Background Image

...

So Much Of What I Am Doing In My Fiction Is Just Trying To Get Into Interesting Places In Terms Of Language Or Form, Places That Don't Bore Me. And This Happens Via Hundreds Of Quick Micro-decisions That Are Done "to Taste," So To Speak. So The Experience Is One Of Groping Toward That Interesting Place - Trying To Leap Away From Anything That Seems Boring, Or About Which I Don't Have Strong Opinions. Essentially Trying To Avoid That Moment Where, Devoid Of Any Strong Feeling, I Start Conceptualizing.

-George Saunders

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

So Much Of What

George Saunders

...

So Much Of What I Am Doing In My Fiction Is Just Trying To Get Into Interesting Places In Terms Of Language Or Form, Places That Don't Bore Me. And This Happens Via Hundreds Of Quick Micro-decisions That Are Done "to Taste," So To Speak. So The Experience Is One Of Groping Toward That Interesting Place - Trying To Leap Away From Anything That Seems Boring, Or About Which I Don't Have Strong Opinions. Essentially Trying To Avoid That Moment Where, Devoid Of Any Strong Feeling, I Start Conceptualizing.

Views: 4

Topic

More From George Saunders

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.

When You're Out There In America, Meeting With Regular People, It's A Pretty Mellow, Relaxed, Kind-hearted Country. The Direction From The Top, From The President, Is Following Mean-spirited Tendencies: Fear And Undue Caution And Distrust Of The Other, So It's Very Depressing.

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.

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).

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.

Being In Church So Often, Spending Those Hours Sitting In Front Of A Highly Symbolic Array Of Objects, Hearing Those Beautiful Texts - It Teaches A Kid That There Are Important Truths Beyond The Literal Ones, And That We Have Ways To Access Those Truths That Are, Let's Say, Super-rational.

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

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."

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

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.

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.

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 This Is The Other Big Issue That Is Not Going Away: Do We Really Believe That Bit In The Constitution Or Not? I Think We Do.

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 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.

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?

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.

In My Case, When I Am Trying To Be "kind" I Often Default In A Sort Of Toothless Loving-all Stance That Is, Actually, Not Kind, Because It Is Not Truthful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Have A Sense That God Is Unfair And Preferentially Punishes His Weak, His Dumb, His Fat, His Lazy. I Believe He Takes More Pleasure In His Perfect Creatures, And Cheers Them On Like A Brainless Dad As They Run Roughshod Over The Rest Of Us. He Gives Us A Need For Love, And No Way To Get Any. He Gives Us A Desire To Be Liked, And Personal Attributes That Make Us Utterly Unlikable. Having Placed His Flawed And Needy Children In A World Of Exacting Specifications, He Deducts The Difference Between What We Have And What We Need From Our Hearts And Our Self-esteem And Our Mental Health.

I've Always Wanted To Write Energetic, Atypical Sentences, I.e., Sentences That Were Not Normal Or Bland.

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.

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.

I've Had That My Whole Career. People Were Always Hedging Around The Question Of: Why Are You So Dark? What Happened To You?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Compassion Doesn't Have To Be Weak Or Enabling; It Can Also Be Quite Bold.

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.

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

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.

Nothing Will Turn You Into A Civil War Buff Like Five Years Of Reading. Some Of The Letters That People Wrote From That Time Are So Deep And So Beautifully Articulate. And You Realize, Especially With The Stuff That's Going On Now In America, That It's Always Been Chaos - People Were Disagreeing At Least As Much As They Are Now And 20,000 People Would Die In A Day. It's The Scale That's Amazing, And Also The Proximity To Our Own Time.

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.

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.

You Can See A Whole Book As A Series Of Creating An Expectation And Then Delivering A Skew On That Expectation So It's Not Totally Satisfied.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 Millions Or Billions Of Micro Decisions That You're Going To Make, That's What Will Determine Who You Are As A Writer, Not You Deciding In Advance.

Character Is That Sum Total Of Moments We Can't Explain.

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

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.

Both [donald] Trump And Bernie [sanders] Got To This Idea Of The Vanishing Middle Class Sooner And With More Passion Than More Mainstream Politicians, And Benefited From It. The Difference, Of Course, Is That Bernie Understood This In A More Compassionate Framework, And Talked About It In Conjunction With A Revitalization Of Another Part Of The American Project, Which Is The Notion That We Are All Created Equal, And That Our Laws And Culture And Action Ought To Reflect That.

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 Think It's Basically The Same Game, Although With A Public Figure Like [donald] Trump I Think You Are Bound To Consider The Public Persona Rather Than The Private One. At Least That Was The Case With That Piece Of Writing.

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

People Who've Written About Abraham Lincoln's Writing Emphasize How Logical He Was. His Writing Was A Syllogistic Tool. He Would Say, If A, Then B, And He Would Reason Through It. His Late Writing Especially Is So Tight And So Beautifully Reasoned.

The Bush Administration Is A Paragon Of Wisdom.

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.

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.

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.

