edinburgh (on 2/19). Tickets (not many, however) are still available for these two events. My event with Max Porter (on 2/18 in Bristol) is, both sadly and happily, sold out, but you can get on a waiting list here.

Also, this lovely profile by Sophie McBain just appeared in The Guardian. This was the first interview I did for Vigil, back a few months ago, and Sophie and I had a wonderful, free-wheeling, two-hour conversation at the Warwick Hotel in New York, which Sophie did a virtuosic job of condensing in the piece - she really caught the tone and feeling of that very energizing visit. Thank you, Sophie.

I also wanted to let you know the happy news that our beloved dog Guin is feeling better. We were really worried earlier this week but then found out she has a urinary tract infection, and she’s already done a beautiful bounce-back on the meds.

I’m getting a real life lesson about not presuming that what appears to be going on actually is, and about persistence through difficulty - kind of like, “Don’t get too emotional; just keep doing the thing that might help.”

Thank you all, so much, for your expressions of support and the stories of your own dear pets…it really helped.

And thank you to the great Paul Karasik (Story Club member, New Yorker cartoonist, and host of this always lovely and inspiring blog, for this drawing of Guin he sent me when I was at my lowest moment:

And here’s Guin herself, last night, already feeling better (and she’s feeling even better this morning):

Thanks to The New York Times interview (video and podcast links below), we got a huge influx of new subscribers. Welcome to all of you. If you are (or should soon choose to become) a paid subscriber, you’ll have access to a vast trove of posts (and the associated comments) dating back to the early Story Club days. (Becoming a paid subscriber also lets you post comments….which is a big part of the fun here, where we have one of the most erudite, generous, and good-hearted communities….well, anywhere.)

I thought it might be fun to ask our long-time members if they have a favorite story or Office Hours from the past.

If you do, please tell us about it here, in the Comments:

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Our usual convention is to discuss a published/classic short story on Sundays. There’ll be a little departure next Sunday, when we’re discussing an exercise I gave two weeks ago.

On Thursdays, we do something called Office Hours, where I answer questions submitted by paid subscribers (yet another reason to leap, with grace and verve, over the paywall).

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So here’s this week’s question, which was identified, in the email subject line, as “A Question about “A Question about The Question,” referring to this earlier post.

Q.

Dear George,

Apologies for the overly-meta subject line — the idea of a post titled that just made me laugh. I’m writing with a question about the post I’ve name-checked, specifically this passage (feel free to cut/condense the quotation passage if need be):

“But sometimes the touchstone can inhibit – it suppresses the subconscious. We get the benefit of feeling that we’re in control (by way of our method or mantra) but the story doesn’t like this, and may go off and pout in the corner while we (logically, in-control) flail away at it, frustrated, in the end, by how quotidian and predictable it has become…”

So, the question this passage sparked for me: what is a writer to do if they have the opposite problem, meaning that they do not desire to be in control and need to let go, but rather cannot escape the reality of any fiction’s malleability, and wish they could somehow forget they are in control?

Perhaps it has something to do with my being autistic, but much like the metaphors some writers use likening their process to gardening, I have never found this sort of personification of a story relatable. Perhaps it accurately captures how writing fiction feels for many writers, but personally I have never been able to trick myself into forgetting the empirical reality that what the narratologists call the diegesis, the fictional world, is not real, and therefore is eternally mutable at the hands of its creator. The brute fact is that a story is not a living organism, has no will, and is absolutely in a writer’s hands — she can do whatever she likes with it and there is literally nothing that could stop her. Perhaps there are certain choices she is unlikely to make, because they would result in the kind of end product that her culture has taught her to view as hack, cliched, boring, absurd, random, contradictory, nonsensical, etc., but still, she could make them.

I suppose I worry about this as there is a narrative, hanging in the air and suffused through literary culture, that following the subconscious or the intuition is the only true path to creating thematically rich fiction that is nonetheless not “preachy” or “overdetermined.” So, if a writer can’t banish the conscious mind in favor of the unconscious, are they doomed to writing “quotidian and predictable” stories? I’ve never been able to meditate either, and not for lack of trying!

A.

Thank you for the interesting question.

What I’m talking about above is simply the experience we’ve all had, of over controlling a narrative to the point where it’s more a screed or lecture – a static demonstration of some idea we hold (it can be a political idea, or just an idea about what the story is "meant” to do).

This tends to be, when I do it, boring and one-sided: me droning on to my poor reader, correcting or instructing here.

Whereas I think a work of art can be more of a two-person (reader and writer) exploration of an idea. A dance, a call-and-response game.

But I couldn’t agree more: the fictional world is not real and it is indeed infinitely malleable - that is entirely, sometimes maddeningly, true. (As some of you who are doing the Sunday exercise may be finding out, a text can be changed an infinite number of times.)

