I wrote a story once about a man and a woman who were attracted to each other, using sections with alternating viewpoints. When it was finished, I wasn’t completely happy with it, but I couldn’t have said why. After abandoning the story for a while, it occurred to me suddenly (I hadn’t realized I’d been subconsciously considering the issue) that I liked the woman, but not the man—she was funny and smart, and he was just kinda snarky and meh. I took him out and rewrote the story from just her POV. It sold right away and was later anthologized.
I think the mistake I made was being too loyal to the form I initially decided to use. The characters didn’t like it.
Great story about your story. FWIW, I too have a story with alternating male and female POVs and I'm also thinking about cutting the male. (she's more interesting and complex; his POV feels underdeveloped and the story is already over 5500 words) So thanks for sharing your example. I'll definitely try this.
I have the same story with 2 POV from the man and woman. But the man is a single dad who is boring and depressed. He has a son with magic power. I moved on to adding a POV for the son and another for a man who 'inherited' the power to the boy.
Now, I want to remove the single dad POV! Need to see how that works!
I have been working for two years on a story with two points of view. It takes place in a doctor's office where one character has taken the other, older one. The thread is the line connecting the two, and the relative blindness of the young character to the truth about the older one and her treatment of older people who are different, treatment that is prejudicial even as the two love each other. It's changed voice- quality - I want humor - and "honesty" - I had invented a too-good, ordinary old character, so I thought about some older people I know who had "shocked" me in ways that were enlightening. I remember my young puritanical self, but am now old and have loosened my expectations. That has helped. That was on the 50th rewrite. I'm letting it sit. The narrative thread, leading to a recognition at the end, remains. I had to go in and give that thread some wool. I don't know if I'm done, or ever will be, but it is a learning task for me. And yet the basic elements remain.
If you don't mind, I'd like to say this to the questioner: Keep going. Keep starting over. You are eventually going to get there. I started writing fiction in my early twenties. I had no idea what I was doing. There was no internet, no George. I didn't know where to go to take a course. But for some reason, I really, really wanted to write at least one decent short story. It meant everything to me. I didn't write that one decent short story until I was 44 years old. You do the math. That's how long it might take to figure this thing out. I hope that's not a depressing thought! What I'm trying to tell you is that you are on the path, and it may take a while. Just don't quit.
George talks a lot here in his post about revising, and maybe that's what you want to do with all the words and stories you've put on paper. If so, have at it. I'm going to offer another idea: Start at new story. But THIS time, tell yourself that the entire point of writing this new story is to write a STORY. Which means, a story that meets some of the conventions of storytelling so that when you pass along your completed draft to someone to read they recognize it for what it is. A story, like in the good old days, around the campfire. Don't worry if it's good writing or not! Don't worry if it goes out of whack as long as it comes back again. Just write a story that works. Use those conventions that no one wants to talk about because they seem so conventional. They work for a reason.
Okay, so now you may ask, well mary g. how do i write that story that works? You can do several things. You can read a story, and then use that story as a jumping off point. For instance, we have read the story The Stone Boy here. In that story, a terrible accident occurs. You can steal that idea. A terrible accident occurs, a person is shunned for it, in the end there is some kind of reconciliation. There--that's a story you can write. I'm not saying you should write all of your stories like this. I'm saying this is an exercise in finishing a story that works.
Remember that many, many stories are all about a character who wants something. Give your character something to want—a problem to solve, an accident to get out of, a bad deed they want to hide, a haircut in time for their wedding. Put your character through their paces. Eventually, as you squeeze your character into a corner, something’s gonna have to give. They’re going to have to make a character-defining decision. That’s their opportunity for change, to take or leave.
All of this is convention. But all of it could lead to a nice story that works. And then you can look at that story that you wrote that works and learn from it. Eventually you won't have to think about conventions--they will be buried in your brain; you'll use them in an automatic way instead of having them sit on the surface.
As to whether or not I've ever given up on a story. I've given up on all those stories that turned out to not be stories. Thousands of words of me expressing myself. But none of them stories. I think that's why it took me so long to get published. As soon as I began to understand what a story is, things started happening for me.
This, from Ethan Canin--an example of using a prompt to get going: "I’ve always set assignments for myself. The assignment for the story “Emperor of the Air,” for example, was to write a story in which an unlikable character becomes likable by the end. For “Accountant,” it was to write a story in which a pair of socks takes on large emotional importance."
Love this! I can get so caught up in trying to heed so many pieces of writing advice when I’m starting out, but giving oneself just one task to achieve at the beginning makes it seem less daunting.
In my imagination you've teed-up a title : "A Helpful Commentator Sticks Around".
Could be a title for a short, or maybe longer, fiction? About a 'Sports Commentator' or, perhaps, a 'Political Commentator'?
Could be a work of memoir? Conceivably written by the much loved yet ever enigmatic 'Story Clubber Mary G.'? Perhaps even inspired - stretching the elasticity of imagination - by having read P. D. James "Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography"?
Could just as likely, given that we are in a momentary realm of speculative imagining, be a playscript with a title borrowed and purposefully tweaked from J. B. Priestly's "An Inspector Calls"?
Star words Andrew; I so heartily agree; thanks to you for shootin' 'em.
Aaarrghh! Early twenties.... forty-four! I might not have enough time... way too old. But I am nonetheless thankful that I had an actual career in the arts. Not in writing, mind you (except, perhaps, grant applications).
In my dotage, I guess I'll call myself an old guy with a writing hobby. And thank you mary g. for your cogent additions to Mr. Saunders' precious advice.
I was REALLY dumb in my twenties. I didn't know about studying! I had years and years to get through, learning about life and learning how to read and study. I'm quite certain that the knowledge you've acquired at this point in your life puts you far ahead of where I was when I began. Write those stories! They are waiting for you! (Calling yourself an old guy with a writing hobby is actually a great way to take some of the pressure off of yourself.) (And thank you for the thank you. I never know if what i write here will ring true for anyone else, but it seems i can't stop myself from posting.)
Firstly, I love this response and suggestions, thank you (even though it wasn't directed at me it's spoken to me lol).
When I first started out writing I did exactly what you suggest here, and to quote Austin Kleon "Steel Like An Artist" (btw an amazing book, I highly recommend all of this work). Sometimes I take the idea as you've suggested e.g. a terrible accident, or sometimes I would take the structure and plug in different characters....this really helped me dissect how good stories are written. Sometimes I will copy out paragraphs of prose I love (often longhand in my journal) in an attempt to let their creative talent flow through me and into my writing. This also 100% helps when I feel blocked, when I can't get the words to sound how I hear them in my head!
Nicola, I'm so glad my suggestions speak to you. Copying out paragraphs of prose--I've done this myself, and I agree, it somehow works. You sort of, I don't know...become one with the words! You really hear them, read them, feel them.
Ah Mary - once again your arrow splits GS's in two, both firmly in the bullseye. I often forget it's meant to be a story. I need to tell it round the campfire before I start writing it!
Hello! I have so many thoughts, and will have to come back later when some of them are more cogent, but I want to immediately say one true thing: You are a writer.
You are a writer. You are writing, you are a writer.
