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

by George Saunders

And this is…scary. She’s modeling the state of every autocrat: happy with her version of things, uninterested in anyone else’s. Her trait, her need to be totally absorbed in whatever she loves, charming enough when applied to Kukin et al., now feels narcissistic and oppressive.

At the beginning of the story, we love Olenka because we perceive her to be good; in the middle sections we feel distant from her. In the end, we love her again, but in a deeper way: we love her even though we have, by way of Chekhov’s guidance, been urged to take her fully into account. We love her even though we see all of her. Maybe we didn’t know we could do that, love a person this deeply flawed, someone who is, arguably, doing harm (to a kid, no less), but now we know that we can, at least for a little while.

The sun that is her way of loving has shone on four different landscapes. That sun is neither good nor bad; it just is.

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.

One of the main symptoms of a bad conversation is this: one of the participants is on autopilot.

Our anxiety has made us crave a method, when what the situation demanded was some moment-to-moment responsiveness to what was actually happening (to the true energy of the conversation).

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.

According to Donald Barthelme, “The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, do...

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.)

So, why the index cards, on that date? In a word: underconfidence.

Our whole artistic journey might be understood as the process of convincing ourselves that we do, in fact, have enough, figuring out what that is, then refining it.

The writer spends her whole artistic life trying to figure out what gas stations she is uniquely capable of making. What does she have that will propel the reader around the track? What does she do in real life when seeking a conversational boost of speed? How does she entertain a person, assure him of her affection, show him that she’s listening? How does she seduce, persuade, console, distract? What ways has she found of being charming in the world, and what might the writing equivalent of these be?

What she arrives at is not a credo but a set of impulses she gets in the habit of honoring.

the only method by which we can know is to read what we’ve written on the assumption that our reader reads pretty much the way we do. What bores us will bore her. What gives us a little burst of pleasure will light her up too.

In a strange way, that’s the whole skill: to be able to lapse into a reasonable impersonation of yourself reading as if the prose in front of you (which you’ve already read a million times) was entirely new to you.

To refer back to the conversational model: some conversations feel evasive, ill-considered, agenda-laced, selfish; others feel intense, urgent, generous, truthful. What’s the difference? Well, I’d say it’s presence.

It happened

two thousand three hundred rubles of church money he had in his keeping,

his kindly and pleasant temper.

turbulent and quarrelsome.

a trick Nikita much appreciated.

horse-thief

The sight and smell of vodka, especially now when he was chilled through and tired out, much disturbed Nikita’s mind.

He too was offered vodka. He went through a moment of painful hesitation and nearly took up the glass and emptied the clear fragrant liquid down his throat, but he glanced at Vasili Andreevich, remembered his oath and the boots that he had sold for drink, recalled the cooper, remembered his son for whom he had promised to buy a horse by spring, sighed, and declined it.

Nikita did not wish to go at all, but he had been accustomed not to have his own way and to serve others for so long that there was no one to hinder the departing travelers.

Again he began counting his gains and the debts due to him, again he began bragging to himself and feeling pleased with himself and his position, but all this was continually disturbed by a stealthily approaching fear and by the unpleasant regret that he had not remained in Grishkino.

“No fear, we shan’t lose him this time!” he said to himself, referring to his getting the peasant warm with the same boastfulness with which he spoke of his buying and selling.

So, it’s interesting to note that his prose consists almost entirely of facts. The language isn’t particularly elevated or poetic or overtly philosophical. It’s mostly just descriptions of people doing things.

When Tolstoy does offer a subjective opinion on a character, these are rendered as objectively and precisely as Nikita’s crossing of the yard or his preparation of the horse. And since they appear, as they do, in a matrix of facts, we’re inclined to accept them.

A fact draws us in. This seems to be one of those “laws of fiction” we’ve been seeking. “The car was dented and red” makes a car appear in the mind. Even more so if the fact is an action: “The dented red car slowly left the parking lot.” Notice how little we doubt that statement, the spontaneous, involuntary buy-in that makes us forget that there is no car and no parking lot.

So, speaking of little gas stations, here’s one of Tolstoy’s: saying something that strikes the reader as true. (Nabokov called this Tolstoy’s “fundamental accuracy of perception.”)

And we like it when a story agrees with our sense of how the world works. It gives us a thrill, and this thrill-at-truth keeps us reading. In a story entirely made up, it’s actually the main thing that keeps us reading.

Tolstoy sought the truth in two ways: as a fiction writer and as a moral preacher.

I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

That’s what “craft” is: a way to open ourselves up to the suprapersonal wisdom within us.

Processing this number of shifts normally requires some extra effort on the part of the reader—a sort of fee gets charged in readerly attention. But here we barely notice, charmed by Tolstoy’s “fundamental accuracy of perception.” When we go into a character’s mind, what we find there feels familiar and true. We’ve had versions of those same thoughts ourselves, and so we accept them, and the result is a view of the situation that feels holographic and godlike.

five perspectives in four paragraphs.

It’s what Tolstoy does once he’s in a mind: he makes a direct, factual report of what he finds there. No judgment, no poetry. Just flat observation—which is, of course, a form of self-observation (the writer asking, “What would I be thinking if I were that person, in that situation?”).

He’s just ascribing to them thoughts he’s had in analogous situations, thoughts not particularly unique, psychologically, to them, produced more by their role in the situation (initiator of the trip; host; young man who loves literature; servant who is cold) than by some secret knowledge Tolstoy has of those particular, individuated minds (which, after all, never existed).

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. That he has an inner Vasili, an inner aged host, an inner Petrushka, an inner Nikita. This confidence serves as a gateway to (what reads as) saintly compassion.

we like to watch one of our fellow human beings doing a passable version of God, telling us in the process how God sees us, if God exists, and what God thinks of the way we behave.

(Every time we feel we are found again, per the above pattern, we anticipate that we will soon be lost again. And then we are. And that’s satisfying.)

holiday

This “lesser writer’s” version reads like a sequence of unrelated events. Nothing causes anything else. Some things…occur. But we don’t know why. The result of the sequence (“they get lost”) feels out of relation with what came before.

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.

causation is what creates the appearance of meaning.

The preferred, most efficient, highest-order form of energy transfer (the premier way for a scene to advance the story in a non-trivial way) is for a beat to cause the next beat, especially if that next beat is felt as essential, i.e., as an escalation: a meaningful alteration in the terms of the story.

Earlier, we defined escalation as that which results when we refuse to repeat beats. Each time we pass that clothesline, the laundry has undergone some small change in its condition.

“Always be escalating,” then, can be understood as “Be alert, always, to the possibilities you have created for variation.” If an element recurs, the second appearance is an opportunity for variation and, potentially, escalation.

Vasili’s values are, roughly speaking, those of the son, but he speaks up in defense of the father. He seems to want to have it both ways: to be regarded as an old-fashioned, traditional, all-powerful master but also to be allowed to indulge in his free-swinging, anti-traditional, capitalist ventures.