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 hear you, Gaelynn, and I'm a fan of your music! It's great you're writing a memoir and I was glad to read your comment—I'm writing non-fiction, too, but not memoir.
And I was wondering how to apply the boiling water to my project (it's a book for musicians on finding their own voice). And what came to my mind (in case this helps you?) is this: "Is this about establishing early on the 'stakes' for the reader—the why we should care? So, speaking to the results beyond the immediate thing we imagine the reader is hoping for?"
But I don't know what readers are looking for in reading a memoir really, or if that should even be a consideration as you write. Except we do want to hook the reader's interest and have them keep going, right?
I guess the overarching thing I hope to find in any memoir is a sense that I'm not alone. I hope to be inspired and moved by someone else's story and to be able to see the world from a very different viewpoint. And I look forward to reading your memoir!
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 :)
Jackson, Berriault, Gogol, Saunders, Kopievsky, good cooks all. Pot Boilers.
One thing occurs: If the heat of the fire (the words we choose,) is the same for all pots, only their size, the contents, differ. But I get what you mean. A fierce fire will boil a small pot in seconds, maybe burn the contents. We are cooks us writers and choosing just the write flame for our work is part of the art of it. The size of the vessel another.
You are too kind, sir. I think the fire is less the words we choose and more the question we ask the story to resolve. A tighter question doesn't require as many words to answer (just like a smaller pot requires less time to boil) - and, yes (as you perfectly point out) requires more attention to ensure the contents don't burn.
Mmm... if writers be thought of as tailors then does it follow that fine stories are always scoped, cut, stitched and trimmed according not only to the client's requirements but also in accordance with the quantity of cloth available?
You won't regret it! 'The Stone Boy' and 'My First Goose' have the added bonus of being discussed here in Story Club, and George's 'Tenth of December' and Jackson's 'Dark Tales' belong on every bookshelf in my opinion 🙂
Mikhaeyla here we are at questions again! Some very good examples, thanks--and I really like your idea: "short stories = tightly focused questions ('small heat') with answers that come from tight, localised conflict, and novels = broad, sweeping questions ('large heat'). And as George says, whether it's a novel or a short story, the water still has to boil.
Small aside: I love when stories have that clarifying moment you describe in Jackson's story "What terrible thing will result from these letters?" -either through the narrator or a character or somehow.
Water boils at different temperatures depending on atmospheric pressure. At sea level, water boils at 212 degrees. For each 500' gain in elevation the temperature to boil water lowers about 1 degree. Might this mean that writing stories and novels on mountaintops is more efficient? It's probably true higher elevations enable creativity. As to choosing between novels and short stories, my experience is finishing a story is easier than finishing a novel simply because a story is shorter, ha !, however, one must follow the heart. Writing is the path, so it's hard to say if one is writing one thing or another that is a right or a wrong path. I have several unfinished novels, or is it only one unfinished novel started over and started over as George refers to. I want to get back to them, or it, and will sometime I'm sure, after I learn how to boil water.
oh yes and keeping the lid on the pot helps water to boil faster, then when you take if off, up come the steam into your face. Ah then there's the pressure cooker of a story....blub blub blub then boomb! holy shit that was fast!
Water boiling is a great image, I’m going to keep going back to that thought. Also, loved finding out about the chicken joint! Cheers to everyone who worked in food service in high school.
Mmmm. I was a waitress only a few times in high school and college, and I must say, I really wasn’t a good one! Should find those customers and return the tips
Salt makes water boil faster. There’s a lot of scientific argument about it but if you’ve ever wanted to speed up some pasta water, it works. What is a writers salt.
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.
I want so bad to be sarcastic, but I won't. I've written three novels (two are published, one will be shortly.) I'm writing a fourth, and I always worry about little details. I worry about how sentences start, about descriptions, about conversations, about scenes. In the last week, I reworked a scene 5 times until I liked the way it flowed.
No matter what you write, you love what you do, and you fret over it.
My ex husband said that I loved films in which a mother and daughter have a complicated relationship, so they go for a meal to discuss it throughout the entire film, nothing gets resolved, so they go home. There is some truth in this. I could listen/watch/read people casually talking forever. But I still think that your comment about boiling water is important. Something needs to happen. Maybe it's only a gentle boiling, and not quite as grandiose as in the big Hollywood films (alien invasion, climate disaster, terrorist attack), but something as subtle as a father's withdrawal from a scene of an avalanche, ignoring the safety of his wife and children (Force majeure - one of the most uncomfortable films I have watched. It was excellent!) So I'll keep this in mind when I write. Apropos boiling water, this was one of the elements that was missing for me in Gertrude Stein story “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene." I appreciated the language, the exposition and the creativity (I read it out loud twice), but still, it left me emotionally detached. So I am looking forward to the conversation on the story.
