A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

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Highlights
- The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind. (Location 120)
- In Buddhism, itâs said that a teaching is like âa finger pointing at the moon.â The moon (enlightenment) is the essential thing and the pointing finger is trying to direct us to it, but itâs important not to confuse finger with moon. (Location 186)
- We could understand a story as simply a series of such expectation/resolution moments. (Location 212)
- 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. Weâd better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning. (Location 242)
- 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. (Location 323)
- 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. (Location 326)
- The movie producer and all-around mensch Stuart Cornfeld once told me that in a good screenplay, every structural unit needs to do two things: (1) be entertaining in its own right and (2) advance the story in a non-trivial way. (Location 693)
- Semyon the only peasant, Hanov the only landowner. A story is not like real life; itâs like a table with just a few things on it. The âmeaningâ of the table is made by the choice of things and their relation to one another. (Location 780)
- Thatâs really all a story is: a limited set of elements that we read against one another. (Location 786)
- (A linked pair of writing dictums: âDonât make things happen for no reasonâ and âHaving made something happen, make it matter.â) (Location 797)
- Chekhov once said, âArt doesnât have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.â âFormulate them correctlyâ might be taken to mean: âmake us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.â (Location 975)
- The world is full of people with agendas, trying to persuade us to act on their behalf (spend on their behalf, fight and die on their behalf, oppress others on their behalf). But inside us is what Hemingway called a âbuilt-in, shockproof, shit detector.â How do we know something is shit? We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it. And that part of the mind is the one that reading and writing refine into sharpness. (Location 998)
- Imagine a painting of a tree: a good, tall, healthy oak, standing proud on top of a hill. Now add a second oak to the painting, butâŚsickly: gnarled, bent, with bare branches. As you look at that painting, your mind will understand it to be âabout,â letâs say: vitality vs. weakness. Or: life vs. death. Or: sickness vs. health. Itâs a realistic painting of two trees, yes, but there is also a metaphorical meaning implied, by the elements contained in it. We âcompareâ the two trees (or âcompare and contrastâ them), at first, anyway, without thought or analysis. We just see them. The two trees stand there in our minds, juxtaposed, meaning by inference. We experience, rather than articulate, the result. The juxtaposition results in a feeling: instantaneous, spontaneous, complex, multitonal, irreducible. (Location 1704)
- Weâre always rationally explaining and articulating things. But weâre at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occursâor doesnâtâin that instant. What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we âknowâ something (we feel it) but canât articulate it because itâs too complex and multiple. But the âknowingâ at such moments, though happening without language, is real. Iâd say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, itâs superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way. (Location 1712)
- It is saying that the highest aspiration of art is to move the audience and that if the audience is moved, technical deficiencies are immediately forgiven. (Location 1748)
- Whitman was right: we are large, we do contain multitudes. Thereâs more than one âusâ in there. When we âfind our voice,â whatâs really happening is that weâre choosing a voice from among the many voices weâre able to âdo,â and weâre choosing it because weâve found that, of all the voices we contain, itâs the one, so far, that has proven itself to be the most energetic. (Location 1782)
- A switch got thrown in my head, and the next day I started writing a story in that new modeâallowing myself to be entertaining, setting aside my idea of what a âclassicâ story sounded like, and my usual assumption that only things that happened in the real world were allowed to happen in a story. In this new story, which was set in a futuristic theme park, I was using an awkward, slightly overdriven corporate voice that came naturally to me when I thought, âGo ahead, be funny.â I wrote it a few lines at a time, not sure where it was going (what its arc was, or its theme, or its âmessageâ), just paying attention to the line-by-line energy and especially to the humor, keeping an eye on my imaginary reader, to see if she was still with meâif she, like my wife, was laughing from the other room and wanted more of the story rather than hoping it would mercifully end soon. In this mode, I found, I had stronger opinions than when I was trying to be Hemingway. If something wasnât working, I knew what to do about it, immediately and instinctually, in the form of an impulse (âOh, that might be coolâ), whereas before Iâd been rationally deciding, in stiff obeisance to what I thought a story should, or must, do. This was a much freer modeâlike trying to be funny at a party. (Location 1805)
