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

by George Saunders

Einstein once said: “No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.”*

We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the trick, in the later pages, is to use that energy. Marya was created unhappy and lonely and has become more specifically unhappy and lonely with every passing page. That is the energy the story has made, and must use.

Just so in a story: we should always be pushing the new bead to the knot. If you know where a story is going, don’t hoard it. Make the story go there, now. But then what? What will you do next? You’ve surrendered your big reveal. Exactly. 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.”

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.”)

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.” We really feel Marya’s loneliness now.

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 “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.

Art is non-conceptual, non-linguistic knowledge.

described by Nabokov as “a neutral blend between a kind of Hindu Nirvana and the New Testament—Jesus without the church,”

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.

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.”

Although they don’t make a more particular person (anyone could find a samovar heavy), they make a more particular action.

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.”)

In a story entirely made up, it’s actually the main thing that keeps us reading. Since everything is invented, we read in a continual state of light skepticism. Every sentence is a little referendum on truth. “True or not?” we keep asking. If our answer is “Yes, seems true,” we get shot out of that little gas station and keep reading.

wrote Milan Kundera, but I would go so far as to say he is not even the spokesman for his own ideas. When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but 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. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

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?”). What else could it be?

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.

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. 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.

The “fundamental accuracy of observation” at work makes me trust the writer and feel engaged. This is, roughly speaking, the essence of “realism”: there’s a world out there and the writer makes his story resemble it. But as we’re seeing, realism isn’t all that real. The Chekhov, Turgenev, and Tolstoy stories we’ve read so far are compressed and exaggerated, with crazy levels of selection and omission and shaping going on in them. (Was there ever a woman as self-abnegating as Olenka? Ever a master as one-noted as Vasili? Do your trips home from town contain as much compressed drama as Marya’s?)

It could be truthful in the way it reacts to itself, in the way it responds to its premise, in the way it proceeds—by how things change within it, the contours of its internal logic, the relationships between its elements. With sufficient care, that wheelbarrow full of things could become an entire system of meaning, saying truthful things about our world, some of which might have been impossible to say via a more conventionally realistic approach. That system would mean, not by the plausibility or acuity of its initial premise, but by the way it reacts to that premise—by what it does with it. If a writer introduces a strange event, then lets the fictive world respond to that event, what we’re really learning about is what we might call the fictive world’s psychological physics.

The nose in the bread is the initial strange event. Now we wait to see how the fictive world (in this case, Ivan and his wife, Praskovya Osipovna) will react to it. That’s where the story’s meaning is going to be made—not in the fact of the nose in the bread but in what the couple does about it in response. This world, where a nose can appear in a loaf of bread, is not our world, but it is a world, and there are going to be rules in that world, and we wait to see what they are.

The narration in “The Nose,” it turns out, is a particular Russian form of unreliable first-person narration called skaz.

because he’s no good at it, he gets placed, by us, down there beside, or even below, them. He’s decidedly not Gogol but a creation of Gogol’s, another character in the story—a functionary who, through his prose style, unconsciously reveals that he’s not as important or smart as he thinks he is.

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.