Love that idea! I revisit the story every year on December 10th and this year friends joined to read aloud. I was surprised everyone was game. It took a certain amount of bravery to join in an activity many of us hadn’t engaged with since we were in school. Passing the book around created this beautiful hush punctuated by genuine reactions to the language. December 10th is my new favorite holiday.
Sounds like the Saunders equivalent of Burns Night (which also sounds like an absolute cracker - have always wanted to attend one). Love that you do it every year on Dec 10th.
It is my favorite story of George's. And yes, I did think this felt a little like an early version of this, more like an early move toward that sort of commitment. (And as I said elsewhere, my son's birthday is also the Tenth of December, and he is one of the kindest people i know--he'd jump into that river and that icy lake. So it all feels just that much more perfect to me.)
George, as someone who gave a shout-out for “The Falls” on the getting to know you post, I really enjoyed reading about how the story was born. I was struck by how as a reader, the only version of the text I can conceive of is the finished product, and so it’s hard to imagine you writing beyond the end of the story as it currently exists; the final line is what I love most about this story, and it’s so powerful and complete that in my imagination when you wrote it you knew instantly that the story was over because, duh, tautology-alert, there is it, the perfect finish to the story.
This led me to try to express why the last line is so important, and what it does to me as a reader. On the most basic level, from the first time I read the story and then called my wife and read it aloud to her over the phone because I wanted to share it with someone else immediately, it’s heartbreaking and heroic and despairing and hopeful, and that mess of emotions that it stirs would be ruined if anything else happened to resolve that ambiguity.
During a later reading, I remember being struck by how powerfully this story asks and answers a key question about the human condition: Why do you do when all the alternatives are hopeless? It’s impossible, of course, to do nothing, to watch the girls drown, but it’s also of course impossible to swim to the snag, and so we get to watch as Morse tries figure this out himself and juggle the impossible and unthinkable outcomes and there’s something thrilling about his thoughts circling around and justifying one course of action while his body has already taken flight. While reading I always appreciate the action that Morse’s body takes, independent of his mind, and see it as deeply moral and heroic and true: that watching the girls drown is the thing that you really can’t do, more than any of the other things that you can’t do, that cuts across your fear and despair and rationalizing and justifying. Knowing whether or not the heroic moment succeeds or fails is counterproductive: if it succeeded, the story of Morse feels as false as the thoughts of Cummings; if it fails we lose that glimmer of hope and our empathy with Morse gets broken and replaced by something else: sorrow, sympathy for his family.
Today, in light of your teaser about looking at sentences as a creative driver, I thought more about the rhythms and cadences of this story, and the ways in which Morse’s thoughts tumble out and over each other like water rushing over the falls. A good deal of the humor and the tragedy of this story for me is what’s happening in Morse’s head and how he can’t seem to stop it, this interior flood of memories and resentments and fears and bits of occasionally forced gratitude. In this way the final sentence feels like a kind of release from Morse’s neuroses: the sentence starts with his normal tumble and turmoil: eight thoughts on top of each other, separated by commas. Then the sentence suddenly slows down as he makes his decision, as we get this lovely “threw his long ugly body out across the water.” If the problem in this reading of this story is Morse’s indecision and anxiety, then this sentence brings it to a close quite nicely: even for just a split second, Morse and the reader are given a moment of grace, and the noble act is mirrored by a calmness of language and thought.
Anyway, glad to have some time today to sit back and think about this stuff; reading literature creates these moments of grace for me where I can sit back and ponder all these questions about being human.
Thanks! My primary purpose here is to think and talk about literature as I don't have a lot of time to do writing of my own, and I'm super happy to have lots of other people to talk about it with.
I love what you write here and that you took the time to share all of this. "Morse's thoughts tumbling out over each other like water rushing over the falls" and "watching the girls drown is the thing that you really can't do, more than any of the other things that you can't do." Perfect.
Also, I noticed that you mainly mentioned Morse. I felt this affinity with Morse, too, and his part of the story is what carried it for me. I wonder (and ask George this, too) what the story would be like if Cummings were not in it at all? Did you consider that when writing it? I only ask because my instinct was to skip over the parts about him when reading it a second time. I am going to try and read it that way just for the fun of it, but I'm sure it will probably lose part of its impact since there were clear intentions to use his character as a sort of contrast.
I think there's no question that the story would be worse without Cummings. There are all the ways that he provides a contrast and a foil to Morse, but he also seems to exist to help us feel closer to Morse, whose anxiety might otherwise be off-putting. Cummings, who is so intent of his artistic vision of the world, gets Morse wrong in his imagination, whereas we feel that we know the actual Morse. His neuroses might be out of control, but at least they are grounded in reality: Morse sees the problems and costs at the end of the story so clearly, in a way that Cummings cannot because he's not really engaging with the world as it exists.
