FEMALE SPEAKER: So as many of you, I'm sure, already know,
George Saunders has been charming readers and critics
alike for years with his truly unique brand
of speculative fiction.
He's the recipient of a MacArthur Grant, as well as a
professor of creative writing at Syracuse University.
And lucky us-- he's here to promote his--
what was, for me at least-- a long
awaited new book of stories.
By the way, "Tenth of December" is available in the
back via Books Inc. Thank you so much, you guys.
And please help me welcome George Saunders.
[APPLAUSE]
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Thank you.
Thanks everybody for being here-- nice to see you all.
I thought I would just read a little sample
from the new book.
And then we could just talk informally about writing, or
maybe the creative process, or whatever comes up.
So this first thing, I'll just read a little--
I was on a reading tour a couple years ago and I drew
this Polish driver who was done.
He'd driven enough.
And he was like a zen driver.
He could drive without getting you anywhere.
[LAUGHTER]
And he was taking me to this bookstore reading, and he
said, "Sir, you go now to do reading?" I said, "Yeah." He
said, "Little advice for you.
Don't read too long." And I thought, oh you know my work.
But basically, you never leave a literary reading going,
damn, I wish he'd read another 40 minutes.
So I'll just give you a little sample.
And I never was a big sci-fi reader as a kid.
Except the one real big moment of my reading, or my cultural
life, was that moment in Star Wars when the ships come over
and you can see that they're dented and
rusty and fucked up.
And I thought that was really a major revelation.
So some of my stuff is kind of sci-fi.
This is definitely kind of sci-fi.
And I think it's self explanatory.
But basically, this guy is in a--
well, you don't where he is at first-- but he's being
ritually administered these different kinds of drugs.
And these drugs, as they do, they change everything.
So he's, you'll see in the course of the story, there's
some inflections in his voice and consciousness that are
from these drugs that are being dripped in.
And later you find out that actually he's in prison.
And his mom has scratched some money together to get him into
this slightly nicer prison, where instead of being a
prisoner, you're--
what did we used to call it in the corporate world-- like a
research assistant.
[LAUGHTER]
So this is a little section from "Escape from
Spiderhead." "One.
Drip on?" Abnesti said over 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 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."
Abnesti said, "Jeff, how about we pep up those language
centers?" "Sure," I said.
"Drip on?" he said.
"Acknowledge," I said.
He added some Verbaluce 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
vignette, the ancient corollary, through which Plato
and some of his contemporaries might have strolled; to wit I
was sensing the eternal and the ephemeral.
I sat pleasantly engaged in these thoughts until the
Verbaluce began to wane.
At which point, the garden just looked nice again.
It was something about the bushes and whatnot.
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 post Verbaluce
feel to it.
"What's going to be cool about that one?" Abnesti 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 nearby.
Or say a park ranger has to work a double shift."
"That'll be cool," I said.
"That's ED763," he said. "We're thinking 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 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?" Abnesti said 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 more quantifiably as per
pretty, as per sexy.
It appeared we liked each other about average, i.e. no
big attraction or revulsion either way.
Abnesti said, "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.
And 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 horndog 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.
"Jeff," Abnesti 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," Abnesti said with a laugh.
"Drip on?" "Acknowledge," she said all breathless.
Soon, experiencing the benefits of the flowing
Verbaluce in our drips, we were not only fucking really
well, but also talking pretty great.
Like instead of just saying the sex types of things we had
been saying, such as wow, and oh God, and hell yes, and so
forth, we now began free styling re our sensations and
thoughts in elevated diction with 80% increased vocab, our
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'd
found the precise arrangement of body, face, mind that
personified all that was desirable.
The taste of her mouth, that 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 realized 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 heretofore 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, bespoke
the same thing.
We had known each other forever, were soulmates, had
met and loved in numerous preceding lifetimes and would
meet and love in many subsequent lifetimes, always
with the same transcendentally 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 nonnarrative
mind scenery, i.e.
A series of vague mental images of places I had never
been, a certain pine packed valley in high white
mountains, a chalet type house in a cul-de-sac, the yard of
which was overgrown with wide, stunted, Seussian trees, each
of which triggered a deep sentimental longing--
longings that coalesced 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 Abnesti had included some
Vivistif in my drip.
Afterward 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 an hour.
It was bliss, it was perfection, it was that
impossible thing--
happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of
some new desire rising from within it.
