I find George so enlightening and helpful and agree wholeheartedly with his advice. There is a point at which a book develops its own momentum and we have to be prepared to run away from our darlings, and fly with that great wind.
When I came to a similar roadblock for one of my original drafts for The Seasonwife, I stopped and interviewed the main characters. I set out a list of who, what, when, where, why and how like the journalist I once was, I was curious to know what the characters felt, who they were underneath, even what they thought of me.
This led to some real changes and different directions. The characters even insisted on different names.
And I think it is worth remembering that the only deadline a writer needs is the deadline of writing towards their best book, not the market, not a publisher, but the book that piques their curiousity, the one they want to read, the book they must write.
All the best. I would definitely mark your novel as a must-read.
To pick up on George’s point about finding that next beat in the aftermath: I see the aftermath as having two phases. First, the initial reaction. Second, how the event shapes and shifts the relationship for years to come. The Ratlines by Philippe Sands stands out for me as a recent-ish (non-fiction) book that examines that grapple, specifically in the adult children of Nazis.
Sands' previous book (East West Street) looked at how the Holocaust shaped human rights law and, as part of his research, he spent time with adult children of Nazis. One man had lived his life as an apology: never having children, publicly lecturing on the horrors of Hitler. Another chap had a very different line of thinking. ‘Yes my father was a high-ranking Nazi but not a bad one. However, if you find evidence to say otherwise, please let me know!’
The Ratlines is Sands (a lawyer) investigating this particular Nazi. In part to solve the mystery of his death, but emotionally, overwhelmingly, to bring the evidence to the son and say, ‘how about now? Is this enough?’ Time and again the son concludes that he loved his father and his father was a good man. Not, I loved him as a child but I can’t as an adult; or, I love him but I can’t love what he did; but: I loved him, he loved me, so he was a good man.
A fascinating, frustrating examination of a stuck point of view. Humans contain multitudes and even the most seemingly consistent people can resist logic when they want to hold certain emotions tight.
Could there be mileage in prose exploration - fictive or non-fictive - of the implications of holding certain emotions tight in people who are evidently inconsistent despite their lifelong lauding logic?
In one way this is just me playing around, shuffling if you will, with words. Looked another way it's me saying thank you for posting a comment that's sparked a sense of a fresh point of view breaking out, with perspective altering potential.
Hey, shuffle away! That’s what writers do. I really enjoyed the question because it made me shuffle through possible solutions. It reminded me that a story - like life - should be about relationships. It’s shattering to discover someone you love is abhorrent; it’s a break in the social contract. So do you try to heal them, change them, walk away from them? What do you do with your love from them, in whatever fashion it remains? No one is walking away from that situation with their soul intact. All of which makes it a great story moment!
Is it inevitable that walking into many, if not all, such situations is going to impact the soul in ways most likely to leave it less intact?
Is 'damage' the primum mobile of great stories?
Which George Saunders story for example isn't hinged, in whatever way, and laced through with 'damage'?
Not so much questions to which I have any instant answer but rather a nested set of queries that will carry forward into my next, say three or five, serendipitous readings George's short stories.
I've let your response John, to what you kindly call my reflection, mull a while.
Here's the thought that's abiding from my latest 'shuffle' on this line of, reflective, exploration: the oft promulgated necessity of story, to wit 'conflict', cometh out of where / whom?
Where other than out of 'the damaged' protagonists / antagonists whose backstories stand at the helm on the bridge of the vessel from which the unfolding story is going to be navigated.
Making sense or no sense? John? Annemarie? George?
Where does conflict come from? Not only from the mental and spiritual state of the characters. There are essentially conflictual situations in life, such as (non-exclusive list) husband/wife, parent/child, sibling 1/sibling 2, teacher/student, employer/employee, etc etc. What is made of a fundamentally conflictual situation will depend on "character", the specific make-up of each partner to the conflict, and the damage each has suffered in life (what kind? How serious? How much life has the damage left intact?) is a determinant of the pursuit and outcome of the conflict.
The story will be how the characters overcome, or fail to overcome, the damage done. How the conflict itself may help them do that, or, to the contrary, make it impossible.
I really loved this comment and question. As I write my novel and flounder away myself, I do try to approach these unexpected shifts that happen between characters and in real life. The surprise is waiting in the shadow story, because of what we know about the characters/people. So questioner, what do you know about this sister and brother at the heart of their relationship that could come up for them in that scene you are writing that would less cliche, more surprising, yet somehow inevitable, based on where they have already been in the preceding chapters?
I'm reminded of a principle in theatre, whereby 'character' isn't something to be defined by assigning labels such as 'bully', 'nurturer', 'liar', etc, but by what that individual wants, and what they're prepared to do to get it. A great source of conflict can then be between what a character thinks they want vs what they actually want; or what they actually want vs what's expected of them.
So one of the individuals you claims to want strong enough evidence about their father's past that it'll change their perceptions, but in reality they want to maintain their perceptions regardless of the evidence.
In a YMCA class I took 1000 years ago with the writer Mark Richard, he advised that one should always go back to the last place where the writing felt correct and restart from there. I think it's a useful idea.
I've thought about that comment for decades. There's often a place where a piece of writing goes down the wrong fork. If you can get back to the place where you KNEW what was unfolding was right, you can forge a new route.
I once read an interview with Anne Tyler in which she said: "I find that writer’s block arises from a subconscious realization that I’ve taken a wrong turn—forced a character into something he wouldn’t do, cheated somehow in the story line. If I don’t see where I’ve gone wrong in a day or two, I find it helps to go back to the start of the problem and painstakingly rewrite those pages by hand—a process slow enough so that I usually discover my misstep."
