How do writers decide what goes in a story and what (because this is also an essay about fishing) gets cast away? Here, Greg Schutz—recent winner of TMR’s 2024 Reprint Prize—offers some insight on the use of edges for making meaning.
1.
This is an essay about fishing. It’s also about how a short story hopefully comes to mean something as I’m writing it—how meaning rises out of the welter of composition. I believe a similar mystery swims at the heart of both topics.
Mystery. Meaning. I’ve barely begun, and already I feel the need to apologize. Flannery O’Connor can get away with talking about mystery, but what about the rest of us? Nevertheless, my hard drive is littered with unfinished drafts, abandoned because I felt I understood them. As soon as I understand the story I’m writing, I no longer want to write it. As soon as I know what it means, it’s no longer capable of meaning—not in that deeper, more mysterious sense I’m after.
Why should this be so?
Meaning, though, may be too settled, too determinate a word for the experience I’m talking about here, which is the sudden, electric apperception of something irreducible within a narrative, something that renders the text resistant to summary, something that animates the text with an undeniable sense of aliveness beyond the bounds of my own authorial ambition.
Whatever this mysterious something is, it can be touched but not named, apprehended but not comprehended. I write in pursuit of it, and my premise here is that it can often be sought at the tense intersection of what’s consciously understood about a story-in-progress—often, for me, its plot—and the felt sense of the fictional life from which the plot is drawn, a tension that must be explored intimately, granularly, sentence by sentence.
This is an essay about casting out lines of text, awaiting the strike.
2.
A largemouth bass seeks edges. This is the first thing to know, the piece of practical wisdom from which all else derives.
An edge marks change. It’s the location in space or time at which a change occurs. Change is the principle by which a bass organizes its life.
Without edges, a bass is lost. Studies confirm this: in a blank, circular pool, isothermal and evenly lit, bass mill aimlessly, seeking edges that aren’t there. Obedient to schooling instinct, they may cluster eventually, choosing as the edge along which to organize their lives the sole point of change available, between fish and not-fish.
Paint one black stripe down the wall of this pool, however, and everything changes. The stripe draws bass like a magnet draws iron. Like iron filings, bass messily fletch the thing that has drawn them in. Soon you can hardly see the stripe for the bass that have chosen it, their point of order in an empty world.
The pool contains a single edge. A comprehensible, orderly system, it yields readily to the observer’s understanding, an efficient machine for arranging living bass just so. In the wild, though, things are never so simple. A living lake defies comprehension, a matrix of edges in constant flux: water temperature, depth, and clarity; weather, season, and time of day; current and wind, shade and sun; dissolved oxygen levels; atmospheric pressure (occasionally and mysteriously relevant, perhaps through some effect on the swim bladder, an air-filled sac bass use to regulate buoyancy), lunar phase (more mysteriously still), and the moon’s position overhead or underfoot; bottom composition and hardness; the presence and density of various species of aquatic vegetation; the locations of various forms of prey, themselves complexly arranged according to these same edges; the presence or absence of submerged stumps, logs, pier pilings, boulders, and various other objects natural and manmade—all these things and more, much more, which is to say that even a small lake is almost impossibly complex, mysterious and unknowable and, like all the best stories, like life itself, stubbornly resistant to summary.
3.
Stories, too, seek edges. They gather at the points in lives when things change. In the undergraduate workshops I teach, I’ve seen some version of the question, “But what, in the end, actually changes?” send many a young writer back to the drawing board to reconsider their story’s plot. Without change, no story.
Plot is commonly understood as a tool for explicating change. It’s how we arrange a narrative in relation to some ultimate change brought about through conflict. The resolution of a neatly plotted story can be expressed in terms of change. How has the main character’s situation changed? How has the main character themselves changed? These are the questions of external and internal conflict, respectively. Plot describes the route a story takes as it navigates from its starting point toward answers.
It’s also readily schematized: acts and arcs, sawteeth and triangles, heroes’ journeys, saved cats. I don’t mean to be entirely dismissive. Such heuristics can be valuable; in the classroom, I turn to them as ways of conceptualizing the difference between a sequence of events and an actual plot. But it’s all too easy to forget these things are heuristics: tools, templates, shorthand. They are not themselves the thing we’re trying to make when we write. They don’t mean in the way we need.
