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 difference in the two versions is that the latter version has more respect for you, the reader, built into it. The ideas “Jim couldn’t believe it” and “It was shocking” are contained in the action of Jim dropping his keys. I made the leap of faith that you’d assume Jim and Sara to be about the same age. In the process, I’ve saved myself (and you) thirty-seven words—about half the total length of the original bit.

A story is a frank, intimate conversation between equals. We keep reading because we continue to feel respected by the writer. We feel her, over there on the production end of the process, imagining that we are as intelligent and worldly and curious as she is.

The exciting part of all of this, to me, is that we always have a basis on which to proceed. The reader is out there, and she’s real. She’s interested in life and, by picking up our work, has given us the benefit of the doubt. All we have to do is engage her. To engage her, all we have to do is value her.

To our accruing list of universal laws of fiction (Be specific! Honor efficiency!), which, by the way, we should continually remind ourselves to distrust, we might add: Always be escalating. That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation.

It’s quite beautiful. The story has increased its meaning into its very last line, and even into the white space afterward. As we’ve said good endings do, this one creates an entire future world of different, plausible possibilities. Olenka could, eventually, become aware of her oppressive behavior and change her ways, thus learning about real love. Sasha could run away from home or kill her in her sleep. He could continue to submit to her (he has nowhere else to go, after all), getting angrier with every passing year, then spend the rest of his life avoiding anything that looks like smothering affection.

Chicago’s too big. Even if I could be granted magical powers and instantaneously grasp Chicago in its entirety (the smell of every gangway, the contents of every box in every attic, the emotional state of every resident), in the very next instant, time moves on, and that Chicago is no more. So, that’s no problem, and it’s even beautiful, but where it gets complicated is in that moment when someone proposes that I judge Chicago, so we can do something about it. When someone asks, “Well, what should we do about Chicago?”—Lord help us. A solution will arise, and it will likely be dunderheaded, because of how pathetically I’ve just underimagined good old Chicago. This is also how we imagine, and then judge, people.

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. And maybe “love” isn’t quite the right word. We don’t approve of her, necessarily, but we know her. We’ve known her in all kinds of weather, we might say.

The writer’s task is to place gas stations around the track so that the reader will keep reading and make it to the end of the story. What are those gas stations? Well, manifestations of writerly charm, basically. Anything that inclines the reader to keep going. Bursts of honesty, wit, powerful language, humor; a pithy description of a thing in the world that makes us really see it, a swath of dialogue that pulls us through it via its internal rhythm—every sentence is a potential little gas station.

What makes my reader keep reading? (What is it that propels a reader through a swath of my prose?) How would we know? Well, as we’ve said, 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. This is, on the face of it, a weird assumption. We all know, from book clubs or writing workshops, that people don’t read identically. And yet, in a movie theater, people sometimes do gasp all at once.

So we might understand revision as a way of practicing relationship; seeing what, when we do it, improves the relationship between ourselves and the reader. What makes it more intense, direct, and honest? What drives it into the ditch? The exciting thing is that we’re not doomed to ask these questions abstractly; we get to ask them locally, by running our meter over the phrases, sentences, sections, etc., that make up our story, while assuming some continuity of reaction between the reader and ourselves.

But to say that the story is nearly all facts doesn’t mean that Tolstoy is a minimalist. He has a gift for making sentences that, staying within factuality, convey a bounty of information and make a rich, detailed, almost overfull world. Consider the difference between “The maid carried the samovar to the table” and Tolstoy’s version: “After flicking with her apron the top of the samovar which was now boiling over, she carried it with an effort to the table, raised it, and set it down with a thud.” That apron flick, the woman carrying the samovar “with an effort,” the thud as she sets it down, the fact that she’s carrying it below the level of the table (she “raised it” before she could “set it down”) are all facts embroidered into the basic action “woman carries samovar to table.” Although they don’t make a more particular person (anyone could find a samovar heavy), they make a more particular action. The samovar is heavier and hotter than if she’d just “carried the samovar to the table,” and I see more of her than, by rights, I should: her red cheeks, the sweat-stained underarms of her blouse (and stepping away from the table, she blows a strand of sweat-plastered hair off her forehead).