We cuddled with a fierceness/focus that rivaled
the fierceness/focus with which we had fucked.
There is nothing less about cuddling vis-a-vis fucking, is
what I mean to say.
We were all over each other in the 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 Abnesti had shut off the Verbaluce,
also the shame reducer.
Basically, everything began to dwindle.
Suddenly we felt shy, but still loving.
We began the process of trying to talk apres Verbaluce--
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 Abnesti said, "Drip on?"
We had kind of forgotten he was even there behind his one
way mirror.
I said, "Do we have to?
We are 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?" Abnesti 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 about 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, or 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 of lunch time 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 Abnesti.
So I'll stop there and deliver what "Reading Rainbow" calls a
cliffhanger, and thank you.
[INAUDIBLE]
[APPLAUSE]
So now, if anybody has a question I'm happy to take it.
And there's a funny phenomenon.
I've been doing a lot of readings.
And there's this weird thing where invariably the person
who asks the first question is the one with the highest
sexual energy in the gathering.
[LAUGHTER]
It's weird.
It's like some kind of Darwinian thing.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah, I had an idea it was you.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: I had the opportunity the other day to
read a little "New York Times Magazine" article about you.
And in the back, at the bottom of it, they mentioned that you
studied or practiced some [? Yingla ?]
Buddhism.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: And a lot of this stuff, in terms of perception
and having alternate viewpoints, different ways of
understanding our experience and reality, particularly
generating experience and being able to appreciate that
and work with that came out.
And I wanted to, I guess hear a couple points about how you
deal with the flexibility of understanding how we perceive
things and how we generate [INAUDIBLE].
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Sure, that's a great question.
I think, for me, that the answer is a little simple,
which is, for me, everything that I do in fiction is
through the language, like the individual sentence.
And it's a funny thing, because when you're a young
writer, you're concept heavy.
And you usually participate in some version of the
intentional fallacy, which is your job as a writer is to
pull up the big shit truck full of meaning or theme and
get the reader [INAUDIBLE]
sit there and, bam, and drop that.
And it's a fundamentally condescending view.
Which I think most of us when we're young artists, we have
that idea, that you're a good artist to the extent that
you're conveying some theme.
So I had a long period of not doing much in art, because I
was operating under that assumption.
And I had a breakthrough where I realized that in order to be
in the kind of intimate relationship you have to be in
with your reader, you have to commit to not being sure about
what's happening.
In other words, to come into it with as low content as
possible and feel your way through it by watching the
energy coming off the prose.
So that's the main answer for me, is as I'm writing I'm
imagining an intelligent, engaged person right over
here, who's smart and is a little skeptical and is
watching me to see if I'm going to pull any tricks.
And I imagine a little gauge in my head-- like positive
over here and negative here.
So as you're reading your own prose, you're watching that
needle, and you're trying to keep it up in the positive.
And when it gets negative, then your job is to be all
right with that.
And like a scientist, to say well, why did it
do that do you think?
Why is it on page two, nine lines in, I just felt a little
bit of a drop.
And then, if you can avoid answering that too
reductively, then it opens up.
So really, in a way, that's the answer to your question.
But I also was raised Catholic.
And we did this intense thing called the stations of the
cross, which maybe some of you did.
And this was the '60s, so we really did it.
We did it for five straight days, naked in the desert
being flayed.
But the thing was, there were these images of the suffering
of Christ around the room.
And so you sat and you looked at each one.
So now it was the second station.
And there was a little narration from the Bible.
And then you were to sit, quietly, and think about it.
And we had one nun who was wonderful, because she would
say, think about what was Jesus experiencing and so on.
And then she'd say, think about what the Roman soldier
was thinking.
What about that guy-- there's an image-- what about that guy
standing to the side?
What's his role?
So that was early, like Novel Writing 101.
But from an early time, the idea was a part of the fictive
process was generating empathy for somebody
that you might not.
I'm not sure if I'm answering your question at all.
[LAUGHTER]
GEORGE SAUNDERS: And when I was a child--
Thank you for your question.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
It's really just about how to appreciate the different ways
of perceiving--
like you were saying, like you can have [INAUDIBLE] the
different characters or understanding that we create
our reality to a certain extent.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Exactly.
And for me, one of the interesting fictive points is
that if you were trying to make a quote, unquote accurate
picture of this room, it would probably consist of 107
separate mind streams going at once and occasionally
interacting.
