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

by George Saunders

A few years back, after class (chalk dust hovering in the autumnal air, old-fashioned radiator clanking in the corner, marching band practicing somewhere in the distance, let’s say), I had the realization that some of the best moments of my life, the moments during which I’ve really felt myself offering something of value to the world, have been spent teaching that Russian class.

this is a resistance literature, written by progressive reformers in a repressive culture, under constant threat of censorship, in a time when a writer’s politics could lead to exile, imprisonment, and execution. 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’re about to spend some time in a realm where it is assumed that, as the great (twentieth-century) Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, “no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”

The basic drill I’m proposing here is: read the story, then turn your mind to the experience you’ve just had. Was there a place you found particularly moving? Something you resisted or that confused you? A moment when you found yourself tearing up, getting annoyed, thinking anew? Any lingering questions about the story? Any answer is acceptable. If you (my good-hearted trouper of a reader) felt it, it’s valid. If it confounded you, that’s worth mentioning. If you were bored or pissed off: valuable information.

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.)

Over the last ten years I’ve had a chance to give readings and talks all over the world and meet thousands of dedicated readers. Their passion for literature (evident in their questions from the floor, our talks at the signing table, the conversations I’ve had with book clubs) has convinced me that there’s a vast underground network for goodness at work in the world—a web of people who’ve put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people and makes their lives more interesting.

In Buddhism, it’s said that a teaching is like “a finger pointing at the moon.” 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.

Years ago, on the phone with Bill Buford, then fiction editor of The New Yorker, enduring a series of painful edits, feeling a little insecure, I went fishing for a compliment: “But what do you like about the story?” I whined. There was a long pause at the other end. And Bill said this: “Well, I read a line. And I like it…enough to read the next.” And that was it: his entire short story aesthetic and presumably that of the magazine. And it’s perfect. A 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.

We could understand a story as simply a series of such expectation/resolution moments.

We might say that what’s happened over the course of this page is that the path the story is on has narrowed. The possibilities were infinite before you read it (it could have been about anything) but now it has become, slightly, “about” something.

What do you care about in this story, so far? It’s Marya. Now: What is the flavor of that caring? How, and where, were you made to care about her?

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. The writer asks, “Which particular person is this, anyway?”

As a particular person gets made, the potential for what we call “plot” increases. (Although that’s a word I don’t like much—let’s replace it with “meaningful action.”)

As a particular person gets made, the potential for meaningful action increases. If a story begins, “Once there was a boy who was afraid of water,” we expect that a pond, river, ocean, waterfall, bathtub, or tsunami will soon appear. If a character says, “I have never once in my life been afraid,” we might not mind it so much if a lion walks in.

One of the features of this page-at-a-time exercise: the better the story, the more curious the reader is to find out what’s going to happen and the more annoying the exercise is.

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.

This is the big event of the page, and notice this: having made Marya on its first page, the story didn’t stay static for long at all.

exaggerated—a place where something new always has to be happening, something relevant to that which has already happened.

Why does a story even need these types of descriptions? Why did Chekhov decide to pull us out of the central action and describe the world outside the cart? 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.

So, as we enter this description, we’re asking, somewhere in the back of our reading mind: How is this description of a road going to turn out to be essential, i.e., not wasteful?

We like hearing our world described. And we like hearing it described specifically. (“Two men in green sweaters were playing catch beside a wrecked car” is better than “I drove through this area that was sort of bland and didn’t notice much.”) A specific description, like a prop in a play, helps us believe more fully in that which is entirely invented. It’s sort of a cheap, or at least easy, authorial trick.

If I am trying to put you in a certain (invented) house, I might invoke “a large white cat, stretching itself out to what seemed like twice its normal length” on a couch in that house. If you see the cat, the house becomes real.

A story is an organic whole, and when we say a story is good, we’re saying that it responds alertly to itself.

Marya’s dilemma is still in effect. She’s still lonely and bored. By removing the first-order solution (Hanov), Chekhov has made his story more ambitious.

Chekhov is averse to making pure saints or pure sinners. We saw this with Hanov (rich, handsome bumbler and drunk) and we see it now with Marya (struggling noble schoolteacher who has constructed her own cage through joyless complicity in her situation).

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.

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. Imagine these things on a table: a gun, a grenade, a hatchet, a ceramic statue of a duck. If the duck is at the center of the table, surrounded closely by the weapons, we feel: that duck is in trouble. If the duck, the gun, and the grenade have the hatchet pinned down in one corner, we may feel the duck to be leading the modern weaponry (the gun, the grenade) against the (old-fashioned) hatchet. If the three weapons are each hanging precipitously over one edge of the table and the duck is facing them, we might understand the duck to be a radical pacifist who’s finally had enough. 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.”)

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.

a story is a system for the transfer of energy. Energy made in the early pages gets transferred along through the story, passed from section to section, like a bucket of water headed for a fire, and the hope is that not a drop gets lost.

Chekhov once said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.”

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.

In class, watching this sequence over and over, we start noticing things we missed the first time through. For example: When the father and the son are walking sadly along the river, the boy walks on one side of a tree, the father on the other. But as they approach the next tree, the boy swerves over, and father and son pass on the same side of it. (We read this as “possible reconciliation pending?”)

building background details supporting mood and theme.

Every aspect of every frame has been carefully considered and lovingly used, and this is part of the reason the sequence moved them the first time they watched it. That is: De Sica was taking responsibility for every single thing in his film.

He is an excellent judge of what a true Russian considers to be either interesting or important: of horses and cattle, timber, bricks, crockery, textiles, leather, singing, and dancing.