As Kundera suggests, the writer opens himself up to that “suprapersonal wisdom” by technical means. That’s what “craft” is: a way to open ourselves up to the suprapersonal wisdom within us.

So, five shifts of vantage point in three paragraphs: (1) the objective truth (via our omniscient narrator), (2) Vasili’s public stance (via his speech to Nikita), (3) Vasili’s private stance (via his thoughts), (4) Nikita’s public stance (via his speech to Vasili), and (5) Nikita’s private stance (via his thoughts). 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.

I’ve worked with so many wildly talented young writers over the years that I feel qualified to say that 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. Making causality doesn’t seem sexy or particularly literary. It’s a workmanlike thing, to make A cause B, the stuff of vaudeville, of Hollywood. But it’s the hardest thing to learn. It doesn’t come naturally, not to most of us. But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.

This is important, because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning. “The queen died, and then the king died” (E. M. Forster’s famous formulation) describes two unrelated events occurring in sequence. It doesn’t mean anything. “The queen died, and the king died of grief ” puts those events into relation; we understand that one caused the other. The sequence, now infused with causality, means: “That king really loved his queen.”

Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.

Returning to the idea of a story as a process for the transfer of energy: in a good story, the writer makes energy in a beat, then transfers this energy cleanly to the next one (the energy is “conserved”). She does this by being aware of the nature of the energy she’s made. In a bad story (or an early draft), the writer doesn’t fully understand the nature of the energy she’s made, and ignores or misuses it, and it dissipates. 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. Expecting to get lost again, we enter the beat “We race a sled full of peasants.” What does the race cause to happen? Well, it fires Vasili up. Of course it does. This man who lives to win has won: “This encounter cheered and enlivened Vasili Andreevich.” His elation then causes the next beat (“he drove on more boldly without examining the way-marks, urging on the horse and trusting to him”), which, in turn, causes the next (essential, very nontrivial) beat: they get lost again.

“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.

A structural unit should, that is, be shaped like a miniature version of a story: rising action, building to a climax. (If a structural unit in a story we’re writing isn’t shaped like that, we might wonder if it wants to be; if it is shaped like that, we might want to make that shape sharper.)

The ghosts don’t change Scrooge into someone else; they remind him that he used to be someone else. He was once someone who felt other than the way he feels now, and those earlier people still exist in him. The ghosts, we might say, switch those former people back on.

Tolstoy is proposing something radical: moral transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy but by a redirection of his (same old) energy.

Like any self-respecting Russian artisan, Ivan Yakovlevich was a terrible drunkard.

I once heard the term “consensus reality” used to describe the set of things about the world that we all pretty much agree to be true. Water is blue, birds sing, and so on. And although water is not simply blue and not all birds sing, and to call what some birds do “singing” approximates and undersells what they actually do, agreeing on this consensus view is natural and useful.

The narration in “The Nose,” it turns out, is a particular Russian form of unreliable first-person narration called skaz. Imagine an actor telling a story in character. And that character is…not right. He is, per the literary critic Viktor Vinogradov, “sharply characterized by his substandard speech.” According to another critic, Robert Maguire, the Gogolian skaz narrator “has little formal education and little idea of how to develop an argument, let alone talk in an eloquent and persuasive way about his feelings, although he wishes to be considered informed and observant; he tends to ramble and digress and cannot distinguish the trivial from the important.” The writer and translator Val Vinokur adds (and this we’ve already begun to notice) that the resulting story is distorted by “improper narrative emphasis” and “misplaced assumption.” As Maguire puts it, the narrator’s “enthusiasms outrun common sense.”

