george saunders, a swim in a pond in the rain

Lugar icônico: “What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space”—the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves—their strengths, weaknesses, obsessions, peculiarities, the whole deal. At this level, good writing is assumed; the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.”

The focus of my artistic life has been trying to learn to write emotionally moving stories that a reader feels compelled to finish.

Reação genuína: What did we feel and where did we feel it? (All coherent intellectual work begins with a genuine reaction.)

Torna-se familiar com a forma a ponto de esta informar os movimentos instintivos: The idea here is that working closely with the stories will make them more available to us as we work on our own; that this intense and, we might say, forced acquaintance with them will inform the swerves and instinctive moves that are so much a part of what writing actually is, from moment to moment.

O escritor como malabarista: In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We’d better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning.

Curiosidade: What a story is “about” is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.

Estrutura como pergunta-resposta: 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. (“Your theme’s no good” gives me nothing to work with, and neither does “You might want to make your plot better.”) These terms are placeholders, and if 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 reader to ask. [...] 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.

Ritmo do conto / Ritmo da vida: notice this: having made Marya on its first page, the story didn’t stay static for long at all. (We didn’t get a second page merely explicating her boredom.) This should tell us something about the pace of a story versus the pace of real life: the story is way faster, compressed, and exaggerated—a place where something new always has to be happening, something relevant to that which has already happened.

Versão Hollywood:  Before we launch into our in-class critique, I’ll sometimes ask the workshop to come up with what I call the “Hollywood version” of the story—a pithy one- or two-sentence summary. It’s no good to start making suggestions about a story until we’ve agreed on what it’s trying to do. (If a complicated machine showed up in your yard, you wouldn’t start altering it and “improving” it until you had some idea of its intended function.) The “Hollywood version” is meant to answer the question “What story does this story appear to want to be?” This is done in the way artillery fire is directed, at least in my imagination: an initial shot, followed by a series of adjustments for precision.

Sobre um personagem em Tchekhov (Hanov, “In the Cart”):  The person that emerges is complex and three-dimensional. We wonder about him, rather than having him neatly in our pocket, and we’re not sure if we want Marya interested in him or not.

A harsh form: Yes: it’s a harsh form, the short story. Harsh as a joke, a song, a note from the gallows.

Autointerrupção de Marya (“In the Cart”, Tchekhov): That self-interruption is a beautiful thing. It says: the mind can be two places at once. (Many trains are running simultaneously in there, consciousness aware of only one at a time.)

Um gato metafórico: That cat, having been placed in that particular story, is now, also, a metaphorical cat, in relation to all of the other dozens (hundreds) of metaphorical elements floating around in the story.

Uma história como um sistema para transferência de energia: 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. That is the energy the story has made, and must use.

Evitar o clichê: This is an important storytelling move we might call “ritual banality avoidance.”

Sendo honesto: If you know where a story is going, don’t hoard it. Make the story go there, now. But then what? What will you do next? You’ve surrendered your big reveal. Exactly. 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-order solution, I know that you will.” [...] 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.

Evitar a estase: The story form reminds us that a human being is never static or stable. The form demands that the writer honor this. If a character keeps doing or saying the same thing, keeps occupying the same position, we will feel this as static, a repeated beat—a failure of development.

Cada elemento da história como um pequeno poema:  Everything in a story should be to purpose. Our working assumption is that nothing exists in a story by chance or merely to serve some documentary function. Every element should be a little poem, freighted with subtle meaning that is in connection with the story’s purpose. [...] let’s call it the Ruthless Efficiency Principle (REP)

When a story is “advanced in a non-trivial way,” we get the local color and something else. The characters go into the scene in one state and leave in another. The story becomes a more particular version of itself; it refines the question it’s been asking all along.

História como configuração de elementos: A story is not like real life; it’s like a table with just a few things on it. The “meaning” of the table is made by the choice of things and their relation to one another. [...] That’s really all a story is: a limited set of elements that we read against one another.

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

A short story is not just a series of events, one following after another. It’s not a lively narrative that briskly continues for a number of pages, then stops. It’s a narrative that compels us to finish reading it, yes, but that, in the midst of itself, somehow rises or expands and becomes…enough.

Formular os problemas: Chekhov once said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” “Formulate them correctly” might be taken to mean: “make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.”