But that’s the fun of it, really: we are making an object. The relation of that object to the real world is…up to us. That object is distorted and exaggerated — it has our stamp on it. It should, it has to, be interesting. And that stamping requires deciding, over and over again — by taste, whimsy, intuition — or by any other means that feels vital to you.

So the question is: what sort of object do you want to make?

And the next question is: how do you go about making that object? (How do you get your object closer to something that delights you and makes you proud, even giddy, to have done it?)

The process I’m fond of involves putting aside larger conceptual ideas, as well as my planning impulse, and to focus on improving (per my personal taste) the quality and speed and general zing of the prose – not only in the lines but in the overall movement and structure of the thing.

But the larger conceptual ideas are still going to be there, trying to crowd up to the table, and one can’t help but be aware of them. Each writer has to decide for himself how much he’s going to tolerate, and indulge in, those ideas.

So, yes: the prose could, indeed, go on changing forever, but the question is, which version do you like best? And that’s up to you.

If you imagine generating, say, 10 versions of the same swath of text (as those of us who are involved in that Sunday experiment may have done by now) which do you prefer? That is, if suddenly your book was to leap into print and be on bookshelves all over the world, which of those many versions of that paragraph would you want in that book? Which would you stand by?

So, I don’t think you have to worry about surrendering to the subconscious or any of that. Just proceed through your text, seeing if it pleases you, and make changes accordingly.

You are just preferring, over and over again, in whatever way you naturally prefer.

Finally, importantly, let me restate a recurring Story Club caution: when I suggest something in a post, it’s never the only way, or the best way, or the respectable way — it’s just one of many possible ways: a suggestion.

Imagine, if you would, that you’re the “teacher,” looking down on a doorless room in which the “student” is trapped. You’re shouting down, “What’s behind that painting?” or “Is there a loose floorboard?” In other words, you’re trying to help. A lot of what you say might not help at all. It might even hurt. It might confuse the student or, as seems may be the case with you dear Questioner, it may distract you into a mode where you are trying to square my conception of the thing with yours.

And the person offering the advice is not claiming, at all, that those suggestions are going to work. (If the “student” moves the painting and there’s just wall there, that’s fine — he doesn’t have to keep “moving the painting.”)

So, if you feel that you “have never found this sort of personification of a story relatable,” I would say: God bless, and good self-observation — please just abandon that idea altogether. If it’s not helping, walk away. Go forth and find your way of thinking about it, and thanks for trying my suggestion.

But anytime thinking about writing gets us tied up in knots and frustrated, we should remember that it’s all just concepts — the “finger pointing at the moon,” as we Buddhists say. The explaining how one does is not the doing of it.

My true advice is: if something you read about craft, here or elsewhere, frustrates or impedes you, just say: “Thanks, but no thanks,” and move on.

Truly.

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P.S. Here again are the links to the Times interview(s)…

Written interview.

Video interview:

Podcast:

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Hello friends,

Happy to let you know that, yesterday, these incarnations of my interview with David Marchese at The New York Times came out:

Written interview.

Video interview:

Podcast:

Read more

Q.

Hi George! I hope you are well and looking forward to your upcoming book tour!

I love Story Club. Your generosity and warmth are a balm in a world that often feels both surprisingly savage and terribly fragile. You are a dear person.

My question is less about craft and more about commerce. Or maybe, when you strip away the details, at its heart, it’s really a question about existential dread? Maybe you can help me figure that out.

I came to writing late in life and rather recently. I knew, even as a little girl growing up in Chicagoland, that I wanted to be a writer. Instead, I became a divorced mother with two little girls and no education. Fast forward: The kids are grown, I have excellent health insurance, and I can afford groceries every week. (Yay!) So, now I am writing.

Of course, finding time to write can be difficult. I assume this is the case for all writers, especially those with full-time jobs outside of writing. Still, I’m not seeking encouragement to keep carving out time to write because to older people, I think, writing is like getting to go outside to play. Instead, I am wondering about spending time pursuing publication.

After all, time becomes more precious when there is less of it to lose.

Let’s say you, George, were the age you are now, but you were currently working at that engineering firm as a technical writer and counting the days until you could retire, hopefully, if all went well, at age seventy. Of course you would keep writing. But would you keep trying to get published? It seems incredibly time-consuming and perhaps a bit soul-crushing.

Sure, it looks like great fun to be in conversation with Deborah Treisman or signing books after a successful reading, but the effort to get there seems superhuman.

Perhaps, like tearing off a roof or curing a hangover with fast food, publishing may be a young man’s game.

Yes, the argument exists that one can simply write for the enjoyment of it and never seek publication but if I were a chef who spent a year or more perfecting recipes to prepare a feast, I would want, eventually, to share that meal with others. Besides, I think it may be an end point, publication, that encourages a writer to keep working until they reach that point. And then to begin again.

