Background Image

...

It Really Was Something, To See Ram Bahadur Bomjon, Apparently Living Without Food Or Water. Before I Went On That Trip I'd Asked Advice On It From A Very Wise Person Who I Love And Revere - Basically Trying To See If I Was Somehow Disrespecting Buddhism By Trying To Write About It, And Also Looking For Some Grounding On What Stance To Take ... And My Friend Said, "well, Why Don't You Just Go And See?" And I Hear That In My Head All The Time Now: "why Don't You Go And See?"

-George Saunders

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

It Really Was Something,

George Saunders

...

It Really Was Something, To See Ram Bahadur Bomjon, Apparently Living Without Food Or Water. Before I Went On That Trip I'd Asked Advice On It From A Very Wise Person Who I Love And Revere - Basically Trying To See If I Was Somehow Disrespecting Buddhism By Trying To Write About It, And Also Looking For Some Grounding On What Stance To Take ... And My Friend Said, "well, Why Don't You Just Go And See?" And I Hear That In My Head All The Time Now: "why Don't You Go And See?"

Views: 5

Topic

More From George Saunders

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.

Suddenly Absurdism Wasn’t An Intellectual Abstraction, It Was Actually Realism. You Could See The Way That Wealth Was Begetting Wealth, Wealth Was Begetting Comfort — And That The Cumulative Effect Of An Absence Of Wealth Was The Erosion Of Grace.

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

I Have Lunch, Flirt With Some Local Grandmothers, Undercut My Flirting By Crotching Myself On The Corner Of A Table As I Leave. -- "the Great Divider

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."

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

Goodbye. I Am Leaving Because I Am Bored.

When I Wrote That [donald] Trump Piece, I Had This Uncomfortable Experience Of Sensing A Lot Of Things That Were Nascent, That I Couldn't Quite Articulate. And One Of Them Was This Move Toward Anti-intellectualism. An Anti-love Move, Even.

I Would Kind Of, You Know, Go Stand Next To Some Unlucky Guy And Say Eventually, Hi, I'm George. You Know, I'm With The New Yorker. I'm A Liberal. I'm Somewhat Left Of Gandhi. Do You Want To Talk? And, You Know, They Always Did.

If You're Going To Make An Emotional Connection With Somebody, Whether It's In The Story Or In The World, There's A Certain Amount Of Self-acceptance That Is Required.

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

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 Always Describe Writing A Story As Throwing Bowling Pins In The Air And Then Catching Them.

Whatever Happens When We Die, It Would Be Really Weird If It Was What We Had Expected. Even If You Were A Lifelong Christian Believer, It Would Be Kind Of Weird If There Actually Were Pearly Gates.

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.

From The Perspective Of Someone With Two Grown And Wonderful Kids, That Your Instincts As Parents Are Correct: A Minute Spent Reading To Your Kids Now Will Repay Itself A Million-fold Later, Not Only Because They Love You For Reading To Them, But Also Because, Years Later, When They’re Gone And Miles Away, Those Quiet Evenings, When You Were Tucked In With Them, Everything Quiet But The Sound Of The Page-turns, Will, Seem To You, I Promise...... Sacred.

The Other Thing That's Useful For Me Is This Notion Of The Absolute Versus The Relative:if We Walk Out And It's A Beautiful Morning, It's Only A Beautiful Morning Because We Don't Have A Broken Leg Or Hemorrhoids Or Something.

The Generalizing Writer Is Like The Passionate Drunk, Stumbling Into Your House Mumbling: I Know I'm Not Being Clear, Exactly, But Don't You Kind Of Feel What I'm Feeling?

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.

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.

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

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.

If You Want To Explore A Political Idea In The Highest Possible Way, You Embody It In The Personal, Because That's Something That No One Can Deny.

A Country Doesn't Need A Businessman To Run It: It Needs A Heartful, Worldly, Compassionate Leader.

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.

