A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

A story is an organic whole, and when we say a story is good, we’re saying that it responds alertly to itself. This holds true in both directions; a brief description of a road tells us how to read the present moment but also all the past moments in the story and all those still to come.

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.

This is an important storytelling move we might call “ritual banality avoidance.” If we deny ourselves the crappo version of our story, a better version will (we aspirationally assume) present itself. To refuse to do the crappo thing is to strike a de facto blow for quality. (If nothing else, at least we haven’t done that.)

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.

Here we’d just about settled into a simple view of Marya as a completely innocent, blameless victim of a harsh system. But then the story says, “Well, hold on; isn’t one quality of a harsh system that it deforms the people within it and makes them complicit in their own destruction?” (Which is another way of saying: “Let’s not forget that Marya is a human being, and complicated, and susceptible to error.”)

I find myself thinking of Terry Eagleton’s assertion that “capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body.

As we’ve been saying, the story form is ruthlessly efficient. 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.

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.

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.

Having seen the difference between Marya’s internally narrated version of herself and her actual position in the world, I find myself feeling more tenderness for her, and more protective of her. This more complicated, endangered Marya is the one I take with me to the end of the story.

Again, Chekhov’s instinct seems to be toward variation, against stasis. One of his gifts is an ability to naturally impose variety on a situation that a lesser writer would leave static.

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.

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 of the week before those three ghosts show up to haunt Scrooge, or Romeo’s tenth-birthday party, or that period in Luke Skywalker’s life when not all that much was going on.)

If we’ve been waiting for an end to her unhappiness, here it is. Relief has arrived in the form of a memory. She recalls who she once was. She is who she once was.

Having recalled those memories, Marya is literally not the same person she was just seconds before. And we feel this as an escalation; suddenly, the person she used to be (beloved, special, cared for) wakes up into this scary new reality. We feel the shock of it. (“I’m a near-peasant teacher in a crummy provincial school? What? Me? Marya?”) but we also feel her joy at being restored to herself, to her real self.

What makes this such a human-scaled and heartbreaking description of loneliness, real loneliness, loneliness as it actually occurs in the world, is that we’ve watched Marya go through all of this from a position inside her. A story with less internality might have produced a simple feeling of pity (“Oh, that poor, lonely person”). We’d understand Marya as the Lesser Other. But the story’s virtuosic internality implicates her, even as it draws us in. She’s not a perfect person who is lonely. She’s an imperfect person who is lonely. We feel pity for lonely imperfect Marya in the same way we would feel pity for someone lonely and imperfect we loved, or for imperfect (lonely) us.

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.

What I stress to my students is how empowering this process is. 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 “built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” 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.

One of the pleasures of this exercise is watching my students as they start to realize that, yes, wow, the director, Vittorio De Sica, really did take that much care. Every aspect of every frame has been carefully considered and lovingly used, and this is part of the reason the sequence moved them the first time they watched it. That is: De Sica was taking responsibility for every single thing in his film.

Of course he was. Bicycle Thieves is a great work of art and De Sica is an artist, and that’s what an artist does: takes responsibility.

When a writer subjects us to a non-normative event—a physical implausibility, the use of markedly elevated language (or markedly vernacular language), or a series of lengthy digressions in a Russian pub in which the people keep freezing in midaction for several pages so that each can be described at length, in turn—he pays a price: our reading energy drops. (We get suspicious and resistant.) But if it doesn’t drop fatally, and if, later, we see that this was all part of the plan—if what seemed a failure of craft turns out to be integral to the story’s meaning (that is, it seems that he “meant to do that”)—then all is forgiven and we might even understand the profitable exploitation of that apparent excess as a form of virtuosity.

A good story is one that, having created a pattern of excesses, notices those excesses and converts them into virtues.

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. So, one way to approach a story—to evaluate how good it is, how graceful and efficient—is to ask, “What is the heart of you, dear story?” (Or, channeling Dr. Seuss, “Why are you bothering telling me this?”)

Again, specificity makes character. Turgenev has the contractor sing in a specific way (he’s a “shredder,” in guitar terms, amazing his audience via technical prowess), and through this, the contractor became a particular guy, and now stands for something.

Or imagine we’re bouncers, roaming through Club Story, asking each part, “Excuse me, but why do you need to be in here?” In a perfect story, every part has a good answer. (“Well, uh, in my subtle way, I am routing energy to the heart of the story.”)

Yes: we connect pragmatism with technical prowess. We remember that the contractor, “a highly resourceful and smart tradesman,” was also an efficient technical singing wizard.

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.

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.

Yashka seems more subdued and beaten down and “doleful.” But, complicating things (making more beauty), the sparrows are the ones who (like Yashka, sort of) fly up and hover over the town (they, like Yashka, are capable of ascension).