And often the explosiveness of the interaction has to do with
the mind streams.
He's thinking, no one respects me.
I never get a break.
And then she's thinking about her sick mother and she
inadvertently steps on his foot.
And a shit storm happens.
But actually it's not really a physical, it's two mind
streams bumping a little bit.
Congratulations on your sexual energy also.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: I wondered if you could say a few things about
your influences.
And the reason that I'm interested in this is
listening to you in this piece resurrected for me a powerful
memory of having read "Flowers for Algernon."
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Oh yeah, sure.
Sure, yep.
AUDIENCE: I feel like it's really beautiful
in a similar way.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah, I know.
I had the same-- when I was writing the
story, I went oh I remember.
I didn't really remember the details of the story, but I
thought, oh I'm channeling that.
AUDIENCE: Yeah
GEORGE SAUNDERS: You know I think when I was younger, I
hated any kind of suggestion that my work had anything to
do with anything that had ever occurred.
And then as you get older, you're like well of course,
where else are you going to come from, except all the
influences that have passed through you?
So in a way, that they might be at the heart of that
Picasso thing about, was it good artists borrow, great
artists steal?
That saying, yeah of course, in any kind of work none of us
exist totally originally.
And maybe your supplements as an artist is your willingness
to let those influences flow through you.
[INAUDIBLE]
And then the other thing I noticed is when you're on a
book tour that you always get the influence question.
And the first thing is to go, well of course, Shakespeare.
Jesus, Mother Teresa was quite important, right?
But then when you really think about it, for me, the '70s
comics were usually--
Steve Martin in his early incarnation, Monty Python,
George Carlin.
And in our school, that was really a way to get a little
bit of credibility is that you could stand up and recite the
George Carlin album or do a passable Steve Martin.
So I had a long period where I really considered that low--
not literary.
And because of where I came from, I thought, well
literature--
I never had met writers.
Literature is a thing that you can't quite do, where you
totally become someone else.
And only at this crisis point, I went well maybe not.
Maybe literature is where you really open up the valve to
everybody that you've been.
And for me that meant letting in the sound of vestigial
Steve Martin and the Monty Python.
So I think influence can sometimes may be more full
body than we think it is.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I saw you come to Google about five years ago.
And I wanted to hear you talk a little bit about what it
must be like five years later to have some of your stories
coming true and we're making them happen.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: My neighbors, for example, just got some
[INAUDIBLE]
in Atherton.
And so I was just wondering if you draw, I guess, inspiration
from Silicon Valley?
Or if it's, I don't know, some other level of inspiration?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: I don't really do a lot of research or
direct tapping for ideas.
But I think my feeling is that if you were wired right, and
if you were alert enough, even the 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 us are young, and yet
we know for a fact--
totally verifiable--
that in x number of years we'll all be
rotting corpses somewhere.
We know it.
Why are we so happy?
Why are we eating lunch?
[LAUGHTER]
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Or even to be a little more serious, we
venture forth every day in love with somebody or somebody
is beloved to us, and yet the incredible vulnerability that
everyone comes to an end, including the people
you love, for sure.
So to me that--
what's weird is the habitual position 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 for the weird pieces is just
through the writing process, through revising, through
trying not to be dull, to try to get some sense of that
wonder back into prose.
So I don't really do a lot of looking for weird things.
Also, the other thing I notice, I don't really have as
much judgment about contemporary culture as people
think I do.
I like it.
I like everything.
I like that--
I won't name companies-- but some of the dangerous
technological developments, I think it's interesting.
So to me, the highest position is to have five or six
opinions, all open, on your desktop.
And they contradict, and there's no way to reconcile
them, but you're OK leaving them open.
That would be the highest aspiration.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Hi.
AUDIENCE: When you have a story that plays around with
characters that are opposites, do you ever find yourself
having trouble sympathizing with one?
Or you sympathize more with one over the other?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Totally, yeah.
The question is if there's two different characters, do you
have trouble with sympathy?
And I think you absolutely do.
And you should, really.
It would be weird if you didn't.
But then I do this kind of iterative revision thing,
where I just go into it hundreds and hundreds of
times, each time tweaking a little something or a lot--
just expressing my opinion on each draft.
And what's interesting is if you do that, the first step is
to out yourself on your bias.
Like in this book, there's a story called "Puppy."
And there's these two mothers who are very similar, and they
had the same interests.
And in the end, it's catastrophic what happens.
