This is exactly the permission/call-to-action/literary-palette-cleanser I needed today! I've been reading zillions of short stories lately, in an effort (like we're all doing here in Story Club) to learn more about how good stories are made, and I've found myself being quietly peeved by so many stories that I "should" love.
Sometimes, it's the writer's attempt at humor that I just don't find funny, or dialogue that doesn't sound like it came from an actual person, or flowery prose that takes it self way too seriously. It's like I have a spidey sense that's telling me something in the story is a tiny bit corny, but like a good student, I try to brush that off as a product of my uncouthiness, or my unrefined taste or whatever. Still, it sticks with me as a question that needs answering: why does this story grate on me? (and also: why does it matter? what can I do about it? Is there even any room for me and my spidey sense in literature?!) Today's exercise is giving that little voice some agency again and... it feels nice to let that freak flag fly :)
Tasha, I'd say trust your "spidey sense". There's plenty of room for it in literature & lots of other places, too. As for what to do about it, put down that story & pick up another one, try again. Life's too short to stick with a thing, story or whatever, that just isn't doing it for you. Also, sometimes the timing isn't right. Your "spidey" meter may not register at all at a later date.
I'm great at just being me and using the spidey sense in music production and songwriting... I've built a whole career around it even, but for some reason, the lit crowd is just so much more intimidating 😂 thanks for the encouragement!
Agree. Especially (in my opinion) with contemporary ‘program fiction’ aka MFA-style writing, the excessive attempts at sounding unironically ‘literary’; the obsession with pseudo-intelligence; the ideology baked in; the telling readers how/what to think; the stilted dialogue; etc. This is why I mostly read the classics. Yet of course there are modern geniuses who can’t be overlooked: Zadie Smith, Ottessa Moshfegh, etc.
I opened five stories at random in a recently acquired literary journal. My least favorite happened to be one that had been freakified by its author. By this I mean it was the only one of the five I randomly turned to that was not written conventionally, but which used the little trick of footnotes (tiresome after David Foster Wallace), but which this writer had updated by having the footnotes refer to google searches. Kind of cute, but immediately annoying. So. What does this say about me--that the story i liked the least was the only story that had attempted a bit of freakification?
I'm not going to rewrite that one.
I think maybe i'm one of those people who is not a fan of this idea of George's. It's an interesting experiment, for sure. And i think experiments are good things. They open us up to possibilities. But if the idea presented here is to jar the reader, if the idea is to be noticed because of purposeful freaky writing--well, I just can't get behind that. I'd rather just....write. And be noticed for good writing. And jar the reader because of my ability to jar the reader--not from freakifying my sentences, but from writing good sentences that affected someone.
I don't want to be noticed for being someone other than who i am. I think George IS the person who writes his stories--which are all freakified. I think that's why they work. They are his voice. And he's an original, with an original and identifiable style. But George is a freaky writer! That's him, being the real deal. The rest of us...well, maybe this will be turn out to be a good thing for others. I hope it is.
When i first started writing short stories, I tried so many voices. That was a kind of freakification, i think. I never tried a sci-fi/alien voice, or one that had a strangeness to it that meant my story was taking place in a different universe than the one we live in (like George's, mostly). But I wrote in uptight voices, and arch voices, and old people voices and teenager voices. I tried all sorts of things. And in the end, all of those stories were terrible and I realized none of them were my writing voice. It took me a long time to find my writing voice. I don't want to freakify it. I want my voice to be my voice, the one I discovered after writing thousands of words. I don't want a voice that calls attention to itself only because it exists to call attention to itself! I want a voice that stands out, yes. But not on purpose.
I understand wanting to move away from conventional writing. I understand that writing ought to be a process of discovery. I understand that original writing gets noticed. But i don't know if the idea to purposely begin by looking for a freakified voice is the way in for me. I think there are other ways of being original.
I'd like to try this experiment, but I think I'll have to do it with my own writing instead of changing someone else's. Maybe I'll take the first paragraph of my most recent story and see if I can enter it through the freak door and see what happens. Maybe I'll learn something big. Maybe I'll see that my negative knee-jerk reaction here appeared for a reason. Like, loosen up, Mary G.! Get off of your high horse!
Okay, I'll try and if i get anything out of it, I'll let you know.
My knee-jerk reaction was also negative! It called to mind the type of contemporary stories I can't stand — all sizzle, no steak.
Maybe freakifying doesn't have to mean making stories more experimental, absurd, or avant-garde (which is a type of genre with it's own conventions, after all). Maybe it can just mean tweaking perfunctory writing to see if it can be made to reach its own point more effectively.
For instance, Jane Austen might've opened P&P with a conventional, run-of-the-mill description of the Bennett family's predicament, but instead she leaned into her distinct knack for making universal insights about humanity while lightly ridiculing society. I feel like I could pick out a paragraph of hers anywhere. She's distinct without being freaky. :)
Melinda, thanks for commenting. I feel less alone! I like this notion of yours--that freaky writing may entail "tweaking perfunctory writing to see if it can be made to reach its own point more effectively." But I think that is at the heart of revising any piece of writing, no? In George's post, he says that maybe what he's talking about is simply another form of editing and revising. But his other notion--of calling attention to the writing, of writing purposely to get others to notice--that part of it kind of stops me in my tracks. It's a motivator, certainly. But i don't think it could be my motivator.
I agree with you Mary. While adopting a freaky style of writing prose worked for Joyce and Pinchon and some more current Irish writers (no punctuation marks at all, really?), it doesn't work for me to put the cart before the horse in this way. It's seems rather twee and self obsessed. Either there's a story to tell and the way it's told is defined by the story and the existing style of the author, or there isn't. Writing style isn't flash fiction.
Galer: What i really would like is for people to put up examples of freaky writing along with an explanation of why it is freaky. And by that I mean the kind of freaky writing George is asking us to try--writing that calls attention to itself on purpose, that exists to be noticed. I'm not seeing that here, but maybe I'm just too confused and not able to get on the right train. People here are writing about wonderful original writing--but so far, i'm not seeing examples of writing that is doing something more than that. Perhaps Tom Wolfe and his use of all caps--that was definitely a way to get attention and it worked. And of course there's James Joyce or Gertrude Stein--the way out there, almost indecipherable writing that calls attention to itself by being so completely different. I guess I'd call those three writers creators of freaky writing.... Maybe that's what George means?
I was just thinking...freakification is a process. I'm not sure looking at whether you like the result or prefer writing that disappears is the best question to be asking. I probably do prefer the kind of writing where the writing has voice because it doesn't sound like writing, or where you deliberately use said because it's almost invisible, or you try to immerse a reader through sensory details (the high specificity dial is set to high;-) ).
Instead, the experience of the process of taking a sentence, and then defamiliarizing de-everydaying the language, is a valuable experiment. Not to judge the result but more to get a sense of the feeling of opening up many unthought of, invisible options which were not there before. Remove the autopilot parts of language. Reminds me of a children's TV show in the UK (mallets mallet) where there was a game where you had to quickly say a word in response to another word, and it couldn't be related. So hard to so deliberately zag when the intuitive thing is to zig. The experience of doing this opens up a gear of editing I didn't have before.
Mary, I agree. We'd want to ask Joyce if he was dyslexic or had bad eyesight (he did) and his style had to do with a poor third grade education or if it just felt right to him to speak in stream of consciousness. If he just did it for attention, I'm not as impressed as I would be if he did it because that's how the work came into his brain and back out again. Writing without periods at the end of sentences just to create buzz isn't interesting, it's annoying. In the end, maybe George just wanted to wind us all up and see what happened?