Plot can be understood heuristically, as a kind of pattern. Meanwhile, by evocative coincidence, the work of deciphering what the bass are doing in a certain lake, on a certain day, under certain conditions—the edges they’ve chosen to occupy—is called patterning the fish. So the angler and the writer face a similar challenge. Both start from a basic heuristic understanding of their quarry—of plot as a means of arranging a story, or of the many ways a bass will tend to arrange its life along natural edges—but if either treats that understanding as sufficient to their purposes, they’re likely to miss something vital.
4.
I’ve already compared the enormous complexity of a living lake, its resistance to summary, to the best short stories and to life itself. Transitively, this is also to say the best stories share something with life: they stand in tension with our heuristic understanding of plot.
Real lives—yours, mine—are unplotted. This is an odder, less obvious assertion than at first perhaps it seems. After all, our lives are eventful. Stuff happens. We want things; we strive and suffer; we realize our desires or do not; and both our circumstances and our selves may be transformed by the effort. Why, then, should it even be possible (let alone—to my mind, at least—a statement of irrefutable fact) to call our lives unplotted?
The answer is that our lives encompass absolutely everything—everything done to us and everything done by our hand. They overflow with detail and event, baggy to the point of shapelessness and bright enough to blind.
Meanwhile, I’m working under the assumption that our characters are alive. Not literally, of course, but in other ways that matter. If we’re doing our jobs as writers, much of what could be said about real lives ought to be able to be said about theirs. Though constructed from language, a character ought to mimic in the reader’s mind the complex feeling of acquaintance engendered by contact with a person who is, in fact, literally alive. (Actually, I’m tempted to go a bit further, and to say the feeling of acquaintance is the character, the words on the page just implements for evoking that feeling, for transferring it from author to reader.)
I’ve witnessed this, too, in workshop. We find ourselves discussing a character’s choices, motives, mistakes, flaws, web of relationships, and inner life much as we might gossip and speculate about a mutual friend, ever attentive to how best to word our sense of the person in question, ever aware that there are better and worse ways of describing them as individuals. This is always an excellent sign, a sign of life in a story: Language, consciously imbibed, has generated a subconscious feeling that’s in turn shaping our sense of what the language ought to be.
Our feeling grows stronger than its source. Mysteriously so.
I propose that our characters’ real lives ought to feel unplotted—or, at least, that an essential element of the mysterious meaning I’m after comes from the way a story generates the illusion of an unplotted life extending beyond the page—and that plot is best understood not merely as the events of a story so arranged, but as a principle of selection.
In other words, plot isn’t what happens. It’s how we decide what needs to be told.
5.
I want my plots to feel like stencils overlaying real lives. I want to appear to the reader to be selecting certain elements from the wealth (or overabundance, moil, prodigality, mess) of real lives and arranging them according to significant biographical edges, the relevant changes by which each story is resolved. I want to generate the illusion of lives extending far beyond the page.
But if that’s my destination, I can’t plot my way there. A plot represents what I understand about the story I’m writing, but the fictional life I’m drawing from needs to remain mysterious to me in the same way real lives—my own included—are mysterious.
How to proceed?
This is where language comes in.
Casting sentences, lines of text.
My time on the water is the same. After all, even clear water obscures. The refracted branch appears broken. A rippling surface scatters sun, its sheen yielding incompletely to the eye. Beyond a few feet, the imagination takes over, which means the angler must adopt a particular stance—curious, desirous, hungry—to the unseen.
Angling as interface between the conscious and subconscious: I’m far from the first to employ water as a metaphor toward such ends. Think Freud, for instance—all that talk of oceanic feeling—or David Lynch, who titled his book on Transcendental Meditation and the creative process Catching the Big Fish.
6.
I fish from a pedal kayak, which means I fish slowly. Seated like a recumbent bicyclist—and, I imagine, appearing to the observer to be caught in the same self-serious embrace of the ridiculous—I flog away with my feet, driving a prop beneath my polyethylene hull. At top speed—hustling back to the launch, say, as a thunderstorm rolls in—I might reach four and a half miles per hour. Usually, I’ll creep along at less than half that rate.