Yes, when it starts to go off, or if there is an interruption, it's often unredeemable. The editing proposed here, in SC, must have to do with work or text which is already, essentially, to standard, not veering off on a/some tangent somewhere.
The epigraph to my novel is a few lines from the great poet John Berryman :
“Am I bad man , am I a good man?
Mr. Bones: I don’t know . Maybe you both , like most of we.”
Maybe you need to recognise and show that there’s some ambiguity…. That each sibling while steadfast in their opposing points of view, still have a touch of the other ( and the other side ) in them ( as siblings do ) .., maybe one of them has an epiphany in the moment he or she realises that ….. and see where that realisation takes them ….
There is nothing wrong with a book having a clear moral perspective. Many's the time people have confused vacillation with intellectual sophistication - refusing to stand by the truth because the truth is on only one side of the argument. Trying to invent nuance where none exists is not an honest approach.
However, the subsequent questions posed by that state of affairs are extremely interesting. I agree fully with George's advice to pursue them. What do you do when a loved one is entirely in the wrong, causing serious harm, and seemingly cannot be reasoned out of their position? And, given that there are many real-world examples of this, what do you *actually* do? There are no good answers to that, and it's where the ambiguity resides.
The comments already get at this, and it may not be helpful because it's so zoomed out, but consider how siblings as a literary device can represent a duality of self, giving us a shortcut to the idea that one is fundamentally capable of being the other. A(n a)moral stance only says so much in itself, because we'd need to know (and I'm sure we would if we'd actually read it) how they happen to have ended up in their respective places, with their respective viewpoints – although like the siblings, there's a relationship between these things, too.
It's easy to make an objective judgment of a person purely based on a moment in time, but you could say that's lazy (and the reason people get mad at one another about politics on social media, for example) but if these are dimensional characters it should be possible for us to sympathise with each of them regardless of where they are or what they're doing.
In trying to wrap up what I'm saying here, one thing I would say about Mr Saunders' work is that regardless of a character's place on the scale of morality, I feel for them – he challenges us as readers to consider how we could be in that place with them, and in doing so inspires us to be more human.
So true. Some of the most effective/ moving/ disturbing stories I have read, or seen in cinema are the ones where I could feel for, and even care for, a “bad” character. People are complex and are rarely good, or bad. We all have the potential to exercise great acts of charity or, inflict the worst pain on each other. How we manage this makes great drama, and literature.
Do not diminish the act of an individual finding her or his voice. If we care about this character we will be deeply moved by her finding her voice after a bookfull of tribulations, because finding one's voice is actually accepting one's self, history, presence in the world. This may be a stereotype, but when it happens to a character at the right time, after said character has overcome obstacles and grown from these experiences, finding the voice is a major victory, one every reader can identify with or aim for.
As a practical exercise - Could you maybe try that scene written with just inference, no referring to the actual issues? Like Hemingway did in Hills Like White Elephants, let your characters talk around the issue. No direct wording at all. What other valences (as George said, and this is a perfect word for it) come up? Then, when you've written that interaction (both dialogue and description) in this manner, do a word search in your document for the words or phrases that come up that interest you/surprise you. You may have already been alluding to this throughout the work. I'm forever surprised that I already set something up, but just didn't recognize it. Maybe it's in there already. I appreciate your letter, George's insight, and the group's responses so much. Fabulous advice.
Sometimes when I get stuck like this, I fill my pen with ink, and I sit down and write an interview. "Elijah, I want to know why you are so hard on your daughter." And then I write the answer in first person. When I asked Elijah why he was so hard on his daughter, he was on the defensive and indignant, and he had quite a lot to say. After I finished the interview, I understood him better, and was better able to write about him. It helped me get unstuck. There's always more of the story than ends up on paper, and you're the only one who knows the missing pieces--you just have to coax them out.
I am imagining reading your book, and I get near the end and there's a showdown between a person who had a part in doing something awful, and someone else who knows it to be wrong.
I don't mind that at all. Seems like that has some real potential and the dramatic imbalance in built in to it.
And, if you've got me this far through the book, you've earned it by making me interested enough to turn so many pages, and that will have meant that the journey to that point for those characters was interesting to me, and I felt the journey and I was enjoying the voice, and I trust you to tell me a story.
The ending of, say, Pride and Prejudice isn't a surprise or especially innovative/ambiguous (certainly not to a modern reader), but the journey to that ending was interesting, innovative, funny, moving and we feel the emotions and we trust the voice. Or Middlemarch, or Macbeth, or A Christmas Carol, or whatever.
This is just me as a reader. For me, the ending need not be anything other than the place an interesting journey has taken me.
Thanks for this. Reading here and elsewhere, I get the sense that an ending must always be a surprise -- an inevitable surprise, but still a surprise -- in order to be satisfying/enlightening/moving, etc. But I find I'm often feeling all of those things when the ending is as I expected, but illuminated to a degree I hadn't.
Love this idea of an expected, non-surprise ending being okay as long as it's "illuminated" in an unexpected way. In fact, I often read the ends of novels/stories first to find out what happens there and get rid of that particular surprise/no surprise problem right from the get go. (No worries about spoiler alerts for me.) Then I go back to the beginning and read as closely as possible to find out exactly how and why it happened. It's surprises ("illuminations") in the answers to these questions along the way that I look for as a reader. It's a journey-destination kind of thing, I guess. And the surprises don't have to necessarily be in any of plot, character, theme, setting, etc.; they can be in style/language, too (e.g., Knausgaard).