All Along, My Mantra Was: Don't Write Unless It Contributes To The Emotion, And Do Anything You Do In Service Of The Emotion Only.

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.

Do Not Really Like Rich People, As They Make Us Poor People Feel Dopey And Inadequate. Not That We Are Poor. I Would Say We Are Middle. We Are Very, Very Lucky. I Know That. But Still, It Is Not Right That Rich People Make Us Middle People Feel Dopey And Inadequate.

I Might Take From The Current Political Chaos A Desire To Somehow Reflect Its Essential Qualities In A Story - The Blatant Lies That Get Accepted With Repetition; The Way Mass Media Seems To Be Agitating People En Masse; The Way, Particularly, That A Relatively Lucky And Affluent And Privileged Population Can Be Undone By A Certain Spoiled Quality; That Feeling When Two Decent People Violently Disagree, Because They Are Arguing From Two Non-intersecting Data Sets - Well, The List Goes On.

It's Funny With Fiction - Once You Cut Something, It Hasn't Happened Anymore.

The One Thing I Noticed Retroactively Was That The Energy At Those Trump Rallies Was Off The Charts Compared To The Hillary Clinton Rallies. The Bernie Sanders Energy Was As Good, Gentler, But There Was A Real Passion There.

I Hear That In My Head All The Time Now: 'why Don't You Go And See?'.

My Artistic Approach Is That You're Supposed To Be A Little Baffled.

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.

[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.

If You Have A Friend, What's The Best Way You Can Experience Her Beauty? It's To Really Accept Her. She's Weird In This Way, I Accept It. She's Hard To Talk To, I Accept It. Then That Person Eventually Will Come All The Way Out Into The Sun. I Think It's The Same Way With Our Talent. We Say, "look, I'm Not Going To Judge You. I'm Going To Try To Use You In The Very Best Way."

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.

It's So Ironic That You Often Hear These Right-wing People Talking About The Constitution.

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

Whatever Happens, We Can Deal With It If We Admit That It's Happening And So On. So To Be Comfortable With What Is - That Is A Real Superpower.

Whatever Happens

Even If Something Within Me Is Ugly, Writing Is A Pretty Good Place To Play With That Thing And To Begin To Really See It.

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.

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

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.

This May Be The One Clear Truth Of The So-called Border Issue: Put A Poor Country Next To A Rich One And Watch Which Way The Traffic Flows. Add Impediments, The Traffic Endeavors To Flow Around Them. Eilimate Disparity. The Traffic Stops.

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

He Was A Father. That's What A Father Does.eases The Burdens Of Those He Loves. Saves The Ones He Loves From Painful Last Images That Might Endure For A Lifetime.

I've Also Found That Trying To Be Active With Social Media Changes My Moment-to-moment Perceptions. Instead Of Feeling, "what's The Deepest Version Of What's Happening Here?" I Start To Feel, "how Can I Use [or "claim"] This?".

Do Those Things That Incline You Toward The Big Questions, And Avoid The Things That Would Reduce You And Make You Trivial.

In A Sense My Whole Life As A Writer Is Trying To Find Structural Ways, Or Formal Ways, To Permit That Outflowing So It Doesn't Just Look Like Crazy Output. In Other Words, If It Turns Out That You Can Do A Given Voice, That's Just Kind Of Inclination. But Then If You Can Find A Way To Put That Voice In A Story So That The Voice Serves A Purpose, Then I Would Say That's Being A Writer.

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

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.

It Was That Impossible Thing: Happiness That Does Not Wilt To Reveal The Thin Shoots Of Some New Desire Rising From Within It.

Impossible Things

For Me, When I'm Coming Up To A Place Where I Have To Make Somebody Up, It's Almost Like Driving And Taking Your Hands Off The Wheel.

It Really Strikes Me How Much Of Your Energy In America, Especially If You're From A Working Back-ground, Is Spent Just Keeping Your Head Above Water. It Really Saps Your Grace And Your Strength.

