Office Hours

A doozy of a question.

Q.

My question has to do with how to think about a story you've just read. Because sometimes a person can read a story, come to the end, and then think...."huh, what was that all about?" When this happens with a "classic" story, a reader might wonder, "what am I missing?" For instance, most of us here have read Donald Barthelme's The School. We've talked about that story here in Story Club. But let's say a person happened upon that story on their own and read it to themselves. They might finish that story and then think...."wha...?" And with no one to turn to to discuss the story, that reader might wonder what the big deal is. Why do so many people love this story? 

I know that you have always suggested that we read a story first for pleasure and secondly to get more out of the story. And you always ask us to think about the places in a story where we "felt" something on first reading. Those are both helpful. But often, they are not enough.

So my question to you is: what sorts of questions or thoughts might a reader use in order to get more out of a story? What can we ask ourselves in order to deepen our understanding of a story? Can you give us a list? You've taken stories and broken them up into pulses--is that a strategy to use for most stories? You've also said that stories ask a question--is that another strategy? Should a reader finish a story and then think, what question was that story asking? I realize that all stories are different, that not all stories can be analyzed in the same way. Still, it seems that there might be something a reader could refer to when reading that would help them get more out of a story read alone. 

Thank you so much, as always.

A.

What a wonderful, intense question. Thank you for it. 

I think the best thing we can do is be honest about what, having just finished a story, we actually feel. 

That sounds easy but it’s actually really difficult, given how much “should” there is in the process of reading.  (“I should like this! I should get this! This should be more obvious to me!  What am I, a cretin?”  And the shadow side of this: “Who does this writer think he is! What an egghead!” Etc.”).

But actually, your “what was that all about?” question is a perfect place to start.  

That is, as a reader, you can ask yourself, “Well, what did I think, really?” and then let yourself answer honestly. 

Now, depending on where the story came from, you might feel that you “should” like it (It came from Story Club! And/or, “It’s a classic!”) but…forget that. 

What did you really think?  (Assume, that is, that you know enough to judge it. Because you do.)

For me, this question (“What did I really think?”) tends to yield one of two answers:

Answer 1: “Holy shit, do I ever love this story, how did the writer do it, oh my God, I am so deficient as a writer, I have to work harder, there’s still so much to do, whoopee!” 

Answer 2: “Yeah.  Yes.  OK.  Although…I don’t know.  If I’m being honest, I don’t get it.  I don’t love it.  Actually…what the hell? Hmm.  (‘What was that all about?’).”

And then, as a subset of Answer 2 (even if I mostly liked the story), my mind might launch off on a sort of joyful, kvetching, “fault-finding” journey – which sometimes will feel snarky and negative BUT, I contend, actually just means that I am an artist and have strong taste. (That is, I list all the things that are false, wrong, bullshittish about the story. I’m peeved, puzzled, maybe even outraged…)

And now we’ve reached a very important step, where we let this judgment be o.k.  That is, we accept, 100%, our own (possibly negative) feelings about the story. 

This is just us, being honest.  No good can come from denying that we aren’t loving something.  Even hating something – even feeling genuinely irritated by our inability to make sense of a thing that seems to have been very intentionally made and, maybe, has gotten a lot of praise – can function as proof of the fact that we still have taste; that we are who we are, and we’ve gotten here, to where we are, by way of a completely lovely and inevitable-if-rocky intellectual/esthetic path; a path that is completely valid, even if it’s left us with a few blind spots. (Our taste is, after all, the only taste we have to work with.)

We dismiss this visceral feeling of reaction at our own peril.

So, let’s start there, with what we actually feel. We might be wrong, slothful, ignorant, etc. but, if we are, getting out of that state starts with admitting where we are right now.

Now comes the big question: Where did the story and I first part ways?

There are no wrong answers.  And, come on: you know exactly where the story lost you.  You do. Just like, if you’re being completely honest, you know where a date went awry, when the weather turned bad, when your ankle first started hurting.

So there are no wrong answers; there are, however, vague answers.  “I don’t know – I just hated it.”  That’s the kind of answer we have to learn to simply not accept from ourselves. We have to develop the ability to reconstruct our reading experience in sufficient detail to be able to give a precise answer to the question of where we and the story first parted ways.

So, let’s say you’re a precise enough reader to be able to say, “Well, I started to feel some distance between me and the story at this section on page 3, and then, at this sentence on page 5, I found myself even more distant, and by this phrase on page 7, I was DONE…” Well, for now…just name those places.  That’s enough: name the places where you felt a distance between you and the story developing. 

And, for now, you don’t even have to say why. 