Questioner: I'm wondering if you'd be willing to let go of some of your commitment to historical accuracy in order to let in a few more of these types of surprises/illuminations along the way? I'm not a reader of historical fiction and so I hope I haven't just said something entirely offensive or suggested something that's a huge no-no for the genre. But I am thinking, for example, of how much I've enjoyed stories where authors have used "alternate histories" (or elements of them) in order to illuminate something new and surprising about the human condition.
It seems to me that the only way you have a good guy and a bad guy in a violent conflict is if the violence is senseless. If the violence is rooted (as wars often are) in deep divides, misunderstandings, and people fighting with their life for their lives and dignity and self-determination, then there are, to risk the wrath of every thinking person, good people on both sides. I'd look for the complexity and the moral truth of the 'bad' sibling, and the shadow side of the 'good' one and work with that.
This fits with my thought that the brother on the bad side of history could show the sister that she is complicit, or at least not as “good” as she thinks she is. That then would lead to her rejecting him, turning against him dramatically, turning for him dramatically, or…whatever you devise. What George said then comes into play as to what the story is about. It can’t be about reiterating that a real moment in history was awful. Your book is about your characters, you. Sounds wonderful.
Exactly: the complexity. How did each sibling get to that act of violence? How did they walk away from it? Did the 'good' sibling see it coming, try to dissuade the bad sibling, or see it coming and look the other way, hoping for the best, so as to keep things peaceful between them? And if there's a motivation to keep things peaceful, what is it? Lots of threads to pull in writing these characters.
An early post from George! Instead of the usual 1:00 pm Pacific Time (US), he's done something new and different. A Story Club lesson in that--try new things, surprise people, see what happens. (And what's happened is that a new group of folks have responded already, which is fantastic.)
George really gave a perfect answer. Here's my tiny two cents: Writer, you have not finished your book yet. Finish it. Finish it in any way that will get it done. Write that ending you haven't written. Just write it so that you have a full and complete draft. Write The End at the end. There--now you have an entire piece to work from. You have a draft. And now.....it's time to rewrite it. I know that may sound painful, but it's really the truth. What you have is a draft of a story, and now is the time to go into that draft and see what you're done to get where you are. Because, if you want the ending to go in another direction from the one you just slapped on (at my request), you're going to have to start dropping clues from way back. You'll need to re-think, re-imagine these characters from the beginning. You may have to delete large sections. Somewhere in your book in this first draft you have led these two to this logical conclusion that you don't really like. That means your characters need to be more complicated. They both need to show their true colors. They both need to be tested along the way so that the ending is a pay off for your reader. We want tension, we want to not be sure what they are going to do. And all of that comes throughout the book. So my take (and i realize this may be hard to hear) is to sit back, breathe, imagine, and then rewrite. Write your second draft. See where it takes you. Your first draft did not work for you. So the answer, really, is to analyze what you've already got on the page and see what changes you can make. The beginning of your book should hold the ending in mind--that's what a rewrite does. So that's my take and I hope you can enjoy the process. It may take a long time, but it's so interesting and fun to look inside your own head and see what you come up with. Even to analyze why you chose to write a story that holds such a strong "right/wrong" idea at the end. That was your choice--to write a book that leads to that. Could be fun to wonder why of all ideas in all the world, that is what came to you.
Historical fiction sometimes is challenging because we are in the 21st century writing about events that we understand in clear moral terms, but perhaps were not understood so in the moment. In life, and writing, I always try and remember that everyone is the hero of their own story, and most likely, each person has good and bad qualities. Unless your character is truly awful, they must have reasoning behind their actions, misguided perhaps, but real to them.
Thinking about your current situation, I wonder what the point of view is in your novel? Might you write this climax scene from the pov of your 'bad guy'. Even just as an exercise and to break this roadblock?
I very much agree with George's position that novels become different than we expect when we start writing, no matter how clear an outline or plan we set off with. I love the idea of the novel all taking place in one day though! I'm sure it's going to be great.
Akin to the notion of multiverses maybe there's scope for a notion of there being not 'story' but 'multi-stories'? Could there have been / be / yet to be several 'best it could be' versions of most, perhaps all, published versions of great stories?
We seem to be in a period when reworking great stories is in vogue and a surprising enduring niche in fiction. Is the story that's been worked up by the Questioner possibly be one that's closer to other fictions than, perhaps, has been previously realised? Could this be, in some way, why difficulty is being experienced in working the ending?
Just passing ruminations on my part... glad to have space to air them.
This is such a refreshing answer. This idea of not forcing a scene to be so "load-bearding." I can't count the number of times of done this, gotten so attached to an idea because it's what was "supposed" to happen and felt it all fall flat, rather than just letting it be what it might need to be, another escalation on the way to whatever the story might end up being about now.
It's particularly good news since, I don't know about the rest of you, but after a while, I often feel like my initially brilliant ideas are, once written out, pretty lame. But in the moments when I've managed to let go and written past them to see what might be beyond, that's usually when I've found success. I still struggle with it, though, and this answer is sort of like the permission I never needed but clearly needed to do just that.
(Also, hello everyone. I never comment, but here I am. I love Story Club.)
I'm going to offer to you a situation from my own life. The situation, the beginning of the end, like yours, is among three friends.
Your book, being based during the Civil War, is rife with differences in what war does to the human mind and our emotions.
We must consider the inner struggles of being on one side of the Mason Dixon Line but being in favor of, even wanting to live and experience what it would be to live on 'the other side'.
Obviously, your characters are so different in the possibilities that it could take years, maybe never, for each to put the love for other and put outside influences aside.
