CHAPTER 6

Recognize Stories, Envision Books

What’s a Story? Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father”

How do pieces of writing, assuming they’re good—the characters feel alive, the events seem significant, the language is sharp and original—convince us that they are whole, so that we start reading, continue, then come to the last words, stop, let out a held breath, and agree that, yes, what had begun is now finished?

It’s hard to write something that will call forth that satisfied sigh, hard to turn a pile of pages into a work of art. How do we know when to stop? What is enough for a story? When writing an entire book, how can we keep our heads clear while making choices and decisions about a book’s worth of characters and story?

Taste varies, and some “short short” stories may seem complete to one reader but incomplete to the next. Still, the popularity of “sudden fiction” or “flash fiction”—a story that is sometimes just a few words long—suggests that there is an entity most of us recognize as “a story,” and that what makes it a story has nothing to do with length. We may argue about particular examples, but even people who prefer to get lost in a story, emerging an hour or more later, may agree that, yes, that fifty-two-word thing that just ran by was indeed a story; and, on the other hand, even the laconic authors of short short stories may look at their fifty-word creations and think, “Nope, not done yet,” then add a few words and it’s finished.

We all seem to recognize that a story implies, if it doesn’t include, two or three events. Whatever is going on at the start of a story, the narrative generally takes at least two steps away from it: a situation changes and then changes back, or changes further; a person conceives a desire or fear and then confronts its embodiment—and then what’s feared or desired does or doesn’t appear, or appears in an unexpected way, or something else entirely happens. In a story, that is, a few events happen—and the last one is sufficiently decisive that it feels, well, like an end.

To understand what we’re talking about in the simplest terms, we may find it helpful to look at an atypical story: “A Conversation with My Father,” by Grace Paley, from her second collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, which came out in 1974. A father (Paley says in a note that her other characters are fictional but the father is her father) demands to know why his daughter no longer writes what he calls “a simple story”: “Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.” The narrator doesn’t want to do that, never has wanted to, because plot “takes all hope away.” She tells the reader, “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”

Then, to satisfy him or defy him, she makes up a story: A woman takes drugs in solidarity with her addicted son, who then gets clean and has nothing more to do with her. The father objects. She has left out detail—the woman’s appearance and background. For him, the nature of the person is all—he wants to know how such choices could come about, what led to them? The daughter expands the story, and in the second version, though she doesn’t seem to care much about finding a background that would explain the woman’s life, there’s more feeling, more detail. The father is unconvinced. He talks about what a tragedy this story is, and the daughter counters that, no, there’s always hope; the woman doesn’t get her son back, but she ends up working in a drug clinic, where her experience is valued. The father insists that the daughter is denying the tragedy: this woman could not change. “When will you look it in the face?” he asks as the story ends.

Father and daughter argue about both the structure and the content of the story she makes up. About structure the father is right. The first version of the story doesn’t really tell “what happened next,” though it moves along in time; the son is an addict, and then he is no longer an addict: “After a while, for a number of reasons, the boy gave it all up and left the city and his mother in disgust.” Stories tell what happened next in some way that suggests that there’s a connection between the two events. If a child builds a sand castle and rain washes it away, that’s not enough. But if the parent, initially, warns that it’s likely to rain, the whole thing comes to life: now building the sand castle is an act of defiance; the rain is a cruel confirmation of the child’s helplessness.

The daughter’s second version of the story about the mother and son makes more of his change (he meets a girl who is into health food, and is converted), but, putting aside the comedy in both versions—Paley is teasing not just her father but the reader—there is admittedly something structurally incomplete about the story—a problem that does not, in fact, occur in Grace Paley’s actual stories, whatever her father thinks. In the bits of fiction the daughter offers the father, Grace Paley is writing parodies of her own stories, not examples.

The father fails to see what she’s up to. Grace Paley’s stories don’t trivialize life, though everything is at least a little funny and her characters find surprising ways out of bad situations. There is plenty of heartbreak, plenty of intensity—but, indeed, always “the open destiny of life.”

The story itself, however—“A Conversation with My Father”—is complete, and what completes it is that this argument about literature takes place as the father is dying. The very first sentence is “My father is eighty-six years old and in bed.” The daughter, she tells us, has “promised the family to always let him have the last word when arguing.” At the end the father takes “oxygen tubes out of his nostrils” to accuse his daughter: “Jokes, jokes again,” he says. The story takes place in a short period of time—or possibly on several occasions, each just a conversation—but in it something shifts, maybe in the daughter, maybe only in the reader. The story is about love, about arguing as a way of loving, and about death: whatever story the daughter writes can’t keep her father alive or make him well again; they both know that, and by the end the reader knows it too. He wants her to imitate Chekhov and Turgenev—take on, I guess, the great tragic themes, give them their dignified due. But all the while, as he takes oxygen tubes out of his nostrils to speak, she is giving a tragic theme its due: this is a story of love and separation between parent and child, more fully realized—because more happens and because we know the people better—than the story-within-the-story of the mother and son, who never come to life. In this story many things happen: the father’s initial request, the invention of the story, the critique, the second version, the new critique—all as he lies on his deathbed. Father and daughter are using their last moments together to argue about literature, about tragedy.

