#A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

[wordshaveteeth]

The stories we’re reading here are among the best their authors ever wrote. But these authors also wrote lesser ones, and it’s important to read those too, if only to remind ourselves that nobody hits it out of the park every time, and that a masterpiece might have three or four test runs behind it, in which the artist was working some things out.

- George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Masterclass on Writing, Reading and Life

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has. ” - Michelangelo

+

“Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes…poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening. That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence.” ― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

[queenoftheferns]

I want to be a better writer so I started analyzing some books I like to see what makes them so good- taking a paragraph out of the book and studying the word choice and sentence structure- and you know what I found every. single. time?

it’s poetry. you can always tell that a good writer is very often a poet as well. the creative ways of describing things just out of reach? poetry. the way paragraphs flow better when each sentence has alternating amounts of syllables? that’s a poetry thing. George Saunders in his book “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” said that (i’m paraphrasing here) language is limited and it’s like there’s this fence in between what we can describe with words and the deeper parts of the human experience that we don’t have the language for but long to express anyway. the writer throws themself against that fence, trying to break it, and fails. But that bulge in the fence that gives you just a taste of the other side? that’s what poetry is.

And, at its best I think fiction can be that as well. We tell stories and we slip in and out of that fence and wink and nudge our way to those wordless parts of humanity.

All this to say, I come from a family of poets and generally wasn’t interested in reading or writing it because it seemed to mystical and hard to understand. But now I’m realizing that to be a good creative writer I’m going to need to develop the tools of a poet as well, or at the very least read some poetry. And tbh i resent that

[loneberry]

George Saunders answers those who consider writing a pastime for bedridden babies. (From A Swim in a Pond in the Rain)

[romilly-jay]

COSY CATASTROPHE: Fixing the writing

My appreciation for the revision process has grown by witnessing the improvements that can be delivered by successive passes and also from my reading of craft texts. Advice from George Saunders stands out in particular. Saunders is a strong advocate for editing repeatedly at the level of the individual sentence.

In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021), Saunders describes how he will print out a short story, weigh every word, make multiple line adjustments, and then type up the changes, reprint the story, and go again.  Saunders claims that careful and repeated changes to a story’s sentences can result in the story becoming not merely more beautifully written, but also more ethical, more morally valuable and instructive. He proposes that this happens because a writer’s moral failings will also result in writing that contains technical flaws. By reverse-engineering – that is, by eliminating the technical faults – some of the moral inadequacy is softened or removed.

Saunders’ claim is that listening to the voice of the novel (a concept he acknowledges borrowing from Milan Kundera), the writer can end up producing something that is morally wiser, kinder, better than they themselves are as a person. Saunders uses the example of Tolstoy, a writer with an established reputation for showing compassion towards the weak on the page, but a real pain to live with, if his wife’s diaries are believed (and they should be, as a matter of principle, as we cultivate resisting patriarchy by believing a woman when she gives testimony to her domestic travails).

I think it’s important that the solution Saunders offers – this attentive, responsive revision focused at the level of the individual sentence and that repeats over and over, until intuition says that a better story has been achieved – can demonstrably improve the writing but does not necessarily change the writer.

(Maybe it does, but not inevitably…)  I realise that we live in a context where a person’s writing and their life tend to be judged together and I see how that is a useful corrective to the perception that there were no consequences at all if you were a certain kind of person.

Nonetheless, Saunders’ theory encourages me to aspire to writing that is able to rise above my personal failings – and within my personal moral choices, it also offers me a way to be able to consider my engagement with a piece of writing on its own terms and as a separate question from my stance in relation to the author.

I may of course still ultimately choose to engage with neither.

References

§ Saunders, G. (2021) A swim in the pond in the rain: in which four Russians give a masterclass on writing, reading and life. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

[youandthemountains]

me, a genius: hm I'm feeling kinda emo, I'll get offline and read this book about Russian lit I've been meaning to for ages

the book, unsurprisingly:

...ok.

[m-c-easton]

Let Characters Be Complicated

In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders advocates for complicated stories that "avoid being merely a one-dimensional position paper." So I tried this out myself, and one secret I learned? Complicate the hell out of your characters. #writing

This week I’m thinking about a point George Saunders made on the value of digressions in fiction. In his book on creative writing A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he wrote that stories must “self-complicate, and thus avoid being merely a one-dimensional position paper” (335). However, when writing the first draft of a story, I’ve found there are two kinds of digressions. There are the valuable…

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

“It really is true: doing what you please (i.e., what pleases you), with energy, will lead you to everything—to your particular obsessions and the ways in which you’ll indulge them, to your particular challenges and the forms in which they’ll convert into beauty, to your particular obstructions and your highly individualized obstruction breakers. We can’t know what our writing problems will be until we write our way into them, and then we can only write our way out.” ― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life

'dolman, american or european, c. 1880' in china through the looking glass: fashion, film, art - andrew bolton (2015)

[nochargebookbunch]

Musings: Why Bother

I’m always surprised when someone reads my reviews, even more when they are referenced. But it stings a little to discover my writing has been ignored or forgotten, when someone asks me if I’ve heard about a book, not knowing I wrote about it. Nevertheless, my own rereading of my reviews brings back not only the book but the feelings I was having while writing about it. The review reminds me of…

[s-che]

A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN is a good book that stumbles, suddenly, into Stalin.

