female speaker: so as many ofyou, i'm sure, already know, george saunders has beencharming readers and critics alike for years with histruly unique brand of speculative fiction. he's the recipient of amacarthur grant, as well as a professor of creative writingat syracuse university. and lucky us-- he's hereto promote his-- what was, for me atleast-- a long awaited new book of stories.
by the way, "tenth of december"is available in the back via books inc. thankyou so much, you guys. and please help me welcomegeorge saunders. [applause] george saunders: thank you. thanks everybody for beinghere-- nice to see you all. i thought i would justread a little sample from the new book. and then we could just talkinformally about writing, or
maybe the creative process,or whatever comes up. so this first thing, i'lljust read a little-- i was on a reading tour a coupleyears ago and i drew this polish driverwho was done. he'd driven enough. and he was like a zen driver. he could drive withoutgetting you anywhere. [laughter] and he was taking me to thisbookstore reading, and he
said, "sir, you go now to doreading?" i said, "yeah." he said, "little advice for you. don't read too long." and ithought, oh you know my work. but basically, you never leavea literary reading going, damn, i wish he'd readanother 40 minutes. so i'll just give youa little sample. and i never was a big sci-fireader as a kid. except the one real big momentof my reading, or my cultural life, was that moment in starwars when the ships come over
and you can see thatthey're dented and rusty and fucked up. and i thought that was reallya major revelation. so some of my stuffis kind of sci-fi. this is definitelykind of sci-fi. and i think it's selfexplanatory. but basically, thisguy is in a-- well, you don't where he isat first-- but he's being ritually administered thesedifferent kinds of drugs.
and these drugs, as they do,they change everything. so he's, you'll see in thecourse of the story, there's some inflections in his voiceand consciousness that are from these drugs that arebeing dripped in. and later you find out thatactually he's in prison. and his mom has scratched somemoney together to get him into this slightly nicer prison,where instead of being a prisoner, you're-- what did we used to call it inthe corporate world-- like a
research assistant. so this is a little sectionfrom "escape from spiderhead." "one. drip on?" abnesti saidover the p.a. "what's in it?," i said. "hilarious," he said. "acknowledge," i said. abnesti used his remote. my mobipak trademark word.
soon the interior gardenlooked really nice. everything seemed super clear. i said out loud, asi was supposed to, what i was feeling. "garden looks nice," isaid. "super clear." abnesti said, "jeff, how aboutwe pep up those language centers?" "sure," i said. "drip on?" he said. he added some verbaluce to thedrip, and soon i was feeling
the same things but sayingthem better. the garden still looked nice. it was like the bushes were sotight seeming and the sun made everything stand out. it was like any moment youexpected some victorians to wander in with theircups of tea. it was as if the garden hadbecome a sort of embodiment of the domestic dreams foreverintrinsic to human consciousness.
it was as if i could suddenlydiscern, in this contemporary vignette, the ancient corollary,through which plato and some of his contemporariesmight have strolled; to wit i was sensing the eternaland the ephemeral. i sat pleasantly engaged inthese thoughts until the verbaluce began to wane. at which point, the gardenjust looked nice again. it was something about thebushes and whatnot. it made you just want to lay outthere and catch rays and
think your happy thoughts,if you get what i mean. then whatever else was in thedrip wore off, and i didn't feel much about the gardenone way or the other. my mouth was dry though and mygut had that post verbaluce feel to it. "what's going to be cool aboutthat one?" abnesti said, "is, say a guy has to stay up lateguarding a perimeter or is at school waiting for his kid andgets bored, but there's some nature nearby.
or say a park ranger has towork a double shift." "that'll be cool," i said. "that's ed763," he said. "we'rethinking of calling it natuglide or maybe erthadmire.""those are both good," i said. "thanks for your help, jeff,"he said, which is what he always said. "only a million years togo," i said, which is what i always said.
then he said, "exit the interiorgarden now, jeff. head over to small workroomtwo." into small workroom two they sent this pale,tall girl. "what do you think?" abnestisaid over the p.a. "me?" i said, "or her?" "both,"abnesti said. "pretty good," i said. "fine, you know," she said,"normal." abnesti then asked us to rate each other morequantifiably as per pretty, as per sexy.
it appeared we liked each otherabout average, i.e. no big attraction or revulsioneither way. abnesti said, "jeff, drip on?""acknowledge," i said. "heather, drip on?" he said. "acknowledge," heather said. then we looked at each otherlike, what happens next? what happened next was heathersoon looked super good. and i could tell she thoughtthe same of me. it came on so sudden.
we were like laughing. how could we nothave seen it-- how cute the other one was? luckily, there was a couchin the workroom. it felt like our drip had, inaddition to whatever they were testing, some ed556 in it, whichlowers your shame level to like nil. because soon, there on thecouch, off we went. it was super hot betweenus, and not merely
in a horndog way. hot yes, but also just right-- like if you dreamed of a certaingirl all your life and all of a sudden there she wasin your same workroom. "jeff," abnesti said, "i'd likeyour permission to pep up your language centers?""go for it," i said, under her now. "drip on," he said. "me too," heather said.
