Always Be Escalating
Writing Tips from George Saunders’ “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain”
I’m too old to be a student. That’s how I feel, anyway. But I think that what I really mean when I say I’m too old to be a student, is that I’m too old to go to school. Too old, and too poor. I own a house (somehow) and I have kids and a dog and a car and all types of insurances, and every month I have to shell out the bulk of what I earn (which isn’t much to begin with) to pay for all those things — to keep the domestic wheels turning. Going back to school seems, frankly, impossible. I know it can be done. I know there are stories out there, true stories, of single moms working two jobs and going to night school. But that’s hero level shit. And I am but a bum, a bum exhausted by the mere thought of night school. All this yammering is to say how grateful I am when an author I admire writes a book on craft, and gives, as it were, a master class on writing fiction, to us lazy bums out there in the working world who still cling to their absurd literary aspirations.
There’s an interesting thing about reading great literature. The interesting thing is that you can’t seem to figure out why it’s so fucking good. It just…is. Everything seems essential. Everything seems unavoidable, and inevitable, with all the right elements getting mixed in when and where they’re needed, and in just the right amounts. You know it’s good. You can taste it. But when you try to cook up a story yourself you get this flat bowl of mush that tastes like you sat your bare ass on a tomato and called it gazpacho. Saunders says as much (and when he does it’s both funnier and more articulate — which is why he is who he is, and I am nobody). From there though, Saunders goes on to show us, in both technical and conceptual terms, how the sausage gets made. Thanks George, we knew you could do it.
The following are a few of my big takeaways from the book, things I think can help me and other aspiring writers to spice up their prose and write something interesting (or at least make a better attempt). This brief summary is by no means an adequate substitute for the book, some TLDR on a long-winded youtube video. The book is filled with Saunders’ typical, uncomplicated wisdom and wit, and the experience of reading and following along with his analysis of several russian short stories, is an illuminating exercise. In short, buy the book.
# 1
RITUAL BANALITY AVOIDANCE
Saunders advises: “deny yourself the crappo version of the story.” He says, “to refuse to do the crappo thing is to strike a de facto blow for quality.” This seems like it would go without saying, but when reading lesser fiction the biggest turn-off I find is that the stories simply aren’t interesting. They’re just plain boring, or they’re riddled with cliches and tired tropes, attempting to do what other authors have already done, but with a fraction of the finesse and skill. But how do you avoid doing that? According to Saunders, it’s potentially simple. Ask yourself ‘where does the story seem to be going?’ and then decide whether that direction is actually interesting or explores some kind of new ground. If it does, great. If it doesn’t, then make it. Saunders suggests that the basic structure of a story is something of a call-and-response: questions arise organically from the story, and then the story answers those questions. To avoid ritual banality then, to avoid boring your readers and making bad art, an author must first be aware of what questions (what expectations) they are raising, and then, in answering those questions, avoid giving, as Saunders says, crappo answers — answers that are too obvious, too preachy, or too neat, or answers that are blatantly false, that feel concocted, made in a lab like some kind of green-washed, gmo-truth. The primary thing is, it seems, to be aware of the expectation you are creating, and then play upon that expectation and do something unexpected. Not M Night Shyamalan surprise-ending unexpected; it can be subtle. But it has to do more than precisely what it advertises. It has to create curiosity in the reader. It’s got to have some hidden features that you couldn’t predict by just looking at the box. It reminds me of an idea explored in James Gleick’s “Information,” basically, if you know what’s coming next, then you aren’t receiving new information, it was already contained in its predecessor, and has merely been repackaged in some trivial way, without additional substance. Real information is always something of a surprise then, something unexpected that could not be known until it arrived, though in retrospect it may seem to have been inevitable. Good fiction, it seems, operates according to a similar principle.
