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Every Writer Has To Find The Thing To Keep Her Eye On About Which She Has Strong Opinions. That's Of Course Deeply Personal, But The Nice Thing Is That It Has To Do With Joy Rather Than Fear. It Has To Do With You. If You're Funny, Your Method Will Be To Try To Be Funnier. Which Again Is Empowering I Think.

-George Saunders

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Every Writer Has To

George Saunders

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Every Writer Has To Find The Thing To Keep Her Eye On About Which She Has Strong Opinions. That's Of Course Deeply Personal, But The Nice Thing Is That It Has To Do With Joy Rather Than Fear. It Has To Do With You. If You're Funny, Your Method Will Be To Try To Be Funnier. Which Again Is Empowering I Think.

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In My Work, And In My Psyche, There's Some Very Sentimental, Traditional, Conventional Side That's Always In Argument With A More Radical, Sarcastic Side. Some Of My Stories Are Really Sentimental, But They're Layered Over With Weird, Satirical Stuff.

Don't Be Afraid To Be Confused. Try To Remain Permanently Confused. Anything Is Possible.

In Art, And Maybe Just In General, The Idea Is To Be Able To Be Really Comfortable With Contradictory Ideas. In Other Words, Wisdom Might Be, Seem To Be, Two Contradictory Ideas Both Expressed At Their Highest Level And Just Let To Sit In The Same Cage Sort Of, Vibrating. So, I Think As A Writer, I'm Really Never Sure Of What I Really Believe.

An Artist's Job Is To Be Interested In Things As They Are.

I Had To Go In And Do The Work Of Toning [invented "historical" Bits] Down In Order To Make Them Fit [in Lincoln In The Bardo]. It's Like If You're An Actor And You're Always Overacting, Well, You're A Bad Actor. But If You're An Actor Who Subdues Yourself To The Extent That's Necessary, Then You're Really Acting.

The Story Sometimes Writes You Into A Corner.

I Was Raised Catholic,i Took From That Was A Sense Of Theater And Drama, And Also The Idea That There Were Truths That Couldn't Actually Be Uttered Directly But Really Had To Be Reached Through Ritual. You Come Out Of Those Masses So Moved, And You're Like, "why Did That Happen?" And The Truth Of It Is That It Happened Through An Hour Of Highly Enacted Ritual.

There's A Really Nice Moment In The Life Of A Piece Of Writing Where The Writer Starts To Get A Feeling Of It Outgrowing Him - Or He Starts To See It Having A Life Of Its Own That Doesn't Have Anything To Do With His Ego Or His Desire To 'be A Good Writer'.

It's On Us To Investigate Ourselves For Any Lingering Sense That We Are 'giving' Equality. We Are Not. It Is Already Given. And Not By Us.

At Times, They're So Right And I'm So Left, We Agree.

Whether You're Eighteen Or Sixty, In A Certain Way, Whatever You Know Is Valid.

I Think We Need Leadership That Can Gently And With Affection Remind Us Of What We Americans Mostly Agree Upon: Civility, Kindness, Tolerance, Humour, Et Cetera. The Current Trump Administration Seems To Thrive On Trying To Enforce A Very Odd, Fearful Agenda, That It Tries To Disguise In A False Garment Of Fondness For The Working-class - Despite The Fact That Its Policies Seem Designed To Continue The Decades-long Habit Of Marginalizing That Group.

I Think If Someone Could Demonstrate To Me That Fiction Did No Good, I Would Still Do It, Because I Think It Does Good For Me.

I'm Finding, As I Get Older, That I'm Not Much Of A Believer In Redemption. I Mean, I Believe In Redemption In Real Life - Redemption Does Happen, And It's Cool When It Does - But I Find Myself Getting Leery Of My Desire For It In Stories (especially My Own).

In My Personal And Spiritual Life, I Reject That. I Don't Believe In That. I'm Always Trying To Get My Mind Into A Less Judgmental Place, Making Less Rigid Judgments About Things Like "perverse" Versus "pure." But In Terms Of Prose, Those Sorts Of Oppositions Seem To Work.

I Sometimes Think That I Can't Do The Bigger Thing That [zadie Smith] Do So Beautifully, As In Swing Time, With So Much World In It And So Much Rapturous Paint Thrown Around. I Don't Think It Would Be Possible To Write A Book On That Scale With As Much Ocd As I Have.

One Lesson I Learned The Hard Way, Early In My Career, Was That If I Tried To Write To Be Smart Or To Convey A Theme Or From Some Existing Plan, The Result Was Usually Pretty Boring. My Intuitive Move, Whenever I'm Considering Writing Something, Is To Steer Towards What Feels Enjoyable. Another Way Of Saying It Is, You Just Try To Avoid The "sucky." If You Start To Think Of A Story And A Way To Tell It, And Your Reaction Is Kind Of Like, Ugh, That's Going To Be Hard, Then You Don't Want To Do That.

My Mind Goes Really Quickly And I Tend To Talk Really Fast, As You've Probably Heard, I Sometimes Lose Track Of My Syntax, As I'm Talking That Fast. The Only Thing I Try To Do, Well, It's Slow Down, But Also I Do Something When I'm Reading That's Similar To When I'm Writing A Section, Which Is To Really Try To Imagine You On The Other Side, In A Certain Way, As An Intelligent, Sympathetic Presence Who's Rooting For Me To Tell You A Good Story.

Kindness, It Turns Out, Is Hard - It Starts Out All Rainbows And Puppy Dogs, And Expands To Include . . . Well, Everything.

If You Want To Be Good, All You've Got To Do Is Be Good.

That's The Only Way That I Can Figure Out How To Live, Is To Say, "well, I Don't Know What This Adds Up To, But I Can Do The Best I Can."

We Try, We Fail, We Posture, We Aspire, We Pontificate - And Then We Age, Shrink, Die, And Vanish.

I Was, Not An Altar Boy, But A Reader Of The Epistle, And I Walked In On A Nun And A Priest Furiously French Kissing When I Was In Seventh Grade. I Walked In, Saw It, And Went, "no Way," Backed Out, Composed Myself, And Went Back In, And It Was Still Going On. And The Experience Of Seeing That Was Actually Very Deep.