Imola, watching / listening to / reading dialogue-heavy stories unfold is fascinating to me too. I'm right there with you w popcorn! And I think you bring up a good point about identifying water boiling moments in stories like this - where the scene may not change, or the boiling happen throughout dialogue.
The Stein story really worked on me, but in a different way. Maybe a more intellectual way? The events of 2 women's relationship rise out of the rythm and repetition of everyday life. They want to be gay. They are supposed to appear gay. The story felt both thought provoking and sad to me, so I cannot say it was just intellectual.
I've always loved the opening of Katherine Mansfield's short story, "The Dill Pickle." It's pretty famous for dropping the reader right in the boiling water.
"And then, after six years, she saw him again."
That line pushes us right in front of an oncoming train.
Here's an interesting thought experiment. Does that line work as the last line of a story? I would say, no. It's hard to imagine that line giving us a sense of finality. But as the opening line -- whew-- it's the curtain lifting on an opera as the overture swells.
More and more I notice that switch from exposition to action, if you will--"And then one day" usually comes after quite a lot of material. I love Katherine Mansfield. And I've been rereading Patrick O'Brian, that incredible novelist, and frequently see that shift--he's got tons of really interesting expo, and then, suddenly, we're in the middle of action (although the exposition itself can be full of action, but it's not the boiling water kind).
This water boiling analogy is very helpful, and timely! I have been struggling with a story of mine that keeps getting rejected. A number of “higher tier” rejections but no takers. I just scanned through the story asking where does the water boil, and realized that is likely the issue. There is a steady simmer throughout the story, but the water doesn’t boil till almost the very end. Even then it is perhaps barely a boil.
It thinks it's great that you were able to immediately apply this water boiling test! I'm in a similar spot with my own short story. After my first submission rejection, I realized that my protagonist required more agency--she needed to take more decisive action (rather than let things simply happen to her). With the second submission, I received feedback from the editor with the rejection, which helped me to better see how to get to the part of my story where the water starts boiling sooner. This had been a struggle for me, and I was grateful for the feedback. Good luck to you!
Thanks Steph. Good luck to you too. Yes, it is important that the protagonist have agency and take action rather than just letting things happen. I had the exact same issue with a previous story. Did not even realize it till a reviewer pointed it out. I ended up making a lot of changes to that story, and finally it got published!
A phenomenon that has its nascence way out in a sea zone, or an ocean zone (if the scale of your story is big enough) where the water is calm and as flat and unperturbed as a mill pond on a still summer afternoon?
A nascence that started with the dropping of a half caught fish from the beak of a sea gull?
A nascence that was spawned by that singular splash - by no means some super-splod-doosh - which was a perturbation that stirred-up your story's starting beneath the still tranquil sea surface?
A nascence that was shifted towards the distant shore as the wind picked-up?
A nascence that was shaped by the long fetch of the wind, blowing easterly, ever easterly, escalating the swell of the story into becoming waves, rising higher, ever higher as the story races to break on the western continental shoreline on the coast at Malibu?
Your story, maybe, needs you to acknowledge and empower it's birthright by ensuring it reads as a rising crescendo of escalations right through to the shore smash and swash of its climacteric in breaking as another great story wave driven onshore at Malibu and then swashed down, resolved in falling action, and out back into the ever broiling sea of stories?
Just passing thoughts from me to you Vishal as I happen to be surfing by what;s but the latest building draft of what, who knows but I for one do hope, may yet morph into the boing water story that editors will become clamourers to publish?
Beautiful writing, Rob! So poetic! And you are right. I think George has said previously as well, if I remember correctly, that we should always be escalating.
You, not I, are the judge of whether or not what I have written is "beautiful" but I can say two things. First what I offered in written response to your comment was considered, albeit that I typed it at pace, Second: without your comment, and those of so many other Story Clubbers, I could never have put my knowledge and experience to such potent prose making,
Do enjoy the next re-reading, review and re-drafting of what I - and maybe others, I suspect - may be a powerful short fiction in the midst of its becoming.
Great to be corresponding with you via the channels that are, ever, the amounting annals of Story Club 🙏
I think that's actually a very good question. My guess, and it's only a guess of course, regarding books such as In Search of Lost Time or, say, Ulysses, is that the water boiling might be a little more complex, and be in part to do with the interaction between reader and text, somewhere around the point when the reader says to herself, 'Ok, wow! So this is what you're attempting? How on earth are you going to pull that off?'
Maybe not. But it's something to think about, I agree.
