Dear George,
I want to thank you so much for Story Club and for your many wonderful books (I especially like “The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil”) and your writing guidance throughout the years. In a funk about my own work, I recently started re-reading/re-listening to “A Swim In A Pond In the Rain” and came across this, (which stuck out so much I underlined it during the first read, and promptly forgot it, because that’s my brain sometimes):
“I’ve worked with so many wildly talented young writers over the years that I feel qualified to say that there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t. First, a willingness to revise. Second, the extent to which the writer had learned to make causality.”
I’m perfectly willing to revise, but I feel like my work has real problems with causality; sometimes nothing happens, sometimes things happen that are unrelated or only tangential. I feel reluctant to change the major happenings of a story because I’m unsure of what to replace it with, or if it’ll stink in a different way. Do you have any suggestions or exercises that could help strengthen an understanding of causality?