From Across The Woods, As If By Common Accord, Birds Left Their Trees And Darted Upward. I Joined Them, Flew Amount Them, They Did Not Recognize Me As Something Apart From Them, And I Was Happy, So Happy, Because For The First Time In Years, And Forevermore, I Had Not Killed, And Never Would.

Realism Is To Fiction What Gravity Is To Walking: A Confinement That Allows Dancing Under The Right Circumstances.

When Somebody You've Known For 20 Years, And With Whom You Have A Full Context, Winks At You Or Whatever, It Can Be Huge. I Think In A Sense What You're Trying To Re-create In Fiction Is That.

For Me, Things Were Either Very Sullied Or Very Pure, Very Controlled Or Very Under-controlled.

For Me, The Fiction Writer's Job Is To Take The Small, Stupid Process Of Learning To Use An Iphone - And Suddenly You're The Guy Who's Asking Your Daughter, "when I Go On Facebook, Can It See Me?"

The Best Thing We Can Bring To Any Fight Is A Calm And Compassionate Mind.

My View Is That Our Minds Are Incredibly Powerful Animals That Are, During Life, Kept Somewhat In Check By The Load Of Our Bodies. Once That Load Is Gone (or So Some Ancient Texts Teach Us) The Mind Is Like A Horse Off The Tether. So The Habits We Get Into Here Might Have Something To Do With What Happens To Us Afterwards. An Exciting But Harrowing Idea, Given The Everyday State Of My Mind. But Also Hopeful, Since That's Something A Person Can Work With.

Intelligent, Heartfelt Stories That Tell A Whole New Set Of Truths About Growing Up American. Julie Orringer Writes With Virtuosity And Depth About The Fears, Cruelties, And Humiliations Of Childhood, But Then Does That Rarest, And More Difficult, Thing: Writes Equally Beautifully About The Moments Of Victory And Transcendence.

That Seems To Be The Definition Of 'novel' For Me: A Story That Hasn't Yet Discovered A Way To Be Brief.

That Underscored This Idea That When We're Reading A Book Or Writing A Book, You're In An Act Of Co-creation. The Reader And The Writer Are Both Trying To Dress Up And Present Their Best Selves And Then There's That Moment, When Suddenly, As A Reader, You're Not Exactly You Anymore, And Likewise, As A Writer, You're Not Really You.

You Don't Want To Be That Parent - The One Who Dresses His Kid In A Cloth Sack When All The Other Kids Are In Armani Cloth Sacks - Especially In A Time Like Ours, When Materialism Is Not Only Rampant And Ascendant But Is Fast Becoming The Only Game In Town.

This - Where We Are Now - Is Where A Culture Gets To, When It Has Chosen, For Many Years, Banality Over Intelligence, The Literal Over The Immaterial Or Complex, Materialism Over Spirituality. This Is The Result Of Many Years Of Disrespecting The Intellectual Project - Of A Collective Acceptance Of The Idea That Thinking And Reasoning And Reading Deeply In Difficult Text And Being Respectful Of History Are Somehow "wimpy" Or Secondary.

Twitter Is A Deliberate Abstention. Somehow I Hate The Idea Of There Always Being, In The Back Of My Mind, This Little Voice Saying: 'oh, I Should Tweet About This.'

I Think The Biggest Single Issue Is Income Inequity And What This Is Doing To The Good Old "american Dream." This And Corporatism - This Delusional Idea That "shareholder Value" Outweighs Everything Else.

Fiction Is Open To Whoever Comes In The Door, As Long As You Come In Energetically.

In Fiction, Conceptualizing, I've Found, Produces Dull And Over-controlled Text.

I Think The Trick Of Being A Writer Is To Basically Put Your Cards Out There All The Time And Be Willing To Be As In The Dark About What Happens Next As Your Reader Would Be At That Time.

If I Go To The Coffee Shop And Have A Nice Interaction With The Barista, I Don't Know What That Does For World Peace, But We Have To Assume That In The Great Basket Of Goodness Maybe That's One Little Micron Or One Little Neutron That You've Put In There.

I Don't Use The Word Lightly, In Fact, I Don't Use It At All, But Ben Marcus Is A Genius, One Of The Most Daring, Funny, Morally Engaged And Brilliant Writers, Someone Whose Work Truly Makes A Difference In The World. His Prose Is, For Me, Awareness Objectified-he Makes The Word New And Thus The World.

Making A Difference

There Were Several Points Where I Would Kind Of Turn To The Book And Say, "get Thee Behind Me." I Don't Think Real Novelists Do That. But I Make A Distinction Between Prose That's Very Efficiency-minded (like, The Minimum I Can Get Away With), Versus Loosening The Screws And Letting The Words Spill Out Beautifully And So On.

I'm Turning 58, And You Get That Kind Of Weird, Old-guy Feeling Of You Don't Have An Infinite Number Of Years Left And If There's Anything You Want To Say Or Represent, It's Time To Try It.

The One Thing About A Christmas Carol That Always Bothers Me Is That Cratchit Is So Sweet And Perfect. He's Like An Ivy League Kid Who Just Is Labeled "poor." He Doesn't Have Any Bad Habits. He's Never Cranky With His Kids.

The Number Of Rooms In A Fictional House Should Be Inversely Proportional To The Years During Which The Couple Living In That House Enjoyed True Happiness.

All I Really Know In Nonfiction Is That When I Come Home, I've Got All These Notes And I'm Trying To Figure Out What Actually Happened To Me. I Usually Kind Of Know What Happened, But As You Work Through The Notes, You Find That Certain Scenes Write Well And Some Don't Even Though They Should. Those Make A Constellation Of Meaning That Weirdly Ends Up Telling You What You Just Went Through. It's A Slightly Different Process, But Still There's Mystery Because When You're Bearing Down On The Scenes, Sometimes You Find Out They Mean Something Different Than What You Thought.

What I Really Found Myself Interested In Was The Idea That Our Minds Our So Powerful And When We're Living, The Mind Is Dampened By The Body. As Crazy As Our Minds Can Get, They're Only So Crazy Because They're Physically Housed.