Crítica: Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, and (2) getting better at articulating that response.

Justificar os excessos: If you closely observe your reading mind, you’ll find that as you encounter an excess in a story (some non-normative aspect), you enter into a transactional relationship with the writer. When Kafka writes, “Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams…changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin,” you don’t say, “No, he didn’t, Franz,” and throw the book across the room. You add “impossible incident: man just turned into bug” to your TICHN [Things I Couldn’t Help Noticing] cart, then enter a period of “waiting to see.” [...] The goal is not to keep the TICHN cart empty and thus write a “perfectly normal” story. A story that approaches its ending with nothing in its TICHN cart is going to have a hard time ending spectacularly. A good story is one that, having created a pattern of excesses, notices those excesses and converts them into virtues.

O coração da história: We might think of a story as a kind of ceremony, like the Catholic Mass, or a coronation, or a wedding. We understand the heart of the Mass to be communion, the heart of a coronation to be the moment the crown goes on, the heart of the wedding to be the exchanging of the vows. All of those other parts (the processionals, the songs, the recitations, and so on) will be felt as beautiful and necessary to the extent that they serve the heart of the ceremony.

Sobre as frequentes descrições de Turgueniev: The contemporary reader feels this method of description as old-fashioned. Per our current understanding of fiction, people are to be described selectively—in the sense that not everyone is described and that not everything about them needs to be described. We expect description to be somewhat minimal and serve a thematic purpose, whereas Turgenev seems to be describing things just because they’re there. This method seems to date from a time when stories were understood to serve a more documentary function. [...] Our current aesthetic understanding says that physical description should come at speed, naturally, presented organically within the action. (We believe in showing, not telling.) 

As reduções impossíveis: Note that as the mind tries to perform these sorts of thematic reductions, it also notes the imperfection of the tracking; there’s a correspondence, but it’s not neat. The story is too lovely and unruly to be reduced in this way: a wild animal that refuses to get into the box we’ve made, whose opening, shaped too neatly “like” that animal, discounts the fact that the animal is always in motion.

O momento logo antes da explicação: We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs—or doesn’t—in that instant. What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple. But the “knowing” at such moments, though happening without language, is real. I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.
> exemplo dessa intuição ao analisar o conto de Turgueniev: We hold the ravine up against the singing contest and…something happens in our mind, and it is good. (On the other hand, if an element is random, we get that “failure to engage” feeling, that “Meaningful Relation Not Found” error message.)

É difícil escrever uma história: To write a story that works, that moves the reader, is difficult, and most of us can’t do it. 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.

Pegar a beleza que for possível: The writer has to write in whatever way produces the necessary energy. [...] It’s hard to get any beauty at all into a story. If and when we do, it might not be the type of beauty we’ve always dreamed of making. But we have to take whatever beauty we can get, however we can get it.

Encontrar uma voz: I teach “The Singers” to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we’ll turn out to be. As young writers, we all have romantic dreams of being a writer of a certain kind, of joining a certain lineage. A painstaking realist, maybe; a Nabokovian stylist; a deeply spiritual writer like Marilynne Robinson—whatever. But sometimes the world, via its tepid response to prose written in that mode, tells us that we are not, in fact, that kind of writer. So we have to find another approach, one that will get us up above the required 1,000 units. We have to become whatever writer is capable of producing the necessary level of energy. (“The writer can choose what he writes about,” said Flannery O’Connor, “but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.”)

This writer may turn out to bear little resemblance to the writer we dreamed of being. She is born, it turns out, for better or worse, out of that which we really are: the tendencies we’ve been trying, all these years, in our writing and maybe even in our lives, to suppress or deny or correct, the parts of ourselves about which we might even feel a little ashamed.

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 be the most energetic. [...]

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. It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too—it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.

~ failures of grace ~ 

Intuição: My experience is that, late in the game, finishing a story, we’re in such deep relation to it that we’re making decisions we’re not even aware we’re making, for reasons too fine to articulate. And we’re in too big of a hurry to articulate them anyway. We’re operating in an intuitive zone, deciding quickly, without much deliberation.

