This is gold. Reminds me of something Sasha Chapin wrote:
I know that there are two modes of experience: appreciative, and evaluative. Concrete example: let’s say you’re listening to a piece of music. Are you sinking into it, awash in emotions? You’re in the appreciative mode. Are you the mixing engineer, listening to the snare hits to make sure they’re consistent? You’re in the evaluative mode. Much of sanity, and happiness, consists of finding the right mode for the right moment. The appreciative mode is terrible for debugging your business plan. But the evaluative mode is terrible for having a first date. A lot of capable, intelligent people suffer because they do not have the ability to switch out of the evaluative mode, or even notice that they’re in it.
I like to think that what we call 'flow state' is perhaps a place where we can use both modes. We are nailing it on the technique but also connected to the heart and letting our inspiration flow from us in a kind of pure expression. It reminds me a little of that old saying about needing your head to learn the rules of playing the piano but needing your heart to really express yourself and make music.
Yeah. Once you've put in the hard yards of becoming very good at something (like piano), it can become instinctive, so that it's actually better not to think about what you're doing consciously, or you might mess it up.
If you're into this sort of thing, I strongly recommend 'The Master and His Emissary' by Iain McGilchrist (maybe you're familiar with his work already).
Yes, 'The Master and His Emissary' is a serious book. I actually listened to the audio version, which was 27 hours long. Totally worth it, though.
I looked at your other comment. I totally agree with you that art can be divinely inspired (an maybe even that all great art is). Another example is George Frideric Handel when he wrote 'The Messiah'. He worked in a kind of fever pitch of inspiration, and completed it in just 24 days. To do this, he had to to shut out the world and focus on the work. Attention is a strange thing. It needs to be wide open to gather inspiration, but then very focussed to act on that inspiration. A time for every purpose under heaven, no?
Music consists entirely of relations, 'betweenness'. The notes mean nothing in themselves: the tensions between the notes, and between notes and the silence with which they live in reciprocal indebtedness, are everything. Melody, harmony and rhythm each lie in the gaps, and yet the betweenness is only what it is because of the notes themselves. Actually the music is not just in the gaps any more than it is just in the notes: it is in the whole that the notes and the silence make together. Each note becomes transformed by the context in which it lies. What we mean by music is not just any agglomeration of notes, but one in which the whole created is powerful enough to make each note live in a new way, a way that it had never done before. Similarly poetry cannot be just any arrangement of words, but one in which each word is taken up into the new whole and made to live again in a new way, carrying us back to the world of experience, to life: poetry constitutes a 'speaking silence'. Music and poetic language are both part of the world that is delivered by the right hemisphere, the world characterised by betweenness. Perhaps it is not, after all, so wide of the mark to call the right hemisphere the 'silent' hemisphere: its utterances are implicit. - Iain McGilchrist, The Master And His Emissary
Sometimes I get to the point in a story where there is no more clarity. It's done. It might not be perfectly clear, but it's the best I can do; which all we can ask of anybody. Their best. Down the line there might be more work that will become clear to me but the work has to be finished and a new story born. That is where I will apply my new understanding. Rinse. Repeat.
Interesting fluid question and the thoughts it musters. I would like to say, having no idea of the protocol since I don't enter internet space often, how much I appreciate a somewhere to place these perhaps helpful thoughts for consideration, thank you for having me, for sharing your own and to our host for his.
The empty vessel seems an often used metaphor for the process of creating and I can only talk of my own experience. Whatever or wherever the flow comes from, which some describe as happening to them, the vessel has to be empty to begin with.
I'm still thinking about 'The Dwarf Pine' and the artist's need to write. When there is no liberty and no thing by which you might triangulate your position, an ant or a blown leaf or a species of tree becomes a detail, a rhythm that might draw you into its tiny existence, no bigger or smaller than your own telling you where you are, right now in the moment, your world as it is. The difficulty to find paper, a pencil stub to make a mark or write some words, to hide the thoughts somewhere they won't be found and to smuggle them out later, is the artist recognising the value of a truth to the self and maybe to others. The act of writing is grabbed liberty outside the arrangements other human beings have made for each other, jails inside jails, systems of exploitation, punishment, judgement, repression and reward.
