George Saunders | September 2018

George Saunders

What follows is an expanded, formalized version of briefer, looser remarks offered at the AWP Conference in Tampa, Florida, on March 8, 2018.

Essential Early Errors

I was raised working-class on the south side of Chicago. My dad says it wasn’t blue-collar, wasn’t white-collar, but “gray-collar.” I didn’t know artists as a kid, and when I first went to Syracuse for grad school, I was amazed to suddenly find myself in the presence of a series of visiting writers and was desperately hungry to learn how the thing was actually done. Now, we writers are inclined to construct after-the-fact explanations for how we write, explanations that are often deceptively  rational. You know: “In this novel, I was attempting to critique patriarchy by utilizing research I’ve done on hawking traditions from the 15^th Century and implementing a color scheme of various shades of mauve, to signify, etc., etc.” Hearing these rational explanations, I was like: “Wow, my God, I’m going to have to get a different job. I mean—I can’t do that.” I had fallen under a version of what I’ve since heard described as “the intentional fallacy.” That is: the idea that a writer fully knows her intention at the outset. She knows the book she wants to write, and just writes it.

I had another affliction at that time: a tragic medical condition called a “Hemingway Boner.” I suspect some of you may have had this same disease. Basically, inspired by my love for (and misunderstanding of) Hemingway’s work, I understood writing to be the simple regurgitation of one’s direct experience, intended to cause the reader to feel exactly what you, the writer, had felt while living those experiences.

I met my future wife, Paula, and we got engaged in three weeks, in the romantic Syracuse ambience, and married within the year. Paula became pregnant with our first daughter soon after, and then had to go on bed-rest for the last four months of her pregnancy. So, we went quickly from being free-spirited, carefree young artists to a couple of overburdened parents, working hard, under serious financial constraints. I was a tech writer, Paula was teaching, and we saw demonstrated, in those early years, Terry Eagleton’s observation that: “Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body.” Our grace and ease were being reduced by the life we were living and the pressing need to make a living. We were both struggling to get writing time, trying to do right by our employers, be present for our kids—all of that.

During this period, a dear friend of mine was getting married down in Mexico, and Paula said I should go down alone—she’d stay home with the baby, we could overcharge a credit card.

The wedding, as it turned out, was something out of a young writer’s dream. A radical Catholic priest from the south side of Chicago was officiating. In the wedding party were a male model/surfer and a guy just got out of Joliet State Prison. It was beautiful and exotic, and I felt that, if I couldn’t make a novel out of that rich material, I might not be a writer after all. I came home and communicated something to Paula along the lines of: “Honey, you’re sitting on a gold mine.” I was sure that this book, once finished, would solve all our problems.

For about six months, I stayed up late every night. I’d have a pot of coffee and—if it felt like a big night—some Boone’s Farm. At the end of that period, I’d finished a 700-page novel. And I was so happy. I’d done it, I felt.

Now, to give you a sense of how (not) great the book was—its title was: La Boda de Eduardo. Which I think means, like, Ed’s Wedding.

Because I’m speaking to an insider crowd, I expect you’ll recognize this move: you finish something, and very casually say to your partner: “Oh, by the way? Here’s something you might be interested in reading. But no rush. Take your time. Only if you really want to.” Then you perch nearby like an anxious gargoyle.

So, Paula took La Boda de Eduardo into the next room, and after a few minutes I snuck a quick look in. She must have been on about page four, and had her head in her hands, just in agony. And instantaneously, I saw the book’s flaws and realized I’d known about them all along but had been in denial. I joke about it now, but at the time it was like getting kicked in the gut. Mostly because I knew she was right—I had wasted all that precious time and had no backup idea.

A Breakthrough of Sorts

The next day I went into work, experiencing that beautiful clarity of despair that comes with having committed a true artistic fiasco: “Okay, this thing to which I have given my all, did not work. And everything I’ve tried up until now hasn’t worked. What now?” Awash in that despair-haze, I was assigned to take notes on a particularly uneventful conference call. It was a particularly uneventful call. So, I started writing these little Seussian poems, kind of out of the corner of my eye. They were light, scatological, irrational, comic—I wasn’t thinking about the writing at all. I was just goofing around, killing time.

