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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.

-George Saunders

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The Weird Thing Was

George Saunders

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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.

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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."

It's A Big World, And I Really Like It.

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.

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.

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.

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.

More And More These Days What I Find Myself Doing In My Stories Is Making A Representation Of Goodness And A Representation Of Evil And Then Having Those Two Run At Each Other Full-speed, Like A Couple Of Peewee Football Players, To See What Happens. Who Stays Standing? Whose Helmet Goes Flying Off?

...smile First, Then Speak.

In Real Life, When You Have An Emotional Experience, It's Never Just Because Of The Thing That's Been Said. There's The Backstory. It's Like [ernest] Hemingway's Iceberg Theory - The Current Emotional Moment Is The Tip Of The Iceberg And All Of The Past Is The Seven-eighths Of The Iceberg That's Underwater.

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

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.

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.

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

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."

Don't Be Afraid To Be Confused. Try To Remain Permanently Confused. Anything Is Possible. Stay Open, Forever, So Open It Hurts, And Then Open Up Some More, Until The Day You Die, World Without End, Amen.

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

In A Story, For Example, You'll Start Off With A Character Who Is A Little Bit Of A Cartoon. That's Not Satisfying And You Start Revising. And As You Revise You Always Are Making It Better By Being Specific And By Observing More Closely, Which Actually Is Really The Same As Saying You Love Your Characters. The Close Observation Equals Love Of Them.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I've Had The Thought That A Person's 'artistic Vision' Is Really Just The Cumulative Combination Of Whatever Particular Stances He Has Sincerely Occupied During His Creative Life - Even If Some Of Those Might Appear Contradictory.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

A Hip-looking Teen Watches An Elderly Woman Hobble Across The Street On A Walker. "grammy's Here!" He Shouts. He Puts Some Macattack Mac&cheese In The Microwave And Dons Headphones And Takes Out A Video Game So He Won't Be Bored During The Forty Seconds It Takes His Lunch To Cook. A Truck Comes Around The Corner And Hits Grammy, Sending Her Flying Over The Roof Into The Backyard, Where Luckily She Lands On A Trampoline. Unluckily, She Bounces Back Over The Roof, Into The Front Yard, Landing On A Rosebush.

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.

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

So Many People Mentioned This At These Rallies. You Go To These Things And It's Kind Of Like An Oldies Concert. I Mean, It's Not Hostile.

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

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.

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.

I've Been Reading About And Writing About The Civil War Period And It Is So Striking That Slavery Was Never Made Right - [abraham] Lincoln Was Killed, Reconstruction Came Along, And All Of That Inequity Was Frozen In Place And Carried Forward Rather Smugly. So I Think The Burden Is Now Upon Us White People, To Say That This Systemic Inequality Offends Us.

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

I Actually Believe That A Lot Of What People Call Originality Has To Do With Persistence In The Craft.

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.

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

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

The Book Says [lincoln In The Bardo],"i Really Need This Sci-fi Device Of A Ghost Inhabiting Another Person." You Say Okay Kind Of Begrudgingly. So The Structure Seemed Informed By Need And Efficiency.

I Was Thinking About The Legacy Of Ghosts In Fiction, And Specifically The Moral Power Of Those Dickensian Ghosts. Because A Ghost Can Be A Very Powerful But Also Manipulative Element.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

I'm Repledging Myself To Human-scale Values. As A Fiction Writer, The Best Data Comes Through The Senses And Is Then Processed Through Many Revisions. We Have To Learn To Be Intelligent Assessors Of The Data Coming In To Us And What It's Doing To Our Mental Process.

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

We All Think We Know What Happens After Death. But Maybe It's Going To Be Not Only Weird But Also Dorky And Comic And Inconsistent.

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.

Developing Our Sympathetic Compassion Is Not Only Possible But The Only Reason For Us To Be Here On Earth.

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.

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

I'm Comfortable With Anything After The Fact.

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.

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

When We Talk About Adversity, This Is The Moment When Character Really Gets Tested. When Things Aren't Going The Way You Want And You Can't See Anyway That They're Going To Go The Way You Want. That's Kind Of When Those Old Virtues Really Become Valuable And Vulnerable Also.

All Of This Strife On The Political Front Might Just Be The Death Throes Of Another Set Of [less-honorable] American Beliefs, That Have, At Their Core, The Notion That Equality Is Something The Privileged Group "gives" To Those Not So Privileged - A Reaching Down, As It Were.

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).

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

If You Think Of A Work Of Fiction As A Kind Of Scale Model Of The World, Then The Positive Valences - Where Things Turn Out Better Than You Thought They Would - Ought To Be In There Somewhere, Too.

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

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.

Night Was Falling. Birds Were Singing. Birds Were, It Occurred To Me To Say, Enacting A Frantic Celebration Of Day's End. They Were Manifesting As The Earth's Bright-colored Nerve Endings, The Sun's Descent Urging Them Into Activity, Filling Them Individually With Life Nectar, The Life Nectar Then Being Passed Into The World, Out Of Each Beak, In The Form Of That Bird's Distinctive Song, Which Was, In Turn, An Accident Of Beak Shape, Throat Shape, Breast Configuration, Brain Chemistry: Some Birds Blessed In Voice, Others Cursed; Some Squeaking, Others Rapturous.

