Boiling Water
Office Hours
Hi George,
I’ve been wondering about the difference between a life centered on writing short stories vs. writing novels. For a decade or more now I’ve been working on short stories and have this growing collection. Each one needs a lot of work, although five of them have been published.
I’m beginning to wonder, was it really smart of me to spend so much time, and why have I spent so much time, on these very tough and demanding and never perfect little pieces? My heart is in them, I care about them deeply, but they are taking forever. What might happen (I know you can’t really answer this) if I dropped them and returned to the unfinished (or slightly started) novels (about three of them) floating around my head and desk and PC?
I have this idea that a novel might be a better form for me because I wouldn’t constantly be worried about every joint and floorboard and gutter and that I could just keep going and let the material come forth in that baggy monster way that Henry James mentions somewhere. It’s clear to me however that Lincoln in the Bardo is not a baggy monster but a highly structured novel (one that I love and admire) and it’s that structuring/controlling that I’m trying to get away from.
I love Story Club and I am so grateful for all that you put into it so generously.
Best wishes and thanks so much.
A.
Well, first of all, I salute your dedication to the short story form. (You had me at, “My heart is in them, I care about them deeply.”) (But you also had me at “They are taking me forever.”)
This is a question I hear a lot in workshops I’ve taught and I’d imagine it’s one that bothers any fiction writer. Life is short, art is long, what should I be doing with my precious hours? (Also known as, “Good Lord, I hope I haven’t been on the wrong path all this time!”)
I actually want to kind of sidestep the question a little and talk a bit about something that might (might!) assuage your anxiety.
Basically, it’s a simple observation I’ve made over my 20+ years of teaching the best young writers in America.
In our Syracuse workshops, we work with short stories or novel excerpts, at the discretion of the writer.
Early on, before I’d written a novel myself (and, actually, after I’d already failed at writing several) I had some anxiety about workshopping novel excerpts. How could I teach it when I couldn’t seem to do it?
But then I noticed something interesting, namely that most, if not all, of the early writers I was teaching had the same essential challenge, which I started referring to as “getting the water to boil.”
If we think of the “exposition” part of any story as “filling a pot with water” – well, most of us can do that. We describe a family, or a neighborhood, or the mind of a character at some point in time. When I started out that’s really all I wanted to do; describe the base camp where I worked in Sumatra, or my dad’s Chicken Unlimited restaurant, where I’d worked as a teenager, or – well, anything.
I just wanted to use my skills with language to make lively, interesting portraits of things as they were, in reality – to kind of show off in that way.
So I did that. Again and again. But these weren’t stories, somehow – nothing was happening, the stakes weren’t rising, there was no escalation – however we want to say it. Basically, even I, the egotistical creator of said text, would get to a certain point and find that things had flat-lined and that my attention was wandering. There was nothing that I increasingly cared about, as I was reading.
In other words: the water wasn’t boiling.
It was good writing but it wasn’t going anywhere.
Now, it’s kind of a tricky, elusive thing to talk about: what do I mean, exactly, when I advise a young writer to “make the water boil?” How does one know when it’s boiling (and when it’s not?)
And it’s tricky because it’s one of those “we know it when we see it” things, really.
It has something to do with the perception of forward motion, or sudden complication, in a narrative – that feeling of suddenly rising interest; of the story suddenly seeming to become a particular story.
In “The Overcoat,” it’s when we learn that Akakii needs a new coat. In “A Christmas Carol” it’s the arrival of Marley Ghost, and the reveal that Scrooge is in trouble. In “Enemies” it’s the visitor’s appeal that the doctor come with him. (Please feel free to supply other examples in the Comments, if this “boil the water” idea is speaking to you.)
And not every example has a precise moment when the water starts to boil. Sometimes it happens slowly over a few sections, say.
But: the wheels start turning; everything starts to matter because a context has arisen; expectations arise.
We might, for simplicity, think about those first five minutes of a movie, and in particular, that first incident that tells you what the film is “about,” or “what you should be wondering.” For me, it’s a bit of an “aha” feeling, kind of like, “Ah, I see. Oh, this could be good.”
Elsewhere I’ve described this as the moment when the path of the story narrows.
One way of thinking of it, in terms of the famous Freytag Triangle: the water starts boiling when the story passes from the “exposition” phase, into the “rising action” phase.
A story made up of all non-boiling water is perennially stuck in the “exposition phase.” We might think of this as a section where the components are joined by a series of “and also” statements. “The house looked like this and also the yard looked like this and also the family was made of five members (and also, and also).”
(At this point, the reader may ask the Seussian question: “Why are you bothering telling me this?”)
Basically, it's a world without (let’s call it) time-based complication. Nothing started happening at a certain point and then changed everything.
I sometimes joke with my students that, if they find themselves mired in this purely expositional mode, they should just plop this sentence in there: “Then, one day, everything changed forever.”
Then the story has to rise to that statement and, voila: boiling water.
Over the years I’ve had some very talented students who wrote these big novels in which the water never boiled. They were, essentially, entire books of exposition. When the book didn’t work, they’d cast it aside and write another. And another. The water wasn’t boiling but the writers would come up with some structural features or flashbacks or wild language that was disguising the non-boiling quality of the text. And it can actually be very tricky, in the face of this sophistication, to see that no water is boiling – there’s lots of energy and motion but there’s an essential failure of focus, we might say; the reader, in a sense, doesn’t know where to look, or what he should be caring about.
My theory is that, in each of these books, there was some moment that the writer went past – the moment at which, edited more watchfully, the water would have started boiling.
