sarah’s Reviews > A Swim in a Pond in the Rain > Status Update

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?)

How did I go about making the cut? Well, I imagined that I was you and that you read the same way I do, that you would be discontented with the first version at the same places I was, as I read it.

The difference in the two versions is that the latter version has more respect for you, the reader, built into it.

Who care if the first draft is good? It doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be, so you can revise it. You don’t need an idea to start a story. You just need a sentence. Where does the sentence come from? Wherever. It doesn’t have to be anything special. It will become something special, over time, as you keep reacting to it.

A story with a problem is like a person with a problem: interesting.

Chekhov has kept us so close to Marya that we’ve essentially become her. He gave us no reason to put any emotional distance between ourselves and Marya and, on the contrary, has described the working of her mind so well that he seems at times to have been describing the workings on our minds. We are Marya and Marya is us, but us in a different life, one in which we are irremediably lonely.

We might think of it this way: Chekhov already “has” the benefit of our expectation of a development between Maria and Hanov. We’ve already pre-imagined that development. So he doesn’t have to go there. He can go past it, to whatever the next presumably more sophisticated solution turns out to be, just be taking Hanov out of the story. (If there were a big bowl of candy in your kitchen and that was all…

Fundamentally, life was so arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when you thought about it you were terrified and your heart sank.

“I love this sentence, it describes one of the thoughts that are always at the back of my mind”

I sometimes joke (and yet not) that we’re reading to see what we can steal.