A book for anyone serious about writing fiction

If you are unable to be admitted to the Syracuse University writing program (it accepts six students a year from an applicant pool of between six and seven hundred), the next best thing is George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.

Actually of course it’s Saunders who gives the master class, which is based on his twenty years of creative writing teaching. To illustrate what he wants to convey he uses three Chekhov stories (“In the Cart,” “The Darling,” “Gooseberries”), two Tolstoy stories (“Master and Man,” “Alyosha the Pot”) and one each by Turgenev (“The Singers”) and Gogol (“The Nose”).

Saunders advises reader at the beginning that none of the models he offers as a way to think about a story is “correct” or sufficient. “If a model appeals to you, use it. If not, discard it.” He is not trying to teach you how to write like George Saunders (or Chekhov). He is trying to teach you how to write a compelling story, one readers want to read.

Each of the stories he examines is, in its own way, worth studying for what the author does and how he does it. Saunders gives each a very close reading. Indeed he analyses “In the Cart” virtually sentence by sentence, one of his points being that the short story writer does not have room for words or sentences that do not contribute directly to the whole. So how does Chekhov do it?

The million-dollar questions Saunders wants to answer is: What makes reader keep reading? He believes happens through a series of expectation/resolution moments. “We read a bit of text and a set of expectations arises. ‘A man stood on the roof of a seventy-story building.’ Aren’t you already kind of expecting him to jump, fall, or be pushed off? You’ll be pleased if the story takes that expectation into account, but not pleased if it addresses it too neatly.”

Janice Hardy on her Fiction University blog has an interesting article that points out the difference between idea, premise, plot, and story. “Ideas are those moments of inspiration that first excite or interest us. The premise is a general description of the story you plan to tell, and what the story is about. The plot encompasses the core conflict. [The] story is . . . the internal struggle the character goes thorough to resolve a personal issue.” 

Saunders says that a story “frames a moment of change, saying implicitly: ‘This is the day on which things changed forever. A variant of that says, ‘This is the day on which things almost changed forever, but didn’t.”

One of the problems with my stories (one among many) is that they tend to be anecdotes. Time passes. Things happen. They often have interesting ideas and observations. But the main character does not change. Or, the character had an opportunity to change but didn’t. 

Chekhov said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” Saunders says, “A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were.”

Saunders mines each of the seven Russian stories for what they can teach about description, pattern, repetition, facts in fiction, and the possibility of saying true things in a world in which “things happen in it that don’t and could never happen in the real world.” I.e., in Gogol’s “The Nose.”

How does a detailed description of a country inn, the furniture, a character’s face, or clothing add to the story? What does “a bloated face, a pair of sly, genial little eyes, and a fleshy forehead with deep furrows running right across it” really tell you about the character? We modern readers are sensitive to and impatient with data dumps. 

Saunders describes how he discovered he was a writer and how he works. He seems to be a pantser rather than an outliner, never sure where the story is going after he’s written the first sentence. He also believes in revision.

At the same time, he insists that every writer should find his/her own way. Hemingway may be a great short story writer but he’s already done what he can do. Writing in the style of Hemingway is still fake, no matter how skillfully done.

Rather he argues, “We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition . . . In my experience that’s the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.”

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a splendid book for several reasons. As a writer, I have revisited older stories and think I now see why and where they fail. As a reading writer, I try to see the mechanism at work under the stories and novels I read; I believe I am now more sensitive to what is actually going on (or not). As a reader, I am delighted to be introduced to seven masterpieces by an experienced and knowledgeable guide.

Finally, I am inspired by Saunders writing. Anyone who is serious about writing fiction should own and read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and return to it regularly for insights and inspiration.