This line: "We can spend a ... lifetime learning to navigate by our instincts."
This line: "It’s ... good to remember that any choice we make...is going to mean giving something up."
Another: "It behooves us not to spend too much time in the land of Thou Must."
And here: "The burden of ... decision-making-- those decisions, as I’ve said many times here before, are what make us uniquely ourselves."
This: "The adventure lies in how we respond to ... challenge – in what spirit, with what resources."
I wasted many years by not listening to my gut. Then again, I had to learn to identify that feeling--that sometimes tiny prick and other times overwhelming punch that was trying to tell me something. George: "Learning to be really attentive to that gut-feeling is about 90 percent of what I “have learned” about writing." Yes, and life, too.
When I start a new story, I will sometimes choose a point of view (past, present, 1st, 3rd) just because it's one I haven't used recently. It's one way to entertain myself.
One of the many reasons I love George's approach to writing is that he avoids presenting any advice in absolute terms. Something that can really mess up new writers are all those musts and shouldn'ts you find on writing sites. For example, you can find a *lot* of people saying not to use present tense. Why? Usually it comes down to something dumb (IMO) like "it reminds me too much of YA fiction". The defunct magazine Bartleby Snopes has a list of "Things That Generally Turn Us Off" (https://www.bartlebysnopes.com/submissions.htm), including "Stories written in present tense (especially third person present tense)". I once tried writing a story that included everything in their list. It was fun.
I came to George early on when mostly everything was first person present tense and I must admit I would feel a twinge of disappointment when the the third person past tense started showing up. I felt like I was in for something a bit more normal, or rather, a bit less George Saunders. Of course, it wasn't the case, but I think I have a reason why I liked the first/present stuff so much.
The present tense seems to be the language of the joke (albeit third person) and it lends itself to comedy a little more. Why? Hmm, I think it's because it's informal. And by being informal it has permission to avoid certain expectations in the level of detail. When you write in the third person past tense, the classic mode, it brings a lot of expectation, or baggage. You may expect a certain specificity of description of action and things, a certain amount of adjective usage. Too little and it may feel chopped or undercooked to certain readers or too Hemingway/Carver.
But with first person too much detail can seem weird or wrong. Except because it's idiosyncratic you can get away with oddball detail, little strange observations that may seem out of place in third person because you're being told these details by a person, not an omniscient narrator. (Leaving aside the fact that not all 3rd person narrators are omniscient and often have a POV, I do think they bring a different expectation.)
So, getting to George's point on "energy" Because the first person present tense can get away with reduced detail level, or actually almost demands reduced detail level, coupled with the fact that the details they can impart are odd and out of place for a 3rd person narrator, means the story can rock along nice and quickly without being bogged down with knowing the colour of the couch but made funnier with some weird observations.
Oh, also, the third person informality suits the undereducated narrator a little better. This allows for a less educated/stupider narrator and provides a good opportunity for an ironic gap between what the narrator is telling us and what we know is the truth or what the much smarter, or at least self aware, author is trying to tell us is happening.
Obviously there is more to it than that, and I've dashed this stuff off without thinking too hard and will probably look at it later and think "you dolt" but I think the energy of the first person suits the comic mode, or at least a certain type of comic mode, very well.
Usually I don't think about voice or tense before I get into the flow of writing a story -- it just starts out in some mode. But a while back I wrote a "memoire" piece about the weird dance I went through with the Selective Service (aka the SS) back in the '60s. The SS approach to drafting me lurched on for almost 4 years, and it became a toxic undercurrent through my college years, while friends were dying in Viet Nam and my student deferment never came through ... etc. It's a long story.
Initially, I wrote it in the first person, past tense, and it came across -- to me at least -- like whining and grumbling. My friends were dying and I was whining; it was intolerable. So, thanks to the text editing software, I reframed the whole thing in the third person, past tense. It still didn't sound right. So I tried everything, and to my utter amazement I ended up using second person, present tense.