Writing And Reading And Speaking With Specificity And Skill Has Never Seen More Important To Me Than It Does At This Moment. It's What's Between Us And Chaos.

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.

I'm Comfortable With Anything After The Fact.

The Main Thing A Childhood In The Church Did For Me, I Think, Was Set Up The Universe As A Moral System. Once You've Seen It That Way, It Always Seems That Way.

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 Have Finally Realized That, You Know, It's Not A Given That My Lifespan Will Accommodate My Writing Aspirations.

I Had An Experience A Few Years Ago Where I Was On A Plane In Which One Of The Engines Went Out. I Couldn't Even Remember My Name. I Was Just Repeating The Word No Over And Over.

When I'm Not Writing, I Tend To Get Depressed And A Little Bit Surly. And Then When I'm Writing, Suddenly I Feel Enlivened. Now The Only Thing As I'm Getting Older That I Notice Is That It's A Pattern.

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'.

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

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

Equality Has Always Been Extant But Some Of Us Just Didn't Know It.

My Heart Goes Out To Him. Sort Of. Because Empathy Depends On How You've Spent Your Day.

Now, We Don't Really Believe These Things - Intellectually We Know Better - But We Believe Them Viscerally, And Live By Them, And They Cause Us To Prioritize Our Own Needs Over The Needs Of Others, Even Though What We Really Want, In Our Hearts, Is To Be Less Selfish, More Aware Of What's Actually Happening In The Present Moment, More Open, And More Loving.

It Was Like Either: (a) I Was A Terrible Guy Who Was Knowingly Doing This Rotten Thing Over And Over, Or (b) It Wasn’t So Rotten, Really, Just Normal, And The Way To Confirm It Was Normal Was To Keep Doing It, Over And Over.

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.

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.

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.

Humor Is What Happens When We're Told The Truth Quicker And More Directly Than We're Used To.

That's What A Story Must Feel Like To Me. It's Not, "i Want To Write About A Gravedigger." But You're Walking Along And - Boop! Shovel. "ok, What Does One Do With A Shovel? Digs A Hole. Why? I Don't Know Yet. Dig The Hole! Oh, Look A Body."

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.

I Think That's One Of The Maybe Under-discussed Aspects Of Process - The Difference Between A Good Writing Day And A Bad One Is The Quality Of The Split-second Decisions You Made.

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.

I Think In Our Time, You Know, So Much Of The Information We Get Is Pre-polarized. Fiction Has A Way Of Reminding Us That We Actually Are Very Similar In Our Emotions And Our Neurology And Our Desires And Our Fears, So I Think It's A Nice Way To Neutralize That Polarization.

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.

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.

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.

Still, Accomplishment Is Unreliable. "succeeding," Whatever That Might Mean To You, Is Hard, And The Need To Do So Constantly Renews Itself (success Is Like A Mountain That Keeps Growing Ahead Of You As You Hike It), And There's The Very Real Danger That "succeeding" Will Take Up Your Whole Life, While The Big Questions Go Untended.

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.

Success Is Like A Mountain That Keeps Growing Ahead Of You As You Hike It... Err In The Direction Of Kindness.

I Think People Have Come To Expect That In Artistic Representation; That Every Work Of Art Should Be A Work Of Extravagant Hope.

I Don't Tend To Work Directly From Life, Except In Trying To Mimic Or Match The Outlines Of Its Insanity. In Other Words, When I Live Through Something, I Just Try To Say To Myself, "ok, Remember This - Life Is Really This Crazy Or Scary Or Beautiful Or Surprising - So Try To 'get At' That In Your Stories.

There's Not A Lot Of Whimsicality In The Form, Not A Lot Of Indulgence Allowed. Like When I Was Younger, I Would Sometimes Go, "oh, Every Other Section Will Be Narrated By A Chair." Or, "it Will Be A Double Helix Shape!" That Never Really Worked.

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.

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.

