Wow. Wow, wow, wow. I've been in many a fiction workshop, received and given many a critique, and never have I heard advice as simple and as poignant as this: trust yourself. So often I have found, when reading my work or the work of others, that I'm looking for something to say or something that needs to be improved upon rather than reading with an open channel as a relatively neutral third party. Sure, I have reactions to what I'm reading, but those reactions are dulled under the blade of criticism.
I like the idea of reading as a meditation, openly, noticing what's coming up and then going back to uncover the why. Thank you for this!
I don't know about anyone else here, but my internal device that distinguishes truth from bullshit (that "P/N meter") has gotten rusty with years of 9-5 work. I guess my question is, How do we maintain a sense of truth in an 8hr/day+ situation that requires nonstop, well, bullshit? I don't know if my question makes sense....
George's post and all of your comments about it are a double expresso when you didn't know just how much you needed it. There is so much to discover in every word, phrase and sentence - not only about what we believe works in writing, but just in who we are. I knew all of this, once, and I used to listen carefully and respect what I heard. Time, life, and some brutal workshops happened. :) It became harder to hear myself clearly, and over time, I fear not hearing anything at all. But we can hear ourselves again if we remember we are supposed to listen. Hopefully this makes sense. Thank you all.
I always sensed there was magic in re-writes and this has illuminated a possible explanation. The iceberg analogy is so helpful. My full writer’s mind is not just right now, it stretches out over time, and to mine all the gold from my idea, I need to bring my developing story with me over time.
I also feel like the trusting of my own sanity, that I’m responding to the writing a certain way for a certain good reason, is key. It’s easy to forget this and it’s nice to see it articulated here in today’s lesson.
And of the “strong desire to make something beautiful”. Yes, damnit. Just yes.
Dear colleagues, please feel free to email me if you're at a stage in a story when, according to George, your positivity meter is high throughout, and you're ready for an open-minded and friendly critique partner. I want to connect with 2 or 3 writers who genuinely want to trade chapters or full manuscripts.
Hey George, Ira Glass, if I'm not mistaken, goes into a speech on how when one starts as an artist, nothing they make seems quite to equal what they imagined for it, and he describes this as the problem of one's taste exceeding one's skill. An artist, he says, is someone who has or feels themself to have good taste in their medium, and the only way to bridge the gap between taste and skill is practice. I really like your idea of revision as a series of micro-decisions through which an artist imposes her taste on a story, and think it's another good solution to the above problem. Although I do wonder at what point in the taste imposing process a writer figures out that a story might not be inclined to work after all and relegates that story to her pile of phrases and thoughts that might later be incorporated elsewhere.
I just read your post while enjoying a bowl of tomato soup and a warm ciabatta roll. All three -post, soup, roll- have left me feeling well nourished.
I appreciate your emphasis on the need to understand, articulate, and trust one's feelings. It took many years of therapy to get there but I have learned the value of not only knowing how I feel/respond to things but also in knowing the internal motivators of those feelings and behaviors. I am a former performer and have been trained to always be audience focused. I approach my writing from this same place. I'm often asking the question, "If I were the audience/reader would I like/dislike this?" But you have stretched and opened my thinking around this idea because I'm not sure I'm ever asking or thinking about why I might or might not like something. Hmm? Now, I'm wondering, if I already have a level of trust in this process, and therefore, I'm not thinking about this as much as I'm just doing it. I'll be rolling this around for awhile. Thanks!
Hiya again, George (I feel funny calling you George. I feel like I should address you as Professor or Sensei or something equivalently deferential),
My favorite bit of this: "In other words, becoming a better reader has something to do with accepting our own visceral opinions as being completely valid – the only possible place for meaningful literary criticism to begin.
Just as, in real life, if we are trying to figure something out, we have to first see how we’re feeling about it, and then accept those feelings (not deny them away)."