I Say Yes To The Hot Bath And The Sandwich - To Getting Ourselves Into The Best Possible Mental Shape To Identify And Then Fight The Necessary Fights From The Best Possible Mind-state: Calm, Loving, Affectionate, Precise. Not Pushovers But Also Not Zealots. With The Idea In Mind That "our Enemies" Are Not Our Enemies; They Might Seem Like That In Their Present Form But That Form Can Morph. We Really Are Large, And Really Do Contain Multitudes. But I Think It All Has To Start With A Kindly Presence Of Mind, And The Aspiration To Affection For Others.

Presence Of Mind

I'm Comfortable With Anything After The Fact.

[lincoln In The Bardo] Is Not A Long Book. And That Meant I Could Obsess Over It And Live In It Both Backwards And Forwards And Hyper-control Everything.

A Sort Of Fearlessness - The Notion That A Person Could Be Comfortable With (even Interested In) Whatever Arises. I Sure Can't Do It, But I Think All Of Us Have Had Little Glimpse Of That Power, Often When We Are Really Actively Loving Someone Or Something And Feel That Little Eradication Of Self That Happens When We Are Engaged In Feeling Protective Or Especially Fond Of Someone Else. I Associate That Feeling With A Corresponding Clarity Of Purpose And A Disappearance Of Confusion.

Clarity Of Purpose

The Mind Is A Machine That Is Constantly Asking: What Would I Prefer? Close Your Eyes, Refuse To Move, And Watch What Your Mind Does. What It Does Is Become Discontent With That-which-is. A Desire Arises, You Satisfy That Desire, And Another Arises In Its Place.

We've Got A Real Problem With Social Media That We Didn't Know We Were Going To Have. It's Almost Like The Demons Have Gotten Out Of The Box.

If You Bring Forth What Is Within You, It Will Save You. If You Do Not Bring It Forth, It Will Destroy You.

Maybe You Could Even Think 100,000 People Are Inside Each Human Being. And You Drop A Novel On That Person, And A Certain Number Of Those Sub-people Come Alive Or Get Reenergized For Some Finite Time.

When I Think About What Fiction Does Morally, I'm Happier Thinking Of A Person Full Of Multiplicities - Sort Of Fragmented.

Success Is Like A Mountain In Front Of You That Keeps Growing. If You're Not Careful, It Will Take Up Your Whole Life.

I'm Always Nice When I Do Drugs. But, You Know, I'm Nicer On The Drug Called "writing."

A John Updike Is A Once-in-a-generation Phenomenon, If That Generation Is Lucky: So Comfortable In So Many Genres, The Same Lively, Generous Intelligence Suffusing All He Did.

I Read To Make Myself Feel Awake.

The One Thing Fiction And Non-fiction Writing Have In Common For Me Is That Sense Of Trying To Get The Sentences To Be Minimal But At The Same Time Be A Little Overfull - To Encourage Them To Do A Kind Of Poetic Work.

Every Writer Has To Find The Thing To Keep Her Eye On About Which She Has Strong Opinions. That's Of Course Deeply Personal, But The Nice Thing Is That It Has To Do With Joy Rather Than Fear. It Has To Do With You. If You're Funny, Your Method Will Be To Try To Be Funnier. Which Again Is Empowering I Think.

So I May Not Have Had A Gothic Childhood, But Childhood Makes Its Own Gothicity.

I've Found That My First Drafts Are Not So Special. But The More I Work On Them, The Better They Get. They Are More Unique And Defensible.

I'm A Liberal And I'm Left Of Gandhi And I Don't Like Trump.

I Think Something That I Can't Name About Our Media Has Made Us Move Away From That Kind Of Specificity And That Kind Of Curiosity.

Someone Told Me Once - I Mean I Said, "is It Ok That I Don't Really Know What The Three-act Structure Is?" And He Said, "it's Basically: Act 1: A Guy Climbs Up A Tree; Act 2: People Come And Throw Stuff At Him; Act 3: He Gets Down."

You Go To The Marketplace And There Are Seventeen Consciousnesses Moving In And Out. Sometimes You Want The Same Shirt That I Want, And Our Thought Bubbles Collide A Bit And That Makes Plot.

It Blew My Mind, Reading Swing Time, That I Could Take Any Sentence In The Book, And It Was One Of The Most Beautiful Sentences Written In English.

When I Write I Know That I'm Going To Have To Produce 40 Percent More Than I Need.

I Grew Up In Chicago On The South Side, And Had A Ton Of Freedom, Just Did Whatever I Wanted, Whenever I Wanted. At The Risk Of Sounding Dopey, I Would Say It Was Blissful.

When You Write An Essay, Of Course You're Going To Get Pushback, But You're Going To Be Allowed To Make Your Case At Leisure. You're Going To Be Allowed To Take Into Account Possible Objections And To Fully Humanize Your Reader. That Feels To Me Like A Much More Sane Thing To Do.

What I Regret Most In My Life Are Failures Of Kindness. Those Moments When Another Human Being Was There, In Front Of Me, Suffering, And I Responded . . . Sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

We Have That Illusion That We Are 'deciding' What To Make A Character Do, In Order To 'convey Our Message' Or Something Like That. But, At Least In My Experience, You Are Often More Like A River-rafting Guide Who's Been Paid A Bonus To Purposely Steer Your Clients Into The Roughest Possible Water.

If You Really Think Back To The Great Writers, There's A Lot Of Happiness In Tolstoy; There's A Lot Of Love, There's Childbirth, And There's Dances. And Likewise In Shakespeare And Even Cervantes, There's A Lot Of Celebrations Of The Positive Manifestations Of Life. Technically, I Found It Harder To Do, So That's Kind Of A Good Late-life Challenge - Without Getting Sentimental Or Chirpy.

If Death Is In The Room, It's Pretty Interesting. But I Would Also Say That I'm Interested In Getting Myself To Believe That It's Going To Happen To Me. I'm Interested In It, Because If You're Not, You're Nuts. It's Really De Facto What We're Here To Find Out About.