And in that story, I definitely had 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 writing her dialogue, you're
condescending to her.
Because I had written it really straight white trash.
And she said, that throws the story off.
You seem like you're making fun of her and
not the other one.
So in that, the process was to take her
dialogue up a little bit.
And in doing that, she became a more full person.
And I liked her better.
So for that story, the critical thing was to do just
what you're saying-- adjust it, so that there's some
semblance of equity between the two.
But I think as a general writing principle, your main
job is to do something and then notice it.
And then adjust accordingly.
And then notice the thing that you've done, and adjust
accordingly--
rinse, lather, repeat a million times.
And then weirdly, in time, the story will adjust itself
morally to be more fair, which is really a weird thing.
But yeah, I think you should.
Of course, you would.
AUDIENCE: I think it's really interesting what you said
about acknowledging how your own mindset has changed as a
writer from a more professorial
place to more engaging--
to combine that with what sounds like a very intense
iterative visionary writing style.
Do you ever have the desire, or do you ever go back to your
earlier work thinking I can 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 in three weeks, and we had a
baby right away.
And so we were racing.
And I was working for a company called Rating.
I was a tech writer, and a very low level tech writer.
And my wife had been married once before, and had a more
full, better, a richer life--
I'll put it that way.
And I could feel her looking at me like, come on, let's get
something going.
So I went on this trip to Mexico.
And it was this perfect novelist trip.
It was a wedding, there was a male model slash surfer who
was in the wedding party, there was a guy who just out
of jail for a DWI, there was a radical Catholic priest.
I'm like, this is it!
It's a gift from God.
So I came home.
I'm like, honey, you're sitting on a goldmine.
Don't worry, I got it.
So I wrote this novel for about a year and a half, and
we had one daughter by that time.
So I get home from work, drink a pot of coffee, and if I was
feeling really ambitious a bottle of Boone's Farm, which
is a deadly combo.
And I would write just until I would drop at the desk, go to
work, and I did this for a year and a half.
And then I had the book.
And it was 700 pages.
And I thought, no I'm a minimalist.
So I cut it.
I cut it to 400, rock hard.
And so I said, I think I've got a little novel for you to
read, sweety.
So she said, OK.
So I said, just take your 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 at the desk like this, fried.
So to give you an idea, the name of that book was "Le
Bourda de Eduardo." Which I think just means Ed's wedding.
So I don't ever go back to that.
That stuff has a taint on it.
I just would rather move ahead.
Thank you bringing up that painful subject.
[LAUGHTER]
But the one thing that I am interested 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 great essay called "I'm not
Knowing." And he says the writer's that person who
embarking on her task has no idea what to do.
And that, to me, seems like the sacred state,
if you can get there.
And then Stuart Dybek, this great Chicago writer, has this
thing about the story Is always talking to you.
And your job is to listen.
But for some reason, we have a tendency to not really want to
hear what the story's natural energy is saying.
But we want to override it.
And so I was a geophysical engineer, that was one of the
big basic scientific principles was you don't go
into a study rooting for some answer.
So that was very helpful in writing.
AUDIENCE: I was wondering if you could speak a bit about
your editing process.
Specifically, I read somewhere that "The Semplica Girl
Diaries" started out as a 200 page story and evolved into a
10 page story.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: And I guess without spoiling it for everyone, I'm
wondering what got left out and how you decided.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Sure.
So the question is about the editing process.
And I had a story called "The Semplica Girl Diaries" which
started in '98 and I finish it last spring.
And it was up to some huge number of pages and got
drastically cut.
One of my things is I think as artists we have to submit to
our neuroses a little bit.
So often we think that to be an artist, you have to conquer
your neuroses and be a perfectly
calm, wonderful person.
But my experience was rather you turn towards with your
ticks and go OK, come on.
So for me I have a real, just like 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 you keep 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 what I consider banal language.
You know when you're in grade school and they have those
little readers, and it's like, Jimmy was a bright happy boy
as he bounced into the room in the middle of a
bright, fall day.
It actually made me a little sick.
There was something so unessential
about it, and blah.
So for me, one of the things that 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 thing will come in and speed it up.
And I think the subtext to that is do you respect your
reader's intelligence?
So I'll give you an exaggerated example.
If you have in a first draft something like, Bob came
happily into the room and sat down on the blue couch.
Perfectly functional sentence right?