Thank you. Can this also apply to being a better writer? Sometimes I struggle with accepting the validity of my own opinions when A) it seems like others are positively bowled over by a published story they've read and I don't feel the same way about it at all or when B) it comes to my own work. I almost never trust my own opinion that something I've written is "good," whatever good means. I'd like to change that so I can free myself up to dig deeper. How do *you* know when something you've written is good? Do you have a set of criteria your own writing must meet?
What trips me up, what causes me anxiety, what halts production and confidence is often too much thinking. On top of that is this feeling that Over-Thinking and Moralizing are somehow necessary conditions (for me) to write.
I feel the weight of the idea that "the world doesn't need any more books, songs, poems, or stories." If we didn't write any more starting now, we'd be fine, and there would be still more than we can handle or need.
There will forever be more art than humans need. And I keep thinking:
So why add to the pile?
And if I'm adding to the pile, what is worthy of the pile?
If I'm adding to the pile, it better be worthy!
You must take care to "make it count" for something that "feels worthy."
Something that feels worthy ought to, at the very least, add to a conversation in some meaningful way.
Something that feels worthy ought to try and engage with the things it purports to be an extension of—awareness of influence, and tradition, and all that (the Anxiety of Influence).
And on and on...
I am trying hard to distinguish between asking these questions out of a sort of "aspirational vanity" (I want to be the next Big Name), and asking them as some form of RESPONSIBILITY we have as writers. As maintainers of this "Pile," these "Canons," this "Sum-Total-of Writing-in-the-World," do we not have some form of responsibility to it? A form of "Do No Harm," as it were that says "don't add to the pile needlessly."
I had a hard time trusting myself as a reader, not because my P/N meter wasn't working, but because I was reading published fiction which had already undergone the editing process. I started taking courses with other new writers and suddenly my P/N meter was reacting beautifully. I learned from reading unedited work, how to better edit myself. It takes practice!
Something I love: Reading your wonderful post, reading the comments (which has to be one of the most amazing lit communities ever to suddenly congregate on the internet), and beginning to feel a kind of thawing in the way I’ve come to regard craft (as someone who’s studied it for years and now also teaches it). It makes me realize that very often (perhaps in my overly technical, nerdy zeal?) I detach craft from myself - see it as something that exists outside of my own reactions. I feel like you’ve given me a warm blanket through this lesson, George, and helped begin the thawing process of that semi-rigid view: a gentle reminder that the technical zeal can be there, but so can the emotion, and the messiness of human reactions.
The responses to this post also speak volumes about how much we all crave (need?) to be given permission to be the way we used to be (as children? as more imaginatively free, less "trained" writers?), or still are but have (in some cases) forgotten how to be. I’m so heartened by all of the comments, the outpouring of passion and imagination and sharing. It’s the inspiration I’ve needed this year (alongside your very generous guidance and wisdom). We as creatives WANT to trust our intuitive inner knowing as we revise and watch our P/N meters, and there is something so profoundly hopeful about that to me - the striving toward that. That so many people want to trust this mysterious intuitive part of ourselves. Sounds very spiritual, in the best kind of way!
This line in particular cracked something open for me: “We might say that bringing a story to completion…reminds us that there are realizable aspects of ourselves that we don’t usually access in real life; craft, like prayer, can function as a form of ritual self-expansion.” YES! YES! YES! Thank you for this, for making this connection between craft and self-expansion - because what are we all doing here, ultimately, on this weird spinning orb in the cosmos, but trying to expand ourselves, and learn who/what we are? And story so fundamentally taps into that quest.
What an exciting post. Again, tears spring to my eyes, just about. This approach is so big-hearted and so hopeful. I've never heard anything like it to be honest and yet as with most (all?) great ideas, it makes sense when you read it. Blessed, beautiful sense. This is liberating:
"accepting our own visceral opinions as being completely valid – the only possible place for meaningful literary criticism to begin.
Just as, in real life, if we are trying to figure something out, we have to first see how we’re feeling about it, and then accept those feelings (not deny them away).
