Dang, just dang. I love you George Saunders. I have nothing eloquent or pithy to say. I wish every kid had a teacher who cares as much as you do. You have a way of neutralizing, normalizing, and warming up a craft that can be so bitter, cold, and distancing. Thank you.
Almost everything in life these days is fast, too fast. The distractions pile up: phone calls, emails, text messages, appointments, magazines, news programs, obligations, bills, etc.; and time for reading is fractured and distracted by what I think of as unwanted noise. I tend to try to read more quickly in these circumstances, so I can finish what I've started, get to the end before another interruption occurs. So the answer, it seems to me now that I'm thinking about it, is always to read more slowly, and to re-read, again more slowly. When I've done that in other areas of my life - looking at art, listening to music, having a conversation with a friend or family member, taking a walk - doing it slowly makes an enormous difference.
The best thing anyone has ever been able to do for me when reading something of mine is to tell me their experience of it, what they felt, where they tripped, where they got confused, where they were pleased. I've tried to do that for others, and it enhances the experience of reading. I think this is close to what George is saying. Slow down and pay attention, experience what you are reading as fully as possible, react honestly but not judgmentally. The close analysis of stories that we have all been doing is a kind of slowing down. You can read a story like Barthelme's The School quickly, and it will have an effect, but a slow and careful reading is a different experience. When I was young, I wanted to read everything. I devoured stories and novels and poems, and I read them all too quickly. Now I want to read fewer things, some of them for a second and third time, and going at a slower pace makes a world of difference. This is one of the great advantages of being older. I highly recommend being 70!
It’s funny, I have a different emphasis on this how to help others thing. I teach undergrad architecture students from time to time. We are specifically not supposed to design for them. But they want us to tell them how to do it, how to solve the puzzle, which thing to fix. They want technical advice: enter the building on a central axis, make the windows line up, your roof is too steep, or flat, or boring. But we are supposed to ‘assist them on their path of creative discovery’ rather than give them specific technical advice. Of course we do give technical advice, for the reason mentioned - it’s actionable and non-judgmental and it works. Most of us can all tell when a structure is working or being deliberately thwarted (in a building or a story) But mostly I try to see beyond the technical and talk to the students about what they are trying to evoke. I try to acknowledge the feeling tone they are after. For example, are they after heaviness, darkness and contemplation or is it lightness, motion and celebration? I try to get them to think about their physical proposals on an emotional and even spiritual level. The technical can be backfilled later. I find in general that folks who are less confident about about what they are trying to say, or what’s in their hearts, will seek protection (and avoidance) in technical efficiency. So I steer away from that for a long time in the creative process. I think when the heart of a building, or a story, is clarified, the details tend to solve themselves, or, even more wonderfully, they can be a little messy and the overall message gets through. One heart reaches out to another, successfully. (I know this sounds a little La La, especially when using something as concrete as a building for my example, but the older I get, the more I lean this way. I’m interested in intentions). ****OK I somehow deleted my whole note by "re-stacking" it to the new Notes area, then deleting it from the Notes section, thereby losing it all, without the possibility to undo. Luckily I had a couple of likes so the comment was copied in my email (thank you Cynthia and Wayne!)
Wow, a doozy of an answer for a doozy of a question! Thank you, as always, George, for such a detailed and thoughtful response. What I really appreciated the most about this answer is the way you have put the responsibility, the onus, on the reader, and in so doing, you demonstrate your absolute respect for each of us who come to a story from our own backgrounds, educations, experiences, etc. It doesn't matter who or what we are, you seem to be saying. We count, our opinions matter, and what's more, our opinions are valid.
The sort of stopping, thinking, feeling, and determining specifically what is going on in our hearts/minds that you write of here will be very beneficial in the future when you post a story here in SC and then give us a week "off" to read and ponder it. If you had posted the answer to this query a week ago, I may have responded differently (here online) to the story we are currently discussing. It's too late for me to go back in and read that story as if it were the first time, but I will definitely use your tools on upcoming stories (and when I read stories on my own).