Blocos de texto incontestáveis: Early in a story, I’ll have a few discrete blocks (blobs? swaths?) of loose, sloppy text. As I revise, those blocks will start to…get better. Soon, a block will start working—I can get all the way through it without a needle drop. The word that sometimes comes to mind is “undeniable,” as in “All right, this bit is pretty much undeniable,” which means that I feel that any reasonable reader would like it and would still be with me at the end of it.

A block, revised, starts telling me what it’s for; sometimes it asks a question (“Who is this Craig of whom they are speaking?”) or seems to want to cause something to happen (“Fern has offended Bryce and he’s about to blow”). Once I have a few “undeniable” blocks of text, they start telling me what order they’d like to be in, and sometimes one will say that I really ought to cut it out entirely.

[...]

As the blocks start to fall into order, the resulting feeling of causation starts to mean something (if a man puts his fist through a wall, then joins a street protest, that’s one story; if he comes home from a street protest and puts his fist through the wall, that’s another) and starts to suggest what the story might want to be “about” (although part of this process is to shake off that feeling as much as possible and keep returning to that P/N meter, trusting that those big thematic decisions are going to be made, naturally, by way of the thousands of accreting microdecisions at the line level).

Um método libertador - trabalhar no nível da sentença: 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 changes at the line level, knowing that if I was wrong, I’d get a chance to change it back on the next read. I once heard someone say that “given infinite time, anything can happen.” That’s how this way of revising makes me feel. No need for overarching decisions; the story has a will of its own, one it is trying to make me feel, and if I just trust in that, all will be well, and the story will surpass my initial vision of it.

a beleza do método: The beauty of this method is that it doesn’t really matter what you start with or how the initial idea gets generated. What makes you you, as a writer, is what you do to any old text, by way of this iterative method. This method overturns the tyranny of the first draft. Who cares if the first draft is good? It doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be, so you can revise it. You don’t need an idea to start a story. You just need a sentence. Where does that sentence come from? Wherever. It doesn’t have to be anything special. It will become something special, over time, as you keep reacting to it. 

Surpreender a si próprio: But a work of art has to do more than that; it has to surprise its audience, which it can do only if it has legitimately surprised its creator.

O escritor como sábio momentâneo: I find this happening all the 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.

But what a pleasure it was, to have been, on the page, briefly less of a dope than usual.

Escalada: What transforms an anecdote into a story is escalation. Or, we might say: when escalation is suddenly felt to be occurring, it is a sign that our anecdote is transforming into a story.

Saltos da história: The boldness of this leap teaches us something important about the short story: it is not a documentary or rigorous accounting of the passage of time or a fair-minded attempt to show life as it is really lived; it’s a radically shaped, even somewhat cartoonish (when held up against the tedious real world) little machine that thrills us with the extremity of its decisiveness.

Especificidade gera trama: We might say that in specificity lies nascent plot. [...] So, “good writerly habit” might consist of continually revising toward specificity, so that specificity can appear and then produce plot (or, as we prefer to call it, “meaningful action”).

Padrões numa história: The patterning of the story works like a form of Pavlovian conditioning. We react without knowing why. And it’s these reactions that make us feel melded to the author, as if we are playing a very important, intimate game of some kind with him.

Convencer a si mesmo de que tem algo a dizer: Our whole artistic journey might be understood as the process of convincing ourselves that we do, in fact, have enough, figuring out what that is, then refining it.

O que faz o leitor continuar? Of all the questions an aspiring writer might ask herself, here’s the most urgent: What makes a reader keep reading? Or, actually: What makes my reader keep reading? (What is it that propels a reader through a swath of my prose?)

How would we know? Well, as we’ve said, the only method by which we can know is to read what we’ve written on the assumption that our reader reads pretty much the way we do. What bores us will bore her. What gives us a little burst of pleasure will light her up too.

[...] In a strange way, that’s the whole skill: to be able to lapse into a reasonable impersonation of yourself reading as if the prose in front of you (which you’ve already read a million times) was entirely new to you. When we go through a section of text like this, monitoring our responses and making changes accordingly, this manifests to the reader as evidence of care. (We might say that a first-time reader is able to intuit the many less-cared-for versions of a sentence behind the one the writer let stand.)

O ceticismo constante do leitor: Since everything is invented, we read in a continual state of light skepticism. Every sentence is a little referendum on truth. “True or not?” we keep asking. If our answer is “Yes, seems true,” we get shot out of that little gas station and keep reading

Kundera: “Not only is the novelist nobody’s spokesman,” wrote Milan Kundera, “but I would go so far as to say he is not even the spokesman for his own ideas. When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.”

