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.
You said it perfectly Mary. Story Club as Life Club. As I read George’s posting all I could think of was, “This is not just a class about writing, it is about life, choices, love, intuition and getting better at being a perceptive and caring human.” That is a gift, a huge gift, a window into true mastery and humility. George is amazing and we are so lucky.
We have all, myself included, talked a lot about gut feeling and instinct. As older, wiser (!) writers, we talk about learning to trust our gut. If I was my young self reading all this, I would be screaming out 'but how!' And I would be even more frustrated at my older self just replying 'experience.'
So for younger writers - you can read a line you have written that you love, and that feeling of it being 'right' is one you trust and are familiar with and you enjoy. It is your gut. When you hit a phrase or word you are uncomfortable with - a sentence you read past, but, two sentences later, you find that uncomfortable sentence is haunting you slightly - that's when you stop and go back and think about it. That's your gut telling you that something could be better. It doesn't tell you how it could be better, that's your craft, it doesn't even tell you what's wrong, that's your experience, it just tells you to stop and take another look. If you do stop and take another look, then you are listening to your gut, and that's kind of all there is to it....
Tom: I am not a young writer. I am older but nor sure wiser however after reading this I agree very much with your premise and lately as I edit my essays written from the start of the Pandemic I and take another look I have cut out every sentence that made me feel uncomfortable. It’s an emotional component of writing for me. thanks for this Gloria
Thanks Gloria. Do you find you cut more sentences than you rewrite. I think I do, suggesting their uncomfortable nature relates to their purpose rather than their structure or make up. Sometimes they are just muddled sentences with the subject in the wrong place, or I’ve used too many adjectives. Harold Evans suggested always searching for ‘LY’ in your work and hitting delete! But he was a journalist!
Thanks Tom. Yes I do. It is a bit scary so I save then in a dump file. I have been reading The Art of Writing Revision by Peter Ho Davies and he writes”What is revision?Call it for now the sum of what changes, and what stays the same and the alchemical reaction between them.’’ I had to look up alchemical.
There have been times when my gut practically screamed at my brain and other times when I’ve had to learn to take some steps and then stop and listen. I love that wisdom crosses boundaries. That it can helps us in different areas - like in writing and life and relationships.
when i had my first child, I had no idea what i was doing and i was scared to death. I asked my son's pediatrician how would i know if my child was sick enough to see a doctor? And he said to me, "You're his mom--you'll know." Those few simple words have carried me through in so many situations. The faith that I know things, deep inside, if I only trust and listen. He was the first to tell me such a thing and I've been forever grateful.
I love this - it's so true. Because I've had some success writing professionally, I've been approached for advice over the years. The one constant I see in 95 percent of what I've read is writers who get caught up in a system rather than following her gut. This is especially true in Hollywood, where for every coffee shop full of screenwriters, there's a system guru telling them that the inciting incident MUST be on page 30 and every character must have an arc and oh yes, don't forget to follow the paradigm and so on. As if writing a script is akin to solving a Rubik's cube -- you just need to know the right algorithms for each condition.
I think having a basic understanding of process is not a bad thing but it's very easy to adopt a system that becomes your writing until it's like a dam and all the good stuff you've got is stuck in a reservoir you don't know how to access. You have to find a way to let yourself follow your instincts. Part of it is trust I think, part of it is practice, mindfulness etc. and a lot of it is what we've been doing here -- figuring out how to get to the place where you give yourself permission to let your talent speak for you. I guess that's the struggle we're all in.
It's why I keep a Rubik's cube on my writing desk. It's way freaking easier!
Thank you Elizabeth - I've spent so much time wrestling with acts and structure, and it's taken me this long to realise that the theory comes second to the writing. I think it was John Yorke in his book 'Into the Woods' who reminded us that plot structure was not 'invented' it was 'discovered'. It's already there in all our stories, and is a tool we can use to refine and distil them, but only after we know what the story is. So true that - gut comes first.
Revision is growth, and the question is about how much intention is effectively involved to achieve aims. I hear poetry in your words, Alfred-Patrick, and appreciate your contemplations.
So…losses and hardships cause us to retreat, so that our wounds can heal, but then if we stay stuck in our retrenchment, without reframing the way we approach the initial experience…our lives cease moving forward—our lives, our thoughts, our art, our love become stuck in a rut, a downward-spiraling negative feedback loop. And the way out of that is, to somehow dynamite that dam, by acting like a child and trying out new things, new attitudes, experimenting, making new connections. (I’m listening in real time to the Hidden Brain podcast on NPR which is exactly about reframing rather than staying stuck.) Thank you Alfred-Patrick for poking into this concept!
I’m not a mother, but my own mom has told me stories about her gut intuition as a mom. My brother had Cushing’s disease and every doctor told my mom that he just needed diet and exercise. Like actual endocrinologists, where recognizing these signs is their job. But my mom just knew that he wasn’t just a chubby kid. He had a tumor completely surrounding his pituitary gland (he’s fully healthy today). So, she’s has two kids with serious disease that included brain tumors and both of us are still alive.
Anyway, my first gut instinct memory was from 6th grade when a man walked into the school auditorium and I said to myself, “that is not a good man.” But I rationalized myself out of it. He was my friend’s stepdad. But I later found out he was indeed, not a good man.
Otherwise, I’ve always known early on in dating someone if there might be a future. I’ve turned off that intuition at times, but it bugged me until I broke things off. I knew very early on that I would marry my husband. And we are happily married.
I’m glad I learned somewhat early on to recognize my gut feelings (even though I sometimes ignore them), my gut has been good friend to me.
Good for your mom. She just knew! (And i'm relieved to hear that you and your brother are both well.) And really great to hear that you've done so well by listening to your trusty gut. My gut has often told me what to do--I just haven't always listened, and for that i paid a price. Life! Always learning.
Mary, you’re wise and great to have around. I always look for (and look forward to) your comments.
Familiarity with my inner gyroscope is the only unqualified blessing of getting old—well, older than I used to be, anyway. The challenge for me is being able to discern, let alone abide by, those instincts when I’m surrounded by others who don’t share them.
In any case, I’m both relieved and scared that there are no set guidelines for writing fiction
thank you, Dan. I love that--relieved and scared by the lack of hard rules for writing fiction. I think each of us has to find our own guidelines that work for us, even while knowing that they are not set in stone. It's all about not being afraid, I think. Which goes along with trusting yourself.
Mary and Dan -sharing what has guided me for Many years “The whole wide world is a very narrow brifge…the point is not to be afraid at all”. Nachman of Breslin
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'd write all those things in the list that turns them off just to be contrary. Rules rules rules! Who needs 'em? Policy. As Sammy says in Updike's "A&P," - "Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency."