"you got it," abnestisaid with a laugh. "drip on?" "acknowledge,"she said all breathless. soon, experiencing the benefitsof the flowing verbaluce in our drips, we werenot only fucking really well, but also talkingpretty great. like instead of just saying thesex types of things we had been saying, such as wow, andoh god, and hell yes, and so forth, we now began free stylingre our sensations and thoughts in elevated dictionwith 80% increased vocab, our
well articulated thoughts being recorded for later analysis. for me the feeling wasapproximately astonishment at the dawning realization thatthis woman was being created in real time, directlyfrom my own mind, per my deepest longings. finally, after all these years,was my thought, i'd found the precise arrangementof body, face, mind that personified all thatwas desirable.
the taste of her mouth, thatlook of that halo of blondish hair spread out aroundher cherubic, yet naughty looking face. she was beneath menow, legs way up. even, not to be crude ordishonor the exalted feelings i was experiencing, thesensations her vagina was producing along the length ofmy thrusting penis were precisely those i hadalways hungered for. though i had never before thisinstant realized that i so
ardently hungered for them. that is to say a desire wouldarise, and concurrently, the satisfaction of that desirewould also arise. it was as if a, i longed for acertain heretofore untasted taste, until b, said longingbecame nearly unbearable, at which time c, i found a morselof food with that exact taste already in my mouth, perfectlysatisfying my longing. every utterance, everyadjustment of posture, bespoke the same thing.
we had known each other forever,were soulmates, had met and loved in numerouspreceding lifetimes and would meet and love in many subsequentlifetimes, always with the same transcendentallystupefying results. then there came a hard todescribe, but very real, drifting off into a number ofsequential reveries that might best be described as atype of nonnarrative mind scenery, i.e. a series of vague mental imagesof places i had never
been, a certain pine packedvalley in high white mountains, a chalet type housein a cul-de-sac, the yard of which was overgrown with wide,stunted, seussian trees, each of which triggered a deepsentimental longing-- longings that coalesced into andwere soon reduced to one central longing, i.e. an intense longing for heather,and heather alone. this mind scenery phenomenon wasstrongest during our third bout of lovemaking.
apparently abnestihad included some vivistif in my drip. afterward our protestationsof love poured forth simultaneously, linguisticallycomplex and metaphorically rich. i dare say we hadbecome poets. we were allowed to lie there,limbs intermingled for nearly an hour. it was bliss, it was perfection,it was that
impossible thing-- happiness that does not wilt toreveal the thin shoots of some new desire risingfrom within it. we cuddled with afierceness/focus that rivaled the fierceness/focus withwhich we had fucked. there is nothing less aboutcuddling vis-a-vis fucking, is what i mean to say. we were all over each other inthe super friendly way of puppies or spouses meeting forthe first time after one of
them has undergone a closebrush with death. everything seemed moist,permeable, sayable. then something in thedrip began to wane. i think abnesti had shutoff the verbaluce, also the shame reducer. basically, everythingbegan to dwindle. suddenly we felt shy,but still loving. we began the process of tryingto talk apres verbaluce-- always awkward.
yet, i could see in her eyesthat she was still feeling love for me, and i wasdefinitely still feeling love for her. well, why not? we had just fuckedthree times. why do you think theycall it making love? that is what we had justmade three times-- love. then abnesti said, "drip on?"
we had kind of forgotten he waseven there behind his one way mirror. i said, "do we have to? we are really liking this rightnow." "we're just going to try to get you guys back tobaseline," he said. "we've got more to do today." "shit," i said. "rats," she said. "drip on?" abnesti said.
"acknowledge," we said. soon something beganto change. i mean, she was fine, ahandsome, pale girl, but nothing special. and i could see that she feltthe same about me, i.e what had all that fuss beenabout just now? why weren't we dressed? we real quick got dressed-- kind of embarrassing.
did i love her, ordid she love me? ha, no. then it was timefor her to go. we shook hands. out she went. lunch came in on a tray-- spaghetti with chicken chunks. man was i hungry. i spent all of lunchtime thinking.
it was weird. i had the memory of fuckingheather, the memory of having felt the things i'd felt forher, the memory of having said the things i'd said to her. my throat was like raw from howmuch i'd said and how fast i felt compelled to say it. but in terms of feelings, ibasically had nada left-- just a hot face and some shamere having fucked three times in front of abnesti.
so i'll stop there and deliverwhat "reading rainbow" calls a cliffhanger, and thank you. [inaudible] so now, if anybody has aquestion i'm happy to take it. and there's a funnyphenomenon. i've been doing alot of readings. and there's this weird thingwhere invariably the person who asks the first question isthe one with the highest sexual energy inthe gathering.
it's weird. it's like some kind ofdarwinian thing. audience: [inaudible]. george saunders: yeah, ihad an idea it was you. audience: i had the opportunitythe other day to read a little "new york timesmagazine" article about you. and in the back, at the bottomof it, they mentioned that you studied or practicedsome [? yingla ?] buddhism.