"Wow! So this is what you're attempting? ..." The reader realizes something else is going on besides the usual tale, and becomes emeshed in that. Does this also happen when the writer addresses the reader directly? I noticed that A.S. Byatt does that in The Djinn in the Nightengale's Eye, when I was looking for the boiling in that story.
Hi Tod, I haven’t read Proust. I think Niall gave a better answer than I could. I have been trying to think through where the water boils in some of the stories I have read. It is not always obvious.
Tod, unrelated to the water boiling discussion, how is your reading of Mrs.Dalloway going? I too am trying to read it but could not make much headway, I guess because of the writing style. Now I am opening the book at random places and reading from there and that seems to go better.
I find Mrs. Dalloway compelling enough to have read it more than once. When I think of it, I think of the party, of the slow revealing of the old relationships and the decisions that shape lives, but also of the soldier with PTSD who dies by suicide, landing on the spikes of a fence. And I think of Mrs. Dalloway's daughter and the woman who influences that daughter.
Mrs. Dalloway. I've read a bunch since then so my impressions have faded. But I remember not being enthralled. I might have been bored, though a few things got my attention between yawns. Can writing transcend its topic? I don't know. Society parties are not my cup of tea. So far modernism in literature leaves me a little cold, like modernism in architecture does. Too stripped down, or something. Artful, yes, but not my kind. Does that make any sense?
Sorry, I have to defend Mrs. Dalloway. If you have made decisions that have directed the flow of your life, and have ever had doubts or regrets about any of those decision, or even if you've felt fortunate that you did the right thing at a time when you could just as likely have done the wrong thing, it is worth reading Mrs. Dalloway again.
Now I have doubts about what I said about her earlier, and how do I know. I didn't do the wrong thing saying those things, so I will read Mrs. Galloway again. All you say about her is fine, and I see those things, but for me, as a reader, I like prose to throw a few curve balls now and then, go out on a limb, be something unordinary, and I didn't get that from Mrs. Galloway. It won't be very soon, but I will read Mrs. Galloway and check in with you later.
Dalloway is definitely worth a revisit. It ages well. Or we age with it. I think Carissa is ca. 60 years old in the narrative? I read it in college and barely vibed with it. I returned to it in the past year or two and wept.
I agree Vishal--the boiling water idea is very helpful, thank you George! Is the story boiling, does it have suspense, do we care what happens and why, and how do we ID where it can start heating up? No one has mentioned the exercise yet. I'm going to give it a try and then report back--I avoided it in 2022. I think that ultimately it's how much the writer is able to relax and let the interior stuff flow.
One of the most devastating lines of dialog I’ve seen in a movie comes near the end of Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood”. The eponymous boy’s mother is sitting at the kitchen table when he enters holding a single cardboard box of his things for college. This is goodbye, from the kid we’ve literally, as the audience, watched grow into an adult on-camera (the same actor over twelve years, a cinema feat). His mother becomes distraught over how fast her life has gone by---and as the audience we’re feeling it, too, having just watched twelve actual years of these actors’ lives compressed into 165 minutes. Trying to make her son understand her grief, she says:
“I just thought there would be more.”
In trying to analyze why, as a writer, I keep making the mistake George describes about not boiling the water but just piling on ever more stuntpilotry in the exposition, I wonder if my problem hasn’t really been a lack of understanding that the water needs to boil, but rather a fear of the grief that I will feel when, having paid the cost of making the water boil, my story begins to narrow and other possibilities are abandoned. When my story escalates and becomes more particular---ah-ha, OK, so it’s a story about X---it also ceases to be a story about Y or Z, not to mention A, or B, or C, or any of the other twenty-five noodle glyphs of the alphabet soup of potential story identities. It’s boiling, yeah, but now it’s just a bowl full of X’s. “Excuse me, waiter, I thought I ordered alphabet soup.”
Once my story has taken on some identity, it by necessity must have shed countless other identities it might have had. As a writer, as a sojourner in a realm of infinite possibility, I’m often needing to enter a headspace where a superposition of all possible story states presents itself to me in an overlapping blur of everything, everywhere all at once. But what I’ve read in George’s advice here (and many elsewheres) is that a story doesn’t achieve what it’s supposed to do until, from out of that blur of possibilities, I mash a button that causes a lens to focus real crisp on some particular possibility, which also has the effect of annhilating all the pretty bokeh effects that had entranced me and kept my particularized story in abeyance.