The Chances Of A Person Breaking Through Their Own Habits And Sloth And Limited Mind To Actually Write Something That Gets Out There And Matters To People Are Slim.

As The Writer Of This Book [lincoln In The Bardo], What I Loved Was The Feeling Of Having So Many Surprises Come At The End That I Hadn't Really Planned Or Planted.

My Stories, I Can Understand Them As A Little Toy That You Wind Up And You Put It On The Floor And It Just Goes Under The Coach. That I Get. Beyond That, I'm A Little Lost.

I Came To Writing Kind Of Late. I Was An Engineer, And The One Thing I've Learned Is That You Have To Steer A Project In The Direction Of The Maximum Fun For You. You Could Say Lively Energy, Or You Have To Try To Be Intrigued. Basically, If You Were A Musician And You Were Playing Joylessly, Nobody Would Want To Hear You.

Even When The Faith Goes Away, There's That Space Where You Crave Something Bigger Than Yourself. For Me, That's Kind Of Where Art Came In, After That.

To Me, The Writer's Main Job Is To Just Make The Story Unscroll In Such A Way That The Reader Is Snared - She's Right There, Seeing Things Happen And Caring About Them. And If You Dedicate Yourself To This Job, The Meanings More Or Less Take Care Of Themselves. That's The Theory, Anyway.

I've Had That Situation Where I Start Writing Somebody Really Miserable, And In Order To Make The Story Come Alive, I Have To Give Them A Vote Of Confidence, Make Him Vulnerable Or Wounded. But In Real Life, You Often Meet People Who, In That Particular Moment, Actually Shouldn't Get A Vote Of Confidence.

Why Were We Put Here, So Inclined To Love, When End Of Our Story = Death? That Harsh. That Cruel. Do Not Like.

So Here's Something I Know To Be True, Although It's A Little Corny, And I Don't Quite Know What To Do With It.

Since, According To Me, Your Life Is Going To Be A Gradual Process Of Becoming Kinder And More Loving: Hurry Up. Speed It Along. Start Right Now. There’s A Confusion In Each Of Us, A Sickness, Really: Selfishness. But There’s Also A Cure. So Be A Good And Proactive And Even Somewhat Desperate Patient On Your Own Behalf - Seek Out The Most Efficacious Anti-selfishness Medicines, Energetically, For The Rest Of Your Life.

I Keep Thinking Of Robert Stone Making The Distinction Between The Word Sublime And The Word Beautiful. He Described Being In A Battle As Sublime. Because Even Though People Were Dying, It Was Such A Huge Sensory Experience That It Became Sublime.

[writing] Is Almost Like Those Boats That Sit Really Low In The Water; They Look Kind Of Ugly. And Then You Get One Of Them Up To 80 Miles An Hour And The Hull Comes Up, And It's A Beautiful Thing. I'm Okay With That For Myself.

As A Young Kid I Assumed That Everybody Was Sort Of On The Same Wavelength As I Was And Then I Found Out In A Lot Of Small Ways That That Wasn't The Case. It's Sort Of A Mixed Blessing. My Mind Is Like A Puppy. It Goes All Over. I Guess Writing Fiction Was A Way Of Harnessing That. I Could Hook A Puppy Up To A Treadmill And Get Something Out Of It.

I'm Such A Baby If I Even Get A Flu.

...smile First, Then Speak.

That For Me Was The Big Turning Point In My Artistic Life, When My Wife And I Had Our Kids. The World Got Infused With Morality Again. Every Person In The World Should Theoretically Be Loved As Much As I Love My Daughters.

The Old And Honorable American Notion, That A Person Who Works Hard Should Be Able To Live In Freedom And Security, With Dignity - Seems To Have Taken On A Secondary Status.

There Are Some Things Fundamentally Off About The Stance Of The Book. And Maybe That's Okay; Maybe Every Book Is Flawed, And Great Books, As Flawed As They Might Be, Articulate A Moral Argument That The Reader Then Carries Forward. The Critique To This Model Is, Of Course, To Ask: Should A Book Be Ever So Perfect That You Come Out Of It With Complete Moral Agreement That Can Be Sustained?

On One Level, I Am A Total Softie, Sort Of Depressed And Afraid Of Losing The People I Love Or Failing Them. To Disguise That, There's All This Harsh, Poop-centric, External Swagger, Full Of Nastiness. I'm A Cloaking Device.

What Good The Prophet In The Wilderness May Do Is Incremental And Personal. It's Good For Us To Hear Someone Speak The Irrational Truth. It's Good For Us When, In Spite Of All Of The Sober, Pragmatic, And Even Correct Arguments That War Is Sometimes Necessary Someone Says: War Is Large-scale Murder, Us At Our Worst, The Stupidest Guy Doing The Cruelest Thing To The Weakest Being.

Slaughterhouse Five

I'm Always Aware Of Writing Around Things I Can't Do, And I've Come To Think That That's Actually What 'style' Is - An Avoidance Of Your Deficiencies.

As For "toothy Kindness" - I Think All Traditions Are Full Of This Sort Of Tough Kindness. If Someone Is On A Wrong Or Dull Path, And Someone Else Startles Them Into Awareness Of That, Then That's A Blessing. And The Method By Which The Startle Is Obtained Might Be Anger, Or Satire, Or An Intentionally Applied Indifference. But That Is, Of Course, A Fine Line.

My Mind Has An Obsessive, Neurotic Quality, But I Also Have A Very Hard Work Ethic. I Know That A Lot Of People Think, Oh, You Have A Wild Imagination. I Don't, Really. If Ten People Are Sitting Around And Someone Says, "hey Complete This Sentence In A Funny Way," I'm Never Ahead Of The Pack.

Wild Imagination

I Love Story-writing Because I Can (more Or Less, On Occasion) Actually Do It. That's Really The Truth. I Like The Idea That A Story Is Sort Of A Site For Making Cool Language Effects - A Site For Celebrating Language, And, Therefore, The World. And The Brevity Is Part Of The Challenge. I Like Stories Because I Get Them - I Know How To Make Beauty, Or Something Like Beauty, In That Mode.