george saunders: yeah. audience: and a lot of thisstuff, in terms of perception and having alternate viewpoints,different ways of understanding our experienceand reality, particularly generating experience and beingable to appreciate that and work with that came out. and i wanted to, i guess hear acouple points about how you deal with the flexibility ofunderstanding how we perceive things and how we generate[inaudible].
george saunders: sure, that'sa great question. i think, for me, that the answeris a little simple, which is, for me, everythingthat i do in fiction is through the language, likethe individual sentence. and it's a funny thing, becausewhen you're a young writer, you're concept heavy. and you usually participatein some version of the intentional fallacy, which isyour job as a writer is to pull up the big shit truck fullof meaning or theme and
get the reader [inaudible] sit there and, bam,and drop that. and it's a fundamentallycondescending view. which i think most of us whenwe're young artists, we have that idea, that you're a goodartist to the extent that you're conveying some theme. so i had a long period of notdoing much in art, because i was operating underthat assumption. and i had a breakthrough where irealized that in order to be
in the kind of intimaterelationship you have to be in with your reader, you have tocommit to not being sure about what's happening. in other words, to come intoit with as low content as possible and feel your waythrough it by watching the energy coming off the prose. so that's the main answer forme, is as i'm writing i'm imagining an intelligent,engaged person right over here, who's smart and is alittle skeptical and is
watching me to see if i'm goingto pull any tricks. and i imagine a little gaugein my head-- like positive over here and negative here. so as you're reading your ownprose, you're watching that needle, and you're trying tokeep it up in the positive. and when it gets negative, thenyour job is to be all right with that. and like a scientist, tosay well, why did it do that do you think?
why is it on page two, ninelines in, i just felt a little bit of a drop. and then, if you can avoidanswering that too reductively, then it opens up. so really, in a way, that's theanswer to your question. but i also was raisedcatholic. and we did this intense thingcalled the stations of the cross, which maybesome of you did. and this was the '60s,so we really did it.
we did it for five straightdays, naked in the desert being flayed. but the thing was, there werethese images of the suffering of christ around the room. and so you sat and youlooked at each one. so now it was thesecond station. and there was a little narrationfrom the bible. and then you were to sit,quietly, and think about it. and we had one nun who waswonderful, because she would
say, think about what was jesusexperiencing and so on. and then she'd say, think aboutwhat the roman soldier was thinking. what about that guy-- there's animage-- what about that guy standing to the side? what's his role? so that was early, likenovel writing 101. but from an early time, the ideawas a part of the fictive process was generatingempathy for somebody
that you might not. i'm not sure if i'm answeringyour question at all. george saunders: and wheni was a child-- thank you for your question. it's really just about how toappreciate the different ways of perceiving-- like you were saying, like youcan have [inaudible] the different characters orunderstanding that we create our reality to acertain extent.
george saunders: exactly. and for me, one of theinteresting fictive points is that if you were trying to makea quote, unquote accurate picture of this room, it wouldprobably consist of 107 separate mind streams goingat once and occasionally interacting. and often the explosiveness ofthe interaction has to do with the mind streams. he's thinking, noone respects me.
i never get a break. and then she's thinking abouther sick mother and she inadvertently stepson his foot. and a shit storm happens. but actually it's not reallya physical, it's two mind streams bumping a little bit. congratulations on yoursexual energy also. audience: i wondered if youcould say a few things about your influences.
and the reason that i'minterested in this is listening to you in this pieceresurrected for me a powerful memory of having read "flowersfor algernon." george saunders: oh yeah, sure. sure, yep. audience: i feel like it'sreally beautiful in a similar way. george saunders: yeah, i know. i had the same-- wheni was writing the
story, i went oh i remember. i didn't really remember thedetails of the story, but i thought, oh i'm channelingthat. audience: yeah george saunders: you know ithink when i was younger, i hated any kind of suggestionthat my work had anything to do with anything thathad ever occurred. and then as you get older,you're like well of course, where else are you going tocome from, except all the
influences that havepassed through you? so in a way, that they mightbe at the heart of that picasso thing about, was itgood artists borrow, great artists steal? that saying, yeah of course, inany kind of work none of us exist totally originally. and maybe your supplements as anartist is your willingness to let those influencesflow through you. and then the other thing inoticed is when you're on a
book tour that you always getthe influence question. and the first thing is to go,well of course, shakespeare. jesus, mother teresa wasquite important, right? but then when you really thinkabout it, for me, the '70s comics were usually-- steve martin in his earlyincarnation, monty python, george carlin. and in our school, that wasreally a way to get a little bit of credibility is that youcould stand up and recite the
george carlin album or doa passable steve martin. so i had a long period where ireally considered that low-- not literary. and because of where i camefrom, i thought, well literature-- i never had met writers. literature is a thing that youcan't quite do, where you totally become someone else. and only at this crisis point,i went well maybe not.
maybe literature is where youreally open up the valve to everybody that you've been. and for me that meant lettingin the sound of vestigial steve martin and themonty python. so i think influence cansometimes may be more full body than we think it is. audience: hi. i saw you come to googleabout five years ago. and i wanted to hear you talka little bit about what it
must be like five years laterto have some of your stories coming true and we'remaking them happen. audience: my neighbors, forexample, just got some in atherton. and so i was just wondering ifyou draw, i guess, inspiration from silicon valley? or if it's, i don't know, someother level of inspiration? george saunders: i don't reallydo a lot of research or direct tapping for ideas.
