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

by George Saunders

This is an important storytelling move we might call “ritual banality avoidance.” If we deny ourselves the crappo version of our story, a better version will (we aspirationally assume) present itself. To refuse to do the crappo thing is to strike a de facto blow for quality. (If nothing else, at least we haven’t done that.)

Often, in our doubt that we have a real story to tell, we hold something back, fearing that we don’t have anything else. And this can be a form of trickery. Surrendering that thing is a leap of faith that forces the story to attention, saying to it, in effect, “You have to do better than that, and now that I’ve denied you your trick, your first-order solution, I know that you will.”

It is a hard, humdrum existence, and only stolid cart horses like Marya Vasilyevna can bear it for a long time; lively, alert, impressionable people who talk about their calling and about serving the ideal are soon weary of it and give up the work.

Marya Vasilyevna drank her tea with pleasure,

Our working assumption is that nothing exists in a story by chance or merely to serve some documentary function. Every element should be a little poem, freighted with subtle meaning that is in connection with the story’s purpose.

The movie producer and all-around mensch Stuart Cornfeld once told me that in a good screenplay, every structural unit needs to do two things: (1) be entertaining in its own right and (2) advance the story in a non-trivial way.

In workshop, we talk a lot about “raising the stakes” of a story. Semyon just did this. There was a bare wire labeled “Marya” and a bare wire labeled “Peasants in a Teahouse” and electricity was coursing through each but they were laid out parallel to one another, several feet apart. Semyon, by reacting to the swearing, just crossed them. Marya and those gathered peasants had nothing to do with one another, were not in relation. Now they do, and are.

Having seen the difference between Marya’s internally narrated version of herself and her actual position in the world, I find myself feeling more tenderness for her, and more protective of her. This more complicated, endangered Marya is the one I take with me to the end of the story.

Notice, too, that we’re reading Semyon and Marya against one another. They’re like two dolls in a box, fallen into different postures. He’s interested in the world; she’s not. He speculates; she doesn’t. They both distrust the system (although for different reasons). He’s a peasant; she nearly is. And so on.

Without even meaning to, we’re continually scanning the three for similarities and differences.

A story is not like real life; it’s like a table with just a few things on it. The “meaning” of the table is made by the choice of things and their relation to one another.

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.”)

Marya has no say in the matter, and is going to have to just sit there bearing the brunt of whatever happens, even though she’s the main character and the smartest, most self-aware person in the story.

In workshop we sometimes say that what makes a piece of writing a story is that something happens within it that changes the character forever.

So, we tell a certain story, starting at one time and ending at another, in order to frame that moment of change.

On the platform of one of the first-class carriages a lady was standing, and Marya Vasilyevna glanced at her as she flashed by. Her mother! What a resemblance! Her mother had had just such luxuriant hair, just such a forehead and that way of holding her head. And with amazing distinctness, for the first time in those thirteen years, she imagined vividly her mother, her father, her brother, their apartment in Moscow, the aquarium with the little fishes, everything down to the smallest detail; she suddenly heard the piano playing, her father’s voice; she felt as then, young, good-looking, well-dressed, in a bright warm room among her own people. A feeling of joy and happiness suddenly overwhelmed her, she pressed her hands to her temples in ecstasy, and called softly, imploringly: “Mama!”

There is that strange and somehow perfect detail of the guard taking off his cap to her. (“Welcome back, madam, to your loneliness.”)

If we feel we are nothing and have always been nothing, that’s one story. But if we feel that we are nothing and then, in one miraculous instant, remember that, once, we were something—is that a happier story or a sadder one?

We might think of a story this way: the reader is sitting in the sidecar of a motorcycle the writer is driving. In a well-told story, reader and writer are so close together that they’re one unit. My job as the writer is to keep the distance between motorcycle and sidecar small, so that when I go right, you go right. When I, at the end of the story, take the motorcycle off the cliff, you have no choice but to follow.

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.”

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.

Yawning like a chasm, this ravine winds its torn and eroded way across the very middle of the village street, dividing the poor little village in two, worse than any river (for a river could at least be bridged).

they go there readily and often.

shining like a guiding star to many a peasant who happens to be driving that way.

Cozy Corner.

it is much better attended than all similar establishments in the neighborhood, and the reason for that is the publican Nikolai Ivanych.

sly, genial

watchful, eye

Like the window of the pub itself

he knows what even the most astute district police officer does not so much as suspect.

He was simply trying to nip in the bud anything that might disturb his peace of mind.

I

Ah, a narrator-protagonist!

the peasants drink a sort of liquid filth from the pond—but who would give the name of water to that horrible hogwash?

There are all sorts of excellent fellows waiting for you: Yashka the Turk, the Wild Gentleman, and the contractor from Zhizdra.

sportsmen

In spite of my efforts to unearth as many details of his past as possible,

What we’re adding to our TICHN cart are, let’s say, “non-normative” aspects of the story—aspects that seem to be calling attention to themselves through some sort of presentational excess.

You add “impossible incident: man just turned into bug” to your TICHN cart, then enter a period of “waiting to see.”

Your reading state has been affected. You are, let’s say, “beginning to resist.” You have “registered a mild objection.”

But we readers will tolerate all kinds of reading states, even negative-seeming ones: periods of boredom, of perplexity, periods during which we are really hating Character X and wondering if the writer knows just how much.

Writers will note the relative charity of "reader" as compared to "editor."

But if it doesn’t drop fatally, and if, later, we see that this was all part of the plan—if what seemed a failure of craft turns out to be integral to the story’s meaning (that is, it seems that he “meant to do that”)—then all is forgiven and we might even understand the profitable exploitation of that apparent excess as a form of virtuosity.

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

the brain performs an instantaneous retro-assessment for efficiency.

On what basis does the mind assess for efficiency? It assumes that everything in the joke is there to serve the punch line, to make it more powerful.

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?”)

If I say: “Two guys got in a fight in a bar across from my house and, guess what? One of them won!”—that’s not meaningful. What would make it meaningful is knowing who those guys were.

The story has become a referendum on…something. We’re not sure what yet. But we know that, on one side of the ballot, is Technical Prowess.

The germ of a story, with him, was never an affair of plot—that was the last thing he thought of: it was the representation of certain persons.

He had their dossier, as the French say….With this material in his hand he was able to proceed; the story lay all in the question, What shall I make them do?…But,

Well, we need characters, to paraphrase David Mamet on actors, so that they can fulfill the purpose required of them by the story.