A Swim In A Pond In The Rain

How The Richardson/Saunders Framework Actually Works When You Try To Use It

I picked up A Swim In A Pond In The Rain a couple years ago and immediately tried to apply it to my own drafting process. That meant going through the actual Seven Russian Stories structure the way Saunders and Russo set it up — mapping out what each character wants, tracking the gap between what they want and what they get, and noting every beat where the story pivots. I spent about three hours doing a line-by-line breakdown of Petruševskaya's "The Closer the Crowns, the Louder the Hammers." Two of those hours were me realizing I'd been misreading the story the whole time. The book isn't really a craft manual in the traditional sense. It's a transcript of a Harvard class, which means it captures genuine confusion, dead ends, and corrections in real time. That's actually more useful than a polished essay because you see how the logic unfolds under pressure. The core mechanism is simple: you pick a story, you annotate it mercilessly, and you answer a set of guiding questions about each character's desires, obstacles, and moments of choice. The questions matter more than any abstract theory Saunders or Russo spells out. Here's what most people miss on the first pass. The book doesn't teach you how to write. It teaches you how to read the way a working fiction writer reads — which means you notice structural decisions that are invisible when you're just consuming narrative for entertainment. Once I started mapping stories the way the framework demands, I could see why my own drafts felt flat. Not because my dialogue was weak or my descriptions were sparse, but because I'd never established a clear desire-driven architecture before drafting a single scene.

I keep a annotated copy of the Petruševskaya story in particular. The moment that shifted everything for me was section four, where Saunders pushes the class to identify what the protagonist actually believes about herself versus what the text reveals she's doing. I'd written off that story as bleak before. After running it through the framework, I saw the character was making active choices at every turn, not just suffering passively. That distinction changed how I approach my own character motivation.

The Actual Process I Use Now

I don't go through all seven stories for every project. I pick one story that shares a structural problem I'm wrestling with in my own draft, and I do a deep annotation pass. Typically this takes me about ninety minutes to two hours depending on how tangled the story is. The annotation itself is ugly — colored highlights, margin scribbles, arrows connecting cause and effect across paragraphs. I keep it all in a dedicated document where each question from the book gets its own section. There's a specific bottleneck I hit early on that I thought was a dead end. When I first ran the framework on Strugatsky's "Yesterday's Shadow," I got stuck on Question 5, which asks what happens if the protagonist fails to get what they want. I kept writing answers like "the character would be sad" or "the story would end differently." That was useless noise. What I needed to do instead was identify the precise turning point where the story's architecture forces a consequence, and trace how the causal chain works from that point backward. I solved this by treating the story like a logic puzzle rather than an emotional experience. Once I stopped trying to feel my way through it, the structure snapped into place. The workaround that actually worked for me was mapping the protagonist's desire as a numbered list of specific, concrete goals ordered by priority. Not abstract wants. Concrete things the character tries to obtain or avoid in sequence. This turned out to be the single most clarifying exercise in the entire book. It also revealed that several of my own scenes were running on autopilot because I'd never pinning down what was actually at stake in each one.

What The Framework Can't Do For You

The Saunders/Russo method has real limitations. It works best on plotted, character-driven stories with clear desire arcs. If you're writing lyrical vignettes, experimental stream-of-consciousness pieces, or narratives where ambiguity is the primary structural principle, this framework will fight you. I tried applying it to a Beckett-style piece once and spent two hours circling the same paragraph trying to extract a concrete desire that the text deliberately refuses to provide. That was a waste of time, and I should have just recognized the mismatch earlier. Another problem: the framework assumes you're working with finished, polished short fiction. Applying it to your own rough drafts is possible but significantly harder because your first drafts haven't gone through the same sculpting process. You're trying to reverse-engineer intention from work that may contain half-formed ideas you yourself haven't resolved yet. I usually run the framework on published stories first to build muscle memory before I apply it to my own material. One more thing worth stating bluntly. This isn't a shortcut to better writing. It's a diagnostic tool. The hours you spend annotating won't automatically make your prose tighter or your dialogue sharper. What it does is give you a structural lens you can apply during revision. I've found that going back to my drafts after a framework session usually cuts revision time in half because I can see exactly which scenes are failing to serve the story's core architecture. But if you're looking for something that teaches sentence-level craft or voice development, you're better off with something like Anne Lamott's bird by bird or Donald Maass's writing the breakthrough novel, depending on where your actual gap is.