As Kundera suggests, the writer opens himself up to that “suprapersonal wisdom” by technical means. That’s what “craft” is: a way to open ourselves up to the suprapersonal wisdom within us.

Auto-observação em Tolstoi: But it’s not just the mind-to-mind movement that makes us believe. It’s what Tolstoy does once he’s in a mind: he makes a direct, factual report of what he finds there. No judgment, no poetry. Just flat observation—which is, of course, a form of self-observation (the writer asking, “What would I be thinking if I were that person, in that situation?”). What else could it be? From where, other than his own mind, could Tolstoy find material with which to fill those other minds? These four people are all Tolstoy, and his recounting of what they’re thinking is not extraordinarily “compassionate.” He’s just ascribing to them thoughts he’s had in analogous situations, thoughts not particularly unique, psychologically, to them, produced more by their role in the situation (initiator of the trip; host; young man who loves literature; servant who is cold) than by some secret knowledge Tolstoy has of those particular, individuated minds (which, after all, never existed).

Histórias que não se nota que foram escritas: That’s the kind of story I want to write, the kind that stops being writing and starts being life.

~ [...] there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t.

First, a willingness to revise.

Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality. ~

Causalidade: that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality. [...] A well-written bit of prose is like a beautifully hand-painted kite, lying there on the grass. It’s nice. We admire it. Causality is the wind that then comes along and lifts it up. The kite is then a beautiful thing made even more beautiful by the fact that it’s doing what it was made to do.

[...]

Returning to the idea of a story as a process for the transfer of energy: in a good story, the writer makes energy in a beat, then transfers this energy cleanly to the next one (the energy is “conserved”). She does this by being aware of the nature of the energy she’s made. In a bad story (or an early draft), the writer doesn’t fully understand the nature of the energy she’s made, and ignores or misuses it, and it dissipates.

The preferred, most efficient, highest-order form of energy transfer (the premier way for a scene to advance the story in a non-trivial way) is for a beat to cause the next beat, especially if that next beat is felt as essential, i.e., as an escalation: a meaningful alteration in the terms of the story.

Escalada e variação: “Always be escalating,” then, can be understood as “Be alert, always, to the possibilities you have created for variation.” If an element recurs, the second appearance is an opportunity for variation and, potentially, escalation.

[Escalada e variação nos elementos de cena de “O patrão e o trabalhador”, Tolstói]: Here, the pattern of variation isn’t too neat or directly metaphorical. (The clothes don’t, for example, go from unfrozen to frozen, as Nikita and Vasili soon will, but are frozen the first time we see them.) We barely notice the variations at speed but, on closer examination, feel them to be perfectly pitched. Rather than neatly spitting out some predetermined, reductive meaning, they produce a feeling of mystery, the metaphorical world lightly infiltrating the physical.

Miniatura: cada unidade da história como uma miniatura: A structural unit (in this case, all of the text describing what happens during this stop in Grishkino), like a story, wants to look something like Freytag’s triangle. (This is more aspiration than rule.) A structural unit should, that is, be shaped like a miniature version of a story: rising action, building to a climax. (If a structural unit in a story we’re writing isn’t shaped like that, we might wonder if it wants to be; if it is shaped like that, we might want to make that shape sharper.)

Padrão antes-depois (quando Vasili, em “O patrão e o trabalhador”, passa da autoconfiança ao desespero): The structural core of this section is a simple before-and-after pattern. Which offers us lesser writers a technique: if we want change to appear to happen in our stories, the first order of business is to note specifically how things are now. We write: “The table was dusty.” If, later, we write, “The newly dusted table gleamed,” this implies that someone who had previously neglected it has now dusted it: someone has changed.

Numa história, falha moral = falha técnica: So, yes, the story was sexist, but another way of saying this was that it was a story with a technical flaw. That flaw was (or would have been, had Gogol not been dead) correctable. The sexism my student identified was definitely there, and it was manifesting in a particular way in the text, in the form of “inequitable narration.”

I’d say there’s a general thesis in here somewhere: 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.