I’d finish one, draw a little cartoon illustration to accompany it, then flip over the page and start another. No thought, no analysis, just spontaneous production. By the time the call was over, I had about twenty pages of these “poems.” And I nearly threw them away. But there was something about them I liked. So, I took them home, dropped them on the table, went off to play with the kids. A few minutes later, I heard this blessed sound: my wife laughing (in a good way!) at these poems.

I hadn’t had anyone express pleasure at something I’d written in a long time. I’d give somebody a story, and the next time I saw them they’d say, “Well, I read it.” Long pause. “Yep, I did. I read it. Sure did.” Or, worse: “It was… interesting.” (Nobody wants that. God save us from being “interesting.”)

But now I’d got this sincere, positive reaction from my wife, a reaction of genuine pleasure. And it was as if a switch had been thrown in my head.

Up until then (I could suddenly see), I’d been withholding my natural gifts, such as they were. For example: humor. All my life, I have tried to be funny. If anxious, if trying to charm somebody, if trying to get out of trouble, I would always, instinctively, resort to a joke. (When my first girlfriend in Chicago broke up with me, she said, “I don’t like it that you’re always joking.” And I couldn’t help it: I responded with a joke.)

But there was no humor in my early work. Certainly not in La Boda de Eduardo. I had the (perhaps working-class?) idea that humor—that thing I used every day—was somehow beneath literature. (Literature was that thing one could not quite do; a venture to be performed on tip-toe, reaching up above one’s normal grasp for a few precious moments a writing-day.) Also: pop culture was absent. Also: I talk fast, but that sort of staccato pacing was nowhere in my (very mannered) work. And maybe most importantly: the biggest thing that was happening in our lives at that time was the stress that our lack of money was causing. And that was nowhere in the stories. It was always somebody trout fishing in Europe. And I’d never fished for trout. Or been to Europe. Or it would be Hemingway, but with my life as the basis. “Nick walked into the Walmart. It was pleasant.”

Now, in light of Paula’s positive reaction to those Seussian poems, I felt like someone who, finding himself in an alley somewhere, getting his butt kicked, suddenly realizes that he’s been fighting all along with one hand tied behind his back.

The new code word for me was entertainment. I could actively try to please my reader. I could try to keep her in my mind, try to imagine the experience she might be having, as she read along. Revision might just be the process of trying to better please, thrill, even shock her. And writing, maybe, could be less planned; could proceed by instinct, for fun; could be instinctual rather than conceptual.

There’s a beautiful Flannery O’Connor quote: “A writer can choose what he writes, but he can’t choose what he makes live.” I had wanted so badly to be part of that realist/Hemingway lineage, but that lineage was not in sync with who I really was and how I really saw things and so it had rejected me. I couldn’t “make it live.” If you have a dream of writing Shostakovich-style string quartets—very somber, in a minor key—and then you write some, but whenever you play them, people start dozing off—well, there’s a lesson in that. But if you pick up an accordion and everybody starts dancing—there’s a lesson in that too.

Next day, at work, in this new mode, I started what would become the first story in my first book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. It was a totally different kind of story. Faster, funnier, more vernacular. It felt (for better or worse) that nobody else could have written it. It felt more related to the actual life I was living than anything I’d written before. It was about class, about the corporate life, about paucity; it had a crazy energy that felt, to me, like a meaningful distortion or compression of the way my days actually felt. Suddenly, writing was fun. I found I had reliably strong opinions at critical moments in the story, and did not have to reason out my next move—I just knew what to do. Writing suddenly felt more adventurous. Difficult problems kept appearing that had moral-ethical ramifications, problems to which I genuinely didn’t know the answer. So instead of a process of confidently knowing and then conveying, it felt like a truly open-ended investigation.

And Yet…

The finished story was also, to tell the truth, a disappointment. Compared with the great works I had in mind, it was—well, it was less. It was small. It was quirky. It had modest aspirations, was a little cartoonish, freakish, misshapen. I felt like I’d sent the hunting dog that was my talent out in search of something (“Bring me Beauty!”) and it had come back with, like, the lower half of a Barbie doll.

So, that moment we all crave when we’re younger—the moment when we “find our voice”—was, for me, bittersweet. All those years I’d been plodding up Hemingway Mountain, hoping to eventually stand beside Ernest at the summit. But as I got closer, I saw that Ernest was up there on an eight-inch platform—I was never going to stand beside him but always a little lower, in the role of Contemporary Imitator. And I thought: “What a fool I’ve been. Why would I emulate this guy? He was a doctor’s son, a rich kid. I’m working-class. No, no more, I’m not doing it.”

