Learning from "Left the Century to Sit Unmoved"

Today is always the best day for a change, so I may as well learn how to read a story for craft details. A friend of mine suggested this story for a few of us to study, and I ended up being fascinated with it. I need good blog post ideas too, so here we are.

The story: Left the Century to Sit Unmoved, by Sarah Pinsker. It's good. And short, under 2300 words (shorter than this post, oops). I'm going to assume you've read it. The following post will be rather confusing if you haven't.

I'll start with the title: It's intriguing. Honestly I find it very effective clickbait. Personally when I see a phrase suggesting something metaphysically implausible like "moving" a "century", I'm hoping to read about the kind of magical shenanigans that will make it literal. In this case: no. But it did lead me to an idea about how to generate curiosity in only a few words: lead the reader to ask, "what could the relationship be between these parts?" More on that later, perhaps.

The first line: "The pond only looks bottomless." It's intriguing, definitely raises a question of how that apparent contradiction appearsk. but... not in the most original way. "X only looks Y" feels like a pattern I've seen before.

The first question in my mind as I read was: why is the pond special? That question is soon answered and replaced with: why do people keep jumping in? This question lingers, and seems to become more urgent as more anecdotes about what happens there appear in the story. The people of the town seem to just accept that this is done, as if they don't realize it's a question, which makes me ask again why that's true. We almost move away from it entirely, like the question isn't even going to be acknowledged, then come back when the narrator talk about their brother's notes, discovering that their brother saw it as a mystery. That becomes the central mystery of the story.

These questions arise by interaction with my existing assumptions and anomaly detection instincts. The focus of the story, from literally the first line, is firmly on the pond. That alone implies the pond is somehow special. The second question, why they jump, mostly arises from my assumption that people need a reason to take a risk of vanishment. I guess you can't manage reader curiosity without at least an idea of their background knowledge assumptions. That said, self-preservation instinct is a relatively reliable one.

A lot of the story consists of very evocative sense description. I mean, a lot. The pond itself is very physically "grounded" (I'll ruminate on what the heck that means later, but for now I know it when I feel it). It feels like a very beautiful place. The closest thing to a sinister aspect is that the water is very dark, repeatedly described as "black". It's not just visual description. We get the feeling of grit and silt in the narrator's feet and eyes. It's also not just the pond. The brother's room where Shay finds his notes about "why we jump" also feels very real, lots of specific touches like the imaginary carnivorous plants. The car key "drowning" in loose change evokes not just a specific point in time but a long process that I at least can easily imagine happening in my own home. I'm not going to dive into what makes good sense description here, just note that it is good in this story and plays a role even in the more abstract aspects of the story's tone.

The speculative component of the story is quite minimal. There is just one impenetrable, quietly terrifying mystery. The mystery is never remotely resolved, not even a hint beyond the narrator's speculation. Reasonable attempts to figure it out are shown to have entirely ordinary, uninformative results. Obviously resolving or not-resolving a mystery is a stylistic choice, but it's useful to point out why a writer would choose either way. Here, the impenetrability of the mystery is essential to induce the inconsistent, superstitious way the people of the town think about the pond, which is the meat of the story.

The bright, concrete setting contrasts strongly with the one piece of unexplainable, unphysical phenomenon. What is concrete in written description is almost synonymous with what is understandable, and the pond is not understandable.

The story evokes, to me at least, a sense of a very young adolescent learning how the world works, how they themselves work. (Side note: I don't think the narrator's gender is ever specified. Their name, "Shay", seems to be gender-neutral. For what it's worth, we only hear about a bottom half of their swimming suit, which suggests a male, but absent more specific data I'm going to stick with "they".) In the first paragraph, they say they are "hoping I miss the rocks, hoping I don't overshoot the middle, hoping I don't lose my bathing suit... I'd become a legend in all the wrong ways". Embarrassment sitting on the same priority list with physical safety, with no particular division, reads like an adolescent attitude to me (in an endearing way, to be clear). Shay is very concerned with what is "cool": "I make a mental note: cool is in not flinching." They then reflect on Kat's coolness coming from her resisting peer pressure to jump, even as they draw some of theirs from jumping before Otis. As far as establishing tone and theme, that part is pretty blunt. Of Kat and Otis, the older teens they are hanging out with, they say, "I'm in love with them, or maybe the way they are around each other." Still trying to figure out the workings of their own mind. Relevant implementation technique: just write some navel-gazing already, it'll be fine.

Regarding age: my friends and I didn't entirely agree on Shay's age. I thought Shay was very young indeed, early teens at latest. They're clearly younger than Kay and Otis, who to me read as perhaps 15-17. Others thought Shay was older, though. They're certainly old enough to be asking questions about sex. I was not a normal teen, so I suppose I have an above-average chance of being wrong on this.

The story conveys a diffuse sense of how the people view the pond, expressed in superstition, etc, that's hard to put into words. There's a lot of talking about "The Rules", which no one quite agrees on, which people reinterpret or rewrite based on their inclinations and experience, but which share some common threads. They're part of the culture of the town. Everyone has their own idea of what happens to those the pond takes. Most of this comes as exposition from Shay's POV. It's a noticeable fraction of the story, but in absolute terms that's still not many words, and it hits above its weight for how much scope it covers. My best guess for how this is accomplished: it evokes familiar social structures, in barest outline, while in the same stroke providing some specifics about how those structures manifest in this town as they relate to the pond. That gives us the data we need to extrapolate how those details would be expressed in the full picture of that social structure, and extrapolating social structures is one of the things human brains do automatically.

