Author George Saunders (Saun) described one of the
lesser-known sides of the writing process in his
interview with George Stephanopoulos (Step) on ABC’s Sunday talk show, This Week, in February 2013. Here are
some excerpts from an incomplete transcript that capture the bits relevant to
anyone interested in the writing process.
***********************************************************************************************Step:…Funny, dark, realistic at the same time…You seem to tap into this economic anxiety that so many Americans are feeling right now.
Saun: It seems that’s the big American subject....
Step: One of thing you write about is the absence of wealth
creates an erosion of grace.
Saun: …Fiction isn’t actually a great propaganda tool. Often
the first impulse of a writer is to pull up the big manure truck of his ideas
and his politics and “stand there reader and dump it,” but I find if you just
concentrate on language and on making lively new situations [possibly
incorrectly heard?], then ideas come out of the woods.
Step: …If you set out to write overtly political fiction, it
won’t work.
Saun: That’s right. I’ve tried and it doesn’t work. There’s
something about the intimacy of exchange demands openness on both sides. And on
the writer's part it means, I don’t know. I might think I know, but I don’t.
know. It’s weird because the way to get to those ideas is through the language,
paying close attention to phrases and sentences, and if you do that in a kind
of an open state, not only will the ideas show up, but they will be the highest
form of your ideas. They won’t be propagandistic; they won’t be superficial. They’ll be sort of deep and ambiguous.
Step: It also seems that you’re trying to create space in
those sentences for heart. That’s another way to reach across that divide.
Saun: That’s right. A Longfellow quote I’m probably mangling:
If we could look into the secret history of our enemies, we’d find sufficient
suffering and sorrow to disarm our hostility. I think fiction is almost a
mechanical way to work through your own shallowness. You start out with a
condescending relationship to your character, almost by definition, and as you work
with the sentences, you find that the bad sentences are equal to over simplicity
or condescension. And as you work with language, you move yourself toward complexity
and often to a state of confusion, where you really don’t quite know what you
think about the person.
Step: You may not, but when you send it out into the world,
what do you hope to get back?
Saun: I think the highest version is you’re sending out a
bundle of energy—concentrated energy that you’ve made with your own sweat and your
heart—and it goes out and jangles somebody. That’s the highest form. Now, there’s
another level where you do hope to make people more alive in the world, maybe
more aware of the fact that we have more in common with others than we think we
do, that’s kind of whole [?]; but even that gets a little bit intentional. So
for me it’s just trying to deliver an energy charge in a certain way.
Step: You did it for me and you did it for so many more. Go
to abcnew.com/thisweek for an excerpt.
******************************************************************************************From George Saunders interview with George Stephanopoulos on This Week:, Sun 2/16/13, regarding Tenth of December (short-story fiction), new book
Have a look at the New York Times review Stephanopoulos refers to in the
interview, George Saunders Has Written
the Best Book You’ll Read This Year, by Joel Lovell, January 3, 2013 , which nominates Saunders as a “writer
for our time.” This catch-phrase (or trope) seems to have irked other
writers (just Google and see what I mean), mostly because Saunder’s
achievements remain with the short-story form and not novels. But honestly, to
go from being a technical writer to a great writer is clearly an achievement.
