Short Stories & the Writing Process
In the past year I’ve read two very amazing books about writing fiction. For my birthday this year, poet Ann Cefola sent me the new book by George Saunders explicating Russian short stories as illustrative for fiction writing, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. And although the stories he explicates very lovingly and expertly are not my favorite short stories, the book is non-the-less illuminating as Saunders walks us through craft techniques such as character development page by page, discovering the heart of a story, patterns in stories, plots, strange fictions, didacticism and ambiguity.
The ending section I found particularly moving and the exercises in the appendix are informative and not to be missed. This is a long book. I took my time with it and it took me about 3 months to finish.
This is not your every-day writing guide, however, and it's well worth the effort you spend on it.
In explicating Ivan Turgenev’s story “The Singers,” Saunders says,
"I teach ‘The Singers’ to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we’ll turn out to be. 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; a deeply spiritual writer like Marilynne Robinson—whatever…
(‘The writer can choose what he writers about,’ says Flannery O’Connor, ‘but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.’)
This writer may turn out to bear little resemblance to the writer we dreamed of being. She is born, it turns out, for better or worse, out of that which we really are: the tendencies we’ve been trying, all these years, in our writing and maybe even in our lives, to suppress or deny or correct, the parts of ourselves about which we might even feel a little ashamed.
Whitman was right: we are large, we do contain multitudes. There’s more than one ‘us’ in there. When we ‘find our voice,’ what’s really happening is that we’re choosing a voice from among the many voices we’re able to ‘do,’ and we’re choosing it because we’ve found that, of all the voices we contain, so far, that has proven itself to be the most energetic.”
A friend of mine likes to sort writers into the generous type and not-so generous type. With her rubric, Saunders feels like a very generous writer and teacher. As I said, the final section called “We End” is a particularly moving wrap-up on why we feel compelled to write in the first place.
“It really is true: doing what you please (i.e., what pleases you), with energy, will lead you to everything—to your particular obsessions and the ways in which you’ll indulge them, to your particular challenges and the forms in which they’ll convert into beauty, to your particular obstructions and your highly individualized obstruction breakers. We can’t know what our writing problems will be until we write our way into them, and then we can only write our way out…
We can decide only so much. The big questions have to be answered by hours at the desk. So much of the worrying we do is a way of avoiding work, which only delays the (work-enabled) solution.”
“Fiction helps us remember that everything remains to be seen. It’s a sacrament dedicated to this end. We can’t always feel as open to the world as we feel at the end of a beautiful story.”
Saunders describes writing and a reading even a little phrase as a little tussle between two people,
“By that little tussle, you know I’m here. And I know you’re there. That phrase is a little corridor connecting us, giving us a fragment of the world over which to tussle, i.e., connect…
That’s a pretty hopeful model of human interaction: two people, mutually respectful, leaning in, one speaking so as to compel, the other listening, willing to be charmed.
That, a person can work with.”
The Science of Narrative
Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better is a much shorter book and much of it based on the research he did for his book Selfie. Storr uses evolutionary psychology, culture and neural science to define why we respond to certain storytelling techniques and he covers things like creating a world, cause and effect, change agents, theories of characterization, dialogue, higher stakes, plots, beginnings and endings.
For example, he illustrates how the brain assembles a sentence and why active sentences create better pictures in the brain than passive sentences.
He talks about how we organize the world in our brains:
“Our goals give our lives order, momentum and logic. They provide our hallucination of reality with a centre of narrative gravity. Our perception organizes itself around them. What we see and feel, at any given moment, depends on what we’re trying to get—when we’re caught in the street in a downpour of rain, we don’t see the shops and trees and doorways and awnings, we see places of shelter…
In order to encourage us to act, to struggle, to live, the hero-making brain wants us to feel as if we’re constantly moving towards something better.”
Talking about figurative, poetic language, he says,
“It’s….associative thinking that gives poetry its power. A successful poem plays on our associative networks as a harpist plays on strings. By the meticulous placing of a few simple words, they brush gently against deeply buried memories, emotions, joys, traumas, which are stored in the form of neural networks that light up as we read. In this way, poets ring out rich chords of meaning that resonate so profoundly we struggle to fully explain why they’re moving us so.”
It's this tone of generosity from Storr and Saunders that is missing from other explication and writing books I’ve bailed on in the last year.
Two examples are Break Blow Burn by Camille Paglia and Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. Paglia’s book is structured very similar to Saunders’ where you read a poem and then she explicates it, but without the whole of Saunders’ joy and amazement. Her explications read more like student papers. Admittedly, Paglia is a difficult writer for me. I heartedly agree with half of what she says and vehemently disagree with the other half. Her tone is often self-righteous as if she’s writing out of grievance.
Klinkenborg is lacking that same chip on his shoulder and is full of great thoughts about writing sentences, but his aesthetic preference for short, journalistic sentences seemed lacking in theperspective. What about the beautifully meandering Proustian sentence. But in all fairness to Klinenborg, I only made it to page 30.
I haven’t given up on these books. I’m assuming I’m just not ready for them yet and they’re sitting back on the to-read shelf.
Places Where the Story Lives
A year or so ago my friend Natalie sent me a story box from the Deadbolt Mystery Society. I’ve since shared these delightful things with many of my friends and discovered there are a few groups putting out these mystery boxes (some aren’t even boxes but letters of artifacts mailed to you periodically).
I’ve done two boxes from Deadbolt and the experience of solving the mystery (I’m better at some clues than others…I suck at solving mathematical riddles for example; thankfully there are hints and solutions available) has made me think a lot (again) about where a story lives.
In this case the narrative is assembled from little pieces of artifacts. My latest ‘story’ included ragtime music, a tiny board game, a tiny set of poker cards (adorable and enticing enough to get me to play a series of hands to uncover a plot point), a piano keyboard, newspaper clipping, letters, notes and book covers.
You have to string a story together from pieces and interactions with the box items. There’s no reason why a story must live in a book, on film or any other one kind of place.
