Where the Needle Settles

George Saunders is the Booker Prize winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and a professor in the Syracuse University MFA program. He also operates a widely read Substack page called Story Club, where he writes regularly about his writing philosophy.

In a 2017 essay published in The Guardian, Saunders describes how he believes a story is constructed. He pushes back on what he calls the “intentional fallacy”: the idea that an artist begins with a clear-cut intention and then confidently executes it. The actual process, he argues, is messier. Good art doesn’t always come from following a plan. So much of the storytelling process involves discovery, and much of that discovery happens in revision.

That’s why Saunders developed his own revision approach: the imaginary needle. When reviewing his work, he pictures a meter, positive on one side and negative on the other, and reads what he has written the way a first-time reader might. Then he asks where the needle settled. Then comes the real work: “edit, so as to move the needle into the ‘P’ zone.”

The needle asks you to assess what’s on the page, not what you meant to write. Many great stories are found, not planned.

Stop asking whether the draft matches the vision you started with. Start asking where the needle moves. Read your writing, mark what lands and what doesn’t, and revise toward the positive. Our Revision Circles are built around exactly that kind of reading. The story you end up with may not be the one you set out to write. It will be the one you found by paying attention, sentence by sentence. Hold process over perfection and your story will reveal itself.