A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

by George Saunders

Isaac Babel put it, “no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”

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.

We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response.

We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy.

If you know where a story is going, don’t hoard it. Make the story go there, now. But then what? What will you do next? You’ve surrendered your big reveal. Exactly. Often, in our doubt that we have a real story to tell, we hold something back, fearing that we don’t have anything else.

the story now begins asking a more profound question: “What if a lonely person can find no way out of her loneliness?”

what kind of Russia is this that compels a person to work a job to which she has no calling, and be so reduced by it?

Ha. Read Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

Chekhov’s instinct seems to be toward variation, against stasis.

A story is not like real life; it’s like a table with just a few things on it.

as you encounter an excess in a story (some non-normative aspect), you enter into a transactional relationship with the writer.

A good story is one that, having created a pattern of excesses, notices those excesses and converts them into virtues.

The whole experience of reading fiction might be understood as a series of “establishings” (“the dog is sleeping”), stabilizations (“he is really sleeping deeply, so deeply that the cat just managed to walk across his back”), and alterations (“Uh-oh, he woke up”).

What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple. But the “knowing” at such moments, though happening without language, is real. I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way. —

Would your current partner ever call his or her new partner by the same pet name he/she uses for you, once you are dead and buried? Well, why not? There are only so many pet names. Why should that bother you? Well, because you believe it is you, in particular, who is loved

we think, “Oh wait, maybe this is her true love.” Or: “Maybe this is another true love.”

“I’ll give it to you!” equals “I’ll kick your ass.” “Scram” equals “You get out of here, person whose ass I will kick if you don’t scram.” The “No fighting!” (in our translation, by Avrahm Yarmolinsky) makes us think that he’s dreaming of breaking up a schoolyard fight. (In the Constance Garnett translation, instead of “No fighting!” he says, “Shut up!”—and we could easily imagine him directing this at a dream version of Olenka.)

Garnett was wrong. Seems like he was being bullied

So we might understand revision as a way of practicing relationship; seeing what, when we do it, improves the relationship between ourselves and the reader.

Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

what makes us think of Tolstoy as a moral-ethical giant here is a technique (going from mind to mind) coupled with a confidence.

Of what is Tolstoy confident? That people are more similar to him than different.

Say you’re a world-class worrier. If that worry energy gets directed at extreme personal hygiene, you’re “neurotic.” If it gets directed at climate change, you’re an “intense visionary activist.”