The story is all in the past, of course, but now it reads like some grim reaper is leading (or dragging) an involuntary victim -- not the reader, despite the second person voice -- through a bizarre series of hassles and tragedies on the backdrop of assassinations and cold war brinksmanship. Somehow this voice and tense make the whole history seem deliberately perverse, and the protagonist (due to being second person) isn't even really reacting to it. The reader has no trouble recognizing what it MIGHT have been like to experience, but the reader is emphatically NOT the "you" in the story, and it doesn't feel like the narrator, the voice, is talking to "you, the reader" at all. It's more like the narration is inviting the reader to empathize, while not getting dragged through anything.
I would never have considered second person present as a viable mode for any particular kind of story, but thanks to editing tech, I was able to read the whole piece in every permutation. Maybe it wasn't the "right" choice, but of course I have no way of knowing, especially since there is no right choice.
This project was quite fascinating, as was reading the exact same piece in half a different dozen modes, and it showed me that these choices can have unexpected and far-reaching subtle effects that may be wildly inappropriate for certain stories, and strangely perfect for others.
There is an interview with Haruki Murakami in today's New Yorker online (1/12/23), in which he speaks about writing his novel "Killing Commendatore." "...it started with just one or two paragraphs. I wrote those paragraphs down and put them in the drawer of my desk and forgot about them. Then, maybe three months or six months later, I got the idea that I could turn those one or two paragraphs into a novel, and I started to write. I had no plans, I had no schedule, I had no story line: I just started from that paragraph or two and kept on writing. The story led me to the end. If you have a plan—if you know the end when you start—it’s no fun to write that novel....I’m writing, but at the same time I feel as though I were reading some exciting, interesting book. So I enjoy the writing."
“Let’s see what arises, out of which I can make a genuine adventure.” I love that, and I also find it mildly terrifying. I read a quote years ago from Alejandro Iñárritu when he was directing the movie The Revenant in harsh conditions similar to what the characters in the film endured. “We don’t have adventures anymore. Now people say, ‘I went to India … it’s an adventure.’ No: We have GPS, a phone, nobody gets lost."
I want that GPS as a writer, to know I'm going in the "right" direction, to be guaranteed success (whatever that might mean). But writing brings me the most life when I allow myself to get truly lost.
Just a comment on the unmentioned POV -- 2nd person. I think that 2nd means one of two things for many writers: 1. The protagonist doesn't want to take responsibility for his actions [not the author, the protagonist] and therefore speaks in the "You" voice to shove it off at arm's length, or 2. The author wants to fully co-opt the reader by making the reader the protagonist (or wear the protagonist's skin). I also think that 2nd person writing is easier in a short story or short novella, and very hard to carry along in a full novel. Is there a 2nd person plural, but only in Southern/Western diction? "You all (Ya'll) imagine that you are a herd of horses, thundering across the Staked Plains towards the drop-off of Palo Duro Canyon."
I'm a firm card-carrying member of the "no hard, fast rules" school, so I appreciate the approach George.
One thing I would add: I've found that if I start something and it isn't working—it feels to disconnected and dry or I'm simply having a hard time finding the motivation to keep going—I'll try rewriting it from a different angle, focusing more on the inner dialogue of the character or switching to first person altogether. This, admittedly, also involves following my instincts. But I often find that I need permission from someone besides myself to try things, so I thought I'd offer that permission to others.🙃
I appreciate this question, and the answer. I'm practicing George's intuitive method more and more, both in life and in writing. The more I practice, the easier it is, but it has taken a LOT of revision of tendencies learned in the distant past and used for many years. Trusting intuition is freeing; there is so much space for invention there! It allows the writing process to flow easily and is much more fun.
On the "gut feel"... I think I kinda want that to be how I read, too... I don't want to notice the voice/tense choices. If I've noticed them, they feel like effects. But that's a problem, they feel like effects but they don't do the work therefore. If I haven't noticed them, THEN they've done the work they were supposed to do.