- When I finished the story, I could see that it was the best thing Iâd ever written. There was some essential âme-nessâ in itâfor better or worse, no one else could have written it. The things that were actually on my mind at that time, because they were in my life, were in the story: class issues, money shortages, work pressures, fear of failure, the oddball tonality of the American workplace, the failures of grace my state of overwork was causing me to commit every day. The story was oddly made, slightly embarrassingâit exposed my actual taste, which, it turned out, was kind of working-class and raunchy and attention-seeking. I held that story up against the stories I loved (Location 1816)
- Andâto belabor this already questionable metaphorâwhat will make that shit-hill grow is our commitment to it, the extent to which we say, âWell, yes, it is a shit-hill, but itâs my shit-hill, so let me assume that if I continue to work in this mode that is mine, this hill will eventually stop being made of shit, and will grow, and from it, I will eventually be able to see (and encompass in my work) the whole world.â (Location 1832)
- We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he wanted to express, and then he just, you know, expressed it. That is, we buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same. The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and beautiful and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully. (Location 1864)
- A guy (Stan) constructs a model railroad town in his basement. Stan acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge, near that fake campfire, then notices that heâs arranged his hobo into a certain postureâthe hobo seems to be gazing back at the town. Why is he looking over there? At that little blue Victorian house? Stan notes a plastic woman in the window, then turns her a little, so sheâs gazing out. Over at the railroad bridge, actually. Huh. Suddenly, Stan has made a love story. (Oh, why canât they be together? If only âLittle Jackâ would just go home. To his wife. To âLinda.â) What did Stan (the artist) just do? Well, first, surveying his little domain, he noticed which way his hobo was looking. Then he chose to change that little universe, by turning the plastic woman. Now, Stan didnât exactly decide to turn her. It might be more accurate to say that it occurred to him to do soâin a split second, with no accompanying language, except maybe a very quiet internal âYes.â He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldnât articulate, and before heâd had the time or inclination to articulate them. In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference. (Location 1867)
- I once heard the great Chicago writer Stuart Dybek say, âA story is always talking to you; you just have to learn to listen to it.â Revising like this is a way of listening to the story and of having faith in it: it wants to be its best self, and if youâre patient with it, in time, it will be. Essentially, the whole process is: intuition plus iteration. (Location 1910)
- Thatâs how I see revision: a chance for the writerâs intuition to assert itself over and over. (Location 1922)
- A piece written and revised in this way, like one of those seed crystals in biology class, starts out small and devoid of intention and begins to expand, organically, reacting to itself, fulfilling its own natural energy. (Location 1923)
- Bob started out a cartoon on which I could heap some scorn, so that my reader and I could be united in looking down at Bob, but now heâs closer to âus, in a different life.â (Location 1946)
- 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, funnierâhis 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. (Location 1952)
- A story is a frank, intimate conversation between equals. We keep reading because we continue to 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. Because sheâs paying attention to where we are (to where sheâs put us), she knows when we are âexpecting a changeâ or âfeeling skeptical of this new developmentâ or âgetting tired of this episode.â (She also knows when sheâs delighted us and that, in that state, weâre slightly more open to whatever sheâll do next.) (Location 1985)
- The exciting part of all of this, to me, is that we always have a basis on which to proceed. The reader is out there, and sheâs real. Sheâs interested in life and, by picking up our work, has given us the benefit of the doubt. All we have to do is engage her. To engage her, all we have to do is value her. (Location 1994)
- (I sometimes joke with my students that if they find themselves trapped in exposition, writing pages and pages in which their action doesnât rise, all they need to do is drop this sentence into their story: âThen something happened that changed everything forever.â The story has no choice but to respond.)* (Location 2298)
- 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; itâs 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. (Location 2327)
