Hi all,
What an amazing response to last Thursday’s Office Hours post, in which I asked you each to list your most powerful reading experiences of 2023. Thank you for that.
And, again, Happy New Year.
By the good, very good, graces of our beloved Mary G., I can now offer you the complete list, below, in one convenient place. I had nothing to do with this, and all thanks to Mary, who has, by the way, started her own Substack, called “What Now?” Based on her wonderful, always insightful, contributions around here, from the very beginning, I know it will be a happy and productive place to be.
Thanks again, Mary, and thanks to all of you - this is an amazing list indeed.
Now for our question:
Q.
First of all, thank you for Story Club. Based on what you’ve written on your journey as a writer, I know a lot of the wisdom you’re offering was hard won, and it’s extremely generous of you to offer it to us here.
My question has to do with the tension between your more organic approach to drafting (the P-N Meter) and some of the past comments I’ve heard you make about the writing of Lincoln in the Bardo.
You’ve spoken before about how the story followed you for a long time before you truly went for it. How was this different (if it was, in fact) from the way you try to approach a short story with as few preconceived notions as possible?
I’m wondering specifically how you navigated the telling of that story from so many different points of view. The book is a focused story that builds to an overarching climax, but it also serves as a wonderful vessel for the stories of the individual characters, and gives them moments to shine in their own narrative thread.
I’m working on a story with multiple points of view, and I have heard the advice that a novel needs one main character whose journey pulls us through the story. Did you consider any of your characters the main character as you were drafting? How far into the drafting did it take for you to land on that large of an ensemble? How did you balance the history and goals of individual characters with the needs of telling a cohesive story?
I know we might be in danger of retreading ground covered in the 1,200 page elephant discussion, but as someone who is planning to undertake a draft with multiple points of view I’m feeling out of my depth in a way that is both daunting and exciting.
Thank you again for all of your advice, and the wonderful community you’ve built here in Story Club.
A.
Thank you for your question.
I want to focus on just one aspect of it, the notion that “a novel needs one main character whose journey pulls us through the story.” As always, there are a million answers to this but mine is simply that I don’t really believe this. Or, it doesn’t excite me to think about it that way, if you see what I mean.
For me, it’s more like this:
The reader is reading along, even after just a page or two, waiting for something to matter. She wants the book to cohere, somehow - to lead her in a certain direction. Some questions will start to arise and the book will, sort of, answer them, or begin/pretend to. Now, often, those questions will involve a central character’s journey.
But I see that as a subset of a greater thing - the story responding both to itself and to the reader’s constantly arising expectations.
So, with Lincoln…let’s say that a certain reader, there around page 20, was thinking, “What in the hell is going on?” That’s good - there’s some energy there. (Even if a reader is slightly objecting, he’s engaged.) How do I use that? Well, I start to answer that question; I start to tell him what the hell’s going on.
In this case, I did it by using a whole cast of characters. One by one they step forward and (ostensibly) help him figure out what the hell is going on. I don’t think any one of them is the “main” character, not even Lincoln. They are, let’s say, a bunch of action figures who keep stepping forward to provide our friend, the reader, with clues - about what the hell is going on, but also about the book’s view of the world, and about what he, the reader, should be wondering about next.
So, the opening of a book makes a certain tension. The writer’s job (let’s say) is to know, or feel, the nature of that tension, and try to maintain it - try to keep answering some original question (“What the hell is going on?”) and complicating it, by posing new questions (“Oh, OK, we’re in a graveyard. But why?”). And so on.
You asked: “How far into the drafting did it take for you to land on that large of an ensemble?
In truth, I knew it from the beginning - I’d worked on another book years before that had a big ensemble cast and got a taste of how much fun that could be - how many opportunities to make a musical thing out of all those cross-talking voices. (That book, also set in a graveyard, didn’t work out, because there was nothing happening in the present-tense frame. So: no escalation). Once I started the Lincoln book, it felt rich to have so many speakers available to help me narrate. I felt like I could sustain that for a long time, i.e., keep the ensemble growing and talking, using the ensemble to keep pushing the fence out on that “What the hell is going on?” question. (That is, a person would know what was going on, and then the story would complicate things, and he, again, wouldn’t be quite sure what was going on.) In this model, the author is sort of like one of those fake rabbits that goes out ahead of the greyhounds at a dog race, expect, in this case, the “rabbit” is saying, “Trust me, all will be revealed.”
