Saunders
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George Saunders: On the Tricks of the Writing Process -
I notice that Doug has an incredible natural enthusiasm for anything we happen to get right. Even a single good line is worthy of praise. When he comes across a beautiful story in a magazine, he shares it with us. If someone else experiences a success, he celebrates it. He can find, in even the most dismal student story, something to praise. Often, hearing him talk about a story you didn’t like, you start to like it too—you see, as he is seeing, the seed of something good within it. He accepts you and your work just as he finds it, and is willing to work with you wherever you are. This has the effect of emboldening you, and making you more courageous in your work, and less defeatist about it.
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Toby is a generous reader and a Zen-like teacher. The virtues I feel being modeled—in his in-class comments and demeanor, in his notes, and during our after-workshop meetings—are subtle and profound. A story’s positive virtues are not different from the positive virtues of its writer. A story should be honest, direct, loving, restrained. It can, by being worked and reworked, come to have more power than its length should allow. A story can be a compressed bundle of energy, and, in fact, the more it is thoughtfully compressed, the more power it will have.
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We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he “wanted to express”, and then he just, you know… expressed it. We buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same.
The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.
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My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period (seven years, in this case, unless you count that 14-year story, which I hope you won’t) and what you’re really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces—trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work. So I’m not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that (really I’m actively trying not to think about them, because doing that can cause you to truncate the natural energy that your subconscious is giving off). Instead I’m just trusting that, if I’m working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book (and in a more profound way than would have occurred if I’d tried to ‘put them’ there.)
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Returned to house, sat on special star-watching platform as stars came out. Our kids sat watching stars fascinated, as if no stars in our neighborhood. What, I said, no stars in our neighborhood? No response. From anyone. Actually, stars there did seem brighter. On star platform, had too much to drink, and suddenly everything I thought of seemed stupid. So just went quiet, like in stupor.
— George Saunders, “The Semplica-Girl Diaries”, Tenth of December