Office Hours

Stories, Sadness, and the Real World

As you’ll see, I’m a little backed-up on questions - this one comes from a few weeks ago, toward the end of the tour…

Q.

I fully enjoyed your book talk event in Santa Cruz yesterday evening - felt many "aha" stirrings re: my own writing project arising.

Thank you so much for being so present for talks, during the relentless schedule of a book tour.

(Puts me in mind of a sci-fi book you might enjoy/have already enjoyed Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel - which features an author on book tour.

However -- there was one question from the audience though that I think you didn't fully hear. The questioner was a younger man, maybe even a high school student - I was in the balcony and didn't see him. He asked how to cope with his sadness after reading "Victory Lap" - at least that's how I understood his question.

I felt your response was about getting to delight in the writing of such stories. Rather than in the reading of them.

So - I'd like to ask my version of that young man's question: what do you have to say to readers who find "Victory Lap" (as an example) so sad and painful they stop there and don't get the fullness of it - like a curry whose bite is so hot you give up before you savor the wonderful, complex flavors that emerge after the burn?

And if I can add a follow on: Do you want/need readers to feel the burn? To me - without the burn, there is only a kind of cynicism. And I'd also probably miss the love you pour into your characters. Such as "The Mom of Bold Action" - who could be me.

Much love and thanks for your work and your generosity of spirit. 

A.

This is one of the embedded dangers of a book tour – you have a brief moment to engage with a question and because of the pace and the pressure of the other, similar questions you’ve recently answered, you sometimes answer a reformulated (i.e., unasked) version of the question.

And actually I think you’re right about this – I had a slight feeling afterward that I hadn’t really addressed that young man’s question…

So: on the most fundamental level, because people have different reactions to, say, violence or menace, I think each of us has to have the right to say, “Sorry, this isn’t for me – it’s too much.”  This is actually, strangely, a way of protecting the artist’s freedom.  If you are an alert and proactive patroller of your own boundaries, I can feel better about taking my stories where I feel they want to go.  To extend your metaphor, if I’m cooking in my restaurant and I’m really going for it with hot peppers, and/but I have confidence that you, my customer, feel empowered to put the dish aside – that amounts to a kind of freedom for me.

Going a little deeper – I think feeling sadness after reading a story is OK.  I think feeling anything is good.  That’s the point, really: the writer is trying to cause something to happen in the mind of the reader, something unusual and exaggerated and rarefied.

We go to a story to feel something, as we react to what is essentially a scale-model of the world.  And if the story succeeds in making us feel something, it’s likely only building on something we’ve already felt out in the real world.

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And speaking of the real world - this is the street, outside Syracuse, where I imagined “Victory Lap” happening. Why? Because I drove by here every day.

And this is that “Russian church"….located behind the houses shown above.

And here is, approximately, and in my mind, the neighborhood where "Victory Lap" was set, on Google Maps.

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After reading “Victory Lap,” for example, we might feel that menace and violence exist in the world and that, even if we succeed in pushing back, that pushback costs us something, and can even be tragic – that is, it costs those two young people in the story something deep, and that cost will, we feel, never go away.

So, yes: that’s sad.  Is it “sad but true?”  I think so.  Is there value in being reminded of this?

Well, here we have to remember that a story is also doing more than (mere) representation.  It is putting you, the reader, through a process, and in that process, what is being revealed to you, ultimately, is your own mind.  In this, a story is like a mirror.  We read a page, and are in a certain place, with certain expectations.  Then the next thing happens – and we learn something about the particular flavor of our pattern of expectation – that is, we learn about our presets, about the belief-cloud that is always hovering around our heads – that is, we learn something about our innate view of the world.

Over the last few years, there’s been a new awareness of the power of stories to upset people, and especially people who’ve suffered trauma that is perhaps similar to (is “triggered by”) the events narrated in the story.

So, I think it’s important to keep in mind just how complex an experience reading can be, and how various – a story will land on a thousand people in a thousand different ways. 

And part of the value of a work of art (we have to believe) is that it creates effects and communicates wisdom in ways that are irrational or that exist beyond conventional rationality – that there’s a kind of magic that goes on in the creation and absorption of a work of art that is irreducible and can’t be quantified or rigorously defended (and don’t need to be).

A work of art can be thought of as a spontaneous (though crafted) yelp of sorts, that works within narrative logic to say something beyond conventional sense.  A yelp that might not be for everybody but that, because it might be for somebody, deserves the right to be produced.

For me, the failsafe is to think that, as a reader starts to feel uncomfortable, she or he can decide whether to go on.  I hold absolutely nothing against a reader who bails – whether this is because the material is too raw, or….well, maybe it’s too boring, or isn’t giving her any fun, or just isn’t, as we used to say, “her cup of tea.”  And actually, I applaud the reader, for knowing herself so well and for being so confident in defense of her own preferred state of mind.

But the nature of the transaction is: I offer the story, hoping that something in it will be of value.  We both tacitly understand that it’s not real – it’s a sort of guided, virtual experience – all made up, powerful in the way it responds to itself, full of omissions and exaggerations and skips-in-time and non-realistic compressions and so on.

In a story, it’s true - we can exaggerate things like violence and menace to the point where they’re worse than they are out in the world.  And that might not be so good – it might produce more anxiety and fear than are justified, or more than a given person can bear, or wants to bear.  That is, we can – I’d say we almost always do – “get it wrong” about the way violence and menace occur in the real world.  Our scaling of these things, and our contextualization of them, is off – and this is because we don’t really understand them completely, and the work of fiction is an experiment to try and understand them better.

We project on to the cave wall shadows of the things outside the cave that terrify us, but the shadows bear an imprecise relation to those scary things.  That’s built right into the game.

And that’s something to be mindful about – just because we can do something, doesn’t mean that we should.  The purpose – or my purpose, anyway, is never merely to shock, but, rather, to be in relation with.  With the subject, and with the reader.  Sometimes this causes shock, but the purpose is to be attentive to the story I’m telling and loyal to its internal truths and, in this way, to guide the reader through a thrilling experience, that causes her to come out on the other side a little more alert and in love with the world.

But, in any case: what we, reader and writer, have just been through together when we reach the end of a story is not the world, but a very particular and induced experience.

So, if I had another shot at that question, I’d first assure that young man that, if a story like “Victory Lap” is too much for him – too dark or violent or sad – he should happily put it aside.  He’s happy, I’m happy.  In the bountiful world of the short story, there are so many others stories that might suit him better – that might serve him better.

But if he were my student, and we had some time together, I’d ask him to tell me more about the quality of his sadness, and what he saw as the cause of it.  Where, precisely, did he feel that sadness and why?  Then I’d try to get us talking about whether that feeling is necessarily negative.  How long did it take to go away?  Was his view of things at all altered by his experience of having felt that sadness?  Was the whole thing a net positive or negative?

I might talk to him, from my side of the thing, about the process of writing the story, about the decisions I made and why I made them – perhaps as a way of underscoring the notion that, you know, “no actual humans were harmed during the writing of the story” – it’s just an elaborate mental construction made of sentences, designed to take the reader on a journey, the exact shape of which was only determined through the writing process and surprised even me, and was relatively free of intention, other than “make journey intense and unforgettable.”

And here it occurs to me that that questioner in the audience might be part of Story Club?  If so, please weigh in.

Sunday, behind the paywall, we’re going to continue our work on Chekhov’s “Lady with Dog,” by discussing the powerful concluding section. Please do join us over there, for full access to the whole past archive…and what’s to come in 2023.