I would respectfully submit that there may be a “Mary version” of freakification that would be quite nice. My freaky isn’t your freaky isn’t George’s freaky. Or maybe when you found your writing voice that was a type of freakification process?
I think so much of allowing yourself to be “freaky” on the page giving yourself permission to be yourself and reach into those recesses the more proper and rule-following parts of our brain tsk-tsk or worry about being embarrassing. And if you are already there maybe you have already entered the freak door!
(Also, I just read a novel that was written with many footnotes, and while I liked the book overall, I found the footnotes became tedious. I felt like I was always on alert looking for the minuscule asterisk that marked the footnote, and then reading the footnote took me out of the story.)
Maybe i'm not fully understanding freakification. I was with George entirely when he wrote, at the top of his post, about discovery in writing. But then, he took a turn and suggested we try "writing intentionally in such a way that would get our prose noticed." "...prose that can't be ignored." "...showing off, making a bit of a scene, purposely departing from the normative, in order to get some damn attention."
Yeah, I don't think that's for me--at least not to that extent! I think I'm one of those people George mentions who won't take to this. Finding my voice wasn't what I would consider a freakification process. It was just years of practicing and getting the internal editor out of my head, finally. Allowing myself to write as I wanted to write, and on subjects I wanted to write about. Getting all of the shit out of there that was clogging up the process. That doesn't mean i haven't been playful at times. I've done a thing or two that wasn't entirely straightforward conventional storytelling. But i didn't do that for attention. I did it because it seemed correct for what I was writing. It was the right form at the time.
Again, maybe i'm just not understanding this entire concept! That would be typical of me--i really do need concrete examples. Elsewhere in this thread--was it Sallie?--someone mentioned Grace Paley as having freaky writing. I guess I'm not seeing it. I see in Grace Paley a very strong voice--one that belongs solely to her. It's not showy and it doesn't exist to draw attention to itself. It's just....her.
I'll be interested to see if i'm the outlier in these threads, as others here all seem to have immediately understood what George was talking about and are excited to put his idea into practice. I feel a bit lost, maybe? Like, is he talking about sentence structure? Style? Voice? Form? Content? All of the above?
Thanks you for commenting, Sara. It's given me a chance to write more here and figure out what I"m thinking. (I'm still not there yet.)
I might be in this camp too...when the style of the writing, or the cleverness of the writer, takes over my attention, I stop entering the story. I get distracted by the shiny surface and can no longer look through or into the depth of the thing. And I think depth of connection is what I'm interested in at this point in my life, more than entertainment. Actually when the styling of anything gets between me and the feeling tone of the thing, I start to lose interest.
Kurt, I don't think "freakification" means being wacky for wackiness's sake. I agree that it leads to surface writing--boring for the writer (if the writer can even remain at the desk beyond the first paragraph) & more than annoying for the reader, who's wasting valuable time reading crap. That kind of writing is only an attempt to be clever, like someone at a party who tells a witty but inappropriate joke in an attempt to garner a little attention. Those things always crash land. Instead, I think of "freakification" as more of an approach, a way to enter a story (one of several) that you might not otherwise have tried. One wacky sentence that provides a little jolt, gives a little steam, a little propulsion, so that you can go on to the next and the one after that, a string of words that might lead you to your heart's truth & what you really mean to say, even if you don't know what that is to begin. The last time I did this, start with a "freakified" sentence (which was really more smart-ass than freaky), a woman took shape right under my fingers who was not the jerk she seemed to be in the freaky/smart-assy first sentence, but someone good, though certainly flawed, who was desperately trying to give her brother one of her kidneys which he would not accept. None of this was known from the start. I don't know any kidney donors or recipients. But propelled by that freaky first sentence, I found this crass but still lovely woman who gave me a story not only publishable but, more importantly, one that broke my heart &, if I'm lucky, maybe the reader's, too.
When it all works together, then I'm all for it. But if the main reason to "freakify" your writing is to garner attention, then that's not aspiring toward a feeling of unity--the feeling that it absolutely HAS to be told that way, in order to be effective. It's just, as you say, a shiny surface that distracts.
Thanks Sea. I know some people like extensive twists, turns and complexity but I prefer a sort of simple clarity. That’s what I’ve liked best about the stories George has shown us so far. They’re really sort of quiet. They sneak up on me and become more profound than I expected, especially with George’s guidance in reading them.
My experience with the five I chose was similar--the one I liked least felt like it was trying too hard. Its narrator even bemoaned pretentious language in fiction as she used pretentious language in an obviously self-conscious way to critique it! I also felt like the writer was purposefully disorienting me with tangents to get me to wonder how they would all come together, and I found myself incredibly bored and not wanting to read on.
So there’s definitely a risk. Language alone isn’t enough. But the value of an exercise is that very often we learn something different than what we’re “supposed” to learn. I haven’t tried it yet, but I am curious what I will find myself adding beyond language when I try to make that first page freaky in a new way that I would actually want to read.
Thanks for sharing your dissenting opinion and as always making room for others to question!
Thank you for this great reminder, Jules--that we often learn something different than what we were supposed to learn when we try new things. You are exactly right. You never know what you may get out of an exercise. Okay, I'm going to try, though I'm definitely not rushing to do it! Lots of psychology at work, I suppose. I've worked so hard to be who I am, and now George suggests I try something new! How dare he (wink, wink)! It's all good for me, I know. Thanks again.
I woke up with this idea that we could all write a vague, rambling, overly flowery and confusing story on purpose, then do a "white elephant" exchange for the holidays, so each of us would have a story to work on. Everyone would know that we wrote the story on purpose to be "freakified." Or as Kurt L said, make the story deeper, more connected. White elephant story exchange party.
Hahahaha! I hear you. I think it would be fun, though. Other idea: find an old story from a million years ago filled with tropes and stereotypes and modernize it. What I like about this whole thing is I'm reading all these fantastic stories.
I hear you Mary. I think I'm still experimenting with different voices in different stories. Though I really like my stories, I recognise that the voice is not active enough, so for me this is an interesting idea to play with.
When I worked at the BBC we did a 'leadership day' in amongst the BBC symphony orchestra. The conductor and the orchestra played a piece, then 'freakified it'. On one play through the first violin was instructed to play as though he was the best violinist in the world, it twisted the piece in a very weird way.
So for me, it seems to be about, 'well what does this voice do?' 'Is there anything in the freakification that brings something new, different or useful. Maybe, maybe not.
On the radio at the moment is a woman talking about how she lost an arm and a leg when she fell through the gap between the tube train and the platform. She was run over by two trains. I add this, as it is suddenly way more visceral than anything I'm writing. It's so shocking.
as horrifying as that story on the radio is (oh my god, that poor woman), it's almost a perfect example here of freakifying your writing. Like, you had me, I was following you, and suddenly the world dropped and the earth fell away and my heart ached.
But about not having a voice that is active enough--that's a great point. Your narrator, whomever they may be, is narrating from a place where they see the world. They've got thoughts and feelings and world views. Even a so-called omniscient narrator is a creation that comes from someone's mind. So, yes, I agree completely, waking up that voice in whatever way is called for to tell a particular story (and not bore yourself or your reader to pieces) is essential. (A boring narrator is sometimes called for--but personally, that's not a story i want to write or read.)
Ha! Probably! But probably better is to just read a good novel with a good third person narrator. I just finished Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and it was the narration that kept me going. You can read the opening online on Amazon by going to the book and clicking on "Look inside." Or there are thousands of books with great third person voices, obviously.