True. At the end of the day you’ve got to know the rules...in order to chuck them over the Cliff and simply trust your gut. Most of writing is just life experience, reading and discipline. Everyone wants to make a profit off teaching writing but the reality is you’re either a writer or you’re not. All kinds of outlets/teachers/people will say Do This or Don’t do That. All the truly important writers laughed and did their own thing anyway.
And the truth is noone is not a writer in my opinion. The best writing teaching is about stripping away all the crap that's coming between us and trusting our gut.
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.
Is a joke kind of like pitching? If you wanna get the guy out with a curveball, you'll set him up with a fastball, if you wanna get the guy out with a fastball, you'll set him up with a curve. So the tense for the set up depends on the punchline.
Or I guess you could craft the punchline to respond to the set up?
Which reminds me of the penguin who walked, was walking, had walked into a bar ...
Isn't the present tense "standard" in oral joke-telling? I'm (vainly) trying to think of a situation in which there's this guy who's telling a joke in the past tense...
There's something about the past tense that nails the action down as "something I am asking you to believe is on the record", while the present seems to open an imaginative field where ducks walk into bars as a matter of course.
Another way of putting it is that the oral folk tradition long ago homed in on the right tense for joke-telling.
It can, of course, depend on the joke and the joke teller. Sometimes part of the joke can be that it's told in formal language, which can make the punchline more surprising. E.g. this one I just found looking for examples:
“Once, my father came home and found me in front of a roaring fire. That made my father very mad, as we didn’t have a fireplace.” —Victor Borge
That plays off of Borge's voice as a story teller, and to my ear wouldn't work as well in present tense.
There's more mystery in the present tense as well, because it's happening in real time. That urgency can keep the reader on their toes, which makes the jokes hit harder.
As someone who wants to tell stories in the third person past, I'm frustrated by the fashion for first person present. As an older writer, I feel rather out of touch. My 'Freakification' journey was to write in the fist person present, it's challenging and different and I'll see where it gets me. But still my first sentences are third person past, and I have to force myself into a different more contemporary voice, I wonder where my gut is in all of this?
I reckon write in the way you’re most comfortable. I doubt your story would be turned down because of the tense and viewpoint if it was right for the story you want to tell. You’ll probably have much more success writing in a way that you feel most natural. It probably can’t hurt to experiment with other styles though. Just do
It for yourself and see if you get something out of it or not. At 55 I sympathise with not feeling like a young writer. But all we have is ourselves and where we’ve been and what we’ve done is part of that and there is more to draw on as we get older. So I guess you’ve already made at least one connection today because of your situation.
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.
I love this so much! Such a wonderful instance of how the form of second person brought out the understory of the piece (that sense of a character being the victim of a perverse almost omniscient fate like predatory force).
Thanks! One of the side-effects of second person, especially in present tense, is that it almost completely eliminates inner dialog or commentary. The malevolent voice of the narration is telling the protagonist what to do or what's going on, so presumably this includes telling him/her what to think, which is largely pointless. So the protagonist becomes almost invisible as a person. This depersonalization turned out to be (horribly) appropriate to the subject matter of the story.
Never been closer to 'the text editing software' than typing the keys of a word processing software. Never yet anyway, but now that you've put 'the text editing software' into my mind who knows but that I'll take a block of story prose and run through the alternative permutations of present / past / future and 3rd / 1st / 2nd person narrative point of view that I can.
I so enjoy the kaleidoscopic sense of 'seeing' so many variations on a single story theme.
I also found your point of departure, being run through the SS mangling that you experienced, powerful.
Thanks Allen, for sharing a story way outside my own experience.
It's amazing how much the change of person & tense can do. The process does require a bit of cleanup after using search & replace to change all the "I" words to "he" or "you", etc., but it's worth the trouble just to see all the unexpected effects on tone and import and other intangible qualities. And the kinds of effects these (roughly 6) permutations will have can change radically with different kinds of stories. (6 = first, second, third in past or present. And there are a few others, like first person plural. The mind reels.)
Given that a person who is unknown, in any detail, to us - being observer, or co-worker, or writer - is nowadays, increasingly, likely to be referred to by use of the pronoun 'they' I'm beginning to see how "They walked into a bar... " might be the way that a story gets progressed - start, middle or end - at any point.
After they had checked in at the hotel, been up to their room, unpacked and taken a shower, they went downstairs to eat. An hour later they walked across the street and into a bar. The patrons couldn't help but stare at the size of the canon they held in their right hand.
"Now listen punks and listen-up good" they began as their arm extended, raised and began to pan around the room, "this here is a Magnum .44, the most powerful handgun the world. I'm going to ask y'all one simple question. Anyone of you gives the answer I'm lookin' for and y'all get to stay lucky. Dick me around and one of you will run out luck, real quick. Capiche?"
What they said was heard. Around the bar, beads of sweat broke out one the faces of wide-eyed heads.
"So what about you?" they said. Pointing the barrel at the guy's chest they asked "Do you think you're goin' to stay lucky punk? Question's comin' up. It'll be eternally unlucky for you if you don't tell me what I need to know."
Three minutes later they left the bar, by the back door. They was pleased it had only take shoot'n three to get the others to give.
Hilarious! Now you've given me some really perverse notions to play with . . . perhaps a scene involving several people whose chosen / assigned / biological genders are extremely important to them, but from the POV of someone who "doesn't see" gender.
Are we, could we, should we be beginning to think in as fully freakified a story starting mode as George seems to have found productive? One question with just the three embedded.
I think this is just what George was talking about. Now we (or someone) just have to write a story that flogs this absurd premise to death, and then come back to it every few months for a couple of years, and we'll end up with a story that critics will call "pathetically derivative of Saunders." <sigh> Then maybe write a story about using a famous writer's methodology to produce stories, but with much more outrageous consequences. The mind reels, in the Irish folk-dance sense . . .
My mind works that way much of the time, but I can't think of any specific stories that do this as a design element. It might be interesting to post a very short story in two or three versions, differing only in person and/or tense. I'm tempted to do that, but I don't think George is looking for us to post our own fiction in the discussion stream. Perhaps I'll do it on my own Substack, if I can find the time. Keeping up with two posts per week, one of which is meant to be a story, is a non-trivial task.
Ironically, because it's "out there," many publishers (and possibly also the US legal system) consider it "published," even though only 9 people have ever noticed it. And since it's "published," many periodicals won't touch it. On the other hand, if you're not "published" as an author, agents and periodicals generally won't touch anything you've written. A bit of a sticky wicket.
I considered publishing this story on my Substack, but I think it's too long. Sadly, Substack doesn't have a simple mechanism for emailing an introduction and posting a full article or story. You can do it, but it's very clumsy compared to following their main pattern, in which every post gets emailed to every subscriber. At least it is for a substack newbie like myself.