I have a real life experience very much related to three friends of many years who loved each other dearly until...
I was a Michigan Yankee homosexual who, at the age of 13, was forced to move from my beloved home state to the Pan Handle of Florida during Segregation. Talk about culture shock.
When my dysfunctional family, poverty stricken but happy in spite of it, moving frequently within the state of Michigan then following almost all of my Ma's family to Florida, though I hated the tense atmosphere in a segregated state but making new friends was easy for me.
Fast forward to graduating from highschool in 1964. By then I truly hated the bigotry of the Florifians. My brother had moved to Atlanta with his wife and son.
Two months after graduation I moved to Atlanta and stayed with my brother. The first word of advice from my sister in-law was to stay away from Piedmont Park. That's where the queers hang out, said she.
I couldn't wait for the next day.
Fast forward again. I'd moved again with my Ma and step father to Massachusetts. There six months my step father's temper got him fired.
The move back to Detroit was interrupted by the draft board. Three years in the Army with a trip to Vietnam. While there, Ma and step dad moved to Atlanta.
Fast forward once more. A presidential run for President was a black man's win. I had worked my way up at Southern Railway's Headquarters from union member to salaried.
The number of friends I had in The Capitol of the South, a city I believed to quickly settle in with integration, Atlanta was like heaven on earth to me.
One of my best friends was a gal who fell in love with another gal at the railroad. The other in this part of my story, was a man my age I met in a gay club.
The three of us were so close. Laughing and partying, my beautiful house rental always full of gay friends, then came the AIDS epidemic.
I'm hoping you're beginning to see the similarities to your story now.
I lost more than a hundred friends to AIDS. My two best friends survived.
President Obama had no idea that two Southerners and one Yankee living in Atlanta had our friendships torn apart by his election.
I no longer lived in Atlanta. We three communicated via email. I was so excited about Obama's success I immediately emailed my two friends with a quick message: "HURRAY!!!"
That ended our friendship. The woman had by then been assured that being a lesbian was wrong. The man, born in the hills to the north of Atlanta, well, both he and the woman had remained friends. They turned on me like milk left in the sun.
I received lengthy rants from both of them. They were furious at me for loving the Black Man in the Whitehouse.
The loss of my two closest friends broke my heart. The man had even joined the Tea Party, en encore of Jim Crow.
The woman had introduced me to a woman who lived in Knoxville, Tennessee. The meeting was via email and remained such well after where this part ends to let you know how the loss of friendships were resolved.
Regarding the woman, her mind became rattled by the many pills she took to calm her nerves. The woman in Knoxville kept me posted on my friend's deterioration until she could no longer deal with the drama. Friend No. 1: Gone.
I missed my male friend so much that finally, after several years apart, I felt I must clear the air between us. I realized that any conversations about politics and religion must be avoided completely. We agreed on those terms and are still loving friends distanced by the miles between San Diego and Atlanta.
I no longer regret the loss of my friendship with the woman. The past can't be changed and sometimes it's not worth correcting.
I'm 78 now. A lot has changed in ny life. But a personality that has always existed across the line between Northern and Southern states of America is within the LGBTQ COMMUNITY and across all the borders and beneath the flags of other nations, our Community's Flag, the Rainbow, is the only Flag that represents every nation on earth. I say, "Live with it." Our community has suffered what all but the poorest, homeless white folks have suffered, the homeless equal to us in the evil eyes of the White Supremacists: equal rights.
A, may I safely assume that the woman in your story is the one who leans to the good? Usually women and gays forgive men for their sins. The last Words said to have come from the lips of Jesus were: "Forgive them. They know not what they're doing."
Sorry. I didn't mean for this to be so lengthy. I felt I needed to point out how differences can be handled by shutting the hell about them. We are supposed to have the right to be different yet subjected to the rights offered to ALL citizens of the United States.
Secret or open, love stands in the way of hatred. It's our weapon for keeping Democracy above hypocrisy.
I don't know if this will work in your characters' scenario, but here's my thought: what if the morality is known by the reader but the so called " bad" character stands by his act and defends it, even validates it. Maybe even convinces the "good" sibling that these things are necessary sometimes to maintain the status quo.
I love narratives that immerse the reader in the experience of the protagonist so deeply that you don't realize what the book is convincing you of is insane. (unreliable narrator(?) But you've been participating all along without realizing it (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas). Like a childhood story that presents a situation of neglect and other horrors matter of factly and explained away even, through life philosophy or what not, as they themselves understood it at the time (The Glass Castle or Educated).
Anyway, this is a great conversation as are all of the ones I've read here thus far. And I'm midway through A Swim in the Pond and loving it.
I find George so enlightening and helpful and agree wholeheartedly with his advice. There is a point at which a book develops its own momentum and we have to be prepared to run away from our darlings, and fly with that great wind.
When I came to a similar roadblock for one of my original drafts for The Seasonwife, I stopped and interviewed the main characters. I set out a list of who, what, when, where, why and how like the journalist I once was, I was curious to know what the characters felt, who they were underneath, even what they thought of me.
This led to some real changes and different directions. The characters even insisted on different names.
And I think it is worth remembering that the only deadline a writer needs is the deadline of writing towards their best book, not the market, not a publisher, but the book that piques their curiousity, the one they want to read, the book they must write.
All the best. I would definitely mark your novel as a must-read.
My goodness, how remarkable that the characters wanted new names, and that you listened. I love that.
To pick up on George’s point about finding that next beat in the aftermath: I see the aftermath as having two phases. First, the initial reaction. Second, how the event shapes and shifts the relationship for years to come. The Ratlines by Philippe Sands stands out for me as a recent-ish (non-fiction) book that examines that grapple, specifically in the adult children of Nazis.