It occurs to me that maybe I should mention George's penchant for close-in third person narration (something I also do--but not as well, obvs.). This technique absolutely leads to an active third person narration. He discussed the use of this voice in Story Club in the archive under "The Falls." Here's a bit of what he wrote:
In both sections, I was doing something I’ve come to think of as “third-person omniscient.” The difference between this mode and “normal” third-person limited has something to do with the idea of trying to minimize or eliminate that omniscient presence that is located…nowhere. Who IS that omniscient narrator? I’m trying to get into the character’s head as fast as I can and (this is key) into his diction as fast as possible.
So the story starts out in third-person limited (“Morse found it nerve-racking to cross the St. Jude grounds just as the school was being dismissed…”) and then, with the next line (“because he felt that if he smiled at the uniformed Catholic children they might think he was a wacko or pervert”) starts to edge into Morse’s diction - the words “wacko” and “pervert” are, subtly, his words, not “mine.”
Okay, this is mary g. again: Going immediately inside of your character's head(s) while staying in third person--that's a great way to have that active voice you're looking for. Many of George's stories do this. Once you look for it, you'll see it all over his work.
I feel like there are actually three related elements encompassed in this "freakification" process: what one could call densification (as in, simply making one's prose contain more ideas, opacifying it to an extent, "chiseling down a sentence to its essence," as it's put - I see this in, for example, T.S. Eliot essays), reduction of sense (putting words and phrases where they don't seem to belong - this is what comes to the fore in the sentence from "The Wavemaker Falters," and in Boris Vian and Ben Marcus), and... beautification? (finding conventionally elegant [more elegant than normal prose, as it comes from the pen of an author], poetic ways to express situations and sentiments, the literary equivalent of a proof from the book - I think of William Gaddis here).
To me, it's always seemed like the process explored here is the only way to become a technically-skilled writer, since the prose of everyday reading and writing, even when perfected, is simply nowhere near the best we humans have to offer. Language, after all, limits the artist in ways other media would never, simply because it is so used; we are put in a box by English's conventions (the connotations of its words; the patterns it naturally congeals into; the fact that it is first and foremost designed for straightforward communication, and so bridles at being used to tease, to play with a reader in the way all literature does); some parameter must be consciously twiddled with, a knob or lever we'd never normally touch, in order that we might escape.
Ironically, it seems plausible that this process of "freakification," in all its modes, is exactly the way authors build emotional restraint into their stories. As Eliot says somewhere ("Tradition and the Individual Talent," maybe?), the role of an author isn't just to spill their emotions onto paper, it's to create new experiences out of the conventional emotions they feel, and express those. In perverting one's prose, one must also necessarily pervert the emotions that have informed said prose - this process necessarily involves the partial loss of control over what one is saying, simply because one is retreating from the everyday language they know and adopting a shadow-language they aren't so familiar with, that isn't even well-defined - and thus create something new and beautiful.
Thanks, Sophie. Well put. John Cheever offers a corollary to your supposition, I think, when he says (somewhere, but I can't find the source), that in its beauty & malleability the same language used to order a steak can also describe a sunset. Such as I make any art at all it is in part owing to this plasticity.
Thank you Sophie. I have been thinking a lot about the limitations of language these days. How much human experience is beyond language and how few overused words we have to express the full range of experience. I wonder whether George’s version of freakification is him expanding the boundaries of language - the purpose is less about uniqueness and more about invention?
This post is so good, I stopped what I was doing to take a full page of notes on it.
I have the worst case of creative anxiety of anyone I know. No matter how playful and generative my brain feels all other hours of the day, I choke at the writing table.
It's like my vision for the story and my reverence for ~*Literature*~ combine to squeeze all the joy and peculiarity out of my sentences. They end up with this very straight, overdetermined quality that I find it hard to fix via line edits, and I've never understood why (I'm a good editor!).
I wonder if it's because I'm aiming for correctness at the macro level (e.g. "Did this scene do what I wanted it to?") when I should be aiming for undeniable zestiness at the sentence level. Maybe there is a mindset shift that happens when the goal is just to cause a ruckus.
I act as if my stories exist somewhere in platonic ideal forms that I can either bring to life or fail to do justice to through my powers of conveying stuff accurately. But the truth is that all my conscious "ideas" are super vague and not that interesting.
Maybe my boring paragraphs aren't boring because I didn't convey the subject properly. Maybe they're boring because the subject was weakly imagined to begin with.
Which is fine! As an aspiring professional writer-person, I should not need to wake up with a reel of compelling, highly-detailed images in mind, just ready to be taken down. I should take comfort in the skill of entertaining myself on the page until something cool springs to life. I think "freakifying" my sentences could be the perfect springboard into writing stuff that I don't want to scrap the next day.
I fully expect this advice to change my life, George Saunders. If it does, I'll let you know.
Melinda, we might be literary soulmates 😂 So much of this resonates with me. Let us go forth toward undeniable zestiness and see what else we discover along the way!
What I wrote here was an obvious attempt to be noticed in the manner George asked of us. And yet--not much noticing going on! And I think that's because this attempt at freaky writing is a bit obnoxious, calling so much attention to itself! And I think that may be a downfall of trying to be noticed. If you don't do it well, people aren't going to be drawn to it.******
PEOPLE OF STORY CLUB! I'M TALKING TO YOU RIGHT HERE, ALL CAPS, SHOUTING INTO THE UNIVERSE SO THAT YOU WILL SEE ME. DO YOU SEE ME? HAVE I GOT YOUR ATTENTION??? I've a thing or two I've been wanting to say to all of you. WAIT! SOMEONE ISN'T LISTENING. YOU, WITH YOUR COFFEE MUG AND YOUR HALF-DEAD EYES! I SEE YOU! Okay, okay, listen up, people. LISTEN UP! The time has come for all good men The time has come for all good people the time has come for all the time has come the time the time the time it is tick tock ticking, right now, right here, this very moment, and if you cannot hear it, I cannot help you. PEOPLE OF STORY CLUB. A new day has dawned. You woke up to this world and every second that passes will never come again. You will never be the person you are RIGHT NOW again, i hope you are listening. YOU IN THE BACK, STOP TALKING AND LISTEN TO ME. Oh, dear god, they won't listen, they won't hear, and evening will come again and this day will be over. PICK UP YOUR PEN AND CAPTURE ALL OF IT BECAUSE FUTURE GENERATIONS WILL NOT FUCKING BELIEVE YOU EVER WERE HERE.
They always say if you need help, make eye contact with one person and say 'you', you with the purple hat. I need help. Otherwise people assume someone else in the crowd. So the half dead eyes got me, but the address to all of us as a club, I found that easier to ignore.
Mostly when I write I'm really trying not to bore myself. When I do, I know the story is in trouble. Most of the first pages of my five stories were pretty boring, but one was glorious. It had a crazy first sentence that didn't make logical sense. Then in had a list. Then it had the line: "Droughts were called things like "Chatterbox who can't take a hint, because it just went on and on and wouldn't leave them be." A story with that line I just can't put down.
This post is just what I needed to stall my end of year writing blues. I’ve been thinking back to the stories I have written this past year and trying to figure out what seems to be missing. Perhaps freakification might do the trick! There’s hope..
All I can say right now about this is: thank you, this is so liberating! Now to carve a trail with a syntactical machete into this wild and woolly new universe….
This is pretty much how I write stories. Only I don't call it "freakification". I'd give this method a name if I could think of one. And working this way isn't so much fun, although it can certainly be fun, as it is engaging, absorbing, totally captivating, which I think of as a specialized kind of fun. As for the results, compared to George's my stories couldn't be more different, though there is in the end much satisfaction in having "freakified", as it were.