(this is the 5th of my brief responses to the books i read in 2023. last time i talked about lemony snicket’s POISON FOR BREAKFAST. there’s also a rolling list over on my twitter)

I liked George Saunders’s book, A Swim In a Pond in the Rain, maybe more than I’ve every liked a how to write book before. For one thing, Saunders actually knows how to teach—too often, I think, successful writers get to talk about their method and pass that off as pedagogy, which it is not. In A Swim In a Pond in the Rain, on the other hand, you get the clear sense that Saunders not only understands how he writes, but understands how other people write—which is important, since I am, in fact, not George Saunders. This might be trite, but—it really does feel like you’re learning, when you read this book..

So I liked Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I liked it a lot, actually, especially as someone who—if you couldn’t tell—isn’t usually thrilled with how to write books. I just have one question, though: What does George Saunders know about Russia? 

The answer is—and he’s honest about this—not much. He’s taught courses on Russian literature, of course—courses from which the readings in this book are drawn.He has a number of Russian friends—who he gestures to as a source of information throughout the book. He has a deep love and a familiarity for the literary giants who he handles in this book—Tolstoy and Gogol and the rest—but when it comes to talking about Russia, which he does only a handful  of times, you are given the distinct impression that Saunders is beginning to fall flat. The most egregious of these moments is in the conclusion of the book, when he begins to muse on the legacy of the Stalinist purges, wondering whether the occasionally anti-Tsarist sympathies of these books might have played into Bolshevik hands. I’d be willing to hear this sort of an argument out, at least, in most cases, but here—where it is clearly mostly speculative—I couldn’t help but start to think (as Saunders teaches us to think!): what happens when americans evoke Russia? What work is done by the subtitle of this book? What has Saunders done in teaching only pre-Revolutionary stories?

I think it would be difficult to deny that, for most americans, invoking “Russia” summons either a nostalgic memory of the gilded Romanovs or (more commonly) the terrifying specter of Soviet brutalism—a specter which still lingers even in american perception of the post-Soviet era. With these dual ghosts in mind, we begin to view Russian history as defined by a kind of a bottleneck—a moment, in 1917, when romance died and industrial modernity seized control. This is certainly true in the invocation of the great Russian authors—all of whom, at least all of those known in the west, were conveniently located in the century leading up to the fall of the Romanovs. That’s the space Saunders is playing in—a nostalgic, Shen Yun-esque look at the cultural wealth of feudal Russia, haunted by the impending catastrophe in the form of the monarchy’s destruction. He’s wearing a kind of political horse blinders which, incidentally, means he seems entirely to overlook 70 years of artistic continuity which was no less complex nor politically muzzled than the century which came before.

If you are going to read this book, then—and I really suggest that you read this book—please merely keep in mind that Russian history did not end in 1917, nor 1937, nor 1991. Saunders is a genius at what he knows—but there are many places he steps, awkwardly, into things he does not.

[cinematic-literature]

You Hurt My Feelings (2023) by Nicole Holofcener

Book title

To Paradise (2022) by Hanya Yanagihara

I Had to Tell It by Beth Mitchell

A Swim In The Pond In The Rain (2021) by George Saunders

Moon Witch, Spider King (2022) by Marlon James

On Freedom - Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021) by Maggie Nelson

[wordshaveteeth]

That’s how characters get made: we export fragments of ourselves, then give those fragments pants and a hairstyle and a hometown and all of that.

- George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Masterclass on Writing, Reading and Life

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

this man!! keeps making Choices(tm)!!! sir why would you insist that LotR is simple and uninteresting and trite at a fucking FANTASY CONFERENCE?!!

[mossyshadows]

"Thursday" by George Saunders is really good! I liked that podcast version where he read it. He has an interesting voice and it lends well to his stories. My partner loves short stories and George Saunders is their favorite :)

Also his book "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain" is really great!

THE favourite is always high praise :0 intrigued to read (or listen) to it <3 thank you for the rec, adding it to my tbr, looks interesting!

