>> Deborah Carnegie: I’m Deborah Carnegie and welcome to the Microsoft research
speaker series. I’m pleased to introduce today’s author, George Saunders. George
Saunders has been described as one of the most important and original writers of
his generation, and an undisputed master of the short story.
He started his career as a geophysicist, receiving his degree form the Colorado
School of Mines, and traveling the world doing site evaluation for oil drilling. In
1988 he received his MA in creative writing from Syracuse University.
Since 1997, Saunders has been on the faculty of Syracuse University teaching
creative writing in the school’s MFA program, while continuing to publish highly
acclaimed fiction and non-fiction. He is the author of several collections of short
stories, including Pastoralia and Civilwarland in Bad Decline, as well as a collection
of essays and a book for children.
In 2000 the New Yorker named him one of the best writers under 40. He writes
regularly for The New Yorker and Harpers, as well as Esquire, GQ, and the New York
Times magazine. He won a national magazine award for fiction in 2004 and his
work is included in the best American short stories 2005.
In 2006 he was awarded both a McArthur fellowship and a Guggenheim fellowship.
The New York Times magazine described his newest work, Tenth of December, as
the best book you’ll read this year.
Please join me in giving a warm welcome to George Saunders.
[applause]
>> George Saunders: Thank you very much. The thing about that New York Times
thing is we all have to promise not to read any other books this year and then we’ll
be all good. Just swear off the toll story and we can protect the unimpetability
[phonetic] of the times.
It’s really nice to be here. Thank you very much. I thought I would just keep it kind
of informal and maybe do a little bit of a talk about the creative process as it
manifests in fiction writing and then read you just a little example, and then we can
just have some questions if you want to.
Are you on break from work? Is that -- you’re like uh -- So we’ll prolong it. It will be
a six-hour presentation followed by drinks. So one of the things, I’m on a big tour
now. This New York Times thing sort of shot this book out of the cannon so I’m
getting a kind of an anthropological opportunity to see what actual attention is like,
and it’s pretty good.
But in the process, you know, you do a lot of interviews, and one of the tropes of
American public intellectual life is a version of what we call the intentional fallacy,
which is that the person who is making the artistic product knew what he was doing
at the beginning, had a very strong idea about it, shat it down upon the public, and
then walked away feeling very patriarchal and satisfied.
And, in fact, for me the process is the complete inversion of that, and I’m sure for
many of you in your work, as a former scientist I went to the school of Mines in
Colorado and was trained as a field geophysicist, so, you know, in science in
technology we understand that you really don’t know until you get there, that the
devil is in the details.
You have to have some kind of plan, but then the whole fire of the creative process is
to get in there, realize you totally screwed up and then start adjusting your
assumptions.
So in fiction it turns out, at least in my experience of it, the way this happens is you
have some kind of idea. In my case I try to keep it as small as possible because I
know myself and when I get big and conceptual I tend to stink up the joint. That’s a
technical term stink up the joint.
So what happens is I’ll try to come up with what I think of as a seed, so just the
tiniest little bit of dialogue or sometimes a little conceptual situation. Just enough to
get a couple paragraphs, and then at the point if you’re lucky the text will start
talking back to you and correcting your misconceptions.
So for example, in my case a lot of times, well, in every time the first draft is a little
sloppy. It’s not that funny. It’s a little repetitive. The language has a kind of an
every man quality that I don’t like.
So then the form of problem solving is to go in a start tweaking individual sentences
and phrases, mostly in my case in terms of sound to try to make them sound better.
And in the process, mysteriously and kind of wonderfully what happens is as you’re
cutting a sentence or phrase down there will appear a kind of linking place.
Suddenly you need a two-beat or three-beat phrase, and it will be gorilla house. And
you’re like, oh, I did not know there was a gorilla house in this story, but the Sonics
of the sentences just told me that there is.
So you put the gorilla house in because it sounds good, and suddenly then you have
a gorilla house to work with, which then implies gorillas and [inaudible].
So in my case what I do is kind of an iterative process where I -- I have one story in
this book that I started in ’98 and just finished last spring, and it’s just going over
and over and over with a red pen in hand every day just trying to make those small
tweaks until very slowly the fictive reality starts to change.
It’s almost like a big cruise ship starts to move in a direction that your subconscious
wants it to go. So it’s sort of one of the challenges of this touring has been to talk
about the process in a way that isn’t reductive, that doesn’t discredit the actual
process, because often the questions come in the form you write a lot about class.
Did you mean to do that?
You know, and you think, yes and no. I want to read you a little bit of a story that got
put together just this way, and the seed of it was ever since I was a kid I’ve had this
feeling, and it was reinforced in engineering school, that a pretty good model for
human intelligence is the machine.
In a certain way, depending on the state of the neuro-matter we can be heroic or we
can be jerks, and I remember having a high fever once as a kid and thinking, wow,
I’m a different person with a high fever.
There’s literally something my thought processes are altered under this state of
having a fever, or then having a mad crush on somebody and you notice that the
neurology is also different in that state.
So this idea that character and personality and all these things are actually quite
mutable, quite situational, and so I just decided to write this story kind of I started
with that idea. How would we maybe show that in prose?
So the shtick of this story is we’re a little more advanced than we are now in terms
of being able to pharmaceutically alter our perceptions. So I think you’ll get the
idea. This is just a little exert.
The beginning section of this story called Escape from Spiderhood.
Drip on, Epneste [phonetic] said over the PA.
What’s in it? I said.
Hilarious. He said.
Acknowledge. I said.
Epneste used his remote, my mobi-pack trademark word. Soon the interior garden
looked really nice. Everything seemed super clear. I said out loud as I was supposed
to what I was feeling. Garden looks nice I said. Super clear.
Epneste said, uh, Jeff, how about we pep up those language centers?
Sure, I said. Drip on? He said.
Acknowledge I said.
He added some verbaloose to the drip, and soon I was feeling the same things but
saying them better. The garden still looked nice, it was like the bushes were so tight
seeming and the sun made everything stand out. IT was like any moment you
expected some Victorians to wander in with their cups of tea.