In a story that’s complete, enough happens—however slight the incidents may be—that we don’t know the end and want to know the end. There is enough new incident not necessarily to change a character (some people never change) but to change the reader: we start someplace, go a distance, and return, or go a distance and arrive. Sometimes the character changes, but in a complete story the reader always changes—if only changing position: we lean back, saying, “Ahhh.” Or we sit up straight near the end, realize we were wrong, and relax again. Or we sag in our chairs, a little bored, thinking we see what the author is up to—and then sit up with a jerk. We go through something.

Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing”

Tillie Olsen’s only complete book of fiction was a collection of four short stories, Tell Me a Riddle. It was published in 1961, but I didn’t find it until the mid-seventies—around the time I found Grace Paley—when I picked up a dilapidated copy in a New Haven bookstore. It was the period in my life when I was looking after three young children and writing poetry, wishing I could also write fiction.

Olsen’s stories are about ordinary life—children, parents, old people, and the struggle to put up with one another and try to live decently. They don’t have surprising endings, only endings that show how the difficult truths that the author has laid out are even more true than you might have expected, but that love is also more possible than you thought. Her characters are likelier to say the wrong thing than the right. They hurt one another, but only death makes anyone disappear from anyone else’s life. Her stories are political without being preachy, without sacrificing the particular person to the general truth. This all suited me, and before long I began writing my own stories, though it took me years to write a story anyone could publish. In some ways Olsen wasn’t the best model. Not much happens in her stories; imitating them, I wrote stories in which nothing happened, which is very different.

“I Stand Here Ironing,” the first story, consists of an internal monologue: a mother, ironing, imagines talking to a guidance counselor or social worker who has asked her to come in and discuss her oldest daughter. It begins, “I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.” The story consists of what she imagines saying. As she describes her daughter she uses sharply observed detail, often emotional and impressionistic, not just descriptive (“She blew shining bubbles of sound” or “a clogged weeping that could not be comforted”), but I think much of the appeal of the story, Olsen’s most famous, is that the mother is defensive, angry, and regretful all at once; she blames herself and the society in which she raised her daughter equally. The girl, Emily, has had a hard time, and the mother is unsentimental, even grim. We learn about Emily’s troubles, but we also learn that she’s lively and funny. She’s a comedian who performs successfully at school events.

Then, as her mother continues ironing and imagining a conversation, Emily herself “runs up the stairs two at a time with her light graceful step, and I know she is happy tonight. Whatever it was that occasioned your call did not happen today.” Emily’s vitality breaks into her mother’s interior monologue: the daughter’s entrance is the only actual occurrence besides ironing. Emily teases her mother, puts together a meal for herself, and then jokingly says something despairing as she goes to bed, and the mother tells the reader (or the social worker she is imagining), “I cannot endure it tonight.” She will not go in to discuss her daughter, she says. The story ends,

Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom—but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know—help make it so there is cause for her to know—that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.

This story is visually complex. In our minds as we read we see the mother in her kitchen with her iron and ironing board—and Emily coming in—and, as if through the mother, we also picture the listening social worker (who will never hear all this), and beyond them we see what the mother is describing: Emily as a baby, a child, a teenager. You could call it a static story in which the ending is simply an image—and ending a story with an image is usually not as powerful as ending it with an event—but we’ve been seeing that iron go back and forth all along, as the mother talks, so it’s more than an inert comparison: we have the horrifying brief image of a girl being ironed flat. Moreover, the story is suspenseful: we wait to find out whether the mother will tell all this to the professional person, who may (or may not) help. In one sense nothing happens in this story, but there is plenty of uncertainty as we read on to find out what happened to Emily in the past, and what the mother may do about it. Her decision to do nothing, along with what she says, constitutes an event that matters. I think at the end of this story we sorrowfully nod our heads. This mother is probably right.

Most new writers I meet say they have trouble with plot. They seem to mean that they can come up with characters and situations—two unhappy sisters with a sick mother; an office in which the boss is unfair—but not the kind of event that unsettles the situation and sets a story in motion, the moment in time that can be seen as the beginning of some kind of shift. They have the habit of thinking in terms of “plot” on the one hand and “characters” on the other. “I can’t do plot,” people wail at me, as if their people existed apart from it, as if plot were something to add. But plot is often almost nothing. It’s whatever keeps the reader moving forward, whatever keeps the reader from thinking the publisher omitted some pages. The precipitating event in “I Stand Here Ironing” is only remembered: it’s the invitation from the social worker to come and talk, which becomes more noteworthy to the reader when we see Emily’s vitality and charm. A possible opening occurs—and the mother rejects it. Most stories have more eventful events than that—I don’t think you should aim for subtle events—but what I failed to see, for years, was that the subtle events in stories like Olsen’s and Paley’s are still events, and are essential.

In a recent workshop I taught, one student’s story was about a man in his seventies who owns a restaurant in which one thing after another goes wrong. The man is afraid of sabotage, and the reader too thinks someone may be making trouble on purpose. Then health department inspectors show up, and there are so many violations that the man’s son gets involved, and then learns from the staff that his father’s memory is failing; that’s the reason for the trouble. The son must take control of his formerly independent, competent dad: the story comes to a moving conclusion. In discussions of a story in workshop, I usually begin by asking the students to name its strengths. I knew that they would speak of the qualities that made this story good—psychological verisimilitude, characters we cared about, telling language. So this time I spoke first: I praised the arrival of the health department inspectors. I suspected that otherwise the incident wouldn’t be mentioned. It was just a few unadorned sentences—but they made the story work. This is what I meant by saying, at the start of this book, that I’m writing not about what makes fiction good but about what makes it possible.