I want to say that your reply here, too, is a kind of a challenge. A gauntlet you have thrown down. Because you are saying, reader, you have it in you. But first, you must do the work. What a beautiful notion that the "work" can only happen when we trust ourselves! How many times have i brought up the wizard of oz in these threads??? Too many, I know. But it seems it is just always apt! Everything we need was always right here in our own backyards, if only we'd known enough to look there. Or trusted ourselves enough.
I haven't yet seen Lucky Hank, but i'd say from the photo that the mediocre writer may be a mediocre writer, but he's awfully good looking in that disheveled young writer way, so I'm guessing he's doing okay on campus in other non-writing capacities.
Lastly, I'll have to think about your comments on using specificity to comment on the work of others in a writing group situation. I have a feeling that any such comments may still come off as judgmental, but I'm not sure. I suppose it depends on the language used. I was once in a workshop where we were asked to say only what we "noticed," as it was thought that this would help our comment to not be construed as judgmental. Maybe this is the same thing as being specific. I've found that no matter what you say about someone's story, it can be construed as judgmental. So I just don't do it anymore.
Well, that’s my personal MFA in one Substack post.
I live in the U.K. where we’re less invested in the short story as a literary form. Don’t know why. We’re just not. And as I live in a remote -- as in ‘Europe’s last great wilderness’ remote -- part of the Scottish Highlands I don’t have easy access to a reading group. So I’ve always struggled to know what to make of the short stories I read. Am I just thick, or what? Why don’t I feel confident I’ve properly understood this one? Are there depths I’ve just not seen? Why don’t I have the least idea what that one was about? What right have I to call myself a writer if I can’t understand it?
And so on.
But now I have a tool kit with which to approach every story I read. Not a prescription, not a rule book, but a simple, straightforward set of tools that neither negate my own immediate responses nor let me get away with going no further. Thank you. A most profound thank you.
As a former school teacher, college lecturer, university tutor and manage development consultant I’ve taught every age group from pre-school to pre-retirement, and every ability range from severely mentally handicapped to post-graduate (yes, I’m pretty ancient) and having been generally rated pretty good at all of these I reckon I can spot good teaching when I see it, in any context.
So I take my hat off to you, George. Not only are you an amazing writer but wow! You’re one helluva teacher.
In some sort of cosmic messaging, I had read the Messina short story last weekend and refrained from engaging with StoryClub because I found myself irritated by it. I felt somehow deficient - if George had put it up here and all these wonderful StoryClubbers had such interesting comments on it, there must be something wrong with me. Instead, George challenges me to ask myself why, a gift of introspection instead of trying to fake enthusiasm. Maybe that is the lesson here -- the necessity of always speaking your own truth, certainly to yourself and if you are courageous enough to others as well
Thank you “A” for such a thoughtful question -- I love reading George’s answer. I especially love this: “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.”
George, I hope you’ll share with us at some point how your response to writing that you love impacts your own fiction -- some of this we have gleaned through the work we’ve done together here in the Story Club -- and also it lives at the periphery of “A Swim on the Pond..” but I’d love to know how you metabolize the writing of others you find remarkable so that it informs your own work. Does this happen through osmosis? You seem to get so many of your “cues” from the story itself, but are there strategies, techniques, etc you’ve found in fiction you love which inspire you to say, “Oh, I’m gonna try that!”
Maybe the answer is obvious and I’m obtuse (not the first time). But I’d be so interested in knowing how this works for you.
Wow! That is a serious set of questions. If only we writers were asked serious questions like that on a regular basis. This did remind me of an interview long ago with Toni Morrison and Gayle King. King said that, while reading Beloved, she found it so dense and complicated that she had to keep going back to re-read sentences and paragraphs and pages. And Morrison responded with, "That's called reading." And I remember that I viscerally disagreed with Morrison's take on reading. Yeah, look at me, the arrogant ass disagreeing with Morrison. But all these years later, I still disagree with her take on reading. The sentence—my theory—that comes coming to mind is "Stories need to have immediate meaning." Do I believe my theory? I think I do.
I'm reminded of two interesting exercises: one from a drawing teacher and another in a psychology book.