It was as if the garden had become a sort of embodiment of the domestic dreams
forever intrinsic to human consciousness. It was as if I could suddenly discern in
this contemporary Vinet [phonetic] the ancient corollary through which Plato and
some of his contemporaries might have strolled. To it I was sensing the eternal and
the ephemeral.
I sat pleasantly engaged in these thoughts until the verbaloose began to wane, at
which point the garden just looked nice again. It was something about the bushes
and what not, it made you just want to lay out there and catch rays and think your
happy thoughts if you get what I mean.
Then whatever else was in the drip wore off and I didn’t feel much about the garden
one way or the other. My mouth was dry though and my gut had that postverbaloose feeling to it.
What’s going to be cool about that one, Epneste said, is say a guy has to stay up late
guarding a perimeter, or is at school waiting for his kid and gets bored, but there’s
some nature near by -- or say a park ranger has to work a double shift.
That would be cool, I said.
That’s ED763, he said. We’re thinking of calling it HU Glide. Or maybe Earth
admirer.
Those are both good, I said.
Thanks for your help, Jeff. He said, which is what he always said.
Only a million years to go, I said, which is what I always said.
Then he said exit the interior garden now, Jeff; head over to small workroom two.
Into small workroom two they sent this pale, tall girl. What do you think? Epneste
said over the PA.
Me? I said, or her?
Both. Epneste said.
Pretty good, I said.
Fine, you know, she said, normal.
Epneste asked us to rate each other more quantifiably as per pretty, as per sexy. It
appeared we liked each other about average, i.e. no big attraction or avulsion either
way.
Epneste said, Uh, Jeff, drip on.
Acknowledge, I said.
Heather, drip on. He said.
Acknowledge, Heather said.
Then we looked at each other like, what happens next? What happened next was
heather soon looked super good. I could tell she thought the same of me. It came on
so sudden we were like laughing. How could we not have seen it? How cute the
other one was.
Luckily there was a couch in the workroom. It felt like our drip had, in addition to
whatever they were testing, some ED556 in it, which lowers your shame level to
like, nil, because soon, there on the couch off we went.
It was super hot between us, and not merely in a horn-dog way. Hot, yes, but also
just right, like if you dreamed of a certain girl all your life and all of a sudden there
she was in your same workroom.
Uh, Jeff? Epneste said. I’d like your permission to pep up your language centers.
Go for it, I said, under her now.
Drip on, He said.
Acknowledge. I said.
Me too? Heather said.
You got it, Epneste said with a laugh. Drip on.
Acknowledge, she said all breathless.
Soon experiencing the benefits of the flowing verbaloose in our drips we were not
only fucking really well, but also talking pretty great. Like, instead of just saying the
sex type things we had been saying, such as Wow, and Oh, God, and hell yes and so
forth, we now began free styling our sensations and thoughts in elevated diction
with 80 percent increased vocab.
My well articulated thoughts being recorded for later analysis. For me, the feeling
was approximately astonishment at the dawning realization that this woman was
being created in real time directly from my own mind per my deepest longings.
Finally, after all these years, was my thought, I had found the precise arrangement of
body, face, and mind that personified all that was desirable.
That taste of her mouth, the look of that halo of blondish hair spread out around her
cherubic yet naughty looking face. She was beneath me now, legs way up.
Even, not to be crude or dishonor the exalted feelings I was experiencing, the
sensations her vagina was producing along the length of my thrusting penis were
precisely those I had always hungered for, though I had never before this instant
that I so ardently hungered for them.
That is to say a desire would arise and concurrently the satisfaction of that desire
would also arise. It was as if A, I longed for a certain here-to-fore untasted taste
until B said longing became nearly unbearable, at which time C I found a morsel of
food with that exact taste already in my mouth perfectly satisfying my longing.
Every utterance, every adjustment of posture spoke the same thing. We had known
each other forever. We’re soul mates, had met and loved in numerous preceding
lifetimes, and would meet and love in many subsequent lifetimes always with the
same transcendently stupefying results.
Then there came a hard to describe but very real drifting off into a number of
sequential reveries that might best be described as a type of non-narrative mind
scenery, i.e. a vague series of mental images of places I had never been, a certain
pine-packed valley and high white mountains, a chalet type house in a cul-de-sac,
the yard of which was overgrown with wide-stunted Susian trees, each of which
triggered a deep sentimental longing, longings that coalesce into and were soon
reduced to one central longing, i.e. an intense longing for Heather, and Heather
alone.
This mind scenery phenomenon was strongest during our third bout of lovemaking.
Apparently Epneste had included some vivistiff in my drip, afterword our
protestations of love poured forth, simultaneously linguistically complex and
metaphorically rich. I dare say we had become poets.
We were allowed to lie there, limbs intermingled, for nearly and hour. It was bliss.
It was perfection. It was that impossible thing. Happiness does not wilt to reveal
the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.
We cuddled with a fierceness focused that rivaled the fierceness with which we had
fucked. There was nothing less about cuddling vis-à-vis fucking is what I mean to
say. We were all over each other in this super friendly way of puppies, or spouses,
meeting for the first time after one of them has undergone a close brush with death.
Everything seemed moist, permeable, sayable. Then something in the drip began to
wane. I think Epneste had shut off the verbaloose, also the shame reducer. Basically
everything began to dwindle. Suddenly we felt shy, but still loving.
We began the process of trying to talk [inaudible] verbaloose, always awkward, yet I
could see in her eyes that she was still feeling love for me, and I was definitely still
feeling love for her. Well, why not? We had just fucked three times. Why do you
think they call it making love?
That is what we had just made three times, love. Then Epneste said, Drip on.
We’d kind of forgotten he was even there behind his one-way mirror. I said do we
have to? We’re really liking this right now. We’re just going to try to get you guys
back to baseline he said, we’ve got more to do today.
Shit, I said. Rats, she said. Drip on, He said. Acknowledge, we said. Soon something
began to change. I mean, she was fine, a handsome pale girl, but nothing special.
And I could see that she felt the same of me, i.e. what had all that fuss been about
just now?
Why weren’t we dressed? We real quick got dressed, kind of embarrassing. Did I
love her? Did she love me? Ha, no. Then it was time for 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 lunchtime thinking. It was weird, I had the memory of fucking Heather,
the memory of having felt the things I’d felt for her, the memory of having said the
things I’d said to her.
