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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.

-George Saunders

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Vonnegut's War Was Necessary.

George Saunders

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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.

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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.

Our First Responsibility In All Things Is To Preserve Our Goodness Of Heart - Then And Only Then Act.

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.

And I Have Finally Realized That, You Know, It's Not A Given That My Lifespan Will Accommodate My Writing Aspirations. It Could Be That It Would Take Me 12 More Books At Six Years Each To Get It - Which Means I Would Have To Live To Be 126. Which I Fully Intend To Do, Of Course.

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.

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

I've Noticed That Nowadays I'm Doing A Lot Of Stuff On The Phone And On The Computer, Which I Usually Wouldn't Do Earlier. And I Can Feel My Brain Being Rewired: I'm Getting Anxious, I'm Getting More Manic. Now, I'm An Extreme Case Because I'm Old And I'm Overdoing It. But Still, It's Really Interesting That I Can Actually Feel A Change In My Neurochemistry From This Interaction With The Technology.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

If I Find Myself Being Too Earnest And Sentimental And Hyperbolic And Simplistic, Which Is Definitely A Tendency I Have, Then I Bring In This Perverse Henchman.

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.

[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.

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

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

Chekhov - Shall I Be Blunt? - Is The Greatest Short Story Writer Who Ever Lived.

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

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

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.

All Traditions Are Also Full Of Meanness For The Sake Of Meanness.

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.

She Said America Was A Spoiled Child Ignorant Of Grief.

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

Wild Imagination

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

I 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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

In The Reason That The Contrast Between The Absolute And The Relative Is So Terrible Is Because We Believe So Fully In Ourselves As Permanent, Continuous, And Central. I Feel Insane Saying This, But If One Weren't So Deluded About The Permanent Reality Of The Self, A Lot Of This Pain Would Actually Lessen.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

[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.

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

Your First Responsibility Is To Yourself And To Your Own Goodness Of Heart.

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

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.

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

The Word 'funny' Is A Bit Like The Word 'love' - We Don't Have Enough Words To Describe The Many Varieties.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

You 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.

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

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

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.

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.

What I'm Primarily Saying,' He Says, 'is That This Is A Time For Knowledge Assimilation, Not Backstabbing. We Learned A Lesson, You And I. We Personally Grew. Gratitude For This Growth Is An Appropriate Response. Gratitude, And Being Careful Never To Make The Same Mistake Twice.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I Don't Feel Like I Have The Intelligence To Really Inhabit A Consistently High Level Of Prose.

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.

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.

Irony Is Just Honesty With The Volume Cranked Up.

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

I 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.

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

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.

My Idea About Collections Is That You Write As Hard As You Can For Some Period And What You're Really Doing During That Time Is Hyper-focusing On The Individual Pieces - Trying To Make Each One Sit Up And Really Do Some Surprising Work.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 Story Sometimes Writes You Into A Corner.

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."

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 Artist’s Job, I Think, Is To Be A Conduit For Mystery.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

While Writing This Book [lincoln In The Bardo], [idea Of Inclusion] Occurred To Me, You Either Believe In The Constitution Or You Don't. If You Do, It's Intense In What It Wants Of Us.

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

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.

What Once Were Two, Are One

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

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.

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

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

I See That Being Looked At Askance As A Form Of Elitism Now, Which Is Really Scary.

...smile First, Then Speak.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Falling In Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The 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.

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."

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.

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'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.

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

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

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

[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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

One Of The Principals Of Composition, I Would Say, In Fiction, Is You Want To Do What You Can Do A Lot Of. You Want To Do What You're Enthusiastic About And What Rings Your Bell. In This Case, Almost Every Decision I Made Was On That Basis.

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."

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

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

If You Could Press A Button And Your Ego Investment Was Less, The Toothache Would Be Less. Or Less Tragic At Least.

I Turned 54 This Year And I Find Myself Feeling Like I'm In A Bit Of A Race To Get Down On Paper The Way I Really Feel About Life - Or The Way It Has Presented To Me. And Because It Has Presented To Me Very Beautifully, This Is Hard. It Is Technically Very Hard To Show Positive Manifestations.

"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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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