What I’m doing when I revise is not so much trying to perfectly imagine another person reading my story, but to imitate myself reading it, if I were reading it for the first time.
- George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Revision blows. It takes forever and it’s very easy to reach a point where you don’t know if you are making the thing better or worse. Sometimes you begin to suspect that the thing you are revising has deep fundamental flaws that make revising it pointless. This makes you want to throw it all out and start over. Sometimes you are supposed to do that, and sometimes you’re supposed to keep going, but how are you supposed to tell? And even if you do keep going, at some point you have to decide that you are finished. For all of these reasons I drastically prefer the process of blasting out words to the process of fixing them.
Unfortunately, according to George Saunders in the very excellent book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, revision is “important.”
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 has learned to make causality.
We’ll talk about causality in a bit. First though a subscription button and then some thoughts about revision as explained by George Saunders.
It turns out the George Saunders approach to revision is built off a fundamental principle we discussed last week, namely that you are supposed to be the writer you are supposed to be. Trusting your intuition, you read what you’ve written and try to react to it as if it’s your first time. You change the parts that feel off. You leave the parts that feel good. After doing this over and over you eventually wind up with something that only you could have written.
Whether that thing is actually good seems to have a lot to do with whether you have trained your intuition toward generating interesting characters and stories. One rule of thumb is “Always be escalating.”
That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation. A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is (still) escalating.
Saunders describes reading student novels that churn their wheels endlessly, stuck in exposition, no escalation in sight. I’ve written a lot of stuff like that. It’s not enough that things keep happening. The things that happen need to build on each other and intensify, like a snowball growing in size and speed as it pursues some Looney Tunes character down a mountain.
The events also have to be connected. AKA, there needs to be causality. This is something I’d never considered before reading this book, which now seems kind of obvious in retrospect. I have absolutely been doing this wrong.
For most of us, the problem is not in making things happen (“A dog barked,” “The house exploded,” “Darren kicked the tire of his car”) but in making one thing seem to cause the next.
This is important, because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning.
“The queen died, and then the king died” (E.M. Forster’s famous formulation) describes two unrelated events occurring in sequence. It doesn’t mean anything. “The queen died, and the king died of grief” puts those events into relation; we understand that one caused the other. The sequence, now infused with causality, means: “That king really loved his queen.”
Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.
This passage hit me with the force of a full-volume TikTok. Duh! Stories aren’t just events… they are connected events. Think about a mystery novel. We discover a clue, which leads us to a location, where we discover another clue. Maybe this is why mysteries are such a compelling format: they are yarn-balls of causality, down to the level of “what caused the crime??”
In literary writing, causality is often more complex. E.g. Saunders discusses the way Tolstoy generates causality from an encounter with some peasants in the short story “And Yet They Drove On.” The main characters, driving a sled, encounter some peasants in another sled. They race. The main characters win. At first glance this seems like a random occurrence, something Tolstoy threw in for a touch of Rustic Peasant Flavor. But as Saunders points out, it’s not random at all:
What does the race cause to happen?
Well, it fires Vasili up. Of course it does. This man who lives to win has won . . . his elation then causes the next beat (“he drove on more boldly without examining the way-marks . . .”), which, in turn, causes the next (essential, very nontrivial) beat: they get lost again.
In real life, unconnected stuff happens all the time. But stories are not real life. They are constructs that mimic aspects of real life in order to… entertain, compel, explore, confuse, provoke, whatever. Good stories are highly specific little devices that could only be themselves. Every part of a good story is connected to every other part. Every part of a good story contributes to what that story is doing. I’m not sure if knowing that gets you closer to writing one but maybe it’s a way to know whether you’ve managed it or not… and as we’ve mentioned before, knowing whether you’ve managed to write something good is a challenge that never goes away.
This series has officially caught up to me in that I no longer have upcoming weeks’ posts already prepared. Hopefully I can avoid the fate of all my friends who started Substacks and quit after a few posts. I would like to do this for a whole year at least lol… thank you for reading & see you next week!