In a post on his blog, George Saunders talks about when it’s time to quit on a story that isn’t working. “When I was young, I would often let stories go,” he says. “I could feel that, at some point, I was making them worse – obscuring what power the early draft had, or just adding and adding to them without knowing why.”
These days, with more years under his belt, Saunders feels capable of reshaping and revising just about any story until it becomes viable. He works on a story until he feels like he knows what it’s trying to say. At that point of clarity, what should happen next becomes apparent. “The reason I felt (and still feel, really) that I could make a story out of anything was because anything, written clearly, is saying something – it’s putting something into play,” he says. “As long as we can feel that thing, we can respond to it.”
When stories go awry, it’s because the writer doesn’t know what he or the story is trying to say, or is trying to impose an idea on a story that doesn’t support it. “I see this in stories by newer writers: lots of information, often charmingly delivered, but the writer hasn’t decided which information is pertinent,” Saunders writes. “Without making this decision, it’s hard for the story to escalate; it is, in a sense, just a bunch of facts or observations.”
When this happens to a story, writers tend to give up on it, as they don’t see a way forward. Saunders suggests ways to write yourself out of a deadend, but ultimately, whether and at what point you abandon a story is up to you. And it may change from story to story. “So, the real answer to the question, ‘At what point do you give up on a story?’ has to remain indeterminate,” he writes. “The Yoda-like answer might be something like: ‘Yes, exactly. When do you?'”
