“That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation. “Be specific! Honour efficiency! … “Always be escalating,” he says. In enjoyably throwaway fashion, he assembles along his way a few rules for writing. (Read the story.)Īll this makes Saunders’s book very different from just another “how to” creative writing manual, or just another critical essay. He has to find out what movement there is, and what freedom, inside the story’s particular conditions – but without cheaply magicking them away. We’d ask, what was it for, then? The writer has to find a sweet spot between an implausibly happy resolution and a brute refusal of satisfaction. Not merely disappointing them: the story can’t do nothing with Marya, that would be cheating. Good writing works in intricate relationship with a reader’s expectations, raising them and leading them on, then sidestepping or surpassing them. But nothing doing: the landowner’s a bit useless and ineffective, and anyway Marya’s preoccupied by her problems with the janitor at school, who is rude to her and hits the boys. A love affair? As if on cue, one attractive and wealthy landowner appears alongside her in his carriage. “The story has said of her, ‘She is unhappy and can’t imagine any other life for herself.’ And we feel the story preparing itself to say something like, ‘Well, we’ll see about that.’”Ī less good writer than Chekhov might have worked with the grain of the expectation raised: something might happen to save Marya from her future. Here was her past and her present, and she could imagine no other future than the school, the road to the town and back … ” Saunders begins to speculate forwards, as any reader is bound to. “She felt as though she had been living in these parts for a long, long time, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Marya, a thwarted, lonely schoolmistress is making her way home in a cart from the town where she’s gone to pick up her salary, to the bleak village school where she works. This kind of reading (one of the best kinds, I’m convinced) tracks the author’s intentions – and missed intentions, and intuitions, and instinctive recoil from what’s banal or obvious – so closely and intimately, at every step, through every sentence. Now, what do you know? And now? And what are you curious about? Where do you think the story is headed? Why did Chekhov go that way, and not this? So much for the death of the author. He takes Chekhov’s “In the Cart”, for instance, literally one page at a time, interrupting the text with his interrogations. Saunders doesn’t come from the end of a completed story but dives in at the beginning and into the middle, trying to experience it in the making, imagine why it unfolded the way it did. You don’t get up from your writing table believing you’ve done something “of value to the world”.Īnton Chekhov: ‘Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.’ Photograph: Print Collector/Getty Images He’s right, too – as well as appealingly modest – in thinking that the best teaching is “of value” straightforwardly, as writing itself somehow can’t be. I love the warmth with which he writes about this teaching, and agree wholeheartedly that there’s not much on earth as good, if you’re that way inclined, as an afternoon spent discussing sublime fiction with a class of eagerly intelligent apprentice writers, saturated in the story and greedy for insight and understanding (everyone saturated and greedy, the teacher along with the rest). “A few years back, after the end of one class (chalk dust hovering in the autumnal air, old-fashioned radiator clanking in the corner, marching band processing somewhere in the distance, let’s say),” he had the realisation that “some of the best moments of my life, the moments during which I’ve really felt myself offering something of value to the world, have been spent teaching that Russian class.” Novelist and short story writer George Saunders has been teaching creative writing at Syracuse University in the US for the last 20 years, including a course in the 19th-century Russian short story in translation. T his book is a delight, and it’s about delight too.
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