Sands' previous book (East West Street) looked at how the Holocaust shaped human rights law and, as part of his research, he spent time with adult children of Nazis. One man had lived his life as an apology: never having children, publicly lecturing on the horrors of Hitler. Another chap had a very different line of thinking. ‘Yes my father was a high-ranking Nazi but not a bad one. However, if you find evidence to say otherwise, please let me know!’
The Ratlines is Sands (a lawyer) investigating this particular Nazi. In part to solve the mystery of his death, but emotionally, overwhelmingly, to bring the evidence to the son and say, ‘how about now? Is this enough?’ Time and again the son concludes that he loved his father and his father was a good man. Not, I loved him as a child but I can’t as an adult; or, I love him but I can’t love what he did; but: I loved him, he loved me, so he was a good man.
A fascinating, frustrating examination of a stuck point of view. Humans contain multitudes and even the most seemingly consistent people can resist logic when they want to hold certain emotions tight.
Yes, this is one of the most interesting things about human beings. They contain multitudes.
Could there be mileage in prose exploration - fictive or non-fictive - of the implications of holding certain emotions tight in people who are evidently inconsistent despite their lifelong lauding logic?
In one way this is just me playing around, shuffling if you will, with words. Looked another way it's me saying thank you for posting a comment that's sparked a sense of a fresh point of view breaking out, with perspective altering potential.
Hey, shuffle away! That’s what writers do. I really enjoyed the question because it made me shuffle through possible solutions. It reminded me that a story - like life - should be about relationships. It’s shattering to discover someone you love is abhorrent; it’s a break in the social contract. So do you try to heal them, change them, walk away from them? What do you do with your love from them, in whatever fashion it remains? No one is walking away from that situation with their soul intact. All of which makes it a great story moment!
Is it inevitable that walking into many, if not all, such situations is going to impact the soul in ways most likely to leave it less intact?
Is 'damage' the primum mobile of great stories?
Which George Saunders story for example isn't hinged, in whatever way, and laced through with 'damage'?
Not so much questions to which I have any instant answer but rather a nested set of queries that will carry forward into my next, say three or five, serendipitous readings George's short stories.
"Is 'damage' the primum mobile of great stories?"
Thanks for that reflection, Rob.
The more the characters in my current work stand up and walk, the more I perceive that what they have in common is damage.
Hi John & Hi Annemarie.
I've let your response John, to what you kindly call my reflection, mull a while.
Here's the thought that's abiding from my latest 'shuffle' on this line of, reflective, exploration: the oft promulgated necessity of story, to wit 'conflict', cometh out of where / whom?
Where other than out of 'the damaged' protagonists / antagonists whose backstories stand at the helm on the bridge of the vessel from which the unfolding story is going to be navigated.
Making sense or no sense? John? Annemarie? George?
Where does conflict come from? Not only from the mental and spiritual state of the characters. There are essentially conflictual situations in life, such as (non-exclusive list) husband/wife, parent/child, sibling 1/sibling 2, teacher/student, employer/employee, etc etc. What is made of a fundamentally conflictual situation will depend on "character", the specific make-up of each partner to the conflict, and the damage each has suffered in life (what kind? How serious? How much life has the damage left intact?) is a determinant of the pursuit and outcome of the conflict.
The story will be how the characters overcome, or fail to overcome, the damage done. How the conflict itself may help them do that, or, to the contrary, make it impossible.
OK, blah. Enough theorizing for today?
I really loved this comment and question. As I write my novel and flounder away myself, I do try to approach these unexpected shifts that happen between characters and in real life. The surprise is waiting in the shadow story, because of what we know about the characters/people. So questioner, what do you know about this sister and brother at the heart of their relationship that could come up for them in that scene you are writing that would less cliche, more surprising, yet somehow inevitable, based on where they have already been in the preceding chapters?
Great illustrations.
I'm reminded of a principle in theatre, whereby 'character' isn't something to be defined by assigning labels such as 'bully', 'nurturer', 'liar', etc, but by what that individual wants, and what they're prepared to do to get it. A great source of conflict can then be between what a character thinks they want vs what they actually want; or what they actually want vs what's expected of them.
So one of the individuals you claims to want strong enough evidence about their father's past that it'll change their perceptions, but in reality they want to maintain their perceptions regardless of the evidence.
In a YMCA class I took 1000 years ago with the writer Mark Richard, he advised that one should always go back to the last place where the writing felt correct and restart from there. I think it's a useful idea.
Richard is a wonderful writer. :)
I've thought about that comment for decades. There's often a place where a piece of writing goes down the wrong fork. If you can get back to the place where you KNEW what was unfolding was right, you can forge a new route.
I once read an interview with Anne Tyler in which she said: "I find that writer’s block arises from a subconscious realization that I’ve taken a wrong turn—forced a character into something he wouldn’t do, cheated somehow in the story line. If I don’t see where I’ve gone wrong in a day or two, I find it helps to go back to the start of the problem and painstakingly rewrite those pages by hand—a process slow enough so that I usually discover my misstep."
Love this.
I love Mark Richard! I teach his story Strays often, it’s so wonderful
Good to know. I was not aware of this writer and just found his collection of short stories and his memoir. I shall check them out.
The stories are perfect. (Like George's!)
Yes, when it starts to go off, or if there is an interruption, it's often unredeemable. The editing proposed here, in SC, must have to do with work or text which is already, essentially, to standard, not veering off on a/some tangent somewhere.
It's great to have this confirmation.