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.
Yes to the getting lost part. The fear is always roaring at the door when I let go. But that’s where I can feel a connection unlike when I am plotting out my next move. I sometimes start in one person then switch back and back again. It feels right to me but I am never sure how a reader would feel
Exactly. There’s no ‘there’ to arrive at. We write because we have to, not financially but spiritually. I don’t mean religion here; I mean it comes from our soul.
Thanks Michael. I like this idea of ‘having’ to write. I read something, somewhere, sometime, by some writer (nice memory work eh?) and she said something like, “oh, writing well is pretty simple, you just sit down at the keyboard, open your veins and let it flow.” I thought that was marvelously weird and a rather accurate metaphor for releasing something deep and important through writing.
i think you're thinking of Hemingway who said "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." (I have a terrible memory, but somehow i remembered this one.)
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 from Pittsburgh, though I haven't lived in the 'burgh for many years, and it is indeed "yinz" (sometimes spelled "yunz") and is only one syllable. It is what happened when the Eastern European immigrants of the late 19thc, speakers of Slavic languages, learned English from the Scots & English settlers who came before. This form of corruption carries all the way down the Appalachian Mts & morphed in the South, also home of Scots & also Irish immigrants, into "y'all", which may be a mash-up of "yew"& "ew", these from the Gaelic.
Thanks, Jules! I've been away from it for a long time & though I've reformed (owing to a Canadian drama teacher), I can still hear that awful accent in my head! My husband (from New Orleans) tells me that when I'm especially tired or angry the accent can come out, which is never good. Oh, those words: nebby, jagger, dahntahn, redd up! Brings back lots of fond memories. My ancestors were from Ireland by way of England and also Eastern European, so mashed together it was a wonder they could understand each other at all. Yinz make my heart happy!
I've also heard it in Tidewater Virginia, but as "all y'alls", plural on top of plural--let's not leave anybody out!---but this among people who have lived in that area for several generations, not transplants or military.
In New Zealand we stick with plain old “youse”. I used to hate it but as I’ve gotten older I’ve become more affectionate of our corrupted antipodean vernacular.
2nd person POV is one of those things in writing that I think, logically, shouldn't ever work. Telling the reader they did all these things seems wrong. And yet it *does* work, at least sometimes.
When I write short pieces, usually intimate snapshots, I write them in 2nd person. It's what comes more naturally, probably because it's the way I talk to myself! So I suppose and hope it sounds like an internal voice, not like someone who is telling the reader what they did.
I can't think of many literary examples though, apart from "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" by Italo Calvino. A famously postmodern novel. And it's not entirely written in 2nd person if I remember correctly.
I've had on my mind for a while to look for more works written in this POV as I'm quite curious to see if and in what kind of stories it can work.
Yeah, it is a common and natural mode of oral storytelling. People often start a story by saying something like, "You know when you go to the grocery store and they're out of frosted flakes? So you asked the guy if they have any in the back..." Etc.
One book I remember in second person is "Bright Lights, Big City" by Jay McInerney.
Thank you David. "Bright Lights, Big City" seems a very interesting example. I feel I should have known this author but I must admit I didn't. It's always a great feeling to realise there is so much more out there to be discovered!
I agree. 2nd person is often the speaker but different, at a distance. It's used quite successfully in poems, and can be a way of inviting the reader in but can also be a way for the speaker to delve deeper into things.
The protagonist can be different from the point of view. I can imagine a story written from the point of view of a passive witness in the second person, about an active protagonist. It could be a second person omniscient opening which then naturally transitions into third person close. Second person conjures an implied addressee which might be the actual reader or might be someone else, another character.
Scout is, isn't she Andrew, the passive witness narrator through whose POV the story is delivered unto its readers, decade in decade out since 1960. Thanks for pointing this up.
Makes me feel like I'm, you know, the he standing stopped on a sidewalk being mesmerised by a fast handed woman hustling a future version of the "keep your eye on this cup, the one of these three you just watched me put the pea under" etcetera, etcetera flows the ceaseless patter until that will reveal you and all the other punters get it wrong. Just so glad that that he, my so much younger me, will not have had as much as a penny in his pocket so that now, stopped standing memerised on another pavement, I have been enjoying the show in the certain knowledge that I will win big the day before yesterday.
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.🙃
This is a great point. To piggy-back off this a little bit, I find this approach most effective when you allow a bit of time away from that piece of writing before searching for new angles. It's almost spooky when you come back to the 'troubled' piece of writing after a short break and find your subconscious has left a very simple solution to your problem waiting for you.
PS: If anyone is interested, we're starting a read-thru of Ovid's Metamorphoses in my newsletter with a segment called "Monday Metamorphoses." Click on the link by my name and check it out!
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!
Like those critics, I was quite a long way into Bleak House before I noticed the change of tense going on. In the hands of someone else you'd feel bludgeoned by it, but Dickens seems to have had a remarkable instinct to learn to trust in the first place, and to be able to experiment, interpose authorial comment where it really ought no to be, use caricature, parade characters built out of one mannerism only, things that really ought to sound false notes but which in his hands read as clean as anything. Am I too obliging of him? I never know.
I absolutely am "too obliging." I will never defend some of his personal life behavior, but his writing works for me, inspires me, and lights up my life when I read it. Every time. And even his "caricatures"... well, I defend them here: https://juliestielstra.com/defending-dickenss-people/
I woke from a dream once with the sudden very clear notion fully formed in my consciousness that it didn't matter if they WERE caricatures, as what Dickens spoke to in me through these figures was premised not on how 'real' they were themselves, but on how real they made it feel to be human, to have hopes and fears and habits and strategies for coping with major and minor calamities and moments of joy and despair and all before breakfast.
Great points, Julie. I do find myself writing more often in present tense the shorter my project. I often use it for flash. Perhaps this sense of immediacy created is the reason we see it more often in short fiction than long forms...? I'll probably pay more attention to this now, even as I try to do what the story asks of me, as George discusses. Discussed.
As in “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” as the White Rabbit says, very much first person speaking in in his present, pushes unexpectedly past Alice at the beginning of Alice in Wonderland ... as he continues to be, just moments later when she's fallen down the hole that takes her to what she'll come to know as Wonderland, when she spots him ahead of her “Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting!”
What's for sure is that Lewis Carroll is artfully using a melange of tenses to rush, push, manipulate the reader into turning the page to find out more about this girl Alice who the reader has not only just met but literally (in the fiction) followed down the falling hole into whatever adventure it is that she / he / we (the readers) might be about to embark on.