George, does any of this ring true in your experience? If so, what do you do about the grief that you anticipate when, facing a choice to make a story become specific, you imagine the discard pile of all the other stories it could have been? Do you ever feel that twinge of “I just thought there would be more” when the story is all grown up? I love your line in Swim about having sent it out to fetch a pheasant, your writing dog comes back with the lower half of a Barbie doll. That’s kind of the feeling that I’m fearing when thinking about making my story get specific. There’s a whole Noah’s Ark of birds and beasts and busted toy components that the story gods have dumped out there in the wild for the picking, and my writing dog could fetch any of them, but I’m afraid to let the dog go a-fetching because I know it’ll have grabbed some specific thing, which might be the lower half of a Barbie doll or maybe that pheasant, but it _won’t_ have been any of the zillion other cool things I imagine it could find.
Thank you for introducing me to the wonderful word bokeh, which (not being a photographer of any kind) I was not familiar with. Had to look it up on Wikipedia. It perfectly describes that cloud of possibilities swirling around in a story, which I too am loath to give up, to the detriment of my stories.
I’ve been watching Miyazaki movies and the water starts to boil fast…spirited away it’s when her parents turn into bigs, ponyo it’s when the little girl/creature washes up on the shore. Excellent movies!
"Ah Niall we're not talking treading the story stage boards in plays such as Shakespeare wrote."
"Are you sure we are not?"
"Sure? I'm sure! It is the fiction see-saw, with Novel Story sat at one end and Short Story sat at the other, that we in play in this thread."
"Ah Rob, and here's the rub, isn't the thing here, the real bid thing, the business of how best to bring a story's water to its boil?"
"Now you lay that card into this, our current discourse, you lift the Cotswold wool from my blinkered eyes. You're right Niall, aye you are, the question is not wither novel or short story but how to boil the water for each and every story, whatever the form of telling its writer feels her way or his way to finding best."
"Aye indeed, that is THE question: how to rightly and most adroitly boil the story water first to capture and then, mostly tightly wrapt, to hold attentions of all our audience, whether our words be spoken loud or read silent?"
"Now Niall your point made well and set to stick, let's move on lest we find ourselves off the pace of the plot and left here waiting, Godot like, for some omnibus foretold but never arriving."
been enjoying Kafka’s very short stories (The Lost Writings, 2020) in this vein. the water boils immediately. some opening lines: “Boats glided past. I hailed one. The pilot was a solidly built old man with a white beard. I hesitated a little on the pier.” or “A farmer stopped me on the highway and begged me to come back to his house with him, perhaps I could help, he’d had a falling out with his wife, and their argument was wrecking his life.”
Second this. Kafka has the uncanny ability to choose the "correct" and "highest" dramatically intriguing moment to begin a story. Literally one sentence, maybe two, and you're sucked into his world.
Strange the way needed insights arrive when they need to: in this case, your Substack landed in my inbox right after I had a conversation about how I'm struggling to write a short story that has ballooned into something other than that: a novella? a novel? The form feels to matter a lot less than the need to write the thing, the need for the thing to have been written, (belaboring the metaphor now) the boiling over feeling of story and writer impulse and the story itself reaching a boiling point, no matter the number of words or pages. So thank you. I don't think these happy serendipities are at all just random coincidences but needed circuitry that makes us feel a lot less alone in this bewilderingly infinite universe (certainly not so according to my Jungian psychoanalyst friend). Thanks for your writing, as always.
George told us some time ago: ask your story if it has anything else to tell you! I've loved doing that? And boy, do the stories set me to boiling the water!
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!!!
Have no fear. Love what you do. Go back to chapter three, or one, or five, find the place to spark it up!
Read Karl Ove Knausgård's "My Struggle"
I hear you, Gaelynn, and I'm a fan of your music! It's great you're writing a memoir and I was glad to read your comment—I'm writing non-fiction, too, but not memoir.
And I was wondering how to apply the boiling water to my project (it's a book for musicians on finding their own voice). And what came to my mind (in case this helps you?) is this: "Is this about establishing early on the 'stakes' for the reader—the why we should care? So, speaking to the results beyond the immediate thing we imagine the reader is hoping for?"
But I don't know what readers are looking for in reading a memoir really, or if that should even be a consideration as you write. Except we do want to hook the reader's interest and have them keep going, right?
I guess the overarching thing I hope to find in any memoir is a sense that I'm not alone. I hope to be inspired and moved by someone else's story and to be able to see the world from a very different viewpoint. And I look forward to reading your memoir!
This is exactly what I am facing.
What Valerieharms said. You wrote my struggle.
I’m ready to connect with you, Gaelynn, about your memoir.
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 :)
Jackson, Berriault, Gogol, Saunders, Kopievsky, good cooks all. Pot Boilers.
One thing occurs: If the heat of the fire (the words we choose,) is the same for all pots, only their size, the contents, differ. But I get what you mean. A fierce fire will boil a small pot in seconds, maybe burn the contents. We are cooks us writers and choosing just the write flame for our work is part of the art of it. The size of the vessel another.
