You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know Until You Know What You Didn’t Know…A Thank-You Note to George Saunders

If you love great writing and don’t know George Saunders’ work, there are three not-to-be-missed titles I would like to recommend: Tenth of December, a well-reviewed volume of short stories, Lincoln at the Bardo, a Man Booker Prize winning, unique (and I never use this term loosely) work of fiction, and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, pictured above.

If you want to improve your writing skills, if you want to become a better reader of fiction, if you love the work of classic Russian writers, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is your dream come true. Saunders, who teaches writing Syracuse University, presents a master class in book form. We read seven short stories by Gogol, Chekov, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. Each is accompanied by a highly readable essay teaching us how to understand the story’s construction, meaning, and greatness. If this sounds in any way boring, trust me, it’s not.

Upon finishing A Swim in a Pond in the Rain I plan to reread Tenth of December and apply what I have learned from Saunders to his own short stories. Will they stand up to the Russian masters…? No matter. As a reader and a writer, this book has forever enhanced my capacity to “see” a story.

Thanks, George.

Creating a World

Creating a World

As one writes a novel, letter by letter, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, people say things, do things, see things and feel things. Babies are born. People get sick; they recover or die. Characters are created and take on a reality of their own.

Each of us, second by minute by hour by day by month by year, write our own life story. We each create our world, including places, people, communication, and action. While a novelist controls the life span of characters, our own personal comedic drama unfolds in an unknown span of time.

Over many years of counseling hospice patients and their families (work from which I retired to focus on writing), I learned that no one regrets saying, “yes” to adventure, or to healing broken relationships, or to foregoing material pursuits for the sake of personal integrity and well-being. At the end of life, what matters is quality of relationships, and the sense of peace with where one stands spiritually. By this I don’t mean religiosity; this can actually present a hinderance to a peaceful end, through a sense of guilt or fear.

What I mean is “being right with the world”. Knowing that one has done more good than harm, that we have forgiven ourselves and others for mistakes, that we have asked pardon for the harm we have done others, that we took chances and lived fully and fearlessly.

Today is The Day, friends. Let’s each write a story of love, kindness, laughter, acceptance, and adventure.

 

 

Righting

My sentence of the week: “Writer as wright, creatively righting.”

To those who are writers, or who want to be writers, or who are passionate readers and interested in the process of writing, I pose a question.

Why write?

In face of the terrifying mass of books published each year, added to those written in the past, to say nothing of those completed only to moulder unaccepted in the file of a frustrated writer’s office, why?

As implied by the title chosen for this posting, and by my absurdly unquotable quote, in this moment, at 2:30 p.m. on a Monday, sitting in the New Brighton Public Library, sharing the room with two elderly gentlemen reading newspapers, I posit that the purpose of spending one’s precious time as a writer lies in the creative construction of a reality which serves in some way to right the world as it exists in the exact moment of creation.

Writing is a deeply contextual process undertaken by a human mind, living in a specific place and time, with a unique history and present moment circumstance. Whether a writer is creating fiction or non-fiction, it inevitably springs forth filtered through that individual’s reality.

Why should you write? Because no one else is you and if the desire won’t leave you alone, you have a story to tell. So get with it!