This reminds me of some author's note that I read recently, although I'm having trouble remembering which book - perhaps Omensetter's Luck - where the key breakthrough in the creation of the story was realizing that this other character needed to be in the story as well - and then suddenly it was infused with this depth and meaning and tension that it didn't have before.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'd love to know more about your assertions toward Morse and Cummings. You write, "we know the actual Morse"; do we not know the actual Cummings? I’m curious about what's prompting your judgments. Morse assesses Cummings as “an odd duck, […] nearly forty, still liv[ing] with his mother.” Whereas later in the paragraph, Morse says that he “was going home to enjoy his beautiful children without a care in the world.” Morse’s passages are grounded in thoughts of family and daily life, whereas Cummings’ are not. You write that Cummings is “not really engaging in the world as it exists.” How does the world really exist, and who deems this? I think there's a lot to discover in the character pairing.
I am re-reading this and seeing so many comparisons between Morse and Cummings. The structure itself says a lot -- the amount of space given to Morse vs. the amount of space given to Cummings is one thing of note. When Cummings sees the girls and tries to make a decision, there are only a few lines to cover his response, while Morse's thoughts run wild for at least a page (after he moves from being stuck in his tracks to running). There are also parallels between their thoughts about how others view them: Morse feels like he is not great or good enough and is worried that people will see true and/or imagined faults (the school kids, his co-workers, anyone who might notice he is nervous, his wife, his son, even Cummings and the girls in the canoe), while Cummings feels like he is great and acts like he is the victim of everyone's misjudgments.
I also love how in the first paragraph Morse thinks (twice), "So humility was the thing ... " and even though trying to put on the appearance of being humble isn't really humble, he is, in reality, a much more humble person, who in the end does a very humble heroic thing. Even the description of his body in the last sentence is a humble one. This is a great contrast to the "if only" statements surrounding the thought, "But some kind of moment in the sun would certainly not be unwelcome." Here he gets a true moment in the sun, however humble.
The more I read it, the more I think this story is brilliant, and I could write a lot more about it, but these are just a few thoughts that came to mind!
Yeah, that's one of the things that I love about this story: it feels like every little detail matters, both in terms of building the characters and then when viewed in retrospect at the end of the story. The memory of being bullied by the swimmer who died is so important to the foundation of Morse's character but then also essential to how we understand the end of the story.
I like all of the reverberations as well - sometimes the character's thoughts apply to them, and sometimes (unknowingly) they apply to the other. Like Will said in the podcast, that part in the first para "Of that he was certain. Or relatively certain. Being overly certain, he was relatively sure, was what eventually made one a wacko. So humility was the thing, he thought..." has as much (or more) to do with Cummings than it does to Morse. (That sequence still makes me smile, every time).
My take: I think the story is Morse's, and Cummings is there in service to that story - he brings the point of comparison (to the point where Morse's decision to jump in is heightened not only by his own indecision but by what we saw in the preceding scene with Cummings' reaction), and foreshadowing - his first interior monologue is all about the possible rain making the 'fine bright day even finer and brighter because of the possibility of its loss' and 'the fleeting passages of time' and how 'time made wastrels of us all, did it not, with its gaunt cheeks and its tombly reverberations and its admonishing glances with bony fingers... as if to say, “I admonish you to recall your own eventual nascent death, which being on its way is forthcoming. Forthcoming, mortal coil, and don’t think its ghastly pall won’t settle on your furrowed brow' (which, having followed Morse's where we learn he is 'tall and thin and as gray and sepulchral as a church about to be condemned' (sorry Morse, but death is on the cards for you...).
On that tangent - there is so much good foreshadowing in this story - how Morse tries to absorb something of the river's serenity, 'but instead found himself obsessing about the faulty latch on the gate, which theoretically could allow Annie to toddle out of the yard and into the river, and he pictured himself weeping on the shore.'
So many new insights and 'easter eggs' to find in re-readings! :)
Yeah, I was contemplating that a bit … what are your thoughts? It’s hard to imagine someone actually being glad that someone died like that, no matter how mean they were when young. Maybe it is almost like an act of atonement.
Since so much of what happens in this story takes place in the heads of the characters, I think that how well we know the characters is directly related to how well they know themselves. Morse, with all his mental back and forth, seems quite aware of his own limitations, his own happiness and sadness and how they're all mixed together in his messy little life. Cummings, on the other hand, is sort of a one-trick pony for much of the story: he's trying to re-imagine and write over the world that he's witnessing and his role within it. It seems to me that the story is pushing back against this kind of understanding of the world by showing the hollowness of Cummings' self-imagined heroism through the comparison to Morse (who is also desperate to prove himself in some way) and his unwillingness but ultimate surrender to the necessity of plunging into the river.
When Morse realises that the two girls he absent-mindedly waved at are oarless and headed towards the Falls, we immediately switch away from the scene and find Cummings, who is stuck in the (selfsame) reverie he has been having since we met him. For me, that moment creates a tautness and tension--we wait. We wait to see if Cummings even notices the girls; we wait to see which of the two men do something about the situation. So, yes, in a sense we want to skip over those parts to get to the end, but that urgency created by the inclusion of Cummings is also what propels us forwards.
I've always been a sucker for "how this was written" narratives, and this was a marvelous one. Of all the many things to dig into here, the most salient for me is when you say: "So, process produced a structure..."
This reminds me of another quote that I saved some time ago and recently stumbled across again. It's from Jasper Johns, in 2006 New Yorker profile: "Actually, when one works, one comes to a solution much more quickly than when one sits and thinks."