So, this isn’t graceless writing; this is a great writer writing a graceless writer writing. (And not only that: it’s a great writer writing a graceless writer writing about a world in which a severed nose winds up in a loaf of bread.)

The skaz tradition (American variants of which we see in Twain, and John Kennedy Toole, and the comedian Sarah Cannon doing Minnie Pearl, and Sacha Baron Cohen doing Borat, and Rainn Wilson doing Dwight Schrute) challenges the notion that a disinterested, objective, third-person-omniscient narrator exists anywhere in the real world. It’s fun to pretend that such a person exists, and writers have made beautiful use of that notion (Chekhov, Turgenev, and Tolstoy among them), but, suggests Gogol, they have done so at a certain cost to the truth. Every story is narrated by someone, and since everyone has a viewpoint, every story is misnarrated (is narrated subjectively).

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.

If you’ve ever wondered, as I have, “Given how generally sweet people are, why is the world so fucked up?,” Gogol has an answer: we each have an energetic and unique skaz loop running in our heads, one we believe in fully, not as “merely my opinion” but “the way things actually are, for sure.”

The entire drama of life on earth is: Skaz-Headed Person #1 steps outside, where he encounters Skaz-Headed Person #2. Both, seeing themselves as the center of the universe, thinking highly of themselves, immediately slightly misunderstand everything. They try to communicate but aren’t any good at it. Hilarity ensues.

The fun here is spending a few moments in the land where language goes to admit what it really is: a system of communication with limitations, suitable for use in everyday life but wonky in its higher registers. Language can appear to say more than it has a right to say; we can form it into sentences that are not in relationship with what actually is or even what could be. If I type, “The desk thought to scratch its arm but, recalling that it was armless and that one of its legs was shorter than the others, blushed slightly,” the personification of the desk is one level of nonsense. But that’s not all: the desk, its blush receding, can return to the emblem it was ratifying, or the freedom-dimple it was juxtaposing, or the Canada it couldn’t help but upholstering with implacable small fate-muffins. Does any of that arise in your mind? It does in mine, sort of. How many fate-muffins are there? Just how “small” are they, and where have you located them? Near those juxtaposed freedom-dimples? The fate-muffins, though only partially made by the mind, can now be eaten, or thrown out the Empathy Port, or repurposed into cylindrical Newark documents, for Judy to loose-ascertain as she rips the flight-superior cat mandate. What does it mean that all of this now, sort of, is? It means that language can make worlds that don’t and could never exist. Reading Gogol, it may occur to us that this is what our mind is doing all the time: making, with words, a world that doesn’t, quite, exis...

Gogol is not making a ridiculous world; he’s showing us that we ourselves make a ridiculous world in every instant, by our thinking.

I had a colleague at Syracuse come in and talk to my class about the challenges of translation. It was wonderful and nearly sunk the whole course. When she was done, we realized what pale imitations of the originals we were reading. She talked us through a section of another Gogol short story masterpiece, “The Overcoat,” showing us all of the sound-related jokes we were missing. For example, early in that story, a mother needing to name her newborn works through a series of names and finally decides to call him after his father, so that he becomes Akakii Akakievich. In Russian, my colleague told us, the language in that section contains a series of feces-evoking sounds that culminate in the announcement of the baby’s name. The “ka-ka” sound having the same associations in Russian as in English, “Akakii Akakievich” sounds, to the Russian ear, especially after this shit-related buildup, something like, you know, “Shit O’Shitvich.” (Or “Crap P. Poopton.” Or “Dumpy Dumperton.” I could go on.) A Russian audience, she told us, would have been giggling throughout and would have exploded in laughter at the reveal of the name. That, to say the least, was not our reaction. To us, it just seemed like a slightly off-balance account of how babies were traditionally named, we assumed, back there in nineteenth-century Russia.