Can you offer any insight to either encourage or dissuade a writer from pursuing publication?

Warmest regards,

A.

Thank you for all of this and I’ll do my best…

This is one of those questions to which the best answer may be simply: “Well, what do you want to do?” (Or: “What do you want to do?” Being an artist is hard and it responds best to passion, even irrational passion. Becoming a better artist, in my experience, is a matter of learning, over and over, what you just plain like, no reasons needed, and then doing that thing as if it’s all that matters.

So, if you were my student, I’d likely just turn this question right back over to you. You don’t have to publish; there’s no shame in not publishing; but you can try to publish, and there’s no shame in that….

So, what do you want?

Only do that.

But I suspect that your answer is contained in your question, with this: “If I were a chef who spent a year or more perfecting recipes to prepare a feast, I would want, eventually, to share that meal with others.”

I agree with that. And it sounds like that’s your preference too.

So, the question is, how much time does it really take, to try to publish things?

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I’m going to assume here that you don’t have an agent.

If that’s the case, my advice would simply be to set aside one afternoon every two weeks to deal with the business aspects – sending new stories out to magazines, maybe approaching agents or editors – whatever is needed.

Apart from that, don’t think about the publishing part at all. Just work on becoming the most interesting writer you can be.

Think of it as you would any other of the many household tasks we have to do to “earn” our writing time.

Back when I was working at the engineering company, I made a little matrix, with magazines along the vertical axis and the names of stories I thought were good enough to send out on the horizontal axis1.

I’d spent some time assembling that short list of magazines I’d be thrilled to be in, and had informally ranked them – so, The New Yorker was at the top and then there were another ten or so places below that. I didn’t go beneath a certain (subjective) level – I wanted my work to be in places where it had a chance of being read. (At that time, that was one way you could get an agent – they were said to read certain higher-profile literary magazines).

So, as the rejections came in, I’d just write “R” in the appropriate box and move on to send the rejected story out to the next magazine.

And if a story got published (happy day!), I’d take it off the list and, as I could, replace it with a new, recently completed one.

You could make the same type of list for agents. (To make either list, I’d recommend this book, Writer’s Market, which lists editors, magazines, agents, etc, as well as advice on how best to make the approach. There’s also this one, in the same series, but geared more to finding an agent.)

The advantage of this approach is that it keeps a firewall between your creative worries (“How do I make this story better? Am I writing the right type of story? What’s the next scene in this thing?”) and your publishing worries (“Why won’t anyone take this story? Where should I send next?”).

It keeps things clean and separates the inevitable rejections from your working life, which, theoretically, should be full of fun and hope and joy and a reasonable level of self-encouragement. It is, I guess, a form of compartmentalization, that keeps the two energies from interfering with, or cross-contaminating, one another.

But it might also be useful for us to interrogate the effect of the prospect of publication on our creative lives.

For me, it’s almost purely excitement. I want to be published, always have. I love the process, and I like getting feedback (although I’m pretty defensive and don’t “love,” exactly, getting negative feedback or bad reviews – but I’ve learned to accept them as the cost of doing business, so to speak). Especially, I cherish the idea of something that I wrote going out in the world and having a positive effect on someone else’s day.

So, when I’m working, I definitely have an eye on audience, and I particularly love the prospect of a certain place in the text delighting or surprising my reader or making her laugh. That’s all an active part of my process – of free-writing and also of revision. If I didn’t have that anticipation going…I don’t know what it would be like to write, or how, exactly, I’d approach it.

But that might just be me. I mean, seriously. I’ve come to the conclusion that artists can tend to work out of some sort of odd, deep need, and for me that’s definitely true: I have a need to attract attention, be liked, make something that is fun or enlightening for another person, who will then appreciate it and admire me. Yes, I do, guilty, for sure.

But I always tell my students that, as hard as making art is, we have to use whatever we’ve got, and especially, maybe, whatever we’ve got in excess.

And, of course, it’s only fair to say that I’ve been very lucky in my publishing life – so what’s not to love? But even back at the beginning, when I was getting all rejections, I treasured the idea of someday having something accepted and having the magazine show up at my house, and all of that. Being published means something to me, I guess I’m saying, and I’d be loathe to give it up.

There is, of course, the very reasonable fear that sending stuff out and getting all rejections might start to take away from the pleasure of doing the actual writing.

But there’s also this, a form of tough love: when we send something out to a lot of places and no one wants it, that might be the world telling us something. It’s not telling us that we’re bad writers, or should quit, necessarily, but it is telling us that, for whatever reason, that particular work is failing to charm anyone. Why would it not? Well, that’s a deep question, for any artist. But asking that question can function as a doorway to one’s own form of originality. That is, rejection, and our acceptance of it as meaningful, can, maybe, make us see what about our current approach is merely habitual, or is due to, you know, “received wisdom,” (even if that wisdom was received here, at Story Club).

