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.

We too were the malformed detritus of capitalism,

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.

The moon (enlightenment) is the essential thing and the pointing finger is trying to direct us to it, but it’s important not to confuse finger with moon.

Just like carere

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

This should tell us something about the pace of a story versus the pace of real life: 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.

Yes: it’s a harsh form, the short story. Harsh as a joke, a song, a note from the gallows.

And who had need of his globes here?

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.

“And you can’t understand,” she thought, “why God gives good looks, friendliness, charming, melancholy eyes to weak, unhappy, useless people—why they are so attractive.”

A work of art moves us by being honest and that honesty is apparent in its language and its form and in its resistance to concealment.

Marya Vasilyevna was sitting down, having tea, while at the next table some peasants were drinking vodka and beer, sweaty with the tea they had had and the bad air.

“Well, hold on; isn’t one quality of a harsh system that it deforms the people within it and makes them complicit in their own destruction?”

Every element should be a little poem, freighted with subtle meaning that is in connection with the story’s purpose.

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.

What has happened to her is profound, and has nothing to do with Hanov: something long-dead just flickered back alive in her.

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.

He was clumsily built—“rough-hewn,” as we say—but he exuded rude health, and, strangely enough, his bearlike figure was not without a certain peculiar kind of grace, which was perhaps the result of his absolute, calm confidence in his own strength.

Booby emptied his glass with eager haste and, as is the custom with confirmed drunkards, grunted and looked sad and preoccupied.

He sang, and every note recalled something that was very near and dear to us all, something that was immensely vast, just as though the familiar steppe opened up before you, stretching away into boundless distance.

I did not want to stay—I was afraid to spoil my impression.

The sunset glow had died away long ago and its last trace could be just distinguished as a pale shaft of light low on the horizon; but through the coolness of the night one could still feel the warmth in the air which had been so glowing-hot only a short while before, and the breast still yearned for a cool breeze.

A story with a problem is like a person with a problem: interesting.

The story is too lovely and unruly to be reduced in this way: a wild animal that refuses to get into the box we’ve made, whose opening, shaped too neatly “like” that animal, discounts the fact that the animal is always in motion.

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.

This writer may turn out to bear little resemblance to the writer we dreamed of being. She is born, it turns out, for better or worse, out of that which we really are: the tendencies we’ve been trying, all these years, in our writing and maybe even in our lives, to suppress or deny or correct, the parts of ourselves about which we might even feel a little ashamed.

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

All we have to do is engage her. To engage her, all we have to do is value her.

it’s a radically shaped, even somewhat cartoonish (when held up against the tedious real world) little machine that thrills us with the extremity of its decisiveness.

When we try to read the story that way, it doesn’t entirely refuse us.)

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

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.

This is important, because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning.

A well-written bit of prose is like a beautifully hand-painted kite, lying there on the grass. It’s nice. We admire it. Causality is the wind that then comes along and lifts it up. The kite is then a beautiful thing made even more beautiful by the fact that it’s doing what it was made to do.

In a sense, Vasili is killed by his fealty to the idea that, to preserve and broadcast his power, a “master” must be firm, strong, and unpersuadable.

Since all narration is misnarration, Gogol says, let us misnarrate joyfully.

There is no world save the one we make with our minds, and the mind’s predisposition determines the type of world we see.

The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence.

So, it’s a poem: a machine for conveying bonus meaning.

Sometimes life feels a certain way that we call “absurd”: nothing matters, all efforts are for naught, everything seems random and perverse, positive intention is perpetually thwarted. This stance communicates darkness and edginess, which can feel like wisdom.

We might imagine a story as a room-sized black box. The writer’s goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another. What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial.

It may be possible that, when all is said and done, that’s what we’re really looking for—in a sentence, in a story, in a book: joy (overflow, ecstasy, intensity). An acknowledgment, in the prose, that all of this is too big to be spoken of, but also that death begins the moment we give up on trying to speak of it.

To retire from the city, from the struggle, from the hubbub, to go off and hide on one’s own farm—that’s not life, it is selfishness, sloth, it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without works. Man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but the whole globe, all of Nature, where unhindered he can display all the capacities and peculiarities of his free spirit.

it’s not the flavor of your taste that matters; it’s the intensity with which you apply your taste that will cause the resulting work of art to feel highly organized.