And we learn something about Kovalyov that rings true for all of us: he adapts quickly (too quickly) to insane new conditions. He has access to limited outrage. Sooner than we expect him to, he accepts his terrifying new state and goes on living, sad, peeved, but not rebellious; that would be impolite.

Personally, I’ve never met a person who was evil in the classic Hollywood mode, who throws down happily on the side of evil while cackling, the sworn enemy of all that is good because of some early disillusionment. Most of the evil I’ve seen in the world—most of the nastiness I’ve been on the receiving end of (and, for that matter, the nastiness I, myself, have inflicted on others)—was done by people who intended good, who thought they were doing good, by reasonable people, staying polite, making accommodations, laboring under slight misperceptions, who haven’t had the inclination or taken the time to think things through, who’ve been sheltered from or were blind to the negative consequences of the belief system of which they were part, bowing to expedience and/or “commonsense” notions that have come to them via their culture and that they have failed to interrogate. In other words, they’re like the people in Gogol. (I’m leaving aside here the big offenders, the monstrous egos, the grandiose-idea-possessors, those cut off from reality by too much wealth, fame, or success, the hyperarrogant, the power-hungry-from-birth, the socio- and/or psychopathic.)

if we want to understand evil (nastiness, oppression, neglect) we should recognize that the people who commit these sins don’t always cackle while committing them; often they smile, because they’re feeling so useful and virtuous.

In I Will Bear Witness, Victor Klemperer’s memoir about Holocaust Germany, the people who, because he’s a Jew, take away his office at the university, his right to shop at certain shops, his job, his home, do so politely, even apologetically. (It’s not their idea; it’s coming down from those boneheads in Berlin. But what’s a person to do?) They seem to like Klemperer, they aren’t anti-Semites, but they’re also not, in those moments, anti-anti-Semites. They’re well-mannered, abashed-but-willing parts of the Nazi machine.

Writing about Gregor von Rezzori’s classic Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Deborah Eisenberg pointed out the great harm that can be done by a handful of evil people, as long as they have the “passive assistance of many, many other people who glance out of the windows of their secure homes and see a cloudless sky.” She goes on to list the sins of such passive people: “carelessness, poor logic, casual snobbery—either social or intellectual—inattentiveness.”

“The Nose” suggests that rationality is frayed in every moment, even in the most normal of moments. But distracted by the temporary blessings of stability and bounty and sanity and health, we don’t notice. Gogol is sometimes referred to as an absurdist, his work meant to communicate that we live in a world without meaning. But to me, Gogol is a supreme realist, looking past the way things seem to how they really are.

Gogol hears, in everyday life, the first hints of the small miscommunications that, under duress, become catastrophic. It’s funny enough when Kovalyov, in the cathedral, can’t seem to get a straight answer from his own nose, but this same species of miscommunication, writ large, causes revolutions and genocides and political upheavals and family disasters that never get healed (divorces, estrangements, bitter grudges) and is, Gogol implies, at the heart of all human suffering—that is, at the heart of that constant nagging feeling of unrest and dissatisfaction that attends every human interaction.

My only goal is to keep the energy of the voice high, to keep the character sounding like himself, which means, I’ve found, that the voice has to keep expanding. Having grasped the approximate “rules” of the voice, the reader will get restless if subjected to a series of sentences that (merely) abide by those rules. So I have to keep finding new ways to make the person sound like himself. The best way to do this is to keep putting new events in front of him, events that are escalatory (new to him), so that he has to find new registers in his voice with which to respond. (If a character, talking along in a certain voice, has never seen a horse before, and I show him one, his voice has to expand, to accommodate the horse.)