Rejection can be a needed shock to the system, I guess I’m saying.

“Now, wait a minute,” I can imagine some of you thinking, “Isn’t that attitude a bit market-subservient? What if the (vapid, shallow, consumer-tainted) market just isn’t getting me?”

A valid point.

Could it be that a writer is SO deep (transcendent, difficult) that no one is getting him? Possibly, of course, but I’d always want (in the spirit of Occam’s Razor) to check the more obvious explanation, which is just that our current approach is somehow failing to engage, because it is too cautious/careful/rule-bound/habitual.

And that can be a pretty exciting moment, when we are suddenly freed (by force, as it were) from whatever esthetic assumptions have been hovering, perhaps unnoticed, in that auto-cloud over our head as we write.

I’ve told the story of my first, 700-page, novel (La Boda de Eduardo) ad nauseum (referenced in the first answer here), but that really was a big moment for me. I’d spent the better part of a year on it, and asked Paula to read it and…it was not successful.

So: the world was not going to want it (as even my own wife couldn’t pretend to like it) and….now what? I still remember and cherish that feeling of total artistic clean-out…not a delusion or illusion left about what kind of writer I was or if I even was one at all – that is: total permission to start anew, with (now) the explicit goal of writing something that a reader would not only finish but love – something she couldn’t help but finish and be dazzled by.

That moment couldn’t have happened if I hadn’t 1) had the sincere ambition to publish, and 2) been bitterly disappointed that what I’d written wasn’t very good and would never be published (and I wouldn’t want it to be).

And then, bingo: freedom to start anew.

What do you think, Story Club? What does the quest to be published cost you? What does it give you?

And let me wish you all the happiest of New Years - the world can seem cruel, dark, discouraging, but, on the other hand, that gives us all work to do, in every moment (don’t be cruel, dark, or discouraged). :)

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Q.

Thank you for all that you do with Story Club and literature, Mr. Saunders! I am a new paid subscriber, and I must say Story Club has been such a reassuring source of comfort in the current climate. Speaking of comfort and the current climate, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on writing in this day and age; pardon me if the question becomes too loaded or existential. As a final-year MFA student, I’m very aware that I have to face the “real world” after graduating, and in that world, I won’t be cocooned in institutional support to produce fiction. Increasingly, both on the domestic and foreign policy fonts, the “real world” seems scary, especially as someone who’s an international student from the “third world”. Amid all this turmoil, how must one stay committed to their art? I have often asked this question to my fiction professors and they told me one principle of living is to embrace uncertainty. I am curious to know what you have to say to a 23-year-old who’s trying hard to be a serious writer.

A.

What a beautiful question and thanks for asking it.

I want to try to answer on two levels.

First, regarding that withdrawal of institutional support – I sometimes joke that the world would prefer that a young writer stop writing. So, part of the artistic journey is to learn how to be a fierce protector of one’s art, despite those pressures.

I always advise my third-year students, who are about to re-enter the world, to take an afternoon alone and do some serious thinking about what they’ve learned during the three years of our program. What do they actually need, to be creative? How many hours a day? What conditions have produced their best work? Are there any myths (about process or approach) that they are ready to reject, given their experience of having been a full-time creative person for the last three years?

I ask them to take a good, honest look at their nervous systems and patterns of work and rest, and all of that, and think about how, practically, to design a life that will continue to support their work.

In my case, I have a high metabolism and lots of drive, and had found, during the MFA years, that I actually did better with short bursts of focused writing time. I also found that, with my young family underway, I couldn’t face the prospect of being the proverbial “starving artist” – or, rather, I didn’t like the idea of making my young family deal with that – and I had a feeling that I’d work better (wilder) if I was sneaking my writing in, without any pressure on it, while working a “real” job. And that’s what I did.

But that won’t be the right approach for everyone, of course – so that’s why I recommend a few hours of really turning inward, asking oneself the question: “What do I need to thrive?”

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On a second, more existential level…Thomas Friedman recently wrote something interesting: “Every few years, I am reminded of one of my cardinal rules of journalism: Whenever you see elephants flying, don’t laugh, take notes. Because if you see elephants flying, something very different is going on that you don’t understand but you and your readers need to.”

I take this to mean that, for any of us who aspire to be artists, the first job is to quickly burn through our disbelief and angst (and fear, and outrage) and start wondering things like: Why is this happening? What contributed to this? What, in my understanding, was flawed, flawed enough that I am now amazed and stunned? What are some of the small details of the moment that might make this come alive in writing?

The current moment is so strange, and things are moving so quickly, that I am finding it hard to shed this ongoing feeling of disbelief.

But there, up there, are the flying elephants – and they’re up there every day. How long do I want to stand here below, going, “I can’t believe it!”

So, the more powerful position is to go, “Right, flying elephants. Now: why is that surprising to me? How did I so poorly understand dogs, and how can I rectify that?”