The drawing teacher gave us homework one week, which was to fill up the tank at a gas station, but make it into a game (back when everyone had a gasoline-powered car and everyone had an empty tank fairly often). The game was to try to fill it to a predetermined dollar amount (say $15), but without looking at the pump. And then: listen to your inner thoughts and attend to the tensions that rise and fall inside you as you try to hit a mark "blindfolded" in this way.
In the psychology book, I think it was called the Breakfast Interview. The shrink interviews the subject on what they had for breakfast, focused in increasingly specific detail, eliciting the subject's inner thoughts, nanosecond by nanosecond--perhaps the fridge makes a squeak when opened to a certain point and the subject makes a point to push past that part quickly, etc. The Breakfast Interview even led to a special graph of the tensions experienced by the subject (as remembered, that is).
The idea I think was to become sensitive to one's experience at this minute and inner level, and in the case of the Breakfast Interview, to notice that the pattern of, say, pushing quickly past the loud squeak was also happening on the macro scale of one's life experiences and in relationships.
The other thing that struck me as I read the post is how, once again, George has slipped us into a lofty plane (spiritual, even, I would say) via the method. I mean, we can see the heart of things, the intersection of Truth, Love, and Beauty here, can't we? That art (Beauty) is entwined with the sensitivity of noticing (attention to, aka Love for) what, specifically and honestly (Truth), we experience. It delights me too that it is experiential (not conceptual, not imposed onto experience) and the more exquisite the sensitivity, the more it is Intelligent (capitalized because I don't mean IQ score but wisdom and insight). With the specificity, we also get nonjudging and real compassion for our fellow beings too.
Such an interesting question. It reminded me of the first chapter of your book 'A Swim in a pond in the rain' - the Chekhov story 'In the Cart'. I read the story completely differently than you did, George. Probably because I have a strong background in Russian philosophy. For me, that story is a metaphor for Russia. Marya is Russia- overburdened with bureaucracy, the land and her people have become insignificant, resigned to their fate, barred from love. The romance at the core of Russia's Mother earth has withered. So I read your chapter (and wrote in the margins) and I thought, 'huh'; and went back and read it again trying to ignore the academic side of my brain and just see the story for itself - the sad, dusty, creaking tale...it still worked kind of in the way a foreign art film might work. On the senses. But left the question, what would Chekhov say?
This post resonates with me so much, thank you for writing it. I'm going to go on a brief tangent here, but stay with me. In my day job (aka the one that pays me so I can write), I do qualitative research on technology in government - on how we can better design user interfaces and systems to make it easier for people to get things done. One of my top mottos and teachings is "why" - why can't someone film out that form? What specifically makes it hard to use? Why exactly are they struggling? By asking the "why" and then pulling apart the subcomponents of that question, we create research that is specific and even more importantly actionable. If you know specifically what is wrong with something than it's very easy to fix it. And to come up with solutions that take different aspects of the problem into consideration.
The reason I bring this up is: there are so many good analogies between this post and the best practices for qualitative research. It warms my heart to see it. I try to bring all of this into my own writing and critiques, because I truly believe it helps me and others be better.
One other thing to add: your approach also helps avoid one of my least favorite things in critiques - when someone leads with things a writer could do differently, without helping them see the origin of the problem that the suggestion is trying to solve. I find this terribly unhelpful in critiques, because it assumes my solution is the same as the critiquers, which it never is. In my work, we call this solution-forward... Asking the "why" and being specific about problems also shifts the writing mindset away from this!
Thank you for responding to Lucky Hank. I’ve been dying to hear the back story on that episode. I subscribed to AMC+ just so I could see George Saunders and then ... was a little disappointed when it was an actor. Not that he was terrible. I mostly missed the voice.
I do this every time I critique because I am not always very confident in my abilities as a writer but reading is my love and my joy and my solace and all the things in between so I can give an honest response to how I felt upon reading and it will always be valid.
Dang, just dang. I love you George Saunders. I have nothing eloquent or pithy to say. I wish every kid had a teacher who cares as much as you do. You have a way of neutralizing, normalizing, and warming up a craft that can be so bitter, cold, and distancing. Thank you.