And I plodded back down Hemingway Mountain, a new man, so glad to be free of that imitative crap. But—what now? And I looked over, and there was… Kerouac Mountain. “Ah! That’s the one for a working-class guy like me!”

Off I went.

I did this over and over. I went up Carver Mountain, Chekhov Mountain, Babel Mountain. But finally, on the day I’m describing—the day I started that weird little story—I looked over and there was this little… shit hill. And somebody had stuck a sign in there, written in crude letters: Saunders Mowntin.

And I thought: “Well, o.k.—it’s a shit hill, but at least it’s my shit hill.” I went over and stood on it, and have been standing on it ever since, just sort of praying, you know: “Rise, little shit hill, please rise.”

So, one thing I try to remember in my teaching: although the MFA model is based on a belief in incremental progress (cogent comments are perfectly processed by the very level-headed student writer, and this results in, say, a ten percent improvement, and this occurs several more reasonable times, until the story is finally publishable), progress can happen another way: suddenly, catastrophically, as it happened for me that day.

The “No Method” Method

This abrupt change in my approach to process took place twenty-five years ago, and I still write that way: trying to entertain, trying not to plan. Basically, I just imagine that I’ve never read the thing I’m working on and try to react to it the way a first-time reader might—without attachment to how “great” it was yesterday, trying to keep myself clear of concepts about it and intentions for it. And the assumption is that this accretion of micro-decisions is, in itself, a form of thought—a form of thought that might even surpass normal and rational thought in its ability to produce beauty.

There are three quotes I recite ritually when trying to describe this approach to writing: the first is from Donald Barthelme who, in his great essay “Not Knowing,” says: “The artist is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do.”

The second, Gerald Stern: “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.”

And finally, Einstein: “No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.”

So, if we set out to do A in our story, and we just do that… we’ve disappointed everybody. Our job, then, is to somehow outwit the controlling mind.

The controlling mind is like a person going on a date, who brings along index cards. You know: “7:00 p.m. Ask about her mother.” “7:15, praise her dress.” Now we can do that, but why would we? Well: anxiety. This date matters to us so much. We want it to go well, so we’re trying to control all the factors. Unfortunately, this urge to control, felt as condescension by the reader/date, ruins everything. It positions the reader beneath the writer and erodes the reader’s necessary feeling of participation. (Nobody likes it when the Idea Manure Dump-Truck pulls up, and the writer leans out the window and says, “Stand right there, don’t move! This has nothing to do with you!”)

Now, artists work in myriad ways. I don’t presume to be putting forth any sort of general theory. But I suspect that any vital creative process somehow involves arranging things so that intuition is given pride of place. The individual writer’s “craft,” might be understood, then, as the process of conspiring to work oneself into the necessary state of mystification, such that one is deferring to the innate energy of the story, rather than overriding it.

In My Head is a Meter

So, basically, my method is: read and then react, from a state of mind that is quick and intuitive, without rationalizing or defending the change, or worrying about what other changes it might necessitate in the story. Just do what seems best in that instant, knowing that, if nothing else, you have made that place in the story incrementally better.

I sometimes imagine there’s a meter in my head, with “P” on one side, for “Positive,” and “N” on the other side, for “Negative.” And what I’m really doing is stepping out of myself and observing my reading self (disinterestedly, honestly, clinically), asking: “So, how’s that needle doing?” If it’s up in the positive zone? Great, keep reading. But as we know, the needle tends to drop, and at the moment it does, the primary move—the one we want to try to enact—is to just say, gently, to the story, “Hello. It appears your energy has dropped into the N range?”

Now, the story doesn’t like this. The story will say, defensively: “No, I’m good. Your meter screwed up. This part was fine yesterday.” Or: “I may appear to be boring, but that’s part of my plan.” Or: “No worries, I’m about patriarchy, so I have to be a little flat right in here.”

But at that point, like a good parent, we need to turn to the story and say: “Now, come on, really. What’s going on? Trust me. You can tell me.”