The word itself scares me but my latest memoir essays as I call them, I kind do that. My writers group always corrects me and I often go back and write it real and boring. So thanks writers and George, I need to be myself with a little Italian prose and enthusiasm for life among the ghosts in my life.
Freakification - and the first writers who popped into my forebrain, simultaneously, were Isaac Babel and Grace Paley. Followed by Kafka - that opening line! And Gogol, The Nose. Paley is freakified all through. I love her because there is life in every line.
Mary g sent me a link that worked. I think this story is the epitome of freakification! Very evocative, very strange, and in places, even in this cleaner version than the one I found first, it is twisted. I knew the Paperhanger had killed the child when she first vanished. I think we are supposed to know that. So where now is the mystery? Or the life? The story will stay with me, but I'm not sure why. It lacks hope.
Norm, I could not get a full copy of the story online. I got a copy that broke off when one of the other workmen describes the paperhanger as a sick puppy.
What I read is interesting: exquisite descriptions and interactions laced with grammatical errors and falling into triteness and cliche. Read in spots like a very bad translation. Yet there were moments of beautiful clarity.
No, I'm from California. I googled William Gay, The Paperhanger, and the only one I could find was in a book and the pages had been photographed. Give me a minute and I'll give you more information. It did read like an awkward translation in spots. And as I said, gorgeous in others.
I've actually been wooling around a similar idea lately, feeling kinda bored with my work. This is a perfect opportunity to step out of these doldrums; thanks, George. Seeing others' responses will be fun!
"The way to go deeper is to try to get noticed." A radical statement. I think some here have been calling it "permission." It seems to me that maybe, in my writing, I have been (not consciously) doing the opposite, that is, trying to hide somehow. Or more like, fit in. It's kind of sickening to think about, because it's not conscious, and therefore, what kind of messaging have I been absorbing? It's not so much that I want permission, I don't think. Altho I'll take it, thanks! It's more like, I needed a reminder, and this post is a great reminder. I can't write like anyone else but myself, and that, as I understand it, is the essence of freakification, with the reminder to turn up the volume and drown out those who say, what the hell is this crap, anyway? (Somehow that response has never gone my way.)
It occurs to me that I can remember being scolded for freaky writing starting as early as third or fourth grade, all the way up to adulthood and a freakin' writing program. Yes. There is a subtle but consistent pattern here, I'm sorry to say.
Some of us have been told that trying to get noticed is not a nice thing to do.
I know George asked us not to mention names of authors, but my version of this exercise (so far) was to look at the opening sentences of some stories and novels by William Faulkner (Mr. Freaky writing himself ) and Henry Green. But I think I could have pulled almost any book off the shelf, read the first sentence or three, and found the freak in it. In other words, I think freak is everywhere. And once you see it, you can't not see it. Which is amazing!
I feel you on the sickening realisation that you may have been hiding. I felt this most when I allowed myself to rank 5 stories and realised how much I am passing my taste over someone else's taste buds.
I like this advice of "trying to get noticed" too. Especially when it is exactly what siblings do in a family try to get noticed by their parents especially if it is essential to their survival or well-being. And we writers form a kind of brotherhood / sisterhood yet yearn to distinguish ourselves too.
An hilarious example of how sickening sickening can get is given in Steve Hely's novel "How I Became a Successful Novelist" which riffs on the 1001 tacks a writer can take to walk, talk, and act like a writer without every once being authentic.
In the last years of the last millennium, the probability was stupendously high that a story which managed to get published in the New Yorker would have some bougainvillea in it or so it seemed to me at the time. Very quickly samples of that weed started to creep into my short stories and climb up the walls of stucco buildings.
My desire to pass off as a product of the literary academic complex was so great and I so depraved, I was slinging in the signature vine that symbolized a certain height of delicate, literary sophistication. My first round of query letters were similar: trying to pass off as one of the gang whatever I imagined the gang to be.
Hely is hilarious when he mocks how we writers inevitably have a story (ideally of mythological proportions) of how we became legit. Here's his example ready for the Today Show.
"Then one morning I woke up in an alley in Minot, North Dakota in the snow. I rooted around in a trash can, hoping to find an old jacket. And I found a tattered copy of Of Mice and Men. Maybe from an angel’s hand. Maybe just a lazy schoolboy. But I read it. And John Steinbeck showed me there was stronger stuff than whiskey."
So freakification is a delightfully deliberate counter to the insidious ways our minds can work to lure us into "hiding" of the kind you're talking about. It sounds extreme, but it is not more or less so than what siblings do, and it is only extreme to rescue us from the absurdities of an all-too-subtle, slithering conformity.
I, also, think freak is everywhere. What I mean to say is that freak is there everywhere, ready for those who choose to find it. More accurately what I think I'm meaning to say is that every where those who go lookin' for it can freakin' find it. Meaning forget takin' a walk on the wild side, it's in the breaks between the shadows under the awnings on Freaky Greek Street where you can get your sunniest, craziest writing cut kicks.*** You followin' my drift? You able to tell me just where seeking freak has landed me up in? I don't recognise any of thos three purple moons? Do you, or any body out there, looking in from their world onto this page want to lend a hand? Like Amanda I just opened a collected short stories volume and whoosh, each of five I read a page (well @ 500 words) of, seemed to be offering transport to itself, to a particular weird world of delights. Exploratorily speaking amazing, freakin' amazin'. . . . 🤯
*** I've just realised, in the minutes after posting this, well, whatever kind of prose extrusion it be, that up to the *** what I've written is a freakification in response to the first page-cum-500 words of the first of my five short story selections. I also can say this piece and the writer's style struck me as a strong candidate for 'favourite', 'liked best', 'most preferred', #1 ... interesting.
A richly woven weave of words A-P 'a deep-rooted viscerally energetic inferiority complex that can turn a person into an indecipherable ghost'. Perchance a fine starter to draw upon in getting first getting warmed up to write, then settling ready to write and finally, though it be but the beginning, firing up the opening words that will attempt to sling shoot an fuzzy, fresh, yet to form story in being, tentatively, as 'Draft One'.
Don't stop, what you refer to as 'trying' seems, reading words forged like the string I've sampled, more like 'achieving' to my reading eye.
This is exactly the permission/call-to-action/literary-palette-cleanser I needed today! I've been reading zillions of short stories lately, in an effort (like we're all doing here in Story Club) to learn more about how good stories are made, and I've found myself being quietly peeved by so many stories that I "should" love.
Sometimes, it's the writer's attempt at humor that I just don't find funny, or dialogue that doesn't sound like it came from an actual person, or flowery prose that takes it self way too seriously. It's like I have a spidey sense that's telling me something in the story is a tiny bit corny, but like a good student, I try to brush that off as a product of my uncouthiness, or my unrefined taste or whatever. Still, it sticks with me as a question that needs answering: why does this story grate on me? (and also: why does it matter? what can I do about it? Is there even any room for me and my spidey sense in literature?!) Today's exercise is giving that little voice some agency again and... it feels nice to let that freak flag fly :)
Flowery prose that takes everything so seriously...I find it hard to read, too.
Tasha, I'd say trust your "spidey sense". There's plenty of room for it in literature & lots of other places, too. As for what to do about it, put down that story & pick up another one, try again. Life's too short to stick with a thing, story or whatever, that just isn't doing it for you. Also, sometimes the timing isn't right. Your "spidey" meter may not register at all at a later date.
I'm great at just being me and using the spidey sense in music production and songwriting... I've built a whole career around it even, but for some reason, the lit crowd is just so much more intimidating 😂 thanks for the encouragement!
Yeah, we lit folk, we like to think we're intimidating. That's why we're lit folk.