Stories, As Much As We Like To Talk About Them, Retrospectively, As Emanations Of Theme Or Worldview Or Intention, Occur Primarily As Technical Objects When They're Being Written. Or At Least They Do For Me. They're The Result Of Thousands Of Decisions Made At Speed During Revision.

I Don't Think Much New Ever Happens. Most Of Us Spend Our Days The Same Way People Spent Their Days In The Year 1000: Walking Around Smiling, Trying To Earn Enough To Eat, While Neurotically Doing These Little Self-proofs In Our Head About How Much Better We Are Than These Other Slobs, While Simultaneously, In Another Part Of Our Brain, Secretly Feeling Woefully Inadequate To These Smarter, More Beautiful People.

I Find That The Great Artists I've Met Are People Who Are So Playfully Invested In Their Process That, Even If It Doesn't Come Out The Way They Like, They Still Power Through And Even Take Energy From It.

I'm Not Sure I Would Call It Agony But There Is A Kind Of Cyclic Frustration. You Get One Story Right And Then Here Comes Another One. When Does That End? What I'm Trying To Do Is Get It To End Right Now, By Recognizing That That Cycle Is Writing. That Is: Trying To Understand The Frustrations And Setbacks (and Agony) As Part Of A Bigger Chess Game You Are Playing With Art Itself.

With Non-fiction Writing I Feel Like I'm Confined And Driven By What Actually Happened. That Makes The "plot". So It's A Process Of Getting All Of My Notes Typed Up, Then Scanning Through The Notes, Trying To Extract Or Find Certain Vignettes That Seem Like They Might Write Well - That Might Have A Potential For Good Energy, Shape, Etc. And Then At Some Point I Start Stringing These Together, Keeping An Eye On The Word Count.

If A Writer Understands His Work As Something That Originates With Him But Then, With Any Luck, Gets Away From Him, Then What He Needs Is Someone Who Can Grasp The Potential Of The Piece And Lead Him To That Higher Ground.

I Read Rand And Thought, "i Want To Be One Of The Earth Movers, The Scientific People Who Power The World. I Don't Want To Be One Of These Lisping Liberal Artsy Leeches." So I Was Working Against My Actual Abilities.

Vonnegut's War Was Necessary. And Yet It Was Massacre And Screaming And Confusion And Blood And Death. It Was The Mammoth Projection Outward Of The Confused Inner Life Of Men. In War, The Sad Tidy Constructs We Make To Help Us Believe Life Is Orderly And Controllable Are Roughly Thrown Aside Like The Delusions They Are. In War, Love Is Outed As An Insane, Insupportable Emotion, A Kind Of Luxury Emotion, Because Everywhere You Look, Someone Beloved To Someone Is Being Slaughtered, By Someone Whose Own Beloved Has Been Slaughtered, Or Will Be, Or Could Be.

And So, A Prediction, And My Heartfelt Wish For You: As You Get Older, Your Self Will Diminish And You Will Grow In Love. You Will Gradually Be Replaced By Love. If You Have Kids, That Will Be A Huge Moment In Your Process Of Self-diminishment. You Really Won't Care What Happens To You, As Long As They Benefit. That's One Reason Your Parents Are So Proud And Happy Today. One Of Their Fondest Dreams Has Come True: You Have Accomplished Something Difficult And Tangible That Has Enlarged You As A Person And Will Make Your Life Better, From Here On In, Forever.

As One Gets Older, This Question Of Death, Becomes More Vexing And Urgent.

When I Was A Kid, I Took 'the Brady Bunch' And 'the Partridge Family' Very Seriously. It Was A World To Me In The Same Way That The Greek Myths Would Have Been Had I Read Them. You Know, Marcia Is Athena And Mr. Brady Is Zeus.

I Think About How I Conceptualize The Audience. The Trick Is That They've Got To Be Smarter And More Worldly Than Me. So As I'm Revising, I'm Keeping That In Mind. I Cannot Condescend, Even A Little Bit. Every Single Choice That I Make Is Motivated By That.

Every Writer Knows That When You're Imitating Somebody - You Know, You're Sounding Like Faulkner - You're Doing Pretty Good, But Your Life In Hoboken Isn't Faulkneresque. So You Get That Kind Of Shortfall Between The Actual Experience Of The Writer And The Things He's Hungry To Express And The Voice Itself.

I Came Away Believing And Really Deeply Troubled By Is The Extent To Which You Can Have Two Well-intentioned People Talking In A Friendly Spirit And You Get To A Point Where The Two Mutual Mythologies Just Don't Intersect. So Kind Of The Next Piece I'd Like To Write Or Think About Is How Did This Left-right Divide Get So Weird And Codified.

What I Regret Most In My Life Are Failures Of Kindness.

I Remember Reading The Bluest Eye When I Was A Young Parent, And Something Opened In Me. That's The Highest Aspiration.

I Believe That, When [meeting Of Writer And Reader] Happens And The Reader Goes Out Into The World The Next Day, There's Some Alteration That Might Possibly Inflect The Person Positively.

I Tend To Foster Drama Via Bleakness. If I Want The Reader To Feel Sympathy For A Character, I Cleave The Character In Half, On His Birthday. And Then It Starts Raining. And He's Made Of Sugar.

I Don't Know How You Feel, But I Feel Like Writing, Clarity Of Thought, And Truth Have Been Validated Because We See What Happens When We Get Lax In Those Areas. I'm Excited By The Idea That Writers Like Us Can Actually Reach Out And Try To Understand And Prod And Agitate The People Who Are In Support Of Trump Because We Have The Tools To Do It. We're Language People And We're Idea People.

If You Haven't Read You Don't Have The Voice. The Lack Of Voice Eliminates Experience.

"kindness" Can Mean A Lot Of Different Things. In This Case, I Felt I Had To Present His [donald Trump's] Supporters In As Fair A Light As Possible - Many Of Them Hadn't Been Interviewed Before And That Entailed Some Interviewer-courtesy In The Editing And So On.

I'm From A Pretty Working-class Background, And I Really Worked Hard In My Life To Eradicate Those Parts Of Myself That Were Stupidly Trapped In That World.those Of Us Who Come Up That Way Made A Series Of Choices To Benefit Ourselves And Make Ourselves More Generous And Open.