Mmm ... this thread has set the windmills of my turning, ever spinning, launched me like a carnival balloon ... 🎈 or 🪁 ... is that a writer's real question that's dancing, suddenly, in the air before me?
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?
Agreed. Am racking my brains and bookshelf. So far I've come up with: Jason's section in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury ("Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say"), Moby-Dick (sort of--it's actually quite a bit of a mix), Don Quixote (like Moby-Dick, the frame is in a first person present, but much of the book is in past tense). I'm starting to notice a theme. Three more examples: Huck Finn, The Great Gatsby, and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Also: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man ("I am an invisible man") and Charlotte Perkins-Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper ("It is very seldom that ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer").
Aside from the Faulkner and Perkins-Gilman examples, it seems that in these older works, writers mainly use present tense as a framing device to create the sense that here and now there is an actual person telling the story from memory, relaying it to a reader intentionally. Perkins-Gilman, on the other hand, uses present tense to relay a descent into a madness trapped in an eternal present, not unlike the shapes in the wallpaper (this made me want to check to see if Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation was in present tense--it's not). Only in the Faulkner example, however, do I see that persistent, very voice-y, hard-driving present tense that I associate more with contemporary fiction, and only then in one of the three major sections of the book.
Here you go Bob ... I was minded to be able to go on ... "here's as tring of exemplars that confounded your thesis ... but I can't ... because after, a quick shuffle shufti, looking through the starting lines of Classic 19th Century Short Stories (not from a particular but rather through documents files in my PC's folders ... you seem to making a pertinent point: 'classic short stories that are narrated by "I" do seem to be set in the past, built on recollection, rather then set in present "moment of seeing a person I know very well beheaded and butchered before me".
Interesting as a next port of, reference call, I'm going to pick up with George's Rain Belted Park Pond Swimming Selection:
'They drove out of town at half past eight in the morning,' Chekov, 'In the Cart'.
Turgenev's 'The Singers'? Well frankly a hotch-potchery of tenses and POVs but that whatever "I' says seems to be written in he 'reported past tense'.
'Olenka Plemyannikova, the daughter of a retired colleague assessor, was sitting on her porch" ... written from 3rd Person POV and 'was' is the key word, tense wise, in Chekov's 'The Darling'.
'It happened in the seventies in winter, on the day after St. Nicholas's Day' yet another confirmation that these, indeed 'the', 'great 19th century short stories' were - in the light of evidence so far found - all written from a past tense POV. This latest case in point being for Tolstoy's 'Master and Man'.
'Raising himself slightly in bed he saw' ... "OK that's enough another past tenser, being Gogol's 'The Nose'.
And so the trend, of 19th century 'classic' short stories being set and narrated form a ;what happened as I recall - either by having witnessed or by receiving report of - continues with Chekov's 'Gooseberries' ... 'Ivan Ivanych, a veterinary, and Burkin, a high school teacher, were already tired .."Stop!" ... 'were', enough said?
'Alyosha was the younger brother' ... opening sentence of 'Alyosha the Pot' by Tolstoy ... again pitches the reader's eye to entering a story set in a world of things past not action in present moments.
Dickens uses present tense very effectively in Bleak House. In a 3rd person narrative which contrasts with 1st person past tense narrative, as I recall.
"Who gives a hoot what tense a story, in the moment we encounter it and in the subsequent moments in which we read its unfolding before our reading eyes, about what tense or narratorial POV the story with which whatever reason(s) we find ourselves engaging with?"
This a question to self provoked by your comment Bob, not in any way a rebuttal of your line of interesting of thought.
Must now go out and look for 'stories from the 'classic past of short fictions' that were written in the present tense.
I too have the general impression that the present tense is becoming more popular in fiction than it used to be. But as always I turned to Chekhov for all matters story related, and sure enough he wrote a number of stories in the 1800s that are entirely in the present tense: A Malefactor, A Dead Body, Oh! The Public, A Day in the Country, Misery, Sleepy, to name a few. And as I noted elsewhere, he also mixes present and past tenses in some of his other stories.
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. :-)
I just read “Sparrow” a few days back. I loved it! How George built this beautiful story out of this seeming blandness, and turned my expectations inside out. A little Grace Paley inversion going on?
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.
You said it perfectly Mary. Story Club as Life Club. As I read George’s posting all I could think of was, “This is not just a class about writing, it is about life, choices, love, intuition and getting better at being a perceptive and caring human.” That is a gift, a huge gift, a window into true mastery and humility. George is amazing and we are so lucky.
We ARE so lucky. And I'm so grateful to be here with you and everyone else.
We have all, myself included, talked a lot about gut feeling and instinct. As older, wiser (!) writers, we talk about learning to trust our gut. If I was my young self reading all this, I would be screaming out 'but how!' And I would be even more frustrated at my older self just replying 'experience.'
So for younger writers - you can read a line you have written that you love, and that feeling of it being 'right' is one you trust and are familiar with and you enjoy. It is your gut. When you hit a phrase or word you are uncomfortable with - a sentence you read past, but, two sentences later, you find that uncomfortable sentence is haunting you slightly - that's when you stop and go back and think about it. That's your gut telling you that something could be better. It doesn't tell you how it could be better, that's your craft, it doesn't even tell you what's wrong, that's your experience, it just tells you to stop and take another look. If you do stop and take another look, then you are listening to your gut, and that's kind of all there is to it....
Tom: I am not a young writer. I am older but nor sure wiser however after reading this I agree very much with your premise and lately as I edit my essays written from the start of the Pandemic I and take another look I have cut out every sentence that made me feel uncomfortable. It’s an emotional component of writing for me. thanks for this Gloria
Thanks Gloria. Do you find you cut more sentences than you rewrite. I think I do, suggesting their uncomfortable nature relates to their purpose rather than their structure or make up. Sometimes they are just muddled sentences with the subject in the wrong place, or I’ve used too many adjectives. Harold Evans suggested always searching for ‘LY’ in your work and hitting delete! But he was a journalist!
Thanks Tom. Yes I do. It is a bit scary so I save then in a dump file. I have been reading The Art of Writing Revision by Peter Ho Davies and he writes”What is revision?Call it for now the sum of what changes, and what stays the same and the alchemical reaction between them.’’ I had to look up alchemical.
So true, Mary.
There have been times when my gut practically screamed at my brain and other times when I’ve had to learn to take some steps and then stop and listen. I love that wisdom crosses boundaries. That it can helps us in different areas - like in writing and life and relationships.
when i had my first child, I had no idea what i was doing and i was scared to death. I asked my son's pediatrician how would i know if my child was sick enough to see a doctor? And he said to me, "You're his mom--you'll know." Those few simple words have carried me through in so many situations. The faith that I know things, deep inside, if I only trust and listen. He was the first to tell me such a thing and I've been forever grateful.