but i think my feeling is thatif you were wired right, and if you were alert enough, eventhe most banal moment would be crazy and full of wonder. so the fact that we're here,we're at google, we're feeling pretty good, most of usare young, and yet we know for a fact-- totally verifiable-- that in x number ofyears we'll all be rotting corpses somewhere.
we know it. why are we so happy? why are we eating lunch? george saunders: or even to bea little more serious, we venture forth every day in lovewith somebody or somebody is beloved to us, and yet theincredible vulnerability that everyone comes to an end,including the people you love, for sure. so to me that--
what's weird is the habitualposition of being ok with that. yeah, i know it's true,but my phone's a little low on battery. it's crazy really. so to me the inspiration forthe weird pieces is just through the writing process,through revising, through trying not to be dull, to tryto get some sense of that wonder back into prose.
so i don't really do a lot oflooking for weird things. also, the other thing i notice,i don't really have as much judgment about contemporaryculture as people think i do. i like it. i like everything. i like that-- i won't name companies-- butsome of the dangerous technological developments,i think it's interesting.
so to me, the highest positionis to have five or six opinions, all open,on your desktop. and they contradict, and there'sno way to reconcile them, but you're okleaving them open. that would be the highestaspiration. george saunders: hi. audience: when you have a storythat plays around with characters that are opposites,do you ever find yourself having trouble sympathizingwith one?
or you sympathize more withone over the other? george saunders:totally, yeah. the question is if there's twodifferent characters, do you have trouble with sympathy? and i think you absolutely do. and you should, really. it would be weirdif you didn't. but then i do this kind ofiterative revision thing, where i just go into it hundredsand hundreds of
times, each time tweaking alittle something or a lot-- just expressing my opinionon each draft. and what's interesting is if youdo that, the first step is to out yourself on your bias. like in this book, there'sa story called "puppy." and there's these two motherswho are very similar, and they had the same interests. and in the end, it'scatastrophic what happens. and in that story, i definitelyhad a bias for the
poorer of the two women. but when i submitted it to the"new yorker." she said something really smart. she said, the way you're writingher dialogue, you're condescending to her. because i had written it reallystraight white trash. and she said, that throwsthe story off. you seem like you're makingfun of her and not the other one.
so in that, the processwas to take her dialogue up a little bit. and in doing that, she becamea more full person. and i liked her better. so for that story, the criticalthing was to do just what you're saying-- adjustit, so that there's some semblance of equitybetween the two. but i think as a general writingprinciple, your main job is to do somethingand then notice it.
and then adjust accordingly. and then notice the thing thatyou've done, and adjust accordingly-- rinse, lather, repeata million times. and then weirdly, in time, thestory will adjust itself morally to be more fair, whichis really a weird thing. but yeah, i think you should. of course, you would. audience: i think it's reallyinteresting what you said
about acknowledging how your ownmindset has changed as a writer from a more professorial place to more engaging-- to combine that with what soundslike a very intense iterative visionarywriting style. do you ever have the desire, ordo you ever go back to your earlier work thinking ican punch this out. george saunders: no. it's so bad, i don't even try.
i'll give you an example. this is a true story. my wife and i we got engaged inthree weeks, and we had a baby right away. and so we were racing. and i was working for acompany called rating. i was a tech writer, and a verylow level tech writer. and my wife had been marriedonce before, and had a more full, better, a richer life--
i'll put it that way. and i could feel her looking atme like, come on, let's get something going. so i went on thistrip to mexico. and it was this perfectnovelist trip. it was a wedding, there was amale model slash surfer who was in the wedding party, therewas a guy who just out of jail for a dwi, there wasa radical catholic priest. i'm like, this is it!
it's a gift from god. so i came home. i'm like, honey, you'resitting on a goldmine. don't worry, i got it. so i wrote this novel for abouta year and a half, and we had one daughterby that time. so i get home from work, drinka pot of coffee, and if i was feeling really ambitious abottle of boone's farm, which is a deadly combo.
and i would write just until iwould drop at the desk, go to work, and i did this fora year and a half. and then i had the book. and it was 700 pages. and i thought, no i'ma minimalist. so i cut it. i cut it to 400, rock hard. and so i said, i think i've gota little novel for you to read, sweety.
so she said, ok. so i said, just takeyour time. i'll give you a week or so. and of course, like any writer,in an hour later i'm looking in the room. and she's literally sitting atthe desk like this, fried. so to give you an idea, thename of that book was "le bourda de eduardo." which ithink just means ed's wedding. so i don't ever goback to that.
that stuff has a taint on it. i just would rathermove ahead. thank you bringing up thatpainful subject. but the one thing that i aminterested in, and i'm sure this is true for you guys too,in any kind of creative work, that moment where you-- donald barthelme has a greatessay called "i'm not knowing." and he says thewriter's that person who embarking on her task hasno idea what to do.