And if you use that tone of voice, the story might eventually admit, for example, “Well… I’m boring.” To which we want to respond (again, gently): “Oh, poor thing, you are boring. But that’s all right. Where did that feeling start, precisely?” And the story might say: “Right where the needle dropped. Page 4, paragraph six, that description of the shark.”

In that moment of admitting that something is wrong, a solution will sometimes present itself, instantaneously, via that flavor of intuition mentioned earlier: I suddenly know what to do, whether it’s cutting a bit of prose, or rearranging something, or adding a phrase, or even, sometimes, just mentally noting that needle-drop and admitting that I don’t have a fix at the moment but won’t forget about it.

Rinse, Lather, Repeat

Along with a strong element of intuition in this approach, there is also a strong element of iteration. For me, the process is: keep going through the story, hundreds or thousands of times, making these micro-choices per my intuitive instincts, over and over. As they say on the shampoo bottles: rinse, lather, repeat. Every time the story tells me something via a needle-drop into the N zone, make the best correction possible. Sometimes I am reversing changes I made the day before; restoring stuff I took out. Everything is fair game, every single time.

Another way of describing this iterative revision process: imagine I give you an apartment in New York that I’ve pre-furnished. Coming in for the first time, you might feel: “Nice—but, honestly, it feels a bit like a hotel. It doesn’t have much me in it.”

If I then allow you to take one item out a day and replace it with one you liked better, day after day, those thousands of decisions (made by choice, by preference, without needing to defend or explain them) are going to gradually make that place feel like home—more like you. And by the time you’ve been doing that for, say, five years, that apartment will have more you-ness about it than you ever could have imagined at the outset—more than you could have put there via the mere mechanical execution of a plan you’d made on the day you’d moved in.

If I Respect You, You Will Like Me Better

What underlies this method is the goal of establishing an intimate, frank, and respectful relationship with our imaginary reader. That’s the whole game: trying to keep her interested, valuing her as a true and beloved equal who is every bit as smart, worldly, curious, and good-hearted as you are.

I sometimes imagine my reader sitting right beside me in one of those motorcycle sidecars. In a well-told story, reader and writer are so close together that their helmets are clicking as they ride. In a poorly told story, reader and writer are miles apart—the writer goes around a corner and the reader doesn’t even notice. By not disrespecting the reader at any point, you keep her right there. When you go left, she goes left. When you go right, she goes right. You don’t give her any place in the story where she might fault your logic or language, and thereby move away from you emotionally. Then, when you finally do go over the cliff—she’s with you. What choice does she have? She’s already agreed to it, at every point along the way.

This attempt-to-respect can be an ongoing principal of one’s revision process. Say we start a story with this: “One day, Bob came into the room and sat down on the brown couch.” Now that’s… a sentence. I don’t really want it in my book for some reason, but it’s a sentence. Why don’t I want it in my book? Let’s find out, by micro-editing it.

If we start trimming, with the goal of being more reader-respectful, we might notice that the phrase “one day” is redundant. We don’t need it. (Obviously, it happens on one day.)

So: cut it.

Now we have: “Bob came into the room and sat down on the brown couch.” But why does he have to come “into the room?” He’s not going to able to sit on the couch from some other room. So, cut it: “Bob sat down on the brown couch.”

Does he have to sit “down” on the couch? Not really. Cut it: “Bob sat on the brown couch.”

Okay, so how about “brown?” What do we care? Is the color important? Doesn’t seem like it. Cut it: “Bob sat on the couch.”

Then, because I have a very active “inner nun” (an excellent editing tool) I ask: “Well, why do we care if he sits on a couch? What’s the significance of that?”

So… cut it.

And now we’re down to just: “Bob…”

Now, this example is, of course, a bit of a joke. But on another level, it’s a deadly serious exercise in banality-avoidance. If we start our story with (just): “Bob…” we don’t suck yet. We haven’t surrendered to banality. There’s still a hope of originality.

Banality is what happens when we take our reader for granted. And revision is, then, an active way of continually improving our relation to the reader—trying to bring the reader up, from where she normally starts out in the writer’s mind (i.e., a position beneath the writer) to a spot up on the same level as the writer. We might even think of revision as a chance to train ourselves to regard the Other (in this case, the imagined reader) more generously, by making a more respectful projection of her. And we do this by paying better attention to her—regarding her as real and as our absolute equal.

