"Fiction helps us remember that everything remains to be seen. It's a sacrament dedicated to this end. We can't always feel as open to the world as we feel at the end of a beautiful story, but feeling that way even briefly reminds us that such a state exists and creates the aspiration in us to strive to be in that state more often."
In the unexpected "A Swim in the Pond in the Rain," George Saunders expands on his teaching curriculum at Syracuse to offer an exploration of the short story format. With a subtitle of "In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life," he relies on Russian masters to do so.
"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."
"A story is not like real life; it's like a table with just a few things on it. The 'meaning' of the table is made by the choice of things and their relation to one another ... That's really all a story is: a limited set of elements that we read against one another."
"A Swim in the Pond in the Rain" examines structure, pacing, energy, revision, causality, and a myriad other topics. Doing so in the context of Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Gogol gives Saunders the opportunity to apply contemporary philosophies to established classics.
Saunders spends a lot of time articulating the importance of the relationship that is constantly being built between writer and reader.
"We might think of a story this way: the reader is sitting in the sidecar of a motorcycle the writer is driving. In a well-told story, reader and writer are so close together that they're one unit. My job as the writer is to keep the distance between motorcycle and sidecar small, so that when I go right, you go right. When I, at the end of the story, take the motorcycle off the cliff, you have no choice but to follow. (I haven't, so far, given you any reason to distance yourself from me.) If the space between motorcycle and sidecar gets too great, when I corner, you fail to hear about it, and fall out of relationship with me and get bored or irritated and stop reading and go off to watch a movie. Then there's no character development or plot or voice or politics or theme. There's no anything."
I was familiar with Saunders's work through "Lincoln in the Bardo" (an honorable-mention nominee for the 2019 Scooties). In this one, he never verges into the procedural, but his nuggets (under the category of TICHN: "things I couldn't help noticing") are both instructive and revealing.
"Yes: it's a harsh form, the short story.
"Harsh as a joke, a song, a note from the gallows."
While certainly no how-to book, this work is full of advice on (as advertised) writing, reading, and, well, life. Saunders's passion for the short story format and these authors in particular shines through, and he includes some fascinating exercises in the appendices.
"You don't need an idea to start a story. You just need a sentence. Where does that sentence come from? Wherever. It doesn't have to be anything special. It will become something special, over time, as you keep reacting to it. 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. We'll find our voice and ethos and distinguish ourselves from all the other writers in the world without needing to make any big overarching decisions, just by the thousands of small ones we make as we revise."
The reading can be a bit intense in sections, but the reward is worth the toil. "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain" is a love letter to short stories in general, an inspiration to writers of all stripes, and a review of some of the most impactful short stories ever written. It would be hard to ask too much more of such a book.
"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."