- So, thatâs no problem, and itâs even beautiful, but where it gets complicated is in that moment when someone proposes that I judge Chicago, so we can do something about it. When someone asks, âWell, what should we do about Chicago?ââLord help us. A solution will arise, and it will likely be dunderheaded, because of how pathetically Iâve just underimagined good old Chicago. This is also how we imagine, and then judge, people. (Location 2684)
- If we set out to do a thing, and then we (merely) do it, everyone is bummed out. (Thatâs not a work of art, thatâs a lecture, a data dump.) When we start reading a story, we do so with a built-in expectation that it will surprise us by how far it manages to travel from its humble beginnings; that it will outgrow its early understanding of itself. (Our friend says, âWatch this video of a river.â The minute the river starts to overflow its banks, we know why she wanted us to watch it.) (Location 2733)
- So, why the index cards, on that date? In a word: underconfidence. We prepare those cards and bring them along and keep awkwardly consulting them when we should be looking deeply into our dateâs eyes because we donât believe that, devoid of a plan, we have enough to offer. 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. (Location 2737)
- The writer spends her whole artistic life trying to figure out what gas stations she is uniquely capable of making. What does she have that will propel the reader around the track? What does she do in real life when seeking a conversational boost of speed? How does she entertain a person, assure him of her affection, show him that sheâs listening? How does she seduce, persuade, console, distract? What ways has she found of being charming in the world, and what might the writing equivalent of these be? It would be nice if she could just go, âOh, in real life, I do X,â and then do X in her workâbut itâs trickier than that. (Location 2748)
- So we might understand revision as a way of practicing relationship; seeing what, when we do it, improves the relationship between ourselves and the reader. What makes it more intense, direct, and honest? What drives it into the ditch? The exciting thing is that weâre not doomed to ask these questions abstractly; we get to ask them locally, by running our meter over the phrases, sentences, sections, etc., that make up our story, while assuming some continuity of reaction between the reader and ourselves. (Location 2774)
New highlights added July 22, 2022 at 10:30 PM
- fact draws us in. This seems to be one of those âlaws of fictionâ weâve been seeking. âThe car was dented and redâ makes a car appear in the mind. Even more so if the fact is an action: âThe dented red car slowly left the parking lot.â Notice how little we doubt that statement, the spontaneous, involuntary buy-in that makes us forget that there is no car and no parking lot. But to say that the story is nearly all facts doesnât mean that Tolstoy is a minimalist. He has a gift for making sentences that, staying within factuality, convey a bounty of information and make a rich, detailed, almost overfull world. (Location 3657)
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Yet his writing is full of compassion. Thatâs what heâs known for. He emanates concern for the weak and powerless, sees all sides of every issue, inhabits character after character (low people, lofty people, horses, dogs, you name it), and the resulting fictional world feels nearly as detailed and various as the real one. A person can hardly read even a few lines of Tolstoy without feeling her interest in life renewed. (Location 3691)
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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. (Location 3700)
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So, five shifts of vantage point in three paragraphs: (1) the objective truth (via our omniscient narrator), (2) Vasiliâs public stance (via his speech to Nikita), (3) Vasiliâs private stance (via his thoughts), (4) Nikitaâs public stance (via his speech to Vasili), and (5) Nikitaâs private stance (via his thoughts). Processing this number of shifts normally requires some extra effort on the part of the readerâa sort of fee gets charged in readerly attention. But here we barely notice, charmed by Tolstoyâs âfundamental accuracy of perception.â When we go into a characterâs mind, what we find there feels familiar and true. Weâve had versions of those same thoughts ourselves, and so we accept them, and the result is a view of the situation that feels holographic and godlike. (Location 3720)
- In other words, what makes us think of Tolstoy as a moral-ethical giant here is a technique (going from mind to mind) coupled with a confidence. Of what is Tolstoy confident? That people are more similar to him than different. That he has an inner Vasili, an inner aged host, an inner Petrushka, an inner Nikita. This confidence serves as a gateway to (what reads as) saintly compassion. (Location 3740)
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So, the big difference in these two versions is the increased causality in Tolstoyâs version. This âlesser writerâsâ version reads like a sequence of unrelated events. Nothing causes anything else. Some thingsâŚoccur. But we donât know why. The result of the sequence (âthey get lostâ) feels out of relation with what came before. They just get lost randomly, for no reason, and this means nothing. (Location 3808)
