George Saunders: if your story has no problems, it's not a story

Three tricks for days when you can't see the wood for the trees.

Paid subscribers can listen to this newsletter as a podcast here.

---

I handed in my creative writing MA dissertation on Tuesday. That’s it: all over. I’d call it the end of an era, but I’m not sure two years qualifies as an era.

I pictured it ending in a much more finessed way – I imagined that I would steadily work on the dissertation over the summer, giving myself plenty of time to polish it to perfection so that I was really submitting my very best work. Somehow, I still skidded towards a pile-up in the final fortnight, which was inevitable really because I never achieve anything until there’s a deadline.

It had to be sent in by Tuesday at 2pm: 18,000 words, give or take ten percent. On Tuesday morning, I was still doing significant rewriting of two or three scenes from the creative part of the submission. I would have been panicking, if I’d been able to spare any time to panic.

Struggling with those passages, I very much had the Ira Glass feeling that I mentioned here a few weeks ago:

Two things journalism taught me about good writing

I could feel that my ability to spot a problem and my ability to fix that problem weren’t lining up. I knew how I wanted those passages to feel, and I could see that they weren’t achieving that yet, but I couldn’t identify exactly why not. Ira would say it just takes a lot of practice.

In some cases it was a problem of choosing better words, but in others, it was a plot point that wasn’t working. I had to move the characters from A to C, situation-wise, but on the forty-seventh read-through, I was realising that the B that I’d written didn’t really make sense.

George Saunders is the saviour of despairing writers (which is why his newsletter is so wonderful). When he came on the In Writing podcast, he had such comforting things to say. Just when it’s all going badly and you’re wondering how wide you can get the window open, he manages to turn your failure into a sign that you’re doing something right: ‘If you don’t feel like there’s a problem, you’re probably not reading it closely enough,’ he told me.

He went on:

There’s a piece I’m working on now that I’ve just hit the end of. It’s about 80% good, but I know if I just bear down on it, I can get it up a few points higher. So I think that for me, the trick at that point is to say, OK, something’s wrong with this – and to not say, therefore I’m a loser, or therefore I should quit. The story isn’t me – it’s a product of me, but it’s not me – so just like when you see yourself in a home video, you know: Do I walk like that? Well, there’s walking like that being done, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be an indictment.

There’s a quick little motion you can make, which is so powerful, which is to say, like you would to a good friend, What’s the problem? What’s going on? And you can answer it very bluntly: It doesn’t make sense that the dog could drive a car. It’s never anything too intellectual.

Once you’ve turned your mind to the problem, I think you’re already close to solving it. One, because you’re not despairing any more. You’re not making it about yourself, your personhood. You’re just saying, Yeah, this thing I’m making has a technical problem. There aren’t an infinite number of solutions – I don’t see it right now, that’s OK. Maybe tomorrow. 

Listening to George at the time, 95% of me felt that this was simple but revelatory and might change my writing life, and the other 5% was sulking. If it was that easy to identify the issue, we wouldn’t be in this situation, the 5% said. But actually, I’ve used George’s ‘What’s the problem?’ trick many times since, including this week, and found it very helpful.

When I’m stuck, it’s all about trying to make things simpler and clearer – I’ve usually zoomed in too far and need to step back. In case ‘What’s the problem?’ fails for you, here are a couple of other tricks that help me.

Summarise

Sometimes when I’m really lost, I challenge myself to summarise sections of text – whether those are paragraphs or chapters – in one line or a few words each.

In non-fiction articles, this is particularly helpful. Say I’m writing a long, unwieldy feature that quotes from four or five different sources and makes multiple connected points. I want the feature to flow in an organised way through those points, so that it becomes a smoother reading experience and more impactful. So I print it off and I read the first paragraph. I scribble ‘1’ next to it, and then on a separate piece of paper, I write ‘1’ and a few words summing up what this paragraph’s about.

Then I read the next one. If it’s moving on to a slightly different point, it gets a ‘2’ in the margin and I add a summary of ‘2’ to my list as well.

This is all sounding very boring, but often halfway through the article I find that having moved through 1, 2, 3 and 4, I then have a paragraph that really is just another way of saying 2, or adds a bit more context to the 2 argument. Either it needs to be deleted because it’s repetitive, or the piece needs to be restructured so that all the paragraphs marked ‘2’ are sitting together and the reader isn’t being led backwards and forwards all over the place.

In fiction, it’s a different process, but summarising can still help. I might read every chapter or section and ask, what is the point of this bit? And write that down in a few words. I might have written something instinctively, but I need to understand why I did that, and whether it’s actually doing the job that it’s there to do. I’m sure for some writers it’s all much more intuitive than this, but for me, it’s helpful to have an explicit understanding of what the story is doing.

Talk about it

When I was acting features director at Grazia magazine, and in various other jobs over the years, I found it invaluable to talk through knotty problems with colleagues. A writing workshop or writers’ group can also be a good place for this. Most of the time though, there’s no one who knows enough about what I’m working on for me to talk it through with them. If I’m really stuck, I get round this by talking to myself out loud, as though I’m explaining the problem.

Sometimes, I even record voice memos on my phone (yes, it’s a bit Alan Partridge) in which I try and articulate what the problem is. If I can just understand the problem, it’s usually a lot easier to find a solution, and of course that’s exactly what George was trying to tell us on the podcast.

In the end, I did the best I could with my dissertation on Tuesday, and I’m happy it’s done. Thanks to Ira, I have a bit more faith that my ability to fix problems in fiction will catch up with my ability to spot them. Thanks to George, I can also comfort myself with these words: ‘I think if you’re writing a story that has no problems, you’re not writing a story.’

---

Congratulations to anyone else who’s just handed in a final project/a dissertation – I know there are a few of you out there. Let me know what those last pre-deadline days were like for you, and whether you have any other secrets to unpicking a problematic bit of writing.

I’ll be sending out a prompt on Sunday morning for the In Writing Creative Club. Become a paid subscriber to join in! It’s fun.

Until then, good luck with your writing this week.