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, Good News/bad News: Good News That I'm Progressing; Bad News That Life Is Short And Art Is Long.

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 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."

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.

Whole Idea Is Really Intriguing To Me. If You Took Snapshots Of Ourselves Throughout The Day, The Way That Our Mind Is Twisting And Turning, Then At The Moment Of Death, The Mind Would Be Twisting And Turning In The Same Way. But The Buddhists Say It's Super-sized Because There's No Bodily Damper On It.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Early On, A Story's Meaning And Rationale Seem Pretty Obvious, But Then, As I Write It, I Realize That I Know The Meaning/rationale Too Well, Which Means That The Reader Will Also Know It - And So Things Have To Be Ramped Up.

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 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.

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 Was A Big And Un-ironic Fan Of Dear Abby When I Was A Kid In Chicago. I Think I Sort Of Internalized Her. So I Have This Inner Abby: Cranky, Proper, Folksy Yet Scathing, With A Beehive Hairdo. But That's My Issue.

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

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?".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

There Are Books That I Read Years Ago That Enlivened Things In Me That Haven't Died Yet.

I Feel Nervous Because I Revere [zadie Smith] So Much. I Don't Want To Be Stupid. If I Say Something Stupid, Just Interrupt Me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I Have Been Married To My Wife, Paula, For 25 Years. We Have Wonderful Kids. Things Are - It's Been A Really Rich Life, So I Started Thinking, Is There A Way To Get Valence A Little More Into The Stories, The Idea That, Yes, Things Can Go Wrong, But Also They Can Go Right.

What A Powerful Thing To Know: That One's Own Desires Are Mappable Onto Strangers; That What One Finds In Oneself Will Most Certainly Be Found In The Other.

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.

I Know That My Only Chance At Any Kind Of Depth Or Profundity Is To Linger Within The Story, Trying To Make It Distinguish Itself.

The Switch That I'd Like To Throw On Is The One That Says, "look, You're A Human Being Whose Mind Is Every Bit As Active As Anybody Else's. Your Experiences Are Just As Real." For That Matter, Even If They're Even If They're Crazy, They're Valid. They Occurred In This World So They're Valid Topics For Literature.

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

One Of The Sad Things About This Political Season Is That It Allows [requires] Us To Get Behind Our Big "liberal" Or "conservative" Banner And Forget, For A Time, That The Big Problems In Our Country Have Been Around A Long Time And Have Been Batted Back And Forth, Caused And Exacerbated, By Both Sides, And Are More Spiritual Or Ethical Than [merely] Political.

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.

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.

I'm Not A Natural Criticizer - I Prefer To Like And Praise And So On.

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.

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

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.

While I'm Doing [writing], I Don't Feel It.i Don't Think That's A Failing. I Think It's Just A Feature. Like, A Feature Of Oneself.

Reading Is A Form Of Prayer, A Guided Meditation That Briefly Makes Us Believe We're Someone Else, Disrupting The Delusion That We're Permanent And At The Center Of The Universe. Suddenly (we're Saved!) Other People Are Real Again, And We're Fond Of Them.

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 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?"

Whatever You Love, That Will Be An Influence. It Just Will. So In Effect The Young Writer's Job Is: Go Out And Find Some Stuff To Love.

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.

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

As A Fiction Writer, One Of Things You Learn Is God Lives In Specificity. You Know, Human Kindness Is Increased As We Pursue Specificity.

I Watched A Documentary About The Immigrant Crisis Around The World. And It Does Make Me Blush At All The Times I've Stood Up On The Stage And Given Your Speech About The Healing Power Of Fiction.

There Comes That Phase In Life When, Tired Of Losing, You Decide To Stop Losing, Then Continue Losing. Then You Decide To Really Stop Losing, And Continue Losing. The Losing Goes On And On So Long You Begin To Watch With Curiosity, Wondering How Low You Can Go.

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.

Goodbye. I Am Leaving Because I Am Bored.

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.

I Would Say One Thing Writing This Book [lincoln In The Bardo] Did For Me Was Underscore The Fact That This Issue [all Men Are Created Equal] Has Never Been Properly Addressed And It Hasn't Gone Away.

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.

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.

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.

When You're Embarking On A Piece Of Writing, The Anxiety Is Just Too Much, Especially When You're Young And You're Trying To Figure Out If This Is Your Thing Or Not. You Feel Like, "if I Don't Write A Good Story, I Gotta Get Going To Law School!"

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.

When You Do Something That's Going To Speak To People, It's Going To Be Because You're Really Allowing All Of Yourself To The Table In An Accepting Way.

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.

My Theory For Nonfiction Is That Nobody Can Be Free Of Some Kind Of Conceptions About Whatever Story They're Writing. But If You Can Find A Way To Build Those Into The Story, Then The Story Becomes A Process Of Deconstructing And Heightening And Sometimes Changing Those Notions And That Makes Dramatic Tension. The Initial Statement Of Your Position, And Then Letting Reality Act On You To Change It, Is Pretty Good Storytelling.

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

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.

