Review by whoischels - A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

whoischels 's review for:

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders

5.0

challenging informative inspiring fast-paced

This was so good, I love the way Saunders thinks about stories, both the criticism of them and the writing of them.

I am obsessed with Gogol's "The Nose," I didn't realize people were writing stories so absurd in 1836. It was crazy how modern it felt in terms of the way it spoke so casually about what is absurdly un-visualizable.

So many good nuggets in this book that really changed the way I think about writing:

Voice comes from the revision, oddly provides permission in a way to do crazy intense revisions.
Short stories, even if they seem to talk about ordinary events, are always incredibly exaggerated in the way they handle time or dialogue.
the writer is a version of the person writing who creates a world that advocates for a certain set of virtues
Heightened causality is what makes a story really good