As a reader, I have a slight aversion to present tense. It makes me feel "rushed," locked into a specific moment or series of moments, and maybe even manipulated by the writer trying to make something feel more urgent or propulsive than the story itself might feel to me - a bit like an overbearing score in
a film can hit you over the head by yelling: "FEEL SCARED!" or "Isn't this adorable?" when the filmmaker doesn't trust their script / acting / story / imagery to do the job. On the other hand, present tense can also let a reader focus more closely on a given moment or place or event, to survey the surroundings, to take in the sounds and smells and feelings as if they are there. I give you Dickens's opening paragraphs of Bleak House: present tense (with hardly any finite verbs!). As John Mullan points out, he is not *describing* London on a foggy day, he is plunging you into it. Dickens also chose when to change tenses - in Bleak House (again, that masterful novel), some chapters are present tense, some past... and at the time, critics didn't even notice. He also changed PoV - Esther Summerson's chapters are in first person, the Dedlock chapters are not. Of course, in a 377,000-word novel, you have more elbow room to play around! It's almost standard for young adult novels to be in the first person - they want to snag the attention and identification of readers who are at a life phase centered mostly on themselves! Some stories definitely decide for you: Lord of the Rings would be pretty impossible in first person, no? Different approaches do different things well - what does your story need? Intimate exploration of a single character? A grand, sweeping perspective? So yeah, like George says: "Choose past tense, and you are going to discover certain hidden gems in that mode. But you’ll also find certain difficulties implicit in that mode. Certain effects will be gained and certain effects will be lost to you." For me, thinking, "Hey, it's just one story..." doesn't really help, because I want to pick what will work best for the story in front of me, not the others, which may / probably will need something else. But I *do* think about it as I start: what feels comfortable, what will support the story in what I want (or hope...) it to do... and be prepared to work around or fix it when it doesn't!
You read the post and you think to yourself, ‘that part about the time before writing, how it’s analogous to a trip, that’s neat. Real neat. Unless your trip turns out to be like the one the Donner party had; that would be not so neat.’
You also consider writing your comment in the second person in sticking with with the topic of the post. ‘That’s mildly amusing,’ you think. ‘Real mildly amusing.’
It may be my imagination but I feel like present tense in fiction is more popular than it used to be. I tend to see it somewhat regularly in new works, but I hardly see it at all in older works. Not to say that’s a good thing or a bad thing, just that it seems to be a wider change in the zeitgeist. Maybe it’s just what I happen to be reading, but can anyone think of older, “classic”, works that were written in present tense?
I really love that "Sparrow" came from a dream. (Didn't "The Semplica Girl Diaries" arrive similarly?, in which case is there something in particular that you eat before bed, George?). "Sparrow" & "My House", which I also admire, don't seem to depend on weirdness, per se, for their "freakification" but seem more to simply follow the tracks each has laid out which I believe contributes to their strengths, their "story-ness". As for dreams as story source, why not? It's all one big dream anyway, is it not?, diurnal or nocturnal makes no difference. But first time I read "Sparrow" I definitely got that community vibe, put me a bit in mind of "A Rose for Emily" in that way. And the opening put me also in mind of Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People", something about the tone and the narrator's declarative voice. It'll be fun to take a deep dive into one of your stories on Sunday, George! Everyone else we've been reading so far is long dead & thus not available to directly address our reactions, but this time I'm looking forward to even more lively discussions, this time involving the actual author. As per usual, a wonderful & helpful post, George---thank you. Hope you & your family are still safe & that your house is where you left it.
Speaking of "Sparrow": it's my favorite story in the collection, George. I find it to be one of those "gem" stories, pretty much perfect. I like it better than all the rest. But curiously, or perhaps not, it hasn't come up much in reviews or in interviews. I'm glad you got out of bed that night to get it down. :-)
Story Club as Life Club
This line: "We can spend a ... lifetime learning to navigate by our instincts."