There is a risk, a courage to being empty because it is not the most comfortable place to be. A global 'lockdown' might have brought this home to a lot of people. If the system pauses then there is a space cleared for thought, free from the burble and chatter of constant commerce and what of it, what happens in the void?
Where and how to find that emptiness, fearful and celebratory simultaneously, an existential dread in my case, aloneness, (it's a simple thing), is either self imposed or imposed on you, there is courage to place yourself in nothingness and starting from there. Shutting down and quietly becoming aware, (I have never managed meditation), sketching or making notes, feeling the sun on my face seem to be similar pathways to a place of no thing, a blank from which to start. With who I think I am out of the picture, it's my senses I have as a connection to outside of me. Letting go of who I think I am and present to others for a moment and facing my own insignificance is something we share as people, we contain opposites, we're faulty and imperfect, privileged (to have paper and a pencil), how can we keep ourselves entertained, enlightened, talking around the campfire? An experience we think is unique to us is how everybody else feels too but perhaps we might find a way of showing whatever the shared experience is from another angle, maybe someone else will nod in recognition saying I hadn't seen it quite like that and my understanding is broadened.
That's the job and the price is being with but apart from your fellows. You may only find the sweet spot by accident and only hit it once or never at all but the point is there is value in trying, making art is an act of defiance, a tiny flame that won't go out until you do and maybe the light from the flame showed something to one other person or many.
I’ve been reading Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales—devastating, brilliant. For anyone inspired by Varlam Shalamov or Aleksandar Tišma, I highly recommend “Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years” by Mihail Sebastian. It’s a journal, of course, so again we have the question—why did it engage me as deeply as great fiction?
i love this: "This thing you’re calling 'heart' is, I think, a moment of real connection between reader and writer. But for that to happen, both parties need to be in agreement regarding where they are."
"These stories often froze up midway, because I was being puzzled by some question at their core, a question that would turn out to be answerable only by way of intense revising. That revising often felt like its purpose was to clarify: clarifying the stakes of the story, clarify the different options the character might have, to get out of the jam I’d put him in."
Yep. I'm at this stage in my craft, and can confirm that the freezing pattern will come after you as soon as you start getting more honest. Injecting heart into the work will feel intuitively "right" in the ways George describes, but may also force you to face the areas where your heart hasn't made up its mind, and invite you to become the person with the wisdom/insight to close the loop on the "question at their core" in a true and believable and compelling way. I.e., "intense revising," possibly also including revisions to yourself and your worldview (or at least clarifications of self and worldview, as George puts it, but I tend to think those are the same since newfound awareness can be quite the change).
A wonderful letter and a wonderful reponse from George. Reread, be attentive to the ideas that come from the back of the head or go bump in the night, but revise, revise, revise again - I've been practising this on one novel for three years now, and gradually the true lines of the sculpture are coming out of the clay. In the end, will it be any good? If we worried about that, we wouldn't even start out. :)
This hit home. I never know exactly what I feel, I discover it through the prolonged act of second, third, fourth (ad nauseum) drafting when nice turns of phrase or striking images finally accrue meaning.
It’s been the hardest lesson - ‘But what is it ABOUT?’ a frustrated (and very talented, damn her) beta reader wrote about an already much edited story. Ouch. Resentfully, I turned back to the story. She was right - I’d been skirting the heart of it. I always skirt the heart of it.
Thank you! I can think of at least one story of mine that I feel very emotional about, and probably to its detriment. I suspect I need to cut off all (or most) traces of sentimentality. The character is trying too hard to draw pity from the readers, but it may be that the only person it draws pity from is his author!
This might be a bit tangental to the topic, but for me I feel that sometimes there is such a thing as over-revising--the sentences seem "objectively" better--they pack more punch, the adverbs have been eliminated; they show, not tell. But somehow the effort is showing. It's like the kid at the party who's immaculately dressed, and somehow making other people a bit embarrassed for him. Maybe there is a sweet spot where the "heart" or connection lies, or where the it emerges most prominently, somewhere between the first draft and the 200th one, depending on the story and the writer. (I am vague on the details, but I recall reading about a conversation between Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Maybe Dylan first asked Cohen how long it took him to write Hallelujah, and Cohen said something like a decade and then asked Dylan how long it took him to write...I forget which song, but I'm almost positive that Dylan's answer was 15 minutes. So I guess there's some wiggle room.)