Intimidating, intimating, abrogating, colossalating, but never ingratiating.
I live to obfuscate, just live for it!
There’s more than one way to skate, but obfu is my new favorite style!
Leave it to the real fog^^
Agree. Especially (in my opinion) with contemporary ‘program fiction’ aka MFA-style writing, the excessive attempts at sounding unironically ‘literary’; the obsession with pseudo-intelligence; the ideology baked in; the telling readers how/what to think; the stilted dialogue; etc. This is why I mostly read the classics. Yet of course there are modern geniuses who can’t be overlooked: Zadie Smith, Ottessa Moshfegh, etc.
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
Swear it is AI writers^^
I saw this subject line in my inbox and just knew this post was going to be a banger.
Off to freakify!
I opened five stories at random in a recently acquired literary journal. My least favorite happened to be one that had been freakified by its author. By this I mean it was the only one of the five I randomly turned to that was not written conventionally, but which used the little trick of footnotes (tiresome after David Foster Wallace), but which this writer had updated by having the footnotes refer to google searches. Kind of cute, but immediately annoying. So. What does this say about me--that the story i liked the least was the only story that had attempted a bit of freakification?
I'm not going to rewrite that one.
I think maybe i'm one of those people who is not a fan of this idea of George's. It's an interesting experiment, for sure. And i think experiments are good things. They open us up to possibilities. But if the idea presented here is to jar the reader, if the idea is to be noticed because of purposeful freaky writing--well, I just can't get behind that. I'd rather just....write. And be noticed for good writing. And jar the reader because of my ability to jar the reader--not from freakifying my sentences, but from writing good sentences that affected someone.
I don't want to be noticed for being someone other than who i am. I think George IS the person who writes his stories--which are all freakified. I think that's why they work. They are his voice. And he's an original, with an original and identifiable style. But George is a freaky writer! That's him, being the real deal. The rest of us...well, maybe this will be turn out to be a good thing for others. I hope it is.
When i first started writing short stories, I tried so many voices. That was a kind of freakification, i think. I never tried a sci-fi/alien voice, or one that had a strangeness to it that meant my story was taking place in a different universe than the one we live in (like George's, mostly). But I wrote in uptight voices, and arch voices, and old people voices and teenager voices. I tried all sorts of things. And in the end, all of those stories were terrible and I realized none of them were my writing voice. It took me a long time to find my writing voice. I don't want to freakify it. I want my voice to be my voice, the one I discovered after writing thousands of words. I don't want a voice that calls attention to itself only because it exists to call attention to itself! I want a voice that stands out, yes. But not on purpose.
I understand wanting to move away from conventional writing. I understand that writing ought to be a process of discovery. I understand that original writing gets noticed. But i don't know if the idea to purposely begin by looking for a freakified voice is the way in for me. I think there are other ways of being original.
I'd like to try this experiment, but I think I'll have to do it with my own writing instead of changing someone else's. Maybe I'll take the first paragraph of my most recent story and see if I can enter it through the freak door and see what happens. Maybe I'll learn something big. Maybe I'll see that my negative knee-jerk reaction here appeared for a reason. Like, loosen up, Mary G.! Get off of your high horse!
Okay, I'll try and if i get anything out of it, I'll let you know.
My knee-jerk reaction was also negative! It called to mind the type of contemporary stories I can't stand — all sizzle, no steak.
Maybe freakifying doesn't have to mean making stories more experimental, absurd, or avant-garde (which is a type of genre with it's own conventions, after all). Maybe it can just mean tweaking perfunctory writing to see if it can be made to reach its own point more effectively.
For instance, Jane Austen might've opened P&P with a conventional, run-of-the-mill description of the Bennett family's predicament, but instead she leaned into her distinct knack for making universal insights about humanity while lightly ridiculing society. I feel like I could pick out a paragraph of hers anywhere. She's distinct without being freaky. :)
Melinda, thanks for commenting. I feel less alone! I like this notion of yours--that freaky writing may entail "tweaking perfunctory writing to see if it can be made to reach its own point more effectively." But I think that is at the heart of revising any piece of writing, no? In George's post, he says that maybe what he's talking about is simply another form of editing and revising. But his other notion--of calling attention to the writing, of writing purposely to get others to notice--that part of it kind of stops me in my tracks. It's a motivator, certainly. But i don't think it could be my motivator.
Write your truth..it will be novel enough^^
I agree with you Mary. While adopting a freaky style of writing prose worked for Joyce and Pinchon and some more current Irish writers (no punctuation marks at all, really?), it doesn't work for me to put the cart before the horse in this way. It's seems rather twee and self obsessed. Either there's a story to tell and the way it's told is defined by the story and the existing style of the author, or there isn't. Writing style isn't flash fiction.
Galer: What i really would like is for people to put up examples of freaky writing along with an explanation of why it is freaky. And by that I mean the kind of freaky writing George is asking us to try--writing that calls attention to itself on purpose, that exists to be noticed. I'm not seeing that here, but maybe I'm just too confused and not able to get on the right train. People here are writing about wonderful original writing--but so far, i'm not seeing examples of writing that is doing something more than that. Perhaps Tom Wolfe and his use of all caps--that was definitely a way to get attention and it worked. And of course there's James Joyce or Gertrude Stein--the way out there, almost indecipherable writing that calls attention to itself by being so completely different. I guess I'd call those three writers creators of freaky writing.... Maybe that's what George means?
I was just thinking...freakification is a process. I'm not sure looking at whether you like the result or prefer writing that disappears is the best question to be asking. I probably do prefer the kind of writing where the writing has voice because it doesn't sound like writing, or where you deliberately use said because it's almost invisible, or you try to immerse a reader through sensory details (the high specificity dial is set to high;-) ).
Instead, the experience of the process of taking a sentence, and then defamiliarizing de-everydaying the language, is a valuable experiment. Not to judge the result but more to get a sense of the feeling of opening up many unthought of, invisible options which were not there before. Remove the autopilot parts of language. Reminds me of a children's TV show in the UK (mallets mallet) where there was a game where you had to quickly say a word in response to another word, and it couldn't be related. So hard to so deliberately zag when the intuitive thing is to zig. The experience of doing this opens up a gear of editing I didn't have before.
Mary, I agree. We'd want to ask Joyce if he was dyslexic or had bad eyesight (he did) and his style had to do with a poor third grade education or if it just felt right to him to speak in stream of consciousness. If he just did it for attention, I'm not as impressed as I would be if he did it because that's how the work came into his brain and back out again. Writing without periods at the end of sentences just to create buzz isn't interesting, it's annoying. In the end, maybe George just wanted to wind us all up and see what happened?
All sizzle, no steak 🥩 ❤️❤️❤️
I would respectfully submit that there may be a “Mary version” of freakification that would be quite nice. My freaky isn’t your freaky isn’t George’s freaky. Or maybe when you found your writing voice that was a type of freakification process?
I think so much of allowing yourself to be “freaky” on the page giving yourself permission to be yourself and reach into those recesses the more proper and rule-following parts of our brain tsk-tsk or worry about being embarrassing. And if you are already there maybe you have already entered the freak door!
(Also, I just read a novel that was written with many footnotes, and while I liked the book overall, I found the footnotes became tedious. I felt like I was always on alert looking for the minuscule asterisk that marked the footnote, and then reading the footnote took me out of the story.)
Maybe i'm not fully understanding freakification. I was with George entirely when he wrote, at the top of his post, about discovery in writing. But then, he took a turn and suggested we try "writing intentionally in such a way that would get our prose noticed." "...prose that can't be ignored." "...showing off, making a bit of a scene, purposely departing from the normative, in order to get some damn attention."