Como uma história absurda pode ser verdadeira (sobre “O nariz”, Gógol): If I assign you to write a story in which the characters are a cellphone, a pair of gloves, and a fallen leaf, chatting away in a wheelbarrow in a suburban driveway, could that story be truthful? Yes. It could be truthful in the way it reacts to itself, in the way it responds to its premise, in the way it proceeds—by how things change within it, the contours of its internal logic, the relationships between its elements.

Sobre o narrador em “O nariz”, de Gógol: The writer and translator Val Vinokur adds (and this we’ve already begun to notice) that the resulting story is distorted by “improper narrative emphasis” and “misplaced assumption.” As Maguire puts it, the narrator’s “enthusiasms outrun common sense.”

So, this isn’t graceless writing; this is a great writer writing a graceless writer writing. (And not only that: it’s a great writer writing a graceless writer writing about a world in which a severed nose winds up in a loaf of bread.)

Tradição skaz: The skaz tradition (American variants of which we see in Twain, and John Kennedy Toole, and the comedian Sarah Cannon doing Minnie Pearl, and Sacha Baron Cohen doing Borat, and Rainn Wilson doing Dwight Schrute) challenges the notion that a disinterested, objective, third-person-omniscient narrator exists anywhere in the real world. It’s fun to pretend that such a person exists, and writers have made beautiful use of that notion (Chekhov, Turgenev, and Tolstoy among them), but, suggests Gogol, they have done so at a certain cost to the truth. Every story is narrated by someone, and since everyone has a viewpoint, every story is misnarrated (is narrated subjectively).

eine große Konfusion: I think, therefore I am wrong, after which I speak, and my wrongness falls on someone also thinking wrongly, and then there are two of us thinking wrongly, and, being human, we can’t bear to think without taking action, which, having been taken, makes things worse.

Inadequação da linguagem a partir de Gógol: Reading Gogol, it may occur to us that this is what our mind is doing all the time: making, with words, a world that doesn’t, quite, exist. Language is a meaning approximator that sometimes gets too big for its britches and deceives us, intentionally (someone with an agenda twists language to urge us into action) or unintentionally (with an idea in mind, we build an earnest case, seeking the language to make our idea seem true, unaware that, too fond of our idea, we’re stretching the thin fabric of language over untrue places in our argument).
Language, like algebra, operates usefully only within certain limits. It’s a tool for making representations of the world, which, unfortunately, we then go on to mistake for the world itself. Gogol is not making a ridiculous world; he’s showing us that we ourselves make a ridiculous world in every instant, by our thinking.

Like someone who watches a friend freak out during an emergency, we may, after reading Gogol, never look at our old pal language the same way again.

A natureza da poesia: 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. Gogol’s contribution was to perform this throwing of himself against the fence in the part of town where the little men live, the sputtering, inarticulate men whose language can’t rise to the occasion but who still feel everything the big men (articulate, educated, at ease) feel.

~ The world is full of nightmares waiting to happen to us but the people to whom Kovalyov turns don’t believe this, or don’t believe it yet, just as we don’t; they understand this nightmare to be uniquely Kovalyov’s (exceptional, freakish, embarrassing) rather than a preview of the (pending, inevitable) nightmare that will eventually come for all of us. ~

~ And we learn something about Kovalyov that rings true for all of us: he adapts quickly (too quickly) to insane new conditions. He has access to limited outrage. Sooner than we expect him to, he accepts his terrifying new state and goes on living, sad, peeved, but not rebellious; that would be impolite. ~

 

~ A life without earnest striving is a nightmare. (When desire vanishes from a normal life, that is called depression.) ~ 

 ~ Gogol hears, in everyday life, the first hints of the small miscommunications that, under duress, become catastrophic. It’s funny enough when Kovalyov, in the cathedral, can’t seem to get a straight answer from his own nose, but this same species of miscommunication, writ large, causes revolutions and genocides and political upheavals and family disasters that never get healed (divorces, estrangements, bitter grudges) and is, Gogol implies, at the heart of all human suffering—that is, at the heart of that constant nagging feeling of unrest and dissatisfaction that attends every human interaction.

There is something eternal about Gogol. He is true in all times and places. When the end of the world comes, he seems to say, it will (it can only) come out of this moment, out of the way we are thinking in this (and every) moment. The misunderstanding operative in the larger world is operative within us, right now, even if we’re sitting alone in a quiet room.

