Office Hours

From L.A.

Greetings from Los Angeles. We live right on the border of the evacuation zone, so we “fled” south, to Redondo Beach, which is where I’m writing this from.

So much incredible devastation and sadness here.

By now you’ll have seen much better photos, of much worse things, but here are some crummy anecdotal snaps of what it looked like from our perspective.

This was from right outside our place, early Tuesday evening.

Ditto - this is 15th and Montana.

From very early on, Tuesday afternoon, looking from Santa Monica toward the Palisades. We were thinking, “Is this going to be a big deal?”

We are lucky and safe and unaffected but so many are not – please, if you’re a praying person, say a few for Los Angeles and for all victims of dislocation everywhere in the world.

Mainly because I don’t know any better way of dissipating nervous energy than working…here’s our question for the week.

Hello George,

Firstly, thanks for Story Club. Thank you for all your generous advice and for being a little beacon of compassion in the way you talk about the world.

I have been using your 'method' of writing through revision. And unlike the me of one year ago, I am actually able to produce stuff. I have something to direct my energy towards and am able to put in an hour of work on my writing every day, rather than just feeling stuck. Which is brilliant.

I'm finding, though, that I tend to simply produce very smooth and refined versions of whatever I happened to spew onto the page initially. That is, I write some little story or scenario then I go through and make whatever changes leap out to me. The sentences get better, the characters' voices gets more consistent, the images become clearer and more efficient. But the meat itself never shifts.

You used the metaphor of getting some lump of clay onto the table. I keep getting a lump of clay on the table and then painting it with a fine brush.

Perhaps this has been asked before. Or perhaps it's the kind of question to which you can only shrug your shoulders. But if you have any advice or have been in this situation before, I'd appreciate your thoughts.

A.

It’s really good to hear that Story Club has been helpful in this context. And I really appreciate this question, because it gives me a chance to (try to) write about a very fine point of process about which I haven’t ever written before, I don’t think.

To pick up on your metaphor – the missing step might involve something like micro-examining that (smoother) lump of clay (that you’ve polished so well).

What are we looking for, as we do this?

Well, for me, it’s imperfections….any place where I feel even the slightest tug of dissatisfaction.

This can be: a place of illogic; a place where the language is banal or lumpy ; a place of weak signification (an under-specified place).

It’s really by feel (and this is where all my talk about the P vs. N meter originates).

But the idea is that such places are not defects, but clues – these are the places where the story is trying to tell you about a direction it would prefer to take.

As always, a disclaimer: I’m not sure this method applies for anybody else in the world – it may just be my idiosyncratic (and brain-related) way of approaching things.

But I find that if I poke at one of these slightly unsatisfying places, my idea of the story starts to give way to the story’s idea of itself.

Just as one example – I’ll sometimes have a swath of pretty clippy dialogue, that I like, but one place within it just…sags, slightly. I have to look pretty closely at my reacting mind to find, or feel, that “sag” but if I read that swath often enough, the sag starts to become undeniable, by way of the very smallest “meh” feeling.

That sag tells me…that the characters might want me to take this dialogue exchange in a slightly different direction. Practically speaking, this just involves trying out some new combinations of lines. A new line might be needed, or there’s one line too many, or this line needs to be run-in with that one. I can usually “hear” a possible change. There’s also a certain quick mental rearranging that goes on - I sort of rapidly imagine the different ways that that particular swath of text might be rearranged or restated (or compressed or eliminated).

Or I might feel, as another example, that there’s a little hitch in this bit of physical description – the analog of a slight tripping motion as I “walk along,” reading it. If I fix that (smooth out the thing that tripped me up), it often turns out that the physical world of the story changes, thus presenting new opportunities - both in terms of language and in terms of the fictive reality.

The trick in this method, of course, is for the writer to develop a sense of what a valid “tug of dissatisfaction” feels like, for them. As we all know, any bit of prose can be altered, and to just alter it blindly is to descend into Rubik’s Cube Land.

So we want to learn to distinguish the feeling of “changing this for the sake of changing it” from the feeling of “changing this because I am genuinely dissatisfied with it (albeit even very slightly).”

One fairly harmless exercise might be to randomly pull out a swath of prose from an existing story – maybe 50-100 words – and just obsess over that a bit, in the spirit of, “If I had to change one thing in here, what would it be?”

Then make that change, and see how it causes the fictive world to morph. Does the changed text, when you read it next time, suggest anything new to you? Sometimes, altering a text causes new questions to arise, or a new valence to enter the text - sometimes the characters can feel it too, and suddenly one of them will blurt something out in response to the change.

It's a very gauzy, subtle state of mind. It takes practice. But I think lingering over a relatively small swatch of text is a good way for a writer to see if this method has any appeal for them.

It might be a little like the meditative experience of sitting very still for a long time and gradually starting to hear more and see more and be aware of more happening in one’s body.

Those data were there all along, but suddenly…we’re noticing them.

So, dear questioner – the idea might be that, having polished/painted that lump of clay, to ask yourself if it is, in even the smallest of ways, suggesting any next steps? Can you detect any slight discontentment, now that everything is so clean and gleaming?

And, by the way, I do think that this sort of polishing is important - it helps us see the story at its best and this, in turn, makes those micro-dissatisfactions easier to notice - we’ve cut way down on the noise in the story.

An analogy might be this: say you hyper-clean your house. Everything is in place and polished and nicely arranged. With the clutter gone, does this suggest any larger-scale rearrangements? Is it suddenly clear, for example, that the couch is in the wrong place? Or, that a painting might be needed just there?

It’s hard to discern what a story (or section) wants to be if its in disarray. But when version 1 is all tidy, it might (might) start to waft out suggestions for version 2.

Any of this ringing any bells, Story Club?