“It was if I'd sent the hunting dog that was my talent out across a meadow to fetch a magnificent pheasant and it had brought back, let's say, the lower half of a Barbie doll.”
-George Saunders
I’ve had this quote stuck in my mind recently, particularly the image of the half Barbie doll in a garbage heap. Saunders uses the contrasting images (pheasant vs. Barbie doll) to talk about writing: the kind of writing he wished he did as a young writer, in contrast to the writing he actually found himself writing. The point he makes in the end is about embracing the kind of style and subject we’re drawn to, rather than fruitlessly trying to make our writing conform to some ideal.
For Saunders, this meant not trying to write Hemingway-esque stories and sentences, and instead following his natural tendency towards a humor that however “oddly made” or “embarrassing” he found it (108), was nonetheless unmistakably his.1
It’s a helpful piece of advice for any writer, but a particular helpful one in the context of workshop. So easy to be jealous, when someone submits a piece of writing, so easy to cringe at whatever you’ve just brought to class. It’s not necessarily the case that one piece is good and the other bad, but rather that the particular type of good in my piece is not the good that I want. Or even: I wish the bad in my piece was of another nature. A more fixable bad, or even just a more interesting one.
My last workshop of the spring semester ended with the professor offering me a version of the same advice, essentially pointing out that it’s not helpful, with novel-writing in particular, to stew over what people think and self-criticize to the point that it paralyzes the writing. Novels are rarely fully drafted when you submit them to workshop, and so feedback—however insightful—can also overwhelm and stall the project as a whole.
The professor offered this thought during the workshop itself, then spoke to me briefly after, apologizing if he’d overstepped. He hadn’t, but I was a little puzzled: I was uncertain about the chapters that I brought, but not, I thought, overly critical of them. I liked his advice but didn’t think (in this particular moment anyway) that I needed it.
He was right, though. I went home and stewed over the chapters and wondered why I was writing this thing in the first place. And realized that, yes, I’d been worrying over all this in the weeks before the workshop; it had just taken the form of obsessively reading the chapter out loud and trying to anticipate what people would say and how I would respond. Which meant that I tinkered with one word here, a phrase there, and then despaired at the whole; that I ended up with sentences that I liked, but a set of chapters that I didn’t. It meant, also, that I found myself completely unable to actually move forward with the novel for those weeks, stuck, instead, on perpetually revising the workshop chapters, until I could hardly see them anymore.
I’ve had to spend some time summarizing this project recently, boiling it down to a hundred words or so, and this, too, has made me cringe. The plot summary feels melodramatic. The conceptual descriptions self-important. The very idea of summarizing what I haven’t yet finished an exercise of false confidence about the direction it will take.
But Saunders’s voice keeps cropping up as I’m thinking this, reminding me that, yes, this project might be half a Barbie in a dumpster instead of a pheasant on Hemingway’s mountain—but it is my weird, particular piece of dumpster paraphenalia.
I wrote the above paragraphs weeks ago, back in May, but they’ve been on my mind this past week too while I’ve been writing at the Collegeville Institute in Minnesota.
It’s been an unexpected gift of time. Ten days of writing on the campus of St. John’s University, alongside other writers. A beautiful space (the little apartment where I’m staying sits on the water; it’s walking distance from campus with a lake and trails and a chapel I’ve come to love.) But, above all, the week has provided time—and the opportunity to see that such time can, in fact, be filled with writing.
I have a tendency to fill time with everything that I can. Work, programs, travel, reading. The usual noise and distractions (Netflix shows and social media and checking email that does not need to be checked). Running, workouts, long rambling walks. Busyness is the best way to crowd out despair, I usually think. Which is true—but it’s also the best way to crowd out creativity and, well, writing. Both of which require the occasional (or not-so-occasional) dose of boredom.
Here, I haven’t been doing that. Phone off, internet (mostly) off. Writing has all the space it needs—and it’s taken quite a lot of that space. To the point that (in spite of ample trails, in spite of things like organ recitals and daily prayer with the monks) I have found myself, each day, skipping these things. And, each day, somehow, still short on time.
The work of writing has been going incredibly well. The rhythm of it, the hours spent moving between revising and drafting.
But the writing itself—another question entirely.
Some days I open my notebook or Word document and find it all easy to love. There are characters I want to spend time with, a scene that recently came together well, a set of sentences or images that still feel pleasing to reread.
And some days I open to the exact same pages and see the flaws of it all laid baldly before me. The same charaters feel strikingly underdeveloped; the scene lacks tension or movement; the sentences or images sound tired, flat, or overcontrived.
Moving back-and-forth between these two reactions so frequently this week, I’ve become increasingly uncertain of my own judgement. I can’t tell whether the parts that make me flinch are clumsy parts of my writing that I should be working to fix—or whether they’re the Barbie doll retrieved from the heap that I need to make peace with.
The moments when I can pinpoint the problem, when it’s limited to a craft concern are clear. Less clear are the moments when the entire project feels confused, ill-conceived, directionless. Less clear are the choices that I know are odd, that risk confusing the reader, but that I’m drawn to nevertheless.
And so this is the question that Saunders’s description has left me wrestling with: How do you know? How do you know what is the ugly weirdness of your own writing that you should be learning to embrace—and what is the weakness of your craft that you ought to be honing?
I think, in the middle of drafting, you often can’t know. Or perhaps if you’re a writer still developing your style (as I still feel I am), you can’t, not yet anyway. Workshop and others’ feedback can help. People often see what you don’t. This week, I’ve had pointed feedback and encouragement, both of which have spurred, rather than stifled, my work on the novel.
But squirreling away and avoiding such feedback can help too. Giving a story the space to develop as it is, free from other people’s eyes, free from your own judgements—at least for a time.
The summer, as a whole, feels like something of a gift in that way too. Not just time but space. As much as I love workshop, it feels freeing to be away from it for awhile, to let the novel grow and become whatever weird thing it wants to become. To accept that there will days when I love it and days when I don’t. To not worry too much over this kind of pendulum swing.
I’m sure the weak parts of the novel—the unrealistic components, the parts that feel soap operatic to me, my continual tendency to take a scene to a point of tension and then immediately undercut it, the excess of characters—all these will still be there when I get to the end of it all, ready for workshop and revision. But hopefully whatever strange goodness is in it will be there too.
Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Random House, 2022. The opening quotation is also taken from page 108.