Later in her life Tillie Olsen published, as a short story, “Requa I,” the first part of a novella that was never completed. The story was printed in a journal in 1970 and then in Best American Short Stories, and it’s included in a collection of Olsen’s work published in 2013, Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I, and Other Works. With almost no explanatory narrative, it recounts, through dialogue and the characters’ thoughts, the relationship between a man and his thirteen-year-old nephew in 1932. The uncle has taken the orphaned boy to live with him in a boardinghouse. The boy is inert with grief; the well-meaning uncle is baffled and increasingly impatient. Then, slowly, there are tiny changes in what the boy does. He is healing. Story is a relative matter. In an adventure story the slight changes in the way this boy and his uncle live would count as stasis. In this story slight changes are as striking as dramatic plot events elsewhere.

Edward P. Jones’s “The Sunday Following Mother’s Day”

We all know why suspenseful stories with dramatic conclusions are stories. But stories like those we’ve just considered, which really work the same way—life becomes unsettled and eventually is resolved—are harder to describe as a series of events leading to other events, though they are. So are long, apparently inconclusive stories like “The Sunday Following Mother’s Day,” from Edward P. Jones’s first book, Lost in the City. One minor reason I love this story is that the author gets away with including two characters named Maddie and Madeleine, and three named Sam. The story begins with a plain statement of fact: “When Madeleine Williams was four years old and her brother Sam was ten, their father killed their mother one night in early April.” Jones tells us immediately that no one would ever find out why this murder occurred, so we know not to expect that the story is going in that direction. From the second paragraph we occasionally look back at events from the vantage point of Madeleine after she has grown up and gone to Columbia University. As an adult she reads all she can about the murder. The story describes in detail the events just after the murder, summarizes most of the next twenty years, and finally slows way down: the last five pages are about one day—a day that turns out to have more to do with race, class, forgiveness, and friendship than murder. By this time Madeleine is married and has a son, also named Sam, who is mentally disabled and in an institution.

Samuel, the murderer, has now been released from prison and has been writing his daughter loving letters. On the Sunday following Mother’s Day, when her husband happens to be away, Madeleine is about to go visit her son in the institution when her father comes to her house, appearing for the first time since he murdered her mother all those years ago, and persuades her to let him drive her. They arrive, another family befriends them, and then a series of hapless accidents puts Madeleine in that family’s company for hours. They idealize the disabled children and cloyingly pretend to impossible friendship. It’s unspoken but obvious that the institution takes inadequate care of its poor, black residents, which makes the family Madeleine meets even more disturbing. She realizes that these people are like her father: countrified, simple black people—people decidedly unlike her. A less complex author would make the reader reject Madeleine’s snobbish loathing for these people and her father, but here everyone is culpable and everyone is right.

A long-ago murder has nothing to do with what’s important at the end of the story: what seems to make a difference then are dilapidated cars, clumsy social life, and embarrassing, foolish civilities. The story carries the reader away from the murder, resisting a simple view of tragedy and leaving that situation unresolved. A tragic ending would require one of the children to kill the father, or the father to murder again. This story becomes comedy. It moves from its opening and then returns to it, resolves it somehow—but resolves it by rejecting it. The stark question that has seemed to motivate the children’s lives—can we forgive the murderer of our mother if he’s our father?—vanishes in the inconvenient detail of the day-to-day. The story slows down, and looking at anything slowly makes it complicated.

So there are many ways to write a story in which something happens and something else happens, and it’s the “something else”—a new thing that breaks into the story, often on page 3 or 4—that frequently distinguishes professional writers’ stories from the work of beginners: there’s an initial problem, and then there’s a new, unexpected person or problem or complexity, as if the author has looked around and thought, “What else is going on here? What else might happen here?” Once there has been an event or several events, then something happens, finally, that is of enough magnitude that we feel that a story has occurred. It sounds obvious, but if you think of it that way—a story feels like a story—then you’ll be able to judge whether the resolutions and solutions and tragedies and uncertainties that you come up with have both psychological rightness—fictional truth—and the requisite force.

A Novel That Never Was Written

When I began writing my first novel, the task seemed so intimidating that I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing for months, and spoke of it as “the thing.” During those years I helped serve lunch in a soup kitchen every Monday, and a distinguished psychoanalyst also volunteered. One Monday, as we passed trays down the line of volunteers and staff members, each adding a scoop of meat, potatoes, or vegetables, someone called to me, “Aren’t you a writer? What are you writing?”

“Well,” I said, stopping to concentrate on a scoop of mashed potatoes. “Well.” I had actually never said it before. Another scoop. “I’m writing . . . well, I’m writing . . . um, I’m writing . . . a novel.”

The psychoanalyst murmured sympathetically, “So it’s come to that.”