But it bugs me, because you think, wait, why does he have
to sit down on a couch?
Can you sit up on a couch?
All right, well let's cut the word down.
Bob came happily into the room and sat on the blue couch.
Why does he have to come into the room?
Is there any meaning to him coming into the room?
Not that we know of--
OK, cut.
Bob happily--
I don't care.
We don't care about Bob's happiness.
Bob sat on the blue couch.
Blue?
[LAUGHTER]
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Does blue signify?
Not really--
OK, Bob sat on the couch.
Bob?
[LAUGHTER]
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Cut it.
So now we don't have much, but what we have doesn't suck.
We have Bob.
So in a slightly less radical way, I apply that kind of
thinking to the story.
And the logic is, if I'm making those really seem like
nitpicky decisions, every time I 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, the whole thing is to get you
stepping closer and closer and closer,
trusting me more and more.
And in the process of trusting me more, the fictive reality
is becoming more three dimensional.
And you get that magical fictional moment where you and
the character aren't different, and you can't
negotiate your way out of the cliff that's approaching.
And I think that process is done--
one way it can be done is by this micro editing to assume
intelligence.
So on that story, it was 180 pages.
But at page 30, you were asleep, basically.
There was no urgency in it.
So then part of the job is just to say OK, those are just
pages and now time to trim it back.
I don't know if that answers your question, but yeah.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Hi.
AUDIENCE: Thanks for coming back.
You just explained how you spent actually quite a lot of
time writing books.
Ed's wedding was a year and a half.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yep.
AUDIENCE: Stuff like that.
How do you motivate yourself to just keep on going through
all that time?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Right.
You know, honestly it's just ego.
I mean, I really like writing.
And I like to be known as a writer.
And I like the whole schtick.
But to me the most horrifying moment is when you send
something out too soon, or that moment where you have
misidentified something shitty as good, and it's got your
name on it.
It's like ugh.
It's a nightmare.
So for me, I have from high school, I loved the-- yeah.
Some people, they want to be songwriters or
they want to be whatever.
I really wanted to be a short story writer.
And it makes me really happy to be in that harness.
So I'll get something like that "Semplica Girl Stories."
I had it in pretty good shape in 1999--
pretty good.
But on a scale of 10, it was about a seven and a half.
And I could feel that I could get it up to 8.3 for sure.
And at that point, I don't really care how long it takes.
So it's a lot of negative urge--
ego, grasping, desperation, but also the pleasure.
I feel like once you've taken a story, any project you're
in, once you've really stuck with one to the end and seen
the benefits, for me that's a bit addictive.
I know what a finished story feels like, and I'm just not
interested in not getting there.
So then it's weird, because it becomes a suspension of time,
where that story took 12 years.
That's all right.
It's out.
It's better than it was.
AUDIENCE: So I'm taking a short story writing class up
at Stanford, and we read "CivilWarLand" in "Bad
Decline." And the whole class really loved the whole book.
And we discuss your short stories all the time.
So I wanted to ask you as a professor of creative writing,
what do you think makes a great writer?
Is it experience?
Is it focus?
Is it getting an MFA?
Is it getting a Ph.D.?
Or being an engineer and then having that experience?
What do you think--
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Right.
Yeah, so if you can do all of those, you're good.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
GEORGE SAUNDERS: No, that's a great question.
You know what's funny is that we are in a moment in America
where the MFA is getting a big head.
And Gary Shteyngart, he had this great line.
He said, we have reached the point in American literary
culture where the number of readers is exactly equal to
the number of writers.
[LAUGHTER]
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah.
And I teach in a great program.
But there's two fallacies that need to be debunked.
One is to be a writer, you have to get an MFA.
False.
Two is if you get an MFA, you'll be a published writer.
False.
We've seen a doubling at Syracuse.
When I go home I have 560 applications to
read for six spots.
And the vast majority are from people who are just coming
from undergrad.
So there's something weird about that.
It's not quite right.
But when they come, our students are off the charts.
But the thing we teach them-- we try to teach them-- is that
the answer to your question is nobody knows.
Nobody knows.
You can be the smartest person in the room, the most
articulate, the most well traveled, the most soulful,
and you can put pen to paper and you don't have any oomph.
Or you can be a little nondescript person with no
opinions who just has never really done anything, and
somehow when you put the pen to paper, this--
So that's the hard thing.
But it isn't true of anything worth doing?
There's an x factor that's magical.