What's Really Baffling To Me Is The Way That The Technology Has Risen Up To Help Us Become More Materialistic.

I Am Trying To Remember That Things Have Certainly Been Crazier In Human History And They May Get Crazier Here And Now, And [here I Am Trying To Be Optimistic] It's Even A Good Thing, To Be Going Through All Of This, If Only To Be Reminded That History Hasn't Stopped - Human Existence Is As Fundamentally Unmanageable Now As It Ever Was.

I Heard Zen Teacher One Time Talking About Abortion, And He Was Saying The Way That Abortion Makes Bad Karma Is Any Time The Person Involved Pretends That There's Not A Cost To The Choice, One Way Or The Other; Whether You Get It Or Don't Get It, There's A Cost. That's Just Basic Responsibility, To Admit That There's A Cost. And The Bad Karma Is When You Pretend That The Thing Is Free.

It Seems To Me A Worthy Goal: Try To Create A Representation Of Consciousness That's Durable And Truthful, I.e., That Accounts, Somewhat, For All The Strange, Tiny, Hard-to-articulate, Instantaneous, Unwilled Things That Actually Go On In Our Minds In The Course Of A Given Day, Or Even A Given Moment.

One Of The Inspiring Things About Susan Sarandon Career Is That There's A Quality Of Real Fearlessness In It - You Seem To Be In It For The Challenge And The Experience.

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.

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'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.

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.

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

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

Down In The City Are The Nice Houses And The So-so Houses And The Lovers Making Out In Dark Yards And The Babies Crying For Their Moms, And I Wonder If, Other Than Jesus, Has This Ever Happened Before. Maybe It Happens All The Time. Maybe There's Angry Dead All Over, Hiding In Rooms, Covered With Blankets, Bossing Around Their Scared, Embarrassed Relatives. Because How Would We Know?

Irony Is Just Honesty With The Volume Cranked Up.

You Didn't Plan To Write A Story; It Just Happened. Well, It Could Be Argued That The Next Thing You Should Do Is Find A Hole To Dig. Right? So You Start Digging A Hole And Then Somebody Brings A Body Along And Puts It In. That's What A Story Must Feel Like To Me. It's Not That You Say, "i Want To Write A Story About A Gravedigger." But You're Walking Along And "i Don't Know What I'm Doing Here In This Story,' And - Boop! A Shovel. "oh, Interesting. Ok, What Does One Do With A Shovel? Digs A Hole. Why? I Don't Know Yet. Dig The Hole! Oh, Look A Body."

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

The Demographics Are Changing - And So What? Citizenship Is A Question Of Certain Agreed-upon Values And That Is That. Do We Believe That? I Think At Heart We Do.

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.

The Scariest Thought In The World Is That Someday I'll Wake Up And Realize I've Been Sleepwalking Through My Life: Underappreciating The People I Love, Making The Same Hurtful Mistakes Over And Over, A Slave To Neuroses, Fear, And The Habitual.

There's Also A Way That You Have Of Being Precise But Also Allusive, That Works Well For Me - It's Something About The Open-hearted Way You Frame Your Queries. Instead Of Feeling Daunted Or Discouraged, I Feel Excited To Give Whatever It Is A Try. This Takes A Lot Of Editorial Wisdom And Confidence - To Know Just How To Get The Writer To Take That Extra Chance.

With Nonfiction, I Go In Trying To Be Really Honest About What My Preconceptions Are.

My Go-to Default Is To Try To Be Nice, Which I Feel Does Less Harm In The Long Run Than Trying To Be, Say, Assertive. If I Am Nice And Maybe Too Passive, I Find That Easier To Live With.

...smile First, Then Speak.

I Think That Feels Like It To Me. I Mean Whenever You Talk About Writing I Think You Have To Remember That It All Has A Big Question Mark Over It - Every Word Has A Big Question Mark Over It.

