{"id":10801,"date":"2024-02-05T08:02:20","date_gmt":"2024-02-05T13:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10801"},"modified":"2024-02-07T09:34:14","modified_gmt":"2024-02-07T14:34:14","slug":"what-makes-stories-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10801","title":{"rendered":"What Makes Stories Work?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Last week was time off for family business, but if you\u2019ve ever dealt much with the health care \u201csystem,\u201d you\u2019ll understand my advice to myself, \u201ctake a book.\u201d There\u2019s always so much time sitting around, waiting, and waiting again, that something engaging to capture at least part of your attention is welcome. You don\u2019t forget why you\u2019re there, of course, you just give the extraneous sights and sounds some competition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book I clung to was Man Booker award-winner and Syracuse U. professor George Saunders\u2019s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain<\/a><\/em>. It\u2019s one that works for writers who want to put more into their writing and readers who want to get more out of their reading. Saunders takes seven stories from four Russian short story masters (Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol) and breaks them down to consider why they work. This isn\u2019t one of those craft books that debates character-driven versus plot-driven or the usual ways stories are analyzed. Instead, Saunders talks about how the stories create the effects they have on readers. So much I wasn\u2019t noticing!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s a small example. One of the stories is Tolstoy\u2019s \u201cMaster and Man,\u201d which in (very) short is about an arrogant merchant, Vasili, who, with his servant, drives out in a horse-drawn sledge on an errand on a blizzardy day. The master doesn\u2019t listen to the servant\u2019s advice about route and gets them lost; they arrive at a small village, twice, because they are driving in circles; but the master refuses to stay the night; they become lost again; and I won\u2019t tell you the rest, in case you want to read it yourself.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saunders says that in his work with talented young writers, two factors separate the writers who go on to publish their work and those who don\u2019t: a willingness to revise and \u201cthe extent to which the writer has learned to make causality.\u201d In the Tolstoy story, because<\/em> of the kind of person he is, Vasili doesn\u2019t listen to his servant\u2019s advice and gets them lost, because<\/em> he won\u2019t stop or stay at the village, they are lost repeatedly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saunders says, \u201cFor most of us [writers] the problem is not in making things happen,\u201d but \u201cin making one thing seem to cause the next.\u201d Why is this important? \u201cBecause causation is what creates the appearance of meaning;\u201d it\u2019s what makes them work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another gem from this same story is Tolstoy\u2019s laundry. Outside the little village of Grishkino is a cottage with a clothesline, which Vasili and Nikita pass four times in their lostness. Each time Tolstoy describes the articles hanging there slightly differently, the wind-blown shirts waving and flapping their sleeves in increasingly desperate fashion. On their last pass, the laundry is gone. Tolstoy doesn\u2019t make the mistake of explaining the symbolism, he just plants it in the reader\u2019s mind to let it grow in significance. Those little repeats, barely more than a sentence each, escalate the story\u2019s tension, even if a reader notices them only subliminally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Try it!: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain<\/a><\/em>, by George Saunders. And read Donald Maass’s blog this week<\/a> on “Effect and Cause.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week was time off for family business, but if you\u2019ve ever dealt much with the health care \u201csystem,\u201d you\u2019ll understand my advice to myself, \u201ctake a book.\u201d There\u2019s always so much time sitting around, waiting, and waiting again, that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Is the story you\u2019re reading\/writing just a series of beads on a strong, or does A actually cause B and B cause C? Prize-winning author George Saunders says this is the key to writing meaningfully.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[174,60,29],"tags":[1277],"class_list":["post-10801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-storytelling","category-writing","tag-george-saunders"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2Od","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10801"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10815,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10801\/revisions\/10815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}