You also asked, “How did you balance the history and goals of individual characters with the needs of telling a cohesive story?”
My principle was that I only needed enough backstory to make the current moment make sense. That is, there was no abstract value in “fleshing out a character” or any of that. The way it often worked was: 1) I needed a new character; 2) I’d already, early on, established the rule that, in this world, a person’s physical appearance or way of speaking was an indicator of why he or she was there - a clue as to what had tormented them so much in life that now, dead, they couldn’t “go on” to the next place.
So, usually, when I needed a new character, or one wandered into a scene, I’d think: “What is his or her issue?” Something would flash into my mind. Then I’d supply the physical or speech corollary and send my mind in search of some reason they were like that.
Sometimes it worked the other way around - the image came into my mind first — for example, of a very tiny old woman - I mean, like doll-sized. I wrote her in. (This would be Abigail Blass, pages 75-82.) Then I had to ask, “What is the moral corollary for “very tiny?” And I thought: Um, extreme frugality. Then my mind went: OK, prove it. That is: demonstrate/explain it. Why is she frugal? Can you show us her being frugal? And a backstory would arise - in this case, she was very poor when she got old and that obsessed her and made her miserable. She never got over it and took it to the grave.
But then - that’s it. That’s all you get about her.
Because that’s all you need. :)
Finally, if I may - you say that you are “planning to undertake a draft with multiple points of view” - the only thing I might suggest is that you ask yourself why you want to do that. What’s your motivation in doing that? As suggested above, “Because it will be great fun,” is a pretty good answer.
But sometimes, a person’s motivation might be more theoretical - you know, they “aspire to do that” or think it would “be impressive to have done” it. And that can work too, of course, since literally anything can work in this magical artistic realm.
But, in general, I think I’d say that it’s best for departures from “the norm,” (i.e., one character, one point of view) to be motivated by need - the book’s need. That is, you start writing and suddenly feel the book saying, “I really need another voice in here! Please, I can’t do this alone. The question(s) I am asking can’t be interestingly answered/expanded by just this one character!” That feeling, I’d honor. Whereas, if you insist upon there being a lot of characters when, maybe, the essential story doesn’t really need it - the reader will feel that and so will you, as you keep trying to justify the presence of all those dang characters in a book that never asked for so many.
But, as I say - this was not the case with Lincoln. There, I knew before I even started that it was going to be a big party - I didn’t know it would be 166-characters big, but I knew the basic plan. And I “knew” that because, when I thought about writing it, it felt exciting - like something I could do, and like the only way in.
Anyway, best of luck with your book and HAVE FUN.
Thank you, George, for mentioning my Substack. All are welcome! We're having fun over there, so please join in.
I remember the first time George mentioned having fun while writing. I'd just completed a short story and I said so in one of these Story Club threads and George replied, "Fun, right?" And I was like...."Um.. I think so?" And ever since then, I've thought about the notion that writing ought to be fun. I'd never thought of it that way before. The idea of writing with abandon and just having fun while doing it--No fear. No voices. No big deal. Just writing. It changed things for me, those two little words: Fun, right? Thank you, George, as ever, for this seemingly simple yet altogether profound advice.
"HAVE FUN." That’s the best advice, sometimes the most difficult!
Hey, George and Story Clubbers, the other day I listed to a podcast called Ten Percent Happier. Bill Hader was the guest, and he chatted about anxiety (a real buzzkill, don’t I know it). Anyway, he dropped George’s name not once, but three times! What a blast to be besties with Bill Hader/ George Saunders. Anyway, if you have anxiety like I do, give it a listen. It’s Episode 706, it’s free, and about an hour.