It's good to be reminded that miracles like good stories emerge not when we're sitting on our hands but when actually putting pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboards). I tried to explain this once to an interviewer -- that writing produces thoughts you could not generate in any way -- by saying that writing *is* thinking. I utterly failed to convey what I meant then, so I'm glad to have the idea clarified for me here in a way that I could probably repeat more sensibly to someone else.
And of course I want to get back to my writing desk now and do some thinking.
V.A. Howard and J.H. Barton have a terrific book based on their research in education on this very topic, titled, *Thinking on Paper* (1988). "...they point out that many of our thoughts first come into being only when put to paper."
Hi George, I loved reading "The Falls" and learning about your process. I’m with you 100% on wanting this kind of peek behind the curtain more than anything from the writers I love - so thank you for this!
I particular loved hearing your thoughts on the ending, and how what happens to Morse/the girls is not ultimately important - not the question the story cares most about. Fascinating and inspiring to see how that kind of focused question the story DOES care about (Morse's ability to transcend himself) emerged so naturally/playfully. One thing I’ve found myself thinking about lately in several pieces I’m working on is the shifting possibilities of what this question at the heart of things could be, and how many possible stories could emerge from the same material/situation, and thus how many questions are there under the surface, each connected to a slightly different story, with slightly different focus, ready to emerge if I go in this or that direction - and so much possibility can just be kind of scary. So it really does feel refreshing to hear how playful your process was with this story, and how a kind of wisdom emerges from the process itself that can't be accessed any other way.
I also want to echo Tina’s comment about this constant Christmas feeling I’m getting from Story Club, created by your warmth and generosity, and the warmth of this community. Pretty special thing going on here.
Thank you George for your boundless insight and reckless generosity. This is like watching a great film, listening to the director’s commentary, and then heading to a coffeeshop to discuss it with people you have never met but know very well. Hello, all.
I had the same experience but for me it was driving into town and hearing Rene Auberjonois perform "The Falls" on Selected Shorts. I'd not yet read George's work and I (for real) should not have been driving while listening to that story. I was a total hazard on the road. Tears pouring out of my eyes. Why did I not just pull over?
Very similar experience! I pulled my car over, though. Sobbing. Trying to hide my convulsing body from my dog, who was in the back seat, looking like, "What? What gives? The world out of treats or something?" When I had gathered myself we took a walk and he was like, "See, everything's fine."
My first decent short story opened a lot of doors for me--and as a result I acquired a delusional mindset: I'd better keep writing EXACTLY like this! This story must be my "voice." Ultimately finding freedom from this trap has put me on a wild goose chase that I never want to end, despite the failures and missteps. This is the adventure. Thank you, George, for revealing your process and inspiring more playfulness, a lighter touch, trusting gut feelings.
Yes - there are many voices in us - my thought is, if I produce one (any one) and then refine it through revising the crap out of it - then that voice is also mine. Something like that. One's real voice is, maybe, the sum total of all the voices one has succeeded in pulling off along the way (?) I think of, like, Picasso - the real him is all of those, uh, hims.
George, in your early years, was it hard to excise your day-job technical voice from your literary narrative voice? Or did you just assimilate/amalgamate/aggregate/some-other-ate into your collection of voices? I do a lot of analytical and policy writing in my day job and I never know if it is bleeding into my stories or whether I am over-correcting to avoid using it... I find that I have to read (even just a page) of something creative to course-correct and calibrate before I start writing (and even then, it takes a while before the creative voice settles in).
The appearance of characters as you explain their arrivals is not like birth. They already exist, though likely from your skin and personality, and they walk into, or talk into your pages.
I like that. We don’t lose anything by recognizing they have appeared, do we? I like that, too.
I think you’re saying creative writing is more like reporting, then, jotting down what we semi-consciously build into a scene. That’s the creative space, but journaling our imagination is kind of cheating. It’s still not creating.
I don’t care, though. We don’t plagiarise our imagination, cuz it’s ours. The sickly feeling of stealing what we imagine is kind of delicious.
Do you always spark such odd thoughts in your classrooms? Those are some lucky ducks who spend time with you.
Ducks return to their home every year. You will need to get a bigger lake to house all of us online students.
"We don't lose anything by recognizing they have appeared, do we?" -- I so think about this all the time -- how much is needed to be known by the writer, especially in a short story format? Thanks for this comment!
I wrote you a nice reply, thanking you for your like, but it went into the ether. That's the thing we lose in writing, unfortunately. Lovely things we said and have lost!!! Thank you, though ...
The comments section on the last post was full of people very bravely truthfully answering the question: what makes you anxious about writing. I wasn't sure what my answer to that question was. I knew that I am anxious about my writing. I knew that I hold back too much of myself too often. But I wasn't sure why. This post gave me my answer. What makes me anxious about writing is the fear that I am, or am at least in danger of becoming, Cummings.
Sometimes I write something and I know it's not great, sometimes I'm fairly pleased with what I've produced, every now and again I have that anxious of joy of feeling instinctive faith in what I've just written. In its rightness. But always I worry that those instincts that tell me what good writing feels like, what bad writing sounds like are just self delusion... That I am not really a writer at all but just someone who likes the ego-pleasing idea of being one. That maybe at the end of the day I have no talent, no true creativity, nothing genuine or relatable to say... just a childish need to be special. And God I hope that's not true!