Easier said than done, for sure, especially as the elephants get stranger and more numerous and seem, sometimes, to be blocking out the sun.

And yet…

I recall this poem, by the Russian poet Anna Ahkmatova, from her collection, Requiem.

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I
spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in
her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there) - ‘Could one ever describe
this?’ And I answered - ‘I can.’ It was then that
something like a smile slid across what had previously
been just a face.

**

You ask, “Amid all this turmoil, how must one stay committed to their art?”

Exactly, that’s a serious challenge.

For me, the hardest part is that fiction takes a long time, to do well, and it rarely directly addresses a political issue. I remember after 9/11, going back to the story I was working on (“Jon,” if I remember correctly) and feeling that I was fiddling around, painting designs on the baseboards of a house as the roof caved in. What was the use?

But now it seems to me that we have to accept, happily, that our work is just on a longer arc. We write it so that it will be able to be read profitably far into the future. (The story we’re working on over on the paid side, “Paper Pills ” by Sherwood Anderson, was written around 1910, and yet, over there, we’re getting all kinds of wisdom and power from it, even now).

I’ve found it helpful to try to disengage my artistic work from my political activities and writing – just to say, “You two may remain separate if you like.” And I’ve had the experience, both as a reader and a writer, of encountering a great work of art that was so deep, and so true, that it felt “political” in the very best way – it did some work in explaining some human tendency that, writ large, becomes political. I think, for example, of the Chekhov story “Enemies,” that we did awhile back and its depiction of how long-lasting enmity gets built. Or I think of the Granderford-Shepardson bit from The Adventures of Huck Finn, and the way that perfectly depicts the current political tribalism.

But, at other times, that resolution to keep politics and art separate doesn’t hold, and I write something that is more overtly political, because I just can’t help it (like, for example, “Love Letter” or “The Red Bow”) but even then I try to make sure that the piece rises out of mere advocacy and has some of the complications that makes it function as a work of art - this will mean that it fails to be “about” the thing I started out to say, and says something different instead, or in addition.

Beyond that, I wonder if we might take some comfort, dear questioner, in asking what, exactly, fiction does to us, as we read it. It seems to me that sometimes a good story can embody certain human qualities that, when we see them on the page, inspire us, and console us, by seeming to say, “Sometimes human beings get it right – you can, too.” This might be through the actions of a character (I think of the indomitable cheerfulness of Scrooge’s nephew) or sometimes it’s a quality being enacted by the writer herself – I think of the steely fearlessness of Katherine Ann Porter, as she leads us into those harrowing last lines of “He.” What confidence, what deep curiosity she’s showing, as she asks how things really are in the world.

And isn’t witnessing that somehow encouraging?

So, when I get rattled by the violence and cruelty of the world, I try to think, “Well, what I’d like to do is write one story that gives one person incrementally more confidence that the world is not totally insane, and people are not without redeeming qualities.”

Maybe I can do this with a single good joke, or a startling image; maybe I can guide a character through a difficult thought process; maybe just the idea that I worked through the writing of my story with love and care will make someone go, “Oh, yes, right: love and care are still out there.”

It’s kind of a cliché to say that writing makes us less alone, but look here, at this community. It has cheered me so many times, just the reality of this group of people who take time out of their busy lives to read, and think , and, most importantly, to communicate thoughtfully and kindly with one another, over and over, for four years now.

What we do and what we write matters, simply because (and as long as) there are people on the other end, receiving those actions and words and being, even subtly, changed by them.

Dear questioner – I wish you the best in your artistic life (and your real life!) and hope you’ll email me back if I’ve missed the mark here in any way, or if you just want to talk about this further.

Warmly,

George

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P.S. Here’s some information on the upcoming tour of Vigil (which you can pre-order here, which is always very much appreciated) and, below, is a complete list of the moderators for all the events (and thanks, in advance, to all of them, for being willing to leap into this with me).

BROOKLYN, NY
Monday, January 26^th, Community Bookstore at Congregation Beth Elohim, Brooklyn, NY. In conversation with Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

NEW YORK, NY
Tuesday, January 27^th, Symphony Space with book sales by The Strand, New York, NY. In conversation with Suleika Jaouad.

PHILADELPHIA, PA
Wednesday, January 28^th, Barnes & Noble at First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia, PA. In conversation with Miwa Messer.

BOSTON, MA
Thursday, January 29^th, Harvard Book Store at Back Bay Events Center, Boston, MA. In conversation with Paul Tremblay.

NASHVILLE, TN
Friday, January 30^th, Parnassus Books at Montgomery Bell Academy, Nashville, TN. In conversation with Ann Patchett.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Monday, February 2^nd, Book Passage at Calvary Presbyterian Church, San Francisco, CA. In conversation with Vendela Vida.