I'm not being coy, or cute. And I do hear you in regards to wanting to be published (oh, do I hear you, for real). And I hear your struggles with the writing process – I have similar ones, and will come back tell you all about my Incredible Shrinking Novel, which throughout the course of the pandemic grew to 40 pages, collapsed into 20, collapsed further into 6, took several detours, and now is technically probably close to 40 again, but loosely/barely connected. It's set in WW2. I've never written historical fiction before. I'm overwhelmed. I have imposter syndrome. I flail. I stop writing. I write 25 words here and there. Sometimes I can see the plot in front of me. Sometimes it collapsed in on itself. This is my second novel. The first one is not published. I queried 80 agents, got 2 full requests and 2 nos. I have an MA and PhD in English & creative writing. It took me 8 years to finish one short story. Another I wrote in three days. I have piles of work in progress, stories I'm shopping around. It's a mess. Sometimes I'M a mess (more often than not). Nothing is smooth, nothing is neat. Half the time I feel hopeless. Sometimes I am floored and thrilled with what is possible for me to write. Sometimes I have a habit and a consistent work ethic. Sometimes what I write is terrible. Sometimes it is hard to believe in myself and the work that I do. But I'm a writer. It's just a part of me. I will always do it, because even when I hate it, even when I'm sure I'm taking the long way round, I love it. I just do.
You write: "My plot rises into action and then falls again into exposition, rises and then falls, looking less like Freytag's Pyramid and more like the vital signs of someone on life support. To be honest, I don't feel like I'm in control of my stories at all. Instead, I try to coax the story out one sentence at a time. One wall that I frequently run into is I create these interesting characters (interesting to me, anyways), and the exposition of the story seems to steep them in all this potential energy, but, as I try to convert this potential energy into kinetic action, it gets confusing and disjointed or, as happened to me in my most recent story, I get to the end of the story before I get to the climax! I don't know what I'm doing wrong."
You're a writer. You just are.
There are different ways to work with early drafting, with revising. There are different approaches and processes you can try. But don't ever doubt that you're a writer. You just are. You already said so - and showed us - with your words.
Whoever you are, Office Hours Questioner, give yourself some credit. You know more than you think you do & know plenty about how, exactly, to tell a story---the evidence is in your very question & in its articulate expression. Are you sure you're not just standing in your own way? The reason I ask is that I struggled similarly (in fact earlier this year during Office Hours I posed a similar question about when & if to abandon a story, which George, generously as always, took up), and struggle still. Because there really is no end to the struggle. (Get used to it!) But here's something that helped me enormously, relieving me of the enormous burden of having to know everything all at once. And wondering why stories can start out so well & then fizzle & then re-ignite & then, damn it, fizzle again. It comes from Ethan Canin, a brilliant story writer (who has not published enough, in my opinion), and who taught for several years at Iowa. His advice was, basically, to get out of your own way (or your head) & to be the character, to deeply imagine somebody else. Emphasis on deeply! Everything else, he said, takes care of itself, falls into place. I truly believe he's right. That's because we already know how to tell stories---it's ingrained & can't be helped. It's part of our biology. We already know what to do, we just don't allow ourselves to do it. Here's Canin: "A writer's lifelong battle. . . is to sustain the imagination, to discover the tricks of habit that allow invention to proceed in the face of conformity." Faced with a deadline to produce in order to receive his MFA (also from Iowa) but totally blanked and panicked, Canin "[S]imply tried to write the beginning of a minor episode. I had no idea where the episode would go, but I started by imaging a man whose neighbor wants to cut down his elm tree. Nothing more. No hopes. No messages. No finale." The events in that story ("Emperor of the Air", which is one of my absolute favorite stories) led one to the next because, as Canin put it, he'd written as a "follower, not as a leader". A story's path, as Canin put it, "is a maze, and the writer is not above it but inside it." I would add deeply inside. I don't know if this will help you any, Questioner, but it did much for me---and I hope it will for you. Everything about my writing shifted once I (finally!) grasped that idea: I, like you, already knew what to do. The issue was one of imagination, then (as it often is). I started work on a series of stories, totally absorbed in imagining the other, just trying to deeply imagine the character, & nothing else, trusting that everything else would take care of itself. I've been publishing some of the results, the latest in the recent issue of New Letters & in a few other places, but more than the publishing, which of course has been lovely, it's the satisfaction of knowing that I have come into the story. And I came into it because I was never out of it. It sounds to me, Questioner, that you're already into it, too---you just don't know it. As I say, anyone who can write as movingly as you have in posing your questions already knows. You know plenty! You do!!
Thank you for this. I started writing short stories partly as a result of this site and everyone's posts on here. There was something so amazing knowing that other people were out there, grappling with the same problems as me. I have only written a few stories so far. They seem to grow like shrubs in the garden. And each time, exactly like you say, as I redraft, the story seems to ask me to think more deeply about the character. That is really helping me move towards a draft I find more satisfying - and touching perhaps.
It was great to read something I have been feeling described so well so thank you. I have appreciated many posts here and been inspired by many but today I felt moved to comment. I lurk but I love the sense of writers community here.
Love the Ethan Canin advice, Rosanne. Sometimes I try switching from third to first person, or letting my protagonist write to me, telling me what is wrong with how I see them. I wonder now if those exercises work for me because they help me 'deeply imagine being someone else' and get closer to the honesty of their experience: less observer, more in the mud with them. I'm going to hold that thought in my head when I sit down to write.
The poet and novelist, James Dickey, said if a story, idea, thought keeps haunting him, eating at him over time, and he can't shake it, he knew it held a charge that might make a good poem or book. That was his criterion, and I've found that it is mine. I might not even want to write it initially, but if it keeps bugging me and won't leave me alone, I know it is my story, and I must write it, and it usually works out well. What it then becomes, is what you bring to it and how hard you work on it. And if that's the case, I never give up on the story. It's as if it chose me, like they say you don't get to chose who you fall in love with, and there is no such thing as giving up on what is yours and chose you. It may not be everything you wanted it to be when you started it, but you give your level best to make it so.
I've been experimenting with propagating pothos plants recently. The process of cutting off one stem in the hopes of growing a new plant reminds me of an anecdote that you (or another writer?) shared, where you completed a story by revisiting an old, long since incomplete draft, lobbing off 99% of it, and using one promising line of voice to start a brand new story. It quells the anxiety I get looking at my overflowing discard pile to know that any one of those failures may one day reveal a gem of prose that I can propagate.
An example: I once gave up on an aimless story that had gone on for 8000+ words with no sign of stopping. It was a hopeless, meandering monster that expanded exponentially without climax. When I closed the file for the final time, I distinctly remember thinking it was the worst thing I'd ever written. However, upon revisiting three years later, I found myself unexpectedly delighted while re-reading it. It was far from perfect, but the joy it sparked buoyed me into reviving it into a terrible first draft of a novel.
So long as I refuse the frequent impulse to shred my documents, delete my files, and light my laptop on fire and throw it into the river while revising, then I figure the drafts I've given up on are never truly given up on.
But if you did light the laptop on fire and throw it into the river...that’d be a hell of a story. You could write it longhand (since you wouldn’t have the laptop)
I have a story that suffers the same problem, and like you, I abandoned it. I am very fond of the story, but it ain't short! And the idea of pressing on with it as a novel is so daunting that I'll need another approach. This post by Mr. Saunders points to several possible "solutions" to attempt. Never say die; I'll have to go back into it.