I love this - it's so true. Because I've had some success writing professionally, I've been approached for advice over the years. The one constant I see in 95 percent of what I've read is writers who get caught up in a system rather than following her gut. This is especially true in Hollywood, where for every coffee shop full of screenwriters, there's a system guru telling them that the inciting incident MUST be on page 30 and every character must have an arc and oh yes, don't forget to follow the paradigm and so on. As if writing a script is akin to solving a Rubik's cube -- you just need to know the right algorithms for each condition.
I think having a basic understanding of process is not a bad thing but it's very easy to adopt a system that becomes your writing until it's like a dam and all the good stuff you've got is stuck in a reservoir you don't know how to access. You have to find a way to let yourself follow your instincts. Part of it is trust I think, part of it is practice, mindfulness etc. and a lot of it is what we've been doing here -- figuring out how to get to the place where you give yourself permission to let your talent speak for you. I guess that's the struggle we're all in.
It's why I keep a Rubik's cube on my writing desk. It's way freaking easier!
Very nicely put, Elizabeth. Practicing without judgment--that's the key. Also, reading! The more we read, the better we write.
Yes reading! Always reading. I'm currently making my way through Moby Dick for just that reason.
Thank you Elizabeth - I've spent so much time wrestling with acts and structure, and it's taken me this long to realise that the theory comes second to the writing. I think it was John Yorke in his book 'Into the Woods' who reminded us that plot structure was not 'invented' it was 'discovered'. It's already there in all our stories, and is a tool we can use to refine and distil them, but only after we know what the story is. So true that - gut comes first.
Revision is growth, and the question is about how much intention is effectively involved to achieve aims. I hear poetry in your words, Alfred-Patrick, and appreciate your contemplations.
So…losses and hardships cause us to retreat, so that our wounds can heal, but then if we stay stuck in our retrenchment, without reframing the way we approach the initial experience…our lives cease moving forward—our lives, our thoughts, our art, our love become stuck in a rut, a downward-spiraling negative feedback loop. And the way out of that is, to somehow dynamite that dam, by acting like a child and trying out new things, new attitudes, experimenting, making new connections. (I’m listening in real time to the Hidden Brain podcast on NPR which is exactly about reframing rather than staying stuck.) Thank you Alfred-Patrick for poking into this concept!
I’m not a mother, but my own mom has told me stories about her gut intuition as a mom. My brother had Cushing’s disease and every doctor told my mom that he just needed diet and exercise. Like actual endocrinologists, where recognizing these signs is their job. But my mom just knew that he wasn’t just a chubby kid. He had a tumor completely surrounding his pituitary gland (he’s fully healthy today). So, she’s has two kids with serious disease that included brain tumors and both of us are still alive.
Anyway, my first gut instinct memory was from 6th grade when a man walked into the school auditorium and I said to myself, “that is not a good man.” But I rationalized myself out of it. He was my friend’s stepdad. But I later found out he was indeed, not a good man.
Otherwise, I’ve always known early on in dating someone if there might be a future. I’ve turned off that intuition at times, but it bugged me until I broke things off. I knew very early on that I would marry my husband. And we are happily married.
I’m glad I learned somewhat early on to recognize my gut feelings (even though I sometimes ignore them), my gut has been good friend to me.
Good for your mom. She just knew! (And i'm relieved to hear that you and your brother are both well.) And really great to hear that you've done so well by listening to your trusty gut. My gut has often told me what to do--I just haven't always listened, and for that i paid a price. Life! Always learning.
Always!
Yes ❤️
Mary, you’re wise and great to have around. I always look for (and look forward to) your comments.
Familiarity with my inner gyroscope is the only unqualified blessing of getting old—well, older than I used to be, anyway. The challenge for me is being able to discern, let alone abide by, those instincts when I’m surrounded by others who don’t share them.
In any case, I’m both relieved and scared that there are no set guidelines for writing fiction
thank you, Dan. I love that--relieved and scared by the lack of hard rules for writing fiction. I think each of us has to find our own guidelines that work for us, even while knowing that they are not set in stone. It's all about not being afraid, I think. Which goes along with trusting yourself.
Mary and Dan -sharing what has guided me for Many years “The whole wide world is a very narrow brifge…the point is not to be afraid at all”. Nachman of Breslin
Angels Landing, Zion National Park, Utah. Exaltation, fear, regret, commitment…exaltation!
Thanks nice - “the bread of angel” Dante
Very true. Instinct. Intuition. Usually doesn’t let you down. The hard part is trusting it.
Right on Mary g thanks for your response and good sense. g
oh, thank you, Gloria!
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'd write all those things in the list that turns them off just to be contrary. Rules rules rules! Who needs 'em? Policy. As Sammy says in Updike's "A&P," - "Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency."
Love that Updike story!
True. At the end of the day you’ve got to know the rules...in order to chuck them over the Cliff and simply trust your gut. Most of writing is just life experience, reading and discipline. Everyone wants to make a profit off teaching writing but the reality is you’re either a writer or you’re not. All kinds of outlets/teachers/people will say Do This or Don’t do That. All the truly important writers laughed and did their own thing anyway.
And the truth is noone is not a writer in my opinion. The best writing teaching is about stripping away all the crap that's coming between us and trusting our gut.
❤️❤️
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.
It's interesting to compare:
"A duck walks into a bar" and:
"A duck walked into a bar."
I already find the first funnier. :)
Is a joke kind of like pitching? If you wanna get the guy out with a curveball, you'll set him up with a fastball, if you wanna get the guy out with a fastball, you'll set him up with a curve. So the tense for the set up depends on the punchline.
Or I guess you could craft the punchline to respond to the set up?
Which reminds me of the penguin who walked, was walking, had walked into a bar ...
The penguin will have walked into the bar, with a duck, a rabbi, a priest and an imam…
Buddy Hackett: A priest, a porcupine, and a prostitute walk into a bar.
Even funnier is “a duck walks into a bar with a priest and a rabbi”!
Isn't the present tense "standard" in oral joke-telling? I'm (vainly) trying to think of a situation in which there's this guy who's telling a joke in the past tense...
There's something about the past tense that nails the action down as "something I am asking you to believe is on the record", while the present seems to open an imaginative field where ducks walk into bars as a matter of course.
Another way of putting it is that the oral folk tradition long ago homed in on the right tense for joke-telling.
It can, of course, depend on the joke and the joke teller. Sometimes part of the joke can be that it's told in formal language, which can make the punchline more surprising. E.g. this one I just found looking for examples:
“Once, my father came home and found me in front of a roaring fire. That made my father very mad, as we didn’t have a fireplace.” —Victor Borge
That plays off of Borge's voice as a story teller, and to my ear wouldn't work as well in present tense.