You are too kind, sir. I think the fire is less the words we choose and more the question we ask the story to resolve. A tighter question doesn't require as many words to answer (just like a smaller pot requires less time to boil) - and, yes (as you perfectly point out) requires more attention to ensure the contents don't burn.
Mmm... if writers be thought of as tailors then does it follow that fine stories are always scoped, cut, stitched and trimmed according not only to the client's requirements but also in accordance with the quantity of cloth available?
Love this, Iam.
Now I have to look up these stories.
You won't regret it! 'The Stone Boy' and 'My First Goose' have the added bonus of being discussed here in Story Club, and George's 'Tenth of December' and Jackson's 'Dark Tales' belong on every bookshelf in my opinion 🙂
Mikhaeyla here we are at questions again! Some very good examples, thanks--and I really like your idea: "short stories = tightly focused questions ('small heat') with answers that come from tight, localised conflict, and novels = broad, sweeping questions ('large heat'). And as George says, whether it's a novel or a short story, the water still has to boil.
🙂 It's all about the question
:) I am thankful for your thinking aloud on the page here. I'm applying your explorations to my own novel.
Small aside: I love when stories have that clarifying moment you describe in Jackson's story "What terrible thing will result from these letters?" -either through the narrator or a character or somehow.
I remember the first time I read the story and I genuinely gasped when I got to that part. It was done so masterfully.
Water boils at different temperatures depending on atmospheric pressure. At sea level, water boils at 212 degrees. For each 500' gain in elevation the temperature to boil water lowers about 1 degree. Might this mean that writing stories and novels on mountaintops is more efficient? It's probably true higher elevations enable creativity. As to choosing between novels and short stories, my experience is finishing a story is easier than finishing a novel simply because a story is shorter, ha !, however, one must follow the heart. Writing is the path, so it's hard to say if one is writing one thing or another that is a right or a wrong path. I have several unfinished novels, or is it only one unfinished novel started over and started over as George refers to. I want to get back to them, or it, and will sometime I'm sure, after I learn how to boil water.
It's a trade-off: gaining elevation may help the water boil sooner, but at some level the writer won't have enough oxygen to write.
oh yes and keeping the lid on the pot helps water to boil faster, then when you take if off, up come the steam into your face. Ah then there's the pressure cooker of a story....blub blub blub then boomb! holy shit that was fast!
Right, I forgot about pressure cookers. That's a great metaphor for a story. But how to pull it off?
Not without a well insulated glove and only after turning the heat off?
Water boiling is a great image, I’m going to keep going back to that thought. Also, loved finding out about the chicken joint! Cheers to everyone who worked in food service in high school.
Get that water boiling...and then ya add the coffee!
It all comes back to coffee…
Once upon a time I was a cocktail waitress in a bowling alley. But that was after high school.
Mmmm. I was a waitress only a few times in high school and college, and I must say, I really wasn’t a good one! Should find those customers and return the tips
Salt makes water boil faster. There’s a lot of scientific argument about it but if you’ve ever wanted to speed up some pasta water, it works. What is a writers salt.
Maybe a great editor is the salt…
We all like a salty tale.
Makes me want to weep with truthfulness and get an editing box of Malden
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.
I want so bad to be sarcastic, but I won't. I've written three novels (two are published, one will be shortly.) I'm writing a fourth, and I always worry about little details. I worry about how sentences start, about descriptions, about conversations, about scenes. In the last week, I reworked a scene 5 times until I liked the way it flowed.
No matter what you write, you love what you do, and you fret over it.
Reading this made me realize I don't fret that much any more and I wonder what that means.
Maybe you are simply more at ease?
Yes. For a long time writing was torture but not any more.
My ex husband said that I loved films in which a mother and daughter have a complicated relationship, so they go for a meal to discuss it throughout the entire film, nothing gets resolved, so they go home. There is some truth in this. I could listen/watch/read people casually talking forever. But I still think that your comment about boiling water is important. Something needs to happen. Maybe it's only a gentle boiling, and not quite as grandiose as in the big Hollywood films (alien invasion, climate disaster, terrorist attack), but something as subtle as a father's withdrawal from a scene of an avalanche, ignoring the safety of his wife and children (Force majeure - one of the most uncomfortable films I have watched. It was excellent!) So I'll keep this in mind when I write. Apropos boiling water, this was one of the elements that was missing for me in Gertrude Stein story “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene." I appreciated the language, the exposition and the creativity (I read it out loud twice), but still, it left me emotionally detached. So I am looking forward to the conversation on the story.