 ~

Resistir a traduzir a lógica da história (de Gogol): We feel that all of this needs to be explained, somehow, and our friend the lesser writer might be tempted to do just that (“Actually, it turns out, what had really happened was…”), but if the story’s crazy logic gets explained away, then so does that revelatory feeling it has produced in us, the sense that the story’s logic is actually the logic of the universe—that the story is an artificial occasion to show us how things really are, whereas normally those workings are hidden, until a moment of loss or disaster brings them into the open.

Sobre a conclusão de “O nariz”: I make a protest about the story’s failure to cohere logically.

“I know, right?” the narrator says. “It’s a train wreck, isn’t it?”
Somehow that’s enough.

And just like that—like one of those Tibetan monks who spend weeks fastidiously creating a sand mandala—Gogol happily destroys his magnificent creation and sweeps it into the river.

A história como uma caixa preta: We might imagine a story as a room-sized black box. The writer’s goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another. What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial.

That’s it.

What is the exact flavor of the thrill? The writer doesn’t have to know. That’s what he’s writing to find out.

Seguir a Voz: An idea for a voice appears, and off you go. You just “feel like” doing that voice. (And you find that you can.) Sometimes the inspiration for that voice might be a real person. Sometimes it’s a tendency in myself that I’ll exaggerate (in a story called “The Falls,” for example, I gave my main character, Morse, a ratcheted-up version of my own neurotic, worry-prone monkey mind). Sometimes it’s a fragment of language that came from elsewhere (like that line from the student paper).

The main thing I’d like to say about this mode of writing is that it’s fun. When I do it, I’m giving almost no thought to anything but sustaining the voice—not thinking of the story’s themes or what needs to happen next or any of that. In the early stages, I might not even be clear about why the person is talking the way he is. My only goal is to keep the energy of the voice high, to keep the character sounding like himself, which means, I’ve found, that the voice has to keep expanding. Having grasped the approximate “rules” of the voice, the reader will get restless if subjected to a series of sentences that (merely) abide by those rules. So I have to keep finding new ways to make the person sound like himself. The best way to do this is to keep putting new events in front of him, events that are escalatory (new to him), so that he has to find new registers in his voice with which to respond. (If a character, talking along in a certain voice, has never seen a horse before, and I show him one, his voice has to expand, to accommodate the horse.)
[...]
So, really, two things were happening at once: the voice was leading me, and I was leading the voice. It’s a chicken-or-egg thing that’s a little hard to explain. But the point is that the voice-creation was an ongoing way of beating back any conceptions that might arise about the “outcome” or the “message” of the story—of making sure that I didn’t end up (just) “writing a poem about two dogs fucking.”

Não ter uma concepção da história: So, one way to get a story out of “the plane of its original conception” is to try not to have an original conception. To do this, we need a method. For me (and, I like to imagine, for Gogol, when he was in skaz mode) that method is to “follow the voice.” But there are many methods. Each involves the writer proceeding in a way that honors or helps her pursue something about which she has strong opinions. It could be that she has strong opinions (is delighted by) patterns of recurring imagery. She might have strong opinions about the way the words look on the page. She might be a sound poet, guided by some obscure aural principle even she can’t articulate. She might be obsessed with the minutiae of structure. It can be anything. The idea is that with her attention focused on that thing that delights her, about which she has strong opinions, she’s less likely to know too well what she’s doing and indulge in that knowing-in-advance that, as we’ve said, has a tendency to deaden a work and turn it into a lecture or a one-sided performance and drive the reader away.

A cor de uma voz: When Jon finally succeeds in having sex with Carolyn, a girl he’s crazy about, he describes it like this:

“And though I had many times seen LI 34321 for Honey Grahams, where the stream of milk and the stream of honey enjoin to make that river of sweet-tasting goodness, I did not know that, upon making love, one person may become like the milk and the other like the honey, and soon they cannot even remember who started out the milk and who the honey, they just become one fluid, this like honey/milk combo.”

What he means is “I really enjoyed that and I think I’m in love.”

But he’s feeling more than just that.

And his voice is required, to tell us what else (what all) he’s feeling.
[...]
That morning has to fall on a certain mind for it to feel like any kind of real morning.