Ha! Exactly!
Thank you for summing it up so efficiently.
Please address if it pertains in the upcoming humor discussion!
There's more mystery in the present tense as well, because it's happening in real time. That urgency can keep the reader on their toes, which makes the jokes hit harder.
As someone who wants to tell stories in the third person past, I'm frustrated by the fashion for first person present. As an older writer, I feel rather out of touch. My 'Freakification' journey was to write in the fist person present, it's challenging and different and I'll see where it gets me. But still my first sentences are third person past, and I have to force myself into a different more contemporary voice, I wonder where my gut is in all of this?
I reckon write in the way you’re most comfortable. I doubt your story would be turned down because of the tense and viewpoint if it was right for the story you want to tell. You’ll probably have much more success writing in a way that you feel most natural. It probably can’t hurt to experiment with other styles though. Just do
It for yourself and see if you get something out of it or not. At 55 I sympathise with not feeling like a young writer. But all we have is ourselves and where we’ve been and what we’ve done is part of that and there is more to draw on as we get older. So I guess you’ve already made at least one connection today because of your situation.
Thank you for this post. Your explanation and George's examples below are helping me mull over this distinction. It is tricky.
Yes. Very tricky. And I think George is right about making a gut decision.
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.
I love this so much! Such a wonderful instance of how the form of second person brought out the understory of the piece (that sense of a character being the victim of a perverse almost omniscient fate like predatory force).
Thanks! One of the side-effects of second person, especially in present tense, is that it almost completely eliminates inner dialog or commentary. The malevolent voice of the narration is telling the protagonist what to do or what's going on, so presumably this includes telling him/her what to think, which is largely pointless. So the protagonist becomes almost invisible as a person. This depersonalization turned out to be (horribly) appropriate to the subject matter of the story.
Never been closer to 'the text editing software' than typing the keys of a word processing software. Never yet anyway, but now that you've put 'the text editing software' into my mind who knows but that I'll take a block of story prose and run through the alternative permutations of present / past / future and 3rd / 1st / 2nd person narrative point of view that I can.
I so enjoy the kaleidoscopic sense of 'seeing' so many variations on a single story theme.
I also found your point of departure, being run through the SS mangling that you experienced, powerful.
Thanks Allen, for sharing a story way outside my own experience.
It's amazing how much the change of person & tense can do. The process does require a bit of cleanup after using search & replace to change all the "I" words to "he" or "you", etc., but it's worth the trouble just to see all the unexpected effects on tone and import and other intangible qualities. And the kinds of effects these (roughly 6) permutations will have can change radically with different kinds of stories. (6 = first, second, third in past or present. And there are a few others, like first person plural. The mind reels.)
"Reels" is the very word Allen.
Given that a person who is unknown, in any detail, to us - being observer, or co-worker, or writer - is nowadays, increasingly, likely to be referred to by use of the pronoun 'they' I'm beginning to see how "They walked into a bar... " might be the way that a story gets progressed - start, middle or end - at any point.
After they had checked in at the hotel, been up to their room, unpacked and taken a shower, they went downstairs to eat. An hour later they walked across the street and into a bar. The patrons couldn't help but stare at the size of the canon they held in their right hand.
"Now listen punks and listen-up good" they began as their arm extended, raised and began to pan around the room, "this here is a Magnum .44, the most powerful handgun the world. I'm going to ask y'all one simple question. Anyone of you gives the answer I'm lookin' for and y'all get to stay lucky. Dick me around and one of you will run out luck, real quick. Capiche?"
What they said was heard. Around the bar, beads of sweat broke out one the faces of wide-eyed heads.
"So what about you?" they said. Pointing the barrel at the guy's chest they asked "Do you think you're goin' to stay lucky punk? Question's comin' up. It'll be eternally unlucky for you if you don't tell me what I need to know."
Three minutes later they left the bar, by the back door. They was pleased it had only take shoot'n three to get the others to give.
Hilarious! Now you've given me some really perverse notions to play with . . . perhaps a scene involving several people whose chosen / assigned / biological genders are extremely important to them, but from the POV of someone who "doesn't see" gender.
Are we, could we, should we be beginning to think in as fully freakified a story starting mode as George seems to have found productive? One question with just the three embedded.
Playful indeed!
I think this is just what George was talking about. Now we (or someone) just have to write a story that flogs this absurd premise to death, and then come back to it every few months for a couple of years, and we'll end up with a story that critics will call "pathetically derivative of Saunders." <sigh> Then maybe write a story about using a famous writer's methodology to produce stories, but with much more outrageous consequences. The mind reels, in the Irish folk-dance sense . . .
My mind works that way much of the time, but I can't think of any specific stories that do this as a design element. It might be interesting to post a very short story in two or three versions, differing only in person and/or tense. I'm tempted to do that, but I don't think George is looking for us to post our own fiction in the discussion stream. Perhaps I'll do it on my own Substack, if I can find the time. Keeping up with two posts per week, one of which is meant to be a story, is a non-trivial task.
I have a version of the second person present story on my never-visited-by-anyone gallery page: https://cave-paintings.com/everybody-gets-a-drum/
Ironically, because it's "out there," many publishers (and possibly also the US legal system) consider it "published," even though only 9 people have ever noticed it. And since it's "published," many periodicals won't touch it. On the other hand, if you're not "published" as an author, agents and periodicals generally won't touch anything you've written. A bit of a sticky wicket.
On my never-visited-by-anyone gallery page. That made me laugh out loud. Wonderfully funny and vulnerable. Thanks Allen!
I considered publishing this story on my Substack, but I think it's too long. Sadly, Substack doesn't have a simple mechanism for emailing an introduction and posting a full article or story. You can do it, but it's very clumsy compared to following their main pattern, in which every post gets emailed to every subscriber. At least it is for a substack newbie like myself.
I hear you. Class of '69, due to aforementioned "year off." And maybe due to a few other things . . .
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."
And then you have John Irving who famously writes the final sentence of his books first. Whatever works!
"In the end is my beginning" I hear the gossamer ghost voice of T S Eliot intone.
Ah well I think as I listen, "all's well that ends well" and then decide next best move will be get "back to the future" post haste.
Whatever works indeed Mary ... ever what krows in de de ... 😂 is it true that "that way madness lies" or am I on "the road to perdition"?
Interesting to learn two somethings about Messrs Murakami & Irving ... thank you Susan and thank you Mary.
his book 'novelist as a vocation' is INCREDIBLE. highly recommend.
Good to hear. I'm on the hold list for it at the library.
“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.