I’ve sometimes wondered if this effect was intentional: a sort of apologia from Turgenev for his own lack of craft. If we are moved, Turgenev has, via this story that claims that emotional power is the highest aim of art and can be obtained even in the face of clumsy craft, demonstrated that very thing.

Which would be, you know—pretty great craft.

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.

The writer can choose what he writes about,” said Flannery O’Connor, “but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

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.

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 clearcut intention and then condently 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.

I once heard the great Chicago writer Stuart Dybek say, “A story is always talking to you; you just have to learn to listen to it.” 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 you’re patient with it, in time, it will be. Essentially, the whole process is: intuition plus iteration.

We’ll find our voice and ethos and distinguish ourselves from all the other writers in the world without needing to make any big overarching decisions, just by the thousands of small ones we make as we revise.

The best it could have been was exactly what we intended it to be. 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.

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.

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 she’s paying attention to where we are (to where she’s put us), she knows when we are “expecting a change” or “feeling skeptical of this new development” or “getting tired of this episode.” (She also knows when she’s delighted us and that, in that state, we’re slightly more open to whatever she’ll do next.)

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 she’s real. She’s interested in life and, by picking up our work, has given us the benet of the doubt.

All we have to do is engage her.

To engage her, all we have to do is value her.

To review: the fundamental unit of storytelling is a two-part move.

First, the writer creates an expectation: “Once upon a time, there was a dog with two heads.” In the reader’s mind arises a suite of questions (“Do the heads get along?” “What happens at mealtime?” “Are other animals in this world two-headed?”) and the first intimations of what the story might be about (“The divided self?” “Partisanship?” “Optimism vs. pessimism?” “Friendship?”).

Second, the writer responds to (or “uses” or “exploits” or “honors”) that set of expectations. But not too tightly (using those expectations in a way that feels too linear or phoned in) and not too loosely (taking the story off in some random direction that bears no relation to the expectations it has created).

One time-honored way of creating an expectation: enactment of a pattern.

I sometimes joke with my students that if they find themselves trapped in exposition, writing pages and pages in which their action doesn’t rise, all they need to do is drop this sentence into their story: “Then something happened that changed everything forever.” The story has no choice but to respond.

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.

So, “good writerly habit” might consist of continually revising toward specicity, so that specicity can appear and then produce plot (or, as we prefer to call it, “meaningful action”).

Consider the following version of “The Darling,” in which the internal dynamics have been neutralized as a source of meaning:

“Once upon a time, Olenka had a lover, Kukin, to whom she conformed completely. She loved him at 9 on a scale of 10. They were together six months. Then he died. Then she had another lover, Vasily, to whom she conformed completely. She loved him at 9 on a scale of 10. They were together six months. Then he died. Then she had a third lover, Smirnin, to whom she conformed completely. She loved him at 9 on a scale of 10. They were together six months. Then he died.”

That’s not a story. It lacks the specificity that creates internal dynamics. (How, exactly, did Kukin die? How long did Olenka mourn? How long, comparatively, did she mourn after Vasily died? Which of her loves was the most physical? The harshest? And so on.) In the above version, nothing is felt to cause anything else. So none of it means anything. The writer has failed to exploit a source of beauty: the internal variation by which things like “progress” and “tragedy” and “reversal” and “redemption” are made to appear to have occurred in a work that is entirely invented.

In an inferior version of that halftime show described above, the people on that football eld just drift around, wearing randomly colored street clothes, conveying no meaning. The difference between a master halftime-show choreographer and a hack is the attention paid to the details of internal dynamics.

Again: do we really “notice” these things the first time we read the story? I sure didn’t, back when I read it for the first time. But we notice them now, as we analyze the story. These structures are undeniably present. And I’d say we noticed them, on rst read, “in our bodies” or “in that deep-reading portion of our minds.” 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.

And let’s note that we’re only asking these questions (which, in turn, are causing the story to ask questions about the nature of love) because the length of each relationship was specified by the story and because Chekhov “remembered” or “took the trouble” to vary this parameter.

Always be escalating. That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation. A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is (still) escalating.

It’s quite beautiful. The story has increased its meaning into its very last line, and even into the white space afterward. As we’ve said good endings do, this one creates an entire future world of different, plausible possibilities.

To me, “The Darling” is about a tendency, present in all of us, to misunderstand love as “complete absorption in,” rather than “in full communication with.

The instant we wake the story begins: “Here I am. In my bed. Hard worker, good dad, decent husband, a guy who always tries his best. Jeez, my back hurts. Probably from the stupid gym.”

And just like that, with our thoughts, the world gets made.

Or, anyway, a world gets made.

This world-making via thinking is natural, sane, Darwinian: we do it to survive. Is there harm in it? Well, yes, because we think in the same way that we hear or see: within a narrow, survival-enhancing range. We don’t see or hear all that might be seen or heard but only that which is helpful for us to see and hear. Our thoughts are similarly restricted and have a similarly narrow purpose: to help the thinker thrive.