Yeah, I don't think that's for me--at least not to that extent! I think I'm one of those people George mentions who won't take to this. Finding my voice wasn't what I would consider a freakification process. It was just years of practicing and getting the internal editor out of my head, finally. Allowing myself to write as I wanted to write, and on subjects I wanted to write about. Getting all of the shit out of there that was clogging up the process. That doesn't mean i haven't been playful at times. I've done a thing or two that wasn't entirely straightforward conventional storytelling. But i didn't do that for attention. I did it because it seemed correct for what I was writing. It was the right form at the time.
Again, maybe i'm just not understanding this entire concept! That would be typical of me--i really do need concrete examples. Elsewhere in this thread--was it Sallie?--someone mentioned Grace Paley as having freaky writing. I guess I'm not seeing it. I see in Grace Paley a very strong voice--one that belongs solely to her. It's not showy and it doesn't exist to draw attention to itself. It's just....her.
I'll be interested to see if i'm the outlier in these threads, as others here all seem to have immediately understood what George was talking about and are excited to put his idea into practice. I feel a bit lost, maybe? Like, is he talking about sentence structure? Style? Voice? Form? Content? All of the above?
Thanks you for commenting, Sara. It's given me a chance to write more here and figure out what I"m thinking. (I'm still not there yet.)
All of the above and more, I think. Experimentation! Free writing! Use what you like and flush the rest!
Write to be understood by others...now there is a good aim^^
I might be in this camp too...when the style of the writing, or the cleverness of the writer, takes over my attention, I stop entering the story. I get distracted by the shiny surface and can no longer look through or into the depth of the thing. And I think depth of connection is what I'm interested in at this point in my life, more than entertainment. Actually when the styling of anything gets between me and the feeling tone of the thing, I start to lose interest.
Kurt, I don't think "freakification" means being wacky for wackiness's sake. I agree that it leads to surface writing--boring for the writer (if the writer can even remain at the desk beyond the first paragraph) & more than annoying for the reader, who's wasting valuable time reading crap. That kind of writing is only an attempt to be clever, like someone at a party who tells a witty but inappropriate joke in an attempt to garner a little attention. Those things always crash land. Instead, I think of "freakification" as more of an approach, a way to enter a story (one of several) that you might not otherwise have tried. One wacky sentence that provides a little jolt, gives a little steam, a little propulsion, so that you can go on to the next and the one after that, a string of words that might lead you to your heart's truth & what you really mean to say, even if you don't know what that is to begin. The last time I did this, start with a "freakified" sentence (which was really more smart-ass than freaky), a woman took shape right under my fingers who was not the jerk she seemed to be in the freaky/smart-assy first sentence, but someone good, though certainly flawed, who was desperately trying to give her brother one of her kidneys which he would not accept. None of this was known from the start. I don't know any kidney donors or recipients. But propelled by that freaky first sentence, I found this crass but still lovely woman who gave me a story not only publishable but, more importantly, one that broke my heart &, if I'm lucky, maybe the reader's, too.
When it all works together, then I'm all for it. But if the main reason to "freakify" your writing is to garner attention, then that's not aspiring toward a feeling of unity--the feeling that it absolutely HAS to be told that way, in order to be effective. It's just, as you say, a shiny surface that distracts.
You said it so well, Kurt, this is the case for me–– I get distracted by all the cleverness.
Thanks Sea. I know some people like extensive twists, turns and complexity but I prefer a sort of simple clarity. That’s what I’ve liked best about the stories George has shown us so far. They’re really sort of quiet. They sneak up on me and become more profound than I expected, especially with George’s guidance in reading them.
Yes. Yes
That’s it.
My experience with the five I chose was similar--the one I liked least felt like it was trying too hard. Its narrator even bemoaned pretentious language in fiction as she used pretentious language in an obviously self-conscious way to critique it! I also felt like the writer was purposefully disorienting me with tangents to get me to wonder how they would all come together, and I found myself incredibly bored and not wanting to read on.
So there’s definitely a risk. Language alone isn’t enough. But the value of an exercise is that very often we learn something different than what we’re “supposed” to learn. I haven’t tried it yet, but I am curious what I will find myself adding beyond language when I try to make that first page freaky in a new way that I would actually want to read.
Thanks for sharing your dissenting opinion and as always making room for others to question!
Thank you for this great reminder, Jules--that we often learn something different than what we were supposed to learn when we try new things. You are exactly right. You never know what you may get out of an exercise. Okay, I'm going to try, though I'm definitely not rushing to do it! Lots of psychology at work, I suppose. I've worked so hard to be who I am, and now George suggests I try something new! How dare he (wink, wink)! It's all good for me, I know. Thanks again.
I woke up with this idea that we could all write a vague, rambling, overly flowery and confusing story on purpose, then do a "white elephant" exchange for the holidays, so each of us would have a story to work on. Everyone would know that we wrote the story on purpose to be "freakified." Or as Kurt L said, make the story deeper, more connected. White elephant story exchange party.
hahaha! I think I'd rather get the ugly blanket
Hahahaha! I hear you. I think it would be fun, though. Other idea: find an old story from a million years ago filled with tropes and stereotypes and modernize it. What I like about this whole thing is I'm reading all these fantastic stories.
I hear you Mary. I think I'm still experimenting with different voices in different stories. Though I really like my stories, I recognise that the voice is not active enough, so for me this is an interesting idea to play with.
When I worked at the BBC we did a 'leadership day' in amongst the BBC symphony orchestra. The conductor and the orchestra played a piece, then 'freakified it'. On one play through the first violin was instructed to play as though he was the best violinist in the world, it twisted the piece in a very weird way.
So for me, it seems to be about, 'well what does this voice do?' 'Is there anything in the freakification that brings something new, different or useful. Maybe, maybe not.
On the radio at the moment is a woman talking about how she lost an arm and a leg when she fell through the gap between the tube train and the platform. She was run over by two trains. I add this, as it is suddenly way more visceral than anything I'm writing. It's so shocking.
as horrifying as that story on the radio is (oh my god, that poor woman), it's almost a perfect example here of freakifying your writing. Like, you had me, I was following you, and suddenly the world dropped and the earth fell away and my heart ached.
But about not having a voice that is active enough--that's a great point. Your narrator, whomever they may be, is narrating from a place where they see the world. They've got thoughts and feelings and world views. Even a so-called omniscient narrator is a creation that comes from someone's mind. So, yes, I agree completely, waking up that voice in whatever way is called for to tell a particular story (and not bore yourself or your reader to pieces) is essential. (A boring narrator is sometimes called for--but personally, that's not a story i want to write or read.)
Indeed. Is there a chapter of a book somewhere called ‘how to write an active third person’ !?
Ha! Probably! But probably better is to just read a good novel with a good third person narrator. I just finished Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and it was the narration that kept me going. You can read the opening online on Amazon by going to the book and clicking on "Look inside." Or there are thousands of books with great third person voices, obviously.
That implies I’m smart enough to work out how they are doing it, but I will take a look.
It occurs to me that maybe I should mention George's penchant for close-in third person narration (something I also do--but not as well, obvs.). This technique absolutely leads to an active third person narration. He discussed the use of this voice in Story Club in the archive under "The Falls." Here's a bit of what he wrote:
In both sections, I was doing something I’ve come to think of as “third-person omniscient.” The difference between this mode and “normal” third-person limited has something to do with the idea of trying to minimize or eliminate that omniscient presence that is located…nowhere. Who IS that omniscient narrator? I’m trying to get into the character’s head as fast as I can and (this is key) into his diction as fast as possible.
