First, I want to invite all of you who are Free subscribers to cross over to the Paid side ($6 a month!) if only to participate in our group discussion of a beautiful story (“A Fabulous Animal) by the Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin, the author of the novel Fever Dream, a finalist for the International Booker Prize, and the novel Little Eyes and story collection A Mouthful of Birds, also longlisted for the Booker.
Samanta was kind enough to give us an exclusive look at the story, not previously published, and it is a beauty.
(By the way, becoming a Paid subscriber also gets you the right to Comment on these Thursday Office Hours posts, if that’s of interest.)
Before our question of the week, some news and a warning.
First the warning: there are (once again) people impersonating me (or my mother) on Substack. DON’T RESPOND and feel free to let me know about it. I will NEVER contact you except by way of the Story Club Gmail account.
And neither will my mom.
Well, you know what they say: “Someone pretending to be you or your mother is the highest form of flattery.”
I want to offer hearty congratulations to my former student, River Selby, on the publication of Hotshot, A Life on Fire. It’s a riveting memoir of life on a wilderness fire-fighting crew, but also an insightful and brave reflection on addiction, trauma, and the environment, and much more, from a student whose presence in our Program was a delight and a privilege.
It’s always a thrill to see one of our former students come into their own; River has lived such a big and interesting life and all of that accrued wisdom and kindness is in the book.
Here’s the (starred) Kirkus review and (starred) Publisher’s Weekly review. And here’s a LitHub interview River gave recently. River also has a Substack called Gathering, which is “devoted to storytelling, narrative, and the writer's life.”
Congrats, River and go get ’em.
I also wanted to let you know that Paula’s tour is going great – she’s been at Skylight Books in L.A. and Bookshop Santa Cruz so far, and is heading to South Dakota and down to the South in the coming weeks (I’ll keep you posted), and has done a number of radio and podcast interviews, including this one, with Cyrus Webb Presents.
She is a wonderful, insightful public speaker, about writing but also about, well, life itself and also a beautiful reader of her own work.
Now, on to our question of the week.
Q.
George (if I can presume - I feel like I can because as an “original” member of Story Club you’re a bi-weekly presence; you and a number of Storyclubbers I now always follow in their comments and consider friends).It seems near redundant and cliché sodden to begin by thanking you for Story Club but how can I not? What a gift it has been.
My question has to do with the very notion of narrative, that is “plot” in a story. I suppose, in one sense, the near definition of a story includes the idea of plot . . .Once upon a time something happened, here it is. Certainly I enjoy many a story that has a strong narrative but I am finding, when I write I am rejecting plot as any kind of driving force. Even to the point where I find a drift towards plot as an almost betrayal of authenticity and honest dealing (again, not in others, just in my own writing). Didion’s dictum that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, to me is near a recognition of some sort of neuroticism - that life is unbearable unless we clean it up and reductively corral it into some sort of narrative structure.
There are writers as diverse as Beckett and Lydia Davis, Knausgaard and Annie Ernaux who seem to eschew plot but still manage to get something meaningful down on the page for the reader to take in. Maybe their power lies in that eschewal of narrative.
Most of the stories we’ve dug into so far have strong plots and a narrative structure you could lay out as a prime element (along with voice, character, dialogue, prose style etc etc). And in following that inner meter, as you suggest, when we read often I find that that meter is mainly twitching up and down on plot points? Is the story driving forward? Do I want to know, “what happens next?
How do you approach plotting when you head out to write a story? Is it important to you? Do you think it’s an essential part of what you’re doing? Do you think it necessary? Is it something basically architectural or is it something slowly revealed in your process of re and re and again rewriting?
Again, huge appreciation for all you continue to give to all of us. If karma is real, yours must be positively glowing!!
A.
(Hello, dear Questioner and thanks for being here from the very start…)
I never think about “plot.” Truly. That word gives me the shivers.
What I do is: try to get a bit of prose to congeal into something. If I do that, the reader’s interest will rise… and that gives me something to address next.