So, in every instant, a delusional gulf gets created between things as we think they are and things as they actually are. Off we go, mistaking the world we’ve made with our thoughts for the real world. Evil and dysfunction (or at least obnoxiousness) occur in proportion to how solidly a person believes that his projections are correct and energetically acts upon them.

And look at that: the more I know about her, 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 innite information. Maybe that’s why He’s able to, supposedly, love us so much.

Those index cards are the conversational equivalent of a plan. A plan is nice. With a plan, we get to stop thinking. We can just execute. But a conversation doesn’t work that way, and neither does a work of art. Having an intention and then executing it does not make good art. Artists know this. According to Donald Barthelme, “The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.

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, “Watch this video of a river.” The minute the river starts to overflow its banks, we know why she wanted us to watch it.)

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 date’s eyes because we don’t 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.

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?)

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.)

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 we’re 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.

Likewise, as we’ll see in a bit, when Tolstoy recounts the thoughts or feelings of his characters, he does this succinctly and precisely, using simple objective sentences that seem factual in their syntax and modesty of assertion.

A fact draws us in. This seems to be one of those “laws of fiction” we’ve been seeking. “The car was dented and red” makes a car appear in the mind. Even more so if the fact is an action: “The dented red car slowly left the parking lot.” 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.

We know how things are and how they are not. We know how things tend to work and how they don’t. We know how things mostly go and how they never go. And we like it when a story agrees with our sense of how the world works. It gives us a thrill, and this thrill-at-truth keeps us reading. In a story entirely made up, it’s actually the main thing that keeps us reading. 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.

Well, of course, the writer is not the person. The writer is a version of the person who makes a model of the world that may seem to advocate for certain virtues, virtues by which he may not be able to live.

“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.

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.

Reading “Master and Man,” we begin living it; the words disappear and we find ourselves thinking not about word choice but about the decisions the characters are making and decisions we have made, or might have to make someday, in our actual lives.

... 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.

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.

This is important, because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning.

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.

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.

Every story is narrated by someone, and since everyone has a viewpoint, every story is misnarrated (is narrated subjectively).

Since all narration is misnarration, Gogol says, let us misnarrate joyfully.

It’s like a prose version of the theory of relativity: no fixed, objective, “correct” viewpoint exists; an unbalanced narrator describes, in an unbalanced voice, the doings of a cast of unbalanced characters.

In other words, like life.

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.

What does it mean that all of this now, sort of, is? It means that language can make worlds that don’t 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 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.

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.

Gogol was a strange creature,” Nabokov wrote, “but genius is always strange; it is only your healthy second-rater who seems to the grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely developing the reader’s own notions of life.” Tolstoy and Chekhov, Nabokov said, also had their “moments of irrational insight” that produced an abrupt moment of “focal shift,” but in Gogol “this shifting is the very basis of his art.

These people say all the right things (they express concern and sympathy, they’re cordial and curious, they want to help, or at least be seen as helpful), but they can’t help, because they are not (not yet) living the nightmare he’s living, that nightmare that can take many forms: the loss of one’s nose, sure, but also the loss of an arm or one’s health or livelihood or wife or child or sanity. 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.

Also, it’s not their job. Each of them stays strictly within the bounds of what they’re allowed to do and expected to do by the system of which they are part. That system (their society) has been engineered for normal operation; it can’t help someone in such extraordinary need as Kovalyov. (Their reactions are strangely mild, as if Kovalyov has lost not his nose but a suitcase.)

But on the mundane side of things, if we want to understand evil (nastiness, oppression, neglect) we should recognize that the people who commit these sins don’t always cackle while committing them; often they smile, because they’re feeling so useful and virtuous.

In I Will Bear Witness, Victor Klemperer’s memoir about Holocaust Germany, the people who, because he’s a Jew, take away his office at the university, his right to shop at certain shops, his job, his home, do so politely, even apologetically. (It’s not their idea; it’s coming down from those boneheads in Berlin. But what’s a person to do?) They seem to like Klemperer, they aren’t anti-Semites, but they’re also not, in those moments, anti-anti-Semites. They’re well-mannered, abashed-but-willing parts of the Nazi machine.

Who is Kovalyov before he loses his nose? A player, an egotist, an unreflective social climber, a name-dropper. How does the nose’s absence and its miraculous recovery change him? It doesn’t. Who is he once his nose goes back on his face? Same guy. “And from that time on”—as soon as his nose was restored—“Major Kovalyov went strolling about as though nothing had happened,” we are told. “And his nose too, as though nothing had happened, stayed on his face.” “Everything was all right, no part of him was missing.” (Or, in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, “he was in no way damaged.”) The last time we see Kovalyov, he’s doing the same thing he was doing when we first met him: pretending to a rank he hasn’t earned, by “buying himself the ribbon of some order, goodness knows why, for he hadn’t been decorated with any order.