Graça: It may be possible that, when all is said and done, that’s what we’re really looking for—in a sentence, in a story, in a book: joy (overflow, ecstasy, intensity). An acknowledgment, in the prose, that all of this is too big to be spoken of, but also that death begins the moment we give up on trying to speak of it.

A ladainha de Ivan Ivanych em “Groselhas”, Tchekhov: “We see the people who go to market, eat by day, sleep by night, who babble nonsense, marry, grow old, good-naturedly drag their dead to the cemetery, but we do not see or hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is peaceful and quiet and only mute statistics protest: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition— And such a state of things is evidently necessary; obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence, and if there were not this silence, happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him—illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives at his ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind—and all is well.”

[...]

> And because that speech (the heart of the heart of the story) is “about” the question of whether our urge to be happy is to be indulged or resisted, we feel the story to be a sort of meditation on that question. Ivan’s conclusion that “there is no happiness and there should be none” hangs, retroactively, over the whole story.

A beleza sem atributos de Pelageya (“Groselhas”): The moment when Pelageya stops Ivan and Burkin in their tracks with her good looks is, for my money, the best proof of a character’s beauty in all of literature. (“Once in the house, the two visitors were met by a chambermaid, a young woman so beautiful that both of them stood still at the same moment and glanced at each other.”) Chekhov tells us nothing about her (no hair length, no height, nothing about her body, or her perfume, or the color of her eyes, or the shape of her nose) and yet the fact that she stuns these two presumably well-mannered old farts into borderline rudeness causes me to see her, or create her, in my mind.

A chuva e o seu sentido indefinido no final do conto “Groselhas”: The rain functions in the story like a side character: it continues to fall as the men bathe in the pond, then disappears until the story’s last line, when it makes a final appearance: “The rain beat against the window panes all night.” Rain has been a source of unhappiness (as they hiked), a source of happiness (falling on them as they swam in the pond), and now provides a persistent, low-level, nagging reminder of…well, something. To be in touch with the complex beauty of the story, try writing out what it is that the rain is “reminding” you of (or “saying” to you or “representing”) as it taps on the window there at the end. It’s not just one thing. It’s many things at once. And it’s personal; even if I could articulate my answer (I’ve tried several times and each time have deleted the result, finding it reductive and insufficient), my answer would not be yours, precisely.

Luckily, we don’t have to say.

That’s part of why the story was written: to produce that irreducible final moment, about which nothing more needs to be said.

~ A story means, at the highest level, not by what it concludes but by how it proceeds. ~

Nenhuma convicção é correta por muito tempo: Every human position has a problem with it. Believed in too much, it slides into error. It’s not that no position is correct; it’s that no position is correct for long. We’re perpetually slipping out of absolute virtue and failing to notice, blinded by our desire to settle in—to finally stop fretting about things and relax forever and just be correct; to find an agenda and stick with it.

Outros contos notáveis de Tchekhov: The lady with the pet dog, In the ravine, Enemies, About love, The Bishop

Escrever linha por linha atrás de uma voz: We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition. [...]

It’s kind of crazy but, in my experience, that’s the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.

Aplicar as preferências de alguém num texto: The point is: if you start with that sad little swath of prose and then begin (to use another fancy technical term) “energetically messing with it,” per exactly your taste (no defense or rationalization needed), it will start to become a more highly organized system.  [...] it’s not the flavor of your taste that matters; it’s the intensity with which you apply your taste that will cause the resulting work of art to feel highly organized.

Questão de gosto: I like what I like, and you like what you like, and art is the place where liking what we like, over and over, is not only allowed but is the essential skill. How emphatically can you like what you like? How long are you willing to work on something, to ensure that every bit of it gets infused with some trace of your radical preference?

The choosing, the choosing, that’s all we’ve got.

