Thank you as always George. I loved the quote by Julie Checkoway about Barth: "stories catch characters at the point at which their habitual way(s) of being in the world are about to meet their greatest challenge and (perhaps) give way.” It was a translation that reached me. We have spoken many times about the power of translations here in SC. This one, from English to English was very helpful!
There is almost always a gem, or many gems, in your posts and I learn something every time - about writing, life, myself, your old guitars, whatever. And I carry these gems with me as I go forward. And they help me decode the world, and other people's stories. You give me 'Writer's Eyes' to view the world. Thank you so much!
I love this essay and thank you, George for posting, and Julie for giving George permission to share it with all of us. I own this book and have many times referred people to the chapter by Jane Smiley on Revision: "What Stories Teach Their Writers: The Purpose and Practice of Revision." It's an excellent book overall, one "writing craft" book that remains on my shelf while many others have found their way to a Goodwill box.
This essay by Barth always cracks me up because his touch is so light and heavy at the same time. What he's saying is not new, but he's found his own way to say it. "Incremental perturbation" is hilarious to me, but maybe I'm just a nerd. There is one line he writes that describes a tendency within me entirely, a tendency that I feel has often ruined me for any sort of narrative-based entertainment. That is when he asks how we can tell if something is the "real thing" in terms of truly being a story. He says we should always watch/read with a third eye, always on the lookout for the increments that perturb the situation, for that climax and the ending that satisfies, bringing all to a new grounded level. Always by thinking about how it was done. Yes, I do this...always. It makes it very difficult for me to enjoy movies, books, stories, etc, the way i feel many others do. I go crazy is there is not a story! Just last night, my husband and I were watching some animated shorts that have been nominated for the Oscars. He fell in love with one of them, that I also loved. But that one bothered me--it had no story. All the others perturbed incrementally, but not this one. This was more like watching a prose poem. He is a voter in the academy and he chose that one--while I objected! I wanted a story! He was happy with the beauty and mastery. Finally, he pointed out that the category was simply for a "short." A "story" wasn't necessary. Okay, he wins because every once in awhile that's what you have to do to make a marriage work.
What else? I read the most interesting chapter on storytelling in the book People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn. What a surprise to find a chapter in that book on telling stories. It spoke to last week's conversation about stories bringing solace or pleasure. Horn pointed out that many stories historically written by Jews do neither. They do not provide redemptive endings nor anything uplifting. For anyone interested, it's truly fascinating.
I look forward to today's comments section as this is one of my favorite topics: What makes a story a story? Thank you, George!
Just reading "Slidell" reminds me of how much I love to say it and how much more I love to sing it. :) I hope this version of you finds loads of joy visiting your family and various other versions of you.
I liked the bit about the “sonority of closure”. Good phrase. True, it’s easy to write an ending with gravitas, with sentiment, one that feels like it should have symphony strings behind it. But there’s a difference between relieving the pent-up tension of the story with something sad or sweet, and actually resolving the conflict in a manner that responds to the questions posed by the story, and actually provides closure. Indeed, an ending should probably leave a bit of ambiguity, some gristle for the reader to chew on by the fire after dinner.
Reading that makes me wonder if my endings are good or not, lol.
I played that album, Workingman’s Dead, every Sunday morning after my mom left for church. Did that for a year or maybe longer. When I told my therapist that the Grateful Dead saved both my life and my soul, I got the impression that he was reconsidering my diagnosis.
Brilliant! Thanks for the mention of Julie Checkoway's film. It's set in Baltimore, my home - sure to be filled with characters. I know what I'm watching tonight. And thanks for the reminder of the Barthes essay. Time for a re-read.
Great photo, George--you look so sweetly determined! And yes to old photos & all you can discover about lives lived, whether yours or others. I'm discovering much about my own family by way of a cache of old photos, people I never knew but whose lives have shaped mine. As for NOLA, I hope you're loading up on king cake & bringing some home! My husband grew up just off St. Charles Ave, has family in NOLA still, and everything I know about making a gumbo (passable in their opinion; delicious in mine) I learned in my in-laws' kitchen. I'll always be the Yankee (Pittsburgh), but fortunately they still let me eat the food!
As for the Barth essay, I know it well from Julie Checkoway's excellent "Creating Fiction", a volume I landed on years ago & can't recommend enough. (I've marked my copy up so much I can now hardly read it.) In it there are also other brilliant essays from Charles Baxter, Charles Johnson, Jane Smiley, Richard Russo and many others.