Almost everything in life these days is fast, too fast. The distractions pile up: phone calls, emails, text messages, appointments, magazines, news programs, obligations, bills, etc.; and time for reading is fractured and distracted by what I think of as unwanted noise. I tend to try to read more quickly in these circumstances, so I can finish what I've started, get to the end before another interruption occurs. So the answer, it seems to me now that I'm thinking about it, is always to read more slowly, and to re-read, again more slowly. When I've done that in other areas of my life - looking at art, listening to music, having a conversation with a friend or family member, taking a walk - doing it slowly makes an enormous difference.
The best thing anyone has ever been able to do for me when reading something of mine is to tell me their experience of it, what they felt, where they tripped, where they got confused, where they were pleased. I've tried to do that for others, and it enhances the experience of reading. I think this is close to what George is saying. Slow down and pay attention, experience what you are reading as fully as possible, react honestly but not judgmentally. The close analysis of stories that we have all been doing is a kind of slowing down. You can read a story like Barthelme's The School quickly, and it will have an effect, but a slow and careful reading is a different experience. When I was young, I wanted to read everything. I devoured stories and novels and poems, and I read them all too quickly. Now I want to read fewer things, some of them for a second and third time, and going at a slower pace makes a world of difference. This is one of the great advantages of being older. I highly recommend being 70!
“If you want to learn who you are, learn what you love.” This entire essay is delightful, but I am stuck firmly on this sentence.
It’s funny, I have a different emphasis on this how to help others thing. I teach undergrad architecture students from time to time. We are specifically not supposed to design for them. But they want us to tell them how to do it, how to solve the puzzle, which thing to fix. They want technical advice: enter the building on a central axis, make the windows line up, your roof is too steep, or flat, or boring. But we are supposed to ‘assist them on their path of creative discovery’ rather than give them specific technical advice. Of course we do give technical advice, for the reason mentioned - it’s actionable and non-judgmental and it works. Most of us can all tell when a structure is working or being deliberately thwarted (in a building or a story) But mostly I try to see beyond the technical and talk to the students about what they are trying to evoke. I try to acknowledge the feeling tone they are after. For example, are they after heaviness, darkness and contemplation or is it lightness, motion and celebration? I try to get them to think about their physical proposals on an emotional and even spiritual level. The technical can be backfilled later. I find in general that folks who are less confident about about what they are trying to say, or what’s in their hearts, will seek protection (and avoidance) in technical efficiency. So I steer away from that for a long time in the creative process. I think when the heart of a building, or a story, is clarified, the details tend to solve themselves, or, even more wonderfully, they can be a little messy and the overall message gets through. One heart reaches out to another, successfully. (I know this sounds a little La La, especially when using something as concrete as a building for my example, but the older I get, the more I lean this way. I’m interested in intentions). ****OK I somehow deleted my whole note by "re-stacking" it to the new Notes area, then deleting it from the Notes section, thereby losing it all, without the possibility to undo. Luckily I had a couple of likes so the comment was copied in my email (thank you Cynthia and Wayne!)
Wow, a doozy of an answer for a doozy of a question! Thank you, as always, George, for such a detailed and thoughtful response. What I really appreciated the most about this answer is the way you have put the responsibility, the onus, on the reader, and in so doing, you demonstrate your absolute respect for each of us who come to a story from our own backgrounds, educations, experiences, etc. It doesn't matter who or what we are, you seem to be saying. We count, our opinions matter, and what's more, our opinions are valid.
The sort of stopping, thinking, feeling, and determining specifically what is going on in our hearts/minds that you write of here will be very beneficial in the future when you post a story here in SC and then give us a week "off" to read and ponder it. If you had posted the answer to this query a week ago, I may have responded differently (here online) to the story we are currently discussing. It's too late for me to go back in and read that story as if it were the first time, but I will definitely use your tools on upcoming stories (and when I read stories on my own).
