A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

One of the tacit promises of a short story, because it is so short, is that there’s no waste in it. Everything in it is there for a reason (for the story to make use of)—even a brief description of a road.

We’ve said that a story is a system for the transfer of energy. Energy made in the early pages gets transferred along through the story, passed from section to section, like a bucket of water headed for a fire, and the hope is that not a drop gets lost.

But we readers will tolerate all kinds of reading states, even negative-seeming ones: periods of boredom, of perplexity, periods during which we are really hating Character X and wondering if the writer knows just how much. What we are saying, essentially, is: “Well, Franz, that bug thing is excessive but I’m going to allow it. Proceed. What are yo

A work of art moves us by being honest and that honesty is apparent in its language and its form and in its resistance to concealment.

This is a big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve.

Whitman was right: we are large, we do contain multitudes. There’s more than one “us” in there. When we “find our voice,” what’s really happening is that we’re choosing a voice from among the many voices we’re able to “do,” and we’re choosing it because we’ve found that, of all the voices we contain, it’s the one, so far, that has proven itself to

Apparently this is a misquote of what Einstein actually said, which was “Let the people know that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” 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 e

The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it.

This is an important storytelling move we might call “ritual banality avoidance.” If we deny ourselves the crappo version of our story, a better version will (we aspirationally assume) present itself. To refuse to do the crappo thing is to strike a de facto blow for quality. (If nothing else, at least we haven’t done that.)