You're not Cummings, Georgia. I mean, we all are a LITTLE Cummings, but...the fact that you can fear you are him, proves you are not. He never worries about that. :)
Ah, that "anxious feeling of joy"! I know it well, along with the fear and what feels like disgust. What I get every now and then is a glimpse of joy without the anxiety. A pure joy that doesn't need to be "good." That is what George has been showing me: "Look! This stuff can be fun! Don't forget to laugh sometimes!" I know it isn't easy, but maybe it doesn't have to be quite so hard.
Can I just say how incredibly refreshing and inspiring your candor has been, already? You noted it at the top and it's so true: this is EXACTLY the kind of insight into the creation of a story that aspiring writers (at least this one) crave. Trying not to gush excessively, but thank you for the early holiday gift that is this newsletter.
I'm gratefully drinking in all this generous sharing of process and craft and just wanted to say...pithiness has its place, but please don't truncate out of misplaced humility! It's a pleasure to be able to dig into all these thought layers of yours.
This class is the only thing keeping me from sticking my head in the toilet and flushing it followed by throwing my work laptop out the window. Thank you.
I was surprised, saddened, and gladdened by your admission that you felt trapped by the first person, minimalist ironic tone of your Civilwarland stories. I started reading you when that book came out 20 something years ago when an Amazon algorithm that no longer seems to exist hooked me up with you because I loved Vonnegut. Even though you have moved on and I love your new work I will always associate you with that earlier voice and I always go back to read those stories for inspiration (a mistake, because it traps me too, but in a worse way, because it was never my voice.) This solves a mystery for me for why your stories have changed (in a more concrete way than the obvious one that people change.) I'm looking forward to more revelations ike this.
Thank you so much for this. I love "The Falls" and I teach it to my students in a fiction writing course. It's such a marvel of point-of-view and voice and I want them to see how much a character's perspective can do on its own, so it's wonderful to hear about the process that got you there. I find I'm still thinking about the story after teaching it many times, and I'm always interested in the elements you built in to make Morse's selfless act feel heavy and serious in the midst of these hilarious characterizations. (The comedy and the meaning are so close together: right before he leaps in he asks if the girls think he is Christ, which is both an image of self-sacrifice and a wonderful joke, since it would be concretely helpful right now if he could walk on water.) I'm also obsessed with the image of Cummings thinking he should find someone to help and turning to find himself face to face with corn. It's perfect and I still don't know why -- perhaps because a huge field of corn is something he could probably have noticed before this moment, so it's an abrupt image of coming face to face with the obvious. At any rate, the story sticks with me, and I'm excited to tell students in future terms about how you wrote it!
I've been teaching history rather than English for the past six or seven years, but I would love to read and discuss this story with students. Makes me tempted to switch departments.
I also hadn't thought about that moment with the corn very deeply, but you're right, it's just perfect how he's off in his imagination in Italy with some leather-clad woman, and then boom: emergency and corn.
Having not read "The Falls" before, when Will Mackin got the the ending, that glorious dive (almost) into the water, I immediately hoped you'd stop right there. What a charming, funny, sad, hopeful story.
Your comments on understory and overstory and the story itself bringing them together really resonated with me as a potentially better way to conceive of story structure/construction than what I've been doing as I muddle along on my own.
And the idea of a vividly-fleshed character itself creating plot or momentum feels like something I've been sensing in my own practice.
I've had a couple old unfinished projects in mind while reading today's post that I haven't grappled with in a while (but that I couldn't bring myself to end my commitment to) that these ideas might help, I think. Thanks for this!
I'm working on an essay about a time I fell into a river, and here now is this story about a man jumping in a river, and surely that can't be a coincidence, except of course it can be a coincidence because so many things happen to so many people that mathematically some of those things are bound to coincide. Then reading ahead I see, "you two guys are in the same story, because I say so." A compelling argument. There is a connection between my essay about a river and the story about a river because there is a connection. Now I get to figure out what that might be.
Is it just me, or is anyone else thinking today, on the Tenth of December, that Story Club has the potential to save a life?
Thank you so much, George, for your warmth, generosity, and inspiration, and for creating this community!
Here here for making December 10th an official writer's holiday
Love that idea! I revisit the story every year on December 10th and this year friends joined to read aloud. I was surprised everyone was game. It took a certain amount of bravery to join in an activity many of us hadn’t engaged with since we were in school. Passing the book around created this beautiful hush punctuated by genuine reactions to the language. December 10th is my new favorite holiday.
Sounds like the Saunders equivalent of Burns Night (which also sounds like an absolute cracker - have always wanted to attend one). Love that you do it every year on Dec 10th.
That Prince Valiant-haircutted boy, how I love him. That story is never far from my heart.
It is my favorite story of George's. And yes, I did think this felt a little like an early version of this, more like an early move toward that sort of commitment. (And as I said elsewhere, my son's birthday is also the Tenth of December, and he is one of the kindest people i know--he'd jump into that river and that icy lake. So it all feels just that much more perfect to me.)