I want to say that your reply here, too, is a kind of a challenge. A gauntlet you have thrown down. Because you are saying, reader, you have it in you. But first, you must do the work. What a beautiful notion that the "work" can only happen when we trust ourselves! How many times have i brought up the wizard of oz in these threads??? Too many, I know. But it seems it is just always apt! Everything we need was always right here in our own backyards, if only we'd known enough to look there. Or trusted ourselves enough.
I haven't yet seen Lucky Hank, but i'd say from the photo that the mediocre writer may be a mediocre writer, but he's awfully good looking in that disheveled young writer way, so I'm guessing he's doing okay on campus in other non-writing capacities.
Lastly, I'll have to think about your comments on using specificity to comment on the work of others in a writing group situation. I have a feeling that any such comments may still come off as judgmental, but I'm not sure. I suppose it depends on the language used. I was once in a workshop where we were asked to say only what we "noticed," as it was thought that this would help our comment to not be construed as judgmental. Maybe this is the same thing as being specific. I've found that no matter what you say about someone's story, it can be construed as judgmental. So I just don't do it anymore.
Thank you, as always, for a great post!
I find this approach works for self-editing, too. Thank you!
Well, that’s my personal MFA in one Substack post.
I live in the U.K. where we’re less invested in the short story as a literary form. Don’t know why. We’re just not. And as I live in a remote -- as in ‘Europe’s last great wilderness’ remote -- part of the Scottish Highlands I don’t have easy access to a reading group. So I’ve always struggled to know what to make of the short stories I read. Am I just thick, or what? Why don’t I feel confident I’ve properly understood this one? Are there depths I’ve just not seen? Why don’t I have the least idea what that one was about? What right have I to call myself a writer if I can’t understand it?
And so on.
But now I have a tool kit with which to approach every story I read. Not a prescription, not a rule book, but a simple, straightforward set of tools that neither negate my own immediate responses nor let me get away with going no further. Thank you. A most profound thank you.
As a former school teacher, college lecturer, university tutor and manage development consultant I’ve taught every age group from pre-school to pre-retirement, and every ability range from severely mentally handicapped to post-graduate (yes, I’m pretty ancient) and having been generally rated pretty good at all of these I reckon I can spot good teaching when I see it, in any context.
So I take my hat off to you, George. Not only are you an amazing writer but wow! You’re one helluva teacher.
Thank you, again.
In some sort of cosmic messaging, I had read the Messina short story last weekend and refrained from engaging with StoryClub because I found myself irritated by it. I felt somehow deficient - if George had put it up here and all these wonderful StoryClubbers had such interesting comments on it, there must be something wrong with me. Instead, George challenges me to ask myself why, a gift of introspection instead of trying to fake enthusiasm. Maybe that is the lesson here -- the necessity of always speaking your own truth, certainly to yourself and if you are courageous enough to others as well
Thank you “A” for such a thoughtful question -- I love reading George’s answer. I especially love this: “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.”
George, I hope you’ll share with us at some point how your response to writing that you love impacts your own fiction -- some of this we have gleaned through the work we’ve done together here in the Story Club -- and also it lives at the periphery of “A Swim on the Pond..” but I’d love to know how you metabolize the writing of others you find remarkable so that it informs your own work. Does this happen through osmosis? You seem to get so many of your “cues” from the story itself, but are there strategies, techniques, etc you’ve found in fiction you love which inspire you to say, “Oh, I’m gonna try that!”
Maybe the answer is obvious and I’m obtuse (not the first time). But I’d be so interested in knowing how this works for you.
Wow! That is a serious set of questions. If only we writers were asked serious questions like that on a regular basis. This did remind me of an interview long ago with Toni Morrison and Gayle King. King said that, while reading Beloved, she found it so dense and complicated that she had to keep going back to re-read sentences and paragraphs and pages. And Morrison responded with, "That's called reading." And I remember that I viscerally disagreed with Morrison's take on reading. Yeah, look at me, the arrogant ass disagreeing with Morrison. But all these years later, I still disagree with her take on reading. The sentence—my theory—that comes coming to mind is "Stories need to have immediate meaning." Do I believe my theory? I think I do.
I'm reminded of two interesting exercises: one from a drawing teacher and another in a psychology book.