My throat was like raw from how much I’d said and how fast I felt compelled to say
it, but in terms of feelings I basically had nada left, just a hot face and some shame re
having fucked three times in front of Epneste.
After lunch in came another girl, about equally so-so, dark hair, average build,
nothing special just like upon first entry Heather had been nothing special. This is
Rachel, Epneste said on the PA.
This is Jeff. Hi Rachel, I said. Hi Jeff, she said. Drip on, Epneste said. We
acknowledged. Something felt very familiar about the way I now began feeling.
Suddenly Rachel looked super good. Epneste requested permission to pep up our
language centers via verbaloose, we acknowledged. Soon we too were fucking like
bunnies. Soon we too were talking like articulate maniacs re our love.
Once again certain sensations were arising to meet my concurrently arising
desperate hunger for just those sensations. Soon my memory of the perfect taste of
Heather’s mouth was being overridden by the current taste of Rachel’s mouth, so
much more the taste I now desired.
I was feeling unprecedented emotions, even though those unprecedented emotions
were, I discerned somewhere in my consciousness, exactly the same emotions I had
felt earlier for that now unworthy seeming vessel Heather.
Rachel was, I mean to say, it. Her lithe waste, he voice, her hungry mouth, hands,
loins, they were all it. I just loved Rachel so much. So I’ll pause there and do what
reading rainbow use to call leaving you hanging.
It goes on from there. Anyway thanks, and if you have any questions I’d be happy to
talk informally about the sort of writing process or whatever you -It’s a funny thing. I do a lot of traveling and I notice that it’s always the most
sexually energetic person in the room who has the first question. It’s kind of a weird
-- I think it’s kind of a Darwinian thing. I don’t know if that’s a -I knew it was you! I knew it.
[laughter]
>>: It’s interesting you talking about your experience with the New York times
almost as if it was sort of like by surprise, you know? And I’d love to hear more
about that cause from the outside it seemed like, I’ve admired your work for many
years now, it kind of seemed like you were having your turn in the [inaudible],
David Foster Wallace kind of spotlight, you know?
And it struck me that you have particularly astute and savvy publicists driving that
process for you.
>> George Saunders: No. I mean I knew the interview was happening. That had
been set up and it was always sort of wobbly like they’re thinking about doing a
story but we’re not sure, will you meet the reporter?
And so we had four or five really great, he’s a really great guy and we really had a
nice bonding. But even I guess up until the last month it was kind of like it wasn’t
sure that it was going to happen.
And then the headline itself was you don’t know that, it just kind of gets [inaudible].
So I knew there would be an interview and, you know, you feel he was kindly
disposed to. It wasn’t like a "got ya" kind of thing. It was too small to be gotten, you
know?
But it was more like what we’re going to try to run this piece. It’ll be kind of an
attempt to get your work here to more people. And the headline kind of came at the
last minute and it was kind of a, I mean, in a way you sort of cringe like if someone
says I’ve got the funniest joke I’m going to tell you right now! You are going to laugh
your ass off. It’s so funny!
Everybody kind of braces. But I kind of feel like maybe it was a slightly hyperbolic
ornery throw down by them, and it did what they wanted to do, which is really kind
of open the door. So I’m happy. It is kind of a little funny to say something is the
best book you’ll read all year in the second week of January is inviting some
backlash, you know?
But I had a funny exchange with this writer and he said, you know, congratulations
on that piece. And I said yeah, I emailed him just waiting for the backlash. And he
wrote back just like two seconds later, I liked your early work better.
I feel like it’s kind of a fun mid or late life ride to just kind of enjoy it. It’s here.
Second most energetic ->>: [inaudible]. Do you mind, could you perhaps go into the root sentences or the
dialogue for that story?
>> George Saunders: Yeah. Actually there was that idea that I said about this could
we somehow in prose demonstrate the idea that a personality, i.e. character is
malleable? And not only by event but maybe by drugs. So that was one kind of
conceptual idea.
And then the other thing that came in from the side and enlivened it was I had
written two or three stories before this where part of the shtick was I kind of
purposely depressed my level of expression. Kind of minimalist, kind of dumbed
down, just as sort of a trope.
And I was sort of tired of that. I wanted to try to write something that would be me
at my most articulate, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to do that. So then when
this idea of verbaloose came in, that was sort of just a cute little trick to give yourself
permission to do that.
So those two things, those two ideas kind of collided on the same day a little bit, and
it was just literally just kind of feeling that bit of resistance writing that first part a
little minimally and kind of maybe 20 percent dumber than me, and then almost like
your body like, I’m sick of this and then it lurks into that higher register.
And then you sort of go why did it do that? And then within the story there was a
rationale. I’ve often felt it and I’m sure it’s true in other art forms too, that part of
what you really watch is your own discontent.
You’re doing something and your body is starting to get restless with it or your mind
or whatever. And that’s often a pretty good barometer of what your reader might be
feeling.
So in that model your writing is sort of a date. You’re on a date with somebody and
if you see her start looking off or nodding off or something it’s an indicator that you
should change things a little bit.
And on the other hand you don’t want to go on a date with a bunch of index cards,
you know?
7:05 ask about her mother. Great, got that, you know. So I mean the model I have
now for artistic interaction is it’s a very intimate full body relationship and your job
as a writer is to be really, really fresh and alert to what your imagined reader might
be feeling at that point, which of course is an impossible thing, especially if you’ve
read the piece 90 million times.
But it’s a pretty good working model. So part of my practice now is to try to get
yesterday’s preconceptions about the work wiped clean as much as possible before
you go in in the morning.
So this one wasn’t so much on the sentence level, but kind of on the general level of
the discourse. It takes a jump up when he’s on that pill, so that made a lot of verbal
fun basically.
Does that answer your question? Sir?
>>: Along those lines I’m curious how do you know when a story is finished. You
mentioned that one of yours took years in the making. How do you imagine the
reader being fully satisfied with that one?
>> George Saunders: That’s the million-dollar question. I teach at Syracuse and
that’s one of the things you realize is every writer has a different answer. For me it’s
kind of like I sometimes think it’s a bit like if you were for some reason painting the
floor of a room.