Imola, watching / listening to / reading dialogue-heavy stories unfold is fascinating to me too. I'm right there with you w popcorn! And I think you bring up a good point about identifying water boiling moments in stories like this - where the scene may not change, or the boiling happen throughout dialogue.
So happy to not be alone with this!
I agree about the Stein story. Seemed more like she was writing for herself than for the reader, but I'm sure we'll find out more...
The Stein story really worked on me, but in a different way. Maybe a more intellectual way? The events of 2 women's relationship rise out of the rythm and repetition of everyday life. They want to be gay. They are supposed to appear gay. The story felt both thought provoking and sad to me, so I cannot say it was just intellectual.
Yes, I am really looking forward to the conversation!
I've always loved the opening of Katherine Mansfield's short story, "The Dill Pickle." It's pretty famous for dropping the reader right in the boiling water.
"And then, after six years, she saw him again."
That line pushes us right in front of an oncoming train.
Here's an interesting thought experiment. Does that line work as the last line of a story? I would say, no. It's hard to imagine that line giving us a sense of finality. But as the opening line -- whew-- it's the curtain lifting on an opera as the overture swells.
More and more I notice that switch from exposition to action, if you will--"And then one day" usually comes after quite a lot of material. I love Katherine Mansfield. And I've been rereading Patrick O'Brian, that incredible novelist, and frequently see that shift--he's got tons of really interesting expo, and then, suddenly, we're in the middle of action (although the exposition itself can be full of action, but it's not the boiling water kind).
This water boiling analogy is very helpful, and timely! I have been struggling with a story of mine that keeps getting rejected. A number of “higher tier” rejections but no takers. I just scanned through the story asking where does the water boil, and realized that is likely the issue. There is a steady simmer throughout the story, but the water doesn’t boil till almost the very end. Even then it is perhaps barely a boil.
Back to the drawing board now! Thanks George!! 😊
It thinks it's great that you were able to immediately apply this water boiling test! I'm in a similar spot with my own short story. After my first submission rejection, I realized that my protagonist required more agency--she needed to take more decisive action (rather than let things simply happen to her). With the second submission, I received feedback from the editor with the rejection, which helped me to better see how to get to the part of my story where the water starts boiling sooner. This had been a struggle for me, and I was grateful for the feedback. Good luck to you!
Thanks Steph. Good luck to you too. Yes, it is important that the protagonist have agency and take action rather than just letting things happen. I had the exact same issue with a previous story. Did not even realize it till a reviewer pointed it out. I ended up making a lot of changes to that story, and finally it got published!
Thank you! Congrats on the previous publication! :)
Maybe think of your story as a phenomenon?
A phenomenon that has its nascence way out in a sea zone, or an ocean zone (if the scale of your story is big enough) where the water is calm and as flat and unperturbed as a mill pond on a still summer afternoon?
A nascence that started with the dropping of a half caught fish from the beak of a sea gull?
A nascence that was spawned by that singular splash - by no means some super-splod-doosh - which was a perturbation that stirred-up your story's starting beneath the still tranquil sea surface?
A nascence that was shifted towards the distant shore as the wind picked-up?
A nascence that was shaped by the long fetch of the wind, blowing easterly, ever easterly, escalating the swell of the story into becoming waves, rising higher, ever higher as the story races to break on the western continental shoreline on the coast at Malibu?
Your story, maybe, needs you to acknowledge and empower it's birthright by ensuring it reads as a rising crescendo of escalations right through to the shore smash and swash of its climacteric in breaking as another great story wave driven onshore at Malibu and then swashed down, resolved in falling action, and out back into the ever broiling sea of stories?
Just passing thoughts from me to you Vishal as I happen to be surfing by what;s but the latest building draft of what, who knows but I for one do hope, may yet morph into the boing water story that editors will become clamourers to publish?
Bon chance Mon Ami 🌊
Beautiful writing, Rob! So poetic! And you are right. I think George has said previously as well, if I remember correctly, that we should always be escalating.
You, not I, are the judge of whether or not what I have written is "beautiful" but I can say two things. First what I offered in written response to your comment was considered, albeit that I typed it at pace, Second: without your comment, and those of so many other Story Clubbers, I could never have put my knowledge and experience to such potent prose making,
Do enjoy the next re-reading, review and re-drafting of what I - and maybe others, I suspect - may be a powerful short fiction in the midst of its becoming.
Great to be corresponding with you via the channels that are, ever, the amounting annals of Story Club 🙏
I wonder where the water boils in Proust? Have you ever read, or tried to read "In Search of Lost Time? " Vishal?