This line: "It’s ... good to remember that any choice we make...is going to mean giving something up."
Another: "It behooves us not to spend too much time in the land of Thou Must."
And here: "The burden of ... decision-making-- those decisions, as I’ve said many times here before, are what make us uniquely ourselves."
This: "The adventure lies in how we respond to ... challenge – in what spirit, with what resources."
I wasted many years by not listening to my gut. Then again, I had to learn to identify that feeling--that sometimes tiny prick and other times overwhelming punch that was trying to tell me something. George: "Learning to be really attentive to that gut-feeling is about 90 percent of what I “have learned” about writing." Yes, and life, too.
These Comment threads keep getting better and better - thank you all for making this such a lively and rewarding place to be.
When I start a new story, I will sometimes choose a point of view (past, present, 1st, 3rd) just because it's one I haven't used recently. It's one way to entertain myself.
One of the many reasons I love George's approach to writing is that he avoids presenting any advice in absolute terms. Something that can really mess up new writers are all those musts and shouldn'ts you find on writing sites. For example, you can find a *lot* of people saying not to use present tense. Why? Usually it comes down to something dumb (IMO) like "it reminds me too much of YA fiction". The defunct magazine Bartleby Snopes has a list of "Things That Generally Turn Us Off" (https://www.bartlebysnopes.com/submissions.htm), including "Stories written in present tense (especially third person present tense)". I once tried writing a story that included everything in their list. It was fun.
I came to George early on when mostly everything was first person present tense and I must admit I would feel a twinge of disappointment when the the third person past tense started showing up. I felt like I was in for something a bit more normal, or rather, a bit less George Saunders. Of course, it wasn't the case, but I think I have a reason why I liked the first/present stuff so much.
The present tense seems to be the language of the joke (albeit third person) and it lends itself to comedy a little more. Why? Hmm, I think it's because it's informal. And by being informal it has permission to avoid certain expectations in the level of detail. When you write in the third person past tense, the classic mode, it brings a lot of expectation, or baggage. You may expect a certain specificity of description of action and things, a certain amount of adjective usage. Too little and it may feel chopped or undercooked to certain readers or too Hemingway/Carver.
But with first person too much detail can seem weird or wrong. Except because it's idiosyncratic you can get away with oddball detail, little strange observations that may seem out of place in third person because you're being told these details by a person, not an omniscient narrator. (Leaving aside the fact that not all 3rd person narrators are omniscient and often have a POV, I do think they bring a different expectation.)
So, getting to George's point on "energy" Because the first person present tense can get away with reduced detail level, or actually almost demands reduced detail level, coupled with the fact that the details they can impart are odd and out of place for a 3rd person narrator, means the story can rock along nice and quickly without being bogged down with knowing the colour of the couch but made funnier with some weird observations.
Oh, also, the third person informality suits the undereducated narrator a little better. This allows for a less educated/stupider narrator and provides a good opportunity for an ironic gap between what the narrator is telling us and what we know is the truth or what the much smarter, or at least self aware, author is trying to tell us is happening.
Obviously there is more to it than that, and I've dashed this stuff off without thinking too hard and will probably look at it later and think "you dolt" but I think the energy of the first person suits the comic mode, or at least a certain type of comic mode, very well.
Usually I don't think about voice or tense before I get into the flow of writing a story -- it just starts out in some mode. But a while back I wrote a "memoire" piece about the weird dance I went through with the Selective Service (aka the SS) back in the '60s. The SS approach to drafting me lurched on for almost 4 years, and it became a toxic undercurrent through my college years, while friends were dying in Viet Nam and my student deferment never came through ... etc. It's a long story.
Initially, I wrote it in the first person, past tense, and it came across -- to me at least -- like whining and grumbling. My friends were dying and I was whining; it was intolerable. So, thanks to the text editing software, I reframed the whole thing in the third person, past tense. It still didn't sound right. So I tried everything, and to my utter amazement I ended up using second person, present tense.