- Iâve worked with so many wildly talented young writers over the years that I feel qualified to say that there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who donât. First, a willingness to revise. Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality. Making causality doesnât seem sexy or particularly literary. Itâs a workmanlike thing, to make A cause B, the stuff of vaudeville, of Hollywood. But itâs the hardest thing to learn. It doesnât come naturally, not to most of us. But thatâs really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality. (Location 3815)
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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 âconservedâ). She does this by being aware of the nature of the energy sheâs made. In a bad story (or an early draft), the writer doesnât fully understand the nature of the energy sheâs 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. (Location 3847)
- Earlier, we defined escalation as that which results when we refuse to repeat beats. Each time we pass that clothesline, the laundry has undergone some small change in its condition. We read this as an escalation, or at least a mini-escalationâa ârefusal to repeat.â (It would be a lesser story if all four descriptions were identical.) (Location 3877)
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âAlways be escalating,â then, can be understood as âBe alert, always, to the possibilities you have created for variation.â If an element recurs, the second appearance is an opportunity for variation and, potentially, escalation. (Location 3880)
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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: âThe table was dusty.â If, later, we write, âThe newly dusted table gleamed,â this implies that someone who had previously neglected it has now dusted it: someone has changed. (Location 3973)
- How does Tolstoy propose that such a transformation might happen? First, letâs note that after that silent half a minute, Vasili does not launch into a soliloquy or internal monologue describing his changed feelings about master/peasant relations or his radical new understanding of Christian virtue as it applies to the treatment of the less fortunate. He doesnât announce (to us or Nikita or himself) that he has ârealizedâ something. The order of operations is not: a change overcomes him, and then he realizes this, tells us about it, then acts. He just acts (or, actually, goes back into action). And he goes back into action just like himself, in the same way he always has, âwith the same resolution with which he used to strike hands when making a good purchase.â Heâs doing what heâs been doing all his life: boldly getting busy, to forestall anxiety. (Location 4059)
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I think something like this is what happens to Vasili. He gets brought back to himself by acting like himself. As himself, he knows what to do. His natural energy, which for so long had been used to benefit only himself, gets redirected. A defect becomes a superpower. (A bull about to run through a china shop gets turned in the direction of a house slated for demolition.) And then, observing himself in action, seeing a charitable, selfless person, he is moved and feels âa peculiar joy,â a joy I associate with his relief at finally shucking off a way of being that has always impeded him. He recognizes this new version of himself, feels that âstrange and solemn tenderness,â and starts to cry. And that is âtransformation.â (Location 4089)
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Tolstoy is proposing something radical: moral transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy but by a redirection of his (same old) energy. What a relief this model of transformation is. What else do we have but what we were born with and have always, thus far, been served (and imprisoned) by? Say youâre a world-class worrier. If that worry energy gets directed at extreme personal hygiene, youâre âneurotic.â If it gets directed at climate change, youâre an âintense visionary activist.â We donât have to become an entirely new person to do better; our view just has to be readjusted, our natural energy turned in the right direction. We donât have to swear off our powers or repent of who we are or what we like to do or are good at doing. Those are our horses; we just have to hitch them to the right, uh, sled. (Location 4116)
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Iâd say thereâs 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 writerâs 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. Here, an accusation weâve been dancing around (âTolstoy seems to be exhibiting class biasâ)* gets converted (by asking, âWhere, exactly?â) into a neutral, more workable, technical observation: âIn (at least) two placesâwhen Nikita comes home from the hospital and in their respective death scenesâNikita is denied the interiority that Tolstoy gave Vasili in similar moments.â (Location 4177)
New highlights added September 9, 2022 at 11:14 PM