Like maybe you’re mentally insane. But you’re painting the floor of a room and you
paint yourself out of the room, you know?
You’re looking like, yeah, that’s pretty much all the same color blue except that’s a
little too light. And then you get one foot left, you know? So it’s kind of like a late
stage in a story ill be reading it and I won’t have any objections. Or another way to
say it, I sometimes imagine there’s a gauge in your head with a needle, you know?
Positive is here and negative is here. And as you are reading part of your job is to be
self-aware and kind of watch where your imagined reader’s reaction is.
So you start off yeah, pretty good, funny, nice, okay I like that. That’s a good image.
Whatever. You’re just responding positively. And at some point in the revision
process you get to something where it’ll go [brake sound]. And suddenly you’re like
I don’t know. I’m not feeling it.
So when you get there that’s where you start reworking it, and there’s a really
wonderful moment where you get to say, all right, what is it about that that’s pissing
you off?
You know, page six has been a thorn in your side for two weeks. Really now, what is
it? So then basically ending just means you get through the whole piece with the
needle in the positive, and then it’s almost like at that point you can go through it
with pleasure and without much resistance.
And then at some point you go all right, that’s it. So it’s kind of very visceral kind of
a thing.
>>: How do you know limits of racy language are? You couldn’t do this talk on
commercial television, for example.
>> George Saunders: No, you couldn’t. Well, we could try but -- yeah I don’t, but
that story was in the New Yorker. So I think I kind of assume in a world with South
Park and that, I mean it’s still a little like that George Carlin sort of a thing. The
seven words you can’t say on T.V. So that’s true, you cant.
But in print there aren’t so many limitations. I don’t think ->>: It’s getting to the point where it could be [inaudible]. I mean not this, but you
know, how do you know when you’re crossing the line?
>> George Saunders: It’s the same thing. There’s a point where the needle goes oh
you’re just being naughty now, come on. You know, you’re being, or often it’s you’re
being naughty because you’re insecure at this point.
>>: Does the publisher tell you that?
>> George Saunders: No. Well, they would. I think they would. But by the time I
send stuff out I kind of know. And it’s sort of like using swear words in a piece.
When you’re young you fucking use them every fucking time because it’s fucking
tough, you know?
It’s a defense mechanism. And then as you get older you go, yeah, that’s you know --
So again it’s that meter thing where in this piece there was all kinds of, I gave myself
permission to write sexually, sexuality. So in a certain way you’re always asking
how important is this to my overall mission, you know?
In what I’m trying to accomplish here aesthetically and morally, ethically, maybe
what’s the minimal I can get away with? You know? But it’s a real balancing act.
The whole thing to me is a bit like riding a bike.
You’re not really thinking woops I’m leaning left. You’re feeling it as you go through
your visions. And at some point you go that’s just about the right mix, you know?
>>: I love how your story presents a kind of society. Do you start with that in mind
or is that something that [inaudible]?
>> George Saunders: What was the thing? The society?
>>: Sort of like your stories have [inaudible] society. So do you start with that, or do
you kind of?
>> George Saunders: No. I mean, I have, and you know there’s a great quote. And
since we’re talking about swearing I can tell you, Gerald Stern was a poet and he one
time told a group, “if you start out to write a poem about two dogs fucking and you
write a poem about two dogs fucking, then you wrote a poem about two dogs
fucking.”
So the idea, Einstein said it in a higher way, Einstein said, “no worthy problem is
ever solved in the plane of its original conception.”
Einstein is kind of a show-off.
[laughter]
But seriously. I think in art often times, and I see it in my students, we go into it for
lofty reasons, moral reasons, political reasons, but if that gets into the actual work
that’s sort of a condescending thing to do, you know?
I know where I stand on issue X, reader sit there and receive. That’s actually antiart. So I have all kinds of very vital political views and so on, but whenever I see one
coming in I kind of try to [inaudible] that. Now, they get in there anyway. They do.
But I think if you can recognize that your main job is to be in an intimate
relationship with your reader. An intimate relationship doesn’t mean preaching,
you know? It doesn’t include preaching. It doesn’t include the moment where
you’re sure and you’re just bonking the reader on the head.
So I think that’s one of the real challenges. If you have a passionate moral feeling
about the world, it seems like fiction or poetry would be a nice way to express them
but actually I think they have to be held back in order for anything to happen at all.
Sir.
>>: That sense of an ideal reader out there is a really precious thing, are you just
lucky in that your idiosyncratic fantasy of that is just apparently commercially
successful?
[laughter]
Or do you do research? Do you take feedback? Or do you have corrections to your
assumptions?
>> George Saunders: Well, I have a wife.
[laughter]
No, seriously. And we were in grad school together and she’s a great reader. So she
is the first reader. And after I’ve worked on it for many, many sometimes years I’ll
give it to her and basically if she reacts emotionally, strongly, then I know I’m good.
But before that I think you’re right. It’s a completely weird [inaudible] kind of
strange thing to construct an imaginary reader, but I think the working model is you
if you hadn’t already read the thing nine thousand times.
If you came to it fresh on the bus and picked it up. So in a certain way the whole
process of learning to be a writer is constructing that imaginary consciousness that
is spurious. But I think it can be done, you know?
And of course the other thing is the iterative approach is a kind of insurance policy
because if you’re reading a piece six thousand times, each time trying to be open to
it, you’re going to manifest as all the different people that you are and there’s almost
like a statistical thing that will happen where when you’re in a terrible mood and
you hate yourself you want to tear the thing up.
Well, okay, ignore that guy for a while. And over the six thousand readings it kind of
becomes its best self, and that I think you can kind of trust. So kind of iffy. But my
wife, it’s her in the background.
>>: How much [inaudible] in your time at [inaudible], and as I read into it, it seemed
like a very inartistic place, right? This technical writing. And I don’t know if you feel
the same way, but I took away from the New York Times sort of that seemed really
critical to your development and who you are and your voice and your eventual
success.
I’m not sure if I exactly have a question but I’m just curious of your reaction.
>> George Saunders: That’s exactly the right, that’s true because I had been in, like
a lot of young writers, I thought, well, I’ll be a bull fighter. That’ll be a good thing.
You know? Or I’ll be on a fishing boat. Anything that was adventurous I could get.