So what you can do is you can do the work.
I think that's really important.
And I found out yesterday that I've been telling a vicious
lie about Robert Frost for about 10 years.
I had a student who told me, I thought--
I maybe misheard him--
that Frost was doing a seminar at a grad school.
And a student asked a really involved technical question
about the sonnet.
And Frost, to debunk his over conceptual mind said, son,
don't worry, work.
And I've been saying for years, that's great advice,
because Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule, and blah,
blah, blah.
Well, I just found out that he didn't say that.
He said, "Don't work.
Worry."
[LAUGHTER]
GEORGE SAUNDERS: So I don't know what
the hell he was thinking.
But I think what you'll find is it's something that some of
us want so desperately--
to be good writers, I think partly because it feels like
consciousness.
When you read a great writer, you feel like you've been
really seen.
And you would love to be the person
who's giving that feeling.
But because it's so hard, I think it's got to be mystery.
I do think that for an individual writer, if you put
the 10,000 hours in, you'll both find out what your issues
are, and you'll find really weird, unique solutions that
you never could have imagined at the outset.
But that process has almost nothing to do with whether
you'll ultimately be published.
So it's tricky.
And you won't make any money.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: So consuming art is very personal process, so it's
really hard to say that someone was wrong
when they did it.
But in all your work, have you ever witnessed someone
observing something you wrote and just interpreting it very
surprisingly, or wrong?
And how did that make you feel?
How did that go?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah.
When you said that, it brought back one thing to mind.
I had written a story called "Winky" which is
in the second book.
And it's this story about this guy who goes to a self help
seminar, and it is the motto of this 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 get rid of her.
So he's thinking, I'm not going to let her crap in my
oatmeal, even though she's nice and innocent and sweet
and has nowhere else to go, I've got to live into my own
personal power.
So it's obviously a tongue in cheek thing.
And in the story, he goes home, he's
resolved to kick her out.
And when he sees her, he can't.
And he melts.
But the kicker is that he feels terrible that he's not a
powerful enough person.
So that's the story.
So it came out in the "New Yorker." And about a week
later, I get this letter.
And this guy says, my name is so and so.
I work with Charlton Heston at the NRA, so I suspect
politically we have our differences.
But I loved your story.
It helped me so much.
This is a great example of art crossing
the left/right divide.
And of course, I was like, ye check off!
See, I did it.
And so of course, fishing for further compliments, I said,
oh thank you so much brother.
Tell me a little more about how I changed your life.
And he said, well my mother is in very good health.
She's 72, and she had a very mild stroke, which has caused
me some inconvenience.
And your story convinced me to put her in a rest home.
[LAUGHTER]
And I was like, what?
And I wrote him back this long thing.
No sir, please, you've misunderstood.
And I gave him the whole exogesis of the thing.
And he's like, that's cool, have a good day.
That was that.
So yeah, I think once you put something out there, there is
no freaking telling what someone'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 gotten that excuse from a Starbucks
cup, reading the coffee grounds or something.
But I think you have to assume that-- and it's interesting to
do a tour, and this book is actually selling, so I'm
meeting a lot of people.
And it's amazing how many good hearted, good readers there
are who do get more--
get what you put in it and then even more.
So mostly not-- that was the one example I can
really think of.
AUDIENCE: Also because of that story, I say crapping in my
oatmeal, and no one knows what I'm talking about.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah.
See?
So there was a good outcome too, so it's a balance.
Thank you.
Thanks for the question.
AUDIENCE: So I just wanted to address something.
One of the reasons why your stories grab me is that they
seem so honest.
And I think I read a reviewer that said something about how
you can come closer to truth in fiction sometimes
than in real life.
So I wanted to ask you, how do you as you're writing try and
sidle up to truth through fiction?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: That's a great question.
And I think the answer is a phrase at a time.
Because if I think about what do I 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 is if you start with anything
really, any prejudice or whatever, through this
iterative process of trying to get your prose not to be a
buzz kill, basically, then weirdly 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 trained reader, that sentence leaves
you a little, eh.
You're waiting for detail, right?
So then if you write that on Tuesday.
Wednesday you come back and say that's vague, let
me flesh that out.
Bob wore an ugly sweater.
OK, now suddenly we're talking about a guy with bad taste.
It's changed a little bit--
still not very specific.
Bob wore a stained red sweater with the torn blue pocket and
a reindeer on the abdomen.