George, as someone who gave a shout-out for “The Falls” on the getting to know you post, I really enjoyed reading about how the story was born. I was struck by how as a reader, the only version of the text I can conceive of is the finished product, and so it’s hard to imagine you writing beyond the end of the story as it currently exists; the final line is what I love most about this story, and it’s so powerful and complete that in my imagination when you wrote it you knew instantly that the story was over because, duh, tautology-alert, there is it, the perfect finish to the story.
This led me to try to express why the last line is so important, and what it does to me as a reader. On the most basic level, from the first time I read the story and then called my wife and read it aloud to her over the phone because I wanted to share it with someone else immediately, it’s heartbreaking and heroic and despairing and hopeful, and that mess of emotions that it stirs would be ruined if anything else happened to resolve that ambiguity.
During a later reading, I remember being struck by how powerfully this story asks and answers a key question about the human condition: Why do you do when all the alternatives are hopeless? It’s impossible, of course, to do nothing, to watch the girls drown, but it’s also of course impossible to swim to the snag, and so we get to watch as Morse tries figure this out himself and juggle the impossible and unthinkable outcomes and there’s something thrilling about his thoughts circling around and justifying one course of action while his body has already taken flight. While reading I always appreciate the action that Morse’s body takes, independent of his mind, and see it as deeply moral and heroic and true: that watching the girls drown is the thing that you really can’t do, more than any of the other things that you can’t do, that cuts across your fear and despair and rationalizing and justifying. Knowing whether or not the heroic moment succeeds or fails is counterproductive: if it succeeded, the story of Morse feels as false as the thoughts of Cummings; if it fails we lose that glimmer of hope and our empathy with Morse gets broken and replaced by something else: sorrow, sympathy for his family.
Today, in light of your teaser about looking at sentences as a creative driver, I thought more about the rhythms and cadences of this story, and the ways in which Morse’s thoughts tumble out and over each other like water rushing over the falls. A good deal of the humor and the tragedy of this story for me is what’s happening in Morse’s head and how he can’t seem to stop it, this interior flood of memories and resentments and fears and bits of occasionally forced gratitude. In this way the final sentence feels like a kind of release from Morse’s neuroses: the sentence starts with his normal tumble and turmoil: eight thoughts on top of each other, separated by commas. Then the sentence suddenly slows down as he makes his decision, as we get this lovely “threw his long ugly body out across the water.” If the problem in this reading of this story is Morse’s indecision and anxiety, then this sentence brings it to a close quite nicely: even for just a split second, Morse and the reader are given a moment of grace, and the noble act is mirrored by a calmness of language and thought.
Anyway, glad to have some time today to sit back and think about this stuff; reading literature creates these moments of grace for me where I can sit back and ponder all these questions about being human.
Lovely, thank you - and yes, perfectly said.
Wow! What a wonderful analyses.
I loved reading this whole thread about this post. Thank you for sharing this moment of grace and inspiring other ones.
Thanks! My primary purpose here is to think and talk about literature as I don't have a lot of time to do writing of my own, and I'm super happy to have lots of other people to talk about it with.
I love what you write here and that you took the time to share all of this. "Morse's thoughts tumbling out over each other like water rushing over the falls" and "watching the girls drown is the thing that you really can't do, more than any of the other things that you can't do." Perfect.
Also, I noticed that you mainly mentioned Morse. I felt this affinity with Morse, too, and his part of the story is what carried it for me. I wonder (and ask George this, too) what the story would be like if Cummings were not in it at all? Did you consider that when writing it? I only ask because my instinct was to skip over the parts about him when reading it a second time. I am going to try and read it that way just for the fun of it, but I'm sure it will probably lose part of its impact since there were clear intentions to use his character as a sort of contrast.
I think there's no question that the story would be worse without Cummings. There are all the ways that he provides a contrast and a foil to Morse, but he also seems to exist to help us feel closer to Morse, whose anxiety might otherwise be off-putting. Cummings, who is so intent of his artistic vision of the world, gets Morse wrong in his imagination, whereas we feel that we know the actual Morse. His neuroses might be out of control, but at least they are grounded in reality: Morse sees the problems and costs at the end of the story so clearly, in a way that Cummings cannot because he's not really engaging with the world as it exists.
This reminds me of some author's note that I read recently, although I'm having trouble remembering which book - perhaps Omensetter's Luck - where the key breakthrough in the creation of the story was realizing that this other character needed to be in the story as well - and then suddenly it was infused with this depth and meaning and tension that it didn't have before.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'd love to know more about your assertions toward Morse and Cummings. You write, "we know the actual Morse"; do we not know the actual Cummings? I’m curious about what's prompting your judgments. Morse assesses Cummings as “an odd duck, […] nearly forty, still liv[ing] with his mother.” Whereas later in the paragraph, Morse says that he “was going home to enjoy his beautiful children without a care in the world.” Morse’s passages are grounded in thoughts of family and daily life, whereas Cummings’ are not. You write that Cummings is “not really engaging in the world as it exists.” How does the world really exist, and who deems this? I think there's a lot to discover in the character pairing.
I am re-reading this and seeing so many comparisons between Morse and Cummings. The structure itself says a lot -- the amount of space given to Morse vs. the amount of space given to Cummings is one thing of note. When Cummings sees the girls and tries to make a decision, there are only a few lines to cover his response, while Morse's thoughts run wild for at least a page (after he moves from being stuck in his tracks to running). There are also parallels between their thoughts about how others view them: Morse feels like he is not great or good enough and is worried that people will see true and/or imagined faults (the school kids, his co-workers, anyone who might notice he is nervous, his wife, his son, even Cummings and the girls in the canoe), while Cummings feels like he is great and acts like he is the victim of everyone's misjudgments.