SANTA CRUZ, CA
Tuesday, February 3^rd, Bookshop Santa Cruz at Rio Theatre, Santa Cruz, CA. In conversation with Parini Shroff.

LOS ANGELES, CA
Wednesday, February 4^th, Skylight Books and ALOUD at Aratani Theatre, Los Angeles, CA. In conversation with Kelly Corrigan.

VANCOUVER, BC

Friday, February 6^th, Vancouver Writers Fest at St. Andrew’s Wesley, Vancouver, BC. In conversation with Alix Ohlin.

CHICAGO, IL
Monday, February 9^th, Chicago Humanities Festival at Heller Auditorium at Francis W. Parker School, Chicago, IL. In conversation with Ayad Akhtar.

MADISON, WI
Tuesday, February 10^th, Wisconsin Book Festival and Madison Public Library at The Orpheum Theater, Madison, WI. In conversation with Quan Barry.

ST. LOUIS, MO
Wednesday, February 11^th, St. Louis County Library with book sales by Left Bank Books, St. Louis, MO. In conversation with David Haynes.

BALTIMORE, MD
Thursday, February 12^th, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, MD. In conversation with Tom Hall. (Note: There won’t be a signing at this event, sorry.)

AUSTIN, TX
Tuesday, February 24^th, How To Academy with First Light Books, Austin, TX. In conversation with Judy Maggio.

HOUSTON, TX
Wednesday, February 25^th, Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series at Cullen Theater, Houston, TX. In conversation with Lacy M. Johnson.

DALLAS, TX
Thursday, February 26^th, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX. In conversation with Krys Boyd.

SAN DIEGO, CA

Friday, February 27^th, Writer’s Symposium by the Sea at Point Loma Nazarene University, San Diego, CA. In conversation with Dean Nelson.

SEATTLE, WA
Tuesday, April 7^th, Seattle Arts & Lectures with book sales by Third Place Books, Seattle, WA. In conversation with Claire Dederer.

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Hi All,

I wanted to share some news with you. On Wednesday, December 10^th (also known as the Tenth of December, ha ha) at 1:30 PM EST, I’m going to go live here on Substack and read a short preview from the very beginning of the new novel, Vigil, which you can read about and pre-order here.

It’s my first time going live (!), but Substack has let me know that if you follow me, you’ll automatically get an email with a link to join as soon as the live starts. And if you’re on the app, you’ll get an alert with a link.

I’ll also, on that live event, be announcing the cast of the audiobook, which has been (under the brilliant direction of the great Kelly Gildea, who also directed the audiobook for Lincoln in the Bardo) a grand creative adventure.

Hope you’ll be able to join me on Wednesday….

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This is the exciting but harrowing period in the publication of a book when, with the writing all done (as I think I mentioned, I sent the very last tweaks off just before our trip to New York for the National Book Awards), the waiting-to-see begins. Will people read it? Will they like it?

I’ve started to do interviews about the book and so am thinking and speaking about it in a different way - in a sense, I’m “learning” the book, as opposed to being deep inside it, altering it so as to make it more itself, by, mostly, feeling.

Now I have to articulate what it all means, as well as I can. While, at the same time, not being entirely sure myself. I often invoke the “roller-coaster-designer” metaphor and I am finding that I believe it more than ever: the writer’s job is to make a wild ride…and the meaning appears (or descends, or is revealed) after that’s been done.

I find myself also really seeing the wisdom in that Chekhov quote we talked about last week: “A work of art doesn’t have to solve a problem, it just has to formulate it correctly.”

So all of the revising I did on Vigil was a form of making the various oppositions in the book more stout, less easy to dismiss…which will, I hope, result in a wilder, more undeniable ride for the reader.

One significant moment this week, I got to see and hold the first example of the physical cover, which I love, and am happy to share with you:

In other news, I’m finishing up a round of calls with my students about our third round of workshop and we’re about to embark on a final, one-on-one round, in which I read their work and give them the frankest edits-and-advice session I can, as they prepare to go back into the real world in May…

Thanks, as always, for being here.

(And thanks to Kirkus Reviews, for this):

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Happy Thanksgiving to all of you who celebrate it.

For anyone interested, here’s a link to my talk at the National Book Awards last week…(This is just “my” portion of the program, not the whole ceremony, as I posted last Sunday.)

Also, here’s a link from The Believer, to an interview I did with my pal Ben Marcus back in (gulp) 2004. Interesting to read this twenty-year old interview and find some things I’m still saying and some I’m not, or am saying differently…

The Believer

An Interview with George Saunders

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8 months ago · 12 likes · George Saunders

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Now, on to our question of the week…

Q.

Hello George, I want to ask about the question you’ve often referred to as shaping a story -- the question to be posed in the right way, as Chekov put it, rather than to be answered.

