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

by George Saunders

So (our defense continues): Turgenev has made a panel of judges with different personalities and degrees of susceptibility and authority, which allows him to provide a precise picture of the two performances as they unfold in real time, via a precise hierarchy of response. That is why these side characters must be described: so that when they react, we’ll know what those reactions mean, which to credit and which to discount; through them, he creates a sort of ascending ladder of credibility.

Well, first, we note that it’s a miniature version of the story itself.

So the story also becomes about that—about exalted things being brought low.

Note that as the mind tries to perform these sorts of thematic reductions, it also notes the imperfection of the tracking; there’s a correspondence, but it’s not neat.

We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs—or doesn’t—in that instant.

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.

One thing that comes to mind is the notion of a binary: there are two singers, and the town is cleft in two.

The ravine, we might say, “unlocks” all of the binary references that are, we now see, seeded within the story.

I’m moved: by Yashka’s performance, which is beautiful though not particularly technically accomplished, and by Turgenev’s performance, an analogous performance, also beautiful though technically rickety.

I’m moved by this clumsy work of art that seems to want to make the case that art may be clumsy if only it moves us.

I’ve sometimes wondered if this effect was intentional: a sort of apologia from Turgenev for his own lack of craft.

This feels like begging the question.

“Yep, Mr. Nabokov is right as usual, even though he hasn’t even been born yet: my literary genius does fall short on the score of naturally discovering ways of telling the story which would equal the originality of my descriptive art. But what am I supposed to do?”

AND YET. This level of charity is not granted by slush readers in a submissions queue. So what makes this "great art" without assuming the conclusion?

I teach “The Singers” to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we’ll turn out to be.

(“The writer can choose what he writes about,” said Flannery O’Connor, “but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.”)

When we “find our voice,” what’s really happening is that we’re choosing a voice from among the many voices we’re able to “do,” and we’re choosing it because we’ve found that, of all the voices we contain, it’s the one, so far, that has proven itself to be the most energetic.

He did it, and then he let it stand. Which is a form (the ultimate form, for an artist) of “meaning to do it” (of taking responsibility). The blessing an artist gives the final product (which he gives by sending it out into the world) is his way of saying that he approves of everything within it, even parts of it that may, in that moment, be hidden from him.

My experience is that, late in the game, finishing a story, we’re in such deep relation to it that we’re making decisions we’re not even aware we’re making, for reasons too fine to articulate.

An established master can say this. A journeyman writer as yet can't.

In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference.

When I’m writing well, there’s almost no intellectual/analytical thinking going on.

No need for overarching decisions; the story has a will of its own, one it is trying to make me feel, and if I just trust in that, all will be well, and the story will surpass my initial vision of it.

That’s how I see revision: a chance for the writer’s intuition to assert itself over and over.

Who cares if the first draft is good? It doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be, so you can revise it. You don’t need an idea to start a story. You just need a sentence.

It was hot, the flies were persistent and annoying, and it was pleasant to think that it would soon be evening. Dark rainclouds were gathering in the east and there was a breath of moisture in the wind that occasionally blew from that direction.

Contrasts: hot/cool, day/evening, annoying/pleasant, now/later

Rain every day, every day, as if to spite me!

Kukin's perspective is opposite Olenka's

In the end his misfortunes moved her and she fell in love with him.

She was always enamored of someone and could not live otherwise.

artless

As opposed to the show's unappreciated "art."

He did not stay more than ten minutes and he said little, but Olenka fell in love with him, so deeply that she stayed awake all night burning as with fever, and in the morning she sent for the elderly lady. The match was soon arranged and then came the wedding.

Whatever ideas her husband had, she adopted as her own.

What good are these theaters?”

Olenka was a widow again.

She now repeated the veterinary’s words and held the same opinions about everything that he did.

Another woman would have been condemned for this, but of Olenka no one could think ill: everything about her was so unequivocal.

Obviously, her best years were over, were behind her, and now a new kind of life was beginning for her, an unfamiliar kind that did not bear thinking of.

Above all, and worst of all, she no longer had any opinions whatever. She saw objects about her and understood what was going on, but she could not form an opinion about anything and did not know what to talk about. And how terrible it is not to have any opinions!

How she loves him! Not one of her former attachments was so deep; never had her soul surrendered itself so unreservedly, so disinterestedly and with such joy as now when her maternal instinct was increasingly asserting itself.

To review: the fundamental unit of storytelling is a two-part move. First, the writer creates an expectation:

Second, the writer responds to (or “uses” or “exploits” or “honors”) that set of expectations.

One time-honored way of creating an expectation: enactment of a pattern.

A pattern is established and we expect it to recur. When it does recur, slightly altered, we take pleasure in this and infer meaning from the alteration.

What transforms an anecdote into a story is escalation. Or, we might say: when escalation is suddenly felt to be occurring, it is a sign that our anecdote is transforming into a story.

It’s an after-the-fact construction that won’t necessarily help us write a story, but it can help us analyze one that’s already up and running or diagnose one that isn’t.

The story is telling us, by skipping those days, that nothing meaningful happened during them and that it intends to set us down in front of the next thing it judges meaningful, i.e., relevant to its purpose.

Suddenly questions arise about the nature of love.

love just is, and you happened to be in the path of it.

When your lover dies or leaves you, there you are, still yourself, with your particular way of loving. And there is the world, still full of people to love.

Because we expect a lover, Chekhov supplies us with a possible candidate. Because, in the past, anyone would do, we expect that she will love (settle for) Trot. The story has made us expect this, because, so far, we have not seen Olenka consider and then reject someone—whomever Chekhov introduced, she loved. But Chekhov asks (is alert to the value of asking), “Okay, but what if she doesn’t settle for Trot?” This sort of narrative alertness is one of Chekhov’s prime gifts.

Always be escalating. That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation. A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is (still) escalating.

What is escalation, anyway? How does a story produce the illusion of escalation? (Or, as a writer might ask it: “How can I get this stupid thing to escalate?”) One answer: refuse to repeat beats. Once a story has moved forward, through some fundamental change in the character’s condition, we don’t get to enact that change again.

expansion in meaning.