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

by George Saunders

He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he’d had the time or inclination to articulate them. In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference.

But all of this, at every step, is more felt than decided. When I’m writing well, there’s almost no intellectual/analytical thinking

No need for overarching decisions; the story has a will of its own, one it is trying to make me feel, and if I just trust in that, all will be well, and the story will surpass my initial vision of it.

“A story is always talking to you; you just have to learn to listen to it.”

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.

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.

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.

The final product was complex, and I think you could say it had “meaning,” but it wasn’t a meaning we’d intentionally put there; no way could we have planned out something so strange or anticipated the exact effect it would have on us later when, having forgotten we’d made it, we walked past it.

the thing we would have planned would have been less.

The best it could have been was exactly what we intended it to be. But a work of art has to do more than that; it has to surprise its audience, which it can do only ...

a reader we are assuming to be a smart person, of good taste, a person we wouldn’t want to bore.

A story is a frank, intimate conversation between equals. We keep reading because we continue to feel respected by the writer.

All we have to do is engage her. To engage her, all we have to do is value her.

We get none of that daily, calendar-tending, mere accounting. Why not? Because those days don’t matter. They aren’t meaningful. By whose standard? The story’s. The story is telling us, by skipping those days, that nothing meaningful happened during them and that it intends to set us down in front of the next thing it judges meaningful, i.e., relevant to its purpose.

The boldness of this leap teaches us something important about the short story: it is not a documentary or rigorous accounting of the passage of time or a fair-minded attempt to

the writer is not the person. The writer is a version of the person who makes a model of the world that may seem to advocate for certain virtues, virtues by which he may not be able to live. “Not only is the novelist nobody’s spokesman,” wrote Milan Kundera,

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.

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 perspectives in four paragraphs. But it’s not just the mind-to-mind movement that makes us believe. 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? From where, other than his own mind, could Tolstoy find material with which to fill those other minds?

The magician doesn’t really have to saw the assistant in half; he just has to look like he’s doing so, for the short duration of the performance, with the advantage of being observed by an audience located some distance away

Reading “Master and Man,” we begin living it; the words disappear and we find ourselves thinking not about word choice but about the decisions the characters are making and decisions we have made, or might have to make someday, in our actual lives. That’s the kind of story I want to write, the kind that stops being writing and starts being life.

One way “Master and Man” achieves its cinematic propulsion is that, early on, Tolstoy announces his organizing principle (his equivalent of “We’re working our way down”): “We’re driving out to buy that land.”

A baseline pattern gets repeated four times: they set out from somewhere and get lost. The whole story can be seen as a series of getting-losts and coming-homes, ending with the biggest coming-home of all: Vasili

And, as we saw in “The Darling,” a pattern creates propulsion. (Every time we feel we are found again, per the above pattern, we anticipate that we will soon be lost again. And then we are. And that’s satisfying.)

the big difference in these two versions is the increased causality in Tolstoy’s version. This “lesser writer’s” version reads like a sequence of unrelated events. Nothing causes anything else.

We know them no better coming out of the sequence than we did going in.

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.

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

the king died of grief” puts those events into relation; we understand that one caused the other. The sequence, now infused with causality, me...

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 show...

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 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

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. It’s like a prose version of the theory of relativity: no fixed, objective, “correct” viewpoint exists; an unbalanced narrator describes, in an unbalanced voice, the doings of a cast of unbalanced characters. In other words, like life.