I’ve often thought that the most valuable thing a reader could offer to a writer would be a simple graph of one’s line-to-line energetic response to a story - maybe, you know, color-coded. (“I was IN, right here (RED!)….then faded 10% here (ORANGE)….almost quit here (RED!), rallied here (MILD YELLOW…”)

That, a writer could work with.

But readers can work with it too.

What we are NOT doing in those moments after we’ve just finished reading a story is pretending to be some sort of absolute authority on stories.  No: we’re simply fessing up to our own taste. 

Why?  Well, if you’re a writer, you’re trying to get in better touch with what you love, because, going right toward what you love represents the best chance you have of doing the work only you can do.  

If you’re not a writer – well, ditto.  What a great thing, as a reader, to wonder what makes you love what you love (and dislike what you dislike).  There are all those books out there.  Which speak to you?  Why?  Which….don’t?  Why not? 

When you ask these questions and answer honestly, what results is: a picture of you, wonderful you.    

Because our taste vis-à-vis a short story is not – cannot be – separate from how we have lived our lives and what we and have lived by, and so on, and can’t be separate from the freaky way each of our brain functions. 

It’s amazing, really – and I bet we can all see this, by reading the Comments – how much divergence there is in matters of literary taste. 

If you want to learn who you are, learn what you love.  Sometimes this means accepting that a certain story is just not speaking to you. 

The only sin is falsifying your reaction.

O.K., so now that we know where we parted ways with the story, we can drop back in and do our best to say why.

The key thing here is specificity.  (Specificity, and feeling free to jettison all of that lit-language we learned in school, as needed; to speak from the heart and from our lived experience, as precisely as we can.)

We can’t (just) say, “That part was stupid.”  Or, “That part was dull.”  We have to (try to) say, with increasing specificity, why we feel that way.

What offended you?  Why did this bit seem false? Why is this part of the story not consistent with that part?  Where did you feel a slight surge of annoyance? When did you first feel that the writer was messing with you? What in the world of the story was not accounted for? Where does the story start coasting, or go suddenly facile? Where does it seem the writer has lost her nerve?

Perhaps, best of all, the foundational question of all of them: why is that a bad (false, or graceless) sentence?

And when you’ve answered, you might want to challenge yourself with this simple self-prompt: “Hello, yes, interesting: can you tell me more about that?” (Other versions of this: “How so?” “Why do you think that?” “Can you support that assertion a little more?”)

We are trying, always, to move from the general, the assertive, the vague, toward the specific, the demonstrated, the precise.

Here’s a nice progression:

1)    This was such a boring story.

2)    It first lost my interest on page 5.  What a stupid page. Who is this writer? What a dolt.

3)    Well, o.k.: page 5, par 4, the description of the horse.  That’s where I first felt my resistance kick in.

4)    Is a horse really capable of enacting a “pregnant pause?”  I think not.

5)    What was the writer avoiding, by the use of that phrase? 

6)    What are some other things that a horse might truthfully have done at that point? How might the story have been better, more honest, less annoying, if that phrase was replaced?

We are, really, using a given story and our reaction to it to develop our opinion on the form. When a story “offends us” (fails to captivate us), we have a golden opportunity to learn something about the form and what we expect from it.

This journey – the journey of trying to be more specific – leads us away from blurry, judging words (“boring,” “facile,” “juvenile,” and even, yes, “sexist,” “racist,” “homophobic,” not to mention “puerile,” “insulting,” “arrogant”), toward precise judgements that, in their precision, become (and you know I love this word) technical.

It’s not that the story isn’t boring, or facile, or racist, or puerile - it likely is, if you first described it that way - but it’s more that we are going to go in and take apart (with our specificity) the concept of (say) “boring,” and break into ever-more-specific component parts. (“When you say this passage is “boring,” is there another way to say that? What are the components of “boring?” How would you express your unhappiness if I denied you use of the word “boring,” as well as its synonyms?”)

And what a powerful thing that is, the technical.

The technical hurts no one’s feelings.  The technical can be acted upon.  The technical is the calm voice saying, “The dam will not hold,” or “You look wonderful in blue,” or “Actually, knitting is not done in exactly that way.” (And actually, “You look wonderful in blue” can stand some more specificity: “When you wear blue, it brings out the blue in your your eyes and you look especially vital.”)

This, in my view, is the entirety of being a literary critic: 1) noting when you parted ways with the story and 2) becoming a master of specifically saying why.

So, re your question about “The School,” I think that reader you’re imagining, who comes out of that story saying, “Wha???” has a job to do. He has to ask himself a series of questions about what he thought the story was trying to do, at various points, and where it failed him. When did it first rebuff him? What does he think the writer was trying to make him feel? Why didn’t he feel that way? Is there any value - any hidden truths - in that “Wha?” feeling? Can he, running around to the other side of the table, try to make a case for the writer?