I Often Think About Image, And Image Is Something That - But In Truth, The Real Artistic Process, As I've Understood It, Is 95 Percent Intuitive, Like Seat-of-the-pants, At-the-moment Decisions That You Can't Even Explain, You Know?

Every Step Was A Victory. He Had To Remember That.

I'm Not Thinking In Any Big Thematic Or Conceptual Terms - Especially In This Book [lincoln In The Bardo] When I Was Trying To Make The Voices More Active, More Energetic.

If I'm Writing A Story And You're Reading It, Or Vice Versa, You Took Time Out Of Your Day To Pick Up My Book. I Think The One Thing That Will Kill That Relationship Is If You Feel Me Condescending To You In The Process. And How Does That Happen? Well, It Happens When I Know More Than You Do, And When I Know That I Know More Than You Do, And I'm Holding It Back From You. So That I Can Then Manipulate You At The End. You Know, You Think About Like In A Dating Situation How Terrible That Would Be, It's The Same Thing With A Book.

I'm Very Happy - If I Can Do Even A Little Bit Of Work To Get The Short Story Out More, I'm Thrilled.

Some Of Buddhist Texts Say That, In The Moment After You Die, You Think Of New Jersey And You Go To New Jersey Or You Think Of 1820 And You Go To 1820. Also, All Your Sort Of Inner-symbology Gets Writ Large. So, If You're A Christian, You See Christian Iconography.

The Bush Administration Is A Paragon Of Wisdom.

The Way I Understood Purgatory - And Maybe You've Got A Different Version - But In Chicago In The '70s, The Idea Was It Was Like Detention. You Had Screwed Up And You Go Over There In Purgatory And You Sit There Until The End Of Days And Then We'll Decide. You'd Made Your Mistake, And You Were In Prison, And It's Not Terrible And It's Not Great, And You Feel A Little Crappy Because You Were Not In The Presence Of God.

The End Of The Day

I Don't Like That New Age Posture Where You Kind Of Tilt Your Head. I Don't Like That Posture Right Now. I Want Something A Little More Confident And More Sure Of The Values That We're Defending, Which Are The Old Ones, Love And Empathy And Patience And Tolerance And Civility. Not To Get Into Politics Or Anything.

I Think It Was A Big Revelation To Me Earlier In My Life That People Who Appear To Be Evil Are Actually Not. In Other Words, Nobody Wakes Up In The Morning And Says, "yuck, Yuck, Yuck, I'm Gonna Be Evil." I Think Even Like Saddam Hussein Or Hitler Would Wake Up And Say, "i Think It's Going To Be A Good Day. I'm Gonna Do Some Really Important Work." And Given Their Definition Of Good, They Went Out And Did Horrible Things.

Just Through The Process Of Trying To Make The Living And The Dead Feel Real, All These Little Benefits Came Out. And These Benefits Turned Out To Be Much More Articulate Statements Of What I Really Believe. And Somehow They Were More Convincing Because They Were Arrived At At Such Length.

I Have A Lot Of Theories About The Beneficial Effects Of Fiction, But I'm Always Trying To Get Away From Them A Little Bit.

Anyone Can Be Shamed, But Feeling Guilt Requires Empathy Within.

All Storytelling Is Kind Of That - There's A Bit Of Text That You Put Pressure On That Spits Out Some Desire That A Character Has And Then You Follow That. The Other Part Is That Every Scene Raises An Expectation In The Reader's Mind - That's Part Of Its Job Is To Make You Look In And Be Curious.

I'm Trying To Read/edit My Story As If I Have No Existing Knowledge Of The Story, No Investment In It, No Sense Of What Herculean Effort Went Into Writing Page 23, No Pretensions As To Why The Dull Patch On Page 4 Is Important For The Fireworks That Will Happen On Page 714.

So For Me The Approach Has Become To Go Into A Story Not Really Sure Of What I Want To Say, Try To Find Some Little Seed Crystal Of Interest, A Sentence Or An Image Or An Idea, And As Much As Possible Divest Myself Of Any Deep Ideas About It. And Then By This Process Of Revision, Mysteriously It Starts To Accrete Meanings As You Go.

Later, I Went One Step Further, By Putting In Some Invented "historical" Bits [into The Lincoln In The Bardo]. And Reading Those Alongside The Actual Historical Bits Was Like Looking Into A Sort Of A Painful Mirror, Because "my" Parts Were So Show-offy At First. They Stood Out Because They Were So Flamboyant.

Monologue Is The Most Honest Way To Represent Human Beings.

As Much As We - In A Revisionist Way - Tell Ourselves That We've Always Been A Righteous Country With A Couple Of Swerves Off The Path, We Need To Look Back And See That We've Always Also Been A Racist Country And Have Had A Tendency Towards Banal Aggressiveness. The Thing That's Alarming Is Not So Much That A Few People In America At The Top Are Initiating These Crazy Policies, But That The Middle Is Willing To Go There Too. There's A Strange Movement Of The Middle To This Position Of Banal Aggressiveness.

I Am Always Considering The Reader. Although This Is Admittedly Kind Of Odd: Which Reader? On What Day? In What Mood? For Me, That "reader" Is Actually Just Me, If I Had Never Read The Story Before.

The Writer, In Order To Proceed, Is Theoretically Trying To Predict Where His Complex Skein Of Language And Image Has Left His Reader, Who He Has Likely Never Met And Who Is Actually Thousands Of Readers.

If I Can Be More Efficient, I'm Actually Being More Respectful To The Reader, Which Then Implies A Greater Intimacy With The Reader.

I Actually Do Believe In Life After Death.

Life After Death

I Have This Tendency To Take A Little Bit Of Questionable Knowledge And Riff On It.

In Catholicism, We Would Say You're Going To Be Judged, So Therefore You Should Do Better Now. For Me, Buddhism Is Somewhat More Workable Because Instead Of Saying I Have To Do Good, It Says I Have To Notice What I'm Actually Doing.

Of Course There's Objective Truth, But When We're Looking At People's Accounts Of It, It Seems The Real Truth Lies In The Accretion Of All These Different Versions.