#2
RUTHLESS EFFICIENCY PRINCIPLE:
Saunders: “nothing exists in a story by chance or merely to serve some documentary function. Every element should be a little poem, freighted with subtle meaning that is in connection with the story’s purpose.” There are no lazy, free-loading, story elements in good fiction. Every element in a story has to perform work, they can’t lie around all day smoking hashish on the couch in their aunt’s basement. Every element, Saunders tells us, has to accomplish two things: it has to be entertaining in its own right, and it has to advance the story in some non-trivial way, providing meaning to what is happening. In good fiction, all free-loading elements get evicted. Bad fiction is full of squatters. In bad fiction things just happen, randomly, or for no reason at all, and they don’t matter. If story is, as Saunders suggests, “a limited set of elements that we read against one another,” than no element exists in a vacuum, they are all interrelated, they play off one another in complex ways and it is the author’s job to make sure that these connections are significant, that they try to say something important and interesting and that they push the story forward. Everything must be integral to where the story is going, or what the story is about. Working from this principle then, the author, it seems, must ask of every element: ‘what is this doing for the overall story? Why is it here? And the answer cannot merely be, ‘because I decided to put it in’, ‘because it sounded good at the time’. The author has to be a defense attorney, making a case for why each element belongs in the story and why it should not be tossed out with or killed with your other darlings.
#3
ALWAYS BE ESCALATING
Saunders: “story, in comparison to life, is way faster, compressed, and exaggerated — a place where something new always has to be happening, something relevant to that which has already happened.”
In other words, your deeply embedded notion that art (story) should imitate life, may be half the reason why your prose sucks. According to Saunders, story is a streamlined version of life, broadcast with the volume turned way up, and at 2x the normal speed. It’s life on steroids, all pumped up and swoll, posing for itself and others. Abandoning the insidious notion that art has to be some objective reflection of the real world, can free you up to do more creative, interesting things. It will help you avoid boring your reader with every mundane, inconsequential detail, listing off, exhaustively, everything your main character consumed for breakfast, or whether she made clockwise or counter-clockwise circles while she brushed her teeth. The blunt question, Who cares?, turns out to be a serviceable editing mantra. Things have to happen, yes, but what happens has to be interesting and stimulating, and it has to build upon what came before in a way that inspires the reader to keep on reading. If you merely recount a character’s daily activities, or detail their shopping list, or repeat the same patterns over and over again to no heightened effect, you’ll lose your audience. You’ve got to switch up the melody, infuse your writing with a little jazz, with some solos and crescendos that will grab and fondle your reader in some emotional or intellectual way. If all you have is paragraph after paragraph of effluent exposition, no matter how poetic, you have what Lisa Cron call’s, “a perfectly written who cares.”
But it’s not just that things need to happen. Things need to escalate, Saunders says. They need “to rise or expand and become more.” They need to grow in intensity. Events have to unfold in such a way so as to increase the pressure and tension of the story, until the situation, the characters, or the story itself threatens to explode. Partially, this is achieved through causality, through that element to element connection in which thing A causes thing B to happen. Saunders calls causality “the crux of the matter,” the thing that breathes life and energy into prose, the stuff that “creates the appearance of meaning.” According to Saunders, it’s what audiences show up for, and it’s the thing which ultimately “distinguishes the competent [writer] from the extraordinary one.”
The other way escalation happens is through the creation of conflict. When I read mediocre work, it is almost always the case that there is too little conflict in the story, that there is no force (internal or external) acting upon the characters, demanding that some action be taken, or situation be resolved. Bad fiction is bad primarily because it just sits there, offering inane descriptions of situations in which nothing is at stake, where achieving some goal, or winning or losing doesn’t matter. Here Saunders quotes Chekhov: “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” A story without a satisfying problem, therefore, can’t have a satisfying solution.
In short, avoid the lame; kill more than just your darlings — ruthlessly evict all those lazy story elements hanging about your prose; and whatever happens in your story, make it matter and make it mean something.
Though I always grope for more (more tips, more tools, more insights), whenever I finish a particularly good book on writing, I have that lurking suspicion that everything I need to know is contained right there in front of me, and that it’s only a matter of sitting down and committing to the work, to the long, often painful, slog up the learning curve. In those moments I tell myself that I don’t need to go back to school, that with a few carefully selected books, and a dedication to the craft, that it is possible to be self-taught. As Saunders says, writing is “a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose.” Learning to write better then, is a matter of paying attention, of asking yourself, over and over and over, is this any good? Does it feel exciting? Is it going somewhere?