The epigraph to my novel is a few lines from the great poet John Berryman :
“Am I bad man , am I a good man?
Mr. Bones: I don’t know . Maybe you both , like most of we.”
Maybe you need to recognise and show that there’s some ambiguity…. That each sibling while steadfast in their opposing points of view, still have a touch of the other ( and the other side ) in them ( as siblings do ) .., maybe one of them has an epiphany in the moment he or she realises that ….. and see where that realisation takes them ….
There is nothing wrong with a book having a clear moral perspective. Many's the time people have confused vacillation with intellectual sophistication - refusing to stand by the truth because the truth is on only one side of the argument. Trying to invent nuance where none exists is not an honest approach.
However, the subsequent questions posed by that state of affairs are extremely interesting. I agree fully with George's advice to pursue them. What do you do when a loved one is entirely in the wrong, causing serious harm, and seemingly cannot be reasoned out of their position? And, given that there are many real-world examples of this, what do you *actually* do? There are no good answers to that, and it's where the ambiguity resides.
What do you do when a loved one is entirely in the wrong, causing serious harm, and seemingly cannot be reasoned out of their position?
> Yes, or anyone, anywhere. Standards do exist, and can be worked for, championed, especially within oneself.
Hah, true, but there's a little more dramatic juice when it's personal.
Love this answer.
The comments already get at this, and it may not be helpful because it's so zoomed out, but consider how siblings as a literary device can represent a duality of self, giving us a shortcut to the idea that one is fundamentally capable of being the other. A(n a)moral stance only says so much in itself, because we'd need to know (and I'm sure we would if we'd actually read it) how they happen to have ended up in their respective places, with their respective viewpoints – although like the siblings, there's a relationship between these things, too.
It's easy to make an objective judgment of a person purely based on a moment in time, but you could say that's lazy (and the reason people get mad at one another about politics on social media, for example) but if these are dimensional characters it should be possible for us to sympathise with each of them regardless of where they are or what they're doing.
In trying to wrap up what I'm saying here, one thing I would say about Mr Saunders' work is that regardless of a character's place on the scale of morality, I feel for them – he challenges us as readers to consider how we could be in that place with them, and in doing so inspires us to be more human.
So true. Some of the most effective/ moving/ disturbing stories I have read, or seen in cinema are the ones where I could feel for, and even care for, a “bad” character. People are complex and are rarely good, or bad. We all have the potential to exercise great acts of charity or, inflict the worst pain on each other. How we manage this makes great drama, and literature.
Do not diminish the act of an individual finding her or his voice. If we care about this character we will be deeply moved by her finding her voice after a bookfull of tribulations, because finding one's voice is actually accepting one's self, history, presence in the world. This may be a stereotype, but when it happens to a character at the right time, after said character has overcome obstacles and grown from these experiences, finding the voice is a major victory, one every reader can identify with or aim for.
Indeed, Tobias Wolf pulls this off in his short story “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs”
Wholeheartedly agree that finding one's voice is never anticlimactic.
As a practical exercise - Could you maybe try that scene written with just inference, no referring to the actual issues? Like Hemingway did in Hills Like White Elephants, let your characters talk around the issue. No direct wording at all. What other valences (as George said, and this is a perfect word for it) come up? Then, when you've written that interaction (both dialogue and description) in this manner, do a word search in your document for the words or phrases that come up that interest you/surprise you. You may have already been alluding to this throughout the work. I'm forever surprised that I already set something up, but just didn't recognize it. Maybe it's in there already. I appreciate your letter, George's insight, and the group's responses so much. Fabulous advice.
Sometimes when I get stuck like this, I fill my pen with ink, and I sit down and write an interview. "Elijah, I want to know why you are so hard on your daughter." And then I write the answer in first person. When I asked Elijah why he was so hard on his daughter, he was on the defensive and indignant, and he had quite a lot to say. After I finished the interview, I understood him better, and was better able to write about him. It helped me get unstuck. There's always more of the story than ends up on paper, and you're the only one who knows the missing pieces--you just have to coax them out.
This is such a simple but potentially productive and revelatory exercise. I love this suggestion.
Trying to think as a reader for this:
I am imagining reading your book, and I get near the end and there's a showdown between a person who had a part in doing something awful, and someone else who knows it to be wrong.
I don't mind that at all. Seems like that has some real potential and the dramatic imbalance in built in to it.
And, if you've got me this far through the book, you've earned it by making me interested enough to turn so many pages, and that will have meant that the journey to that point for those characters was interesting to me, and I felt the journey and I was enjoying the voice, and I trust you to tell me a story.
The ending of, say, Pride and Prejudice isn't a surprise or especially innovative/ambiguous (certainly not to a modern reader), but the journey to that ending was interesting, innovative, funny, moving and we feel the emotions and we trust the voice. Or Middlemarch, or Macbeth, or A Christmas Carol, or whatever.
This is just me as a reader. For me, the ending need not be anything other than the place an interesting journey has taken me.
Thanks for this. Reading here and elsewhere, I get the sense that an ending must always be a surprise -- an inevitable surprise, but still a surprise -- in order to be satisfying/enlightening/moving, etc. But I find I'm often feeling all of those things when the ending is as I expected, but illuminated to a degree I hadn't.
Love this idea of an expected, non-surprise ending being okay as long as it's "illuminated" in an unexpected way. In fact, I often read the ends of novels/stories first to find out what happens there and get rid of that particular surprise/no surprise problem right from the get go. (No worries about spoiler alerts for me.) Then I go back to the beginning and read as closely as possible to find out exactly how and why it happened. It's surprises ("illuminations") in the answers to these questions along the way that I look for as a reader. It's a journey-destination kind of thing, I guess. And the surprises don't have to necessarily be in any of plot, character, theme, setting, etc.; they can be in style/language, too (e.g., Knausgaard).