Whether you’re interested in becoming a better writer or a better reader, it’s the same process: being alert to our response to the text, whether that text is by some Russian master, or we just wrote it ourselves, yesterday.
So this is the task: read a story, watch our reactions, and then, trusting them, learn to more precisely articulate them."
If I can only believe it to my core, imbibe it, take it into my marrow, and live it... maybe there is hope. I have never felt so encouraged in this writing endeavor as I do now, and I'm 53 and have taken A LOT of writing course. Thank you, George, for making this such a positive, loving, hopeful adventure.
This post was all I needed to whip out the credit card. I look forward to future posts and to engage with the Story Club writing community. Should G.S. read this, I must ask: What is the bit of dialogue advice from Doug Unger you received and refused to share in your October 2015 essay for The New Yorker? I am rather desperate to know. Years ago I even ferreted out your professional and personal emails in hopes of asking. I never did. (I felt a desperation that seemed to whiff of stalkerhood, and I believed I'd be judged a nut.) I'd be mightily grateful for that bit of advice.
Looking back, I can see myself working with that P/N meter in the editing process for myself in my nonfiction work, doing little things to what I wrote until I liked all of it, however long that took. That’s always felt comfy enough.
Now that I’m trying fiction, and working with these humans-that-aren’t-real-humans-but-are, characters that mean a lot to me, I feel more spooked somehow. I worry about harming them or misrepresenting them in a way I’ve never had to worry about with nonfiction, since real life nonfiction people are already themselves and very sturdy in that. The worst I can do is bother or pain them with what I wrote. I can’t ruin them as whole people.
I feel like an overly powerful, untrained surgeon who could kill the patient if I make too many wrong moves. I don’t know how else to articulate this fear but I think I wonder how to, uh, relax about that so I can work.
Also I’m so happy to be here in Story Club I can barely believe it. Thank you for being with all of us like this.
General observation: this has got to be one of the best comments sections on the internet.
George,
Wow. Wow, wow, wow. I've been in many a fiction workshop, received and given many a critique, and never have I heard advice as simple and as poignant as this: trust yourself. So often I have found, when reading my work or the work of others, that I'm looking for something to say or something that needs to be improved upon rather than reading with an open channel as a relatively neutral third party. Sure, I have reactions to what I'm reading, but those reactions are dulled under the blade of criticism.
I like the idea of reading as a meditation, openly, noticing what's coming up and then going back to uncover the why. Thank you for this!
I don't know about anyone else here, but my internal device that distinguishes truth from bullshit (that "P/N meter") has gotten rusty with years of 9-5 work. I guess my question is, How do we maintain a sense of truth in an 8hr/day+ situation that requires nonstop, well, bullshit? I don't know if my question makes sense....
George's post and all of your comments about it are a double expresso when you didn't know just how much you needed it. There is so much to discover in every word, phrase and sentence - not only about what we believe works in writing, but just in who we are. I knew all of this, once, and I used to listen carefully and respect what I heard. Time, life, and some brutal workshops happened. :) It became harder to hear myself clearly, and over time, I fear not hearing anything at all. But we can hear ourselves again if we remember we are supposed to listen. Hopefully this makes sense. Thank you all.
I always sensed there was magic in re-writes and this has illuminated a possible explanation. The iceberg analogy is so helpful. My full writer’s mind is not just right now, it stretches out over time, and to mine all the gold from my idea, I need to bring my developing story with me over time.
I also feel like the trusting of my own sanity, that I’m responding to the writing a certain way for a certain good reason, is key. It’s easy to forget this and it’s nice to see it articulated here in today’s lesson.
And of the “strong desire to make something beautiful”. Yes, damnit. Just yes.
Dear colleagues, please feel free to email me if you're at a stage in a story when, according to George, your positivity meter is high throughout, and you're ready for an open-minded and friendly critique partner. I want to connect with 2 or 3 writers who genuinely want to trade chapters or full manuscripts.