He has to try to track his journey through the story with as much precision and specificity as he can muster, while always keeping in mind that it just might not be the story for him.

Now I will skillfully segue into a related sidebar, to answer a question that’s been popping up in the Comments, re the new TV show “Lucky Hank” and the appearance of a “George Saunders” character there.

Yes, I did know it was coming; the writers very kindly reached out to me and even gave me a chance to tweak/rewrite/make notes on some of things “I” was meant to say in the show.  They also asked if I’d like to play me, and I sort of did and sort of didn’t, but then couldn’t, because of the tour schedule last fall, and so they hired the wonderful Brian Husky to play me, and his intention was not to imitate me but, as he put it, via a mutual friend, to “transmit my good vibes,” which I absolutely think he did.

I bring this up, related to the topic of specificity and how we react to a piece of prose, because there’s a moment in that episode (Episode 2) where “I,” as a visiting writer, get to interact with a student, a student that, in Episode 1, the Hank character (played by Bob Odenkirk) has upbraided in class, kind of accurately, as “a mediocrity.”

That’s “me,” on the left.

(Here, for ease of reading, I’ll stop putting quotes around the “I.”)

And here are our students, with the possibly mediocre kid there in the middle, in the checkered shirt, and with that piece of paper in front of him…

I am actually very (perhaps cloyingly) nice to this kid, who is, in truth it seems, not a very good writer, and who is also kind of entitled and arrogant.  But I’m the Visiting Writer, and, in this position, for God’s sake, who would be mean to some random kid?  Why bother? (The nice thing about being the Visiting Writer, in my experience, is that you can just be NICE, and get admired for it, whereas the teacher who actually lives there has to actually work with (endure, tolerate, catch shit from) the arrogant kids.  But you get to fly home, well-paid, as everyone in the place you just Visited talks about how NICE and GENEROUS and ACCEPTING you were.)

But in this moment, in the show, I do something kind of smart, if I may say so myself. 

The kid reads a pretty bad little bit of prose, and instead of saying to that student, as Hank has said the week before, “you are thoroughly mediocre,” I simply….edit his prose.  With specificity.  And because 1) I’m the Visiting Writer and (importantly) 2) because I am being specific (“Cut this because of this; trim that, because of this other thing”) the kid can actually hear me, and is not humiliated, and he might (might) actually make those cuts and learn something in the process.

Or he might not. In any event, we’ve defied that terrible moment of dismissive, premature, hurtful judgment, in favor of a few things that poor kid can actually try.

This is the value of specificity. It lets us diagnose without judging. It leaves open the vast field of possibilities. It’s respectful.

And this is something I try to use in my real teaching life all the time.

Because who knows who this kid is?  And who am I (who is Hank?) to call him “mediocre?”  There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, and I could paste in some early stories of my own that Hank would definitely, and not incorrectly, have mocked me for in public.

But look at me now, Hank, I’m in your dang TV show.

Let us confine ourselves to what is specific and demonstrably true, and thereby try to never hurt anyone, but only, maybe, help them along, by way of accurate statements of fact.

We also might do this exercise: 1) ask ourselves what we think the writer was trying to do; 2) ask, very kindly, how and where she failed; that is, ask how she might have gone about accomplishing what she was trying to do. (She didn’t mean to fail, and thereby offend us; things just didn’t work out, because…well, because this shit is HARD, and, maybe, we aren’t her idea audience - that is, we came to the story looking for something it wasn’t interested in providing.)

That is, we accept that the writer had something in mind, something valid, something that was important to her. And then we wonder what it would have looked like, had she, per us, succeeded. And we do this not to judge, but to learn: to learn about how the form works.

More about all of this to come because, in the end, with a nod to Carver, this is all we are ever talking about when we talk about literature.

I feel, even after all this typing, that I still haven’t answered this very excellent and thoughtful question - but I promise to keep thinking about it. It may just be that stories are ornery and there can be no method; the method of analysis must depend on the reader and the story and the moment…

I want to say again (and again) how lucky I feel to have so many interesting, intelligent, generous people receiving these posts. It’s a privilege. And it’s wonderful, this community we’ve made, that we’re in the process of making. Thanks for being here.

For what it’s worth, I’m up here in Corralitos for the first time in many months, doing some work around the house to reverse the effects of the atmospheric river and the always-encroaching local mouse population, with our dog Guin and our daughter’s dog Nils up here to keep me company, taking a little break from writing.

Oh, and I found those “CommComm” drafts, which are full of surprises, for example: at one point, early in the game, “CommComm” and “Sea Oak” were the same story. Really.

I’ll post these in a few weeks, one of these Sundays…