Questioner: I'm wondering if you'd be willing to let go of some of your commitment to historical accuracy in order to let in a few more of these types of surprises/illuminations along the way? I'm not a reader of historical fiction and so I hope I haven't just said something entirely offensive or suggested something that's a huge no-no for the genre. But I am thinking, for example, of how much I've enjoyed stories where authors have used "alternate histories" (or elements of them) in order to illuminate something new and surprising about the human condition.
It seems to me that the only way you have a good guy and a bad guy in a violent conflict is if the violence is senseless. If the violence is rooted (as wars often are) in deep divides, misunderstandings, and people fighting with their life for their lives and dignity and self-determination, then there are, to risk the wrath of every thinking person, good people on both sides. I'd look for the complexity and the moral truth of the 'bad' sibling, and the shadow side of the 'good' one and work with that.
This fits with my thought that the brother on the bad side of history could show the sister that she is complicit, or at least not as “good” as she thinks she is. That then would lead to her rejecting him, turning against him dramatically, turning for him dramatically, or…whatever you devise. What George said then comes into play as to what the story is about. It can’t be about reiterating that a real moment in history was awful. Your book is about your characters, you. Sounds wonderful.
Exactly: the complexity. How did each sibling get to that act of violence? How did they walk away from it? Did the 'good' sibling see it coming, try to dissuade the bad sibling, or see it coming and look the other way, hoping for the best, so as to keep things peaceful between them? And if there's a motivation to keep things peaceful, what is it? Lots of threads to pull in writing these characters.
An early post from George! Instead of the usual 1:00 pm Pacific Time (US), he's done something new and different. A Story Club lesson in that--try new things, surprise people, see what happens. (And what's happened is that a new group of folks have responded already, which is fantastic.)
George really gave a perfect answer. Here's my tiny two cents: Writer, you have not finished your book yet. Finish it. Finish it in any way that will get it done. Write that ending you haven't written. Just write it so that you have a full and complete draft. Write The End at the end. There--now you have an entire piece to work from. You have a draft. And now.....it's time to rewrite it. I know that may sound painful, but it's really the truth. What you have is a draft of a story, and now is the time to go into that draft and see what you're done to get where you are. Because, if you want the ending to go in another direction from the one you just slapped on (at my request), you're going to have to start dropping clues from way back. You'll need to re-think, re-imagine these characters from the beginning. You may have to delete large sections. Somewhere in your book in this first draft you have led these two to this logical conclusion that you don't really like. That means your characters need to be more complicated. They both need to show their true colors. They both need to be tested along the way so that the ending is a pay off for your reader. We want tension, we want to not be sure what they are going to do. And all of that comes throughout the book. So my take (and i realize this may be hard to hear) is to sit back, breathe, imagine, and then rewrite. Write your second draft. See where it takes you. Your first draft did not work for you. So the answer, really, is to analyze what you've already got on the page and see what changes you can make. The beginning of your book should hold the ending in mind--that's what a rewrite does. So that's my take and I hope you can enjoy the process. It may take a long time, but it's so interesting and fun to look inside your own head and see what you come up with. Even to analyze why you chose to write a story that holds such a strong "right/wrong" idea at the end. That was your choice--to write a book that leads to that. Could be fun to wonder why of all ideas in all the world, that is what came to you.
The timing was...an error. :) The interesting thing is, I'm not sure precisely what the error was. So...keeping us all (including me) on our toes.
I think it went up at 1am Pacific, which is 10am here in France. 1am, 1pm...
Anyway, great discussion here!
Historical fiction sometimes is challenging because we are in the 21st century writing about events that we understand in clear moral terms, but perhaps were not understood so in the moment. In life, and writing, I always try and remember that everyone is the hero of their own story, and most likely, each person has good and bad qualities. Unless your character is truly awful, they must have reasoning behind their actions, misguided perhaps, but real to them.
Thinking about your current situation, I wonder what the point of view is in your novel? Might you write this climax scene from the pov of your 'bad guy'. Even just as an exercise and to break this roadblock?
I very much agree with George's position that novels become different than we expect when we start writing, no matter how clear an outline or plan we set off with. I love the idea of the novel all taking place in one day though! I'm sure it's going to be great.
Akin to the notion of multiverses maybe there's scope for a notion of there being not 'story' but 'multi-stories'? Could there have been / be / yet to be several 'best it could be' versions of most, perhaps all, published versions of great stories?
We seem to be in a period when reworking great stories is in vogue and a surprising enduring niche in fiction. Is the story that's been worked up by the Questioner possibly be one that's closer to other fictions than, perhaps, has been previously realised? Could this be, in some way, why difficulty is being experienced in working the ending?
Just passing ruminations on my part... glad to have space to air them.
This is such a refreshing answer. This idea of not forcing a scene to be so "load-bearding." I can't count the number of times of done this, gotten so attached to an idea because it's what was "supposed" to happen and felt it all fall flat, rather than just letting it be what it might need to be, another escalation on the way to whatever the story might end up being about now.
It's particularly good news since, I don't know about the rest of you, but after a while, I often feel like my initially brilliant ideas are, once written out, pretty lame. But in the moments when I've managed to let go and written past them to see what might be beyond, that's usually when I've found success. I still struggle with it, though, and this answer is sort of like the permission I never needed but clearly needed to do just that.
(Also, hello everyone. I never comment, but here I am. I love Story Club.)