When there are no customers he can usually be seen sitting like a sack on the ground in front of his cottage, his thin legs tucked up under him, exchanging pleasantries with every passer-by. He has seen much in his life, outlived more than a dozen of the small landowners who used to drop in for a glass of vodka; he knows everything that happens for a hundred miles round but never breathes a word about it and does not ever let on that he knows what even the most astute district police officer does not so much as suspect. All he does is keep mum, chuckle to himself quietly, and busy himself with the glasses.

Nikolai Ivanych is married and has children. His wife, a brisk, sharp-nosed, and quick-eyed tradeswoman, has also put on a good deal of weight lately, just like her husband. He defers to her judgment in everything, and she keeps a tight hand on the purse-strings. Rowdy drunkards are afraid of her; she dislikes them, for there is little profit and a lot of noise from them; she would much rather deal with the silent and gloomy ones. Nikolai Ivanych’s children are still small; the first all died, and those who survived resemble their parents: it makes one feel good to look at the clever little faces of these healthy children.

The sun was blazing away in the sky with a kind of fury; it was scorchingly, piteously hot; the air was saturated with choking dust. The rooks and crows, their feathers gleaming in the sunlight, gazed dolefully at the passers-by, their beaks gaping, as though begging them for sympathy;

As we read a story (let’s imagine) we’re dragging along a cart labeled “Things I Couldn’t Help Noticing” (TICHN).

If you closely observe your reading mind, you’ll find that as you encounter an excess in a story (some non-normative aspect), you enter into a transactional relationship with the writer. When Kafka writes, “Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams…changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin,” you don’t say, “No, he didn’t, Franz,” and throw the book across the room. You add “impossible incident: man just turned into bug” to your TICHN cart, then enter a period of “waiting to see.” What’s Kafka going to do with that? 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. What we are saying, essentially, is: “Well, Franz, that bug thing is excessive but I’m going to allow it. Proceed. What are you going to do with that thing I couldn’t help noticing? I hope you’re going to make it pay off.”

The goal is not to keep the TICHN cart empty and thus write a “perfectly normal” story. A story that approaches its ending with nothing in its TICHN cart is going to have a hard time ending spectacularly. A good story is one that, having created a pattern of excesses, notices those excesses and converts them into virtues.

Here’s a place to ask a simple question: How do we know a story is good? I once heard the writer and comic artist Lynda Barry cite a neurological study that said that when we get to the end of a story, a short lyric poem, or a joke, the brain performs an instantaneous retro-assessment for efficiency. If, as I tell the one about the duck who walks into a bar, I interject a fifteen-minute digression about the duck’s childhood that turns out to have nothing to do with the punch line, your brain notes this as an inefficiency and, at the end, you laugh less. 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.

So, 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?”)

Our evolving, rather hard-ass model of a story says that every part of it should be there for a reason. The merely incidental (“this really happened” or “this was pretty cool” or “this got into the story and I couldn’t quite take it out again”) won’t cut it. Every part of the story should be able to withstand this level of scrutiny, a scrutiny that, we should note, is to be administered generously, lest our story become too neat and mathematical.

Imagine a painting of a tree: a good, tall, healthy oak, standing proud on top of a hill. Now add a second oak to the painting, but…sickly: gnarled, bent, with bare branches. As you look at that painting, your mind will understand it to be “about,” let’s say: vitality vs. weakness. Or: life vs. death. Or: sickness vs. health. It’s a realistic painting of two trees, yes, but there is also a metaphorical meaning implied, by the elements contained in it. We “compare” the two trees (or “compare and contrast” them), at first, anyway, without thought or analysis. We just see them. The two trees stand there in our minds, juxtaposed, meaning by inference. We experience, rather than articulate, the result. The juxtaposition results in a feeling: instantaneous, spontaneous, complex, multitonal, irreducible. And we’re really good at this. Say the painting has in it that healthy tree and a second one that, on first glance, looks identical. The mind immediately starts scanning for differences. Say there’s a bird in one of the trees, barely noticeable. Now we read the bird-containing tree as “life-welcoming,” the other as “barren.” 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. 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. But the “k...

we feel the story to be saying something about technical proficiency vs. emotional power, and coming down in favor of the latter. It is saying that the highest aspiration of art is to move the audience and that if the audience is moved, technical deficiencies are immediately forgiven.

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

The beauty of this method is that it doesn’t really matter what you start with or how the initial idea gets generated. What makes you you, as a writer, is what you do to any old text, by way of this iterative method. This method overturns the tyranny of the first draft. 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. Where does that sentence come from? Wherever. It doesn’t have to be anything special. It will become something special, over time, as you keep reacting to it. Reacting to that sentence, then changing it, hoping to divest it of some of its ordinariness or sloth, is…writing. That’s all writing is or needs to be. We’ll find our voice and ethos and distinguish ourselves from all the other writers in the world without needing to make any big overarching decisions, just by the thousands of small ones we make as we revise.

When I write, “Bob was an asshole” and then, feeling this sentence to be somewhat lacking in specificity, revise it to read, “Bob snapped impatiently at the barista,” then ask myself, seeking yet more specificity, why Bob might have done that, and revise to “Bob snapped impatiently at the young barista, who reminded him of his dead wife,” then pause to add “who he missed so much, especially now, at Christmas”—in the process, Bob has gone from “pure asshole” to “grieving widower, so overcome with grief that he has behaved ungraciously to a young person to whom, normally, he would have been nice.” Bob started out a cartoon on which I could heap some scorn, so that my reader and I could be united in looking down at Bob, but now he’s closer to “us, in a different life.”

What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already done. There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly we’re adjusting what’s already there. The writer revises, the painter touches up, the director edits, the musician overdubs.