- The narration in âThe Nose,â it turns out, is a particular Russian form of unreliable first-person narration called skaz. Imagine an actor telling a story in character. And that character isâŚnot right. He is, per the literary critic Viktor Vinogradov, âsharply characterized by his substandard speech.â According to another critic, Robert Maguire, the Gogolian skaz narrator âhas little formal education and little idea of how to develop an argument, let alone talk in an eloquent and persuasive way about his feelings, although he wishes to be considered informed and observant; he tends to ramble and digress and cannot distinguish the trivial from the important.â The writer and translator Val Vinokur adds (and this weâve already begun to notice) that the resulting story is distorted by âimproper narrative emphasisâ and âmisplaced assumption.â As Maguire puts it, the narratorâs âenthusiasms outrun common sense.â (Location 4731)
- 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. Itâs 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). (Location 4750)
- 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 canât bear to think without taking action, which, having been taken, makes things worse. (Location 4782)
- If youâve ever wondered, as I have, âGiven how generally sweet people are, why is the world so fucked up?,â Gogol has an answer: we each have an energetic and unique skaz loop running in our heads, one we believe in fully, not as âmerely my opinionâ but âthe way things actually are, for sure.â The entire drama of life on earth is: Skaz-Headed Person #1 steps outside, where he encounters Skaz-Headed Person #2. Both, seeing themselves as the center of the universe, thinking highly of themselves, immediately slightly misunderstand everything. They try to communicate but arenât any good at it. Hilarity ensues. (Location 4784)
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The fun here is spending a few moments in the land where language goes to admit what it really is: a system of communication with limitations, suitable for use in everyday life but wonky in its higher registers. Language can appear to say more than it has a right to say; we can form it into sentences that are not in relationship with what actually is or even what could be. (Location 4809)
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What does it mean that all of this now, sort of, is? It means that language can make worlds that donât and could never exist. Reading Gogol, it may occur to us that this is what our mind is doing all the time: making, with words, a world that doesnât, 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, weâre stretching the thin fabric of language over untrue places in our argument). (Location 4818)
- Language, like algebra, operates usefully only within certain limits. Itâs 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; heâs showing us that we ourselves make a ridiculous world in every instant, by our thinking. (Location 4823)
- Here was Gogolâs self-assessment: âPushkinâŚtold me that no other writer before has had this gift of presenting the banality of life so vividly, of being able to describe the banality of the banal man with such force that all the little details that escape notice flash large in everyoneâs eyes. That is my main quality, which belongs to me alone, and which indeed no other writer possesses.â (Location 4884)
- Most of the evil Iâve seen in the worldâmost of the nastiness Iâve been on the receiving end of (and, for that matter, the nastiness I, myself, have inflicted on others)âwas done by people who intended good, who thought they were doing good, by reasonable people, staying polite, making accommodations, laboring under slight misperceptions, who havenât had the inclination or taken the time to think things through, whoâve been sheltered from or were blind to the negative consequences of the belief system of which they were part, bowing to expedience and/or âcommonsenseâ notions that have come to them via their culture and that they have failed to interrogate. (Location 4975)
- Writing about Gregor von Rezzoriâs classic Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Deborah Eisenberg pointed out the great harm that can be done by a handful of evil people, as long as they have the âpassive assistance of many, many other people who glance out of the windows of their secure homes and see a cloudless sky.â She goes on to list the sins of such passive people: âcarelessness, poor logic, casual snobberyâeither social or intellectualâinattentiveness.â (Location 4991)
- The main thing Iâd like to say about this mode of writing is that itâs fun. When I do it, Iâm giving almost no thought to anything but sustaining the voiceânot thinking of the storyâs 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, Iâve found, that the voice has to keep expanding. Having grasped the approximate ârulesâ 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.) (Location 5208)
- So, one way to get a story out of âthe plane of its original conceptionâ 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 âfollow the voice.â 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 canât 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, sheâs less likely to know too well what sheâs doing and indulge in that knowing-in-advance that, as weâve said, has a tendency to deaden a work and turn it into a lecture or a one-sided performance and drive the reader away. (Location 5234)