Shay ultimately has a clear eye about "the rules". "They're just things people made up and passed down to make us feel better about our chances." Again, a little bit of exposition is fine.

The grief for their brother, Nick, is muted. They obviously think about him a lot, and his disappearance made a mark on them, but there's no mention of mourning. When talking about him, their tone seems more curious than grieved. That's a strange writing choice that I frankly don't understand. Certainly, a realistic amount of grief would turn this into a very different story, with less of the bright, supersaturated zest for life that the narrator exudes. The point where I felt most strongly that the narrator was missing their brother was when they were thinking about conservation of energy and mentioned "A brother is not something that can become nothing". That could be just because I'm a sucker for tying physics concepts to human emotion.

Mom is tragic. It was her idea to leave the (Buick) Century unmoved, the car her son, Shay's brother, took to go to the pond. She seems unwilling to admit he's gone. She's an outsider; Shay says outright of Mom "she doesn't understand at all" why they jump. I'm not sure what purpose this serves in the overall theme. It's an extra bit of emotional impact, and serves to contrast the viewpoint of the rest of the town. Sometimes that's enough to justify a story component.

I find myself trying to come up with answers for why they jump, trying to understand. In my view this is one of the defining features of a really good unresolved mystery. How do you invent a mystery where wrong answers are always on the tip of your tongue, but never correct ones? It wouldn't work if the situation didn't seem plausible: a guessing game that can end with "well of course people wouldn't do that at all," isn't much fun. Jumping is an insane thing to do, but I can imagine real people doing it anyway. My best guess about why it resonates: jumping is an act of defiance somehow, defiance against fear, against reason, against unreason, or all the above (the pond being impossible appears in a lot of the mooted reasons). People can scent *defiance* even if they don't know what they're defying, and some are drawn to it. Shay ends the story by defying "The Rules" (namely rule 4). "Simply have deep insight into human nature" is not the kind of actionable engineering advice I'm looking for, but I'm also not afraid to defer to inspiration. Maybe that's the play here.

The story hits the Theme of "transformation" a few times. The visual of the Century slowly decaying, "Just a thing caught up in the slow process of transforming into another thing," is not an attractive one, kind of gross compared to the natural beauty of most of the setting. We've seen cars with flat tires and broken windows sitting on the roadside or in ill-maintained yards. But it has resonance here in the eyes of our narrator because of the other transformations it connects to, the broader perspective of which it's just one example. They talk about their brother's room "turning to dust" Their favored explanation for what happens to the people the pond takes is that they are transformed into something else. "I think they're transformed... Is that different from dying?" They try to link it to the science of conservation of mass and energy, pondering how "a brother is not something that can become nothing." The line "People can change much faster than things can, if they're given the chance," strikes me as ultimately a very optimistic one. It feels good to hear from a young narrator just starting in life, even if the immediate reference is to people mysteriously disappearing. The focus on transformation becomes part of the broader perspective at the end.

The story manages to convey a sense of growing to understand how all of existence works. It took a few rereads to dawn on me, but I think it's the story's most impressive achievement. Early on, Shay is keenly aware of what's "universal to everyone jumping", starting early with a broad perspective. They find relationships between the people, the water, the sky, trying to fit it all together. Everything seems to be on some journey of transformation. Life feels better with risk, relief. We always talk about young people trying to figure out how they fit into the world, but this story avoids the cliches through specificity.

The whole thing is full of the narrator philosophizing. As writing techniques go, that's not subtle. You can just add philosophizing if you like that. But I think it probably wouldn't be enough to merely show the narrator thinking about all these things. It's the specifics, glimmers of a model that feels like maybe it really could encompass Everything, that make it worth taking seriously and let it have emotional weight.

Why does this have such impact? I supposed it might not for everyone. For me, being young and trying to figure everything out, and the optimism that I actually will, is a very powerful memory, or maybe wish. I miss being that optimistic. As a writer, I don't think you can create that feeling from scratch, some part of it has to already be there in the reader.

The story ends how it began, with strong description and a focus on Shay's relationship with, and specifically adoration for, Kay and Otis. The last lines are, "The sky is impossibly blue, and the water is impossibly black. There have never been any rules." Bold, hyperreal sense information juxtaposed (with no pretense of transition, I might add) against defiance and freedom.

If it wasn't obvious, one of my obsessions is the precise management of questions and curiosity in the reader's mind. More broadly, managing tone and "writing between the lines" is a persistent problem for me. I so often have an idea for a tone or emotion I want to convey, but don't know what specific words will get it to the reader. So reverse-engineering the links between words and impressions was my focus while analyzing this piece.

The way I wrote this analysis was to read the story a few times and ruminate on it for... a few days. Weeks, really. It wasn't exactly my plan, since I didn't think of writing this until a couple weeks after I read it, but I think it was important to suss out the effects the story had on me before analyzing them. When I got to writing, I tried to write and organize it effect-first, though without being too picky. Being too slavish to any organizational principle would have made it less clear, and I was figuring out new ideas right up to the last minute.

For any future story dissections I think I'll follow a similar procedure. Start by reading the story, focus on noting the effects it acheives, re-read at least a couple times and let my impression converge. Then for each of those effects, I'll try to figure out how they work and do my best to imagine how someone could start from the effect and work backward. We'll see how far this gets me. Hopefully it gets easier with practice!