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

by George Saunders

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.

They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.

For a story to ask these sorts of questions, we first have to finish it. It has to draw us in, compel us to keep going.

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.

Awareness

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.)

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.

it. 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.

That’s the million-dollar question: What makes a reader keep reading? Are there laws of fiction, as there are laws of physics? Do some things just work better than others? What forges the bond between reader and writer and what breaks it? Well, how would we know? One way would be to track our mind as it moves from line to line.

Flow is NB. The math of writing.

I’ll give you the story a page at a time. You read that page. Afterward, we’ll take stock of where we find ourselves. What has that page done to us? What do we know, having read the page, that we didn’t know before? How has our understanding of the story changed? What are we expecting to happen next? If we want to keep reading, why do we?

In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We’d better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning.

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.

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.

I’ll sometimes ask the workshop to come up with what I call the “Hollywood version” of the story—a pithy one- or two-sentence summary. It’s no good to start making suggestions about a story until we’ve agreed on what it’s trying to do. (If a complicated machine showed up in your yard, you wouldn’t start altering it and “improving” it until you had some idea of its intended function.) The “Hollywood version” is meant to answer the question “What story does this story appear to want to be?”

Where might the story go from here? Scan your mind, make a list. Which of your ideas feel too obvious? That is to say: Which, if Chekhov enacts them, will disappoint you by responding too slavishly to your expectations? (Hanov, on the next page, drops to one knee and proposes.) Which, too random, won’t be responding to your expectations at all? (A spaceship comes down and abducts Semyon.)

That self-interruption is a beautiful thing. It says: the mind can be two places at once. (Many trains are running simultaneously in there, consciousness aware of only one at a time.)

Often, in our doubt that we have a real story to tell, we hold something back, fearing that we don’t have anything else. And this can be a form of trickery. Surrendering that thing is a leap of faith that forces the story to attention, saying to it, in effect, “You have to do better than that, and now that I’ve denied you your trick, your first-order solution, I know that you will.”

Just imagine the many Maryas who have existed, all over the world, their best selves sacrificed to exigency, whose grace suffered under the pressure of being poorly suited to the toil required of them to make a living. (Maybe, like me, you’ve been one of them yourself.)

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 linked pair of writing dictums: “Don’t make things happen for no reason” and “Having made something happen, make it matter.”)

A short story is not just a series of events, one following after another. It’s not a lively narrative that briskly continues for a number of pages, then stops. It’s a narrative that compels us to finish reading it, yes, but that, in the midst of itself, somehow rises or expands and becomes . . . ​ enough. When I was a kid, Lipton had a TV commercial with the catchphrase “Is it soup yet?”

We’ve said that 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.” “Formulate them correctly” might be taken to mean: “make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.”

Have everybody silently read the first page, then ask, as we did above: (1) What do you know so far? (2) What are you curious about? and (3) Where do you think the story is headed? (What bowling pins are in the air?)

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.

But inside us is what Hemingway called a “built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” How do we know something is shit? We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it. And that part of the mind is the one that reading and writing refine into sharpness.

Good tweet

Of course he was. Bicycle Thieves is a great work of art and De Sica is an artist, and that’s what an artist does: takes responsibility.

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.

A/B method

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 “knowing” at such moments, though happening without language, is real. 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. This makes me ask, of the story: Any other binaries in there? Actually, the story is full of them: the doleful, sympathy-seeking rooks and crows vs. the relatively content, chirping, energetic sparrows; the town’s former pastoral glory (it had a common, a pond, a mansion) vs. its present state (the common is “scorched” and “dust-laden,” the pond “black and almost incandescent,” the mansion “grown over with nettles”); Yashka vs. the contractor; technique vs. emotion; Boy #1 vs. Boy #2; the opposition of the beautiful artistic moment Yashka produced vs. the ugly town in which he produced it; the comfortable gentleman who is our narrator vs. the lowly rustics he’s dropped in here to observe.

Brilliant Observation

We’ve been preparing a hall for a banquet all day, arranging furniture, hanging and rehanging decorations, working so fast and with such intensity that we wouldn’t be able to explain the basis on which we’ve been working. It’s late. The guests are coming soon. We’ve got to race home and get dressed. We pause in the doorway, taking in the whole room at once. We see nothing to change. By not darting back in to adjust even one more thing, we pronounce the room perfect (we approve it)—and that work of art is finished.

Analogy for completion over perfection

How, then, to proceed? Skipping over, for the moment, the first draft, assuming some existing text to work with, my method is this: I imagine a meter mounted in my forehead, with a P on this side (“Positive”) and an N on that side (“Negative”). I try to read what I’ve written the way a first-time reader might (“without hope and without despair”). Where’s the needle? If it drops into the N zone, admit it. And then, instantaneously, a fix might present itself—a cut, a rearrangement, an addition. There’s not an intellectual or analytical component to this; it’s more of an impulse, one that results in a feeling of “Ah, yes, that’s better.”

Early in a story, I’ll have a few discrete blocks (blobs? swaths?) of loose, sloppy text. As I revise, those blocks will start to . . . ​get better. Soon, a block will start working—I can get all the way through it without a needle drop. The word that sometimes comes to mind is “undeniable,” as in “All right, this bit is pretty much undeniable,” which means that I feel that any reasonable reader would like it and would still be with me at the end of it.

I start asking questions like “Does E cause F or does F cause E? Which feels more natural? Which makes more sense? Which produces a more satisfying click?” Then certain blocks start to adhere (E must precede F) and I know they won’t come unstuck. When something has achieved “undeniability,” it feels like something that has actually

I once heard the great Chicago writer Stuart Dybek say, “A story is always talking to you; you just have to learn to listen to it.” Revising like this is a way of listening to the story and of having faith in it: it wants to be its best self, and if you’re patient with it, in time, it will be. Essentially, the whole process is: intuition plus iteration.

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

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.

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. Because she’s paying attention to where we are (to where she’s put us), she knows when we are “expecting a change” or “feeling skeptical of this new development” or “getting tired of this episode.” (She also knows when she’s delighted us and that, in that state, we’re slightly more open to whatever she’ll do next.)

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.

Because every story is a pattern story. What I mean by this is that every story has patterns within it. (“The Darling” is a daringly purebred “pattern story.”)

The math of writing

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.

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. Artists know this.

According to Donald Barthelme, “The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.” Gerald Stern put it this way: “If you start out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking—then you wrote a poem about two dogs fucking.”

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.

In other words, 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.

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.

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 his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy writes, of the terminally ill Ivan: “The syllogism . . . ​‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,’ had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. . . . He was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa. . . . What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of?”

We don’t have to become an entirely new person to do better; our view just has to be readjusted, our natural energy turned in the right direction. We don’t have to swear off our powers or repent of who we are or what we like to do or are good at doing. Those are our horses; we just have to hitch them to the right, uh, sled.

I’d say there’s a general thesis in here somewhere: any story that suffers from what seems like a moral failing (that seems sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, pedantic, appropriative, derivative of another writer’s work, and so on) will be seen, with sufficient analytical snooping, to be suffering from a technical failing, and if that failing is addressed, it will (always) become a better story.