Yes to the getting lost part. The fear is always roaring at the door when I let go. But that’s where I can feel a connection unlike when I am plotting out my next move. I sometimes start in one person then switch back and back again. It feels right to me but I am never sure how a reader would feel
Write it. Finish it. Take a walk, better take a break, leave it longer, better still. Pick it up. Read it, not as Writer but with a Reader's 👀.
Just a passing suggestion Sarah.
Exactly. There’s no ‘there’ to arrive at. We write because we have to, not financially but spiritually. I don’t mean religion here; I mean it comes from our soul.
Thanks Michael. I like this idea of ‘having’ to write. I read something, somewhere, sometime, by some writer (nice memory work eh?) and she said something like, “oh, writing well is pretty simple, you just sit down at the keyboard, open your veins and let it flow.” I thought that was marvelously weird and a rather accurate metaphor for releasing something deep and important through writing.
i think you're thinking of Hemingway who said "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." (I have a terrible memory, but somehow i remembered this one.)
Yes I think you nailed it. Thanks!
We’re pretty sure this one’s not an Einstein quote, right….?
Lol
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."
It’s a memoir but have you ever read Paul Auster’s “Winter Journal”? Told in second person. Brilliant.
No, sorry. But there's a popular novel, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights Big City, that's in 2nd
I’ve read that.
Good points about second person. In Pittsburgh, "yinz" (actually pronounced more like "you-uns") is, in fact, a thing.
I'm from Pittsburgh, though I haven't lived in the 'burgh for many years, and it is indeed "yinz" (sometimes spelled "yunz") and is only one syllable. It is what happened when the Eastern European immigrants of the late 19thc, speakers of Slavic languages, learned English from the Scots & English settlers who came before. This form of corruption carries all the way down the Appalachian Mts & morphed in the South, also home of Scots & also Irish immigrants, into "y'all", which may be a mash-up of "yew"& "ew", these from the Gaelic.
Interesting. I love learning about all this stuff, especially "Y'all" which is so inclusive.
My friend Barbara, now a retired Carnegie Mellon sociolinguistics professor, wrote a book about Pittsburghese if you are interested! Here’s an article about it: https://www.verylocal.com/book-about-pittsburghese-barbara-johnstone/2739/
Thanks, Jules! I've been away from it for a long time & though I've reformed (owing to a Canadian drama teacher), I can still hear that awful accent in my head! My husband (from New Orleans) tells me that when I'm especially tired or angry the accent can come out, which is never good. Oh, those words: nebby, jagger, dahntahn, redd up! Brings back lots of fond memories. My ancestors were from Ireland by way of England and also Eastern European, so mashed together it was a wonder they could understand each other at all. Yinz make my heart happy!
Cool! Thanks, Jules. Checking it out!
“All y’all” is also a thing, at least in Texas. 😀
I've also heard it in Tidewater Virginia, but as "all y'alls", plural on top of plural--let's not leave anybody out!---but this among people who have lived in that area for several generations, not transplants or military.
In New Zealand we stick with plain old “youse”. I used to hate it but as I’ve gotten older I’ve become more affectionate of our corrupted antipodean vernacular.
i think Archie Bunker used to say "youse guys."
Must have had a kiwi associate influencing his language choices - let’s make that canon 😂
Tamara, You're hilarious! Or, rather, yinz is.
2nd person POV is one of those things in writing that I think, logically, shouldn't ever work. Telling the reader they did all these things seems wrong. And yet it *does* work, at least sometimes.
When I write short pieces, usually intimate snapshots, I write them in 2nd person. It's what comes more naturally, probably because it's the way I talk to myself! So I suppose and hope it sounds like an internal voice, not like someone who is telling the reader what they did.
I can't think of many literary examples though, apart from "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" by Italo Calvino. A famously postmodern novel. And it's not entirely written in 2nd person if I remember correctly.
I've had on my mind for a while to look for more works written in this POV as I'm quite curious to see if and in what kind of stories it can work.
I can recommend the collection of short stories "Self-Help" by Lorrie Moore.
Thanks!
Yeah, it is a common and natural mode of oral storytelling. People often start a story by saying something like, "You know when you go to the grocery store and they're out of frosted flakes? So you asked the guy if they have any in the back..." Etc.
One book I remember in second person is "Bright Lights, Big City" by Jay McInerney.
Thank you David. "Bright Lights, Big City" seems a very interesting example. I feel I should have known this author but I must admit I didn't. It's always a great feeling to realise there is so much more out there to be discovered!
Roberta,
I agree. 2nd person is often the speaker but different, at a distance. It's used quite successfully in poems, and can be a way of inviting the reader in but can also be a way for the speaker to delve deeper into things.
The protagonist can be different from the point of view. I can imagine a story written from the point of view of a passive witness in the second person, about an active protagonist. It could be a second person omniscient opening which then naturally transitions into third person close. Second person conjures an implied addressee which might be the actual reader or might be someone else, another character.
I shouldn't plug one of my own stories, but it seems an apt example of a passive witness, in this case a rock in a guy's shoe: https://www.intrinsick.com/stories/the-rock-in-your-shoe
You remind me also of epistolary stories, stories written in letters addressing another character. So many different ways to tell a story!
I loved your story David, it was a joy to read. I had so much fun. Thanks for sharing it!
Thanks, Roberta! I'm glad you enjoyed it.
oh i loved your story!
Thank you, Mary!
“There is no amount of logic capable of penetrating the thick fog of babyhood…” Love that line, and the whole story. Especially the old rock
consciousness, and the contrast between the death-metal self and the suburban dad self, battling it out moment by moment. A great read!!
Thank you!
Thanks, Bobbe!
To Kill a Mockingbird is a good example of the "passive witness" POV.
Scout is, isn't she Andrew, the passive witness narrator through whose POV the story is delivered unto its readers, decade in decade out since 1960. Thanks for pointing this up.
Lovely words.
Makes me feel like I'm, you know, the he standing stopped on a sidewalk being mesmerised by a fast handed woman hustling a future version of the "keep your eye on this cup, the one of these three you just watched me put the pea under" etcetera, etcetera flows the ceaseless patter until that will reveal you and all the other punters get it wrong. Just so glad that that he, my so much younger me, will not have had as much as a penny in his pocket so that now, stopped standing memerised on another pavement, I have been enjoying the show in the certain knowledge that I will win big the day before yesterday.
😅😂🤣
Adorable
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.🙃
This is a great point. To piggy-back off this a little bit, I find this approach most effective when you allow a bit of time away from that piece of writing before searching for new angles. It's almost spooky when you come back to the 'troubled' piece of writing after a short break and find your subconscious has left a very simple solution to your problem waiting for you.
PS: If anyone is interested, we're starting a read-thru of Ovid's Metamorphoses in my newsletter with a segment called "Monday Metamorphoses." Click on the link by my name and check it out!
