In Which We Pause...

...to consider what we're doing.

So, on this, the approximate two-month anniversary of Story Club (Happy Anniversary, everyone), and before we launch into our next story (a great one, by an under-acknowledged American master, whose name I am going to withhold so no one rushes ahead to read her) it might be a good time to ask: What is it that we think we’re doing here?

When I was in engineering school, we were taught to look critically at experiments we were doing, to better understand their inherent limitations.  So: are there any inherent limitations in the way we’re working here?

We’ve been approaching the stories in, let’s call it, a “technical” way: reading them closely, tracking our reactions, trying to understand what caused those reactions, micro-examining the texts, and so on.  But this isn’t, of course, the only way to interact with a story and won’t prove equally useful to each of us.

We’ve also been largely ignoring the question of how a given story was written.  (How was the thing done, from the inside?) We’ve been looking at the evidence the writer left behind, in the form of the style and structure of the story, but this doesn’t tell us anything about, say, what it felt like to write it.  And we may feel this question to be related to another, important to many of us: how should I feel, as I write?

For now, I just want to acknowledge that we are (largely) ignoring this question. We’ll try to sneak up on it later, by way of some editing exercises, while also recognizing that it may have to just remain a mystery.

Imagine for a moment that we’re aspiring carpenters, walking through The Museum of Gorgeous Tables.  We step up to a supposedly classic table, made by a master, have a reaction to it.  Trying to understand what just happened to us, we do some “analysis,” asking questions like: What was it about that table that caused the reaction?  When did we first feel something?  How did the table’s components work together to produce that feeling? Can we break our overall reaction to the table into sub-reactions, and talk about how those worked in sequence?  Is there anything we could imagine changing about the proportions of the table, that might have intensified our reaction?  What are the features, generally, of a beautiful table?  And so on.

Then we’re out in the parking lot of the Museum and have to go home and build a table of our own.

What did all this analysis tell us about how those Gorgeous Tables in there were actually built?  The state of the carpenters’ minds as they were building them, the decisions made along the way, the way they proceeded, day-to-day? What does it tell us, in other words, about how we might go about building a beautiful table of our own?

One possible answer has to be: “Well, maybe not much.”

Analysis and creation, that is, might be unrelated processes.  For some of us, analyzing the (already-made) table might even prove inhibitory; it might make us self-conscious, cause us to overvalue the planning and design stages, undervalue the intuitive, mysterious elements that are so much of the creation of a work of art. We might start to feel that writing well is just a matter of, you know…directly importing all of that craft advice we’ve been getting. (“Show, don’t tell. Check! The frame must self-justify! Roger, got it.”)

I used to get this question in my classes, often about a third of the way through the semester: “George, this is fun and all, analyzing stories technically, but how is it supposed to help my work?”

Here’s how I think analyzing stories helps us write our own.

Imagine that we each have a huge silo over our head. 

What we’re doing is adding these stories we’re reading, plus our attempts to analyze them, into our personal silo.  Someday (according to me) when we’re struggling with an artistic problem, the contents of our silo will be there, to subtly inform our solution.  I don’t mean that we will very rationally say to ourselves, “Ah, I know, I’ll apply technique 6A, as demonstrated by Lu Tsun in ‘An Incident.’”  A story’s too smart for that.  It wants a solution organic to itself.  The blind application of some recently acquired technique won’t feel authentic, since the intention in that case isn’t “intuit, with my full artistic sensibility, what this particular story needs, right at this moment,” but “use this cool thing I picked up from another story, whether my story needs it or not.” 

The hope is that working with these stories will move them down from our heads into what we might call our “artistic bodies.”  Whatever we’ve “learned” will appear, now and then, in the form of an instinct, or an aversion, or an expansion of ambition.  We will have infused ourselves with a more complex notion of beauty.  Having seen so many Gorgeous Tables, and having taken their dimensions and observed their lines and so on, we’ll know beauty (better) when we see it.  And we’ll know it when we don’t see it. (We will have improved our taste.)  We’ll tend to veer, viscerally, toward beauty and be dissatisfied in its absence.  That’s a big thing, actually.  If we can say, “I know that what I am currently doing stinks and refuse to let it stand,” we’re on our way to…stinking less.

Or, to say it more positively: refusing to let the non-beautiful stand amounts to a form of artistic patience.

So, we’re having faith in the idea that learning to analyze stories technically will, in a way that we can’t exactly explain, improve our taste, and thereby make us better writers (and readers).

Once we’ve done the work, we can just…forget about it. We don’t need a list of takeaways or maxims or resolutions re what we are always going to do when writing, or never going to do. Whatever we got from the experience is in us, and will come forward when we need it.

A SiloHeaded Story Club Member. (Come to think of it, maybe that’s actually a “hopper.”)

When we read in this technical way, we may start to see that a story is really a system; a little machine for creating an intellectual/emotional response. If that system is failing to do that (whether it’s our story or someone else’s), well, we can notice that. We can see where it seems to be flagging or failing. And…it can be fixed. It can be improved, at least. Everything become workable. This comfort with analysis can help lacerate the myth of genius, the myth of inspiration; it cuts through the fear and the superstition and the sense of a story as a fragile thing that, given enough time, I will surely drop and break, because, after all, I’m an imposter.

If something’s wrong with your story, it’s not you. It’s just, let’s say (a bit corporately) the work product - the thing that happened to come out of you, so far, as it stands, at the current moment.

But the future lies ahead; adjustments can be made; what doesn’t work can be made to work (better).

So, my hope is that Story Club might help you to see a story as, let’s say, a tuneable machine: separate from you, but within your power to improve.

On another level, what we’re doing here is working on our powers of concentration.  We read a story once, for pleasure, in the normal way, feel something, note it, then double back, asking, “Hey, how did that happen?”  Things are caused, all things are caused, including, of course “feelings while reading.” When we try to attribute causes, we’re doing, on this local scale, something we do all the time in the real world: noting (believing in) cause-and-effect.  Which is powerful, because, it makes the world feel less crazy and random. 

What makes these times seem crazy (what has given us all a form of what Joan Didion called “the jitters”) is the sense that the center is somehow not holding; truth, reason, kindness seem to have been overthrown.  But in a story, these still reign supreme.  Something is perfectly described: we see it; we have been reminded of one truth about the way the world is. A certain event causes another: reason still applies.  We find ourselves leaning in to learn something more about a made-up person: this is a species of kindness, proof that active curiosity still lives in us.