I just had a short story rejected by a magazine. This is when I'm overwhelmed by self-doubt. I thought the story was good, maybe great, but it...might not be good or great. It might be a failure. Is it salvageable? Do I have the confidence to reevaluate the story and begin the brutal edit? This is when the desire to abandon the story is strongest. I have previously abandoned stories after rejections. Ugh.
You, Sherman, wrote "a magazine". Rejected by "a" magazine. If the piles in my workroom/office/scriptorium plus our living room, front hall, & bedside tables are any indication, then I believe there may be more then one magazine, one of which I'd bet would be delighted to have your story. Just sayin'
Then again, the story very well may be good. Even great. There are a zillion reasons that one magazine may have rejected you, some of them having nothing to do with the story.
Yes, that could be true but, in thinking abiut George's answer to the question about giving up on a story, this is an example of when those doubts hit me.
Ugh, this is a tough one. I submitted what I thought was one of my best stories to a contest & was auto rejected with no comment at all. But I had a story that was rejected in 5 places and then one magazine published it, saying she loved it. I've learned that many rejections have nothing to do with the quality of the story. Maybe you could send it to a few more places as is. If you think the story was great, chances are some editor will too. Of course, if you were lucky enough to get notes along with the rejection, you may want to do some edits based on those. Good luck.
One of my friends has said that even if your story is rejected, every submission is a chance to win another fan. Even if the editors can't use that particular story at that moment, you may catch someone's interest in a way that will lead to something good later.
I love this question and topic. Yes, I've abandoned stories. But I've un-abandoned them too. I once had a story I'd been sending out, and it was getting good ink, but no one was publishing it. I put it on the shelf. A few years later, I pulled it off the shelf, revised (even referencing something I learned while the story was on the shelf), workshopped it, and got this new version published finally. It was even nominated for a Pushcart--my first. A couple weeks ago, I pulled out another story (similar: getting good ink, but no one was taking it.) This other story was 6500 words. An editor had told me for their pub, 5000 words is the sweet spot. So, I decided to see if I could get the word count down. This time I skimmed part of Matt Bell's "Refuse to Be Done." (the last third talks about strategies for polishing). He has a page full of "weasel words" -- words that suck the life out of the words near them. When I did a "find" on my doc, I was horrified how often I used those words. They all didn't need to be cut but they often pointed to a sentence that could be rewritten to be stronger. Anyway...the "weasel words" exercise helped me to get beyond that ossified sense of the story. I started cutting words here and there, then sentences. On the third read-through, I could see how the pace dragged about four pages in. After fixing that, I saw a later scene with internal monologue that wasn't getting at the primary concern for the char. It felt kind of amazing. But cutting the dross I could see the story more clearly. This draft is done. It's now 5200 words and feels much tighter. I've set it aside and will run it past my writing group next month but...I guess the point is that even when we've bailed on a story, it's possible to come back later with fresh eyes. Robert Boswell once said that one of his goals of revising is to keep the story fresh for him, as a writer.
One framing that's helped me is distinguishing between mechanism and plot.
Every story needs mechanisms. You can't write normal fiction about nothing happening - you either end up with extraordinarily inorganic exposition, works that are not traditional stories (though there's nothing wrong with this - one of the best things I've written is a fictional manifesto of sorts - it's probably not what you want, either), or, well, philosophizing (which is rather like attempting to prove the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture in the middle of your story - if you pull it off, great, but you're probably going to fail at producing anything nontrivial, considering most fiction authors are neither trained mathematicians nor philosophers [though more of them should be!]).
Not every story needs plot. In fact, there is a case to be made that the best literary works of our era are so precisely because of their plotlessness - or, e.g. with Gaddis, because their plots are so incredibly stupid that one might simply disregard them.
You seem to write quite like I do, and Mallarme did, in that you are focused on microstructures: the way words sound together, perfection (or as close to it as one can get) on the level of sentences, not stories or even paragraphs. It seems like what might be afflicting you is that you are attempting to synthesize this style with some extremely macrostructural concepts: Freytag's triangle, kinetic energy, exposition, etc. Of course this is possible, but it is, as most such syntheses (Ginzburg-Landau + BCS, maybe?), not easy. I would contend that no author has done this satisfactorily yet - for this would, in a sense, be equivalent to writing a prose poem at Mallarmean standards that is also a novel, which as far as I know no one has done.
So mechanism, as a microstructural concept (what is happening at this instant? not where it leads, not where it came from), might be a good point to focus on. In other words, don't judge yourself by rubrics that aren't apt for your particular style. If you can chain together a series of happenings in a way that coheres (easier said than done, I know), you have yourself a story.
How do you focus on microstructure? Here are three points from my experience.
I remember reading somewhere or the other (Edmund Wilson?) that Joyce would write disparate sections of Ulysses (the paragon of microstructural novels, in a way) in parallel - not edit them in this way, which everyone does, but actually write them disjointedly. This prevents you from trying to luck yourself into a plot, and forces you to rely on short-term mechanisms instead of long, cross-story action (though you will still have threads uniting your story, these will be based on character and whatever motifs you select). This also ensures a degree of coherence in your writing, because you're coalescing everything simultaneously, instead of trying to extrude a string of material as far as it will go.
If you're still struggling to unite sections of a work, write more, not less. Keep going until you find the mechanism that will tie up the strands your previous mechanisms have created. I generally have no idea how my 7-8k word stories will finish until I'm 5-6k words in - in part, because the problem of tying things together hasn't been set until then! If you are having trouble with this problem at, say, 5k words, adding another scene will change the problem you have been set, possibly making it easier to find an answer. And if you have already found an answer, well, keep writing anyway until you find a problem with a better answer.
Finally, listen to classical music. Composers in that tradition are invariably masters at transitions, at uniting disparate thematic material into a cohesive whole, and studying how they do this is surprisingly applicable to literature, in a way I can't really articulate. I will just say that I have been reading the score of, analyzing, and listening to the Kreutzer Sonata for my current work, and everything I write has become so much tighter - I intuitively understand a little better how to put elements into their place, how much I should write between mechanisms, between points within each mechanism, et cetera.
Right about the music. I listen a lot, and though the effect is indirect, it is there. Listening to a concerto, the interaction between solo and orchestra, the dialogue between two instruments, the power in Beethoven's symphonies and his violin concerto, feed into my imagination. An artist can always learn from or at least reflect on another art form. I have written a story called Transfigured Night inspired by Schonberg's piece, which also was inspired by a poem by Richard Dehmel, to find that my story actually mirrors the poem!
I'm sure I don't understand everything you're saying here, but I find myself nodding as I read. I especially like the story about Joyce's techniques or processes. Thank you for it. I'm going to give it more thought, although probably not while I'm trying to fix a specific story problem!
I sometimes find that if I am having difficulty writing, I need to search in myself what deep emotions are there, that the section of writing is reflecting or engaging without me knowing. As Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk says: When I write, I have to feel everything inside myself. I have to let all the living beings and objects that appear in the book go through me, everything that is human and beyond human, everything that is living and not endowed with life. I have to take a close look at each thing and person, with the greatest solemnity, and personify them inside myself, personalize them.