I also love how in the first paragraph Morse thinks (twice), "So humility was the thing ... " and even though trying to put on the appearance of being humble isn't really humble, he is, in reality, a much more humble person, who in the end does a very humble heroic thing. Even the description of his body in the last sentence is a humble one. This is a great contrast to the "if only" statements surrounding the thought, "But some kind of moment in the sun would certainly not be unwelcome." Here he gets a true moment in the sun, however humble.
The more I read it, the more I think this story is brilliant, and I could write a lot more about it, but these are just a few thoughts that came to mind!
Yeah, that's one of the things that I love about this story: it feels like every little detail matters, both in terms of building the characters and then when viewed in retrospect at the end of the story. The memory of being bullied by the swimmer who died is so important to the foundation of Morse's character but then also essential to how we understand the end of the story.
I like all of the reverberations as well - sometimes the character's thoughts apply to them, and sometimes (unknowingly) they apply to the other. Like Will said in the podcast, that part in the first para "Of that he was certain. Or relatively certain. Being overly certain, he was relatively sure, was what eventually made one a wacko. So humility was the thing, he thought..." has as much (or more) to do with Cummings than it does to Morse. (That sequence still makes me smile, every time).
My take: I think the story is Morse's, and Cummings is there in service to that story - he brings the point of comparison (to the point where Morse's decision to jump in is heightened not only by his own indecision but by what we saw in the preceding scene with Cummings' reaction), and foreshadowing - his first interior monologue is all about the possible rain making the 'fine bright day even finer and brighter because of the possibility of its loss' and 'the fleeting passages of time' and how 'time made wastrels of us all, did it not, with its gaunt cheeks and its tombly reverberations and its admonishing glances with bony fingers... as if to say, “I admonish you to recall your own eventual nascent death, which being on its way is forthcoming. Forthcoming, mortal coil, and don’t think its ghastly pall won’t settle on your furrowed brow' (which, having followed Morse's where we learn he is 'tall and thin and as gray and sepulchral as a church about to be condemned' (sorry Morse, but death is on the cards for you...).
On that tangent - there is so much good foreshadowing in this story - how Morse tries to absorb something of the river's serenity, 'but instead found himself obsessing about the faulty latch on the gate, which theoretically could allow Annie to toddle out of the yard and into the river, and he pictured himself weeping on the shore.'
So many new insights and 'easter eggs' to find in re-readings! :)
Yeah, I was contemplating that a bit … what are your thoughts? It’s hard to imagine someone actually being glad that someone died like that, no matter how mean they were when young. Maybe it is almost like an act of atonement.
Since so much of what happens in this story takes place in the heads of the characters, I think that how well we know the characters is directly related to how well they know themselves. Morse, with all his mental back and forth, seems quite aware of his own limitations, his own happiness and sadness and how they're all mixed together in his messy little life. Cummings, on the other hand, is sort of a one-trick pony for much of the story: he's trying to re-imagine and write over the world that he's witnessing and his role within it. It seems to me that the story is pushing back against this kind of understanding of the world by showing the hollowness of Cummings' self-imagined heroism through the comparison to Morse (who is also desperate to prove himself in some way) and his unwillingness but ultimate surrender to the necessity of plunging into the river.
Very good points! Thanks for responding so thoughtfully!
When Morse realises that the two girls he absent-mindedly waved at are oarless and headed towards the Falls, we immediately switch away from the scene and find Cummings, who is stuck in the (selfsame) reverie he has been having since we met him. For me, that moment creates a tautness and tension--we wait. We wait to see if Cummings even notices the girls; we wait to see which of the two men do something about the situation. So, yes, in a sense we want to skip over those parts to get to the end, but that urgency created by the inclusion of Cummings is also what propels us forwards.
I've always been a sucker for "how this was written" narratives, and this was a marvelous one. Of all the many things to dig into here, the most salient for me is when you say: "So, process produced a structure..."
This reminds me of another quote that I saved some time ago and recently stumbled across again. It's from Jasper Johns, in 2006 New Yorker profile: "Actually, when one works, one comes to a solution much more quickly than when one sits and thinks."
It's good to be reminded that miracles like good stories emerge not when we're sitting on our hands but when actually putting pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboards). I tried to explain this once to an interviewer -- that writing produces thoughts you could not generate in any way -- by saying that writing *is* thinking. I utterly failed to convey what I meant then, so I'm glad to have the idea clarified for me here in a way that I could probably repeat more sensibly to someone else.
And of course I want to get back to my writing desk now and do some thinking.
Love that Johns' quote. Writing it on my forehead now.
This made me laugh! "Actually, when one works, one comes to a solution much more quickly than when one sits and thinks." THANK YOU, William.
V.A. Howard and J.H. Barton have a terrific book based on their research in education on this very topic, titled, *Thinking on Paper* (1988). "...they point out that many of our thoughts first come into being only when put to paper."