In subsequent years I’ve learned that anxiety about writing a first novel or a book-length memoir is common. How the hell do you write something that long? If a story is a couple of incidents, one final and decisive, what’s a book? Two hundred incidents, one final and decisive? How do you even keep track of the damn thing? My first novel eventually did get written, somehow, but many others are never finished.

Tillie Olsen, the author of “I Stand Here Ironing,” was born Tillie Lerner in 1912 to secular Jewish immigrants from Russia in Omaha, Nebraska. Her parents were leftist activists. Tillie Lerner never finished high school or went to college, but she was a serious reader, and in her twenties, during the Great Depression, she began writing poems and a novel. She married young, became a Communist, had a daughter, moved to California. In 1934, part of her unfinished novel was published in the Partisan Review, and at the very time that Lerner was jailed for support of a longshoremen’s strike, the New Republic—in a story about proletarian literature—called her novel excerpt “a work of early genius.” Publishers went searching for this Tillie Lerner and found her in jail. She was offered money, asked to write about her political life, offered a contract for a novel. Every writer’s fantasy. But she doesn’t seem to have taken the distant world of publishing very seriously, though she was glad to get money. She wrote an article about the strike and implied in a letter to Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House, that her novel was almost finished. Her biographer, Panthea Reid, in Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles records that she signed a contract with Macmillan, then agreed to sign with Random House. Macmillan eventually released her, and she signed with Random House for a $500 advance and 15 percent of royalties, very high for the time. She promised to send eight chapters, and in the months that followed, she sent two, admitting that she hadn’t actually worked on the novel for two years. Her old notes were chaotic. She was sick several times, her marriage ended, and her life, working with other activists, was full of turmoil.

Though her biographer doesn’t say this, it seems clear that there was never any reason to think Tillie Lerner was writing a novel or would finish one—but the publishers wanted a novel from her, and she and they tacitly agreed to pretend that one would appear. In 1935 and 1936 she planned chapters and periodically asked for more money and received it, for a total of $1,200. She sent in no more writing. She was working full time for the Communist Party, and it must have been hard to believe that she could do more for the world by sitting alone writing and rewriting fiction than by going out and fighting for social change. In her article about the longshoremen’s strike, which is included in the 2013 collection of her work, she describes a day when the police violently attacked the strikers. She was not on the picket line: she was in Communist Party headquarters, typing, she says, while horrors took place outside and ambulances rushed by: “And I sit there, making a metallic little pattern of sound in the air, because that is all I can do, because that is what I am supposed to do.” This doesn’t sound like someone who was likely to give up working for the party—even if all she did for it was type—and sit at home for months writing a novel.

Also, my guess is that Tillie Lerner didn’t know how to write a novel—as we’ve noted, it’s not obvious—and resisted the combination of imaginative freedom and consecutive thinking it would require. She had written articles for a party newsletter and several pieces of journalism but, not having been to college, would have had little experience planning and completing other pieces of writing, and she was a perfectionist.

She began living with Jack Olsen, another Communist. They had three more daughters, and married during the forties, when he was in the army, so she’d receive the benefits military wives were entitled to. She then became Tillie Olsen.

In 1954, when Tillie Olsen was forty-two, she got in touch with a writer named Arthur Foff, with whom one of her daughters was studying at San Francisco State College. She showed him a draft of the story that eventually became “I Stand Here Ironing,” and he let her into his class. As his student, she finished that story and made notes for the others that would later be published in Tell Me a Riddle. Foff encouraged her to apply for a fellowship at Stanford, and Wallace Stegner phoned to offer her a fellowship that included attending classes. There she studied with the novelist Richard Scowcroft, and over the next three years, she completed the other stories in Tell Me a Riddle. Mostly she still couldn’t write, and Scowcroft recorded that she cried during their conferences. But she published the four stories in magazines and got a contract for the collection. Publishers fought over her again, and now Viking offered her a contract for a novel. She promised various novels to more than one publisher, but never completed any.

Finally, her husband found two envelopes containing the incomplete novel from the thirties, which had been lost. Tillie Olsen couldn’t finish it, but she was able to make sense of the fragments of the early chapters, and they were published as Yonnondio: From the Thirties in 1974. Its harrowing, gorgeous, sensitively written chapters recount the childhood of Mazie Holbrook. Her father works in the Wyoming mines, then becomes an unsuccessful tenant farmer. He finds unsafe work in the Omaha sewers, then gets a job in a slaughterhouse, where he is in danger from scalding water. The story is an indictment of injustice, callousness, and lack of opportunity, a chronicle of the Great Depression—and also a sharply observed account of children growing up. It is even more fervent in its outrage than Tell Me a Riddle but no less exact and irresistible in depicting life moment by moment. It breaks off with a note that begins, “Reader, it was not to have ended here.”

Back in the thirties, Tillie Lerner had sent a plan to Random House outlining the novel she intended to write. Editors there pointed out to one another that she had done nothing more than enumerate one disaster after another. They tried to keep from criticizing her so as not to discourage her, but Cerf wrote her that she might consider giving her main character “a few good breaks here and there.” The plan stayed at Random House, and when she was working on Yonnondio in the seventies, Olsen didn’t have it. Panthea Reid includes it in an appendix.

