Most Popular Highlights: George Saunders
The ten most popular storytelling takeaways from 'A Swim in a Pond in the Rain', discussed.
This is You Are a Story, where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. Recordings are made available for those who can’t make it on the night. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.
Popular posts:
Scamming Substack?: How to get money for nothing and likes for free on the world’s favourite newsletter platform
How To Be a Story: Rules for being an imaginary person
Forever Seventeen: How your teenage self never leaves you
Coming up:
Decoding the Darkness: What if our depression was trying to tell us something? (SUBSCRIBER ONLY)
How Art Becomes Us: Inside my midlife identity crisis
Atomic Writing: The secret of the world’s best writers, revealed (SUBSCRIBER ONLY SCIENCE OF STORYTELLING SPECIAL)
Will Storr’s new book, A STORY IS A DEAL, is available now
George Saunders is a Man Booker prize-winning author and highly regarded scholar of storytelling. By the time he wrote A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he’d been at teaching a class on nineteenth-century Russian short stories for twenty years, at Syracuse University in New York. The book was lauded by critics and a New York Times bestseller. These days, Saunders captains a highly popular storytelling Substack.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is structured around seven nineteenth-century Russian short stories, from which Saunders extracts valuable writing advice. He is superb company throughout, and his book is filled with wisdom for both storytellers and those who want to become better readers. My only personal hesitation about the book is that, to get the best out of it, it’s better if you at least somewhat share Saunders’ enthusiasm for this particular literary niche. In all honestly, I found myself inwardly sighing a bit when we were instructed to read all about “the barber Ivan Yakovlevich who lives on Voznesensky Avenue”, or whoever, and was always relieved when the perky and fascinating Saunders returned to comment. But this is surely a failure of imagination on my part, and certainly shouldn’t put you off giving this book a go, if you haven’t already.
Helpfully for us, all ten of the book’s most popular highlights are situated either in the introduction, or his discussion of one story, In The Cart by Anton Chekhov (1897). It concerns Marya Vasilyevna, a provincial schoolteacher who has come down in the world since her rarified childhood in Moscow. Marya is unhappy. She is lonely and also bored with the humdrum routine of her life. We meet her in the back of a horse-drawn cart. She has been out shopping. On the way home, she has a brief encounter with a man she is mildly attracted to, but apparently not romantically interested in. Her shopping tips over in the cart. She goes to a teahouse, where we note she’s comfortable in the company of ‘the peasants’. When she continues on her journey home, her cart goes through a river and Marya and her shopping get wet. She waits for a train to pass by and sees someone who resembles her mother. This triggers a powerful flashback of her happier childhood in Moscow. Elated by this memory of her former self, Marya starts to cry.
That’s the whole story. It feels like a pretty marginal work to me, I have to say, but Saunders bursts with love and compassion for his “new friend” Marya who “if my experience is any indication, will stay with you forever.”
Anyway, to the highlights.
10.
“The movie producer and all-around mensch Stuart Cornfeld once told me that in a good screenplay, every structural unit needs to do two things: (1) be entertaining in its own right and (2) advance the story in a non-trivial way.”
This excellent highlight comes as Saunders discusses Marya’s trip to the teahouse. His point is that this scene contains tension: the peasants are foul-mouthed and rowdy, and so give Marya reason to feel insulted – this makes it “entertaining in its own right.” But the scene is more than just entertaining. It tells us something interesting about Marya that’s relevant to the story: she is unphased, which shows the extent to which her status in the world has declined. “The characters go into the scene in one state and leave in another,” he writes. “The story becomes a more particular version of itself.”
A well-constructed story is a symphony of change. What changes in this scene is the reader’s understanding of the protagonist. The essential ‘dramatic question’ of fiction is: ‘who is this person?’ Humans have evolved to be incorrigibly interested in the true, inner nature of other people, and investigations into private selves are one of the great, nosey pleasures of storytelling. Saunders reminds us that it’s also necessary for any successful scene to be entertaining in itself. You can advance your story – move your characters forwards – but, separate from that, you should also work to make each scene maximally entertaining.
From a science of storytelling perspective, we can also observe here that one of the principle ‘ultimate’ themes of the story is status (the other being connection. This is not a survival story.)