So the story starts out in third-person limited (“Morse found it nerve-racking to cross the St. Jude grounds just as the school was being dismissed…”) and then, with the next line (“because he felt that if he smiled at the uniformed Catholic children they might think he was a wacko or pervert”) starts to edge into Morse’s diction - the words “wacko” and “pervert” are, subtly, his words, not “mine.”
Okay, this is mary g. again: Going immediately inside of your character's head(s) while staying in third person--that's a great way to have that active voice you're looking for. Many of George's stories do this. Once you look for it, you'll see it all over his work.
i have great faith in you
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I feel like there are actually three related elements encompassed in this "freakification" process: what one could call densification (as in, simply making one's prose contain more ideas, opacifying it to an extent, "chiseling down a sentence to its essence," as it's put - I see this in, for example, T.S. Eliot essays), reduction of sense (putting words and phrases where they don't seem to belong - this is what comes to the fore in the sentence from "The Wavemaker Falters," and in Boris Vian and Ben Marcus), and... beautification? (finding conventionally elegant [more elegant than normal prose, as it comes from the pen of an author], poetic ways to express situations and sentiments, the literary equivalent of a proof from the book - I think of William Gaddis here).
To me, it's always seemed like the process explored here is the only way to become a technically-skilled writer, since the prose of everyday reading and writing, even when perfected, is simply nowhere near the best we humans have to offer. Language, after all, limits the artist in ways other media would never, simply because it is so used; we are put in a box by English's conventions (the connotations of its words; the patterns it naturally congeals into; the fact that it is first and foremost designed for straightforward communication, and so bridles at being used to tease, to play with a reader in the way all literature does); some parameter must be consciously twiddled with, a knob or lever we'd never normally touch, in order that we might escape.
Ironically, it seems plausible that this process of "freakification," in all its modes, is exactly the way authors build emotional restraint into their stories. As Eliot says somewhere ("Tradition and the Individual Talent," maybe?), the role of an author isn't just to spill their emotions onto paper, it's to create new experiences out of the conventional emotions they feel, and express those. In perverting one's prose, one must also necessarily pervert the emotions that have informed said prose - this process necessarily involves the partial loss of control over what one is saying, simply because one is retreating from the everyday language they know and adopting a shadow-language they aren't so familiar with, that isn't even well-defined - and thus create something new and beautiful.
Thanks, Sophie. Well put. John Cheever offers a corollary to your supposition, I think, when he says (somewhere, but I can't find the source), that in its beauty & malleability the same language used to order a steak can also describe a sunset. Such as I make any art at all it is in part owing to this plasticity.
Thank you Sophie. I have been thinking a lot about the limitations of language these days. How much human experience is beyond language and how few overused words we have to express the full range of experience. I wonder whether George’s version of freakification is him expanding the boundaries of language - the purpose is less about uniqueness and more about invention?
Love this dearly, Sophie!
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This post is so good, I stopped what I was doing to take a full page of notes on it.
I have the worst case of creative anxiety of anyone I know. No matter how playful and generative my brain feels all other hours of the day, I choke at the writing table.
It's like my vision for the story and my reverence for ~*Literature*~ combine to squeeze all the joy and peculiarity out of my sentences. They end up with this very straight, overdetermined quality that I find it hard to fix via line edits, and I've never understood why (I'm a good editor!).
I wonder if it's because I'm aiming for correctness at the macro level (e.g. "Did this scene do what I wanted it to?") when I should be aiming for undeniable zestiness at the sentence level. Maybe there is a mindset shift that happens when the goal is just to cause a ruckus.
I act as if my stories exist somewhere in platonic ideal forms that I can either bring to life or fail to do justice to through my powers of conveying stuff accurately. But the truth is that all my conscious "ideas" are super vague and not that interesting.
Maybe my boring paragraphs aren't boring because I didn't convey the subject properly. Maybe they're boring because the subject was weakly imagined to begin with.
Which is fine! As an aspiring professional writer-person, I should not need to wake up with a reel of compelling, highly-detailed images in mind, just ready to be taken down. I should take comfort in the skill of entertaining myself on the page until something cool springs to life. I think "freakifying" my sentences could be the perfect springboard into writing stuff that I don't want to scrap the next day.
I fully expect this advice to change my life, George Saunders. If it does, I'll let you know.
"Undeniable zestinesss." There you go!
Melinda, we might be literary soulmates 😂 So much of this resonates with me. Let us go forth toward undeniable zestiness and see what else we discover along the way!
Undeniable zestiness--yes!
******Note added five hours after posting this:
What I wrote here was an obvious attempt to be noticed in the manner George asked of us. And yet--not much noticing going on! And I think that's because this attempt at freaky writing is a bit obnoxious, calling so much attention to itself! And I think that may be a downfall of trying to be noticed. If you don't do it well, people aren't going to be drawn to it.******
PEOPLE OF STORY CLUB! I'M TALKING TO YOU RIGHT HERE, ALL CAPS, SHOUTING INTO THE UNIVERSE SO THAT YOU WILL SEE ME. DO YOU SEE ME? HAVE I GOT YOUR ATTENTION??? I've a thing or two I've been wanting to say to all of you. WAIT! SOMEONE ISN'T LISTENING. YOU, WITH YOUR COFFEE MUG AND YOUR HALF-DEAD EYES! I SEE YOU! Okay, okay, listen up, people. LISTEN UP! The time has come for all good men The time has come for all good people the time has come for all the time has come the time the time the time it is tick tock ticking, right now, right here, this very moment, and if you cannot hear it, I cannot help you. PEOPLE OF STORY CLUB. A new day has dawned. You woke up to this world and every second that passes will never come again. You will never be the person you are RIGHT NOW again, i hope you are listening. YOU IN THE BACK, STOP TALKING AND LISTEN TO ME. Oh, dear god, they won't listen, they won't hear, and evening will come again and this day will be over. PICK UP YOUR PEN AND CAPTURE ALL OF IT BECAUSE FUTURE GENERATIONS WILL NOT FUCKING BELIEVE YOU EVER WERE HERE.
They always say if you need help, make eye contact with one person and say 'you', you with the purple hat. I need help. Otherwise people assume someone else in the crowd. So the half dead eyes got me, but the address to all of us as a club, I found that easier to ignore.
This is not obnoxious, mary g., but hilarious and brilliant!
Don't be afraid of your freak : )
I see plenty of noticing in it, too!
Aw, Amanda G.! Thanks so much!
"Ask Swift." Bingo. The freak is on!
Thanks Alfred-P! Feels nice to get my freak on this morning.
YES, GEORGE, YES! Reading this post makes me feel like Ace Ventura when he crawls out of the rhinoceros's butt. Thank you for lighting the way!!!
I legit LOL’d this. And I’m almost always a “laugh internally in my mind” type vs an LOL type.
why, thank you, Sara!! :)
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Mostly when I write I'm really trying not to bore myself. When I do, I know the story is in trouble. Most of the first pages of my five stories were pretty boring, but one was glorious. It had a crazy first sentence that didn't make logical sense. Then in had a list. Then it had the line: "Droughts were called things like "Chatterbox who can't take a hint, because it just went on and on and wouldn't leave them be." A story with that line I just can't put down.
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I just read Freakification and switched to a friend's email about the top stories of 2022 according to the BBC -- first on the list is "Liberation Day!" Congratulations and what a shout out for your writing/style:) https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220407-the-best-books-of-the-year-2022
Thank you! So many freaky looking books to drop into!!