Hey George, Ira Glass, if I'm not mistaken, goes into a speech on how when one starts as an artist, nothing they make seems quite to equal what they imagined for it, and he describes this as the problem of one's taste exceeding one's skill. An artist, he says, is someone who has or feels themself to have good taste in their medium, and the only way to bridge the gap between taste and skill is practice. I really like your idea of revision as a series of micro-decisions through which an artist imposes her taste on a story, and think it's another good solution to the above problem. Although I do wonder at what point in the taste imposing process a writer figures out that a story might not be inclined to work after all and relegates that story to her pile of phrases and thoughts that might later be incorporated elsewhere.
George,
I just read your post while enjoying a bowl of tomato soup and a warm ciabatta roll. All three -post, soup, roll- have left me feeling well nourished.
I appreciate your emphasis on the need to understand, articulate, and trust one's feelings. It took many years of therapy to get there but I have learned the value of not only knowing how I feel/respond to things but also in knowing the internal motivators of those feelings and behaviors. I am a former performer and have been trained to always be audience focused. I approach my writing from this same place. I'm often asking the question, "If I were the audience/reader would I like/dislike this?" But you have stretched and opened my thinking around this idea because I'm not sure I'm ever asking or thinking about why I might or might not like something. Hmm? Now, I'm wondering, if I already have a level of trust in this process, and therefore, I'm not thinking about this as much as I'm just doing it. I'll be rolling this around for awhile. Thanks!
Hiya again, George (I feel funny calling you George. I feel like I should address you as Professor or Sensei or something equivalently deferential),
My favorite bit of this: "In other words, becoming a better reader has something to do with accepting our own visceral opinions as being completely valid – the only possible place for meaningful literary criticism to begin.
Just as, in real life, if we are trying to figure something out, we have to first see how we’re feeling about it, and then accept those feelings (not deny them away)."
Thank you. Can this also apply to being a better writer? Sometimes I struggle with accepting the validity of my own opinions when A) it seems like others are positively bowled over by a published story they've read and I don't feel the same way about it at all or when B) it comes to my own work. I almost never trust my own opinion that something I've written is "good," whatever good means. I'd like to change that so I can free myself up to dig deeper. How do *you* know when something you've written is good? Do you have a set of criteria your own writing must meet?
What trips me up, what causes me anxiety, what halts production and confidence is often too much thinking. On top of that is this feeling that Over-Thinking and Moralizing are somehow necessary conditions (for me) to write.
I feel the weight of the idea that "the world doesn't need any more books, songs, poems, or stories." If we didn't write any more starting now, we'd be fine, and there would be still more than we can handle or need.
There will forever be more art than humans need. And I keep thinking:
So why add to the pile?
And if I'm adding to the pile, what is worthy of the pile?
If I'm adding to the pile, it better be worthy!
You must take care to "make it count" for something that "feels worthy."
Something that feels worthy ought to, at the very least, add to a conversation in some meaningful way.
Something that feels worthy ought to try and engage with the things it purports to be an extension of—awareness of influence, and tradition, and all that (the Anxiety of Influence).
And on and on...
I am trying hard to distinguish between asking these questions out of a sort of "aspirational vanity" (I want to be the next Big Name), and asking them as some form of RESPONSIBILITY we have as writers. As maintainers of this "Pile," these "Canons," this "Sum-Total-of Writing-in-the-World," do we not have some form of responsibility to it? A form of "Do No Harm," as it were that says "don't add to the pile needlessly."
I’m just here for the kindness
I had a hard time trusting myself as a reader, not because my P/N meter wasn't working, but because I was reading published fiction which had already undergone the editing process. I started taking courses with other new writers and suddenly my P/N meter was reacting beautifully. I learned from reading unedited work, how to better edit myself. It takes practice!