Hi George, I loved reading "The Falls" and learning about your process. I’m with you 100% on wanting this kind of peek behind the curtain more than anything from the writers I love - so thank you for this!
I particular loved hearing your thoughts on the ending, and how what happens to Morse/the girls is not ultimately important - not the question the story cares most about. Fascinating and inspiring to see how that kind of focused question the story DOES care about (Morse's ability to transcend himself) emerged so naturally/playfully. One thing I’ve found myself thinking about lately in several pieces I’m working on is the shifting possibilities of what this question at the heart of things could be, and how many possible stories could emerge from the same material/situation, and thus how many questions are there under the surface, each connected to a slightly different story, with slightly different focus, ready to emerge if I go in this or that direction - and so much possibility can just be kind of scary. So it really does feel refreshing to hear how playful your process was with this story, and how a kind of wisdom emerges from the process itself that can't be accessed any other way.
I also want to echo Tina’s comment about this constant Christmas feeling I’m getting from Story Club, created by your warmth and generosity, and the warmth of this community. Pretty special thing going on here.
I think so too, Joy, and thanks for saying so.
Thank you George for your boundless insight and reckless generosity. This is like watching a great film, listening to the director’s commentary, and then heading to a coffeeshop to discuss it with people you have never met but know very well. Hello, all.
I love that!
HOLY SHIT, “The Falls”
Just read it and I have never laughed so hard in a story and then gotten stabbed in the tear ducts like that.
And then we get a look inside how it grew?! What kind of constant Christmas is this place?
Is my favorite learning experience ever underway??
More thoughts on all the presents in the post later but I had to run here and freak out.
I had the same experience but for me it was driving into town and hearing Rene Auberjonois perform "The Falls" on Selected Shorts. I'd not yet read George's work and I (for real) should not have been driving while listening to that story. I was a total hazard on the road. Tears pouring out of my eyes. Why did I not just pull over?
Very similar experience! I pulled my car over, though. Sobbing. Trying to hide my convulsing body from my dog, who was in the back seat, looking like, "What? What gives? The world out of treats or something?" When I had gathered myself we took a walk and he was like, "See, everything's fine."
Dogs are among the best kind of people.
Totally agree, but have you ever read "My Flamboyant Grandson"? Holy moly. That story drops me to the floor.
I haven’t! Uh oh.
Tina. Oh no. But I also envy you, too.
then let me not take anymore time reading it, if it is so funny. thank you for the review.
My first decent short story opened a lot of doors for me--and as a result I acquired a delusional mindset: I'd better keep writing EXACTLY like this! This story must be my "voice." Ultimately finding freedom from this trap has put me on a wild goose chase that I never want to end, despite the failures and missteps. This is the adventure. Thank you, George, for revealing your process and inspiring more playfulness, a lighter touch, trusting gut feelings.
Yes - there are many voices in us - my thought is, if I produce one (any one) and then refine it through revising the crap out of it - then that voice is also mine. Something like that. One's real voice is, maybe, the sum total of all the voices one has succeeded in pulling off along the way (?) I think of, like, Picasso - the real him is all of those, uh, hims.
Indeed! I'm soon teaching a course called "Finding Your Voices."
George, in your early years, was it hard to excise your day-job technical voice from your literary narrative voice? Or did you just assimilate/amalgamate/aggregate/some-other-ate into your collection of voices? I do a lot of analytical and policy writing in my day job and I never know if it is bleeding into my stories or whether I am over-correcting to avoid using it... I find that I have to read (even just a page) of something creative to course-correct and calibrate before I start writing (and even then, it takes a while before the creative voice settles in).
The appearance of characters as you explain their arrivals is not like birth. They already exist, though likely from your skin and personality, and they walk into, or talk into your pages.
I like that. We don’t lose anything by recognizing they have appeared, do we? I like that, too.
I think you’re saying creative writing is more like reporting, then, jotting down what we semi-consciously build into a scene. That’s the creative space, but journaling our imagination is kind of cheating. It’s still not creating.
I don’t care, though. We don’t plagiarise our imagination, cuz it’s ours. The sickly feeling of stealing what we imagine is kind of delicious.
Do you always spark such odd thoughts in your classrooms? Those are some lucky ducks who spend time with you.
Ducks return to their home every year. You will need to get a bigger lake to house all of us online students.
"Do you always spark such odd thoughts in your classrooms?" No, but I love it when I do. Thanks for this comment.
"We don't lose anything by recognizing they have appeared, do we?" -- I so think about this all the time -- how much is needed to be known by the writer, especially in a short story format? Thanks for this comment!
I wrote you a nice reply, thanking you for your like, but it went into the ether. That's the thing we lose in writing, unfortunately. Lovely things we said and have lost!!! Thank you, though ...
This was a joy to read, John Francis. (Or do you go by just John?)
John.
You are so kind, Heidi.
Aww! Thanks for saying so. I glanced at your substack--you have quite a way with words!
The comments section on the last post was full of people very bravely truthfully answering the question: what makes you anxious about writing. I wasn't sure what my answer to that question was. I knew that I am anxious about my writing. I knew that I hold back too much of myself too often. But I wasn't sure why. This post gave me my answer. What makes me anxious about writing is the fear that I am, or am at least in danger of becoming, Cummings.
