What Is a Story?

 I like how George Saunders approaches that question in his On Darkness:

I wanted to briefly take up this idea of darkness, of sad stories. I note, in some of your comments and, for that matter, in the general culture, a desire for “uplifting” stories – stories that are….well, “not so sad,” “hopeful,” “less negative,” etc.

Here’s my theory: the only sad story is a falsified one.  What makes a story hopeful, heroic, uplifting, is when the writer has perfectly lived into her story – has responded truthfully to a story’s DNA.  She’s not afraid to go where the story leads her. The uplift comes, in a sense, from her fidelity to her task, and from the resulting feeling of honesty in the story, and from the pleasure of watching the artist perform her task with panache, bravery, flair. 

The blues are “sad” but are a source of joy if played beautifully; I find Flannery O’Connor’s stories uplifting because they are so damn good – their endings are aware of their beginnings, they never go false, they are joyful in the way they celebrate human brokenness.  They make us see that brokenness, which is an uplift – to be trusted like that, by O’Connor.  “You are capable of joining me in seeing this,” she seems to say.

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So, stories tend to be cautionary – they tell us what can go wrong in this life.  Here is not a story: “Little Red Riding Hood’s mother had told her not to talk to any wolves she saw in the woods.  And so she didn’t.” 

As some of you have mentioned, reading many stories in a row might make us long for a “happy” story – one about triumph, say, one in which, at the end, all is well.  But when is it, that time when “all is well?”

I recognize how grim are my stories. Grimness may be my own mindset, but it is also what I see in the world around me. I want to avoid grimness porn (if I may create a phrase), grimness for the sake of grimness, and work very hard at avoiding nihilism. I have had enough nihilism in my own life, thank you very much. If I have any "message" it is that we can endure the grim, that there is a way of enduring what comes at us. Enduring may be painful, may cause its own problems. We are imperfect creatures living in an imperfect world. 

My "Colonel Tom" was described in one rejection as depressing. KH described my protagonist as a bitch, but a necessary one. I had hoped to tell of a person whose solution to the pains in her life was to fight against the cruelty of death, however this solution caused its own problems with the ones who she hoped to protect and had hardened herself. "Problem Solving" was meant to tell how another woman came to solve a problem with herself and her life while waiting for an abortion. I think they are stories as defined by Saunders. 

The two speculative fiction stories I have written the past two weeks may be harder to fit into his definition. "The Psychotic Ape" I fear may be too much of a philosophical discussion, and "Exemplary Employee" has a protagonist who does not know he is being exploited by his employer - although the reader is quite aware of this. The former story I hope will be seen as a bit of an adventure story, also a story of two friends and of ideas. I think of the other story as closer to Brave New World than 1984, not a lurid tale of rebellion, but an attempt at examining a life accepting a capitalistic serfdom and a vignette of such a society. Some of my other stories are what I think of as an oblique examination of a place or a society. The protagonist serves for me as a window into that place or society. Whether they are successful stories, I guess time will tell.

Meanwhile, read the whole of Saunders wrote. He is brilliant and sensible.

sch 10/29/22