A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

by George Saunders

How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?

To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it behaves in relation to another mind (i.e., the writer’s) across space and time. What we’re going to be doing here, essentially, is watching ourselves read (trying to reconstruct how we felt as we were, just now, reading). Why would we want to do this? Well, the part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality.

We could understand a story as simply a series of such expectation/resolution moments.

We might think of structure as simply: an organizational scheme that allows the story to answer a question it has caused its reader to ask.

A specific description, like a prop in a play, helps us believe more fully in that which is entirely invented. It’s sort of a cheap, or at least easy, authorial trick. If I am trying to put you in a certain (invented) house, I might invoke “a large white cat, stretching itself out to what seemed like twice its normal length” on a couch in that house. If you see the cat, the house becomes real.

That’s really all a story is: a limited set of elements that we read against one another.

(A linked pair of writing dictums: “Don’t make things happen for no reason” and “Having made something happen, make it matter.”)

Does the story solve the problem of loneliness? Suggest a solution? No. It seems to say that such loneliness has always been with us and always will be. As long as there’s love, there’ll be people who aren’t loved. As long as there’s wealth, there’ll be poverty. As long as there’s excitement, there’ll be dullness. The story’s conclusion, essentially, is: “Yes, that’s how it is in this world.”

Chekhov once said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” “Formulate them correctly” might be taken to mean: “make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.”

To review: a story is a linear-temporal phenomenon. Actually, that’s any work of art. We know what we think of a movie even a few minutes in. We step up to a painting with a blank mind, look at it, and the mind fills up. In a concert hall, we’re either riveted right away or wondering what that guy in the balcony’s texting about.

A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were. Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, and (2) getting better at articulating that response.

So, one way to approach a story—to evaluate how good it is, how graceful and efficient—is to ask, “What is the heart of you, dear story?” (Or, channeling Dr. Seuss, “Why are you bothering telling me this?”)

thinker thrive. All of this limited thinking has an unfortunate by-product: ego. Who is trying to survive? “I” am. The mind takes a vast unitary wholeness (the universe), selects one tiny segment of it (me), and starts narrating from that point of view. Just like that, that entity (George!) becomes real, and he is (surprise, surprise) located at the exact center of the universe, and everything is happening in his movie, so to speak; it is all, somehow, both for and about him. In this way, moral judgment arises: what is good for George is…good. What is bad for him is bad. (The bear is neither good nor bad until, looking hungry, it starts walking toward George.) So, in every instant, a delusional gulf gets created between things as we think they are and things as they actually are. Off we go, mistaking the world we’ve made with our thoughts for the real world. Evil and dysfunction (or at least obnoxiousness) occur in proportion to how solidly a person believes that his projections are correct and energetically acts upon them.

And look at that: the more I know about her, the less inclined I feel to pass a too-harsh or premature judgment. Some essential mercy in me has been switched on. What God has going for Him that we don’t is infinite information. Maybe that’s why He’s able to, supposedly, love us so much.

A plan is nice. With a plan, we get to stop thinking. We can just execute. But a conversation doesn’t work that way, and neither does a work of art. Having an intention and then executing it does not make good art. Artists know this.

If we set out to do a thing, and then we (merely) do it, everyone is bummed out. (That’s not a work of art, that’s a lecture, a data dump.) When we start reading a story, we do so with a built-in expectation that it will surprise us by how far it manages to travel from its humble

there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t. First, a willingness to revise. Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality. Making causality doesn’t seem sexy or particularly literary. It’s a workmanlike thing, to make A cause B, the stuff of vaudeville, of Hollywood. But it’s the hardest thing to learn. It doesn’t come naturally, not to most of us. But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.

For most of us, the problem is not in making things happen (“A dog barked,” “The house exploded,” “Darren kicked the tire of his car” are all easy enough to type) but in making one thing seem to cause the next. This is important, because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning.

Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.

If I think of a story as something that has to convey a certain message, as a train that has to pull into a certain station at a certain time, and myself as the stressed-out engineer trying to make that happen—it’s too much. I freeze up and no fun is had. But if I imagine myself as a sort of genial carnival barker, trying to usher you into my magical black box, the workings of which even I don’t fully understand—that, I can do.

The difference between a great writer and a good one (or a good one and a bad one) is in the quality of the instantaneous decisions she makes as she works. A line pops into her head. She deletes a phrase. She cuts this section. She inverts the order of two words that have been sitting there in her text for months.

We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition. That’s it. Over and over.

These stories we’ve just read were written during an incredible seventy-year artistic renaissance in Russia (the time of, yes, Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Tolstoy, but also of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Ostrovsky, Tyutchev, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and many more) that was followed by one of the bloodiest, most irrational periods in human history. Twenty million or more killed by Stalin, the torture and imprisonment of countless others; widespread starvation, even, in places, cannibalism; kids turning their own parents in, husbands ratting out their wives; the systematic and deliberate overthrow of the humanist values by which our four writers lived.

I want to thank you for allowing me to guide you rather bossily through the stories, for letting me show you how I read them, why I love them. I’ve tried to be as clear and persuasive as possible, telling you what you should be noticing, pointing out certain technical features, offering my best explanation for why “we” were moved in this place or that, and so on.

One of the dangers of writing a book about writing is that it might be perceived to be of the how-to variety. This book is not that. A lifetime of writing has left me with one thing: the knowledge of how I do it. Or, to be completely honest, a knowledge of how I have done it. (How I will soon do it has to remain a continual mystery.) God save us from manifestos, even mine. (“An explanation does not go up to the hilt,” said Tolstoy.) The closest thing to a method I have to offer is this: go forth and do what you please.