Love her "Drive Your Plow" ... this also reminds me of George saying, "What does this character, this story, have to tell me now?" Or words to that effect.
Dear George, thanks so much for this post and for all your kind insightful comments. I've been a lurker, reading these posts when I find the time. I caught up on some this weekend. That, combined with this particularly just-what-I-needed-to-hear post, helped me to make the decision to make time for reading these posts and the chat and being fully engaged. I just upgraded to paid. Thanks again for doing this. I'm hoping/assuming some of this will appear in your next craft book someday, "Office Hours"??? Much metta, Patti
i love "A hitter can be telling himself, 'Become one with the ball!' even as it zings right past him."
and
"The Yoda-like answer might be something like: 'Yes, exactly. When do you?' ('When do you?')"
and
"What a tough problem. I’m still working on that myself"
very much!
in answer to your generous questions at the end, i am more of a standup comedian than a traditional short story writer, but i think there is a commonality in the question. when do i give up on a joke? one answer is "sometimes." but a more thorough answer is that i never knowingly give up on a particular joke or idea FOREVER. i always have lots of ideas in lots of notebooks and files and my brain and sometimes i'll set one aside FOR A TIME. and sometimes years later, the time comes to revisit that specific idea, because so much in my life or the world has changed and the way forward becomes clear, where once it seemed impossible. so for myself, i frame the idea not as giving up on one particular creative path, but as choosing to follow a different one. what am i saying YES to, as opposed to what am i saying no to. if that makes sense.
Jokes are harder, I think. Stand-up comedians can die up there, on stage. If a writer dies on the page, sitting down, there's always a chance to revise.
I have written a beginning to a story that I like very much - but it's been changed and polished probably too much, only because I don't know what to do next. So I keep going back to fix what I already have, and that makes it even harder somehow to move ahead. I think I got ahead of myself, refining language until it became so set that I can't easily go forward. Someone suggested that I make this the end of the story, and now I get to work on the beginning and the middle and then try to make it all connect. It's counter-intuitive, but worth a try.
Thanks for sharing! I don’t know if jokes are harder to write than stories but it is true that to succeed in comedy it takes failing publicly. But I will say that standup offers a chance to revise as well, night after night. Once you publish a book, that’s it! But once I do a show, I can keep revising show after show as long as I want. So, I think they’re different, and we get to choose our form of challenge. For me, writing jokes is easier than writing stories because I’ve been doing it for longer. But I can understand that for others, it might be the reverse. Thanks again for sharing!
I don't so much abandon things as set them aside for later, sometimes a lot later! And I also like to have a few starts going at once. If I can't seem to make headway on one, there's another I can try. In short anything I can do in the way of writing that makes me feel good is helpful, I think. Spending long moments in discouragement is not.
It takes time to find the approaches that work for you.
Agreed! I have gone back to pieces after ten-plus years, including stories I had thought were done. I’m not sure if I’ll ever know if I’ve given up on a story until I’m dead.
George says what most people say when asked for rules for good writing: "there are no rules." Somehow (ie. by being specific) he makes this a more helpful comment than it usually is.
I've bailed on stories, I'm sure I have. Though, I'm not sure what we mean by "bailing" really. For those of us who aren't published, what does "bailing" even mean? I've set stories aside. Have I deleted them from my hard-drive? No. They're still sitting there, haunting me every now and then. I've left the possibility of returning to them alive. But based on my current projections, that returning likely won't happen. I don't give myself enough time to work on the stories I tell myself I'm actually working on!
This leads me to another thing I appreciate about George and what he does with Story Club. With every post, he encourages. I had a creative writing prof take on a similar approach once, and at the time I found it a little annoying. I wanted clearer instruction. But what I'm learning here is that the artform doesn't afford clear instruction. (Thank God) there's no formula to follow. You just have to do it. George Saunders should be sponsored by Nike.
This comment is aimed at myself just as much as it is to anyone else.
I’m so glad the writer asked this question—and so glad to read George’s answer. I am working on a story now and am trying to make the beginning and the end align. I’ve found that when I’m moving in the wrong direction, that’s the day’s stopping point. I often see a new path the next day (or in the next writing session, which, to be honest, is often not the next day).
I once wrote a story that mattered to me. I couldn’t figure out how to trim it below 9,000 words, but I knew it wasn’t a 9,000 word story. I gave up on it. I found it years later and realized what I was including that was absolutely unnecessary. It was published at 5,000 words. Perhaps giving up is really just putting a place marker in the brain.
Nice. I had a similar experience. In 2012 I got my first story published. In my writing workshop I had originally presented it as a 29 page story. Final draft to the magazine: 13 pages.
I was listening to a snippet of a Judy Blume interview when they asked what she was thinking when she had written Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. And her answer, and I’m paraphrasing, was that she had no clue what she was doing, she said she knew nothing about writing, and said “I just had all this stuff inside of me and it spilled out.” And the rest is history of course. But I think there are a lot of people who have so much inside that they could spill out but they don’t. They are afraid, or they overthink. I say just write. And keep on writing. Spill it out then go back and refine and edit and erase then add. The only way through is through it seems. And I have read such interesting thoughts on this blog/workgroup. So many good writers abound! A sea of words is a lovely thing.
I’m not sure why, but this posting was so life-giving.
In any case, I think a pivotal point for me was learning to focus on the internal logic and cadence of a story, versus having a vague story idea that I think I’ll clarify through writing. Per George’s influence, I think I’ve become less attached to the initial impetus that began the story. But it makes the writing (and, hopefully, reading) of the story that much more fun. If a particular character or event seems unusually beguiling and in need of more attention, I don’t have to feel like I’m “getting off track” to pursue that. I now give myself full clearance to pursue, and I usually end up being more pleased with the end result.
I’m not sure if anyone else can speak to/relate to this experience, but sometimes I think I approach a short story the same way I do a poem, and that doesn’t seem to work. With a poem, it is trying to capture in some tangible way the initially ineffable origin of it; with writing, it seems more like being willing to set out on a journey and trusting yourself that you’ll have the tools to be able to cope along the way.
I wrote a story once about a man and a woman who were attracted to each other, using sections with alternating viewpoints. When it was finished, I wasn’t completely happy with it, but I couldn’t have said why. After abandoning the story for a while, it occurred to me suddenly (I hadn’t realized I’d been subconsciously considering the issue) that I liked the woman, but not the man—she was funny and smart, and he was just kinda snarky and meh. I took him out and rewrote the story from just her POV. It sold right away and was later anthologized.
I think the mistake I made was being too loyal to the form I initially decided to use. The characters didn’t like it.
Great story about your story. FWIW, I too have a story with alternating male and female POVs and I'm also thinking about cutting the male. (she's more interesting and complex; his POV feels underdeveloped and the story is already over 5500 words) So thanks for sharing your example. I'll definitely try this.
I have the same story with 2 POV from the man and woman. But the man is a single dad who is boring and depressed. He has a son with magic power. I moved on to adding a POV for the son and another for a man who 'inherited' the power to the boy.
Now, I want to remove the single dad POV! Need to see how that works!
Thank you James for sharing.