and that, to me, seems likethe sacred state, if you can get there. and then stuart dybek, thisgreat chicago writer, has this thing about the story isalways talking to you. and your job is to listen. but for some reason, we have atendency to not really want to hear what the story's naturalenergy is saying. but we want to override it. and so i was a geophysicalengineer, that was one of the
big basic scientific principleswas you don't go into a study rootingfor some answer. so that was very helpfulin writing. audience: i was wondering ifyou could speak a bit about your editing process. specifically, i read somewherethat "the semplica girl diaries" started out as a 200page story and evolved into a 10 page story. audience: and i guess withoutspoiling it for everyone, i'm
wondering what got left outand how you decided. george saunders: sure. so the question is aboutthe editing process. and i had a story called "thesemplica girl diaries" which started in '98 and i finishit last spring. and it was up to some hugenumber of pages and got drastically cut. one of my things is i think asartists we have to submit to our neuroses a little bit.
so often we think that to be anartist, you have to conquer your neuroses andbe a perfectly calm, wonderful person. but my experience was ratheryou turn towards with your ticks and go ok, come on. so for me i have a real, justlike inner nun syndrome, like i really don't like what i do. when i do it, i feel like, ugh,mr. saunders, what do you think you are smarty pants?
so that ends up to be, if youkeep it in check, a pretty valuable editing tool. and i have a slight aversion,i've always had this since i was a kid, an aversion to whati consider banal language. you know when you're in gradeschool and they have those little readers, and it's like,jimmy was a bright happy boy as he bounced into the roomin the middle of a bright, fall day. it actually made mea little sick.
there was somethingso unessential about it, and blah. so for me, one of the thingsthat i do is i'll get something up to a decent length,pretty happily, with that feeling that all is well. and then that inner nun thingwill come in and speed it up. and i think the subtext to thatis do you respect your reader's intelligence? so i'll give you an exaggeratedexample.
if you have in a first draftsomething like, bob came happily into the room and satdown on the blue couch. perfectly functionalsentence right? but it bugs me, because youthink, wait, why does he have to sit down on a couch? can you sit up on a couch? all right, well let'scut the word down. bob came happily into the roomand sat on the blue couch. why does he have to comeinto the room?
is there any meaning to himcoming into the room? not that we know of-- ok, cut. bob happily-- i don't care. we don't care aboutbob's happiness. bob sat on the blue couch. blue? george saunders: doesblue signify?
not really-- ok, bob sat on the couch. bob? george saunders: cut it. so now we don't have much, butwhat we have doesn't suck. we have bob. so in a slightly less radicalway, i apply that kind of thinking to the story. and the logic is, if i'm makingthose really seem like
nitpicky decisions, every timei do it, i'm honoring your intelligence a little bit. that which you could assume,i'm going to assume that you're smart enough to assume. and in my model of reading, thewhole thing is to get you stepping closer andcloser and closer, trusting me more and more. and in the process of trustingme more, the fictive reality is becoming more threedimensional.
and you get that magicalfictional moment where you and the character aren't different,and you can't negotiate your way out of thecliff that's approaching. and i think that processis done-- one way it can be done is bythis micro editing to assume intelligence. so on that story, itwas 180 pages. but at page 30, you wereasleep, basically. there was no urgency in it.
so then part of the job is justto say ok, those are just pages and now timeto trim it back. i don't know if that answersyour question, but yeah. audience: thanks forcoming back. you just explained how you spentactually quite a lot of time writing books. ed's wedding was ayear and a half. george saunders: yep. audience: stuff like that.
how do you motivate yourself tojust keep on going through all that time? george saunders: right. you know, honestlyit's just ego. i mean, i really like writing. and i like to be knownas a writer. and i like the whole schtick. but to me the most horrifyingmoment is when you send something out too soon, or thatmoment where you have
misidentified something shittyas good, and it's got your name on it. it's like ugh. it's a nightmare. so for me, i have from highschool, i loved the-- yeah. some people, they wantto be songwriters or they want to be whatever. i really wanted to be ashort story writer. and it makes me really happyto be in that harness.
so i'll get something like that"semplica girl stories." i had it in pretty goodshape in 1999-- pretty good. but on a scale of 10, it wasabout a seven and a half. and i could feel that i couldget it up to 8.3 for sure. and at that point, i don'treally care how long it takes. so it's a lot ofnegative urge-- ego, grasping, desperation,but also the pleasure. i feel like once you've takena story, any project you're
in, once you've really stuckwith one to the end and seen the benefits, for me that'sa bit addictive. i know what a finished storyfeels like, and i'm just not interested in notgetting there. so then it's weird, because itbecomes a suspension of time, where that storytook 12 years. that's all right. it's out. it's better than it was.
audience: so i'm taking a shortstory writing class up at stanford, and we read"civilwarland" in "bad decline." and the whole classreally loved the whole book. and we discuss your shortstories all the time. so i wanted to ask you as aprofessor of creative writing, what do you think makesa great writer? is it experience? is it focus? is it getting an mfa?