Yonnondio, insofar as it exists, isn’t just a recitation of disasters, though there are plenty of those. The author is seduced by the look, sound, and smell of things, the psychological feel of whatever is going on, and we have the thrill of reading something true about life—which is a happy experience, even when we are reading about suffering. In Yonnondio there is a little too much insistence on how bad everything is, but I imagine that Tillie Olsen would have written the rest with her usual clear eye and sense of language, her usual insight into human psychology. As a series of pages and paragraphs, the book would have worked, as the early chapters do.

Still, the plan suggests that it might not have worked as a whole book, a novel. I’m doubtful not because of the many disasters, but because Olsen is thinking not about what her characters will do, only about what they will experience—what will happen to them—and what these happenings will feel like. She projects a series of descriptions, almost tableaus, without actions resulting at least in part from earlier actions. The book would have lacked the events that keep a novel from becoming a series of static portraits. It seems that her intention, in each chapter, is to demonstrate to readers what situations mean emotionally, not to start up uncertainties in the reader’s mind. Here’s a piece of the plan that outlines a chapter she never wrote:

The City: With Will in the reformatory for running away. School and how alien it and the kids are. Mazie friendship for Ellen her cousin and their dreams together. The neighborhood, the poverty, the sense of being a burden and Jerry bitter tongue, the men around. The work for room and board, and falling asleep in school over her lessons, the shame . . .

She would have produced a series of gloriously alive, difficult moments, as she did in her stories, which work because the passage of time, and subtle shifts and arrivals and departures, as well as undramatic but real sources of suspense—like the question of whether Emily’s mother will go and talk to the counselor—provide forward motion. But she’d probably have needed more for a book; she’d have needed characters with desires, who try to act.

When she did write parts of the novel, she didn’t like them, and she may have been correct that they didn’t work. She needed friends and books, help making up if not a plot, at least a series of forward-looking episodes that would carry a reader along. Then—well, maybe nothing would have helped, but maybe she’d have liked what she was writing and found the courage to continue.

Olsen did better as a spokesperson for her ideas. She was a political leftie all her life and, apparently, took delight in almost any disruption of established order. In her last decades she was a vocal feminist celebrity who regularly used more than her allotted time as a public speaker and jumped from subject to subject, resisting all demands for coherence and logic. Her passionate talks about feminism and the thirties inspired many. When she was invited to Yale, a mile from my house, I heard her speak. She spontaneously sang “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (maybe she always spontaneously sang it, I don’t know), and I was smitten. She died in 2007.

The story of Tillie Olsen is sad, despite the existence of those amazing stories and the fragment Yonnondio, as well as a nonfiction book she wrote called Silences—which, tellingly, is about how women find it hard to write—and despite her years as a feminist role model. Her youth wasn’t wasted: there were good reasons (something her biographer, who is unfortunately highly critical of her subject, doesn’t seem to grasp) why an ethical young woman might have devoted her time to the Communist Party in the 1930s. Still, the silence is tragic: there should have been more fiction.

Imagining a Novel

My guess is that novels come about in one of two ways. One is when the original impulse is an idea for an action that will be at the center of the book (a crime, an accident, a misunderstanding), an idea that comes trailing possible subsequent actions—or actions that lead up to it—like strands of mozzarella off a pizza. Although writing such a novel has its own difficulties, the outline of the story—what draws us in, what makes us keep reading, what complicates matters, what resolves them—will be fairly clear.

But maybe you don’t want to or can’t write that kind of novel, the kind that turns on a dramatic action that comes to mind first. For me, and maybe for you, a novel doesn’t start up in the mind as an action; it starts as a person in a situation. One novel started in my mind as an ending: four women who know one another each go into different stalls of a women’s room, to be alone for the first time in hours, after something huge has happened. I needed to write a book that would explain their pleasure in that moment of solitude—how the main character, especially, finally has a chance to think, and what she thinks. Feeling my way backward, I slowly imagined a series of events that would lead to this moment. If you start writing novels this way, your musings have to do with the actions and large questions that might best lead to the feelings and nature of people in the situation you have in mind, and bring them to the place where you want them to end.

Or you may first conceive of a novel by imagining people and how they know one another. You’ve written a story, and a friend or teacher says, “This could be a novel!” or your story is published and an agent writes to you and says, “Do you have a novel? Is this story part of a novel?” You think, why not? You could go on forever about these two brothers . . . the time they got lost, the time their sister fell in love. . . .

If you think first of characters and relationships, whether your story is based on real people or not, you may think up incident after incident, but maybe not a central one large enough to carry the book and set it up for a conclusion. You may have to struggle for quite a while to decide what matters most to these brothers, what could take them to the next place in their lives.

In Chapter 7 we’ll go into more detail about all this. All we need to agree on right now is that in a novel some large thing needs to happen. Maybe we don’t write mysteries about crime—but all novels are mysteries about crime in one way or another, though the crime may be kissing the wrong man or spoiling a friendship, and the mystery may be something like “Will this character fix her life?”

You may not know the ending, but you may know what the ending will be about—either a marriage or a breakup, either an accomplishment or a failure, either a moment of new mutual comprehension or renewed hopeless enmity. It may take you many weeks or months to think of events that will take you to the ending—and let you find out what exactly it is—but after a while you’ll have a wisp of a novel.