And my class origins were sort of work. I’ve worked since I was sixteen. And so
when I got out of grad school and we got married and I ended up working at that
place I thought it was kind of a defeat, like, shit, how can I be an artist when I’m in
this terrible place? You know?
And it turned out to be an incredible blessing because of course, you know, life is
everywhere, which means literature is everywhere, and the only thing that wasn’t
getting it was my own kind of stupid sensibility that said in order for it to be art it
has to be exotic, it’s got to be other.
So it was a seven or eight year tech writing job there, during which I wrote my first
book, and it was an incredible blessing because if you can’t go to literature,
literature will come to you. And in that place I heard so much incredible language,
you know?
Corporate language. And my first reaction was aversion. That’s not language. But
then of course it’s all language, and so I came to think that poetry is actually any
diction, no matter how weird, that overflow. And in that place you would hear a lot
of people who had been trained in that kind of stiff, passive voice corporate thing,
and they were having an affair, for example.
You know? So it’s like, Molly, in terms of my feelings for you there are things, which
are not at this time appropriate to express in this environment. But he’s red in the
face! And you think wow, that’s a love poem, you know?
So it was a real break through and a blessing to be in there day after day and not as
an outsider, not as a reporter.
We were doing a lot of work with companies who had done environmental pollution
and we were sort of their mouth piece, and also doing legitimate geological studies,
so it was just a great immersion in -- well, for one thing, okay. I was in that
generation that couldn’t pronounce the word corporation without a sneer, you
know?
The corporation. And then to be in there and to go wait a minute, this is great! We
have health insurance. We have these two little babies at home. It was very familial
in that office. So it was a great lesson in kind of disturbing your ambient
conceptions and that made it into that first book for sure. So that was a major,
major turning point.
Did you, sir?
>>: Your inner critic is really well developed I think. I’m wondering if you’ve ever
gotten any feedback from anyone in the press that has made you rethink anything in
your work.
>> George Saunders: Constantly. Yeah, I was talking before I got the chance to go
on a trip with Clinton a few years ago, and I interviewed him and said what do you
do with all the hate? Because he gets a lot.
And he said that Hilary had given the advice that, and he didn’t put it this way, but
I’ll -- he said that basically it comes to you in a, and he didn’t say this, a shit matrix, it
comes to you sometimes from a source that doesn’t like you in a very aggressive and
negative way, but Hilary told him if there is some gold in there and you don’t take it
then the joke is on you.
I’ve had a lot of reviews that first were like, oh god, that’s embarrassing I hope
nobody reads that, that hurts, no you’re wrong. And a couple weeks later you go you
know, there was something in there that is really -One guy, I don’t remember the review but I remember not liking it at all, being hurt
by it. But in there he said Saunders is a writer who works better out of love than
anger. And that was really true, and I’d never thought of that.
So I think it’s like anything else, your defenses come up but then if you can just make
a mental note to not disregard the good stuff it’s very powerful. Thanks.
Yes, sir.
>>: So when do you have a day job? How do you find the energy to do your art?
>> George Saunders: Well, I have a high metabolism. That was one thing. So I
would get home and have a pot of coffee and work at night sometimes, but also in
that job, I don’t know how it is here at Microsoft, but we’d build our hours.
So, for example, if somebody offended me and then they gave me two hours of
buildable time for what I knew to be a forty minute job I would just go, I’ll try to get
it done, and then that extra hour and twenty minutes was writing time.
And at that point, this is way back when and I was, this was in the ‘90s, so I was
known, I had a reputation as the guy that could do the cover verse for the
documents because I could center and change fonts. I’m not bragging.
[laughter]
So they would say could you do a cover for me? And I would say, well, I’ll try to fit
you in and you’d take an hour for it. And you know, it’s twenty seconds. And you
know actually I’ll tell you something that helped me a lot. When I was younger I had
come back from Asia and I was really kind of like scraping bottom living with my
aunt in Chicago, and I had this Hemmingway-esque idea that I’d go to El Salvador.
That was my thing. And I didn’t speak Spanish, but this way my dream. So I went to
see a friend of mine, and he wasn’t home but his dad was there. And his dad was
kind of a classic south-side Chicago Irish truck driver, raised 19-20 kids, whatever.
And I was talking to him.
I said I thinking I want to be a writer and I was thinking of maybe going to El
Salvador, and I kind of expected him to mock me, right? But he said, no, you know
what, if that’s your dream, you got to do it.
I said yeah! He said, you know why? If you don’t do it, you know who you’re going
to blame, right?
I said yeah, myself. He said, bullshit! You’ll blame your wife and your kids. And I
thought, yeah that’s right. And so I remembered that when I was working that job
and I would feel a little guilty and think, you know, if I don’t at least try this in
another five or six years I’m going to be a miserable guy.
And so then once you give yourself permission to steal time it’s kind of enjoyable,
you know?
[laughter]
>>: You [inaudible] the phrase giving yourself permission. You used it before. I
gave myself permission to write about sex. And I’m wondering what that
permission entailed. You need to give yourself permission to write about forests, for
example?
>> George Saunders: No. No. That’s a great question. I’ll have the answer about
four a.m. No I mean part of it is I think, okay. The way I understand the story form is
that it’s very strict, actually. It doesn’t, if you’re doing something, well I had a
Hollywood guy one time say it very beautifully.
He said that in a script everything you write has to do two things. It has to advance
the plot in a non-trivial way and be beautiful in its own right. So that’s the motto of
the story.
So I think the permission sometimes means okay, strict form requires a scene here
that has sex in it. And that’s the permission. The form has given permission to do it.
Whereas just to say ah, I think I’ll write some sex, that’s somehow against the
discipline in a certain way.
I’m not sure if that’s -- yeah.
Yes?
And after you’ve been writing stories for a long time you kind of know when
something is essential and when it isn’t and when you’re being self indulgent and so
on.
Great question.
Sir.
>>: I was wondering about your output. Do you stay with a story until it’s a finished
product, or are there things that just don’t go anywhere and you put them aside?
>> George Saunders: Lately most stuff gets used but sometimes way down the line.
So what I do is I end up finishing two stories a year no matter what. If I’m on leave,
if I’m, you know, it doesn’t matter.