The drawing teacher gave us homework one week, which was to fill up the tank at a gas station, but make it into a game (back when everyone had a gasoline-powered car and everyone had an empty tank fairly often). The game was to try to fill it to a predetermined dollar amount (say $15), but without looking at the pump. And then: listen to your inner thoughts and attend to the tensions that rise and fall inside you as you try to hit a mark "blindfolded" in this way.
In the psychology book, I think it was called the Breakfast Interview. The shrink interviews the subject on what they had for breakfast, focused in increasingly specific detail, eliciting the subject's inner thoughts, nanosecond by nanosecond--perhaps the fridge makes a squeak when opened to a certain point and the subject makes a point to push past that part quickly, etc. The Breakfast Interview even led to a special graph of the tensions experienced by the subject (as remembered, that is).
The idea I think was to become sensitive to one's experience at this minute and inner level, and in the case of the Breakfast Interview, to notice that the pattern of, say, pushing quickly past the loud squeak was also happening on the macro scale of one's life experiences and in relationships.
The other thing that struck me as I read the post is how, once again, George has slipped us into a lofty plane (spiritual, even, I would say) via the method. I mean, we can see the heart of things, the intersection of Truth, Love, and Beauty here, can't we? That art (Beauty) is entwined with the sensitivity of noticing (attention to, aka Love for) what, specifically and honestly (Truth), we experience. It delights me too that it is experiential (not conceptual, not imposed onto experience) and the more exquisite the sensitivity, the more it is Intelligent (capitalized because I don't mean IQ score but wisdom and insight). With the specificity, we also get nonjudging and real compassion for our fellow beings too.
Amazing.
Such an interesting question. It reminded me of the first chapter of your book 'A Swim in a pond in the rain' - the Chekhov story 'In the Cart'. I read the story completely differently than you did, George. Probably because I have a strong background in Russian philosophy. For me, that story is a metaphor for Russia. Marya is Russia- overburdened with bureaucracy, the land and her people have become insignificant, resigned to their fate, barred from love. The romance at the core of Russia's Mother earth has withered. So I read your chapter (and wrote in the margins) and I thought, 'huh'; and went back and read it again trying to ignore the academic side of my brain and just see the story for itself - the sad, dusty, creaking tale...it still worked kind of in the way a foreign art film might work. On the senses. But left the question, what would Chekhov say?
Training the mind to go from vague to specific is a good practice, something I need to keep working on. Another great question and post.
Also... I agree with Mary, saying what you notice can help a writer the most.
This post resonates with me so much, thank you for writing it. I'm going to go on a brief tangent here, but stay with me. In my day job (aka the one that pays me so I can write), I do qualitative research on technology in government - on how we can better design user interfaces and systems to make it easier for people to get things done. One of my top mottos and teachings is "why" - why can't someone film out that form? What specifically makes it hard to use? Why exactly are they struggling? By asking the "why" and then pulling apart the subcomponents of that question, we create research that is specific and even more importantly actionable. If you know specifically what is wrong with something than it's very easy to fix it. And to come up with solutions that take different aspects of the problem into consideration.
The reason I bring this up is: there are so many good analogies between this post and the best practices for qualitative research. It warms my heart to see it. I try to bring all of this into my own writing and critiques, because I truly believe it helps me and others be better.
One other thing to add: your approach also helps avoid one of my least favorite things in critiques - when someone leads with things a writer could do differently, without helping them see the origin of the problem that the suggestion is trying to solve. I find this terribly unhelpful in critiques, because it assumes my solution is the same as the critiquers, which it never is. In my work, we call this solution-forward... Asking the "why" and being specific about problems also shifts the writing mindset away from this!
Thank you for responding to Lucky Hank. I’ve been dying to hear the back story on that episode. I subscribed to AMC+ just so I could see George Saunders and then ... was a little disappointed when it was an actor. Not that he was terrible. I mostly missed the voice.
I do this every time I critique because I am not always very confident in my abilities as a writer but reading is my love and my joy and my solace and all the things in between so I can give an honest response to how I felt upon reading and it will always be valid.