I think that's actually a very good question. My guess, and it's only a guess of course, regarding books such as In Search of Lost Time or, say, Ulysses, is that the water boiling might be a little more complex, and be in part to do with the interaction between reader and text, somewhere around the point when the reader says to herself, 'Ok, wow! So this is what you're attempting? How on earth are you going to pull that off?'
Maybe not. But it's something to think about, I agree.
It's more of a slow, constant simmering.
"Wow! So this is what you're attempting? ..." The reader realizes something else is going on besides the usual tale, and becomes emeshed in that. Does this also happen when the writer addresses the reader directly? I noticed that A.S. Byatt does that in The Djinn in the Nightengale's Eye, when I was looking for the boiling in that story.
I never got as far as asking the question.
Hi Tod, I haven’t read Proust. I think Niall gave a better answer than I could. I have been trying to think through where the water boils in some of the stories I have read. It is not always obvious.
Tod, unrelated to the water boiling discussion, how is your reading of Mrs.Dalloway going? I too am trying to read it but could not make much headway, I guess because of the writing style. Now I am opening the book at random places and reading from there and that seems to go better.
I find Mrs. Dalloway compelling enough to have read it more than once. When I think of it, I think of the party, of the slow revealing of the old relationships and the decisions that shape lives, but also of the soldier with PTSD who dies by suicide, landing on the spikes of a fence. And I think of Mrs. Dalloway's daughter and the woman who influences that daughter.
Thanks Linda! I am having some trouble following the narrative in the book, but maybe that is just me. Will keep at it!
Mrs. Dalloway. I've read a bunch since then so my impressions have faded. But I remember not being enthralled. I might have been bored, though a few things got my attention between yawns. Can writing transcend its topic? I don't know. Society parties are not my cup of tea. So far modernism in literature leaves me a little cold, like modernism in architecture does. Too stripped down, or something. Artful, yes, but not my kind. Does that make any sense?
Sorry, I have to defend Mrs. Dalloway. If you have made decisions that have directed the flow of your life, and have ever had doubts or regrets about any of those decision, or even if you've felt fortunate that you did the right thing at a time when you could just as likely have done the wrong thing, it is worth reading Mrs. Dalloway again.
Now I have doubts about what I said about her earlier, and how do I know. I didn't do the wrong thing saying those things, so I will read Mrs. Galloway again. All you say about her is fine, and I see those things, but for me, as a reader, I like prose to throw a few curve balls now and then, go out on a limb, be something unordinary, and I didn't get that from Mrs. Galloway. It won't be very soon, but I will read Mrs. Galloway and check in with you later.
Dalloway is definitely worth a revisit. It ages well. Or we age with it. I think Carissa is ca. 60 years old in the narrative? I read it in college and barely vibed with it. I returned to it in the past year or two and wept.
I agree Vishal--the boiling water idea is very helpful, thank you George! Is the story boiling, does it have suspense, do we care what happens and why, and how do we ID where it can start heating up? No one has mentioned the exercise yet. I'm going to give it a try and then report back--I avoided it in 2022. I think that ultimately it's how much the writer is able to relax and let the interior stuff flow.
most days I find myself in a puddle, wondering if more water might help. so, yeah, this helped me. thanks.
One of the most devastating lines of dialog I’ve seen in a movie comes near the end of Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood”. The eponymous boy’s mother is sitting at the kitchen table when he enters holding a single cardboard box of his things for college. This is goodbye, from the kid we’ve literally, as the audience, watched grow into an adult on-camera (the same actor over twelve years, a cinema feat). His mother becomes distraught over how fast her life has gone by---and as the audience we’re feeling it, too, having just watched twelve actual years of these actors’ lives compressed into 165 minutes. Trying to make her son understand her grief, she says:
“I just thought there would be more.”
In trying to analyze why, as a writer, I keep making the mistake George describes about not boiling the water but just piling on ever more stuntpilotry in the exposition, I wonder if my problem hasn’t really been a lack of understanding that the water needs to boil, but rather a fear of the grief that I will feel when, having paid the cost of making the water boil, my story begins to narrow and other possibilities are abandoned. When my story escalates and becomes more particular---ah-ha, OK, so it’s a story about X---it also ceases to be a story about Y or Z, not to mention A, or B, or C, or any of the other twenty-five noodle glyphs of the alphabet soup of potential story identities. It’s boiling, yeah, but now it’s just a bowl full of X’s. “Excuse me, waiter, I thought I ordered alphabet soup.”
