2 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
George Saunders's 2021 book based on his Syracuse MFA course — using seven classic Russian short stories (Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol) to teach fiction writing — covering narrative velocity, escalation, and the moment-to-moment decisions that make stories work.
Ivan Goncharov's 1859 Russian novel about Ilya Oblomov — a Russian nobleman so overcome by inertia that he cannot bring himself to get out of bed — which became the defining literary treatment of paralysis, procrastination, and the failure to engage with life.