Something I love: Reading your wonderful post, reading the comments (which has to be one of the most amazing lit communities ever to suddenly congregate on the internet), and beginning to feel a kind of thawing in the way I’ve come to regard craft (as someone who’s studied it for years and now also teaches it). It makes me realize that very often (perhaps in my overly technical, nerdy zeal?) I detach craft from myself - see it as something that exists outside of my own reactions. I feel like you’ve given me a warm blanket through this lesson, George, and helped begin the thawing process of that semi-rigid view: a gentle reminder that the technical zeal can be there, but so can the emotion, and the messiness of human reactions.
The responses to this post also speak volumes about how much we all crave (need?) to be given permission to be the way we used to be (as children? as more imaginatively free, less "trained" writers?), or still are but have (in some cases) forgotten how to be. I’m so heartened by all of the comments, the outpouring of passion and imagination and sharing. It’s the inspiration I’ve needed this year (alongside your very generous guidance and wisdom). We as creatives WANT to trust our intuitive inner knowing as we revise and watch our P/N meters, and there is something so profoundly hopeful about that to me - the striving toward that. That so many people want to trust this mysterious intuitive part of ourselves. Sounds very spiritual, in the best kind of way!
This line in particular cracked something open for me: “We might say that bringing a story to completion…reminds us that there are realizable aspects of ourselves that we don’t usually access in real life; craft, like prayer, can function as a form of ritual self-expansion.” YES! YES! YES! Thank you for this, for making this connection between craft and self-expansion - because what are we all doing here, ultimately, on this weird spinning orb in the cosmos, but trying to expand ourselves, and learn who/what we are? And story so fundamentally taps into that quest.
What an exciting post. Again, tears spring to my eyes, just about. This approach is so big-hearted and so hopeful. I've never heard anything like it to be honest and yet as with most (all?) great ideas, it makes sense when you read it. Blessed, beautiful sense. This is liberating:
"accepting our own visceral opinions as being completely valid – the only possible place for meaningful literary criticism to begin.
Just as, in real life, if we are trying to figure something out, we have to first see how we’re feeling about it, and then accept those feelings (not deny them away).
Whether you’re interested in becoming a better writer or a better reader, it’s the same process: being alert to our response to the text, whether that text is by some Russian master, or we just wrote it ourselves, yesterday.
So this is the task: read a story, watch our reactions, and then, trusting them, learn to more precisely articulate them."
If I can only believe it to my core, imbibe it, take it into my marrow, and live it... maybe there is hope. I have never felt so encouraged in this writing endeavor as I do now, and I'm 53 and have taken A LOT of writing course. Thank you, George, for making this such a positive, loving, hopeful adventure.
This post was all I needed to whip out the credit card. I look forward to future posts and to engage with the Story Club writing community. Should G.S. read this, I must ask: What is the bit of dialogue advice from Doug Unger you received and refused to share in your October 2015 essay for The New Yorker? I am rather desperate to know. Years ago I even ferreted out your professional and personal emails in hopes of asking. I never did. (I felt a desperation that seemed to whiff of stalkerhood, and I believed I'd be judged a nut.) I'd be mightily grateful for that bit of advice.
Looking back, I can see myself working with that P/N meter in the editing process for myself in my nonfiction work, doing little things to what I wrote until I liked all of it, however long that took. That’s always felt comfy enough.
Now that I’m trying fiction, and working with these humans-that-aren’t-real-humans-but-are, characters that mean a lot to me, I feel more spooked somehow. I worry about harming them or misrepresenting them in a way I’ve never had to worry about with nonfiction, since real life nonfiction people are already themselves and very sturdy in that. The worst I can do is bother or pain them with what I wrote. I can’t ruin them as whole people.
I feel like an overly powerful, untrained surgeon who could kill the patient if I make too many wrong moves. I don’t know how else to articulate this fear but I think I wonder how to, uh, relax about that so I can work.
Also I’m so happy to be here in Story Club I can barely believe it. Thank you for being with all of us like this.