If, as I’m always hearing, paying attention is a form of love, then this form of revising is actually a form of love. The reader is elevated through the author’s increased respect for her, which coaxes her into a state of higher attentiveness. And, in turn, a more generous and attentive and open part of the reader rises out of her normal workaday self.

The beautiful fictive moment is enacted when the fish that is your best reading self and the fish that is my best writing self simultaneously leap out of the water and, in mid-air, briefly, kiss.

I’m guessing fish don’t actually do this in the real world. But in fiction, they do. And they do it because the writer has respected all of the parties involved—including, as we’ll now see, her characters.

Loving Bob Better

Revision involves the attempt to make better sentences. For mysterious reasons, better sentences result from an increased level of specificity. Increased specificity, in turn, leads us to a more empathetic position vis-à-vis our characters. As we increase the level of specificity, we decrease the level of cheap (facile/condescending/habitual) judgment. The imagined entity (the character) appears in more detail, without the taint of overt authorial intentionality.

So, there’s another kind of elevation respectful revision produces: the elevation of the imagined character.

For example, let’s say we start out a story, as we often do, in a position rhetorically above our character. “Bob was an asshole.” The gods of fiction, craving specificity, respond with a question they are fond of asking: “How so?” We are obliged to answer and, in doing so, via intuitive riffing, we make both a (slightly) better sentence and a more complex view of Bob: “Bob was an asshole because he… snapped at the young barista.” But the gods of fiction, like Columbo, are not quite done: “So, why do you think Bob did that?” Slightly annoyed, we respond (revise): “Uh… Bob snapped at the young barista, who reminded him of his… wife… dead wife.” Suddenly, in essentially two swipes of the pen, Bob has been transformed from mere “asshole” to “man so stricken by the death of the love of his life that he has lost his ability to be kind to a young person who has done him no harm.” Bob may still be “an asshole,” but he is now a more particular asshole and we accordingly feel differently about him: more curious to hear what happens next to this once-good man, more hopeful for his transformation, more likely to understand him as existing on a continuum with us.

Had I been standing, in the real world, behind Bob, in that coffee-shop line, I might have just thought (as I “thought” in my first draft), “Ugh, asshole.” But given the opportunity, through revision, to slow down time and reconsider Bob (by trying to improve my sentence about him), I have modified my relation to Bob. The process has produced in me (and in my reader) a more open, less rigid understanding of Bob.

I should say here that this notion applies, also, to characters (and people!) who actually are assholes—who do bad, hurtful, hateful, violent things. Stories do not have to be about good people and, within them, bad people do not always have to be transformed. Some assholes just… stay assholes. But, as we saw with “Bob,” “asshole” is a semantic placeholder for a more complex suite of attributes, and even the restatement (the deconstruction) of that term is a form of increased attention, i.e., love. (It doesn’t change the essential assholery, but it might present us with a wider range of responses to it, or a more potent wariness of it; should active opposition become necessary, it will make us more efficient fighters against that particular brand of assholery.)

So: we can understand a beautiful fictive moment as a sort of three- fish-kiss, or writer/reader/character compassion troika—writer, reader, and character all elevated at once into a state of mutual respect.

Let Us Cultivate Our Miraculous Frozen Ponds

A good MFA program should also be infused with this notion of mutual respect.

Bearing this in mind, a few thoughts about MFA-World.

First—there are a lot of programs now. And there are a lot of programs that leave kids in huge debt. We should think about that. Being in debt distorts the artistic process: interferes with the young writer’s freedom, puts an undue emphasis on publishing quickly.

Second—one of the things we sometimes forget is that there is a magical element of artistic accomplishment. It’s not all craft. It’s not all methodology. I’ve had the privilege of meeting, for example, Toni Morrison, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Tobias Wolff, Grace Paley. In the presence of these masters, you realize that there is some aspect of personality, of personhood at work, that is not teachable. Now, certainly, craft is a way to find out about our personhood and to advance and refine that personhood—but we shouldn’t lead our students to believe that craft will solve everything. Great writing, ultimately, is not entirely teachable or reducible, but fundamentally mysterious.

Third—I have a quarrel with the notion that the MFA teacher is there to confer some sense of whether a particular writer “has it” or “will make it.” I’ve been teaching writing for twenty years now, at one of the best programs in the country, and honestly can’t tell if a writer “has it” or not. And I don’t believe anyone can, not really. There are too many unknowns, and our understanding of literary growth is too rudimentary. I don’t think I would have had much hope that the poor dope who wrote La Boda de Eduardo would ever write a publishable story, much less a whole book.

