In my incessant goal of becoming a better writer, I re-read George Saunders’ masterpiece A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. He’s the author of Lincoln in the Bardo, and A Swim in a Pond explores what makes stories tick on a very technical level.

Saunders presents seven short stories by four Russian writers — Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, & Gogol — and, page by page, line by line, analyzes how each story is built.

It’s 400+ pages, so not exactly a quick read. Today, I want to share seven of my favorite ideas from the book with you:

1. Always Be Escalating

“What is escalation, anyway? One answer: refuse to repeat beats. Once a story has moved forward, through some fundamental change in the character’s condition, we don’t get to enact that change again. And we don’t get to stay there elaborating on that state.”

Your story isn't a treadmill. It's a staircase. Each step should take you higher. As Saunders says, "A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were."

2. Story as a Transfer of Energy

“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.”

The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; only converted from one form of energy to another (thank you, engineering degree).

Saunders says something similar of stories. You build your “potential energy” early on, to turn it into “kinetic energy” later. Your goal is to avoid losing energy between your story’s beats.

3. Causation Creates the Appearance of Meaning

“Making causality doesn’t seem sexy or particularly literary. It’s a workmanlike thing, to make A cause B… But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.”

Last week, I wrote about causation as one of the four pillars of storytelling. Saunders takes that a step further and claims that “causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for.”

Readers ask themselves, “Does this feel true?” Causation helps you make that answer a resounding “yes.”

4. Ruthless Efficiency

“A story is a frank, intimate conversation between equals. We keep reading because we feel respected by the writer. We feel her, over there on the production end of the process, imagining that we are as intelligent and worldly and curious as she is.”

This mindset creates a sort of pressure to respect your audience’s time. The more inefficiencies in your story, the less your audience feels respected, then the less they care about the story.

5. Meaningful Specificity

“The more I know, the less inclined I feel to pass a too-harsh or premature judgment. Some essential mercy in me has been switched on. What God has going for Him that we don’t is infinite information. Maybe that’s why He’s able to, supposedly, love us so much.”

The more we know about a person, their hopes and dreams and fears and failures, the more compassionate we are toward them.

This is how Saunders says great characters are built. By using meaningful specificity to help your reader empathize with them, no matter how crazy or horrible or average that character may at first seem.

6. A Motorbike with a Sidecar

Visualize a motorbike with a sidecar speeding down the highway. You, the storyteller, are the driver while your audience is your passenger.

“If the writer is doing his job right, he’s driving the motorcycle, and the reader is right there. When I go left, you feel me going left. If you’re writing a bad story, that sidecar is six miles away, and there’s no connection between the two.”

7. The Bouncer Test

Saunders says each line in your story should be able to answer the question, “Excuse me, but what are you doing here?”

When something feels out of place, it fails to be meaningful.

On my bookshelf filled with too many books on writing and storytelling, A Swim in a Pond is the one I pull out most often. This line sums up these seven ideas well:

“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, as an escalation: a meaningful alteration in the terms of the story.”

Have an awesome weekend,

Nathan

PS. What’s your favorite book on writing and / or storytelling?

Trivia — A Sentence I Wish I Wrote

This line comes from my favorite animated movie. What movie does it come from? Tap your best guess.