Any chance anyone has a link to "The Dwarf Pine" in its native Russian? I've become a decently conversational Russian speaker and have been loving reading the English and Russian works side-by-side, Ivan Ilych in Russian broke my heart a bit, would love to do the same with Shalamov. Thanks (':
Excuse the late reply... Substack is not forwarding anything for some reason. Yes, I do read it, including the handwritten pages. One can get a feeling for the way Shalamov writes, how he feels, just from looking at the manuscript pages.
I hope the Russian studies go well--it will get you thinking in new, exciting, even brilliant ways. I used to have my own Office Hours, once a week, while teaching Intermediate Russian.
Such a difficult language, especially in literary form, encountering such a plethora of unfamiliar words. Maybe I'm imagining this because my own vocabulary is rather stunted, but compared to Tolstoy, for instance, Shalamov seems to use a much more complex lexicon. Am I imagining that?
It seems like I should be able to read a Cormac McCarthy novel without wanting to throw it somewhere far away from me, but I absolutely hate his writing. Overblown, pretentious swaggering. Head hates it. Heart detests it. Is it just me…?
Interesting. I rarely understand the haters…certainly don’t elevate writers to gods, but a teacher from high school who I’m now friends with once recommended ‘Blood Meridian’ to me, and I went on to read his other works, and of late, have been talking to another friend about books I’ve been reading, he mentioned he was listening to the audiobook, which inspired me to listen to that on runs. I’d wanted to revisit it, as it aligns well with some history in reading from the time.
Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 2, that literally stopped me in my tracks on a run (punctuating and grammar mistakes are mine and not his as it’s a transcript of what I heard, not a copy and paste of the text).
“But where does a man come by his notions. What world he’s seen that he liked better
N’can think of better places and better ways
Can you make it be?
No
No, No. it’s a mystery
A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind’s is ought he has to know it with…he can know his heart, but he don’t want to, rightly so…best not to look in there
It ain’t the heart of a creature that is bound for the way god set for it, you can find meanest in the least of creatures. But when god made man, the devil was at his elbow
A creature that can do anything , make a machine and a machine to make a machine and evil that can run a thousand years, no need to tend it”
In other words, there is value, and maybe overblown to you, is just the wrong time.
Perhaps important to note, this was said after the hermit character (a former enslaver) put away a black man’s heart he’d bought for $200. I guess my point being, he connected the analytical and the heart, literally and figuratively, with this reader.
Some balance between heart and head, but always the scale on the heart side weighs a trifle more, an apprehension of some genuine emotion, arresting a shift from major to minor in music. I see trees differently since meeting Shalmanov’s pine. Heart felt…
This is a fascinating discussion! An example that comes to mind of a story in which the heart was removed Raymond Carver's story The Bath. Editor Gordon Lish chopped it up and published it as a truncated version that changed the true humanity of this great story. Later, Carver published the story the way it was written as A Small Good Thing in his collection Cathedral.
A great example, yes. It always felt to me that Lish - a good editor - was proceeding from an aspiration to minimize which, often, worked for his Carver edits. But that story (it seemed to me) needed that extra bit of exploratory courage, in order to answer the real question being asked ("Why is that baker so MEAN") and give him a chance to speak up for himself and to change. The edit that Lish did felt like it was trying to not become sentimental, but then it lost something on the way.
"Trying not to become sentimental"--a tough one--One of my several internal critics is always looking for what might be felt as sentimental--he's such a severe judge that he can really get in the way--I have to stop and ask, wait a minute, what's wrong with that feeling in there? Do you suppose that often what is condemned as sentimental, especially in revising, is simply honest, real feeling that embarrasses us?
Yes, 'exploratory courage.' Sometimes words, combined, release whole realms. The titles, too, change between the edited and unedited versions. Style, potency, trueness, truth, alignment--the rules of editing must be both individual and universal.
Yes, our MFA instructor had us read this story, along with 'Cathedral.' It's quite an exercise to look at the different versions, and seeing the power, the potency released by the editing of some of the stories, toggling between the two versions. Some of the editing is sublime, which does make me wonder how much of such edited versions are the author's own work.
