George Saunders - Puppy

‘Puppy’ first appeared in The New Yorker (May, 2007) and is probably my favourite story in Saunders’s collection, Tenth of December (2013). You can read the story here.

What do you think?

I was stunned, not only by the events of the story but at how Saunders switches between two protagonists, multiple times, in less than 3,500 words, and by the emotional range of the story, its visceral and poetic images, and the way my sympathies were constantly shifting.

Oh George.

So I sat down to figure it out. Story School, Week 1.

I typed up the story, a couple of paragraphs at a time, discovering things I’d missed on my initial reading. I highlighted and made notes. I looked for patterns. I identified the Controlling Idea; I dot-pointed everything that happened in the order it happened (plot); and I figured out the engine of the story (more on these concepts later).

But for now my focus is on two elements of voice: differentiating narrative voice and irony. 

When I typed up ‘Puppy’, I noticed that Marie’s consciousness is expressed in long, complex sentences: the first sentence in the story is 12.5 lines long. When I got to Callie’s section, I noted that Callie’s consciousness is expressed in short sentences and fragments, some only one or two words long. 

This is something I’d like to use in my writing, so I came up with the following exercise:

Describe the same scene (say, a kid’s birthday party or sitting at the pub on a Sunday afternoon) from two different perspectives. Use third person narration but let that narration express itself in the kinds of words these characters would use. Have one of these characters think in extremely long sentences and one in shorter sentences. What tone does this set? What does this suggest about the characters? 

I also noted the irony created by the discrepancy between how the characters perceive themselves/their surroundings and how the narrator relates these things to the reader. Using one (or both) of the characters from the above exercise I could then try the following: 

Have a character blatantly misinterpret something another character does, something the reader can correctly interpret.

Have a character/narrator downplay or merely hint at something being awry in the middle of this ordinary scene.