You sometimes mention the question that’s in your head as you draft a story. I don’t recall one exactly, but some examples might be, why is there such unfairness in the world, or, in the case of Young Goodman Brown, what happens when we judge people at extremes. (And I’m not quite sure those are such good examples.)

I have learned about concepts like the big and small stories within the story, the heart of the story, etc. but you are the first of my many instructors, teachers, or, as I might put it, aimiable coaches to suggest to me the importance of the ‘Chekhov question’ if I might call it that.

I don’t think I’ve ever started a story with the C question in mind, and I find it difficult to identify one even in a second or third draft. Would you be willing to describe where the question becomes clear to you in your own stories? What helps you give shape to the question? And, do you think that the clearer the C question to the writer, the stronger the story? This is what I suspect.

Thank you so much for Story Club and for your generosity and kindness.

A.

Yes, thank you – I believe the quote you’re referring to goes something like: “A work of art doesn’t have to solve a problem, it just has to formulate it correctly.”

So, we might note, first, that Chekhov is not actually advocating having a question. I think what he’s saying is that a story, well-told, poses a problem, and, although we sometimes feel that the writer’s job is to “solve” that problem (i.e., let the reader know the correct answer/where the writer stands), in fact, the writer’s job is to accentuate and heighten that problem, by representing both sides of it fairly, with heft.

The best example I know of this among Chekhov’s stories is “Gooseberries,” which I wrote about at length in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

In that story, the “problem” or “question” might be said to be: “Is happiness good or bad? A positive thing to seek, or negative?” And Chekhov doesn’t offer a final answer – he just lets both sides make their best case. This causes a complexifying of the question and then, magically, the story pops up out of that realm and becomes about something even bigger - a meditation on excess that seems to say, “Well, it’s not happiness itself, but the spirit in which we pursue happiness that’s the trouble.” (Ivan, swimming, is pursuing happiness in a pure way; his brother, who has slowly killed his wife with his mad desire to have a country place, is pursuing happiness in the wrong way.)

So it’s a story about happiness, which becomes a story about excessive belief, which, in the end, becomes (also, I think) a story about the different varieties of desire and contentment, and, of course, the story is much, much more than even all of that – the story is remarkable for the way in which it manages to be “about” all of these things (to encompass all these things) and yet still elude simple reduction.

And my guess is, if Chekhov had written it with “What’s my central question?” in mind, he would have written a much less wonderful story.

When we write (and especially if we’re revising well) all kinds of magical, incidental, accidental things happen, on their own, and then that same intuitive part of the mind “notices” these and responds…and the cycle goes on and on, yielding more and more complexity – more than we could ever “will into” it.

It’s difficult, subjective work and, as we all know, it’s tempting to desire a touchstone.

But sometimes the touchstone can inhibit – it suppresses the subconscious. We get the benefit of feeling that we’re in control (by way of our method or mantra) but the story doesn’t like this, and may go off and pout in the corner while we (logically, in-control) flail away at it, frustrated, in the end, by how quotidian and predictable it has become.

So, honestly, I almost never have a “question” in mind before I start – in fact, I think I can say I’ve never written a story in that way. What does happen is: I’m writing along, staying alert, so that, when and if such a question (or problem, or opposition) starts manifesting itself, I’ll notice. At that point, I’ll feel pleased (that my story has started to be “about” something) but I’ll also be hoping that the story will outgrow that thing and find another thing, on its own, and, in that way, will get clear of my literal, dull, merely-planning mind.

So, it’s maybe more a recognition of a question the story might be asking, and a nod in that direction, but a slightly skeptical nod, as in: “Well, maybe, dear story, if you say so – but let’s wait and see.”

I have stories of mine that I really like that I couldn’t reduce to a question/problem, except by really straining and putting on my “I am writing a college essay!” hat – and that answer would have little to do with the actual process I went through while writing the story.

For example, an early one, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” makes the case, in its first few pages, that sometimes violence is needed to protect virtue. Then the characters take that too far, and the very act of trying to protect virtue by violence becomes evil.

Did I “see that” while writing the story?

Not that I recall, no.

In “CommComm,” without planning to, I made two characters (Rimney and Giff) who were, each in their own way, extremists. So the story became a story about extremism, and I think the reader’s attention naturally turns to the main character, wondering, “Does this guy have anything in his life that he’s extreme about?” And the reader comes to feel that yes, the main character does (he is extremely attached to his parents), and this realization might make the story feel that much more like an organic whole, and gives the reader something to wonder about (“Will he continue along that extreme path, or catch himself?”)

But again: I only realized all of this a few months after the story was done and had run in The New Yorker. (Or, I only consciously recognized it then.)

But: the revision process I enacted while writing those stories “saw” and honored and heightened those patterns…but without my conscious involvement, if that makes sense.

You asked: Do you think that the clearer the Chekovian question to the writer, the stronger the story?

I have to say, I feel strongly that the opposite may sometimes be true.

