A Sweet Letter from a Canadian Friend

600 Pages of Huge Potential.

Hi George,

I hope this finds you well. As a Canadian neighbour, I’m hoping there are no tariffs on stories yet, but I expect them in the next wave (hur dur dur).

I just wanted to say thank you for all you do for the art of storytelling. Your generosity and care is inspiring. Truly.

How do you get out of the weeds? How do I know I’m in the weeds and not just, say, revising toward “story”? How do I know when something is turd I’m polishing and not just a dirty window I can’t yet see through?

I just feel this amazing pressure. I care so much but seem to have lost “it”.

About me. I’m sure this will be familiar to some of your readers.

I was a young writer, 18 years old, studying psychology. I had been writing for a few years at that point and was making some progress. Most of all I was just “doing” it. I loved it. You couldn’t stop me. There was no pressure.

In second year, I joined a undergrad workshop. The professor singled my writing out as being of good quality and invited me into the upper-level classes that spring. And then into Masters fiction seminars when I was in third year.

Suddenly, I thought, maybe I have “the chops”. I was 19 in a class with 30- and 40-year-olds. And I could hang with them! It was like a dream.

I decided on an MFA. I was 21. And then, you guessed it, my writing got worse and worse. You mention something similar happening to you, only my Hemingway period was a Bukowski period (you can fill in the rest, I’m sure, glug glug glug).

Since then I have NOT been able to finish a single story. For five years after I graduated, I wrote daily and have a stack of about 600 pages of 80% finished stories.

Then I just quit. For eight years. I couldn’t even read fiction without feeling a blurry sadness.

I’m 36 now. It’s like Prufrock, except I still have a decent head of hair.

About a year ago I fell back in love with it all again. For a bit I was doing well. But the same problems creeped in. The same bad habits. Info dumps. Meandering. No escalation. Yadda yadda. It feels like I have let myself down and it is just painful.

Now it feels like I have gone so long failing that even a small success is impossible. Like I have taught myself how to “not” finish a story instead of finish it.

So, more specifically, what I’m wondering is:

1) How do you know when a story is a story and not just writing?

2) Do you ever abandon a piece? How do you know it’s not worth finishing?

3) How can I cut the ego (thinking, I want to be good) and focus on the sharing element (I want my reader to enjoy this)?

Thanks for your time, Mr. Saunders.

Much love,

A.

Well, I was very moved by this note. I think all of us, at one time or another, have felt like this.

Writing matters to us, and we care, and that puts us in a real vulnerable place, forever.

(For what it’s worth, I shared your note with a friend of mine, whose reaction was: “I'd read his 600 pages if they were filled with this open sensitive tone.”)

So, first, to the specific questions you posed:

1) How do you know when a story is a story and not just writing?

I’m not sure that we can know this, to be honest – or, I’m not sure we’d want to know it. What we’re trying to do is slowly move that “just writing” into “writing a story.” And maybe even trying to drop the idea of “a story” altogether. We’re just hoping something (anything) will develop. How do we know something is developing? Well, sometimes a story will write itself out of the original expectations you had for it. When that happens there might be a feeling of “an open question” having appeared. It can be a feeling of being, suddenly, lost. The story has lost its overdetermined quality and is standing there, kind of simple and unadorned, asking something sincerely. It’s not necessarily a great feeling, for the writer – it’s the feeling of having to shed a bunch of expectations (about what the story is saying, what it’s about, what it’s taking on, where it’s headed, and so on. (And of course, this feeling that “something is developing” is going to manifest to each of us differently, and part of the long job of craft is to learn what, for us, it feels like, specifically.)

2) Do you ever abandon a piece? How do you know it’s not worth finishing?

I do, but only very rarely. Sometimes I just think, “Well, this first four pages is really good and I’ll lop it off and set it aside and hope it grows into something later.” For most writers, I think, it’s best to assume that if your subconscious gave you something, that thing can be finished, and wants to be. (Although, there’s a whole world in the phrase “if your subconscious gave you something.” Sometimes it hasn’t but we think it has. Maybe a topic for another time).

But I’d assume: there are no turds. Just move ahead on the assumption that, if you felt inclined to type something up, there’s something in it for you. Sometimes, in the process of trying to take something from “turd” to “non-turd” we learn important things about our process. What was turd-like about it, anyway? What is our definition of “turd?” (What is the opposite of a turd? What is needed, to do the conversion?)

3) How can I cut the ego (thinking, I want to be good) and focus on the sharing element (I want my reader to enjoy this)?

I’m not sure you want to do that, exactly. Maybe, try to think: “I want this to be good, and one way I’ll know that it is good, is if my reader enjoys it.” Go ahead and use your ego, I’d say; there is so much positive energy in that, if we approach things correctly.