Finally—two false ideas seem to be floating around regarding MFA programs: 1) If you want to be a writer, you have to be in an MFA program. 2) If you get into an MFA program, you will automatically be a writer. Both of these are demonstrably false. This growing cultural sense that an MFA is required threatens to turn a mysterious art into something literal; to downgrade a vocation into (mere) career. The growing economic power of these programs also has the potential to sever the important link between one’s writing and the public; if we create a micro-economy in which we are training writers to train other writers to write stories that only other writers read, we run the risk of marginalizing an activity that is essential to the larger culture and monetizing the sacred.

As pursuing an MFA becomes more popular, and our programs grow and grow, we should remember (and communicate to our applicants and students) the truth that there is no necessary relation between “number of spots in a program” and “number of spots, in the larger culture, for writers.” Many young people want to become writers; if they (incorrectly) believe an MFA is required and sufficient, and we don’t, and thereby raise false hopes, and accept large tuition payments, and drive them into crippling debt—there is something disrespectful about this.

Now, having expressed these reservations, let me tell you a quick story to explain why I still love teaching in an MFA program and believe in it fiercely.

When I was in my twenties, pre-grad school, I had a plan for my writing life, which was basically: “Since my real life is too boring to write about, I will need to find a war zone.” (A side-effect of the Hemingway boner.) So, although I didn’t speak Spanish, and didn’t know anything about the politics, I decided to go down to El Salvador, so I’d have something to write about. (O, youth! O, especially, Youth who is not actually doing any writing, just theorizing about it a lot.) I was in my hometown, recently laid off from a roofing job, rather flailingly studying Spanish in our local library. I went over to say goodbye to a friend of mine, and he wasn’t home, but his father was: a lifelong Chicago-area truck driver, six or seven kids, a hard worker all his life. I’d never really had an adult conversation with him before, and he asked me what I was doing. Flinching a little, I said, “Well, you know, I want to be… a writer. So, I’m going to El Salvador. To, uh, you know, write about it.”

Without missing a beat, he said: “So…is that your dream?”

“Well, yes,” I said.

“Then you better do it,” he said. “You know why? Because if you don’t, you know who you’re going to blame.”

“Yes,” I said, suddenly enlightened. “Myself.”

“Bullshit!” he fired back. “You’ll blame your wife and kids.”

I remembered this when I was stealing time from work to write CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. I self-sanctioned this theft because, I told myself, I didn’t want to become that bitter future me he was describing.

And I think about it now, in relation to my teaching. For all of the defects of the MFA model, I’d rather err in the direction of saying, to an applicant: “Young person, you want to be a writer? Good for you. Let us help, if we can.” Giving a young person a chance to really take her shot at her artistic dream is a beautiful thing to do, even if she doesn’t ultimately “succeed” (that is, publish). I believe we make our students’ future lives better by giving them the support and mentoring they need at this critical moment in their trajectory. If someone tries and fails to write a book, but in a supportive environment, with ample time, then that “failure” has a greater potential to move her profitably on to the next thing—whether it be another book, or some new endeavor entirely. Supplying those conditions can therefore be understood as an act of generosity, beneficial to the artist, regardless of the outcome.

I often think of the young writer, before she comes to our program, as running energetically through a forest, in the winter, wearing ice skates. If we are doing our job right, our program is a frozen pond that magically appears before her. She’s still moving in the same direction, under her own power, but is suddenly moving faster, with fewer obstructions.

Enough About Me

At this point in my life, I’m getting a little tired of myself. I’m fifty-nine years old. I know all my stuff. I know my nostalgic sub-loops (Nostalgia Sub-Loop 8B: Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin, Summer of 1973). I know the way my mind behaves on anxiety, on bliss, on ambition. I know that I am going to regularly/reliably disappoint myself in the level of attention (love) I am able to manifest in a real-world situation. That person—George, collection of habits—is not so interesting to me. But in writing mode, I’m better: funnier, wittier, kinder; more honest, reliably generous, curious and watchful. This is because, during the many months (or years) during which that “that guy” works on a given story, all of the people sub-contained in “him” are allowed to come out and play, so to speak—to weigh in on the story, adjusting it this way and that, over time. The wildly lyrical person, the minimalist; the person who believes in his talent too much, the person who constantly doubts it; the person who loves America, the person who can’t stand it; the cynic, the optimist; the humorist, the tragedian; the person who tolerates an extraneous phrase in exchange for a slight improvement in the image; the person who doesn’t.