This discussion reminds me of the axiom "protected and connected" --that ineffable state of being where one is connected to their feelings yet protected from ego assaults, and so is able to be present in their feelings and yet responsive to what is happening around them, no matter what. Very hard to do sometimes! But a writer who manages to achieve this state via the perfectly balanced story, is able to reach most readers, I believe, because people recognize that rarified state and respond with their own heart-felt feelings. Always trying to achieve this state...but I am somewhat cheered by my belief from my faith tradition that work performed in the spirit of service is worship. So writing work has to attain that spirit of service to humanity. Pure intentions that are elusive, but worth working to attain.
This is well put thank you Christine. "...that ineffable state of being where one is connected to their feelings yet protected from ego assaults, and so is able to be present in their feelings and yet responsive to what is happening around them." Isn't that the essence of writing fiction? I do think it really is a physical state--"where in your body do you feel this feeling" and (from Eudora Welty, I think, "Every feeling waits upon its gesture."
So, I missed the opinion piece and now too late to comment, but, I believe it made a difference. It made an important difference. The more intelligent people speak out, I think it shows what depths of dystopian stupidity this administration is mired in. Thank you. I have not been keeping up here as much as I was. When I found you on Substack I subscribed paid immediately, before people paid. This is such a brilliant place to be, Story Club.
This is gold. Reminds me of something Sasha Chapin wrote:
I know that there are two modes of experience: appreciative, and evaluative. Concrete example: let’s say you’re listening to a piece of music. Are you sinking into it, awash in emotions? You’re in the appreciative mode. Are you the mixing engineer, listening to the snare hits to make sure they’re consistent? You’re in the evaluative mode. Much of sanity, and happiness, consists of finding the right mode for the right moment. The appreciative mode is terrible for debugging your business plan. But the evaluative mode is terrible for having a first date. A lot of capable, intelligent people suffer because they do not have the ability to switch out of the evaluative mode, or even notice that they’re in it.
I like to think that what we call 'flow state' is perhaps a place where we can use both modes. We are nailing it on the technique but also connected to the heart and letting our inspiration flow from us in a kind of pure expression. It reminds me a little of that old saying about needing your head to learn the rules of playing the piano but needing your heart to really express yourself and make music.
Yeah. Once you've put in the hard yards of becoming very good at something (like piano), it can become instinctive, so that it's actually better not to think about what you're doing consciously, or you might mess it up.
Great quote, thanks for sharing.
I had to look Sasha Chaplin up; this was one of the first hits:
https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/50-things-i-know
He's one of my favourite writers on this platform.
If you're into this sort of thing, I strongly recommend 'The Master and His Emissary' by Iain McGilchrist (maybe you're familiar with his work already).
This might also be of interest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU&t=67s
That's wild! Thanks.
You beat me to it!
An animated summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvr_gubcWUk
Yes, 'The Master and His Emissary' is a serious book. I actually listened to the audio version, which was 27 hours long. Totally worth it, though.
I looked at your other comment. I totally agree with you that art can be divinely inspired (an maybe even that all great art is). Another example is George Frideric Handel when he wrote 'The Messiah'. He worked in a kind of fever pitch of inspiration, and completed it in just 24 days. To do this, he had to to shut out the world and focus on the work. Attention is a strange thing. It needs to be wide open to gather inspiration, but then very focussed to act on that inspiration. A time for every purpose under heaven, no?
Music consists entirely of relations, 'betweenness'. The notes mean nothing in themselves: the tensions between the notes, and between notes and the silence with which they live in reciprocal indebtedness, are everything. Melody, harmony and rhythm each lie in the gaps, and yet the betweenness is only what it is because of the notes themselves. Actually the music is not just in the gaps any more than it is just in the notes: it is in the whole that the notes and the silence make together. Each note becomes transformed by the context in which it lies. What we mean by music is not just any agglomeration of notes, but one in which the whole created is powerful enough to make each note live in a new way, a way that it had never done before. Similarly poetry cannot be just any arrangement of words, but one in which each word is taken up into the new whole and made to live again in a new way, carrying us back to the world of experience, to life: poetry constitutes a 'speaking silence'. Music and poetic language are both part of the world that is delivered by the right hemisphere, the world characterised by betweenness. Perhaps it is not, after all, so wide of the mark to call the right hemisphere the 'silent' hemisphere: its utterances are implicit. - Iain McGilchrist, The Master And His Emissary
This is a first. I am now a “clubber!”