The Internet Kind Of Feels Like Happiness Sometimes, However. It Feels Like Stimulation.

According To Me, Your Life Is Going To Be A Gradual Process Of Becoming Kinder And More Loving. Hurry Up. Speed It Along. Start Right Now.

I Do Find The Values In A Christmas Carol Significant. It Is Important Not To Be Mean And Stingy And Not To Give Up Love For Money.

I Like [barak] Obama. I Like Him. So How Far Does Rationality Help To Persuade Anybody? You Know, I'm Not So Sure.

Whole Swaths Of The Book [lincoln In The Bardo] Are Made Up Of Verbatim Quotes From Various Historical Sources, Which I Cut Up And Rearranged To Form Part Of The Narrative.

When Something Really Bad Is Going On In A Culture, The Average Guy Doesn't See It. He Can't. He's Average And Is Surrounded By And Immersed In The Cant And Discourse Of The Status Quo.

One Of The Revelations In That Book [lincoln In The Bardo] For Me Was This Idea About Citizenship. Even That Word - Citizenship - For Someone My Age, It Makes Me Cringe. But, To Me, The Political Space We're In Now Argues For A Reboot Of Fairly Simple Ideas And The Examination Of The Way That Americans Have Not Been Living Into Them.

I Was A Straight Arrow, A Control Freak. I Didn't Do Drugs Or Drink, And This Was The '70s. I Didn't Like The Loss Of Control. Which Isn't Exactly Right, Because I Didn't Know What Happened When You Did Drugs.

As Flannery O'connor Says, A Person Can Choose What She Writes But She Can't Choose What She Makes Live. Some People Are Really Acoustic Writers And So For Them The Secret Revision Is Sound. Other People May Revise In Terms Of The Way A Paragraph Feels. There's A Million Ways To Do It.

If You Start With The Idea That You Are Going To Be Writing About A Night In A Graveyard, And That There Are Only A Few Living People In That Frame, All Sorts Of Interesting And Difficult Technical Problems Arise. And Then Form - New Form, Or Experimental Form - Might Be Understood As Just Trying To Tell That Story Most Movingly And Efficiently.

On A More Technical Level, A Story Takes A Lot Of Words. And To Generate Words And Phrases And Images And So On, That Will Compel The Reader To Continue Reading - That Stand A Chance Of Really Grabbing A Reader - The Writer Has To Work Out Of A Place Of, Let's Say, Familiarity And Affection. The Matrix Of The Story Has To Be Made Out Of Stuff The Writer Really Knows About And Likes. The Writer Can't Be Stretching And (purely) Inventing All The Time. Well, I Can't, Anyway.

I See This Quality [real Interest And Joy] In The Work Of [pavel] Chekhov, Of Course, And [alexei] Tolstoy And Really Just About Any Great Writer.

Some Of Our Writers Are Starting To Incorporate Elements Of Social Media, Etc. In The Work Itself, Which Is All For The Good, I Think - Finding New Ways Of Being Poetic.

The Only Thing I Might Have Noticed [and This Is Pretty Anecdotal] Is That There Is Some Tendency To Need To Be Taught That 'writing Is Rewriting' - Maybe More Of A Sense Than Was Pervasive 10 Years Ago That The First Or Second Pass Of A Story Is Sufficient. That Is An Idea That Is Easily Dislodged, But I Suspect It Might Have Something To Do With The Turnaround Time Re: Blogging And So On - This Sense That There Is Some Essential Truth About A First Draft That One Runs The Risk Of "ruining" By Coming Back To It.

[reading Swing Time] Made Me A Feel A Little Bit Like When I Used To Read David [foster] Wallace. Like, "i Can't Play That Game. I Wish I Could, But I Can't Do It."

The Artist's Job, I Think, Is To Be A Conduit For Mystery. To Intuit It, And Recognize That The Story-germ Has Some Inherent Mystery In It, And Sort Of Midwife That Mystery Into The Story In Such A Way That It Isn't Damaged In The Process, And May Even Get Heightened Or Refined.

Writing A Story I Am Just Trying To Find Some Little Interesting Thing To Start Out With: Something Small, Even Trivial. Preferably Something That Doesn't Have A Lot Of Thematic Or Political Baggage - A Little Crumb That Is Interesting.

The Cool Parts - The Parts That Have Won Dubai Its Reputation As 'the Vegas Of The Middle East' Or 'the Venice Of The Middle East' Or 'the Disney World Of The Middle East, If Disney World Were The Size Of San Francisco And Out In A Desert' - Have Been Built In The Last Ten Years.

You Can Say You're A Liberal And Everybody Laughs And It's A Good Time.

Every Writer Knows That When You're Imitating Somebody - You Know, You're Sounding Like Faulkner - You're Doing Pretty Good, But Your Life In Hoboken Isn't Faulkneresque.

A Writer Writes What Interests Him And What He Can Manage, And What He Can Make Live, As Flannery O'connor Said. So My Reaction To Someone Saying "you Must!" Or "you Should!" Or Even "hey, Why Don't You?" Is Basically To Sort Of Shrug And Politely Walk Off And Do Whatever I Want To Do. It's Nobody Else's Business, Really, And Even If I Happened To Agree With One Of Those "musts" Or "shoulds" What Would I Do About It, If My Heart Wasn't In It?

To Understand Any Plea For Further Consideration Of A Group You Don't Know Anything About To Be Some Form Of, Quote, Political Correctness. These Things Are Bubbling Right Under Us.

Let's Say There's Something Operating In You Called Mind. It's Very Powerful, But It's Dampened By The Body, By Physicality. When You Die, That Tether Gets Cut And Off The Mind Goes With Incredible Power.

To Me, The Process Of Writing Is Just Reading What I've Written And - Like Running Your Hand Over One Of Those Mod Glass Stovetops To Find Where The Heat Is - Looking For Where The Energy Is In The Prose, Then Going In The Direction Of That. It's An Exercise In Being Open To Whatever Is There.

I Sometimes Imagine A Great Writer As A Sort Of God-surrogate: The Writer Is Doing His Or Her Human-best To Emulate What God Might Think Of Is, If God Was Inclined To Observe Some Human Beings And Present Their Activities In The Form Of A Narrative.