What a blessing, to able to dwell in a story for many months or years and find, when finished, evidence of a better me there on the page, which implies that this better me must be in there somewhere, all the time, if it is so reliably available for this daily coaxing-out.

Writing is Living, But Slower, with Do-Overs

How we do we imagine the other? Via projection. It’s all we have. Writing helps us correct our lazy habits of projection. We imagine a character via projection; then gradually refine that projection via revision. We become, in essence, more generous narrators. We train ourselves in starting out with an initial projection from within some broad reductive category (Trump supporter, liberal elitist, undocumented worker, professional bowler, Foghat fan) and then revising toward a more complex, individuated version of that entity. And this has the effect of infusing our relation to that entity with increased generosity and possibility.

In other words, when we write, we ritually remind ourselves that everybody in this world is on a continuum with us and is therefore somewhat knowable to us. There is no such thing as “the Other,” really; “the Other” is just us on a different day, or having arisen from a different set of circumstances, or beset by a different set of hardships. This impulse does not come to us naturally, but we can, through writing, train ourselves to get better at it, both on the page
and off.

In Conclusion: Why We Bother

Understood this way, writing (this practice of trying to get in the habit of seeing oneself on a continuum with every other person) is not some niche thing, some quaint-but-outdated indulgence. It is the essential thing that humans beings do: we story-tell in order to locate ourselves in the universe, to concoct a viable stance for ourselves here amidst the chaos, and forge a less-insane connection with other beings. We story-tell, in a sense, to “untell” a delusional tale we are all born telling: the tale of our own permanence, centrality, and separateness.

Lincoln once said, in a different context: “We must disenthrall ourselves, and we will save our country.” Art is a culture’s primary method of self-disenthrallment. We disenthrall ourselves of stupid, habitual, hurtful, lazy ideas. We ask: “How am I to most intelligently and freshly understand all of these other people running around down here? How should I treat them? What stance should I enact toward them? Of the many mental states of which I am capable, which should I bring forward, and which suppress?”

We might, then, view our current national drift towards autocracy as a failure of literary imagination. The people driving this drift are fearful and aggressive, and these traits are made worse by a third defect: a defective imaginative capability. They reason in broad and stereotypical categories; have not done the work of individuating within the categories of people they are mistreating. It’s no sin to under-imagine the complexity of the world (we all do this, in every instant). But the sin comes when this under-imagination is coupled with too-aggressive action and a programmatic agenda, untouched by the ritual humility that true imagination engenders.

The literary imagination, which trains us in specificity, brings us into daily acquaintance with contradiction, has the potential to make us less afraid, more judicious in action, more comfortable with complexity and ambiguity, more attuned to the individual manifestation, warier of the delusional nature of the large-scale conceptual generalization. We hear “illegal immigrant;” do we picture a mob of gangsters, or a smiling young couple? Are we able to imagine that the group might contain members of both of those categories? Are we able to see that the phrase “illegal immigrant” is, in itself, a slanted, projective phrase? Have we trained ourselves in holding several contradictory truths at once in our mind? Do we automatically recognize the mind’s inability to produce a meaningful representation of that large a group?

So, as we attempt to comport ourselves honorably in this frightening time, we should remember that we have in our possession a supple and muscular powerful tool for resistance: the artistic mindset. Decades of marginalizing art has left us where we are at this moment: intensely materialistic, reflexively violent; worshipping pragmatism as a god; with a disrespect for truth and a weakened belief in the ineffable. There is a way back, but this way requires that people like us—who believe in and live by the Word—make this a radical article of belief: that if we neglect this highest gem of human activity, we move toward doom. To be an artist—to be constantly imagining and reimagining this reality we move through—is not a hobby, or a half-comic loveable departure from the serious, adult business of “producing value”—it is a form of training ourselves in expanding our ability to love. And this is why we are here; there is no greater aspiration.

 

George Saunders is the author of nine books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize, and the story collections Pastoralia and Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction in 2013. He was included in Time’s list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.