So usually there’s four or five in process and then the only kind of rule I have is that
when I go in in the morning I just scan the five and go which one of you sons of
bitches is going to be fun? You know?
Like I don’t want to say I’ve had this one for six years I should get it done, but rather
which one of these seems open in a certain way? And then sometimes when will
lurch forward and continue to be enjoyable and you can feel it heading towards the
door and then you might put everything aside and go.
But for me it’s always useful to not have that terrifying blank page moment where
there’s no, you know?
So in this story that I just read there was a scene. I got on this comic riff where one
of the drugs they gave him was called Knight Life, K N I G H T L I F E, and I made you
talk like a resonance fair person, and it was really fun to write, and it wasn’t
essential.
It didn’t do anything in the -- so I knocked it off and kept it for a couple years, and it
actually grew into another story in the book. So for me the nightmare is that day
when you go, wow, what should I write about?
And if I just keep five things going on then you never get to that day, you’re always,
you know. Because you’re not so much thinking what am I going to write about?
But here’s this, what should I do with it?
And then that question is easily answered just by starting to read it and you look for
your little meter and see. So in that way you never had that kind of where do you
get your ideas moment, which to me is terribly [inaudible] filled thing.
>>: Are you seeing any trends or changes in literary fiction, creative fiction, given
sort of the inundation of media and our shortness of attention spans? Or are you
seeing that the form is going to prevail over time?
>> George Saunders: That’s a great question. I should know because I’m ideally
situated to know, but it’s kind of hard to tell. One thing I know for sure is I teach at
Syracuse and when I go home there’s five hundred and sixty applications for six
spots in our program. So everywhere I go there are so many incredibly talented
young people who really are kind of living and dying by literature.
So that makes me think we’re fine no matter what. Probably honestly I see a little
bit of a decay in sort of stylistic engagement, that if you can generalize the prose is a
little more pedestrian than it was ten or fifteen years, but that’s okay.
So I’m not sure. I think that with the quality of T.V. for example, right now it’s
having sort of an effect like when photography appeared suddenly painting had to
rethink itself a little bit. So I think a lot of, my guess is that it will make fiction do
what it does even better.
And I think what it does is the kind of really complicated language things that makes
that unity of writer, reader, character, like if you’re saying the woman stood by the
ocean. Well, as soon as you write that you have just supplied a woman and an
ocean.
And she’s wearing a particular dress even it turns out. Or not. We don’t know. But
there’s something instantly triangulating about just a simple English sentence that
makes the reader and the writer intimate in a way that I would argue that visual
media does something also great, but not that.
So I think that’s what’s going to happen is fiction is going to maybe move back into
stylistic richness because that’s kind of what we have to offer. It’s kind of my U.S.A.
today answer.
We’re eating more pigeons! I don’t know.
[laughter]
Yes, sir.
>>: I’m curious whether you feel like you’ve found your form in the short story or
you have desire or permission to work in other areas, whether it’s a novel, I hesitate
to say novel because it’s [inaudible]. But screen plays or --
>> George Saunders: I had a period after my third book of stories where I kind of
felt a little bit artistically, not lost exactly, but not energetic. So I wrote some nonfiction and some scripts and all that. And then I kind of came back with a vengeance
to this story.
So I think my baseline is I’m always writing a story. If some day one of them looked
at me and said I need another 80 pages that would be great. But I always love that
Flannery O’Connor quote, she says, “A writer can choose what he writes but he can’t
choose what he makes live.”
So I think that’s when you go in a piece and it’s always communicating with you. It’s
kind of telling you, cut me! I’m going on too long! Save me from myself!
Or I’m sure in some cases it says, oh, now we need another 40 pages from another
point of view. So I think the first responsibility is just listen to what the text is
saying to you without too many preconceptions. Oh, I should write a novel, I always
write stories just kind of put that aside, you know?
Because the number one responsibility is to do something vital. And if you fail in
that then everything else fails too, you know?
Sir.
>>: Can you talk a little bit about some of your influences. Obviously that great
essay about Vonnegut is your discovery of Vonnegut. It’s funny because there is that
technical writing correlation of pen shed you can see some parallels there. Like,
who are you passionate about from a ->> George Saunders: Well, I came to writing kind of a little bit late and from a weird
angle. So it’s funny because the influence question, everyone’s first impulse is, well,
Jesus was big for me, and Mother Teresa, I love her, and Shakespeare. But in
honesty one of the things I -When I was at Radian Corporation I had not published in about seven years and I
made this two or three day [inaudible] thing where I was getting published. And
what happened was I remembered some actual influences that I had been denying,
which were Steve Martin, Monte Python, Rich Little, and all those kind of comedians.
I think I had that early adolescent deep engorgement in those guys and loved them.
Gilder Radner. Somehow because of my background I think I thought, well, art was
the thing that you can’t do. The thing that’s so difficult that it has nothing to do with
who you are as a person, it’s some rare thing.
So all those comic influences I just said well, you guys are nice but please don’t come
in with me. This is fancy. You can’t come into the dining hall. And then in a moment
of desperation, which is being at the job for seven years and not having written
anything that was good, I just went all right.
And then it was completely natural. I just had fun and when I was in the story I
knew what to do. So that was kind of one of those moments where your real
influences are the ones maybe sometimes that are just so organic it’s like one of my
big influences is oxygen, that kind of thing.
So that was really, you know.
>>: Not to be a question hog, but who are your literary heroes is maybe a different
way to say it.
>> George Saunders: Well, I love Gogol [phonetic], that Russian writer Gogol. I go
back and read the overcoat three or four times a year. And then more
contemporary, Tobias Wolff was my teacher at Syracuse, and he’s an incredible
master.
Also I met him at a time of my life where I thought you had to be a derelict to be a
writer, and he is so not a derelict. I mean he’s a former green beret, a great family
man. So that was a big, kind of that coincidence of aesthetic and personal where you
went, oh okay, so if you want to write these beautiful stories like Toby Right’s, it has
nothing to do with what you’re doing the other 20 hours of the day.
It has to do with those four. We can’t really know what he’s doing, but from the
evidence he’s bringing incredible ferocity and passion to this four hours and then
he’s going out and being a nice guy, you know?