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

A whole world came into being from the DNA of the voice in that student paper, which, in trying to imitate, I altered.

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.

The kind of intuitive, line-by-line attention to editing we’ve been talking about—that’s what makes it more likely that what happens in there will be thrilling and non-trivial, that whatever happens in there will happen more crisply and denitively. And since, in every decision, I’m proceeding by the question “Does this delight me?” there should be some delight for you in there too.

It was like having Chekhov himself there in the room with us: a charming, beloved person who thought highly of us and wanted, in his quiet way, to engage us.

But regardless of how the story came to be, part of the pleasure of reading it lies in this: what we first felt as waste or indirectness (the digression) turns out to be exactly what elevates the story “out of the plane of its original conception” and makes it so complex and mysterious. What at first seemed like a digression is understood to be beautifully efficient.

The story is not there to tell us what to think about happiness. It is there to help us think about it. It is, we might say, a structure to help us think.

There’s a lovely moment in Henri Troyat’s biography of Chekhov, describing the first time Chekhov and Tolstoy met. Chekhov had put off the meeting, feeling “reticent about bowing before the redoubtable prophet, the Tolstoy who insisted on denying scientific progress to promote progress of a spiritual nature.”

But on August 8, 1895, Chekhov traveled to Tolstoy’s home, Yasnaya Polyana, to meet the great man.

“They met on a beech-lined path leading to the house,” Troyat writes. “Tolstoy was wearing a white smock and had a towel over his shoulder; he was on his way to bathe in the river. He invited Chekhov to join him. The two men undressed and jumped in, and they had their first conversation in a state of nature, paddling neck-deep through the water. Tolstoy’s simplicity won him over to the point that he all but forgot he was face to face with a monument of Russian literature.

The stories we’re reading here are among the best their authors ever wrote. But these authors also wrote lesser ones, and it’s important to read those too, if only to remind ourselves that nobody hits it out of the park every time, and that a masterpiece might have three or four test runs behind it, in which the artist was working some things out.

So, to generalize a bit here: in a highly organized system, the causation is more pronounced and intentional. The elements seem to have been more precisely selected. Things escalate decisively; everything is to purpose.

A more highly organized system is just, you know, better.

The obvious question for the artist, then, is: How do I get my system to be more highly organized?

It turns out, there is such a list of prime virtues, one we’ve been casually compiling as we’ve worked our way through these Russian stories: Be specific and efficient. Use a lot of details. Always be escalating. Show, don’t tell. And so on. The respective craft talks of those ten writers will all involve some restatement/personalization of those prime virtues, plus or minus a few, with some likable variation in the anecdotes they use to sing the praises of those virtues and claim that they always faithfully work by them.

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.

Maybe you’ve seen a mixing board in a recording studio, with rows of fader switches. A story can be thought of as a version of that mixing board, only with thousands of fader switches on it—thousands of decision points.

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.

Once our stick figure has been fitted with a dening attribute, the story goes about putting that attribute to the test. “Once upon a time, a cheerfully obedient boy went out into the world.” And that’s what Alyosha does, there at the bottom of the first page, as the rising action begins: he goes to the home of a merchant, to whom his father has basically rented him out.

In a story, attribute must meet adversity. (Olenka, in “The Darling,” is an extreme one-man woman; then that man dies. Vasili, in “Master and Man,” is arrogant; a blizzard appears, to humble him.) Here, the family’s reception of Alyosha is a minor, introductory adversity. How will Alyosha respond? By doing what he’s always done: cheerfully working hard. He doesn’t talk back, does everything immediately and “willingly,” never rests.

He [Tolstoy] 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.

But the story, in declining to answer (in obscuring the place where it might have answered), feels like it’s not avoiding the question but irradiating it with increased intensity.

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.

But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection. When reading and writing, we feel connection happening (or not). That’s the essence of these activities: ascertaining whether connection is happening, and where, and why.

A student once told me this story: Robert Frost came to a college to give a reading. An earnest young poet stood up and asked a complex, technical question about the sonnet form, or something like that.

Frost took a beat, then said: “Young man, don’t worry: WORK!”

I love this advice. It’s exactly true to my experience. We can decide only so much. 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.

So, don’t worry, work, and have faith that all answers will be found there.

My capacity for language is reenergized. My internal language (the language in which I think) gets richer, more specific and adroit.

I find myself liking the world more, taking more loving notice of it (this is related to that reenergization of my language).

I feel luckier to be here and more aware that someday I won’t be. I feel more aware of the things of the world and more interested in them.

So, that’s all pretty good.