The story is all in the past, of course, but now it reads like some grim reaper is leading (or dragging) an involuntary victim -- not the reader, despite the second person voice -- through a bizarre series of hassles and tragedies on the backdrop of assassinations and cold war brinksmanship. Somehow this voice and tense make the whole history seem deliberately perverse, and the protagonist (due to being second person) isn't even really reacting to it. The reader has no trouble recognizing what it MIGHT have been like to experience, but the reader is emphatically NOT the "you" in the story, and it doesn't feel like the narrator, the voice, is talking to "you, the reader" at all. It's more like the narration is inviting the reader to empathize, while not getting dragged through anything.
I would never have considered second person present as a viable mode for any particular kind of story, but thanks to editing tech, I was able to read the whole piece in every permutation. Maybe it wasn't the "right" choice, but of course I have no way of knowing, especially since there is no right choice.
This project was quite fascinating, as was reading the exact same piece in half a different dozen modes, and it showed me that these choices can have unexpected and far-reaching subtle effects that may be wildly inappropriate for certain stories, and strangely perfect for others.
There is an interview with Haruki Murakami in today's New Yorker online (1/12/23), in which he speaks about writing his novel "Killing Commendatore." "...it started with just one or two paragraphs. I wrote those paragraphs down and put them in the drawer of my desk and forgot about them. Then, maybe three months or six months later, I got the idea that I could turn those one or two paragraphs into a novel, and I started to write. I had no plans, I had no schedule, I had no story line: I just started from that paragraph or two and kept on writing. The story led me to the end. If you have a plan—if you know the end when you start—it’s no fun to write that novel....I’m writing, but at the same time I feel as though I were reading some exciting, interesting book. So I enjoy the writing."
“Let’s see what arises, out of which I can make a genuine adventure.” I love that, and I also find it mildly terrifying. I read a quote years ago from Alejandro Iñárritu when he was directing the movie The Revenant in harsh conditions similar to what the characters in the film endured. “We don’t have adventures anymore. Now people say, ‘I went to India … it’s an adventure.’ No: We have GPS, a phone, nobody gets lost."
I want that GPS as a writer, to know I'm going in the "right" direction, to be guaranteed success (whatever that might mean). But writing brings me the most life when I allow myself to get truly lost.
Just a comment on the unmentioned POV -- 2nd person. I think that 2nd means one of two things for many writers: 1. The protagonist doesn't want to take responsibility for his actions [not the author, the protagonist] and therefore speaks in the "You" voice to shove it off at arm's length, or 2. The author wants to fully co-opt the reader by making the reader the protagonist (or wear the protagonist's skin). I also think that 2nd person writing is easier in a short story or short novella, and very hard to carry along in a full novel. Is there a 2nd person plural, but only in Southern/Western diction? "You all (Ya'll) imagine that you are a herd of horses, thundering across the Staked Plains towards the drop-off of Palo Duro Canyon."
I'm a firm card-carrying member of the "no hard, fast rules" school, so I appreciate the approach George.
One thing I would add: I've found that if I start something and it isn't working—it feels to disconnected and dry or I'm simply having a hard time finding the motivation to keep going—I'll try rewriting it from a different angle, focusing more on the inner dialogue of the character or switching to first person altogether. This, admittedly, also involves following my instincts. But I often find that I need permission from someone besides myself to try things, so I thought I'd offer that permission to others.🙃
I appreciate this question, and the answer. I'm practicing George's intuitive method more and more, both in life and in writing. The more I practice, the easier it is, but it has taken a LOT of revision of tendencies learned in the distant past and used for many years. Trusting intuition is freeing; there is so much space for invention there! It allows the writing process to flow easily and is much more fun.
On the "gut feel"... I think I kinda want that to be how I read, too... I don't want to notice the voice/tense choices. If I've noticed them, they feel like effects. But that's a problem, they feel like effects but they don't do the work therefore. If I haven't noticed them, THEN they've done the work they were supposed to do.
