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 physics of the form (“How does this thing work, anyway?”),

I sometimes joke (and yet not) that we’re reading to see what we can steal.

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.

If a story drew us in, kept us reading, made us feel respected, how did it do that?

learn to write emotionally moving stories that a reader feels compelled to finish.

The basic drill I’m proposing here is: read the story, then turn your mind to the experience you’ve just had.

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.) Once you’ve read each story, I’ll provide my thoughts in an essay,

here—be as technical, nerdy, and frank as needed, as we try to explore the way the creative process really works.

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?

We read a bit of text and a set of expectations arises. “A man stood

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 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? Before we start, let’s note, rather obviously, that, at this moment, as regards “In the Cart,” your mind is a perfect blank.

He has, already, with this first page, caused certain expectations and questions to arise. You’ll feel the rest of the story to be meaningful and coherent to the extent that it responds to these

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.

The possibilities were infinite before you read it (it could have been about anything) but now it has become, slightly, “about” something. What is it about, for you, so far? What a story is “about” is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.

What is the flavor of that caring? How, and where, were you made to care about her?

in service of increased specification.

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

When there was nothing in the story (before you started reading it) there was nothing that wanted to happen.

we feel the story preparing itself to say something like “Well, we’ll see about that.”

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. (See? Structure’s easy.

our minds quietly file it under “Semyon, Stuff About,” and “Marya, Stuff About.” Our expectation, given the extreme frugality of the form, is that the stuff in those files will prove meaningful later.

did your mind “receive” Hanov into the story?

What did you take Hanov for? What did you think he was here in the story to do?

Don’t we automatically understand that this new person has appeared to alter or complicate or deepen the first man’s hatred of his job? (Otherwise, what’s he doing here? Get rid of him and find us someone who will alter, complicate, or deepen things. It’s a story, after all, not a webcam.) Having understood Marya

we’re already waiting for some altering presence to arrive.

didn’t stay static for long at all. (We didn’t get a second page merely explicating her boredom.) 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.

The “Hollywood version” is meant to answer the question “What story does this story appear to want to be?” This is done in the way artillery fire is directed, at least in my imagination: an initial shot, followed by a series of adjustments for precision.

what makes a piece of writing a story is that something happens within it that changes the character forever.

How do we know a story is good?

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. We might

specificity makes character.

So, 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. And this

I’m moved by this clumsy work of art that seems to want to make the case that art may be clumsy if only it moves us.

To write a story that works, that moves the reader, is difficult, and most of us can’t do it. Even among those who have done it, it mostly can’t be done. And it can’t be done from a position of total control, of flawless mastery, of simply having an intention and then knowingly executing it. There’s intuition involved, and stretching—trying things that are at the limit of our abilities, that may cause mistakes. Like Yashka, the writer has to risk a cracking voice and surrender to his actual power, his doubts notwithstanding. Let’s say there was a wrist-mounted meter that could measure energy output during dancing

The writer has to write in whatever way produces the necessary energy.

I teach “The Singers” to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we’ll turn out to be.

We have to become whatever writer is capable of producing the necessary level of energy.

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

This writer may turn out to bear little resemblance to the writer...

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 lit...

When we “find our voice,” what’s really happening is that we’re choosing a voice from among the many voices we’re able to “do,” and we’re choosing it because we’ve found that, of all the voices we contain, it’s the on...

I knew what to do about it, immediately and instinctually, in the form of an impulse (“Oh, that might be cool”), whereas before I’d been rationally deciding, in stiff obeisance to what I thought a story should, or must, do.

When I finished the story, I could see that it was the best thing I’d ever written. There was some essential “me-ness” in it—for better or worse, no one else could have written it.

This is a big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve.

It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too—it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.

metaphor—what will make that shit-hill grow is our commitment to it, the extent to which we say, “Well, yes, it is a shit-hill, but it’s my shit-hill, so let me assume that if I continue to work in this mode that is mine, this hill will eventually stop being made of shit, and will grow, and from it, I will eventually be able to see (and encompass in my work) the whole world.”

intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same.