Groovy! I’m also a fan of looking at old family photos. I had a preternatural resemblance to my brother, who was more than 10 years older than me, something I write about at length on my substack and in my memoir. A couple examples, relatives who never met me but had met him would call me by his name. My high school basketball coach on my first day of high school, asked if I was going out for the team again that year, despite my brother having graduated 10 years before. I said “umm I’m not Lynn, I’m Lee. That was 10 years ago.” He just walked off shaking his head muttering, having aged 10 years in a few seconds.
My sister has all of our family’s old photo books. Recently she sent me a picture. There was one of a good looking bearded young guy with an Oxford sweatshirt on at an outdoor market in New Mexico (I went to grad school in Albuquerque). I asked my sister, “when did Lynn visit New Mexico, I don’t remember that.”
She said, “That’s not Lynn. That’s you.” Haha.
Even I can’t tell us apart or recognize myself in a picture!!
"Be it understood at the outset that mere architectural completeness, mere storyhood, doth not an excellent fiction make." (p. 127)
I need to give this essay more time and another, deeper read, but I loved this quote. There is so much writing advice out there focused on story structure, the simple mechanics of plot, and I suppose in its own way, it's fine. But it's nowhere near enough. Bare minimum, really.
As someone who would like to write excellent fiction, I'm so grateful for Story Club and the chance to examine all the innumerable, mysterious elements that bring more light into a story and transform it into Something More. Thank you, George, for sharing!
I spent two summers in NOLA working at a summer camp at Tulane. Only a handful of months in total, but enough for the city to cast its spell on me. I found it to be a beautiful fever dream of a place. I hope I can go back soon.
The Barth essay is worth reading over and over again: thank you! And how serendipitous, as I have found myself thinking during the past few days about plot and dramaturgy, and especially about the relationship of plot to the idea of free will, or the absence thereof, realizing that for some of us life is something that seemingly just happens to us even when we desperately choose to think we might be in control of events. Stories could work better, I was thinking, with characters who can change, and who engage in active decision-making and decisive action. But now I wonder. Romeo, Juliet and Oedipus may have thought they were on top of things, but they were also caught up in events over which they could not exercise much control. So, maybe it’s the interplay of (seemingly) conscious and willful action with a chaotic environment, that possibly makes for an intriguingly unstable system in which to play on the convoluted way to a satisfactory denouement?
At any rate, I had forgotten how much I once loved John Barth!
Loved the photo. And the reference to Slidell. I grew up in Mobile, finishing high school there in '72. Lots of memories driving through Slildell on the way to NOLA. A few years later, I became a Huge fan of Walker Percy who, as you probably know, lived across the lake in Covington. I recently reread The Moviegoer, still a favorite of mine. I look forward to reading the Barth essay; the title alone reminds me of Percy's approach to writing. Cheers, Pat
Barth revisits this in "Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera" (1994, p.78) (not to be confused with "A Floating Opera" (1956). "Story plots are triangular in at least two ways: The "curve" of dramatic action is classically a non-equilateral triangle, a,b,c, where ab represents the rising action or incremental complications of some conflict; b, the climatic "epiphany" or reversal of fortune; and bc, the denouement or resolution of dramatic tension. But the dramatical conflict, sine qua non itself most often involves a triangle of forces; not just x versus y (Jack v Giant, Oedipus v Fate, Hamlet v Hamlet) but x versus y catalyzed and potentiated by some z (the magic beans, Tiresias the prophet, Gertrude/Ophelia) as crucial to plot combustion as is the third log in a fireplace to successful ignition of the other two."
Some time ago I was part of an ad hoc group of wastrels intent on the postmodernists; Barth, Hawkes, Barthelme, et al. There was a used bookstore that we frequented, a warren of gloomy, dusty stacks of errata and ephemera, and one of our cohort exhumed the 1967 Atlantic issue that contained the controversial "The Literature of Exhaustion" of which "incremental perturbations" is a part. Well, we all groked on that one for a long while. One day, on my way home as I approached the bookstore, I noticed a throng of passersby grouped outside the door. The owner, an affable elderly gentleman, had succumbed to a heart attack and was being carted off. A little old lady took my arm and whispered conspiratorially, "Oh, that poor man. All those books. And they're so close together!". My recounting of this incident, as you might expect, was received with all the profound sagacity it deserved. A few nights later our little band of layabouts was indulged in some arcane nitpicky rhetorical analysis when well along, flying suspended on a cloud of illicit substances, one of the group intoned, "All those incremental perturbations. And they're so close together!" I guess you hadda be there.
Thank you as always George. I loved the quote by Julie Checkoway about Barth: "stories catch characters at the point at which their habitual way(s) of being in the world are about to meet their greatest challenge and (perhaps) give way.” It was a translation that reached me. We have spoken many times about the power of translations here in SC. This one, from English to English was very helpful!