I did admire, in the face of the current administration, Mr. Saunders NYT opinion piece. Bold.
I loved seeing the op ed this morning in the paper. Sad that it had to be written…but here we are.
Sometimes I get to the point in a story where there is no more clarity. It's done. It might not be perfectly clear, but it's the best I can do; which all we can ask of anybody. Their best. Down the line there might be more work that will become clear to me but the work has to be finished and a new story born. That is where I will apply my new understanding. Rinse. Repeat.
Interesting fluid question and the thoughts it musters. I would like to say, having no idea of the protocol since I don't enter internet space often, how much I appreciate a somewhere to place these perhaps helpful thoughts for consideration, thank you for having me, for sharing your own and to our host for his.
The empty vessel seems an often used metaphor for the process of creating and I can only talk of my own experience. Whatever or wherever the flow comes from, which some describe as happening to them, the vessel has to be empty to begin with.
I'm still thinking about 'The Dwarf Pine' and the artist's need to write. When there is no liberty and no thing by which you might triangulate your position, an ant or a blown leaf or a species of tree becomes a detail, a rhythm that might draw you into its tiny existence, no bigger or smaller than your own telling you where you are, right now in the moment, your world as it is. The difficulty to find paper, a pencil stub to make a mark or write some words, to hide the thoughts somewhere they won't be found and to smuggle them out later, is the artist recognising the value of a truth to the self and maybe to others. The act of writing is grabbed liberty outside the arrangements other human beings have made for each other, jails inside jails, systems of exploitation, punishment, judgement, repression and reward.
There is a risk, a courage to being empty because it is not the most comfortable place to be. A global 'lockdown' might have brought this home to a lot of people. If the system pauses then there is a space cleared for thought, free from the burble and chatter of constant commerce and what of it, what happens in the void?
Where and how to find that emptiness, fearful and celebratory simultaneously, an existential dread in my case, aloneness, (it's a simple thing), is either self imposed or imposed on you, there is courage to place yourself in nothingness and starting from there. Shutting down and quietly becoming aware, (I have never managed meditation), sketching or making notes, feeling the sun on my face seem to be similar pathways to a place of no thing, a blank from which to start. With who I think I am out of the picture, it's my senses I have as a connection to outside of me. Letting go of who I think I am and present to others for a moment and facing my own insignificance is something we share as people, we contain opposites, we're faulty and imperfect, privileged (to have paper and a pencil), how can we keep ourselves entertained, enlightened, talking around the campfire? An experience we think is unique to us is how everybody else feels too but perhaps we might find a way of showing whatever the shared experience is from another angle, maybe someone else will nod in recognition saying I hadn't seen it quite like that and my understanding is broadened.
That's the job and the price is being with but apart from your fellows. You may only find the sweet spot by accident and only hit it once or never at all but the point is there is value in trying, making art is an act of defiance, a tiny flame that won't go out until you do and maybe the light from the flame showed something to one other person or many.
I’ve been reading Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales—devastating, brilliant. For anyone inspired by Varlam Shalamov or Aleksandar Tišma, I highly recommend “Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years” by Mihail Sebastian. It’s a journal, of course, so again we have the question—why did it engage me as deeply as great fiction?
dear george,
wonderful piece as always!
i love this: "This thing you’re calling 'heart' is, I think, a moment of real connection between reader and writer. But for that to happen, both parties need to be in agreement regarding where they are."
thank you for sharing!
love
myq
"These stories often froze up midway, because I was being puzzled by some question at their core, a question that would turn out to be answerable only by way of intense revising. That revising often felt like its purpose was to clarify: clarifying the stakes of the story, clarify the different options the character might have, to get out of the jam I’d put him in."