Well, that's a better sense already.
And suddenly now it's about Bob is now
a little bit slovenly--
almost belligerently slovenly.
And that's interesting, suddenly.
And then it produces plot too.
Because having established that Blob--
Blob?
[LAUGHTER]
GEORGE SAUNDERS: I'm editing right now.
So having established that Blob is belligerently
slothful, then we know what might have to happen to him.
So in the bad Hollywood version, he meets an
incredibly neat girl, played by Angelina Jolie.
So I think if you take the thing a phrase at a time, that
boat will mysteriously move towards truth, and also it'll
move you to a place of empathy.
When we live in New York, upstate, I used to wait for a
bus across from this barbershop.
And there was this middle aged barber who came out--
a pear shaped guy-- and he'd come out with a
cigarette and a coffee.
And every time a woman walked by, 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 going to nail that guy.
I am going to write a story and just make fun of him.
So I started, and it was really enjoyable--
this guy with this thought stream
that's always perverted.
And then about a year into that, the story just died.
I couldn't get it to go past 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 so intent on kicking him, that I
wasn't giving him any hope of getting
out of that low position.
And that's not a story.
There has to be at least a trace--
the hope that the person could transcend himself.
So as soon as I did that, I thought I've got to make this
guy more sympathetic.
Now because I'm not that subtle, I wrote in
that he had no toes.
So that was my subtle Chekovian move there.
But I did it, because suddenly here's a guy who now he's
still a sexist, and he's very defensive, and he
doesn't have any toes.
So suddenly, oh, poor guy, and so then the
story could move ahead.
So I think that's where the honesty and everything comes
from just line by line immersion in
the thing, I think.
Yeah, but the funny thing about that, because that story
come out in the "New Yorker." And by that time, I'd spent
about three years with this projection of
this guy in my mind.
So we happened to be in that town.
And I'm walking down the street with my wife and my two
daughters, and lo and behold this 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 looked at 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'd talk a little bit about
how your process is the same and/or different when working
on nonfiction rather than fiction.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Sure.
Yeah, I did a series of nonfiction 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 of rewriting to generate plot, to
say, well what's the next thing that should happen, that
could happen, that's meaningful.
And for some reason, that takes me a lot of hours.
So with the nonfiction, you come home from a week and you
know there are 10 things that happened.
So then the process is just trying to write those 10 and
see which one of them comes to life.
And then once, say six of them do, four of them don't, then
you just do a calculation.
I've got 12,000 words, I can take this one up,
turn this one down.
So it's a little more like engineering work--
you're cutting to fit.
And then the meaning of the story, and the theme, come out
of which elements have risen to the occasion a little bit.
So that tends to be faster.
Your main job is to make whatever you do charming on a
sentence to sentence level.
But the events are given to you.
So that's really a nice palate cleanser in a way.
AUDIENCE: I think I read in an interview with your editor
saying that with nonfiction you tended to give extra
material to the editor.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: How does that process work?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Well, basically, at "GQ" I always
had a week long trip and 12,000 words.
So you'd get those three or four bits.
You're like I can't believe that's not going in there.
And you have a point in time vision of your 12,000 words,
but this part over here still feels red hot.
So in that setting, you had the liberty of saying what do
you think, should I try to 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, then it becomes really like a
Rubik's cube.
Where does it go, what do I have to give up to get that
back, and so on?
But just to have a second set of eyes saying, actually no,
you've got that, that one's not so good, I think there's
heat in that third one, put it in.
AUDIENCE: My question is about how your world view influences
your writing.
In many of your interviews, you've talked about when you
started off and you were working as an engineer, you
had the sense that things could go drastically wrong in
your life at any point, how it was very fragile.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Right.
AUDIENCE: And that world view seems to be reflected in
stories like "CivilWarLand." And now you're famous, you're
well-to-do, and your books have even started selling.
I'm wondering how your world view has changed, and whether
that change affects how you write and approach fiction?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: That's a great question, yeah.
For me, when we were young, a writer is like the canary in a
coal mine in that we were never in the gulag.
We were way over extended on credit
cards, but not starving.
But I found that just that little whiff of fear that you
have when you have small kids and you're
not a powerful person--
that was enough to really--
you know that great Terry Eagleton quote about
"Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body." So I
could feel that.
And so I got those first two 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 kids are wonderful and grown.