You have to listen to the characters sometime James and then listen to yourself when you edit. Try rewriting it from your heart. good luck
Funny story =)
I have been working for two years on a story with two points of view. It takes place in a doctor's office where one character has taken the other, older one. The thread is the line connecting the two, and the relative blindness of the young character to the truth about the older one and her treatment of older people who are different, treatment that is prejudicial even as the two love each other. It's changed voice- quality - I want humor - and "honesty" - I had invented a too-good, ordinary old character, so I thought about some older people I know who had "shocked" me in ways that were enlightening. I remember my young puritanical self, but am now old and have loosened my expectations. That has helped. That was on the 50th rewrite. I'm letting it sit. The narrative thread, leading to a recognition at the end, remains. I had to go in and give that thread some wool. I don't know if I'm done, or ever will be, but it is a learning task for me. And yet the basic elements remain.
Touché. Good example.
love this!
If you don't mind, I'd like to say this to the questioner: Keep going. Keep starting over. You are eventually going to get there. I started writing fiction in my early twenties. I had no idea what I was doing. There was no internet, no George. I didn't know where to go to take a course. But for some reason, I really, really wanted to write at least one decent short story. It meant everything to me. I didn't write that one decent short story until I was 44 years old. You do the math. That's how long it might take to figure this thing out. I hope that's not a depressing thought! What I'm trying to tell you is that you are on the path, and it may take a while. Just don't quit.
George talks a lot here in his post about revising, and maybe that's what you want to do with all the words and stories you've put on paper. If so, have at it. I'm going to offer another idea: Start at new story. But THIS time, tell yourself that the entire point of writing this new story is to write a STORY. Which means, a story that meets some of the conventions of storytelling so that when you pass along your completed draft to someone to read they recognize it for what it is. A story, like in the good old days, around the campfire. Don't worry if it's good writing or not! Don't worry if it goes out of whack as long as it comes back again. Just write a story that works. Use those conventions that no one wants to talk about because they seem so conventional. They work for a reason.
Okay, so now you may ask, well mary g. how do i write that story that works? You can do several things. You can read a story, and then use that story as a jumping off point. For instance, we have read the story The Stone Boy here. In that story, a terrible accident occurs. You can steal that idea. A terrible accident occurs, a person is shunned for it, in the end there is some kind of reconciliation. There--that's a story you can write. I'm not saying you should write all of your stories like this. I'm saying this is an exercise in finishing a story that works.
Remember that many, many stories are all about a character who wants something. Give your character something to want—a problem to solve, an accident to get out of, a bad deed they want to hide, a haircut in time for their wedding. Put your character through their paces. Eventually, as you squeeze your character into a corner, something’s gonna have to give. They’re going to have to make a character-defining decision. That’s their opportunity for change, to take or leave.
All of this is convention. But all of it could lead to a nice story that works. And then you can look at that story that you wrote that works and learn from it. Eventually you won't have to think about conventions--they will be buried in your brain; you'll use them in an automatic way instead of having them sit on the surface.
As to whether or not I've ever given up on a story. I've given up on all those stories that turned out to not be stories. Thousands of words of me expressing myself. But none of them stories. I think that's why it took me so long to get published. As soon as I began to understand what a story is, things started happening for me.
This, from Ethan Canin--an example of using a prompt to get going: "I’ve always set assignments for myself. The assignment for the story “Emperor of the Air,” for example, was to write a story in which an unlikable character becomes likable by the end. For “Accountant,” it was to write a story in which a pair of socks takes on large emotional importance."
Love this! I can get so caught up in trying to heed so many pieces of writing advice when I’m starting out, but giving oneself just one task to achieve at the beginning makes it seem less daunting.
I think that's a great idea!
You're a very helpful commenter, mary. Thanks for sticking around.
Isn't that the truth? Man. Thanks, Mary.
Oh, that's so nice, Andrew. Thanks so much.
Neat Andrew.
In my imagination you've teed-up a title : "A Helpful Commentator Sticks Around".
Could be a title for a short, or maybe longer, fiction? About a 'Sports Commentator' or, perhaps, a 'Political Commentator'?
Could be a work of memoir? Conceivably written by the much loved yet ever enigmatic 'Story Clubber Mary G.'? Perhaps even inspired - stretching the elasticity of imagination - by having read P. D. James "Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography"?
Could just as likely, given that we are in a momentary realm of speculative imagining, be a playscript with a title borrowed and purposefully tweaked from J. B. Priestly's "An Inspector Calls"?
Star words Andrew; I so heartily agree; thanks to you for shootin' 'em.
Aaarrghh! Early twenties.... forty-four! I might not have enough time... way too old. But I am nonetheless thankful that I had an actual career in the arts. Not in writing, mind you (except, perhaps, grant applications).
In my dotage, I guess I'll call myself an old guy with a writing hobby. And thank you mary g. for your cogent additions to Mr. Saunders' precious advice.
I was REALLY dumb in my twenties. I didn't know about studying! I had years and years to get through, learning about life and learning how to read and study. I'm quite certain that the knowledge you've acquired at this point in your life puts you far ahead of where I was when I began. Write those stories! They are waiting for you! (Calling yourself an old guy with a writing hobby is actually a great way to take some of the pressure off of yourself.) (And thank you for the thank you. I never know if what i write here will ring true for anyone else, but it seems i can't stop myself from posting.)
Fantastic response!!!
Thank you... and I didn’t even ask the question!
Oh, thank you, Marcy!
Sound advice Mary thanks
Firstly, I love this response and suggestions, thank you (even though it wasn't directed at me it's spoken to me lol).
When I first started out writing I did exactly what you suggest here, and to quote Austin Kleon "Steel Like An Artist" (btw an amazing book, I highly recommend all of this work). Sometimes I take the idea as you've suggested e.g. a terrible accident, or sometimes I would take the structure and plug in different characters....this really helped me dissect how good stories are written. Sometimes I will copy out paragraphs of prose I love (often longhand in my journal) in an attempt to let their creative talent flow through me and into my writing. This also 100% helps when I feel blocked, when I can't get the words to sound how I hear them in my head!
Nicola, I'm so glad my suggestions speak to you. Copying out paragraphs of prose--I've done this myself, and I agree, it somehow works. You sort of, I don't know...become one with the words! You really hear them, read them, feel them.
Ah Mary - once again your arrow splits GS's in two, both firmly in the bullseye. I often forget it's meant to be a story. I need to tell it round the campfire before I start writing it!
"I often forget it's meant to be a story." This used to happen to me over and over.
I am just in love with this advice. Made me tear up. Thank you for continuing on.
So so true... Self-expression disguised as stories... Yep that's very familiar! Well-expressed Mary G.
Yeah. Exactly. Practice the craft. Write write write. Read. Repeat.
Hello! I have so many thoughts, and will have to come back later when some of them are more cogent, but I want to immediately say one true thing: You are a writer.
You are a writer. You are writing, you are a writer.