Sometimes I write something and I know it's not great, sometimes I'm fairly pleased with what I've produced, every now and again I have that anxious of joy of feeling instinctive faith in what I've just written. In its rightness. But always I worry that those instincts that tell me what good writing feels like, what bad writing sounds like are just self delusion... That I am not really a writer at all but just someone who likes the ego-pleasing idea of being one. That maybe at the end of the day I have no talent, no true creativity, nothing genuine or relatable to say... just a childish need to be special. And God I hope that's not true!
You're not Cummings, Georgia. I mean, we all are a LITTLE Cummings, but...the fact that you can fear you are him, proves you are not. He never worries about that. :)
Exactly!
This sounds like the thinking of most of us, Georgia! Trust your instincts!
Ah, that "anxious feeling of joy"! I know it well, along with the fear and what feels like disgust. What I get every now and then is a glimpse of joy without the anxiety. A pure joy that doesn't need to be "good." That is what George has been showing me: "Look! This stuff can be fun! Don't forget to laugh sometimes!" I know it isn't easy, but maybe it doesn't have to be quite so hard.
Can I just say how incredibly refreshing and inspiring your candor has been, already? You noted it at the top and it's so true: this is EXACTLY the kind of insight into the creation of a story that aspiring writers (at least this one) crave. Trying not to gush excessively, but thank you for the early holiday gift that is this newsletter.
I'm gratefully drinking in all this generous sharing of process and craft and just wanted to say...pithiness has its place, but please don't truncate out of misplaced humility! It's a pleasure to be able to dig into all these thought layers of yours.
Agreed !, we need lucid explanations, much like George's for it to gently sink into ourselves
This class is the only thing keeping me from sticking my head in the toilet and flushing it followed by throwing my work laptop out the window. Thank you.
I think in the 50's, when you flushed your head, they called it a "swirly".
Thanks for the great reading of my story, brother!
Such a great reading — I listened twice! Really looking forward to reading your stories, WIll.
Beautifully read!
Bring Out the Dog is officially on my to-read list (somehow it wasn't already ...).
My husband is a Marine Corps vet and voracious reader. I just bought your pink book for him.
Me too. I’m almost sure he will!
Will, Crossing the River No Name blew me away.
haha :)
I was surprised, saddened, and gladdened by your admission that you felt trapped by the first person, minimalist ironic tone of your Civilwarland stories. I started reading you when that book came out 20 something years ago when an Amazon algorithm that no longer seems to exist hooked me up with you because I loved Vonnegut. Even though you have moved on and I love your new work I will always associate you with that earlier voice and I always go back to read those stories for inspiration (a mistake, because it traps me too, but in a worse way, because it was never my voice.) This solves a mystery for me for why your stories have changed (in a more concrete way than the obvious one that people change.) I'm looking forward to more revelations ike this.
Also - I slightly (and with pleasure) reverted, in a recent story called "Ghoul" that ran in The New Yorker. These voices are always in us.
I will look it up. Thank you.
Thank you so much for this. I love "The Falls" and I teach it to my students in a fiction writing course. It's such a marvel of point-of-view and voice and I want them to see how much a character's perspective can do on its own, so it's wonderful to hear about the process that got you there. I find I'm still thinking about the story after teaching it many times, and I'm always interested in the elements you built in to make Morse's selfless act feel heavy and serious in the midst of these hilarious characterizations. (The comedy and the meaning are so close together: right before he leaps in he asks if the girls think he is Christ, which is both an image of self-sacrifice and a wonderful joke, since it would be concretely helpful right now if he could walk on water.) I'm also obsessed with the image of Cummings thinking he should find someone to help and turning to find himself face to face with corn. It's perfect and I still don't know why -- perhaps because a huge field of corn is something he could probably have noticed before this moment, so it's an abrupt image of coming face to face with the obvious. At any rate, the story sticks with me, and I'm excited to tell students in future terms about how you wrote it!
I've been teaching history rather than English for the past six or seven years, but I would love to read and discuss this story with students. Makes me tempted to switch departments.
I also hadn't thought about that moment with the corn very deeply, but you're right, it's just perfect how he's off in his imagination in Italy with some leather-clad woman, and then boom: emergency and corn.
Having not read "The Falls" before, when Will Mackin got the the ending, that glorious dive (almost) into the water, I immediately hoped you'd stop right there. What a charming, funny, sad, hopeful story.
Your comments on understory and overstory and the story itself bringing them together really resonated with me as a potentially better way to conceive of story structure/construction than what I've been doing as I muddle along on my own.
And the idea of a vividly-fleshed character itself creating plot or momentum feels like something I've been sensing in my own practice.
I've had a couple old unfinished projects in mind while reading today's post that I haven't grappled with in a while (but that I couldn't bring myself to end my commitment to) that these ideas might help, I think. Thanks for this!
I'm working on an essay about a time I fell into a river, and here now is this story about a man jumping in a river, and surely that can't be a coincidence, except of course it can be a coincidence because so many things happen to so many people that mathematically some of those things are bound to coincide. Then reading ahead I see, "you two guys are in the same story, because I say so." A compelling argument. There is a connection between my essay about a river and the story about a river because there is a connection. Now I get to figure out what that might be.