~ In a story, attribute must meet adversity.  ~

~ tradutor de Alyosha the Pot para o inglês: “When Alyosha first awakens to the notion of disinterested sympathy, of plain human fondness, the thought is so astonishing that Tolstoy’s syntax collapses into a kind of hash; this is an image of Alyosha’s almost languageless mentality groping toward a new idea. Most translators thwart Tolstoy by rendering this story in a style suitable for the drawing rooms of War and Peace. I have tried to be as low, simple, and even ungrammatical as the original.” ~ 

~ ambiguidade ao final de Alyosha the Pot: He just dies by chance, in a manner equivalent to, say, being hit by a falling tree. (Or does he? I always feel his fall as a kind of suicide-by-agitation—not intentional, but somehow in response to the incident with his father, the sort of thing the body unconsciously does when, for example, we’re distracted and become clumsy. His father has mastered him, locked him into a state of perpetual adolescence, and so Alyosha, regarding the frozen plain that is about to be the rest of his life, subconsciously opts out.) ~

Sobre Tolstói: He valued simplicity in style (“Look how wonderfully the peasants tell a story,” he said to Gorky. “Everything is simple. Few words, but much feeling. True wisdom needs few words—like ‘God have mercy’ ”) and believed the teaching of morality to be the true function of art.

Contradições de Tolstói: Tolstoy knew how to contradict himself.

“Novels and short stories,” he wrote in his diary in 1896, “describe the revolting manner in which two creatures become infatuated with each other…and all the while life, all of life, is beating at us with urgent questions—food, the distribution of property, labor, religion, human relations! It’s a shame! It is ignoble!” He also wrote this, thirty years earlier, in 1865: “The aim of the artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably but to make people love life in all its countless inexhaustible manifestations.” It wasn’t just age that produced the contradiction; the artist and the prude seemed to flicker on and off in him at every stage of his life.

Omissão, lâmina de dois gumes (sobre “Alyosha the Pot”, em que Tolstói declina de descrever as percepções do seu personagem no leito de morte): He wrote around that moment when he might have specified what Alyosha was feeling (what, precisely, he was surprised about) because—well, because he didn’t know. Or didn’t know yet. Or didn’t like the answer he was about to come up with. That swerve represents a sort of interim decision to not, at that moment, decide—to defer deciding.

The most artful and truthful thing is sometimes simply that which allows us to avoid being false: the swerving away, the deletion, the declining to decide, the falling silent, the waiting to see, the knowing when to quit.

Omission is sometimes a defect and leads to unclearness. But other times it’s a virtue and leads to ambiguity and an increase in narrative tension.

“The secret of boring people,” Chekhov said, “lies in telling them everything.”

A relação escritor/leitor como conversa: Those two people, in those postures, across that pond, are doing essential work. This is not a hobby, pastime, or indulgence. By their mutual belief in connection, they’re making the world better, by making it (at least between the two of them, in that small moment) more friendly. We might even say they’re preparing for future disaster; when disaster comes, they’ll enter it with a less panicky, reactive vision of the Other, because they’ve spent so much time in connection with an imaginary Other, while reading or writing.

~ At its best, in my experience, artistic mentoring works something like this: the mentor strongly expresses his view as if it is the only and entirely correct view. ~

Obsessão: The road to that “iconic space” I mentioned at the outset (that place where you do the work that only you can do) is marked by moments of strong, even maniacal preference. (And defiance, orneriness, fascination, indefensible obsession.) What Randall Jarrell said about stories holds true for the writers of stories: they “don’t want to know, don’t want to care, they just want to do as they please.”

~ A lifetime of writing has left me with one thing: the knowledge of how I do it. Or, to be completely honest, a knowledge of how I have done it. (How I will soon do it has to remain a continual mystery.) ~

Ausência de método: The closest thing to a method I have to offer is this: go forth and do what you please.

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.

[...]

The big questions have to be answered by hours at the desk. So much of the worrying we do is a way of avoiding work, which only delays the (work-enabled) solution.

A abertura proporcionada pela ficção: Fiction helps us remember that everything remains to be seen. It’s a sacrament dedicated to this end. We can’t always feel as open to the world as we feel at the end of a beautiful story, but feeling that way even briefly reminds us that such a state exists and creates the aspiration in us to strive to be in that state more often.

~ There are many versions of you, in you. To which one am I speaking, when I write? The best one. The one most like my best one. Those two best versions of us, in a moment of reading, exit our usual selves and, at a location created by mutual respect, become one. ~

Porque ainda escrever depois dos russos: part of my job (part of your job) is to find new paths for the story form to go down; to make stories that are as powerful as these Russian stories but that, in their voice and form and concerns, are new, meaning that they respond to the things history has given us to know about life on earth in the years since these Russians were here.