And then what? Novelists are often asked, “Do you use an outline?” Probably not. I suspect that only predictable fiction, with formulas instead of lifelike characters, could be completely planned in advance. People who make up imaginative stories are often uncomfortable with strict logic and rigid planning. What we’re good at is using free association and other sloppy techniques that encourage our thoughts to run easily, so, feeling our way, we can sense what small but believable, emotionally true thing will happen next. An outline would be too rational for most of us, and for the way we happen upon story. Is there a way to use intuition and feeling along with reason (a flying kite tugged now and then by a good stout string) to organize the large elements in a book?

The Quarry for Middlemarch

A few years ago, in an exhibit of manuscripts collected by the poet Amy Lowell at Harvard’s Houghton Library, I saw a small notebook identified as the “quarry” George Eliot used when she wrote one of my favorite novels, Middlemarch—which, as you probably know, is about a fictional Midlands English town and especially two people in it, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate. They are ambitious and idealistic, wanting to improve life for others, but they marry the wrong people: they are both powerful and smart, but at times foolish. This novel is a grand statement about how hard it is to become the person you dream of being—someone who does good work—how firmly the world will oppose you, but how love can make a difference, while its absence is hell. Even with someone to love who shares your ideals and understands your thoughts, the narrow prejudices of provincial life may make you fail. Middlemarch was published in serial form in 1871 and 1872, and as a book in 1874, but it takes place in 1830 and ’31, just before the passage of the Reform Act enlarged the English electorate and made the country more democratic.

The notebook I saw under glass was open to a page on which Eliot had written down a list of the scenes in the fifth section of her novel. It was a stunning moment: I was watching George Eliot figure out her book. I pulled out a notebook of my own and wrote down everything I saw. Some lines were crossed out, and some were hard to read. I copied “Mr. Casaubon dies. Brooke stands and falls. Embarrassment of Lydgate. Raffles comes on the scene. Scandal in Middlemarch”—about twenty such short summaries. I noticed that they all had to do with action, with event, not with feeling—George Eliot knew she didn’t have to remind herself what the characters would feel.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “quarry” as “an open-air excavation from which stone for building or other purposes is obtained by cutting, blasting, or the like.” In other words, a quarry makes what’s shaped and functional out of what’s haphazard. And it’s where you’d go digging. George Eliot produced a few other “quarries” besides the one for Middlemarch—two for her novel Romola, one written in Italian, and one for a novel she never wrote—but the one for Middlemarch is the most detailed and complicated. In 1950 the University of California Press published it, edited by Anna Theresa Kitchel, and I was able to borrow her edition.

The quarry is in two parts. Eliot wrote from the beginning to the middle of the notebook, then turned it upside down and backward and started again from what had been the back cover. Harvard owns the quarry and will let you see a facsimile on the Web; the second part is upside down. The first part consists of notes Eliot made when she read about medicine as it was practiced in the 1830s, to help her write about Tertius Lydgate, who’s a young doctor. The second part is her plan for the book.

Eliot also kept journals, not very detailed. She records trips, visitors, a few words about her writing, and names the books, in several languages, she is reading. She often mentions having a headache or losing a day to illness. She speaks of how happy she is with George Henry Lewes, the man she lived with for many years, mentioning “our growing love.”

In November of 1868 Eliot writes in the journal, “The return of this Saint Cecilia’s day finds me in better health than has been usual with me in these last six months. But I am not yet engaged in any work that makes a higher life for me—a life that is young and grows, though in my other life I am getting old and decaying. It is a day for resolves, and determination.”

A month later, on New Year’s Day, 1869, she writes, “I have set myself many tasks for the year—I wonder how many will be accomplished?” Along with some poems, she plans “A Novel called Middlemarch.” On January 23: “I have made a little way in constructing my new Tale.” Six months later—the next time she refers to it—she is “writing an introduction to Middlemarch.” A week after that she “meditated characters for Middlemarch.” She records beginning the book on August 2, but she began with a section that comes second in the finished novel. On September 1 she again “meditated characters and conditions for Middlemarch which stands still in the beginning of Chapter III.” Then, on September 10: “I have achieved little during the last week except reading on Medical subjects.” The next day she writes:

I do not feel very confident that I can make anything satisfactory of Middlemarch. I have need to remember that other things which have been accomplished by me, were begun under the same cloud. G. has been reading Romola again, and expresses profound admiration. This is encouraging. At p.50—end of Chapter III.

A couple of weeks later: “As to my work, im Stiche gerathen”—German for “stuck.” And three days after that:

It is worth while to record my great depression of spirits, that I may remember one more resurrection from the pit of melancholy. And yet what love is given to me!—what abundance of good I possess. All my circumstances are blessed; and the defect is only in my own organism. Courage and effort!

During these months, Lewes’s son was staying with them. He’d been living in Africa, and arrived sick. Eliot briefly records his ups and downs day by day and then his death, after which she didn’t write in her journal for seven months. When she started again, turning the book over and writing toward the beginning, as with the quarry, she speaks of writing poems, traveling, and being ill. Middlemarch is still stalled.

George Eliot, a prolific and great novelist, suffered from the troubles that touch every writer’s life. She was sick, depressed, unable to figure out what to write next. Though she lived happily with her partner (despite societal disapproval because he was married, though he and his wife had agreed to an open marriage and his wife had children with another man), love couldn’t save them from sorrow and loss. Beginning writers sometimes think there is something wrong with them because troubles like these hold them back. Obviously not.