This post is just what I needed to stall my end of year writing blues. I’ve been thinking back to the stories I have written this past year and trying to figure out what seems to be missing. Perhaps freakification might do the trick! There’s hope..
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All I can say right now about this is: thank you, this is so liberating! Now to carve a trail with a syntactical machete into this wild and woolly new universe….
Or is it woolly ‘n’ wild galaxy? Or maybe a wooly mammoth traipsing across the stars as a new astrological sign. Let’s get freaky!
Isn’t Stewart Brand trying to bring the Woolly Mammoth back to life? Delivered by passenger pigeons?
Sounds very Woolly Bully^^
Hattie Gold Hattie!
Yes. Probably why it was stuck in my brain!
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This is pretty much how I write stories. Only I don't call it "freakification". I'd give this method a name if I could think of one. And working this way isn't so much fun, although it can certainly be fun, as it is engaging, absorbing, totally captivating, which I think of as a specialized kind of fun. As for the results, compared to George's my stories couldn't be more different, though there is in the end much satisfaction in having "freakified", as it were.
The word itself scares me but my latest memoir essays as I call them, I kind do that. My writers group always corrects me and I often go back and write it real and boring. So thanks writers and George, I need to be myself with a little Italian prose and enthusiasm for life among the ghosts in my life.
Freakification - and the first writers who popped into my forebrain, simultaneously, were Isaac Babel and Grace Paley. Followed by Kafka - that opening line! And Gogol, The Nose. Paley is freakified all through. I love her because there is life in every line.
Mary Gaitskill. The Girl On The Plane. William Gay.
Don't know this writer. I'll have to look her up. Is William Gay a writer, or one of Gaitskill's books?
He’s a fabulous writer. He came to it later in life. As poor as poor can be. Check out his short story, The Paperhanger. Let me know what you think.
Mary g sent me a link that worked. I think this story is the epitome of freakification! Very evocative, very strange, and in places, even in this cleaner version than the one I found first, it is twisted. I knew the Paperhanger had killed the child when she first vanished. I think we are supposed to know that. So where now is the mystery? Or the life? The story will stay with me, but I'm not sure why. It lacks hope.
Norm, I could not get a full copy of the story online. I got a copy that broke off when one of the other workmen describes the paperhanger as a sick puppy.
What I read is interesting: exquisite descriptions and interactions laced with grammatical errors and falling into triteness and cliche. Read in spots like a very bad translation. Yet there were moments of beautiful clarity.
Are you from outside the US? Are you reading a translation into another language besides English? Because that doesn't sound like Gay's writing.
No, I'm from California. I googled William Gay, The Paperhanger, and the only one I could find was in a book and the pages had been photographed. Give me a minute and I'll give you more information. It did read like an awkward translation in spots. And as I said, gorgeous in others.
I've actually been wooling around a similar idea lately, feeling kinda bored with my work. This is a perfect opportunity to step out of these doldrums; thanks, George. Seeing others' responses will be fun!
Oh, I like that, "wooling around". Consider it now stolen!
"The way to go deeper is to try to get noticed." A radical statement. I think some here have been calling it "permission." It seems to me that maybe, in my writing, I have been (not consciously) doing the opposite, that is, trying to hide somehow. Or more like, fit in. It's kind of sickening to think about, because it's not conscious, and therefore, what kind of messaging have I been absorbing? It's not so much that I want permission, I don't think. Altho I'll take it, thanks! It's more like, I needed a reminder, and this post is a great reminder. I can't write like anyone else but myself, and that, as I understand it, is the essence of freakification, with the reminder to turn up the volume and drown out those who say, what the hell is this crap, anyway? (Somehow that response has never gone my way.)
It occurs to me that I can remember being scolded for freaky writing starting as early as third or fourth grade, all the way up to adulthood and a freakin' writing program. Yes. There is a subtle but consistent pattern here, I'm sorry to say.
Some of us have been told that trying to get noticed is not a nice thing to do.
I know George asked us not to mention names of authors, but my version of this exercise (so far) was to look at the opening sentences of some stories and novels by William Faulkner (Mr. Freaky writing himself ) and Henry Green. But I think I could have pulled almost any book off the shelf, read the first sentence or three, and found the freak in it. In other words, I think freak is everywhere. And once you see it, you can't not see it. Which is amazing!
I feel you on the sickening realisation that you may have been hiding. I felt this most when I allowed myself to rank 5 stories and realised how much I am passing my taste over someone else's taste buds.
I like this advice of "trying to get noticed" too. Especially when it is exactly what siblings do in a family try to get noticed by their parents especially if it is essential to their survival or well-being. And we writers form a kind of brotherhood / sisterhood yet yearn to distinguish ourselves too.
An hilarious example of how sickening sickening can get is given in Steve Hely's novel "How I Became a Successful Novelist" which riffs on the 1001 tacks a writer can take to walk, talk, and act like a writer without every once being authentic.
In the last years of the last millennium, the probability was stupendously high that a story which managed to get published in the New Yorker would have some bougainvillea in it or so it seemed to me at the time. Very quickly samples of that weed started to creep into my short stories and climb up the walls of stucco buildings.
My desire to pass off as a product of the literary academic complex was so great and I so depraved, I was slinging in the signature vine that symbolized a certain height of delicate, literary sophistication. My first round of query letters were similar: trying to pass off as one of the gang whatever I imagined the gang to be.
Hely is hilarious when he mocks how we writers inevitably have a story (ideally of mythological proportions) of how we became legit. Here's his example ready for the Today Show.
"Then one morning I woke up in an alley in Minot, North Dakota in the snow. I rooted around in a trash can, hoping to find an old jacket. And I found a tattered copy of Of Mice and Men. Maybe from an angel’s hand. Maybe just a lazy schoolboy. But I read it. And John Steinbeck showed me there was stronger stuff than whiskey."
So freakification is a delightfully deliberate counter to the insidious ways our minds can work to lure us into "hiding" of the kind you're talking about. It sounds extreme, but it is not more or less so than what siblings do, and it is only extreme to rescue us from the absurdities of an all-too-subtle, slithering conformity.
Awe-shucks.
I, also, think freak is everywhere. What I mean to say is that freak is there everywhere, ready for those who choose to find it. More accurately what I think I'm meaning to say is that every where those who go lookin' for it can freakin' find it. Meaning forget takin' a walk on the wild side, it's in the breaks between the shadows under the awnings on Freaky Greek Street where you can get your sunniest, craziest writing cut kicks.*** You followin' my drift? You able to tell me just where seeking freak has landed me up in? I don't recognise any of thos three purple moons? Do you, or any body out there, looking in from their world onto this page want to lend a hand? Like Amanda I just opened a collected short stories volume and whoosh, each of five I read a page (well @ 500 words) of, seemed to be offering transport to itself, to a particular weird world of delights. Exploratorily speaking amazing, freakin' amazin'. . . . 🤯
*** I've just realised, in the minutes after posting this, well, whatever kind of prose extrusion it be, that up to the *** what I've written is a freakification in response to the first page-cum-500 words of the first of my five short story selections. I also can say this piece and the writer's style struck me as a strong candidate for 'favourite', 'liked best', 'most preferred', #1 ... interesting.
A richly woven weave of words A-P 'a deep-rooted viscerally energetic inferiority complex that can turn a person into an indecipherable ghost'. Perchance a fine starter to draw upon in getting first getting warmed up to write, then settling ready to write and finally, though it be but the beginning, firing up the opening words that will attempt to sling shoot an fuzzy, fresh, yet to form story in being, tentatively, as 'Draft One'.
Don't stop, what you refer to as 'trying' seems, reading words forged like the string I've sampled, more like 'achieving' to my reading eye.