Tag: writing-tips

I always imagine there’s a meter in your head, and this is positive and this is negative. And you’re just very lightly going through it and what you’re doing is reading that prose and watching that needle. And you’re not attributing cause, you’re not defending, you’re just watching. If the needle stays up in the positive, you’re good. And when you train yourself in this approach, you’ll see once in a while it’ll just drop. At that point, don’t say “Oh, no! I’ve failed. I have to go back to law school.” You just say very gently to the story, “What’s going on? I noticed that your needle dropped there, what do you think?” And if you approach it this way, eventually the story will say, “I don’t know, I’m just boring right here.” Once you get your defensiveness down, the story will very frankly tell you what’s wrong with it. And the fix is often quite simple. So my process is to read along in the story, hopefully keeping the needle up high. When it drops, don’t panic. You just keep going through the thing again and again, and eventually (you might be deluding yourself) you get to a point where it feels like the needle is up in the positive for the whole story. And then you’re done. — George Saunders

The story I started in August 2023 has a lot of good stuff in it. To paraphrase Saunders, quite a lot of it’s in the positive zone. But there are places where the story is clear in its negative self-assessment, by which I mean I’m bored when I re-read it. The problem is that I haven’t done the work to figure out exactly where that is, and exactly what’s boring about it (and what I mean by boring in the first place). To use Saunders’ analogy, I haven’t had a meter; I’ve just had an idiot light, a big red bulb that just says “This whole story sucks. Stop now!”

So for the past couple of days, I’ve much more patient and detailed diagnostic work. I’ve gone back into the manuscript and laid out each scene within each chapter, as preparation for putting the meter onto each one individually. Using the opening chapter as an example, it looks like this:

Chapter 1, which establishes Martha and George and the fact of well-to-do young adults in 1940

• Scene 1—the friends at Antioch College in their last semester of senior year. Martha proposes to George, in a way (1,482 words)
• Scene 2—They decide to tell their two families (476 words)
• Scene 3—They visit Martha’s family in Toledo (793 words)
• Scene 4—They visit George’s family in Detroit (3,327 words)
• Scene 5—They commit to their future on their way back to school (317 words)

At this point, I’ve done this for the first seven chapters, about forty scenes total. Just through the work of naming the subsections, I’ve discovered (for instance) that Chapter 6 Scene 10 isn’t accomplishing anything worthwhile for the story as a whole, and I’ll probably dump the whole 1,188 words in favor of a sentence or two somewhere else.

All of this work does a few things. First, it forces me to slow down and take what I’ve done in small segments, thinking closely about each one. Second, it allows me to celebrate the ones that really are working; more than I thought, perhaps. Third, it makes me more careful in defining “works” and “doesn’t work.” What exactly do I mean by those judgments? Is the language fun? Is the dialogue real? Is the scene advancing the plot, or developing one or more themes? Is it introducing uncertainties that will have to come to fruition later on? I spent much of the day today on Chapter 3 Scene 6, helping it do three pieces of work simultaneously instead of just one.

If it’s done right, the reader won’t notice any of that; she’ll just be carried forward. But the writer is working from a sounder foundation.