I Don't Know About Transformation. But Scientifically You Can Say: Well, It Doesn't Seem To Hurt Anybody. Personally I've Been Cheered By Books At Really Critical Moments. That Much I Believe.

I Was Trained In Seismic Prospecting. We'd Drill A Deep Hole And Put Dynamite In The Bottom And Blow It Up Remotely, Which Would Give You A Cross-sectional Picture Of The Subsurface, Which Tells You Where To Drill.

I Often Wonder If There Are Certain Areas Of Real Life That Are Roped Off, With A Sign Saying, "art, Don't Come In Here." But That's Maybe A Deeper Question.

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

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

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.

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 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.

I Live Up In The Hills, And I Don't Have Any Cable, And I Have Really Slow Satellite, So That Does It - Because Being On The Internet Is Okay, But It Takes A Long Time. I Have A Prediction That At Some Point, There Will Be A Backlash. Like At The End Of The '60s, There Was That Back-to-the-land Movement, And I'm Guessing That People Will Start Consciously Saying, "i'm Not Taking The Phone With Me," Or "i'm Only Checking Email X Number Of Times A Day," Or "i'm Not Ever Gonna Self-google," For Example.

Sometimes I Just Turn On The Tv And I'm Like, Wait A Minute, That Guy [donald Trump]? It's Incredible That He Did All Those Things And He Still Won. It's Hard To Process.

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.

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

I Know This Will Sound Naïve, But I Often Wonder What America Would Be Like If Our National Ethos Was Simply To Minimize Suffering. Period. To Try, Every Day, To Convert Our Wonderful Wealth And National Energy Into The Cessation Of Suffering Wherever We Find It. Imagine If That Was Our National Mindset. Well, We Can-we Must-dream.

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. And Then You Can Really Surprise Yourself. There's That Cliche, "no Surprise For The Writer, No Surprise For The Reader!"

We're In The Transition Between Birth And Death. But The One That People Often Know About Is The Transition Between The Moment Of Death And Whatever Comes Next, So Reincarnation Or Heaven Or Hell.

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.

Certainly We're Always Rooting For Our Particular Contingent Moment To Be A Great One. Pain-free. But The More Expansive Vision Has To Include The Idea That, Even For Us, Sometimes Our Particular Contingent Moment Is Going To Be Horrific.

The Universal Human Laws - Need, Love For The Beloved, Fear, Hunger, Periodic Exaltation, The Kindness That Rises Up Naturally In The Absence Of Hunger/fear/pain - Are Constant, Predictable, Reliable, Universal, And Are Merely Ornamented With The Details Of Local Culture.

Based On The Experience Of My Life, Which I Have Not Exactly Hit Out Of The Park, I Tend To Agree With That Thing About, If It's Not Broke, Don't Fix It. And Would Go Even Further To: Even If It Is Broke, Leave It Alone, You'll Probably Make It Worse.

I Don't Really Write Beautifully Naturally, Unlike Some People.

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.

Do All The Other Things, The Ambitious Things - Travel, Get Rich, Get Famous, Innovate, Lead, Fall In Love, Make And Lose Fortunes...but As You Do, To The Extent That You Can, Err In The Direction Of Kindness.

Falling In Love

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

I Watched A Bunch Of Kids Movies On Christmas. I Was Kind Of Joking With Our Family By Asking, "is Anyone Allowed To Die In A Kid's Movie Anymore?"

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.

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.

It's Not Fiction's Job To Be Photographically Representative Of Reality. If I Want To Make A Fictional World Where There's No Kindness, This Doesn't Mean I Believe There's No Kindness In The Real World. In Fact, What It May Mean Is That I Very Much Value Kindness. Like If You Make A Painting In Which Only Greens Are Allowed, It Wouldn't Mean You Don't Believe In Blue.

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.

From The Beginning [of The Lincoln In The Bardo], I Actually Had It In Mind Not To Write A Novel. I'd Kind Of Gotten Past That Point Where I Felt Bad For Never Having Written A Novel, Even To Where I Felt Really Good About It, Like I Was A Real Purist.