But slowness is a virtue. Powered by a two hundred and fifty horsepower outboard, a fiberglass bass boat skims the surface of a lake at highway speeds; in such a craft, one travels above the water, very nearly airborne. You miss things, too beholden to the predetermined patterns in your head. Seated low in a kayak, proceeding at a brisk walk before slowing to a stalk, I am in the water. The difference is palpable, and manifests as intimate attention.
In the lake rather than on it, I notice things I might otherwise have missed: that crayfish are molting two weeks earlier than last year in a warm northern bay, or that a shift in the wind, slight but perceptible across my line of travel, is pushing waves into an isolated bed of aquatic cabbage at an unusually oblique angle. At such moments, an interesting friction arises between expectation and reality, between intellect and perception—or, more precisely, between the heuristic shortcuts on which I’ve relied to plan my excursion (my maps of the lake, both mental and actual, my understanding of the biological preferences and drives that dictate bass behavior, how these things combine with the various techniques of angling craft I’ve cultivated over the years, and so forth—the patterns I have in mind for locating the fish) and the enormous, unpredictable profusion of detail offered up by the lake as it actually is.
I’ve discovered a surprising, subtle edge. But if I want to touch the life that invisibly occupies it, I need to get casting.
7.
Those who don’t fish might be surprised at how intimate it can be, how tactile. Weighing one-eighth of an ounce, a tungsten jig transmits bottom contact up sixty feet of zero-stretch braided line, down a seven-foot rod of high-modulus graphite, and into my right hand as firmly as the tap of a typewriter’s hammer against my palm. Hopping and dragging the jig along—think how a molting crayfish moves, shyly scooting and scuttling—I feel in my hand every detail, every change, no matter how subtle: the tug of silt, the scratch of sand, the rubbery bend of a stalk of cabbage, the click of a stone. Cast by cast, I comb the bottom by touch, as though dragging my hand along, as though stroking a cat.
Or else I’m writing: slouching forward, nose to pixels, mumbling the words as a sentence coalesces, grunting, backtracking, deleting, mumbling my way forward again. Perhaps plot’s gotten me this far—to this particular scene, this particular limning of a character’s interior state, this particular expository passage skimming the cream off weeks of fictional time—but plot can’t help me now. What I’m waiting for, as I cast the sentence again and again, retracting one line of text and sending out another, provisionally, into the blank of the page, is something that can’t be schematized, diagrammed, or thought through. I’ll know it when I feel it.
Say it happens. It always does. (It has to, again and again, if the story’s going to be any good.) Suddenly, out of a long muddle—sifting through possible words, rhythms, and granules of detail—the line strikes something. Or, to be more faithful both to my metaphor and to the actual felt experience of writing, something strikes the line.
This is the mystery: the way some bit of language—this rhythm, not that; this word, not its synonym—can suddenly connect me to my real feeling of acquaintance with a character, with their life not as I consciously know it or have mapped it out, but with a felt sense of it that’s akin to the sense I have of my own. This feeling thrums within the plot I’ve devised; it struggles against such paltry confines. Any story that comes to mean something, finally, does so here, on the level of language, the intimate friction between what is knowable and what is not.
In this way, language challenges my conscious understanding of the story I’m telling, according to the dictates of some mysterious structure in my subconscious. A thrill every time, as is the struggle that follows. From language itself comes the feeling of selection that enlarges the story beyond plot. A largemouth bass is the same: living evidence, drawn from the depths, of a larger order with which I’ve become briefly aligned.
by Greg Schutz
Greg Schutz is the author of Joyriders, a story collection, forthcoming in March 2025 from the University of Massachusetts Press. His stories have appeared in numerous journals, including Ploughshares, Story, and American Short Fiction. They’ve been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, anthologized in New Stories from the Midwest and Masters Review Anthology X, and listed among the distinguished stories of the year by both Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery Stories. A graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Greg has received fellowships and support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He lives in Michigan with his partner and their terrier, and can be found online at www.gregschutz.com.