So, one way to get a story out of “the plane of its original conception” is to try not to have an original conception. To do this, we need a method. For me (and, I like to imagine, for Gogol, when he was in skaz mode) that method is to “follow the voice.” But there are many methods. Each involves the writer proceeding in a way that honors or helps her pursue something about which she has strong opinions. It could be that she has strong opinions (is delighted by) patterns of recurring imagery. She might have strong opinions about the way the words look on the page. She might be a sound poet, guided by some obscure aural principle even she can’t articulate. She might be obsessed with the minutiae of structure. It can be anything. The idea is that with her attention focused on that thing that delights her, about which she has strong opinions, she’s less likely to know too well what she’s doing and indulge in that knowing-in-advance that, as we’ve said, has a tendency to deaden a work and turn it into a lecture or a one-sided performance and drive the reader away.

When Jon finally succeeds in having sex with Carolyn, a girl he’s crazy about, he describes it like this: “And though I had many times seen LI 34321 for Honey Grahams, where the stream of milk and the stream of honey enjoin to make that river of sweet-tasting goodness, I did not know that, upon making love, one person may become like the milk and the other like the honey, and soon they cannot even remember who started out the milk and who the honey, they just become one fluid, this like honey/milk combo.” What he means is “I really enjoyed that and I think I’m in love.”

Any of us who’s ever walked out of their house on a lovely summer morning knows that the truth of that moment is more than just “I walked out of my house one morning in June.” In that sentence, there’s something missing, which is the “I” walking out of the house. That morning has to fall on a certain mind for it to feel like any kind of real morning.

If I think of a story as something that has to convey a certain message, as a train that has to pull into a certain station at a certain time, and myself as the stressed-out engineer trying to make that happen—it’s too much. I freeze up and no fun is had. But if I imagine myself as a sort of genial carnival barker, trying to usher you into my magical black box, the workings of which even I don’t fully understand—that, I can do. “What’s going to happen to me in there?” you ask. “I really don’t know,” I say, “but I promise I’ve done my best to make it thrilling and non-trivial.” “Will there be any joy in there?” you ask. “Well, I hope so,” I say. “I mean, that’s what I was trying to feel as I made it, so…”

Everything is peaceful and quiet and only mute statistics protest: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition— And such a state of things is evidently necessary; obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence, and if there were not this silence, happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him—illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives at his ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind—and all is well.

At the time I was struggling with all sorts of young-writer questions: Was writing supposed to be smart or entertaining? Philosophical or performative? Enlightening or fun? Toby’s reading of Chekhov answered: Yes, of course, all of those. Suddenly, the potential for fiction as a vital force in the world felt unlimited. It could be everything: the most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication ever devised, a powerful form of entertainment, in the highest sense of that word. I suppose part of me had been wondering if the short story was going to be enough—enough for my grandiose ambitions, enough to accommodate my (youthful) ideas about art (that it should speak to everybody, to the best part of everybody, and make life better).

Let’s first just notice this as a structural module, a pair of before-and-after photographs. Before: The weather is great, the world is beautiful, they’re happy. After: The weather goes bad, the world goes ugly, they’re mad. The storm introduces into the story the notion that happiness exists in relation to material conditions, conditions beyond our control. It’s not always within our power to choose to be happy. Happiness is a gift, a conditional gift. We’d best accept it when it comes. Feeling happy can be a valuable tool, a necessary condition for doing good. (It’s hard to “Do good!” or even “Feel okay!” when you’re “cold and messy and uncomfortable through and through.”) And isn’t it nice (doesn’t it refresh us and increase the possibility that we might be able to do good in the world, wouldn’t we be foolish to refuse the empowering uplift) when we come in from the rain to find the beautiful Pelageya bringing us towels and soap and dressing gowns and slippers and tea?

The story is not there to tell us what to think about happiness. It is there to help us think about it. It is, we might say, a structure to help us think.

Another way of saying this: the story seems to want its reader to stay off autopilot, to stay alert to the possibility that it (and the reader) might be solidifying around some too-simple concept and in the process becoming false. So, it keeps qualifying itself until it qualifies itself right out of the business of judgment. We keep trying to get to a place of stability, to understand the story as being “for” or “against” something, so we can be for or against that thing too. But the story keeps insisting that it would rather not judge.