Finally, on December 2, 1870—sixteen months after she began writing Middlemarch—Eliot writes in her journal:

I am experimenting in a story, which I began without any very serious intention of carrying it out lengthily. It is a subject which has been recorded among my possible themes ever since I began to write fiction, but will probably take new shapes in the development. I am today at p.44.

On December 31, she writes:

I have written only 100 pages—good printed pages—of a story which I began about the opening of November, and at present mean to call ‘Miss Brooke.’ Poetry halts just now.

In my private lot I am unspeakably happy, loving, and beloved. But I am doing little for others.

At some point the story she refers to became part of the novel—it is the story of Dorothea Brooke, one of the two central characters of the novel. After that, in subsequent entries in 1871 and 1872, she records progress on Middlemarch—and then its publication and success.

At the start of the book, Tertius Lydgate has recently moved to Middlemarch to take over another doctor’s practice. The chapters she was stuck on, I suppose, are versions of the ones that exist as the second of the novel’s eight books, in which Lydgate starts up his practice and tries to make a place for himself in the town, falling in love with a beautiful but difficult woman, Rosamond Vincy. He has to take a stand in a decision made by the board of directors of a new hospital, which he will run, and his decision makes enemies for him. Thus the conflicts in Lydgate’s story begin: struggles concerning love, work, and money.

The story “Miss Brooke,” which Eliot began so casually after being stuck for months, became not just part of Middlemarch but the part that begins it, and which many of us remember most clearly when we think of this book. Eliot wrote poems and a story because she couldn’t write her novel—and then the story turned out to be the salvation of the novel. Dorothea Brooke is an idealistic, intense, intellectually curious young woman who marries a cold scholar whose life has been wasted on trivia. She believes he is brilliant and hopes to help him with his work—and then she realizes the truth. Like George Eliot as she began that part of the story, Dorothea is unhappy that she does nothing for others. As her story plays out, she becomes acquainted with her husband’s cousin Will Ladislaw—and their story eventually dominates the book. So George Eliot had to wait to write her book until she realized that a story she already had in mind belonged with the one she was writing. When we read Middlemarch now, the linking of the two stories seems inevitable.

Research and reading may be invaluable in writing a novel, not only because they keep us from making mistakes, but because they may suggest story. An actual quarry has plenty of rock in it that will never be cut up and made into anything, and George Eliot, as she read about medicine—preparing herself to write about a young doctor practicing forty years earlier—read widely and wrote down what interested her, not knowing whether she’d use it or not. Sometimes she didn’t. In the quarry she noted controversies about such issues as how much doctors could charge and whether they might dispense drugs. Lydgate, a reformer, advocates new medical practices and refuses to dispense drugs, and the local doctors think he’s an incompetent snob.

Eliot also noted the changing understanding of typhus and typhoid fever, which had been considered one disease. Research took place in Paris, and we learn that Lydgate studied there.

Early in the book a young man, Fred Vincy, comes down with typhoid fever. Another Middlemarch doctor sees Fred but doesn’t take his illness seriously. Lydgate is called in, realizes what’s wrong, and treats it—and in the course of his many visits, he confers with Fred’s sister Rosamond, and they fall in love; she is the woman he marries. The facts about typhoid fever that Eliot had written down enable her not just to write accurately about the disease, but also to advance the story. We don’t know whether an idea for the plot came first and the information about typhoid second, or whether information she found suggested what might happen. But since she didn’t use everything she found, and since she read whole issues of medical journals, not just articles on subjects she’d already decided to write about, at least sometimes the information available seems to have helped her make up story. The more you learn about ways of life that are unfamiliar, the easier it will be to imagine the kind of trouble and fun your characters might get into.

The editor of the quarry doesn’t discuss when in the process of writing Middlemarch George Eliot wrote the quarry. It seems clear to me that she began writing the book before she wrote at least the second part of the quarry, which consists of list after list, like the ones I saw at the Houghton Library—plans for scene after scene. The lists refer to Dorothea from the first, and we know that Eliot wrote some of the Lydgate chapters before deciding to make her a character. So the second part of the quarry must have been written when she was no longer stuck. When she writes in her journal, “I have achieved little during the last week except reading on Medical subjects,” maybe she’s referring to the notes she took that make up the first part of the quarry—which would mean she began the entire quarry after she’d begun the book. She didn’t write about Dorothea in her journal for more than a year after that. Perhaps she turned the quarry over to start again from the back at about the time she did the same thing with the journal, and then began planning the book as she now intended to write it—and did write it, including Dorothea.

Eliot began the second part by writing down information she’d acquired on other subjects besides medicine—political history, student life, and jobs in hospitals, much of which she didn’t use. Then she writes the word “Middlemarch” in the middle of a page, and from then on, almost everything is about the novel. She lists the names and professions of minor characters. She draws a little map, just dots indicating the town of Middlemarch and the villages around it. The facsimile of the quarry on the Web makes clear that the author kept crossing things out, I think sometimes because she changed her mind and sometimes after she’d finished writing a section.