Once my story has taken on some identity, it by necessity must have shed countless other identities it might have had. As a writer, as a sojourner in a realm of infinite possibility, I’m often needing to enter a headspace where a superposition of all possible story states presents itself to me in an overlapping blur of everything, everywhere all at once. But what I’ve read in George’s advice here (and many elsewheres) is that a story doesn’t achieve what it’s supposed to do until, from out of that blur of possibilities, I mash a button that causes a lens to focus real crisp on some particular possibility, which also has the effect of annhilating all the pretty bokeh effects that had entranced me and kept my particularized story in abeyance.
George, does any of this ring true in your experience? If so, what do you do about the grief that you anticipate when, facing a choice to make a story become specific, you imagine the discard pile of all the other stories it could have been? Do you ever feel that twinge of “I just thought there would be more” when the story is all grown up? I love your line in Swim about having sent it out to fetch a pheasant, your writing dog comes back with the lower half of a Barbie doll. That’s kind of the feeling that I’m fearing when thinking about making my story get specific. There’s a whole Noah’s Ark of birds and beasts and busted toy components that the story gods have dumped out there in the wild for the picking, and my writing dog could fetch any of them, but I’m afraid to let the dog go a-fetching because I know it’ll have grabbed some specific thing, which might be the lower half of a Barbie doll or maybe that pheasant, but it _won’t_ have been any of the zillion other cool things I imagine it could find.
Thank you for introducing me to the wonderful word bokeh, which (not being a photographer of any kind) I was not familiar with. Had to look it up on Wikipedia. It perfectly describes that cloud of possibilities swirling around in a story, which I too am loath to give up, to the detriment of my stories.
I’ve been watching Miyazaki movies and the water starts to boil fast…spirited away it’s when her parents turn into bigs, ponyo it’s when the little girl/creature washes up on the shore. Excellent movies!
Love those movies, Miyazaki doesn’t muck around
Worth noting how quickly the water comes to the boil in Shakespeare.
Hamlet? Hamlet. I just wanted to catch you quickly. You see, there's, er, there's this ghost and I really think you're going to want to see him.
Romeo? Hey Romeo. Wanna come to a party? No, no it's not at my place. Actually, the funny thing is...
Ok girls, we're going to have a lovely family get together. Let's just talk about how much you love me. Won't that be great?
Hamlet doesn’t stop, it’s relentless
"Ah Niall we're not talking treading the story stage boards in plays such as Shakespeare wrote."
"Are you sure we are not?"
"Sure? I'm sure! It is the fiction see-saw, with Novel Story sat at one end and Short Story sat at the other, that we in play in this thread."
"Ah Rob, and here's the rub, isn't the thing here, the real bid thing, the business of how best to bring a story's water to its boil?"
"Now you lay that card into this, our current discourse, you lift the Cotswold wool from my blinkered eyes. You're right Niall, aye you are, the question is not wither novel or short story but how to boil the water for each and every story, whatever the form of telling its writer feels her way or his way to finding best."
"Aye indeed, that is THE question: how to rightly and most adroitly boil the story water first to capture and then, mostly tightly wrapt, to hold attentions of all our audience, whether our words be spoken loud or read silent?"
"Now Niall your point made well and set to stick, let's move on lest we find ourselves off the pace of the plot and left here waiting, Godot like, for some omnibus foretold but never arriving."
An empty pot will never boil.
But it might burn up.
And that's why those expository novels failed. The writers neglected to fill the pot before they lit the fire.
been enjoying Kafka’s very short stories (The Lost Writings, 2020) in this vein. the water boils immediately. some opening lines: “Boats glided past. I hailed one. The pilot was a solidly built old man with a white beard. I hesitated a little on the pier.” or “A farmer stopped me on the highway and begged me to come back to his house with him, perhaps I could help, he’d had a falling out with his wife, and their argument was wrecking his life.”
Second this. Kafka has the uncanny ability to choose the "correct" and "highest" dramatically intriguing moment to begin a story. Literally one sentence, maybe two, and you're sucked into his world.
Strange the way needed insights arrive when they need to: in this case, your Substack landed in my inbox right after I had a conversation about how I'm struggling to write a short story that has ballooned into something other than that: a novella? a novel? The form feels to matter a lot less than the need to write the thing, the need for the thing to have been written, (belaboring the metaphor now) the boiling over feeling of story and writer impulse and the story itself reaching a boiling point, no matter the number of words or pages. So thank you. I don't think these happy serendipities are at all just random coincidences but needed circuitry that makes us feel a lot less alone in this bewilderingly infinite universe (certainly not so according to my Jungian psychoanalyst friend). Thanks for your writing, as always.
Agreed. The form doesn't matter. We're inclined to name and define things, but like you say what matters is "the thing to have been written."
George told us some time ago: ask your story if it has anything else to tell you! I've loved doing that? And boy, do the stories set me to boiling the water!