“A man stood on the roof of a seventy-story building.”
Aren’t you already kind of expecting him to jump, fall, or be pushed off?
You’ll be pleased if the story takes that expectation into account, but not pleased if it addresses it too neatly. We could understand a story as simply a series of such expectation/resolution moments.
~ George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
I got dumped right at the start of the year. My friend Will Partin advised me against posting about it on social media but I feel like I can mention it in this newsletter since it only gets 13 views. I was extremely sad about the breakup at first obviously… one day somebody is your best friend and the next day you aren’t talking. There wasn’t any drama, to be clear. Just a clean break, followed by a weird resounding silence.
One month later I am pretty much recovered. My apartment (pictured above) has never looked better. I’ve been cooking all my meals. I caught a bad cold and have mostly defeated it at time of writing. The best news though was that George Saunders finally put out a book I’d been awaiting: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life)
Given the importance of George Saunders to me (see below) and the relevance of the book to this newsletter’s stated mission (how write good short story??) I could not resist immediately derailing our whole trajectory to read this book and write about it.
In 2015 when I was a miserable consultant with little hope of becoming a writer I emailed George Saunders at his Syracuse address. My email contained a bunch of annoying fluff but the core of it was this:
How do I know when I've written something good? When I think that something I've written is good, how do I tell whether it's just me being arrogant?
Miraculously, he wrote me back. In addition to some general encouragement, he offered the following suggestion:
Examine your mindset when writing. Are you trying to teach someone? Put one over on someone? Impress someone? Or are you trying to genuinely communicate with someone? I think that last is the real key to readability - you are trying to communicate with someone for whom you have affection and respect. That sometimes gives a writer a new way of thinking about revising - you are trying to better communicate affection and respect for your reader.
I think about this advice all the time. It’s so easy to slip into “showing off” whether that’s via vocabulary or digression or hamfisted mimicry of whatever writing style you were just impressed by… it’s hard to stay genuine and humble, to keep your reader in mind no matter what…
(Many times when I have wanted to give up on writing fiction I have thought about this email. He didn’t have to write me this email. Now I owe it to him, somehow, to keep trying.)
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is based on a course Saunders teaches at Syracuse. The format of the book is seven Russian short stories plus accompanying essays and exercises. I’m only a few stories in and I’ve already had my mind repeatedly blown:
We might say that the three paragraphs we’ve just read were in service of increased specification.
Characterization, so called, results from just such increasing specification. The writer asks, “Which particular person is this, anyway?” and answers with a series of facts that have the effect of creating a narrowing path: ruling out certain possibilities, urging others forward.
As a particular person gets made, the potential for what we call “plot” increases. (Although that’s a word I don’t like much—let’s replace it with “meaningful action.”)
Ahh! The joy of new terminology! I love this idea of characterization = increased specification. I love the dismissal of “plot” for “meaningful action.” Here and elsewhere Saunders rejects analytical terms and suggests an organic approach to story-writing that sounds… way more fun. The creation of art as “play” and “exploration” instead of cold calculation.
I’m having this issue right now with an 133,000-word manuscript on its 12th draft… My approach to this thing has become so calculating and analytical… trying to figure out how the pieces should fit together… Saunders proposes a simple solution to such ‘structure’ woes:
We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.
This breaks my brain in half. It’s so obvious and yet I have never ever thought about it this way. And now I want to read through everything I write with this in mind.
Every structural unit needs to do two things: (1) be entertaining in its own right and (2) advance the story in a non-trivial way.
Brilliant!
Keep in mind we’re like 1/7 of the way through the book here. And then Saunders drops the following bomb, which I am still recovering from as we speak:
As young writers, we all have romantic dreams of being a writer of a certain kind, of joining a certain lineage. A painstaking realist, maybe; a Nabokovian stylist . . . But sometimes the world, via its tepid response to prose written in that mode, tells us that we are not, in fact, that kind of writer. So we have to find another approach . . . We have to become whatever writer is capable of producing the necessary level of energy.
He shares a story from his own experience… spending his early thirties determined to become a “Hemingwayesque realist.” Abject failure no matter how much time and effort he poured into those stories. Until he figured out that he was allowed—no, supposed—to write funny stuff. And he found his voice.
In this mode, I found, I had stronger opinions than when I was trying to be Hemingway. If something wasn’t working, I knew what to do about it, immediately and instinctually, in the form of an impulse, whereas before I’d been rationally deciding, in stiff obeisance to what I thought a story should, or must, do.
This was a much freer mode—like trying to be funny at a party.
I’ve been there!! I’ve felt this!! Now I know that's how it’s supposed to feel! Now I know to chase it!
ok that’s the newsletter for this week. now that i’ve kicked my cold i gotta go try to write a short story based on the above… as always thank you for reading and feel free to subscribe or share w/ ur friends lol
I'm with you on George. After talking his online Substack "course" I ended up with a publisher and finished two books. He's got a strange influence on what's already there in writers. I have, subsequently, fostered (in the parenting frame) three writers. None have responded with actual writing, but George's commitment to us wannabes and mightbes counts, so I must do the same.
God bless you in Wtf, which obviously means Writing Tremendous Fiction. Am I the only one who knows?