We might also distinguish between different appearances of ego. There’s the (bad) kind that goes, “I know this, so I’ll put it in” or “Wow, can I ever write a complicated fancy sentence”). Then the good kind goes: “I want to be truly great and offer something beautiful to the world, and that gratuitous fact or fancy sentence is actually keeping me from doing that.”)

You say that you have “a stack of about 600 pages of 80% finished stories.” Let me ask you this: what, do you feel, makes them “80% finished?” That is: what’s not happening, according to you, that should be? (Also, what’s the good stuff happening in those 600 pages that makes you keep them, and feel that they are 80% done (which is pretty darn good, that 80%)?

I suspect, to cut to the chase, that you’re being too hard on yourself – dangling, in front of yourself, a standard of “finished” that is not only impossible for you to meet, but that is also somehow circular (“If I can finish it, it must not be done.”)

This feeling often comes out of a great love and respect for the form – well, maybe too great a love and respect for the form. (“I just feel this amazing pressure. I care so much but seem to have lost “it.”)

The form is not some tiny hoop you are trying to leap through. The form is a record of people who….have leapt. Who have just leapt. In leaping, they found something new for the form to do, some new way for it to work.

We don’t get to where we want to be by: trying/calculating/getting it just right. In my experience, that moment when a story shows you how to finish it involves more recklessness and not-knowing…it involves surrendering to something the story is already urging you to do.

What you are trying to do is find your way to finish a story. And, believe me, the key is in those 600 pages of stories. They are just sitting there waiting for you to find a (new) way to finish them.

It could be that you are trying to finish them in ways that other stories you love have been finished; trying to finish them according to someone else’s model, let’s say. But your stories want to be “finished” in a new flavor (in your flavor) - to “learn to end” in ways that you (and only you) can find for them.

They may, that is, want you to do something that you haven’t seen done before – something that you, at present, don’t associate with “how a short story ends” or “what a short story has to do.”

So, my real advice (said in the most friendly way possible) is: Lighten up. Say no to the “amazing pressure.” Say no to the inner voice that says you are failing.

The process has to be fun, playful, and low-consequence.

The reader does not want to see us sweating it out. (Hemingway talked about the negative effect of “the smell of the midnight oil.”) And the reader is very attuned to this smell. The reader wants to us you being fun, reckless, open, confused.

But mostly, the reader wants your stories to be talking about something the two of you share. The reader may like pyrotechnics and dazzle but what she really wants is connection.

How are those 600 pages trying to connect with someone? (I suspect that, at some level, they already are.)

Now, believe me, I get it, I do: we care, of course we do, and that creates “success” and “failure” and “lean periods” and “unreal victories” and all of that.

But we have to engage in a little self-gaming here, by saying: “Yes, I care, and one way I am going to care is to chill out about all of this.”

It might be like a performer or athlete who tries to loosen up before a show or a game – not a denial of the importance of the thing, but an endorsement of it…a physical/psychological way to make sure that one is bringing all of one’s resources to the effort – which won’t happen if we come to it with too much tension.

And especially if we come to it with the feeling of being in the midst of a failure.

Sometimes (as a way of self-soothing, or, you know, getting myself to calm the F__ down, I say to myself, in lean or difficult creative periods: “Hey, if it was easy, everybody’d be doing it.”

So: I’d maybe advise you to avoid thinking in terms like “info dumps,” “meandering,” “escalation.” (Even if you picked some of them up here, ha ha.) Free yourself, as much as you can, of expectations, of know-how, of techniques, of requirements. You are just trying to write, say, 500 words that are fun to get through and that, in even the smallest way, leave the reader in a different place than she was at the start.

That’s it.

I sometimes think, early in a story, that I am “trying to find the charms of” it - trying to understand it on its own terms, see what it has to recommend it, and so on. (And, allowing you all even further into my process, I sometimes imagine myself, at such times, looking at my little story with a curiosity-cocked head and a tolerant, forbearing smile on my face, like, “Oh, you dear little thing, what are you trying to say? I’ve got you.”)

We might also think about reading some different writers than the ones you now love.

A question for the group: can we name some writers that seem to write narratives that are less dependent on rising action, escalation, plot, the good old epiphanic ending? What our questioner needs, I think, is a new lineage, a lineage of writers whose stories might not explode in the traditional way but still offer beauty and value and meaning.

I think, right away, of Lydia Davis, and those hundreds of very short stories in The Collected Stories. They are wise, gem-like and, taken together, they are, I think, one of the great masterpieces of our time.

But…who else might we recommend our dear questioner read?