Yep. I'm at this stage in my craft, and can confirm that the freezing pattern will come after you as soon as you start getting more honest. Injecting heart into the work will feel intuitively "right" in the ways George describes, but may also force you to face the areas where your heart hasn't made up its mind, and invite you to become the person with the wisdom/insight to close the loop on the "question at their core" in a true and believable and compelling way. I.e., "intense revising," possibly also including revisions to yourself and your worldview (or at least clarifications of self and worldview, as George puts it, but I tend to think those are the same since newfound awareness can be quite the change).
Kelly Wilde Miller is a Substack writing coach who calls it "apprenticing to your own material": https://open.substack.com/pub/kellywildemiller/p/we-apprentice-to-our-own-material?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=17mz6p
I recently wrote about the same phenomenon; getting stuck writing a science fiction novel about growth and change that incorporates my recent divorce: https://open.substack.com/pub/takimwilliams/p/the-story-behind-the-story-2-grove?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=17mz6p
Thanks for the hope that there's light at the end of the tunnel, George!
A wonderful letter and a wonderful reponse from George. Reread, be attentive to the ideas that come from the back of the head or go bump in the night, but revise, revise, revise again - I've been practising this on one novel for three years now, and gradually the true lines of the sculpture are coming out of the clay. In the end, will it be any good? If we worried about that, we wouldn't even start out. :)
Looking forward to that novel. :)
This hit home. I never know exactly what I feel, I discover it through the prolonged act of second, third, fourth (ad nauseum) drafting when nice turns of phrase or striking images finally accrue meaning.
It’s been the hardest lesson - ‘But what is it ABOUT?’ a frustrated (and very talented, damn her) beta reader wrote about an already much edited story. Ouch. Resentfully, I turned back to the story. She was right - I’d been skirting the heart of it. I always skirt the heart of it.
But into the flames we must go.
Thank you! I can think of at least one story of mine that I feel very emotional about, and probably to its detriment. I suspect I need to cut off all (or most) traces of sentimentality. The character is trying too hard to draw pity from the readers, but it may be that the only person it draws pity from is his author!
This might be a bit tangental to the topic, but for me I feel that sometimes there is such a thing as over-revising--the sentences seem "objectively" better--they pack more punch, the adverbs have been eliminated; they show, not tell. But somehow the effort is showing. It's like the kid at the party who's immaculately dressed, and somehow making other people a bit embarrassed for him. Maybe there is a sweet spot where the "heart" or connection lies, or where the it emerges most prominently, somewhere between the first draft and the 200th one, depending on the story and the writer. (I am vague on the details, but I recall reading about a conversation between Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Maybe Dylan first asked Cohen how long it took him to write Hallelujah, and Cohen said something like a decade and then asked Dylan how long it took him to write...I forget which song, but I'm almost positive that Dylan's answer was 15 minutes. So I guess there's some wiggle room.)
Any chance anyone has a link to "The Dwarf Pine" in its native Russian? I've become a decently conversational Russian speaker and have been loving reading the English and Russian works side-by-side, Ivan Ilych in Russian broke my heart a bit, would love to do the same with Shalamov. Thanks (':
Brian Granger found this link to the Russian text and Shalamov's handwritten pages:
https://shalamov.ru/manuscripts/text/31/1.html
See Brian's comment to the May 11 post for more interesting links.
Wow! Angel! Thank you hugely, and huge thanks to Brian if he reads this
Hi Max,
Excuse the late reply... Substack is not forwarding anything for some reason. Yes, I do read it, including the handwritten pages. One can get a feeling for the way Shalamov writes, how he feels, just from looking at the manuscript pages.
I hope the Russian studies go well--it will get you thinking in new, exciting, even brilliant ways. I used to have my own Office Hours, once a week, while teaching Intermediate Russian.
Such a difficult language, especially in literary form, encountering such a plethora of unfamiliar words. Maybe I'm imagining this because my own vocabulary is rather stunted, but compared to Tolstoy, for instance, Shalamov seems to use a much more complex lexicon. Am I imagining that?
It seems like I should be able to read a Cormac McCarthy novel without wanting to throw it somewhere far away from me, but I absolutely hate his writing. Overblown, pretentious swaggering. Head hates it. Heart detests it. Is it just me…?