If it becomes too clear to the writer what that alleged “certain question'“ is, she might freeze up, in an attempt to “honor” that question and in that process, stop listening to the story and start overriding it.

Well, here’s the big question: if we don’t want to cling too tightly to mantras and methods and all of that, what do we cling to? (Well, the right answer, I guess, is: nothing, nothing at all.)

And yet…how are we supposed to proceed?

I understand my stories as sequences of events that, aligned in a certain order, make for rising tension. So there’s a lot of attention being paid to the order of events – can they be improved upon? Are certain events redundant and thus asking to be cut?

Or (related): I see a story in-progress as a pattern of areas that work and others that don’t yet. Revision is: trying to get the flat bits to work better - and that “better” doesn’t have much explanation about it - just a feeling that is more powerful or kicks more ass, or (I especially like this phrasing) is more “undeniable.”

Or (related): a story is a pattern of places where the narration resembles a fast, narrow river (that’s good), and other, less refined, places, where the narrative (lake-like) seems to spread out and slow down and become low-energy and vague (not so good). And there, revising looks like trying to make rivers out of those lakes.

But, of course, revision looks and feels the same in each of the above models. (Those are all imperfect metaphors for one consistent thing.)

One thing these models have in common: most of the work that takes place occurs on a local, (phrase- or sentence- ) level. That’s where the first-order choosing happens and the choosing is what will, over time, make the system called “your story” more coherent and shaped system.

And sometimes, this close work makes it more clear what sort of larger, structural, section-level work needs to happen. But that work is done in the same spirit - intuitive, trying to make the whole more undeniable.

Most of the revision I do is in response to a certain gut feeling that this is better than that; that I prefer this way of saying it to that way; that I prefer this sequence to that, and so on – all of those decisions being made almost entirely by instinct and on a very local level.

When I’m done, the story might appear to have posed a question - but that’s a result, not a cause.

The real game is for a given writer to develop her sense of what she prefers and learn to enact that value system in as many places as possible throughout the story.

Honestly, my advice, dear Questioner, might be for you to consider putting this “Chekhovian question” construct aside for a little while. It’s just one of many ways of looking at a story. It’s possible for such a notion to do you more harm than good. A writer may started feeling that, in the absence of such a question, she’s “not doing it right,” which would be a shame, since continuing to try is required for a story to find its true shape.

That is, I’d rather feel, “Ah, hell with it, I’m probably doing something right,” than, “Oh, no, I’m not finding the Chekhovian question, which means I’m doing it all wrong and my therefore my story is doomed.”

I know you’re not saying that, dear Questioner, but….I worry. 😊

Hope you all have a beautiful day today.

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Really loving the conversation over behind the paywall about the notion that we have entered a “post-literate” age. Lots of good arguments for and against this, and some incredible “reading in our times” anecdotes, and even some hopeful solutions.

Join us over there, if you’re so inclined.

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Very happy to announce that I’ll be coming to the U.K. in February, for Vigil - excited to see so many old (and new) friends in a place that’s been so good to me over the years, and of which I have so many fond memories.

And here are the links for tickets:

Tuesday 17^th February London, The Adelphi Theatre, hosted by How To Academy. George Saunders in conversation with Richard Ayoade. Time: 7.30 pm

Wednesday 18^th February Bristol, 1532 Performing Arts Theatre, hosted by Storysmith. George Saunders in conversation with Max Porter. Time: 6.30 pm

Thursday 19^th February Edinburgh, Gordon Aikman Lecture Theatre, hosted by The Portobello Bookshop George Saunders in conversation. Time: 7 pm

Hope to see some of you there!

I want, also, to wish my wife, Paula, a very happy birthday today (November 13th) and let you all know about two upcoming events in support of her beautiful novel, Starting From Here.

On Tuesday, November 18th, she’ll be appearing here, in the Rancho Mirage Writers Series, interviewed by the wonderful Dr. Khoi Le…

…and on Monday, December 1st, she’ll be here, at Godmothers Books in Santa Barbara, interviewed by our dear friend and legendary photographer Stewart Shining - it should be a very special conversation, as Stewart and Paula were next-door neighbors, growing up in Rapid City, South Dakota.

I’ll be in attendance at both of these events - in addition to being the love of my life, she’s a phenomenally inspiring speaker.

Beyond the (very low!) paywall, we’ll be starting a new story on Sunday - quite an old story, and very odd.

We’re off to New York this week, for the National Book Awards ceremony, where I’ll be receiving the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, presented by my dear pal Deborah Treisman of The New Yorker. Should be a fun night and the whole process has evoked a lot of nostalgia and gratitude on my part, of course. More about that once I’m back…

And speaking of Deborah Treisman, here’s a link to my event with Deborah and the amazing Zadie Smith at The New Yorker Fest a couple of weeks back.

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