is it getting a ph.d.? or being an engineer and thenhaving that experience? what do you think-- yeah, so if you can do allof those, you're good. george saunders: no, that'sa great question. you know what's funny is that weare in a moment in america where the mfa is gettinga big head. and gary shteyngart, hehad this great line. he said, we have reached thepoint in american literary
culture where the number ofreaders is exactly equal to the number of writers. and i teach in agreat program. but there's two fallacies thatneed to be debunked. one is to be a writer, youhave to get an mfa. false. two is if you get an mfa, you'llbe a published writer. we've seen a doublingat syracuse. when i go home i have560 applications to
read for six spots. and the vast majority are frompeople who are just coming from undergrad. so there's somethingweird about that. it's not quite right. but when they come, our studentsare off the charts. but the thing we teach them-- wetry to teach them-- is that the answer to your questionis nobody knows. nobody knows.
you can be the smartest personin the room, the most articulate, the most welltraveled, the most soulful, and you can put pen to paper andyou don't have any oomph. or you can be a littlenondescript person with no opinions who just has neverreally done anything, and somehow when you put thepen to paper, this-- so that's the hard thing. but it isn't true of anythingworth doing? there's an x factorthat's magical.
so what you can do isyou can do the work. i think that's reallyimportant. and i found out yesterday thati've been telling a vicious lie about robert frostfor about 10 years. i had a student who toldme, i thought-- i maybe misheard him-- that frost was doing a seminarat a grad school. and a student asked a reallyinvolved technical question about the sonnet.
and frost, to debunk his overconceptual mind said, son, don't worry, work. and i've been saying for years,that's great advice, because malcolm gladwell's10,000 hour rule, and blah, blah, blah. well, i just found out thathe didn't say that. he said, "don't work. worry." george saunders: soi don't know what
the hell he was thinking. but i think what you'll find isit's something that some of us want so desperately-- to be good writers, i thinkpartly because it feels like when you read a great writer,you feel like you've been really seen. and you would loveto be the person who's giving that feeling. but because it's so hard, ithink it's got to be mystery.
i do think that for anindividual writer, if you put the 10,000 hours in, you'll bothfind out what your issues are, and you'll find reallyweird, unique solutions that you never could have imaginedat the outset. but that process has almostnothing to do with whether you'll ultimatelybe published. so it's tricky. and you won't make any money. audience: so consuming art isvery personal process, so it's
really hard to say thatsomeone was wrong when they did it. but in all your work, have youever witnessed someone observing something you wroteand just interpreting it very surprisingly, or wrong? and how did thatmake you feel? how did that go? when you said that, it broughtback one thing to mind. i had written a story called"winky" which is
in the second book. and it's this story about thisguy who goes to a self help seminar, and it is the motto ofthis thing is, "don't let anybody crap in your oatmeal." and at home he's got this dim,very religious sister who has been kicked out of her house,and she's living with him. and he wants to getrid of her. so he's thinking, i'm not goingto let her crap in my oatmeal, even though she's niceand innocent and sweet
and has nowhere else to go, i'vegot to live into my own personal power. so it's obviously a tonguein cheek thing. and in the story, hegoes home, he's resolved to kick her out. and when he seesher, he can't. and he melts. but the kicker is that he feelsterrible that he's not a powerful enough person.
so that's the story. so it came out in the "newyorker." and about a week later, i get this letter. and this guy says, myname is so and so. i work with charlton hestonat the nra, so i suspect politically we haveour differences. but i loved your story. it helped me so much. this is a great exampleof art crossing
the left/right divide. and of course, i waslike, ye check off! see, i did it. and so of course, fishing forfurther compliments, i said, oh thank you so much brother. tell me a little more abouthow i changed your life. and he said, well my motheris in very good health. she's 72, and she had a verymild stroke, which has caused me some inconvenience.
and your story convinced meto put her in a rest home. and i was like, what? and i wrote him backthis long thing. no sir, please, you'vemisunderstood. and i gave him the wholeexogesis of the thing. and he's like, that's cool,have a good day. that was that. so yeah, i think once you putsomething out there, there is no freaking telling whatsomeone's going
to read into it. but what i've noticed is, statistically, most people don't. and that guy was looking. i mean, he could have gottenthat excuse from a starbucks cup, reading the coffeegrounds or something. but i think you have to assumethat-- and it's interesting to do a tour, and this book isactually selling, so i'm meeting a lot of people.
and it's amazing how many goodhearted, good readers there are who do get more-- get what you put in itand then even more. so mostly not-- that wasthe one example i can really think of. audience: also because of thatstory, i say crapping in my oatmeal, and no one knowswhat i'm talking about. see? so there was a good outcometoo, so it's a balance.
thank you. thanks for the question. audience: so i just wantedto address something. one of the reasons why yourstories grab me is that they seem so honest. and i think i read a reviewerthat said something about how you can come closer to truthin fiction sometimes than in real life. so i wanted to ask you, how doyou as you're writing try and
sidle up to truththrough fiction? george saunders: that'sa great question. and i think the answer isa phrase at a time. because if i think about what doi think is true, or if you think, what's true? we have some answers. but mine are a little rickety. they're a little conceptual,they're a little political. so what i love about fiction isif you start with anything
really, any prejudice orwhatever, through this iterative process of trying toget your prose not to be a buzz kill, basically, thenweirdly you'll gradually move towards truth and specificity. so if you say, bob was ugly-- back to bob again-- bob was ugly. well, if you're a trainedreader, that sentence leaves you a little, eh.