One Of The Ideas That Runs Through This Book [lincoln In The Bardo] Is This Buddhist Notion That The Mind Is Incredibly Powerful; Not The Brain But The Mind.

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

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

There's This De Facto Assumption That For Something To Have Value, It Has To Be Economically Self-supporting - Which Imposes A Very Low Ceiling On A Culture.

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.

What America Is, To Me, Is A Guy Doesn't Want To Buy, You Let Him Not Buy, You Respect His Not Buying. A Guy Has A Crazy Notion Different From Your Crazy Notion, You Pat Him On The Back And Say, Hey Pal, Nice Crazy Notion, Let's Go Have A Beer. America, To Me, Should Be Shouting All The Time, A Bunch Of Shouting Voices, Most Of Them Wrong, Some Of Them Nuts, But Please, Not Just One Droning Glamorous Reasonable Voice.

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.

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.

It Seemed To Me, In Some Way, Especially When You're Looking Back At Distant Historical Events, The "truth" With A Capital "t" Is Kind Of The Juxtaposition Of All The Many, Many, Many Truths That Seem True To People At The Time.

Toni Morrison Seems To Have A Lot Of Faith In People - That's What I Mean By Gentle Power.

My General Approach To Writing Fiction Is That You Try To Have As Few Conceptual Notions As Possible And You Just Respond To The Energy That The Story Is Making Rather Than Having A Big Over Plan. I Think If You Have A Big Over Plan, The Danger Is That You Might Just Take Your Plan And Then You Bore Everybody. I Always Joke That It's Like Going On A Date With Index Cards. You Know, At 7:30 P.m. I Should Ask About Her Mother. You Keep All The Control To Yourself But You Are Kind Of Insulting To The Other Person.

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.

I Attended Catholic School. We Received A Great Education From The Nuns. ... Also, Guilt. Guilt And A Feeling Of Never Being Satisfied With What You've Done. And A Sense That You Are Inadequate And A Big Phony. All Useful For A Writer. I'm Always Being Edited By My Inner Nun.

I Try To Keep My Artistic Opinions Not So Much "to Myself" But "on Myself."

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.

You Don't Want To Spend Your Life Writing About Stuff That Doesn't Matter. You Want To Try To Pull Out Of The Temporal Mediocre And Write In A Way That Is Meaningful To Everybody. This Goes Back To This Idea Of Being Intimate With Your Reader. Since We're All Down Here And We're All Dying And Aspiring And Loving And Feeling Inadequate, All These Things That We All Are Doing All The Time, What A Relief It Is, When Somebody Looks At You And Says, "yeah, Me Too."

I Think Kindness Is A Sort Of Gateway Virtue - Having That Simple Aspiration Can Get You Into Deep Water Very Quickly - In A Good Way.

I Have Nothing. My Model Is I Have Nothing Figured Out, And I'm Starting With Some Little Nugget And Hoping That It Will Talk Back To Me Enough To Let It Grow.

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?

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.

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.

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.

The Bush Administration Is A Paragon Of Wisdom.

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.

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

For Me, The Game Would Be To Assume A Very Intelligent Reader Who Can Extrapolate A Lot From A Little. And That's Become My Definition Of Art; To Get That Pitch Just Right, Where I Can Put A Hint On Page Three, And The Reader's Ears Go Up A Bit, As Opposed To Dropping It All On The First Page.

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.

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.

Positive Human Action Is Not Only Possible, But Pervasive; Human Beings Can Improve And Choose Light And So On. And This Is All Happening.

I Actually Do Believe In Life After Death.

Life After Death

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.

I've Seen Time And Time Again The Way That The Process Of Trying To Say Something Dignifies And Improves A Person.

It Is Technically Very Hard To Show Positive Manifestations. But I Can Look Back At The Way I Thought And Felt Even As A Little Kid And There Was A Lot Of Wonder There, And Openness To The Many Sides Of Life.