But, in some of these cases, the writer’s view of revising was to simply start over, and “get it right” next time. Personally, I’m not sure that’s possible. I mean, it might be (since, in art, anything is) but it always struck me that, in such cases, the writer was missing an opportunity to adjust – sort of like someone who throws a dart blindfolded and then misses, but insists on throwing again, blindfolded, without apprising himself of how he missed the first time.
Let me get back to the “assuaging anxiety” part.
For those of my students who found themselves obsessing over whether they should be writing stories or a novel, and who felt that this was a potentially tragic, life-or-death, decision, I would try to (lightly, politely) tell them that, in either form, there is really only one skill we have to master (getting the water to boil), and that this has to happen, and rather quickly, in either form. (It can happen more gradually in a novel, I guess, but it still has to happen, because this is a function of story – it’s true of a story we’d tell at a party, or around a campfire, and it’s true, even, of a joke).
So, no matter what form they were ostensibly working in, what they were really working on was learning to get the water to boil. Or, better yet: they were trying to discover their method of getting their water to boil (because different writers find different ways to give a reader that “I am now leaning into this narrative” feeling.)
And once they learned how to do it, they would be using this skill forever, in whatever narrative medium they ended up working in.
So: how do we learn to make the water boil?
Ha, ha, right, yes, exactly.
But seriously, here’s a little exercise that sometimes helps. I won’t say much about it (because that’s part of the way it works), but here’s the original post (from way back in January of 2022) having to do with the “200/50” exercise.
And here’s the follow-up discussion on why (I think) the exercise helps us familiarize ourselves with our own flavor of water-boiling.
What do you think, Story Club? Is any of this speaking to you/making sense? Can you list some examples, in stories or novels, of “the water starting to boil?”
P.S. Behind the paywall on Sunday, we’ll begin our discussion of the very wild, very cool Gertrude Stein story, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene.” All you free subscribers: feel free to leap over there. It’s going to be good.
Oh my goodness, yes, yes, YES this made so much sense and was extremely helpful for me to read at this point in my writing journey. I am currently on Chapter 15 of 20 in my memoir (my first big, non-music-based writing project) and I am realizing that I may be afraid to crank up the heat and make the water boil because I am nervous about the accuracy of defining a "plot" to a life and making a singular struggle the moving force of the book. But all books need a story arc, even a memoir. If I think of it, I do have a "plot struggle" identified but I may have accidentally moved past moments that needed more gravity because I am so worried about telling the memoir honestly. I fear over-dramatizing things. But in reality I think naming a struggle / plot / hero's journey and showing it more blatantly might make the book a more interesting read (and can still be truthful, of course). Haha not sure if any of what I just wrote will be understood. BUT identifying "where the path narrows" and then keeping that path as the main focus for the rest of the book is basically mind-blowing and extremely helpful. So thank you, thank you, thank you!!!
I think the difference between getting water to boil in a short story vs a novel is in the energy source - to get a small pot to boil you don't need a lot of heat, to get a large pot to boil, you do. If we take the exposition in the beginning as the simmering point (it's not that nothing is happening - there's implicit tension in what is being established), then the start of the incline in Freytag's pyramid is when we crank the heat up. In a short story, you only need enough heat to sustain the short arc of your story, but in novels, you need something bigger that can sustain conflict and conflict resolution over chapters and chapters.
One of my favourite short stories is Shirley Jackson's 'The Possibility of Evil' - there's the simmering tension of the opening pages (Adela's sharp character, something a little off about the other townsfolk, Adela's hint of insensitivity), but we get the story's real first burst of heat at the point where she writes that first letter of the day - which is when the story's question becomes clear: "What terrible thing will result from these letters?" (which then shifts at the climax, when she drops one of the letters, to "Will she get caught?").
The question(s) are enough energy to sustain the short story, but I can't see them carrying an entire novel. In a novel, this moment might be part of the rising tension, but the real heat (needed to make the novel's water boil) would need to come from a bigger heat source - maybe the letter causes someone to do something more stupid than cut some roses and that sets off a tale of small-town vendettas or grief or some other ongoing/escalating drama, in which case the question moves on from "what terrible thing will result from these letters/will she get caught?" to "how do the consequences of these letter converge and what is the ongoing damage that will manifest? (i.e. is the possibility of evil in everyone? what triggers it? how does it change and corrupt us?)".
So I'm wondering now whether short stories = tightly focused questions ('small heat') with answers that come from tight, localised conflict, and novels = broad, sweeping questions ('large heat') with answers that come from wider, far-reaching conflict.
Maybe the decision to choose short stories vs novels is a choice in how wide you want your camera lens to be - do we capture one incident and its profound impacts on a limited target in a limited timeframe under the microscope (I think of Berriault's 'The Stone Boy'), or do we capture a succession of incidents and their broad and wide-ranging impacts on a less limited target against a longer timeframe (and maybe against a vaster backdrop of worlds and people and events)?
When trying to answer questions like this, I think about whether certain short stories could be novels? Could 'The Stone Boy' or 'My First Goose' or 'Tenth of December' be novels? Their content is ripe enough for novel-length exploration, the questions they ask are similarly large and complex and perfect for interrogating the human condition. Except they don't ask the big questions in their entirety, or maybe don't answer them in their entirety, but (it seems to me) a kind of more immediate subset, the kind of questions that can be answered (or partially answered) in a few pages: 'The Stone Boy' asks "Can a mother love the killer of her son?", but maybe as a novel it would have asked (explored) "how does a mother's rejection and a son's guilt transform their lives?"); 'My First Goose' asks "What must we lose of ourselves to become an accepted part of the 'other'?", but maybe the novel would have asked "how far would we go to become an accepted part of the 'other' and how does that corrupt us?"; and 'Tenth of December' asks... well, maybe this one's better left to George :)