This may look like “plot” but it’s arising organically, from a quest to make, in my case, funny or interesting or nicely dense groups of sentences.
So, just as an example, in my most recent book, Liberation Day, there’s a story called “A Thing at Work.” This started out as a comic riff about a workplace. I had a page or two of a little incident in the office’s kitchen. I kept messing with that, trying to make it funnier and find some sort of (Invented Phrase Alert) meaning-throughline at work in the section, until finally something came out of the stone, so to speak, which was the idea of two people talking trash about a third person…and then that person walks in.
This was that “congealing” mentioned above. The reader could feel that this little faux pas was the “point” of that episode. And it gave me “something to address next,” which was that the person who’d been offended was the boss of one of the women present, who then went down to his office to try to see if he was mad at her. And once there, she throws the other woman – who was actually the one doing the trash-talking – under the bus. Which then puts some bad feelings into the air – feelings of wanting revenge and so on.
To me, that’s “plot” – but I wasn’t thinking of it that way, and never would come up with all of that if I was thinking “make plot!” or had I tried to think it all out in advance.
What you seem to be reacting against, dear Questioner, is the manipulative nature of that process by which we sometimes “think up” a plot. (You are rejecting bad, corny, obvious, plot). And I feel the same way. Mainly because I can’t do it, not gracefully or in a way that produces a good story. (If I could, I would, probably, as it would save me a lot of time.)
But “inventing plot,” it seems to me, is often a way that a writer seeks to keep control over the story and, done badly, this can feel like a form of condescension (to the reader). (We line up a bunch of allegedly consequential events in advance and say to the reader, in effect, “You sit there and endure this.”)
So my advice is a version of “if your eye offends thee, pluck it out.”
If thinking in terms of plot makes you unhappy, forget that term. All of these terms of art we use are only useful to the extent they help you do something exciting,
No matter what sort of fiction we write – and this would apply to all of the allegedly non-plotting writers you mention above – we are trying, in all cases, I would say, to generate a sense of increasing interest over the course of the work. (Even a work that was deliberately static might be said to be generating interest, of the “Jeez, when is something going to happen?” or “Yikes, what is the point of this annoying thing?” variety.)
We should always be open to restating or eliminating any writing platitude that is giving us trouble.
So, my second bit of advice here would be to circle back around, always, to the (vexing, elusive) question of: “Where is my reader now?”
When a reader is leaning in over a book, reading with interest: something is happening, by definition. She has been brought to care about something. And that something is coming from within her and from within you – you two are speaking some sort of language that you have in common.
So, if we think in terms of readerly interest – and recognize that that “reader” is, first, you, as you read during revision – we can become sensitive to very small changes in the text, and these become “plot.”
If a man sits in a cave and nothing ever happens, and we show three vignettes over a fifty-year span – that’s about as plot-free is it gets.
But I’d like to read that, if it was done well.
And “being done well” would mean adjusting the focus of the narrative so that suddenly things were happening – if only in his mind. Or, you know: outside the cave, a tree falls and that changes the nature of the light in there, which has an effect on him.
Is that “plot?” Well, I’m not sure. But it could generate that “sense of increasing interest” mentioned above.
So I guess I’m saying that if the writer concentrates intensely enough on his or her text, it’s impossible for “nothing to happen.” A change in the focus of our gaze will take place naturally.
My larger point here is to happily advise that we do away with, or avoid, whatever terms of art cause that dreaded condition called (2nd Invented Phrase Alert) Artistic Ass-Tightening Syndrome (AATS), to occur.
These terms (including that one, AATS) were invented to help us talk about the ineffable, but talking about the ineffable is not required in order to accomplish it.
What do you think, Story Club?
P.S. I might also refer you to this interesting and brilliant essay by Douglas Unger, who was my teacher (and Paula’s) when we were grad students at Syracuse, in which he takes up the question of why we write in the first place.
Thank you so much for mentioning my book, George! <3 <3 And for your kind words.
It may be a scam but the notes I get excusing my absence from work that are signed “George Saunders’ mother” work every time.