I'm not being coy, or cute. And I do hear you in regards to wanting to be published (oh, do I hear you, for real). And I hear your struggles with the writing process – I have similar ones, and will come back tell you all about my Incredible Shrinking Novel, which throughout the course of the pandemic grew to 40 pages, collapsed into 20, collapsed further into 6, took several detours, and now is technically probably close to 40 again, but loosely/barely connected. It's set in WW2. I've never written historical fiction before. I'm overwhelmed. I have imposter syndrome. I flail. I stop writing. I write 25 words here and there. Sometimes I can see the plot in front of me. Sometimes it collapsed in on itself. This is my second novel. The first one is not published. I queried 80 agents, got 2 full requests and 2 nos. I have an MA and PhD in English & creative writing. It took me 8 years to finish one short story. Another I wrote in three days. I have piles of work in progress, stories I'm shopping around. It's a mess. Sometimes I'M a mess (more often than not). Nothing is smooth, nothing is neat. Half the time I feel hopeless. Sometimes I am floored and thrilled with what is possible for me to write. Sometimes I have a habit and a consistent work ethic. Sometimes what I write is terrible. Sometimes it is hard to believe in myself and the work that I do. But I'm a writer. It's just a part of me. I will always do it, because even when I hate it, even when I'm sure I'm taking the long way round, I love it. I just do.
You write: "My plot rises into action and then falls again into exposition, rises and then falls, looking less like Freytag's Pyramid and more like the vital signs of someone on life support. To be honest, I don't feel like I'm in control of my stories at all. Instead, I try to coax the story out one sentence at a time. One wall that I frequently run into is I create these interesting characters (interesting to me, anyways), and the exposition of the story seems to steep them in all this potential energy, but, as I try to convert this potential energy into kinetic action, it gets confusing and disjointed or, as happened to me in my most recent story, I get to the end of the story before I get to the climax! I don't know what I'm doing wrong."
You're a writer. You just are.
There are different ways to work with early drafting, with revising. There are different approaches and processes you can try. But don't ever doubt that you're a writer. You just are. You already said so - and showed us - with your words.
I agree 100%!
I love everything you said!!
All so true .
How often we need to be reminded of this!
Myself included, haha!
Whoever you are, Office Hours Questioner, give yourself some credit. You know more than you think you do & know plenty about how, exactly, to tell a story---the evidence is in your very question & in its articulate expression. Are you sure you're not just standing in your own way? The reason I ask is that I struggled similarly (in fact earlier this year during Office Hours I posed a similar question about when & if to abandon a story, which George, generously as always, took up), and struggle still. Because there really is no end to the struggle. (Get used to it!) But here's something that helped me enormously, relieving me of the enormous burden of having to know everything all at once. And wondering why stories can start out so well & then fizzle & then re-ignite & then, damn it, fizzle again. It comes from Ethan Canin, a brilliant story writer (who has not published enough, in my opinion), and who taught for several years at Iowa. His advice was, basically, to get out of your own way (or your head) & to be the character, to deeply imagine somebody else. Emphasis on deeply! Everything else, he said, takes care of itself, falls into place. I truly believe he's right. That's because we already know how to tell stories---it's ingrained & can't be helped. It's part of our biology. We already know what to do, we just don't allow ourselves to do it. Here's Canin: "A writer's lifelong battle. . . is to sustain the imagination, to discover the tricks of habit that allow invention to proceed in the face of conformity." Faced with a deadline to produce in order to receive his MFA (also from Iowa) but totally blanked and panicked, Canin "[S]imply tried to write the beginning of a minor episode. I had no idea where the episode would go, but I started by imaging a man whose neighbor wants to cut down his elm tree. Nothing more. No hopes. No messages. No finale." The events in that story ("Emperor of the Air", which is one of my absolute favorite stories) led one to the next because, as Canin put it, he'd written as a "follower, not as a leader". A story's path, as Canin put it, "is a maze, and the writer is not above it but inside it." I would add deeply inside. I don't know if this will help you any, Questioner, but it did much for me---and I hope it will for you. Everything about my writing shifted once I (finally!) grasped that idea: I, like you, already knew what to do. The issue was one of imagination, then (as it often is). I started work on a series of stories, totally absorbed in imagining the other, just trying to deeply imagine the character, & nothing else, trusting that everything else would take care of itself. I've been publishing some of the results, the latest in the recent issue of New Letters & in a few other places, but more than the publishing, which of course has been lovely, it's the satisfaction of knowing that I have come into the story. And I came into it because I was never out of it. It sounds to me, Questioner, that you're already into it, too---you just don't know it. As I say, anyone who can write as movingly as you have in posing your questions already knows. You know plenty! You do!!
Thank you for this. I started writing short stories partly as a result of this site and everyone's posts on here. There was something so amazing knowing that other people were out there, grappling with the same problems as me. I have only written a few stories so far. They seem to grow like shrubs in the garden. And each time, exactly like you say, as I redraft, the story seems to ask me to think more deeply about the character. That is really helping me move towards a draft I find more satisfying - and touching perhaps.
It was great to read something I have been feeling described so well so thank you. I have appreciated many posts here and been inspired by many but today I felt moved to comment. I lurk but I love the sense of writers community here.
I like this comment so much. It's helping me, too!
Thank you for this, I needed to hear it today.
Love the Ethan Canin advice, Rosanne. Sometimes I try switching from third to first person, or letting my protagonist write to me, telling me what is wrong with how I see them. I wonder now if those exercises work for me because they help me 'deeply imagine being someone else' and get closer to the honesty of their experience: less observer, more in the mud with them. I'm going to hold that thought in my head when I sit down to write.
Nice. Yes. Agree. Deep involvement in your characters = immersion = organic story
The poet and novelist, James Dickey, said if a story, idea, thought keeps haunting him, eating at him over time, and he can't shake it, he knew it held a charge that might make a good poem or book. That was his criterion, and I've found that it is mine. I might not even want to write it initially, but if it keeps bugging me and won't leave me alone, I know it is my story, and I must write it, and it usually works out well. What it then becomes, is what you bring to it and how hard you work on it. And if that's the case, I never give up on the story. It's as if it chose me, like they say you don't get to chose who you fall in love with, and there is no such thing as giving up on what is yours and chose you. It may not be everything you wanted it to be when you started it, but you give your level best to make it so.
Love that
I've been experimenting with propagating pothos plants recently. The process of cutting off one stem in the hopes of growing a new plant reminds me of an anecdote that you (or another writer?) shared, where you completed a story by revisiting an old, long since incomplete draft, lobbing off 99% of it, and using one promising line of voice to start a brand new story. It quells the anxiety I get looking at my overflowing discard pile to know that any one of those failures may one day reveal a gem of prose that I can propagate.
An example: I once gave up on an aimless story that had gone on for 8000+ words with no sign of stopping. It was a hopeless, meandering monster that expanded exponentially without climax. When I closed the file for the final time, I distinctly remember thinking it was the worst thing I'd ever written. However, upon revisiting three years later, I found myself unexpectedly delighted while re-reading it. It was far from perfect, but the joy it sparked buoyed me into reviving it into a terrible first draft of a novel.
So long as I refuse the frequent impulse to shred my documents, delete my files, and light my laptop on fire and throw it into the river while revising, then I figure the drafts I've given up on are never truly given up on.
But if you did light the laptop on fire and throw it into the river...that’d be a hell of a story. You could write it longhand (since you wouldn’t have the laptop)
I have a story that suffers the same problem, and like you, I abandoned it. I am very fond of the story, but it ain't short! And the idea of pressing on with it as a novel is so daunting that I'll need another approach. This post by Mr. Saunders points to several possible "solutions" to attempt. Never say die; I'll have to go back into it.