you're waiting fordetail, right? so then if you writethat on tuesday. wednesday you come back andsay that's vague, let me flesh that out. bob wore an ugly sweater. ok, now suddenly we're talkingabout a guy with bad taste. it's changed a little bit-- still not very specific. bob wore a stained red sweaterwith the torn blue pocket and
a reindeer on the abdomen. well, that's a bettersense already. and suddenly now it'sabout bob is now a little bit slovenly-- almost belligerently slovenly. and that's interesting,suddenly. and then it produces plot too. because having establishedthat blob-- blob?
george saunders: i'mediting right now. so having established thatblob is belligerently slothful, then we know whatmight have to happen to him. so in the bad hollywoodversion, he meets an incredibly neat girl, playedby angelina jolie. so i think if you take the thinga phrase at a time, that boat will mysteriously movetowards truth, and also it'll move you to a placeof empathy. when we live in new york,upstate, i used to wait for a
bus across from thisbarbershop. and there was this middle agedbarber who came out-- a pear shaped guy-- andhe'd come out with a cigarette and a coffee. and every time a woman walkedby, he would just go, zoom. and even when she busted him,he'd just keep looking. and we just had our daughters,so i was like a new feminist. and i noticed this guy. and i thought, i am goingto nail that guy.
i am going to write a storyand just make fun of him. so i started, and it wasreally enjoyable-- this guy with thisthought stream that's always perverted. and then about a year into that,the story just died. i couldn't get it to gopast the middle part. it was fun. it very funny. and it finally occurred to me,the reason i couldn't get it
to move is because i was sointent on kicking him, that i wasn't giving him anyhope of getting out of that low position. and that's not a story. there has to be atleast a trace-- the hope that the person couldtranscend himself. so as soon as i did that, ithought i've got to make this guy more sympathetic. now because i'm not thatsubtle, i wrote in
that he had no toes. so that was my subtle chekovianmove there. but i did it, because suddenlyhere's a guy who now he's still a sexist, and he'svery defensive, and he doesn't have any toes. so suddenly, oh, poorguy, and so then the story could move ahead. so i think that's where thehonesty and everything comes from just line by lineimmersion in
the thing, i think. yeah, but the funny thing aboutthat, because that story come out in the "new yorker."and by that time, i'd spent about three years withthis projection of this guy in my mind. so we happened tobe in that town. and i'm walking down the streetwith my wife and my two daughters, and lo and beholdthis guy steps out onto the sidewalk.
and i thought, george,you bastard. you just mocked this guy in the"new yorker." you don't know who he is. he could be a million[inaudible] the tyranny of fiction. but as we walked by, he lookedat my wife and my daughters and he goes, ladies. like that, and i thought, wow! [laugther]
george saunders: yeah, score! audience: i'm wondering if you'dtalk a little bit about how your process is the sameand/or different when working on nonfiction ratherthan fiction. yeah, i did a series ofnonfiction pieces for "gq," mostly travel based pieces. and those were such a relief,because in fiction, as i've said, i'm doing a lot ofrewriting to generate plot, to say, well what's the next thingthat should happen, that
could happen, that'smeaningful. and for some reason, thattakes me a lot of hours. so with the nonfiction, you comehome from a week and you know there are 10 thingsthat happened. so then the process is justtrying to write those 10 and see which one of themcomes to life. and then once, say six of themdo, four of them don't, then you just do a calculation. i've got 12,000 words, ican take this one up,
turn this one down. so it's a little more likeengineering work-- you're cutting to fit. and then the meaning of thestory, and the theme, come out of which elements have risen tothe occasion a little bit. so that tends to be faster. your main job is to makewhatever you do charming on a sentence to sentence level. but the events aregiven to you.
so that's really a nice palatecleanser in a way. audience: i think i read in aninterview with your editor saying that with nonfictionyou tended to give extra material to the editor. audience: how does thatprocess work? george saunders: well,basically, at "gq" i always had a week long tripand 12,000 words. so you'd get those threeor four bits. you're like i can't believethat's not going in there.
and you have a point in timevision of your 12,000 words, but this part over herestill feels red hot. so in that setting, you had theliberty of saying what do you think, should i tryto fit this in? and my editor, andy ward,is just a great friend and a great guy. and he can just say, no, no,no, yes, put that one in. and once he's said that, thenit becomes really like a rubik's cube.