Nice!!
🔥🔥🔥
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.
Exactly ❤️❤️
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!
Like those critics, I was quite a long way into Bleak House before I noticed the change of tense going on. In the hands of someone else you'd feel bludgeoned by it, but Dickens seems to have had a remarkable instinct to learn to trust in the first place, and to be able to experiment, interpose authorial comment where it really ought no to be, use caricature, parade characters built out of one mannerism only, things that really ought to sound false notes but which in his hands read as clean as anything. Am I too obliging of him? I never know.
I absolutely am "too obliging." I will never defend some of his personal life behavior, but his writing works for me, inspires me, and lights up my life when I read it. Every time. And even his "caricatures"... well, I defend them here: https://juliestielstra.com/defending-dickenss-people/
I woke from a dream once with the sudden very clear notion fully formed in my consciousness that it didn't matter if they WERE caricatures, as what Dickens spoke to in me through these figures was premised not on how 'real' they were themselves, but on how real they made it feel to be human, to have hopes and fears and habits and strategies for coping with major and minor calamities and moments of joy and despair and all before breakfast.
Separate the art from the artist 👩🎨 🫰🔥❤️
Dickens always handles it with such a deft hand and your desire to follow the story eclipses any questioning of person, at least this is what I find
Great points, Julie. I do find myself writing more often in present tense the shorter my project. I often use it for flash. Perhaps this sense of immediacy created is the reason we see it more often in short fiction than long forms...? I'll probably pay more attention to this now, even as I try to do what the story asks of me, as George discusses. Discussed.
Good point
This makes sense to me. I’m not a huge fan of present tense either. And you’re right: the feeling is of being rushed, pushed, manipulated.
As in “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” as the White Rabbit says, very much first person speaking in in his present, pushes unexpectedly past Alice at the beginning of Alice in Wonderland ... as he continues to be, just moments later when she's fallen down the hole that takes her to what she'll come to know as Wonderland, when she spots him ahead of her “Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting!”
What's for sure is that Lewis Carroll is artfully using a melange of tenses to rush, push, manipulate the reader into turning the page to find out more about this girl Alice who the reader has not only just met but literally (in the fiction) followed down the falling hole into whatever adventure it is that she / he / we (the readers) might be about to embark on.
Mmm ... this thread has set the windmills of my turning, ever spinning, launched me like a carnival balloon ... 🎈 or 🪁 ... is that a writer's real question that's dancing, suddenly, in the air before me?
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.’
This IS amusing and playful and I appreciate it.
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?
Agreed. Am racking my brains and bookshelf. So far I've come up with: Jason's section in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury ("Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say"), Moby-Dick (sort of--it's actually quite a bit of a mix), Don Quixote (like Moby-Dick, the frame is in a first person present, but much of the book is in past tense). I'm starting to notice a theme. Three more examples: Huck Finn, The Great Gatsby, and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Also: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man ("I am an invisible man") and Charlotte Perkins-Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper ("It is very seldom that ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer").
Aside from the Faulkner and Perkins-Gilman examples, it seems that in these older works, writers mainly use present tense as a framing device to create the sense that here and now there is an actual person telling the story from memory, relaying it to a reader intentionally. Perkins-Gilman, on the other hand, uses present tense to relay a descent into a madness trapped in an eternal present, not unlike the shapes in the wallpaper (this made me want to check to see if Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation was in present tense--it's not). Only in the Faulkner example, however, do I see that persistent, very voice-y, hard-driving present tense that I associate more with contemporary fiction, and only then in one of the three major sections of the book.
Here you go Bob ... I was minded to be able to go on ... "here's as tring of exemplars that confounded your thesis ... but I can't ... because after, a quick shuffle shufti, looking through the starting lines of Classic 19th Century Short Stories (not from a particular but rather through documents files in my PC's folders ... you seem to making a pertinent point: 'classic short stories that are narrated by "I" do seem to be set in the past, built on recollection, rather then set in present "moment of seeing a person I know very well beheaded and butchered before me".
Interesting as a next port of, reference call, I'm going to pick up with George's Rain Belted Park Pond Swimming Selection:
'They drove out of town at half past eight in the morning,' Chekov, 'In the Cart'.
Turgenev's 'The Singers'? Well frankly a hotch-potchery of tenses and POVs but that whatever "I' says seems to be written in he 'reported past tense'.
'Olenka Plemyannikova, the daughter of a retired colleague assessor, was sitting on her porch" ... written from 3rd Person POV and 'was' is the key word, tense wise, in Chekov's 'The Darling'.
'It happened in the seventies in winter, on the day after St. Nicholas's Day' yet another confirmation that these, indeed 'the', 'great 19th century short stories' were - in the light of evidence so far found - all written from a past tense POV. This latest case in point being for Tolstoy's 'Master and Man'.
'Raising himself slightly in bed he saw' ... "OK that's enough another past tenser, being Gogol's 'The Nose'.
And so the trend, of 19th century 'classic' short stories being set and narrated form a ;what happened as I recall - either by having witnessed or by receiving report of - continues with Chekov's 'Gooseberries' ... 'Ivan Ivanych, a veterinary, and Burkin, a high school teacher, were already tired .."Stop!" ... 'were', enough said?
'Alyosha was the younger brother' ... opening sentence of 'Alyosha the Pot' by Tolstoy ... again pitches the reader's eye to entering a story set in a world of things past not action in present moments.
Mmm ....
Thanks for this post. Super helpful.
Dickens uses present tense very effectively in Bleak House. In a 3rd person narrative which contrasts with 1st person past tense narrative, as I recall.
"Who gives a hoot what tense a story, in the moment we encounter it and in the subsequent moments in which we read its unfolding before our reading eyes, about what tense or narratorial POV the story with which whatever reason(s) we find ourselves engaging with?"
This a question to self provoked by your comment Bob, not in any way a rebuttal of your line of interesting of thought.
Must now go out and look for 'stories from the 'classic past of short fictions' that were written in the present tense.
I too have the general impression that the present tense is becoming more popular in fiction than it used to be. But as always I turned to Chekhov for all matters story related, and sure enough he wrote a number of stories in the 1800s that are entirely in the present tense: A Malefactor, A Dead Body, Oh! The Public, A Day in the Country, Misery, Sleepy, to name a few. And as I noted elsewhere, he also mixes present and past tenses in some of his other stories.
Maybe he was just ahead of his times. 😊
Nope: you are correct. It got trendy in MFA programs and now it’s ubiquitous.
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. :-)
I just read “Sparrow” a few days back. I loved it! How George built this beautiful story out of this seeming blandness, and turned my expectations inside out. A little Grace Paley inversion going on?