There is almost always a gem, or many gems, in your posts and I learn something every time - about writing, life, myself, your old guitars, whatever. And I carry these gems with me as I go forward. And they help me decode the world, and other people's stories. You give me 'Writer's Eyes' to view the world. Thank you so much!
I love this essay and thank you, George for posting, and Julie for giving George permission to share it with all of us. I own this book and have many times referred people to the chapter by Jane Smiley on Revision: "What Stories Teach Their Writers: The Purpose and Practice of Revision." It's an excellent book overall, one "writing craft" book that remains on my shelf while many others have found their way to a Goodwill box.
This essay by Barth always cracks me up because his touch is so light and heavy at the same time. What he's saying is not new, but he's found his own way to say it. "Incremental perturbation" is hilarious to me, but maybe I'm just a nerd. There is one line he writes that describes a tendency within me entirely, a tendency that I feel has often ruined me for any sort of narrative-based entertainment. That is when he asks how we can tell if something is the "real thing" in terms of truly being a story. He says we should always watch/read with a third eye, always on the lookout for the increments that perturb the situation, for that climax and the ending that satisfies, bringing all to a new grounded level. Always by thinking about how it was done. Yes, I do this...always. It makes it very difficult for me to enjoy movies, books, stories, etc, the way i feel many others do. I go crazy is there is not a story! Just last night, my husband and I were watching some animated shorts that have been nominated for the Oscars. He fell in love with one of them, that I also loved. But that one bothered me--it had no story. All the others perturbed incrementally, but not this one. This was more like watching a prose poem. He is a voter in the academy and he chose that one--while I objected! I wanted a story! He was happy with the beauty and mastery. Finally, he pointed out that the category was simply for a "short." A "story" wasn't necessary. Okay, he wins because every once in awhile that's what you have to do to make a marriage work.
What else? I read the most interesting chapter on storytelling in the book People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn. What a surprise to find a chapter in that book on telling stories. It spoke to last week's conversation about stories bringing solace or pleasure. Horn pointed out that many stories historically written by Jews do neither. They do not provide redemptive endings nor anything uplifting. For anyone interested, it's truly fascinating.
I look forward to today's comments section as this is one of my favorite topics: What makes a story a story? Thank you, George!
I'm gonna go to Slidell and look for my joy
Go to Slidell and look for my joy
Maybe in Slidell I'll find my joy
Maybe in Slidell I'll find my joy
- Lucinda Williams "Joy"
Just reading "Slidell" reminds me of how much I love to say it and how much more I love to sing it. :) I hope this version of you finds loads of joy visiting your family and various other versions of you.
Maria Popova, such a gem. So grateful for her scrupulous work. "What an abundant place The Marginalian is – always something amazing in there."
I liked the bit about the “sonority of closure”. Good phrase. True, it’s easy to write an ending with gravitas, with sentiment, one that feels like it should have symphony strings behind it. But there’s a difference between relieving the pent-up tension of the story with something sad or sweet, and actually resolving the conflict in a manner that responds to the questions posed by the story, and actually provides closure. Indeed, an ending should probably leave a bit of ambiguity, some gristle for the reader to chew on by the fire after dinner.
Reading that makes me wonder if my endings are good or not, lol.
I played that album, Workingman’s Dead, every Sunday morning after my mom left for church. Did that for a year or maybe longer. When I told my therapist that the Grateful Dead saved both my life and my soul, I got the impression that he was reconsidering my diagnosis.
I am ever so grateful for the heaps of rich information coming from Story Club.
Despite 12 published short stories and 2 novels, I am still learning. (It never ends, right?)
Novel #3 -- what a struggle, the hardest yet -- but all of what I'm getting here adds to my day.
Thank you, George :)
Brilliant! Thanks for the mention of Julie Checkoway's film. It's set in Baltimore, my home - sure to be filled with characters. I know what I'm watching tonight. And thanks for the reminder of the Barthes essay. Time for a re-read.
Great photo, George--you look so sweetly determined! And yes to old photos & all you can discover about lives lived, whether yours or others. I'm discovering much about my own family by way of a cache of old photos, people I never knew but whose lives have shaped mine. As for NOLA, I hope you're loading up on king cake & bringing some home! My husband grew up just off St. Charles Ave, has family in NOLA still, and everything I know about making a gumbo (passable in their opinion; delicious in mine) I learned in my in-laws' kitchen. I'll always be the Yankee (Pittsburgh), but fortunately they still let me eat the food!
As for the Barth essay, I know it well from Julie Checkoway's excellent "Creating Fiction", a volume I landed on years ago & can't recommend enough. (I've marked my copy up so much I can now hardly read it.) In it there are also other brilliant essays from Charles Baxter, Charles Johnson, Jane Smiley, Richard Russo and many others.