As a reader, I have a slight aversion to present tense. It makes me feel "rushed," locked into a specific moment or series of moments, and maybe even manipulated by the writer trying to make something feel more urgent or propulsive than the story itself might feel to me - a bit like an overbearing score in
a film can hit you over the head by yelling: "FEEL SCARED!" or "Isn't this adorable?" when the filmmaker doesn't trust their script / acting / story / imagery to do the job. On the other hand, present tense can also let a reader focus more closely on a given moment or place or event, to survey the surroundings, to take in the sounds and smells and feelings as if they are there. I give you Dickens's opening paragraphs of Bleak House: present tense (with hardly any finite verbs!). As John Mullan points out, he is not *describing* London on a foggy day, he is plunging you into it. Dickens also chose when to change tenses - in Bleak House (again, that masterful novel), some chapters are present tense, some past... and at the time, critics didn't even notice. He also changed PoV - Esther Summerson's chapters are in first person, the Dedlock chapters are not. Of course, in a 377,000-word novel, you have more elbow room to play around! It's almost standard for young adult novels to be in the first person - they want to snag the attention and identification of readers who are at a life phase centered mostly on themselves! Some stories definitely decide for you: Lord of the Rings would be pretty impossible in first person, no? Different approaches do different things well - what does your story need? Intimate exploration of a single character? A grand, sweeping perspective? So yeah, like George says: "Choose past tense, and you are going to discover certain hidden gems in that mode. But you’ll also find certain difficulties implicit in that mode. Certain effects will be gained and certain effects will be lost to you." For me, thinking, "Hey, it's just one story..." doesn't really help, because I want to pick what will work best for the story in front of me, not the others, which may / probably will need something else. But I *do* think about it as I start: what feels comfortable, what will support the story in what I want (or hope...) it to do... and be prepared to work around or fix it when it doesn't!
You read the post and you think to yourself, ‘that part about the time before writing, how it’s analogous to a trip, that’s neat. Real neat. Unless your trip turns out to be like the one the Donner party had; that would be not so neat.’
You also consider writing your comment in the second person in sticking with with the topic of the post. ‘That’s mildly amusing,’ you think. ‘Real mildly amusing.’
It may be my imagination but I feel like present tense in fiction is more popular than it used to be. I tend to see it somewhat regularly in new works, but I hardly see it at all in older works. Not to say that’s a good thing or a bad thing, just that it seems to be a wider change in the zeitgeist. Maybe it’s just what I happen to be reading, but can anyone think of older, “classic”, works that were written in present tense?
I really love that "Sparrow" came from a dream. (Didn't "The Semplica Girl Diaries" arrive similarly?, in which case is there something in particular that you eat before bed, George?). "Sparrow" & "My House", which I also admire, don't seem to depend on weirdness, per se, for their "freakification" but seem more to simply follow the tracks each has laid out which I believe contributes to their strengths, their "story-ness". As for dreams as story source, why not? It's all one big dream anyway, is it not?, diurnal or nocturnal makes no difference. But first time I read "Sparrow" I definitely got that community vibe, put me a bit in mind of "A Rose for Emily" in that way. And the opening put me also in mind of Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People", something about the tone and the narrator's declarative voice. It'll be fun to take a deep dive into one of your stories on Sunday, George! Everyone else we've been reading so far is long dead & thus not available to directly address our reactions, but this time I'm looking forward to even more lively discussions, this time involving the actual author. As per usual, a wonderful & helpful post, George---thank you. Hope you & your family are still safe & that your house is where you left it.
Speaking of "Sparrow": it's my favorite story in the collection, George. I find it to be one of those "gem" stories, pretty much perfect. I like it better than all the rest. But curiously, or perhaps not, it hasn't come up much in reviews or in interviews. I'm glad you got out of bed that night to get it down. :-)