I just had a short story rejected by a magazine. This is when I'm overwhelmed by self-doubt. I thought the story was good, maybe great, but it...might not be good or great. It might be a failure. Is it salvageable? Do I have the confidence to reevaluate the story and begin the brutal edit? This is when the desire to abandon the story is strongest. I have previously abandoned stories after rejections. Ugh.
This is why I come to your writing regularly, Sherman: honesty.
Thank you, Andrew.
You, Sherman, wrote "a magazine". Rejected by "a" magazine. If the piles in my workroom/office/scriptorium plus our living room, front hall, & bedside tables are any indication, then I believe there may be more then one magazine, one of which I'd bet would be delighted to have your story. Just sayin'
Maybe I should've written "the" magazine! Ha!
Ah, heck, whadda they know. Really.
Hahahahhaha. I'll try again with the next story! Never quit, never surrender!
Then again, the story very well may be good. Even great. There are a zillion reasons that one magazine may have rejected you, some of them having nothing to do with the story.
Yes, that could be true but, in thinking abiut George's answer to the question about giving up on a story, this is an example of when those doubts hit me.
Oh, right! In the words of Emily Litella, never mind.
🕶
A zillion reasons? Maybe not quite that many.
hyperbole is one of my best friends
"I have previously abandoned stories after rejections." Publish a book of those. I'd want to read it.
That's a great idea! The Rejected!
Yes! And that title! Do it.
Ugh, this is a tough one. I submitted what I thought was one of my best stories to a contest & was auto rejected with no comment at all. But I had a story that was rejected in 5 places and then one magazine published it, saying she loved it. I've learned that many rejections have nothing to do with the quality of the story. Maybe you could send it to a few more places as is. If you think the story was great, chances are some editor will too. Of course, if you were lucky enough to get notes along with the rejection, you may want to do some edits based on those. Good luck.
One of my friends has said that even if your story is rejected, every submission is a chance to win another fan. Even if the editors can't use that particular story at that moment, you may catch someone's interest in a way that will lead to something good later.
I love this question and topic. Yes, I've abandoned stories. But I've un-abandoned them too. I once had a story I'd been sending out, and it was getting good ink, but no one was publishing it. I put it on the shelf. A few years later, I pulled it off the shelf, revised (even referencing something I learned while the story was on the shelf), workshopped it, and got this new version published finally. It was even nominated for a Pushcart--my first. A couple weeks ago, I pulled out another story (similar: getting good ink, but no one was taking it.) This other story was 6500 words. An editor had told me for their pub, 5000 words is the sweet spot. So, I decided to see if I could get the word count down. This time I skimmed part of Matt Bell's "Refuse to Be Done." (the last third talks about strategies for polishing). He has a page full of "weasel words" -- words that suck the life out of the words near them. When I did a "find" on my doc, I was horrified how often I used those words. They all didn't need to be cut but they often pointed to a sentence that could be rewritten to be stronger. Anyway...the "weasel words" exercise helped me to get beyond that ossified sense of the story. I started cutting words here and there, then sentences. On the third read-through, I could see how the pace dragged about four pages in. After fixing that, I saw a later scene with internal monologue that wasn't getting at the primary concern for the char. It felt kind of amazing. But cutting the dross I could see the story more clearly. This draft is done. It's now 5200 words and feels much tighter. I've set it aside and will run it past my writing group next month but...I guess the point is that even when we've bailed on a story, it's possible to come back later with fresh eyes. Robert Boswell once said that one of his goals of revising is to keep the story fresh for him, as a writer.
Stephen King once said, No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
amen
One framing that's helped me is distinguishing between mechanism and plot.
Every story needs mechanisms. You can't write normal fiction about nothing happening - you either end up with extraordinarily inorganic exposition, works that are not traditional stories (though there's nothing wrong with this - one of the best things I've written is a fictional manifesto of sorts - it's probably not what you want, either), or, well, philosophizing (which is rather like attempting to prove the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture in the middle of your story - if you pull it off, great, but you're probably going to fail at producing anything nontrivial, considering most fiction authors are neither trained mathematicians nor philosophers [though more of them should be!]).
Not every story needs plot. In fact, there is a case to be made that the best literary works of our era are so precisely because of their plotlessness - or, e.g. with Gaddis, because their plots are so incredibly stupid that one might simply disregard them.
You seem to write quite like I do, and Mallarme did, in that you are focused on microstructures: the way words sound together, perfection (or as close to it as one can get) on the level of sentences, not stories or even paragraphs. It seems like what might be afflicting you is that you are attempting to synthesize this style with some extremely macrostructural concepts: Freytag's triangle, kinetic energy, exposition, etc. Of course this is possible, but it is, as most such syntheses (Ginzburg-Landau + BCS, maybe?), not easy. I would contend that no author has done this satisfactorily yet - for this would, in a sense, be equivalent to writing a prose poem at Mallarmean standards that is also a novel, which as far as I know no one has done.
So mechanism, as a microstructural concept (what is happening at this instant? not where it leads, not where it came from), might be a good point to focus on. In other words, don't judge yourself by rubrics that aren't apt for your particular style. If you can chain together a series of happenings in a way that coheres (easier said than done, I know), you have yourself a story.
How do you focus on microstructure? Here are three points from my experience.
I remember reading somewhere or the other (Edmund Wilson?) that Joyce would write disparate sections of Ulysses (the paragon of microstructural novels, in a way) in parallel - not edit them in this way, which everyone does, but actually write them disjointedly. This prevents you from trying to luck yourself into a plot, and forces you to rely on short-term mechanisms instead of long, cross-story action (though you will still have threads uniting your story, these will be based on character and whatever motifs you select). This also ensures a degree of coherence in your writing, because you're coalescing everything simultaneously, instead of trying to extrude a string of material as far as it will go.
If you're still struggling to unite sections of a work, write more, not less. Keep going until you find the mechanism that will tie up the strands your previous mechanisms have created. I generally have no idea how my 7-8k word stories will finish until I'm 5-6k words in - in part, because the problem of tying things together hasn't been set until then! If you are having trouble with this problem at, say, 5k words, adding another scene will change the problem you have been set, possibly making it easier to find an answer. And if you have already found an answer, well, keep writing anyway until you find a problem with a better answer.
Finally, listen to classical music. Composers in that tradition are invariably masters at transitions, at uniting disparate thematic material into a cohesive whole, and studying how they do this is surprisingly applicable to literature, in a way I can't really articulate. I will just say that I have been reading the score of, analyzing, and listening to the Kreutzer Sonata for my current work, and everything I write has become so much tighter - I intuitively understand a little better how to put elements into their place, how much I should write between mechanisms, between points within each mechanism, et cetera.
Right about the music. I listen a lot, and though the effect is indirect, it is there. Listening to a concerto, the interaction between solo and orchestra, the dialogue between two instruments, the power in Beethoven's symphonies and his violin concerto, feed into my imagination. An artist can always learn from or at least reflect on another art form. I have written a story called Transfigured Night inspired by Schonberg's piece, which also was inspired by a poem by Richard Dehmel, to find that my story actually mirrors the poem!