Interesting. I rarely understand the haters…certainly don’t elevate writers to gods, but a teacher from high school who I’m now friends with once recommended ‘Blood Meridian’ to me, and I went on to read his other works, and of late, have been talking to another friend about books I’ve been reading, he mentioned he was listening to the audiobook, which inspired me to listen to that on runs. I’d wanted to revisit it, as it aligns well with some history in reading from the time.
Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 2, that literally stopped me in my tracks on a run (punctuating and grammar mistakes are mine and not his as it’s a transcript of what I heard, not a copy and paste of the text).
“But where does a man come by his notions. What world he’s seen that he liked better
N’can think of better places and better ways
Can you make it be?
No
No, No. it’s a mystery
A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind’s is ought he has to know it with…he can know his heart, but he don’t want to, rightly so…best not to look in there
It ain’t the heart of a creature that is bound for the way god set for it, you can find meanest in the least of creatures. But when god made man, the devil was at his elbow
A creature that can do anything , make a machine and a machine to make a machine and evil that can run a thousand years, no need to tend it”
In other words, there is value, and maybe overblown to you, is just the wrong time.
Perhaps important to note, this was said after the hermit character (a former enslaver) put away a black man’s heart he’d bought for $200. I guess my point being, he connected the analytical and the heart, literally and figuratively, with this reader.
Some balance between heart and head, but always the scale on the heart side weighs a trifle more, an apprehension of some genuine emotion, arresting a shift from major to minor in music. I see trees differently since meeting Shalmanov’s pine. Heart felt…
This is a fascinating discussion! An example that comes to mind of a story in which the heart was removed Raymond Carver's story The Bath. Editor Gordon Lish chopped it up and published it as a truncated version that changed the true humanity of this great story. Later, Carver published the story the way it was written as A Small Good Thing in his collection Cathedral.
A great example, yes. It always felt to me that Lish - a good editor - was proceeding from an aspiration to minimize which, often, worked for his Carver edits. But that story (it seemed to me) needed that extra bit of exploratory courage, in order to answer the real question being asked ("Why is that baker so MEAN") and give him a chance to speak up for himself and to change. The edit that Lish did felt like it was trying to not become sentimental, but then it lost something on the way.
"Trying not to become sentimental"--a tough one--One of my several internal critics is always looking for what might be felt as sentimental--he's such a severe judge that he can really get in the way--I have to stop and ask, wait a minute, what's wrong with that feeling in there? Do you suppose that often what is condemned as sentimental, especially in revising, is simply honest, real feeling that embarrasses us?
Yes, 'exploratory courage.' Sometimes words, combined, release whole realms. The titles, too, change between the edited and unedited versions. Style, potency, trueness, truth, alignment--the rules of editing must be both individual and universal.
Yes, our MFA instructor had us read this story, along with 'Cathedral.' It's quite an exercise to look at the different versions, and seeing the power, the potency released by the editing of some of the stories, toggling between the two versions. Some of the editing is sublime, which does make me wonder how much of such edited versions are the author's own work.
This discussion reminds me of the axiom "protected and connected" --that ineffable state of being where one is connected to their feelings yet protected from ego assaults, and so is able to be present in their feelings and yet responsive to what is happening around them, no matter what. Very hard to do sometimes! But a writer who manages to achieve this state via the perfectly balanced story, is able to reach most readers, I believe, because people recognize that rarified state and respond with their own heart-felt feelings. Always trying to achieve this state...but I am somewhat cheered by my belief from my faith tradition that work performed in the spirit of service is worship. So writing work has to attain that spirit of service to humanity. Pure intentions that are elusive, but worth working to attain.
This is well put thank you Christine. "...that ineffable state of being where one is connected to their feelings yet protected from ego assaults, and so is able to be present in their feelings and yet responsive to what is happening around them." Isn't that the essence of writing fiction? I do think it really is a physical state--"where in your body do you feel this feeling" and (from Eudora Welty, I think, "Every feeling waits upon its gesture."
So, I missed the opinion piece and now too late to comment, but, I believe it made a difference. It made an important difference. The more intelligent people speak out, I think it shows what depths of dystopian stupidity this administration is mired in. Thank you. I have not been keeping up here as much as I was. When I found you on Substack I subscribed paid immediately, before people paid. This is such a brilliant place to be, Story Club.