Dear A,
I'm going to offer to you a situation from my own life. The situation, the beginning of the end, like yours, is among three friends.
Your book, being based during the Civil War, is rife with differences in what war does to the human mind and our emotions.
We must consider the inner struggles of being on one side of the Mason Dixon Line but being in favor of, even wanting to live and experience what it would be to live on 'the other side'.
Obviously, your characters are so different in the possibilities that it could take years, maybe never, for each to put the love for other and put outside influences aside.
I have a real life experience very much related to three friends of many years who loved each other dearly until...
I was a Michigan Yankee homosexual who, at the age of 13, was forced to move from my beloved home state to the Pan Handle of Florida during Segregation. Talk about culture shock.
When my dysfunctional family, poverty stricken but happy in spite of it, moving frequently within the state of Michigan then following almost all of my Ma's family to Florida, though I hated the tense atmosphere in a segregated state but making new friends was easy for me.
Fast forward to graduating from highschool in 1964. By then I truly hated the bigotry of the Florifians. My brother had moved to Atlanta with his wife and son.
Two months after graduation I moved to Atlanta and stayed with my brother. The first word of advice from my sister in-law was to stay away from Piedmont Park. That's where the queers hang out, said she.
I couldn't wait for the next day.
Fast forward again. I'd moved again with my Ma and step father to Massachusetts. There six months my step father's temper got him fired.
The move back to Detroit was interrupted by the draft board. Three years in the Army with a trip to Vietnam. While there, Ma and step dad moved to Atlanta.
Fast forward once more. A presidential run for President was a black man's win. I had worked my way up at Southern Railway's Headquarters from union member to salaried.
The number of friends I had in The Capitol of the South, a city I believed to quickly settle in with integration, Atlanta was like heaven on earth to me.
One of my best friends was a gal who fell in love with another gal at the railroad. The other in this part of my story, was a man my age I met in a gay club.
The three of us were so close. Laughing and partying, my beautiful house rental always full of gay friends, then came the AIDS epidemic.
I'm hoping you're beginning to see the similarities to your story now.
I lost more than a hundred friends to AIDS. My two best friends survived.
President Obama had no idea that two Southerners and one Yankee living in Atlanta had our friendships torn apart by his election.
I no longer lived in Atlanta. We three communicated via email. I was so excited about Obama's success I immediately emailed my two friends with a quick message: "HURRAY!!!"
That ended our friendship. The woman had by then been assured that being a lesbian was wrong. The man, born in the hills to the north of Atlanta, well, both he and the woman had remained friends. They turned on me like milk left in the sun.
I received lengthy rants from both of them. They were furious at me for loving the Black Man in the Whitehouse.
The loss of my two closest friends broke my heart. The man had even joined the Tea Party, en encore of Jim Crow.
The woman had introduced me to a woman who lived in Knoxville, Tennessee. The meeting was via email and remained such well after where this part ends to let you know how the loss of friendships were resolved.
Regarding the woman, her mind became rattled by the many pills she took to calm her nerves. The woman in Knoxville kept me posted on my friend's deterioration until she could no longer deal with the drama. Friend No. 1: Gone.
I missed my male friend so much that finally, after several years apart, I felt I must clear the air between us. I realized that any conversations about politics and religion must be avoided completely. We agreed on those terms and are still loving friends distanced by the miles between San Diego and Atlanta.
I no longer regret the loss of my friendship with the woman. The past can't be changed and sometimes it's not worth correcting.
I'm 78 now. A lot has changed in ny life. But a personality that has always existed across the line between Northern and Southern states of America is within the LGBTQ COMMUNITY and across all the borders and beneath the flags of other nations, our Community's Flag, the Rainbow, is the only Flag that represents every nation on earth. I say, "Live with it." Our community has suffered what all but the poorest, homeless white folks have suffered, the homeless equal to us in the evil eyes of the White Supremacists: equal rights.
A, may I safely assume that the woman in your story is the one who leans to the good? Usually women and gays forgive men for their sins. The last Words said to have come from the lips of Jesus were: "Forgive them. They know not what they're doing."
Sorry. I didn't mean for this to be so lengthy. I felt I needed to point out how differences can be handled by shutting the hell about them. We are supposed to have the right to be different yet subjected to the rights offered to ALL citizens of the United States.
Secret or open, love stands in the way of hatred. It's our weapon for keeping Democracy above hypocrisy.
Richard La France
Ready to help you write and edit your memoir, Richard! Fascinating life.
And so much was left out of what I wrote here. My hope was to help A.
Lee, I would like to have a conversation with you. I've been working on my story for many years but circumstances beyond my control got in the way.
I'm so pleased that finding Substack has allowed me to start anew. I feel that this freedom has actually improved my form.
We can take this conversation offline Richard - lee@leehornbrook.com
I have to catch up on some housework today. Spending too much time online. I'll contact you on your private link when I'm done.
I don't know if this will work in your characters' scenario, but here's my thought: what if the morality is known by the reader but the so called " bad" character stands by his act and defends it, even validates it. Maybe even convinces the "good" sibling that these things are necessary sometimes to maintain the status quo.
I love narratives that immerse the reader in the experience of the protagonist so deeply that you don't realize what the book is convincing you of is insane. (unreliable narrator(?) But you've been participating all along without realizing it (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas). Like a childhood story that presents a situation of neglect and other horrors matter of factly and explained away even, through life philosophy or what not, as they themselves understood it at the time (The Glass Castle or Educated).
Anyway, this is a great conversation as are all of the ones I've read here thus far. And I'm midway through A Swim in the Pond and loving it.