I Used To Joke About This But I've Recently Realized That I Really Believe It: I Spent Many Years Training Myself To Write Very Slowly For Pretty Good Money. So The Idea Of Writing Really Quickly For Free Offends Me.

I Knew If I Evoked That Stuff Too Easily Or Gratuitously, As A Way Of Assuaging My Fears Of Not Being Edgy Or Whatever, The Writing Would Fall Apart. This Book [lincoln In The Bardo] Was Going To Have To Have Some Earnestness In It.

I'm Not Thinking Much About Overall Themes Or Preoccupations Or Anything Like That. Instead I'm Just Trusting That, If I'm Working Hard, Various Notions And Riffs And Motifs And So On Are Very Naturally Suffusing The Stories And The Resulting Book.

With Fiction, And Also With Nonfiction That You Can Take Your Time Doing, You Have A Much Better Chance Of Reaching Across The Divide And Connecting With Somebody Who Is Opposed To You On Some Things. They're Opposed To You On One Axis, Which Is Politics, But If You Go Over The Axis Called Puppies, You Might Find Some Common Ground.

I Think Fiction Isn't So Good At Being For Or Against Things In General - The Rhetorical Argument A Short Story Can Make Is Only Actualized By The Accretion Of Particular Details, And The Specificity Of These Details Renders Whatever Conclusions The Story Reaches Invalid For Wider Application.

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 Still Believe That Capitalism Is Too Harsh And I Believe That, Even Within That, There Is A Lot Of Satisfaction And Beauty If You Happen To Be One Of The Lucky Ones, Although That Doesn't Eradicate The Reality Of The Suffering. It's All True At Once, Kind Of Humming And Sublime.

What Evil Does First In The World, Maybe, Is Distract Us From Our Pursuit Of Goodness.

I Know What It Feels Like To Be In That Middle And Lower-middle Class, And Feel Like The Culture Is Passing You By; It Translates Into A Great Sense Of Personal Frustration That Can Then Morph Into Political Frustration.

The Greatest Thing About Writing A Book Is That At First It's All Inchoate, But The More You Work On It, The More The Book Teaches You Its Internal Rules.

The Writer Has To Make Pleasure For The Reader - Which, I Think, Is Done By Taking One's Character's Seriously And Taking One's Readers Seriously -don't Condescend Or Try To Be Tricky. Be A Friend To Your Reader - I'd Say That's A Pretty Good First Step.

In Fact Unrestrained Capitalism Is Quite Cruel And The Cost Is On The Individual Human, On His Or Her Grace.

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.

I Think The Wave Of Social Media Rejection Is Coming. I Think There Will Be A Big Reaction Against It. It's Just Like Sugar- - Mean, I Loved It As A Kid.

The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me Is That Nothing Happened In Writing. I Ended Up Working For Engineering Companies, And That's Where I Found My Material, In The Everyday Struggle Between Capitalism And Grace. Being Broke And Tired, You Don't Come Home Your Best Self.

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

Life Is Short, Very Short, And What Are We Doing Here If Not Trying To Become More Generous And Loving?

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).

My Habit Would Have Been To Veer Towards The Dark - To Prove I Was Something; Edgy, Or Maybe To Prove That I Was Cognisant Of The Dark Side. Now, With Age And Confidence, I Can Say, Yeah, That's True, But I Am Cognisant Of The Fact That People Can Do Things Well. And Can Be More Loving Than You Expect.

Working With Language Is A Means By Which We Can Identify The Bullshit Within Ourselves (and Others).

When I'm Explaining Something To You, If I'm Being Long-winded, And Twisty In A Non-productive Way, I Could Make You Feel Vaguely Insulted. And You'd Have A Right To Be.

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.

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.

I'm A Control Freak. I'm Defensive. And I'm An Egomaniac. That's True About Me.

Trending Author

Michael Schenker

Stefano Langone

Category