where does it go, what do i haveto give up to get that back, and so on? but just to have a second setof eyes saying, actually no, you've got that, that one's notso good, i think there's heat in that thirdone, put it in. audience: my question is abouthow your world view influences your writing. in many of your interviews,you've talked about when you started off and you were workingas an engineer, you
had the sense that things couldgo drastically wrong in your life at any point, howit was very fragile. audience: and that world viewseems to be reflected in stories like "civilwarland." andnow you're famous, you're well-to-do, and your books haveeven started selling. i'm wondering how your worldview has changed, and whether that change affects how youwrite and approach fiction? george saunders: that's agreat question, yeah. for me, when we were young, awriter is like the canary in a
coal mine in that we werenever in the gulag. we were way over extendedon credit cards, but not starving. but i found that just thatlittle whiff of fear that you have when you have smallkids and you're not a powerful person-- that was enough to really-- you know that great terryeagleton quote about "capitalism plunders thesensuality of the body." so i
could feel that. and so i got those firsttwo books out of that. now why that was a revelation,i'm not quite sure. i should have known that. so now it's later, and our kidsare wonderful and grown. and so the one thing i notice,my desire, what i want to accomplish before die is to tryto make a fictional scale model of the world in which thepositive and the negative, the hopeful and the not arethere in a compelling mix.
and i noticed it -- when you look at my earlierwork, it's very good at showing the potentialfor chaos. and i just want to try to getsome of the positive valence in there, in a way that'snot cheesy, that's not sentimental or corny. but i think any of us who livein america in this time, you've got to love it. we're very fortunate.
or forget america, you walkthrough a field of grass on a summer day and theyjust cut it-- so for some reason, fictionskews dark. some would say happinesswrites white. so technically, i think it'sharder to get the positive valences in. and that's my mission, butagain, without becoming mr. positive thinker-- the guy who gets a spike throughhis head and says what
a great opportunity. and i think the greatwriters do it. tolstoy did it, shakespeare didit, virginia woolf did it, alice munro does it. and so that's my personalmission. audience: just a quick followup question on that. i think that you are drivingat what was in my mind too. why does fiction tendto be darker? audience: why is it so difficultto capture the
beautiful and positivemoments in our lives? george saunders: i think oneanswer is just the little red riding hood syndrome, which isif i say once upon a time, there was a girl named littlered riding hood. her mother told her, don'ttalk to the wolf, and then she didn't. george saunders: soi think it's just something about maybe-- here, i'm just guessing--but maybe at some level,
storytelling is cautionaryin its design. and i think that even in thebible, these things don't often come out well. but in the bible, they do-- the resurrection is the big-- so i think it's possible. but for some reason, certainlyat the beginning levels, smirking is so easy, to makefun of something is easy. and when we get ourapplications, it's funny.
because every year, you'rereading young writers. and so for example, it turnsout that in that fictive country, everybody over35 is a pedophile-- everybody. and every person, for example,any midget is a genius, is a sage. those are the only oneswho ever show up. there's tropes thatyou get into-- every stepfather is a terriblemonster, who only reveals
himself on page 12. so that's not true. it's just a patternof imagination. so i don't really knowwhy that is. but i know for sure, fromexperience, it's harder to get into those high registers. audience: hello. i want to ask you abouthemingway's influence on you. i was listening yesterdayat the forum.
you spoke about how you triedto imitate him or work a lot like him. and it was frustratingat the end. and earlier, you spokeabout how you make something sound true. and i think hemingway, in oneof his books when he was in paris, i think he tells thathe tries to write something that sounds the truest. that's a technique,i think, for him.
if it sounds true, thenit's good enough. audience: and so my question is,are there things that you learn from hemingway that youuse in your writings, like this one or other things thatyou can talk about? george saunders: yeah,hemingway was a huge influence, as he is, i think,on a lot of writers. and at some point, you get tothat critical point where your worldview and your hero'sdiction just don't close. so i was living in amarillo,texas and trying to be
hemingway too. and so you'd go like, nickwalked into the walmart . it was pleasant. george saunders: but there's,for a young writer, that wonderful moment where you go iknow things in my gut that i can't say in that diction, nowmatter if you're imitating kerouac or whoever it is. so that is a holy moment for ayoung writer, when you start getting full body impatientwith your mentor.
but i did, from him, i think,just minimalism-- just cutting, cutting, cutting,cutting, making sure that as much as you can help it,you're not on auto pilot. it was a dark and cloudy day. ugh. really? so to just lean into thesentence the way he did. and make sure that the sentenceis not only a sentence but it actually canbecome a thing in the world
itself in a certain way. audience: do you thinkthat this style it represents his time? it's not something youcan use anymore? because [inaudible] a certain figure of people[inaudible]. george saunders: yeah, for me,what i got tired of in hemingway was that he, in hislater work especially, he wasn't funny.
he didn't have any senseof humor actually. he knew very well who thenoble, interesting people were and so on. and my life was not-- i never lived a hemingwayesquemoment really. i remember as a young kid comingout of a funeral-- a very sad, terrible thing. but the funeral was being heldin a mock georgian mansion-- one of those mansions that hadbeen put up just to be a
funeral parlor. and then you walk out ofthat, and everyone's crying and it's terrible. and across the street, there'sa chuck e cheese. and the mouse is on break. and he's on the side of thebuilding with his head off. and he's smoking. so that moment could notshow up in hemingway. he couldn't do it.
he had a stylistic cave hehad made for himself. and i thought, that's wherethe gateway to style is. and when you see something inyour life, in your heart, in your world that the style ofyour hero can't accommodate, then it's a time for growth. male speaker: i'm afraidwe're out of time. but i just want to saythank you for coming. george saunders: thankyou very much-- appreciate it.
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