I'm sure I don't understand everything you're saying here, but I find myself nodding as I read. I especially like the story about Joyce's techniques or processes. Thank you for it. I'm going to give it more thought, although probably not while I'm trying to fix a specific story problem!
Yes: Write your way into comprehension
I sometimes find that if I am having difficulty writing, I need to search in myself what deep emotions are there, that the section of writing is reflecting or engaging without me knowing. As Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk says: When I write, I have to feel everything inside myself. I have to let all the living beings and objects that appear in the book go through me, everything that is human and beyond human, everything that is living and not endowed with life. I have to take a close look at each thing and person, with the greatest solemnity, and personify them inside myself, personalize them.
Thanks for this quote. I love it.
Love her "Drive Your Plow" ... this also reminds me of George saying, "What does this character, this story, have to tell me now?" Or words to that effect.
Dear George, thanks so much for this post and for all your kind insightful comments. I've been a lurker, reading these posts when I find the time. I caught up on some this weekend. That, combined with this particularly just-what-I-needed-to-hear post, helped me to make the decision to make time for reading these posts and the chat and being fully engaged. I just upgraded to paid. Thanks again for doing this. I'm hoping/assuming some of this will appear in your next craft book someday, "Office Hours"??? Much metta, Patti
Yes, that book. Love the title.
❤️❤️👌
dear george,
thank you so much for this, as always.
i love "A hitter can be telling himself, 'Become one with the ball!' even as it zings right past him."
and
"The Yoda-like answer might be something like: 'Yes, exactly. When do you?' ('When do you?')"
and
"What a tough problem. I’m still working on that myself"
very much!
in answer to your generous questions at the end, i am more of a standup comedian than a traditional short story writer, but i think there is a commonality in the question. when do i give up on a joke? one answer is "sometimes." but a more thorough answer is that i never knowingly give up on a particular joke or idea FOREVER. i always have lots of ideas in lots of notebooks and files and my brain and sometimes i'll set one aside FOR A TIME. and sometimes years later, the time comes to revisit that specific idea, because so much in my life or the world has changed and the way forward becomes clear, where once it seemed impossible. so for myself, i frame the idea not as giving up on one particular creative path, but as choosing to follow a different one. what am i saying YES to, as opposed to what am i saying no to. if that makes sense.
thank you for asking!
love,
myq
Jokes are harder, I think. Stand-up comedians can die up there, on stage. If a writer dies on the page, sitting down, there's always a chance to revise.
I have written a beginning to a story that I like very much - but it's been changed and polished probably too much, only because I don't know what to do next. So I keep going back to fix what I already have, and that makes it even harder somehow to move ahead. I think I got ahead of myself, refining language until it became so set that I can't easily go forward. Someone suggested that I make this the end of the story, and now I get to work on the beginning and the middle and then try to make it all connect. It's counter-intuitive, but worth a try.
"Fail better," Beckett said.
Thanks for sharing! I don’t know if jokes are harder to write than stories but it is true that to succeed in comedy it takes failing publicly. But I will say that standup offers a chance to revise as well, night after night. Once you publish a book, that’s it! But once I do a show, I can keep revising show after show as long as I want. So, I think they’re different, and we get to choose our form of challenge. For me, writing jokes is easier than writing stories because I’ve been doing it for longer. But I can understand that for others, it might be the reverse. Thanks again for sharing!
I don't so much abandon things as set them aside for later, sometimes a lot later! And I also like to have a few starts going at once. If I can't seem to make headway on one, there's another I can try. In short anything I can do in the way of writing that makes me feel good is helpful, I think. Spending long moments in discouragement is not.
It takes time to find the approaches that work for you.
Agreed! I have gone back to pieces after ten-plus years, including stories I had thought were done. I’m not sure if I’ll ever know if I’ve given up on a story until I’m dead.
You can always go back to old writing and draw from it again 👌
George says what most people say when asked for rules for good writing: "there are no rules." Somehow (ie. by being specific) he makes this a more helpful comment than it usually is.
I've bailed on stories, I'm sure I have. Though, I'm not sure what we mean by "bailing" really. For those of us who aren't published, what does "bailing" even mean? I've set stories aside. Have I deleted them from my hard-drive? No. They're still sitting there, haunting me every now and then. I've left the possibility of returning to them alive. But based on my current projections, that returning likely won't happen. I don't give myself enough time to work on the stories I tell myself I'm actually working on!
This leads me to another thing I appreciate about George and what he does with Story Club. With every post, he encourages. I had a creative writing prof take on a similar approach once, and at the time I found it a little annoying. I wanted clearer instruction. But what I'm learning here is that the artform doesn't afford clear instruction. (Thank God) there's no formula to follow. You just have to do it. George Saunders should be sponsored by Nike.
This comment is aimed at myself just as much as it is to anyone else.
Extremely true. The only rule is there is no rule. The rule is to write. A lot.
I’m so glad the writer asked this question—and so glad to read George’s answer. I am working on a story now and am trying to make the beginning and the end align. I’ve found that when I’m moving in the wrong direction, that’s the day’s stopping point. I often see a new path the next day (or in the next writing session, which, to be honest, is often not the next day).
I once wrote a story that mattered to me. I couldn’t figure out how to trim it below 9,000 words, but I knew it wasn’t a 9,000 word story. I gave up on it. I found it years later and realized what I was including that was absolutely unnecessary. It was published at 5,000 words. Perhaps giving up is really just putting a place marker in the brain.
"Perhaps giving up is really just putting a place marker in the brain." ... I love this so much, thank you
Nice. I had a similar experience. In 2012 I got my first story published. In my writing workshop I had originally presented it as a 29 page story. Final draft to the magazine: 13 pages.
Ah—now that’s a trim!
I was listening to a snippet of a Judy Blume interview when they asked what she was thinking when she had written Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. And her answer, and I’m paraphrasing, was that she had no clue what she was doing, she said she knew nothing about writing, and said “I just had all this stuff inside of me and it spilled out.” And the rest is history of course. But I think there are a lot of people who have so much inside that they could spill out but they don’t. They are afraid, or they overthink. I say just write. And keep on writing. Spill it out then go back and refine and edit and erase then add. The only way through is through it seems. And I have read such interesting thoughts on this blog/workgroup. So many good writers abound! A sea of words is a lovely thing.
❤️❤️
I’m not sure why, but this posting was so life-giving.
In any case, I think a pivotal point for me was learning to focus on the internal logic and cadence of a story, versus having a vague story idea that I think I’ll clarify through writing. Per George’s influence, I think I’ve become less attached to the initial impetus that began the story. But it makes the writing (and, hopefully, reading) of the story that much more fun. If a particular character or event seems unusually beguiling and in need of more attention, I don’t have to feel like I’m “getting off track” to pursue that. I now give myself full clearance to pursue, and I usually end up being more pleased with the end result.
I’m not sure if anyone else can speak to/relate to this experience, but sometimes I think I approach a short story the same way I do a poem, and that doesn’t seem to work. With a poem, it is trying to capture in some tangible way the initially ineffable origin of it; with writing, it seems more like being willing to set out on a journey and trusting yourself that you’ll have the tools to be able to cope along the way.
Exactly. I mentioned this as well. Follow the characters wherever they go.