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

A pattern is established and we expect it to recur. When it does recur, slightly altered, we take pleasure in this and infer meaning from the alteration.

They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.

(A linked pair of writing dictums: “Don’t make things happen for no reason” and “Having made something happen, make it matter.”)

Often, in our doubt that we have a real story to tell, we hold something back, fearing that we don’t have anything else. And this can be a form of trickery. Surrendering that thing is a leap of faith that forces the story to attention, saying to it, in effect, “You have to do better than that, and now that I’ve denied you your trick, your first-ord

time. I like the person I am in my stories better than I like the real me. That person is smarter, wittier, more patient, funnier—his view of the world is wiser. When I stop writing and come back to myself, I feel more limited, opinionated, and petty.

We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.

I also doubt that Chekhov would have thought of this as “a pattern story.” Because every story is a pattern story. What I mean by this is that every story has patterns within it. (“The Darling” is a daringly purebred “pattern story.”)

But all of this, at every step, is more felt than decided. When I’m writing well, there’s almost no intellectual/analytical thinking going on. When I first found this method, it felt so freeing. I didn’t have to worry, didn’t have to decide, I just had to be there as I read my story fresh each time, watching that meter, willing to (playfully) make

In workshop we sometimes say that what makes a piece of writing a story is that something happens within it that changes the character forever. (That’s a bit Draconian, but let’s go with it as a starting place.) So, we tell a certain story, starting at one time and ending at another, in order to frame that moment of change. (We don’t tell the story