Groovy! I’m also a fan of looking at old family photos. I had a preternatural resemblance to my brother, who was more than 10 years older than me, something I write about at length on my substack and in my memoir. A couple examples, relatives who never met me but had met him would call me by his name. My high school basketball coach on my first day of high school, asked if I was going out for the team again that year, despite my brother having graduated 10 years before. I said “umm I’m not Lynn, I’m Lee. That was 10 years ago.” He just walked off shaking his head muttering, having aged 10 years in a few seconds.
My sister has all of our family’s old photo books. Recently she sent me a picture. There was one of a good looking bearded young guy with an Oxford sweatshirt on at an outdoor market in New Mexico (I went to grad school in Albuquerque). I asked my sister, “when did Lynn visit New Mexico, I don’t remember that.”
She said, “That’s not Lynn. That’s you.” Haha.
Even I can’t tell us apart or recognize myself in a picture!!
"Be it understood at the outset that mere architectural completeness, mere storyhood, doth not an excellent fiction make." (p. 127)
I need to give this essay more time and another, deeper read, but I loved this quote. There is so much writing advice out there focused on story structure, the simple mechanics of plot, and I suppose in its own way, it's fine. But it's nowhere near enough. Bare minimum, really.
As someone who would like to write excellent fiction, I'm so grateful for Story Club and the chance to examine all the innumerable, mysterious elements that bring more light into a story and transform it into Something More. Thank you, George, for sharing!
I spent two summers in NOLA working at a summer camp at Tulane. Only a handful of months in total, but enough for the city to cast its spell on me. I found it to be a beautiful fever dream of a place. I hope I can go back soon.
The Barth essay is worth reading over and over again: thank you! And how serendipitous, as I have found myself thinking during the past few days about plot and dramaturgy, and especially about the relationship of plot to the idea of free will, or the absence thereof, realizing that for some of us life is something that seemingly just happens to us even when we desperately choose to think we might be in control of events. Stories could work better, I was thinking, with characters who can change, and who engage in active decision-making and decisive action. But now I wonder. Romeo, Juliet and Oedipus may have thought they were on top of things, but they were also caught up in events over which they could not exercise much control. So, maybe it’s the interplay of (seemingly) conscious and willful action with a chaotic environment, that possibly makes for an intriguingly unstable system in which to play on the convoluted way to a satisfactory denouement?
At any rate, I had forgotten how much I once loved John Barth!
Loved the photo. And the reference to Slidell. I grew up in Mobile, finishing high school there in '72. Lots of memories driving through Slildell on the way to NOLA. A few years later, I became a Huge fan of Walker Percy who, as you probably know, lived across the lake in Covington. I recently reread The Moviegoer, still a favorite of mine. I look forward to reading the Barth essay; the title alone reminds me of Percy's approach to writing. Cheers, Pat
Barth revisits this in "Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera" (1994, p.78) (not to be confused with "A Floating Opera" (1956). "Story plots are triangular in at least two ways: The "curve" of dramatic action is classically a non-equilateral triangle, a,b,c, where ab represents the rising action or incremental complications of some conflict; b, the climatic "epiphany" or reversal of fortune; and bc, the denouement or resolution of dramatic tension. But the dramatical conflict, sine qua non itself most often involves a triangle of forces; not just x versus y (Jack v Giant, Oedipus v Fate, Hamlet v Hamlet) but x versus y catalyzed and potentiated by some z (the magic beans, Tiresias the prophet, Gertrude/Ophelia) as crucial to plot combustion as is the third log in a fireplace to successful ignition of the other two."
Some time ago I was part of an ad hoc group of wastrels intent on the postmodernists; Barth, Hawkes, Barthelme, et al. There was a used bookstore that we frequented, a warren of gloomy, dusty stacks of errata and ephemera, and one of our cohort exhumed the 1967 Atlantic issue that contained the controversial "The Literature of Exhaustion" of which "incremental perturbations" is a part. Well, we all groked on that one for a long while. One day, on my way home as I approached the bookstore, I noticed a throng of passersby grouped outside the door. The owner, an affable elderly gentleman, had succumbed to a heart attack and was being carted off. A little old lady took my arm and whispered conspiratorially, "Oh, that poor man. All those books. And they're so close together!". My recounting of this incident, as you might expect, was received with all the profound sagacity it deserved. A few nights later our little band of layabouts was indulged in some arcane nitpicky rhetorical analysis when well along, flying suspended on a cloud of illicit substances, one of the group intoned, "All those incremental perturbations. And they're so close together!" I guess you hadda be there.
“try to spiral out of their circularity “ (bottom of page 128 in the essay) is a great phrase.
Didn’t mean it that way, Mary :). Just couldn’t resist. Take care.