Two authors have had an outsized impact on my continued desire to hone my writing craft: Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders. At the end of 2023 I read Lincoln in the Bardo and completed Liberation Day to begin 2024, both by Saunders, so he is front of mind.
Saunders and Vonnegut share similar qualities as writers. They develop absolutely wacky plots and worlds that somehow manage to be complete and consistent. Both craft prose that goes down easy. They each balance on a knife’s edge of satire, with Vonnegut tending to sway more on the side of ridiculous, while one can’t possibly look away from Saunders’ morbid humor.
Where Saunders differentiates himself is as a master of short stories and internal monologue. He thoroughly develops and explores characters and always finds inventive ways to slowly reveal the world through careful use of line returns, typography, and diction. His best writing appears eerie and uncomfortable, prodding and teasing the reader with the foreknowledge that some twist will be coming, that there is more to this world than we know, but all we can do is forge ahead on the edge of our seat waiting for a reveal.
It’s a joy to experience.
That experience fuels me to continue writing. Just as I practice guitar and piano and spend time attempting to recreate the sounds of musicians I enjoy, or riff on a song to add my own flair, I read a story by George Saunders and consider how I could build on that world and that style with my own take.
Other than the few times in school where it was required, I’ve never been a close reader. I don’t take notes, write in margins, or highlight passages. Yet reading anything by Saunders puts my brain on high alert for patterns and clues as to how the story became what it now is. I yearn to understand its foundations, the mechanical choices made to build something that so perfectly draws me in, the path he took to experiment with sentence fragments and noun emphasis to align with the strange world he built. Or to go the deeper level of piercing the veil of the story, arriving at the point being made, the analogy being drawn, the wonderful derision and critique that I admire in my favorite writers. Not only do they have something to say about the world, but they build a framing device—using their own sensibilities—in which to present their ideas, and hone their abilities so they can write a final product that others can take in.
As I said in my post about Vonnegut, building these skills requires concerted effort. Writing is not simple nor painless. One must labor and toil over sentences, passages, and paragraphs to create a flow that, ideally, goes completely unnoticed by the reader. Writing should be self-contained, each choice consistent with the broader point and style that the author is attempting to achieve. When Saunders makes a jarring choice—cutting off words in a sentence, capitalizing a word like a German would, foregoing quotation marks—it serves the story’s greater purpose. It is jarring and strange because the story is as well.1Vonnegut achieves a similar effect when he uses his chosen interjection for a novel, such as “Listen.” or “So it goes.”
I aim to write with a similar intentionality and purpose. This requires time to learn techniques for drafting, editing, and rewriting; I’ve terribly underdeveloped those last two. Luckily all this writing I do as a hobby is not a race. Patience and quality are key to my growth. My first project will be working through stories from The Last Question written during NaNoWriMo. I’ve found some excellent resources to learn more about how to properly edit, then revel in the act of rewriting.
This blog is not immune from these efforts. While expository writing is certainly not the same as fiction, the mechanical principles are analogous. Saunders and Vonnegut both have written non-fiction essays and manage to retain the elements of their voices that I admire. I want to take this writing—the writing that directly communicates my thoughts—at least as seriously as my larger fiction project.
While I still plan to write one post per week with some proof-reading thrown in, I also have rough ideas for how to increase the number of high quality posts. I want to push myself to not write more, but to write better (which happens to often mean writing less). My ability to think through ideas and present them on this site is linked to my skills in effectively wielding language. In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy reading good writers and learn as much as I can in the process.
- 1Vonnegut achieves a similar effect when he uses his chosen interjection for a novel, such as “Listen.” or “So it goes.”