A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

by George Saunders

The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.

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?

The main thing I want us to be asking together is: What did we feel and where did we feel it? (All coherent intellectual work begins with a genuine reaction.)

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.

story is a linear-temporal phenomenon. It proceeds, and charms us (or doesn’t), a line at a time. We have to keep being pulled into a story in order for it to do anything to us.

You’ll be pleased if the story takes that expectation into account, but not pleased if it addresses it too neatly. We could understand a story as simply a series of such expectation/resolution moments.

evil,

First indication of drama

offered anything new and interesting to Marya Vasilyevna,

she always, invariably, longed for was to reach her destination as soon as possible.

Here was her past and her present, and she could imagine no other future than the school, the road to the town and back, and again the school and again the road.

Look away from the page and summarize for me what you know so far. Try to do it in one or two sentences.

What are you curious about?

Where do you think the story is headed?

You’ll feel the rest of the story to be meaningful and coherent to the extent that it responds to these (or “takes them into account” or “exploits them”).

What a story is “about” is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.

We might say that the three paragraphs we’ve just read were in service of increased specification.

Characterization, so called, results from just such increasing specification.

As a particular person gets made, the potential for meaningful action increases.

And we feel the story preparing itself to say something like “Well, we’ll see about that.”

The first page has radically narrowed the concerns of the story; the rest of the story must now address (use, exploit) those concerns and not any others.

If you were the writer, what would you do next?

As a reader, what else would you like to know?

And again there was a long silence. Marya Vasilyevna thought of her school,

And just as she was thinking about the examinations she was overtaken by a landowner named Hanov in a carriage with four horses, the very man who had acted as examiner in her school the previous year.

What I wanted to know was: How did Marya get here, in this crummy life?

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. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.

There should be a name for this moment in a story when, a situation having been established, a new character arrives. We automatically expect that new element to alter or complicate or deepen the situation.

the story is way faster, compressed, and exaggerated—a place where something new always has to be happening, something relevant to that which has already happened.

worn face and a lifeless expression,

handsome and attractive to women. He lived alone on his large estate,

he drank heavily.

She’s twice now retreated from the world to thoughts of the school (and we’re that much more sensitized to future occurrences).

Notice how impatient your reading mind is or, we might say, how alert it is.

Like an obsessed detective, the reading mind interprets every new-arriving bit of text purely in this context, not interested in much else.

One of the tacit promises of a short story, because it is so short, is that there’s no waste in it. Everything in it is there for a reason (for the story to make use of)—even a brief description of a road.

A specific description, like a prop in a play, helps us believe more fully in that which is entirely invented.

Why is he so passive? If she had power, she’d do something with it.

Look away from the page and summarize for me what you know so far.

Next to old Semyon he seemed well-built and vigorous, but there was something barely perceptible in his gait which betrayed him as a weak creature, already blighted, approaching its end.

it occurred to her that if she were his wife or his sister she would devote her whole life to his rescue.

Fundamentally, life was so arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when you thought about it you were terrified and your heart sank.

One of the accomplishments of this story is Chekhov’s representation of the way a lonely mind works.

And it’s sad—her mind returns to Hanov not because he’s a great guy or her soulmate but because (1) there’s nobody else around (that is, in her world) and (2) her loneliness is so extreme.

two people, not exactly ripe for love (who, if they were going to become involved, would have done so years ago), meet again.

Einstein once said: “No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.”

We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the trick, in the later pages, is to use that energy. Marya was created unhappy and lonely and has become more specifically unhappy and lonely with every passing page. That is the energy the story has made, and must use.

we’ve been rooting for Marya.

We want what she wants: for her not to be so lonely. The energy of the story is being stored in our hope that she’ll find some relief.

Chekhov, in these first five pages, built a door and indicated that he wanted us to go through it. Over that door is a sign: “Hanov Might Assuage Marya’s Loneliness.” Every time we’ve felt Marya’s loneliness, we’ve glanced hopefu...