So that was very permission giving in essence because I didn’t have to become
addicted or become like a crazy person. The other guy that I love is Stewart Dybek.
If any of you are from Chicago he’s a great Chicago writer.
And I read this story Hot Ice of his, which was kind of set approximately in my dad’s
neighborhood in Chicago. So it was kind of the first time I had read something for
which the real life corollary was available. So then I went oh, so literature isn’t a
mirror necessarily, or at least it’s not a flat mirror.
It can be a distorted mirror. And then the other big influence was this Russian Isaac
Babel who Hemmingway said was a much more efficient writer even than
Hemmingway was. And he died in a Stalinist camp at 40, but he has these beautiful
stories that I think for American writers are important because they are very
minimal in facts but they’re also funny.
And a lot of them he has a whole cycle set in childhood. So writers like me who love
Hemmingway and thought, well, Hemmingway equals exotica, Babel is every bit as
aesthetically intense and it’s set in a suburban home basically. So it’s kind of a
window.
Yeah?
>>: Similarly, who are some of the new university writers that you’re excited about
now?
>> George Saunders: I love this guy Ben Markus. Have you read him? His latest
book is called Plain Alphabet. For anybody who is technical he’s got a great book
called The Age of Wire and String, which is this crazy book that’s like a how-to guide
for a universe that doesn’t exist.
Like one of the stories is called resuscitation with vacuum cleaner of dead wife, or
something like that. And they’re just these kind of Gertrude Steinian little prose
poems that are kind of explosive.
One of my former students Adam Lavin is really wonderful. He had that book called
The Instructions. Who else do I? I think Sam Lipsyte is pretty amazing. Gary Lutz is
a guy who they call the best sentence writer in America, and I think that’s probably
true.
Lea Davis is wonderful. Who do you like?
>>: I’ll get back to you on that.
>> George Saunders: You can just say me and then everybody is happy.
[laughter]
Yes, sir?
>>: Could you talk a little bit about your characters and humor? Because one of the
things that strikes me reading at least form my perspective is that often you’ll set up
situations or set up characters that seems like it’d be easy to tear them down or tear
them apart in a funny way, but you often choose to go in a direction and have
humanity at heart and try to be funny in that space.
>> George Saunders: Thank you. It’s kind of the same thing we talked about earlier
where often in the first draft I’m tearing somebody down, you know? I had a story
called The Barber’s Unhappiness, which we lived in this little town in New York and
there was this barber who was there. And I was taking the bus so I had a lot of time
to observe this guy.
And he was one of these guys who would always check out women kind of blatantly,
you know? And even when they busted him he just, you know? And we had just had
our daughter, so I was like a new feminist, you know? And once you notice it was
even worse, you know?
So I thought, oh, I’ll write a story about that asshole. So I wrote this story in which I
just tore him down. And it was really fun because you got to be kind of excess your
inner pervert and kind of think of how does the world look to him?
And then about half way into it, it just stopped dead, you know? And it was because
I was having too much fun kicking him. And so I think the story exists formally in an
area where there has to be some hope.
Like if you wrote a story about a completely irredeemable person I don’t think you
could make it be a story, you know? So I had done that. This guy was so terrible and
awful that you just hated him. Laughed at him but hated him. And so I got stuck.
And then finally when I realized wait a minute, you have to have some redeeming
quality in him. And for me the magic of fiction is that when you get to that point you
often find that you are on autopilot a little bit.
You’re not actually looking at him as you’ve made him in language. You’re still
operating on your first assumption. So when you go back and say wait a minute
now, let me think about this guy a minute, how is he really thinking? And in that
story because I’m not very subtle, I had put in a clue. I put in a throw away joke that
he had been born with no toes on one of his feet.
It was just again to make a sentence sort of funny. And then about a year into I
thought, oh wait a minute, that’s right. His left foot has no toes on it. And that was
sort of a gateway into feeling more deeply about him and starting to actually like
him a little bit.
So I guess the short answer is it’s part of this iterative thing. At first, yeah, you’re
going to kick the guy. Oh, isn’t it funny? What a dope! You know, and the reader
and the writer are standing here mocking this guy in the schoolyard.
And then you find out that that’s not a story. Maybe it’s a satire piece or maybe it’s
just mean. So then in revision you start saying to the reader, wait here a minute, I
want to ask him something, you know?
And go over and as you do that he suddenly becomes, one, more interesting, and
two, trickily he’s manifesting out of your out of your shed, because where else could
he come from?
So suddenly you like him better. So if there’s anything sort of redemptive about
writing it’s that it trains you to be more caring, or at least more attentive to other
people in a certain way.
Yeah?
>>: It kind of seems like that [inaudible] a little of what you were saying before
about if you’re just using [inaudible] with this too. If you’re using the writing just
kind of preaching perspective, like your perspective on that guy is just that one
thing.
Part is not to preach politically, it’s sort of to examine an issue. This almost became
it sounds like an examination of the character and maybe that guy probably didn’t
actually have no toes on his foot, but examination of the kind of mental process that
person ->> George Saunders: You’re always examining your own processes aren’t you?
Because for me to imagine a pervert, well, wait a minute now, let’s slow down. Is
that all he is?
Although you’re exactly right, and by the end he was a guy that was doing that kind
of behavior for a set of reasons that had to do with his own inferiority and so on.
But a funny P.S. is that story came out in the New Yorker and we had moved by that
time and we went back to that town to visit some friends, and we just happened to
be walking by his shop the day the story came out.
And my wife, who is very pretty, and my daughters with her, and they’re very pretty
but very young, and as we’re walking by he comes out and I thought, you know
what? What an asshole a fiction writer is. Here’s this guy. He doesn’t even know
he’s in the New Yorker.
What a jerk you are, George! It’s very arrogant. And as we pass he turns and he
looks at my family and goes, “ladies.”
[laughter]
I was just like, wow, maybe I was more correct than I thought.
>>: It’s easier to have him as just that one thing than to let yourself go, well, let me
look at why he’s ->> George Saunders: Exactly.
>>: It’s a lot more tempting.
>> George Saunders: And what’s mysterious, and I don’t really understand this and
I think other writers get this, but somehow the form doesn’t permit it. Now, of
course it does. There are all kinds of stories that are basically propaganda and you
know.