After the map she makes a list of “Relations to be developed”—Dorothea and Mr. Casaubon, Lydgate and Rosamond, and so on: who has to know whom. Maybe it served as a reminder to write scenes in which characters meet, so they’d have a relationship when the plot required one. If I had learned nothing else as a novelist from seeing the quarry, this list of relationships would have made it helpful.

Next we find a list of “Private dates”—the years when events in the book will happen. At first they’re listed haphazardly; then she repeats part of the list, putting some events in chronological order and adding detail—and that method, listing and then repeating a list in more detail, becomes her habit all through the quarry. A series of lists: it’s a way to keep things straight and yet to change your mind.

Most of the rest of the notebook consists of lists of scenes or chapters—phrases summarizing the contents of the eight books into which this novel is divided. As I noticed when I saw the original quarry, nearly all the chapter summaries describe actions: “Sir James appeals to the Rector” or “Featherstone asks for something awkward.”

Eliot keeps changing her mind, and book 3 changes the most. Some scenes in the finished book are not in the same order as on the list. Other important scenes seem not to have occurred to her when she first compiled the list. They bring important relationships to life: it’s in these scenes that Dorothea gets to know the man she will eventually love. Some scenes are shifted a third time—and in the actual book the order of these events is different yet again. Eliot is making a plan—but it’s a fluid plan, a succession of plans, a plan that recognizes the intuitive, disorderly nature of the process she’s engaged in.

After the plans for the third part, she comes up with something else, a list she calls “Motives,” which are broadly defined movements, not yet divided into scenes: “Featherstone’s burial. Arrival of Ladislaw.” Next, the “motives” are divided into chapters. She continues that way, with lists of motives followed by lists of chapters. A few have question marks in front of them. She proceeds all the way through to the end of the novel.

Then she makes some general plans again, with a list of the ages of some characters. And then she does something she hasn’t done before: she writes an account of one character’s history: facts that are slowly revealed at the end of the book and make it suspenseful are worked out here as if in their own story. Then Eliot again makes lists for the middle and the end of the book. It feels as if she got to a point where she didn’t feel completely at ease with the plan she had, so she redid it, again moving from the general to the more specific—as if she’s thinking through the book over and over, telling herself the story, noting down what she’s telling herself.

Book 6 is planned several times, with the lists of events becoming more and more specific. “Fred Vincy choosing his career” becomes “3. Fred Vincy has an adventure 4. In consequence seeks employment with Mr Garth.” As before, what’s in the quarry is what moves the story along.

What’s in the book is a lively, spontaneous scene. Mr. Garth is a surveyor and property manager. He’s practical, unpretentious, and scrupulous (goodness is tangible in George Eliot). Fred Vincy has been trained for the church, but is so unspiritual and restless with indoor life that the woman he loves—Mr. Garth’s daughter—has told him she won’t marry him if he becomes a clergyman. He can’t figure out what else to do until this scene, where he comes upon Mr. Garth working. Nearby a bunch of ignorant farmers with pitchforks are attacking surveyors working on a new and terrifying phenomenon: the railway. Fred and Mr. Garth save the surveyors, and Mr. Garth scolds the farmers. When Mr. Garth’s assistant sprains his ankle, Fred helps hold the measuring tape—and that’s how he ultimately becomes Mr. Garth’s assistant and leads a good life after all.

Eliot is coming to the end of her novel. After the list of scenes in the quarry, she writes, “How to End the Parts”—major events at the conclusion of each section—and then “Remaining Scenes of Part VI” and another summary of events.

For book 7, near the end, she becomes less orderly. She asks herself questions: “What becomes of Bulstrode’s arrangements as to property, especially Stone Court?” She makes notes she doesn’t fully explain: “About Dorothea’s money, over and above her own 700 a year.”

When she reaches the last part, book 8, it feels as if she’s thinking aloud: “Reasons why Dorothea does not immediately have her interview with Lydgate.” When she writes her usual numbered list of scenes, the numbers no longer refer to chapters. She’s just enumerating events, apparently to help herself keep them straight as she writes.

The plan in George Eliot’s quarry for Middlemarch feels familiar to me: it resembles the progress of a mind thinking, of my own mind and maybe yours, of the lists and more lists I write when I’m working on a novel—each the bones of a book, each different. When the lists are no longer helpful, they are superseded. Her process is not just to break something large into smaller parts, as an outline does, but to keep rethinking the larger divisions as well, reaching back and forth from large to small, but also from small to large.

The quarry’s method is organic and fluid, and much easier than trying to figure out a whole book at once. It takes advantage of the way a mind moves through a thought: associating, getting ideas, coming to a new understanding, rejecting that understanding, trying another. And it does so about a huge intellectual project. It uses a mixture of rational and irrational thinking: logical progress interrupted when the needs of storytelling or the nature of the characters make the plan wrong. I think it’s a quarry in part because it contains material Eliot could use when she wanted it, and in part because she’s making a mess in order to make something orderly. She’s excavating rough ground here. Like people setting out to cut building blocks from a hill of rock, she can’t say in advance exactly what she’ll find or from what angle she’ll approach it, to get the right piece out of the quarry and into words. Thinking hard, not taking her thoughts too seriously, and thinking again helps her write a book that feels alive and unpredictable on every page. It’s not the only way to write a novel, but it’s one way.