Honestly, The Choice Is: I Can Be A Cheerful Person, More Awake To Correction, More Of A Force For Good ... When I'm Writing. Or I Can Be The Opposite Of All Those Things, When I'm Not Writing.

It Would Be So Weird If We Knew Just As Much As We Needed To Know To Answer All The Questions Of The Universe. Wouldn't That Be Freaky? Whereas The Probability Is High That There Is A Vast Reality That We Have No Way To Perceive, That's Actually Bearing Down On Us Now And Influencing Everything.

There Might Be A Different Model For A Literary Community That's Quicker, More Real-time, And Involves More Spontaneity.

Each Of Us Is Born With A Series Of Built-in Confusions That Are Probably Somehow Darwinian. These Are: (1) We're Central To The Universe (that Is, Our Personal Story Is The Main And Most Interesting Story, The Only Story, Really); (2) We're Separate From The Universe (there's Us And Then, Out There, All That Other Junk - Dogs And Swing-sets, And The State Of Nebraska And Low-hanging Clouds And, You Know, Other People), And (3) We're Permanent (death Is Real, O.k., Sure - For You, But Not For Me).

What Really Interests Me, On A Deeper Level, Is How Our Information Is Coming To Us In Some Kind Of Messed Up Way That Is Making Us Idiotic. I Don't Think We've Become More Idiotic Than We Always Were, But I Think The Information Transfer Is Funky. The Shorthand Of It Is That Social Media Is Making Us Mentally Insane.

The Beginning [of Lincoln In The Bardo] Is Strange, And I Did A Lot Of Work Calibrating That So That A Reader With A Certain Level Of Patience Would Get Through It And In The Nick Of Time Start To Figure Out What Was Going On. In A Short Book, You Can Do That.

If I'm Writing A Story And You're Reading It, Or Vice Versa, You Took Time Out Of Your Day To Pick Up My Book. I Think The One Thing That Will Kill That Relationship Is If You Feel Me Condescending To You In The Process.

That's One Of The Reasons I Take A Lot Of Consolation In Fiction. You Have Years To Work On It. I Think That Allows You To Reach For The Best Part Of Your Reader Instead Of A Lot Of The Internet Stuff, In Which You're Kind Of Reaching For The Worst Or The Most Shallow Part Of Your Reader.

One Of The Ways That We Cope With Anxiety Is By Over Planning And Over Controlling. If We Know Where It's Going To, We Can Just Relax And Do It. Unfortunately, In My Experience, That's Not The Way It Works. The Story Doesn't Want To Be Told What To Do. You Have To Enter Into This Process With A High Level Of Trust That The Many Hours Of Choosing That You're Doing Every Day Will Gradually Clarify The Narrative For You. And That's What Happens.

I Think That Tri [to Ram Bahadur Bomjon] Was The First Time I'd Even Seen Something That Made Me Think, Or Really Feel: "ah, I Don't Know What's Really Going On In The World - I Think I Do, And It Feels Like I Do, But Whatever Is Really Going On Is, De Facto, Beyond The Scope Of My Comprehension - The Best We Can Do Is Look For Hints." I'd Known That Intellectually Before But That Was The First Time I Really Believed It Viscerally.

Whatever Your Supposed Politics Are - Left, Right - If You Put It In A Human Connection, Most People Will Rise To The Occasion And Feel The Human Pain In A Way That They Might Not If It Was Presented In A More Conceptual Way.

I Think When You See [donald] Trump In Person, My Reaction Is You Kind Of Enjoy It. It's Kind Of An Enjoyable Night Out.

Back In 1992, I Had My First Story Accepted By 'the New Yorker.'

It Seems To Me That There Are Certain Thoughts And Vignettes And Attitudes That I Have Always Had The Desire To Represent.

We Have To Move Toward Specificity, Intelligence, Facts, Proof, And Mutual Affection. What I Think People Have To Do Now Is Be Very, Very Assertive About The Utter Essentiality Of Intellectual Undertakings.

I Wasted A Lot Of Years Working On My Writing And Very Grandly Saying, 'and Now... My Novel!,' Which Would Soon Be Reduced To A Short Story, Then To A Paragraph.

As A Kid, I Had A Real Fascination With Perverse, Off-color, And Kind Of Risky Things, And I Also Had A Very Sanctimonious Catholic, Purist Side.

I Understand What Something Short Should Be Like. I Understand Beauty In That Form. If I Start Extending, Somehow I Kind Of Lose My Bearings.

Sometimes I Think Fiction Exists To Model The Way God Might Think Of Us, If God Had The Time And Inclination To Do So.

I Think Each Writer Has To Seek Her Most Energetic Prose Style. She Has To Find A Way To Write So That Nobody Can Deny It.

It's A Little Like Packing For A Trip. First You Lay Out Everything That Might Possibly Be Useful, With No Thought About The Size Of Your Suitcase. Then, Look At Your Suitcase. In The Case Of Narrative, There's A Certain Obligation To Keep The Pace Up And Have Each Section Or Subsection Be Doing Something.

Ralph Kramden, As Played By Jackie Gleason, Was This Big Bumbling New York City Bus Driver Who Was Kind Of Mean And Crass And A Little Bit Egotistical. But Underneath It All, He Was A Big Heart Looking For A Place To Land I Think.

I Think That Fiction Has A Part To Play In Urging Us, As A Species, Toward Compassion.

Success Makes Opportunities And So Many Of Those "opportunities" Are Actually Exemptions - From Hardship, From Unfriendliness, From Struggle.

Now I Began To Understand Art As A Kind Of Black Box The Reader Enters. He Enters In One State Of Mind And Exits In Another. The Writer Gets No Points Just Because What's Inside The Box Bears Some Linear Resemblance To "real Life" -- He Can Put Whatever He Wants In There. What's Important Is That Something Undeniable And Nontrivial Happens To The Reader Between Entry And Exit.

It's One Thing To Be A Perfectionist When You're Alone, But When You're Trying To Make It Work In An Ensemble That's A Whole Different Deal.

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