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.

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

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.

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

I 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.

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.

The Most Hopeful Thing In The Stories, I Hope, Is Wit. I Make It Up. If I Make Up A World In Which We're Ruled By Big Talking Turds, It Doesn't Mean That We Are. So You Shouldn't Feel Depressed.

[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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 Always Cheerfully Say, "well, You Know, The Species Is Adapting, And Whatever It Needs To Do, It'll Do," But I Do Think It's Maybe A Little Bit Alarming. Everybody Knows That One Thing We Really Have To Do Is To Be More Wherever We Are, More Present, That's Just Kind Of A Commonplace. And The Whole Mobile Phone Thing Is Completely 100% The Opposite - To Never Be Where You Are Because You Can Always Be Somewhere Else; And Yet It's So Fun And Addictive.

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

[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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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'm Starting To Withdraw From [technology] As Much As I Can. I Don't Do Much Of The Social Media Stuff. Like, If I'm On Facebook, It Changes My Relation To The Real World In A Way That Makes Me Feel Sick - Almost Like I've Had Too Much Sugar Or Something.

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

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

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.

The Contours Of The Coming Disaster Expanded To Include The Deaths Of All Present.

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 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 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.

The Great American Denial Riff Is That You Can Do Whatever You Like And You Always Triumph At The End. The World Is Saying No, You Can Do What You Like, But There Are Consequences. And Maturity Is To Be Able To Turn To The Consequences And Accept Them.

What Once Were Two, Are One

[in The Moment Of Reading Writer And Reader] Are Both Briefly Their Best Selves, Or At Least Better Selves. A Flawed Human Being Writes Something And 60 Years Later A Reader Picks Up The Book And Something In Them Rises To Meet It.

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.

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

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

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

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

If 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.

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.

This Whole Literary Game Of Trying To Put Yourself In The Shoes Of Your Opponent Is Good For Everybody. It Leaves You More Open-hearted, It Gives You A More Accurate Vision Of The Other Person, Because It's More Based On Curiosity Than Projection. In The End If You Do Have To Fight, You're Better Equipped To Fight. Also It Doesn't Leave You Damaged At The End, It Doesn't Leave You Hateful Or Malformed By Your Own Anger.

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

It Is Very Easy For Us To Go, You Know, "i Am Being Cruel To Be Kind," When Really We Are Just ... Being Cruel. Because It Makes Us Feel Big, Or Whatever.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

What Was Fun For Me With This Book [lincoln In The Bardo] Was To Start Out With The Principle That Went, "we're Going To Fight Every Day To Make This Not A Novel; Make It Too Short To Be A Novel." And Then With That Principle In Place, The Book Sort Of Starts To Say, "okay, But I Really Need This. I Really Need Some Historical Nuggets." And You're Like, "all Right, But Keep It Under Control."

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I 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.

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.

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.

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 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!"

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

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."

Goodbye. I'm Leaving Because I'm Bored.

I'm Not A Big Fan Of My Books Going On Cross-country Road Trips. They Get Arrogant And, Next Thing, Start Aspiring To Become 'large-print' Books. I Say, Let Them Stay Home And Be Regular Small-print Books.

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.

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.

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

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

If 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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Social Media Sometimes Feels Like A Vehicle For One-dimensional Sniping, More Than True Criticism.

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.

In The Moment Of Reading, The Writer Comes Up To The Surface And The Reader Comes Up To The Surface And They Kiss, Like Two Fish. That Actually Does Happen.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I 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.

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.

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."

In The Absolute Sense - Kind Of From The God's-eye View - God Might Feel Like, "i Made This Thing That Has All Of That In It, All The Horror And All The Beauty."

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?

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

The Thing I've Discovered That Is A Help Is That There Isn't A Simple Virtue Or A Simple Vice. They're Always Connected. If You Have Tendency A, That You Loathe, You Can Almost Be Sure That Tendency B, Which You Love, Is Somehow Connected To It.

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

When You Read A Short Story, You Come Out A Little More Aware And A Little More In Love With The World Around You. What I Want Is To Have The Reader Come Out Just 6 Percent More Awake To The World.

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.

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 Haven't Written A Novel Or Something That Long, Because I Really Am Improvising All Along And The Story Is Growing New Limbs To Do What It Needs To Do. So There's Very Little Planning. There's A Little Planning Where I Say, "well, It Looks Like I'm Going In This Direction, Ok, Good." But There's Very Little Forethought Or Intellectual Justification: "oh, Look, I'm Putting In A Theme Park Because That Represents Dystopian America!"

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

Fiction Is A Kind Of Compassion-generating Machine That Saves Us From Sloth. Is Life Kind Or Cruel? Yes, Literature Answers. Are People Good Or Bad? You Bet, Says Literature. But Unlike Other Systems Of Knowing, Literature Declines To Eradicate One Truth In Favor Of Another.

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?".

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.

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.

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.

I Guess What I'm Trying To Say Is That Whatever Weirdness Was Going To Be In There, I Felt, Had To Be Earned. And It Had To Be Required By The Emotional Needs Of The Book.

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 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.

I Think When You Get To Export Your Creative Impulse Into Something, It Kind Of Lessens That Busy Energy That Can Be So Confrontational And Pissy.

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 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."

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