The Bottom Line For Me Is That Life Is Short And Art Is Long.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm Comfortable With Anything After The Fact.

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.

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

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.

Nostalgia Is, 'hey, Remember The Other Mall That Used To Be There?'

That Luminous Part Of You That Exists Beyond Personality - Your Soul, If You Will - Is As Bright And Shining As Any That Has Ever Been. Bright As Shakespeare’s, Bright As Gandhi’s, Bright As Mother Theresa’s. Clear Away Everything That Keeps You Separate From This Secret Luminous Place. Believe It Exists, Come To Know It Better, Nurture It, Share Its Fruits Tirelessly.

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.

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.

The Traveller Must, Of Course, Always Be Cautious Of The Overly Broad Generalisation. But I Am An American, And A Paucity Of Data Does Not Stop Me From Making Sweeping, Vague, Conceptual Statements And, If Necessary, Following These Statements Up With Troops.

I'm A Big Fan Of The Russians: Isaac Babel Is Just An Exquisite Line-to-line Stylist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Don't Mind Being Criticized Intelligently; Although I Don't Love It.

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.

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.

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

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.

I Guess: People Who Are Comfortable Enough With Reality To Allow Other Sorts Of Realities And Other Mindsets To Just Be, And Then To Regard These With Real Interest And Joy [and The Joy Appears In The Prose Quality Itself].

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.

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.

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.

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.

We Have Not Been Energetic Enough - White People Haven't - In Pursuing Racial Equity.

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

Stay Alert. The Big Moral Crossroads In Your Life May Not Come Labeled As Such.

Monologues, In Some Ways, Are The Most Scientific Descriptions Of Consciousness And Even Of Gatherings.

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.

I'm Fascinated With Actors, And I've Never Quite Understood The Process.

A Culture's Ability To Understand The World And Itself Is Critical To Its Survival. But Today We Are Led Into The Arena Of Public Debate By Seers Whose Main Gift Is Their Ability To Compel People To Continue To Watch Them.

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?"

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.

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.

In The Buddhist Texts, Some Of Them Say, When You Die, Basically That Wild Horse Gets Cut Loose, And The Mind Is Incredibly Powerful And Expansive, Omniscient And Can Go Anywhere And See Anything, But - And This Is The Catch - It's Colored By The Habits Of Thought We Made In Life.

I Really Wanted To Be Allowed To The [writer's] Table. So It Makes Me Happy To Be At The Table. It Sounds A Little Shallow, But If I Imagine The Shadow Life, Where I Didn't Get That Chance, And All The Ways My Negative Inclinations Would Have Bloomed If I Hadn't Gotten The Attention, But Also The Creative Outlet ... I'm Not Actually That Happy. I Have Multiplicities. My Happiness Blooms And It Wilts.

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

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.

...there Is No End To The Making And Selling Of Things There Is No End To The Making And Selling Of Things There Is No End... Man, It Occurs To Me, Is A Joyful, Buying-and-selling Piece Of Work. I Have Been Wrong, Dead Wrong, When I've Decried Consumerism. Consumerism Is What We Are. It Is, In A Sense, A Holy Impulse. A Human Being Is Someone Who Joyfully Goes In Pursuit Of Things, Brings Them Home, Then Immediately Starts Planning How To Get More.

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.

The Idea Of Inclusion Has Become Kind Of A Stone That We've Passed Our Hand Over So Many Times That It Doesn't Mean Anything.

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.

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.

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."

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 Feel That There Is Nothing That Can Happen To A Person That Is Banal. Everything That Happens To Us Is Interesting.

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.

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.

[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.

The Weird Thing Was That I Went To Trump Rallies Thinking I Was Going To Run Into Militant, Right Wing, Racist People And Mostly I Didn't. That Should Have Been A Clue To Me. The People I Talked To Were Not, On The Surface Level, Crazy. They Were Quite Nice, Quite Normal, Employed, And Actually Were Wealthier Than The Press At That Time Would Have Led Us To Believe. At That Time, The Narrative Was That These Were All Working Poor But These Were Not Working Poor. That Should've Been A Clue To Me That This Was A Little Bigger Than I Thought.

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.

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.

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?

I Don't Really Do Much Social Media. I Just Don't Like It That Much. I've Trained Myself To Write Very Slowly For A Lot Of Money So It Really Galls Me To Write Quickly For Free.

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 Glamourous Reasonable Voice.

"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.

My Understanding Of Kindness Is That We Are Hoping To Be Truly Beneficial In Every Situation, And That This Desire Means A Whole Suite Of Things: Being Nicer, Sure, But Also Being More Aware, More Present, More Articulate, More Fearless, Less Habituated, Etc., Etc. And Sometimes Even Being Firm, Or Having An Edge, Or Even Being Angry.

The Idea Is That What An Artist Lives Through Should Broaden His Notion Of What It Is Possible For A Human Being To Live Through, And That New Understanding Should Then Get Into And Expand The Work.

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

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.

Trending Author

Colonel Sanders

Category