But if you’re a well-trained reader you wont stand for it. You wont stand for that
kind of easy assassination. It’s a very interesting thing. And there’s a relation to
rewriting and a relation to your own discomfort in the face of an easy truth maybe
something like that.
But it’s interesting.
>>: Between technical writing and the place that you are now, how does the
transition between technical and creative writing work for you? How did you
handle it, for example? When you do technical writing you have to be in a particular
mindset, and when you’re writing more creatively there’s a shift and you have to
open up certain things inside of yourself for that to flow.
How would you rate yourself and your ability to do technical writing and have that
go smoothly versus more creative type writing? What’s that experience like for
you?
>> George Saunders: The funny thing is when I was doing it, writing my first book,
it would literally be a two second window where I’d have a report up and then
realize that everyone had left the area, you know? And the [inaudible] was shift F3,
you know?
So that was actually interesting because it sort of meant that you didn’t have any
time to conceptualize that shift. You just did it or you lost your writing time for the
day.
I haven’t really thought about this but I think it might have been valuable because at
that point my aesthetic thinking was sort of lame. And when I was in grad school I
did a lot of research, you know? Like, oh, I think I’ll do research on fifteenth century
tennis [inaudible] and Dutch whatever.
In that office environment there was none of that. So you were just literally going
form a report quote unquote shift F3, looking at the new text. And I think that
enabled some originality.
For example, the technical text, as you know nobody wants a lot of ornamentation in
a manual. So when I made the shift some of that was there. I’d be writing a section
of creative work but still the principle of efficiency was very strong in my mind at
the time. So I think that was actually kind of valuable.
So for me the thing was just the speed meant that you couldn’t theorize it. You just
did it, you know? And then you sort of went, well, I don’t know if it’s helpful or not
but I don’t have a whole lot of choice. But I think one of the mistakes I see in my
students, they sometimes have as they get more time they become more leisurely,
which means you build up more neuroses about the actual doing.
So for me it was incredibly helpful to have a situation where I was over 30, the clock
was ticking, we had two daughters, and it was either right then between 2:14 and
2:20, or not at all that day.
And it’s that thing about the knowledge that wants to be hanged in the morning has
the effect of focusing the mind. It was something like that. I’m not sure if I’m
answering your question.
>>: No that totally makes sense. You time boxed yourself essentially into actually
producing something. [inaudible]. So how much of that do you apply in your
creative writing?
>> George Saunders: I still do it, actually. I mean, I’m not working that kind of job
but I still mimic that now. I’ll go in and partly mimic the mindset and also just set,
you know, I’ll agree to do some chore in two hours.
Because one of the things that’s amazing is, okay, speaking of that intentional fallacy,
I think many of us who have artistic aspirations think that the job is to know in
advance what it is and then do it. And for me a more viable model is that art is this
sort of black enclosure, black box.
You really don’t know what’s going to happen in there and you don’t have to be
responsible for it, you just have to make sure it’s nontrivial. Maybe. Or whatever
word works for you.
But that frees you of the idea of how you should feel when you’re doing it, how you
should feel after you’re doing it, having intentions while you’re doing it. All that gets
set aside and your job is to take the reader into that black box, run around the other
side, and have her come out like, fuck! That was, wow! I don’t even know what to
say about that.
That’s actually the whole job. And I think because it’s such a scary job we frayed it
with a lot of concepts, but in fact that’s really the whole shebang.
>>: That’s where iteration [inaudible].
>> George Saunders: Exactly. I think iteration is a bit like if I said I just gave you a
furnished apartment in New York. I furnished it for you. Hope you like it. You
know, you’d go in and go ehh, it’s like the frickin’ Holiday Inn. It doesn’t feel like me.
But if I said to you, okay, every day you can take out one item and put in one of your
choosing. Well, then let two years go by. By then every single thing has been
touched by your preference, and it’s more like you than you could even imagine.
So I think revision is sort of like that. The thing slowly moves toward something you
couldn’t have predicted that inexplicably is more like you than you are, actually.
You know? Yeah.
Thank you.
>>: So you said that when you were writing your book you were in your early 30’s?
And you also said that you came to writing sort of late in life, which early 30’s for
many of us in the realms of rearview.
[laughter]
And you know, it can be done, but do you have any words of encouragement or
advice to late bloomers in the world of art?
>> George Saunders: I think in art there is no such thing. It’s just what you want is
that flash of human realness. And as we know it doesn’t come when called, you
know?
And actually form the other side of it what I see at Syracuse is one of the biggest
problems is, especially in today’s MFA culture, is that kids are so in a hurry to get
there while they’re young and they have all the chops and they have all the time, but
they haven’t been hurt.
Hurt might be too strong, but they have nothing to which they can subjugate their
virtuosity, you know? Those of us who are older you go in the world and you find
out that stuff costs, you know? There are things that really are painful. There are
things that are worth doing that are difficult.
And I think that is the gold. To have been bruised maybe in your life. To have your
empathy expanded by something that happened to you or somebody that you love,
which seems to roughly correlate with age, that seems to correlate with age roughly.
That’s gold. So I don’t think there’s any -- I always thought when I was working that
Radian job it looked like things weren’t going to happen, you know. And I thought if
I can just write one good story by the time I’m ninety, that good story lasts. You go
and look at a story like Indian Camp by Hemmingway, I don’t know how old he was
when he wrote that, or where he was or anything, but that story sort of exists out of
time.
So what I would say to a person who is young but is -- is trust whatever your life has
made in you. It is exportable, and it is really valuable. And don’t worry about time
because that’s just a buzz kill, you know?
One more question, anybody?
>>: I notice in this latest collection that there is no introduction by you or preface.
Is that by choice?
>> George Saunders: Yeah, I never do that. I really think that the stories should
kind of speak on their own and, yeah, the stories individually and collectively should
say whatever, not what I meant to say but should say something. Yeah, in short
story collections it’s a little bit unusual to have an introduction.
So the idea is just you’re going to hit it running and it’s going to do something to you
and when you’re done you’ll know what it is. Something like that, right?
Thank you so much for your attention. I really enjoyed it.
[applause]