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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
******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.
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!!!
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.
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
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.
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!