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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.