A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

I recently checked out George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life from the local library.

Have you read it? Shall we enthuse?

I finished Swim Sunday morning. I immediately had to go back through it erasing all my pencil marks, which I had begun to make just as though I owned the book. It seems necessary for me to buy a copy.

At first I was pushing back against Saunders very slightly, because for whatever reason I am an adversarial first-time reader, but by the end I had marked so many pages that I knew I valued this book a great deal.

The structure is simple, effective, modular: seven Russian stories from the golden era; seven essays, one on each story, each exploring the aspects of craft that Saunders notes in that story; then seven "afterthoughts", mini-essays (each wife had seven sacks, each sack held seven cats...); plus three exercises in the appendices, all amounting to a gentle, expansive course in writing and reading whose wisdom snuck up on me -- witness my pencil marks. (Well, don't, or I'll get in trouble at the library.)

I transcribe here some of the parts I marked as useful to my creative writing classes, or my academic writing classes, or my soul:

When we talk about fiction, we tend to use terms like "theme," "plot," "character development," and "structure." I've never, as a writer, found these very useful.... These terms are placeholders, and it they intimidate us and block us up, as they tend to do, we might want to put them aside and try to find a more useful way to think about whatever it is they're placeholding for.... we might think of structure as simply an organizational scheme that allows the story to answer a question it has caused its readers to ask. (19)

I like anything that invited me to avoid conventional terms for organizing a story, though Saunders also supports many of the regular tenets for writing -- and he's, you know, good at writing, so that seems fair.

Of the first story, Chekhov's "In the Cart / The Schoolmistress", he writes:

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. This is the energy the story has made, and must use. (35)

That seems like a sexy way to think about setup and payoff. (Though I guess some really good surreal stories pay off somewhere else entirely.)

Oh, and this, from the same page:

Einstein once said: "no worth problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception." .... Note: Apparently this is a misquote .... but years ago a student relayed this to me in the form above and, no offense to Einstein, I thought my student's version was brilliant and have been using it ever since. (35)

Of why we study reading and observe ourselves doing it:

[T]he part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality. (8)

Of what makes a story "good":

When we say a story is good, we're saying that it responds alertly to itself. (29)

!!!

Of Turgenev's "The Singers" as a parable of craft:

To write a story that works, that moves the reader, is difficult .... 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 Yaksha, the writer has to risk a cracking voice and surrender to his actual power, his doubts notwithstanding. (105)

This, I might give to a writing class as they were starting out:

Let's say there was a wrist-mounted meter that could measure energy output during dancing and the goal was to give off an energy level of 1000 units. Or someone would (say) kill you. And you had a notion of how you wanted to dance, but when you danced that way, your energy level was down around 50. And when you finally managed to get your energy level above 1000, you glanced up a a mirror (there's a mirror in there, wherever your'e dacing off death) and -- wow. Is that dancing? Is that me dancing? But your energy level is at 1200 and climbing.

What would you do?

You'd keep dancing like that. (105)
 

And that's just the first quarter of the book. I might be indulgent and post more excerpts on other days.

There are some great passages about editing that are too long to quote here, but that in Saunders' utterly unpretentious way make the case for revision more clearly than any lecture I've ever heard or given. I might bring those into my academic writing courses.

{rf}