And so the one thing I notice, my desire, what I want to
accomplish before die is to try to make a fictional scale
model of the world in which the positive and the negative,
the hopeful and the not are there in a compelling mix.
And I noticed it --
when you look at my earlier work, it's very good at
showing the potential for chaos.
And I just want to try to get some of the positive valence
in there, in a way that's not cheesy, that's not
sentimental or corny.
But I think any of us who live in America in this time,
you've got to love it.
We're very fortunate.
Or forget America, you walk through a field of grass on a
summer day and they just cut it--
pretty good.
So for some reason, fiction skews dark.
Some would say happiness writes white.
So technically, I think it's harder to get the positive
valences in.
And that's my mission, but again, without becoming Mr.
Positive Thinker--
the guy who gets a spike through his head and says what
a great opportunity.
And I think the great writers do it.
Tolstoy did it, Shakespeare did it, Virginia Woolf did it,
Alice Munro does it.
And so that's my personal mission.
AUDIENCE: Just a quick follow up question on that.
I think that you are driving at what was in my mind too.
Why does fiction tend to be darker?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: That's a great question.
AUDIENCE: Why is it so difficult to capture the
beautiful and positive moments in our lives?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: I think one answer is just the Little Red
Riding Hood syndrome, which is if I say once upon a time,
there was a girl named Little Red Riding Hood.
Her mother told her, don't talk to the wolf,
and then she didn't.
[LAUGTHER]
GEORGE SAUNDERS: So I think it's just
something about maybe--
here, I'm just guessing-- but maybe at some level,
storytelling is cautionary in its design.
And I think that even in the Bible, 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, certainly at the beginning levels,
smirking is so easy, to make fun of something is easy.
And when we get our applications, it's funny.
Because every year, you're reading young writers.
And so for example, it turns out that in that fictive
country, everybody over 35 is a pedophile--
everybody.
And every person, for example, any midget is a
genius, is a sage.
Those are the only ones who ever show up.
There's tropes that you get into--
every stepfather is a terrible monster, who only reveals
himself on page 12.
So that's not true.
It's just a pattern of imagination.
So I don't really know why that is.
But I know for sure, from experience, it's harder to get
into those high registers.
AUDIENCE: Hello.
I want to ask you about Hemingway's influence on you.
I was listening yesterday at the forum.
You spoke about how you tried to imitate him or
work a lot like him.
And it was frustrating at the end.
And earlier, you spoke about how you make
something sound true.
And I think Hemingway, in one of his books when he was in
Paris, I think he tells that he tries to write something
that sounds the truest.
That's a technique, I think, for him.
If it sounds true, then it's good enough.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Right.
AUDIENCE: And so my question is, are there things that you
learn from Hemingway that you use in your writings, like
this one or other things that you 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 to that critical point where your
worldview and your hero's diction just don't close.
So I was living in Amarillo, Texas and trying to be
Hemingway too.
And so you'd go like, Nick walked into the Walmart .
It was pleasant.
[LAUGHTER]
GEORGE SAUNDERS: But there's, for a young writer, that
wonderful moment where you go I know things in my gut that I
can't say in that diction, now matter if you're imitating
Kerouac or whoever it is.
So that is a holy moment for a young writer, when you start
getting full body impatient with 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 the sentence the way he did.
And make sure that the sentence is not only a
sentence but it actually can become a thing in the world
itself in a certain way.
AUDIENCE: Do you think that this style it
represents his time?
It's not something you can 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 his later work especially, he
wasn't funny.
He didn't have any sense of humor actually.
He knew very well who the noble, interesting
people were and so on.
And my life was not--
I never lived a Hemingwayesque moment really.
I remember as a young kid coming out of a funeral-- a
very sad, terrible thing.
But the funeral was being held in a mock Georgian mansion--
one of those mansions that had been put up just to be a
funeral parlor.
And then you walk out of that, and everyone's
crying and it's terrible.
And across the street, there's a Chuck E Cheese.
And the mouse is on break.
And he's on the side of the building with his head off.
And he's smoking.
So that moment could not show up in Hemingway.
He couldn't do it.
He had a stylistic cave he had made for himself.
And I thought, that's where the gateway to style is.
And when you see something in your life, in your heart, in
your world that the style of your hero can't accommodate,
then it's a time for growth.
MALE SPEAKER: I'm afraid we're out of time.
But I just want to say thank you for coming.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Thank you very much--
appreciate it.
[APPLAUSE]