[blog2collectionsanfavs]

Posted by/at https://blog2collectionsanfavs.tumblr.com/  

[romilly-jay]

Story: drafting and looping and looking for the heart

Past couple of years have been framed for me around a genre fiction MFA at City, University of London (now City St Georges, U of L).

I worked from a story-seed that I'd first developed for a chapter in an education studies crossover anthology (contributors were invited to write a speculative short story that in some way explored a possible future for education, to be accompanied by guide study questions).

That story was about a community that for Reasons possessed the biological - and trainable - ability to jump through time. I thought of it as analogous to the way that in principle human bodies can dive through space, with certain bodies being better pre-disposed and everyone, again, in principle, capable of improving with training.

Didn't have too much, initially, beyond the idea of the capability (and lots of questions about what challenges would come from living with an ability like that). Oh, and a central character, femme, in search of her lost brother, MIA after breaking protocols and jumping alone.

At the time, there wasn't much more to it beyond a desire to reverse the hero narrative. I tried to set up a situation where the cultural coding was that someone making a grand, individualistic gesture was a bit of a pr*ck because problems are best solved together.

To my delight (and surprise) the story found itself flourishing in a new - space! - context and with the time-jumpers juxtaposed against a colony of standard flavour humans (with the standard human tendencies including unwholesome desire for power-over-others).

Status: Book One exists as a complete draft, while the draft for Book Two around halfway there. I guess the overall status therefore is "pretty secure early draft" - can see what it's going to be but we might still be some distance from the finish.

Plan for 2025 is to share the draft text a bit at a time (weekends) and reflect on the qus & choices it's asking me to address (midweek).

I don't know how much I'll be bringing from George Saunders into this - probably not as much as I would like - but here's an extract from something I wrote earlier on his approach to redrafting.

This is my aspiration for the time I'm about to spend...

====================================

Ethics: a craft perspective   

Before I started working on my MFA Major Project, I assumed the ethical tone of a piece of writing would be addressed by revising details within the plot, so, the narrative components.

The author and creative writing (CW) lecturer George Saunders takes a different view. He believes that ethical improvements are woven through the central craft of CW.

Saunders is a strong advocate for focused editing at the level of the individual sentence. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021), he describes how he prints out a short story, weigh every word, makes multiple line adjustments, and then types up the changes, reprints the story, and repeats. Then repeats again.

I assumed that revisions at the level of the sentence were necessary to eliminate errors and to finesse vocabulary choices.

Saunders, however, makes a bigger claim:

I once heard the great Chicago writer Stuart Dybek say, ‘A story is always talking to you; you just have to learn to listen to it.’ … Essentially, the whole process is: intuition plus iteration… What’s interesting to me is that revising by this method – trying to make better sentences, per one’s taste, over and over – has unintended effects that we might characterize as moral-ethical (2021, pp. 111-112).

In other words, Saunders take the position that careful and repeated changes to a story’s sentences can result in the story becoming not merely more beautifully written, but also more ethical, more morally valuable and instructive.

Saunders proposes that this outcome is achieved because a writer’s moral failings will also result in writing that contains technical flaws. By reverse-engineering – that is, by eliminating the technical faults – some of the moral inadequacy is softened or removed:

I’d say there’s a general principle in here somewhere: that any story that suffers from what seems like a moral failing (that seems sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, pedantic, appropriative, derivative of another writer’s work, and so on) will be seen, with sufficient analytical snooping, to be suffering from a technical failing, and if that failing is addressed, it will (always) become a better story (Saunders, 2021, p.244).

By listening to the voice of the novel (a concept he acknowledges borrowing from Milan Kundera), Saunders says that the writer can end up producing something that is morally wiser, kinder, better than they themselves are as a person.

Saunders uses the example of Tolstoy, a writer with an established reputation for showing compassion towards the weak on the page, but a real pain to live with, if his wife’s diaries are believed (and they should be, as a matter of principle, as we cultivate resisting patriarchy by believing a woman when she gives testimony to her domestic travails):

Tolstoy was not, however, according to the diaries of his wife, Sonya, much of a moral-ethical giant around the house…Duly noted, Sonya: the guy sounds like a pain. Yet his writing is full of compassion… What do we make of this? Well, of course, the writer is not the person. The writer… makes a model of the world that may seem to advocate for certain virtues, virtues by which he may not be able to live (2021, pp. 217-218).

References:

Aamli, P. (2022) The Time Tumblers. In D. Conrad & S. Wiebe (Eds.), Educational fabulations: teaching and learning for a world yet to come (pp. 51-64). Palgrave Macmillan.

Saunders, G. (2021) A swim in the pond in the rain: in which four Russians give a masterclass on writing, reading and life. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.