‘Order Out of Chaos’: An interview with George Saunders
By: Richard Chachowski
Tags: Writers On Writing, Writing Tips, Writing, Writing Life, Writers Life

George Saunders’ latest book, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” was released on January 12th (Photo by Zach Krahmer, courtesy of Random House).

Note: An edited version of this interview originally appeared in the TCNJ “Signal” newspaper.

When it comes to literature and short stories, there is perhaps no writer as unique as George Saunders.

A professor at Syracuse University, Saunders’ short story collections have won widespread praise, with Saunders winning the National Magazine Award for fiction on four different occasions, the 2013 Story Prize for his short story collection “Tenth of December,” and both a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His debut novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” won the Man Booker Prize in 2017, and his new nonfiction book, “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain,” an analysis of several notable Russian short stories, is being hailed as one of the most anticipated books of 2021.

I was fortunate enough to recently speak with Professor Saunders in a candid discussion on his writing process.

Can you talk a little bit about your writing process? Do you typically prefer writing with pen and paper, or type your first drafts directly into a Word document?

I always work at the keyboard and then edit by hand on paper.

Do you have a specific amount of time or specific time of day, or an ideal word count in mind, when you start writing?

I’d prefer to work in the morning but, at this point, I’ll take whatever I can get. There’s a little move I make in my mind before starting, kind of like, “Now it’s time.” And then I’m ready.

Do you jump from one section/scene in a story to another at all, or do you move from the chronologically beginning through to the end?

Honestly, I’ve done it both ways and both ways at once and so on. Every story has its own needs. I think what the young writer is trying to do is get confident enough that he’s serving the needs of the story, no matter the particulars of how he’s doing that.

What about when you decide to call it a day and stop writing? Do you reach a point where, like Hemingway, you go, “Okay, I think I know where this story is going, so I can just go to bed and pick it up from the same place tomorrow,” or do you write until you reach a wall and need a few days to sort of gather your thoughts and figure out where the story’s going from there?

Again — and not to be evasive here — I’ve done it all sorts of ways. I like that Hemingway idea and have talked about doing it that way — but, you know: unless I don’t. There can arguably be value in occasionally writing too long, even to writing yourself into a bad place. There’s just no limit to the ways in which art can work — which I think is the fun of it. There is no method. And a person has to get used to that and even start to like it — the freshness and challenge of that.

You mentioned you don’t like drafting your stories ahead of time, but I’m curious, how detailed a mental picture do you have of the entire story? Do you have an idea of where the story’s going or what the ending looks like when you first start off, or do you prefer to just figure out where the story is going day by day as you’re writing it?

I prefer the last thing you said — letting it lead me a little each day. But sometimes…it works the other way: a whole draft just comes out. The one thing that’s always true for me is once I get a passable full version, I go back and revise the heck out of it. It’s like, once I know the story’s larger intentions, I have what I need in order to start refining its innards.

Many of your stories usually contain an “A-story” — the main plot- or storyline — as well as a “B-story” that simultaneously develops in the background of the main narrative (the most obvious examples being “The Wavemaker Falters” and “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” where both narrators are facing problems in their professional lives, as well as dealing with marriages that are falling apart). When you first begin writing a story, how greatly have you planned out both the “A-” and “B-” storylines? Do you usually have an idea ahead of time, as in, “Oh, this person has a failing marriage and has problems at work,” or do you reach a point with your main story where you hit a kind of wall and decide, “Okay, well, is there any potential B-storyline I could explore to progress the story forward at all?”

No, God no, seriously. No plan. Mostly I just have a voice or, to be more honest, a handful of sentences that sound weird or intriguing. And my theory is, if I just start messing with those, trying to improve them (per my own quixotic inner standard), then plot and theme and all of that will appear. And it works best for me to keep the plan at bay as long as possible — to let the story reveal it to me, instead of declaring it to the story. But again — people work in all kind of different ways and some very good writers DO plan it all out. Or, I’m guessing, they plan a lot of it out. There always has to be some surprise, which is really just an occasion where your subconscious — the smartest part of us, I’d say — shows up to give the writer a gift.

Your observation about the A/B structure is totally correct and I think comes pretty naturally out of my life and the context of those stories (you go to work, you come home, go to work, come home.) So, not planned, but, as I was writing those stories, somewhat predictable — as soon as I put a guy at work, the structure arose naturally.

That was actually a big realization for me, the young Hemingway acolyte: life wasn’t all trout fishing. People went to work and that sapped their grace.

You’ve spoken a lot about your literary influences, and even your musical influences before. Do you believe you have any other influences from theatre or film, such as a particular playwright or director or specific films at all? If so, how do you believe they have influenced you?

Monty Python was, and is, very big for me. I just love it. Steve Martin too. “Jaws” was a powerful early experience — it was so visceral. I think those early, big experiences get into a person’s artistic DNA and then he or she is always trying to do…something like that. I loved the John Ford film of “The Grapes of Wrath,” too.

I think influence is mostly permission-giving: you read or watch something, it thrills you and says, “Of course this is allowed, if you do it right.” And/or, thrillingly, you see some aspect of your life in the work of art, that could only have got there in that particular, original, form. That’s exciting.

Obviously, your stories are marked by fantastic, sometimes surreal concepts and ideas, including ghosts, zombies, humorously-themed amusement parks and restaurants, and other absurdist, almost Pynchonesque ideas and plotlines. Do you ever draw the line for yourself as you’re writing these elements into your stories and say, “No, no, that idea is just too far; I’ll lose the reader if I do that”?

Well, sort of. But the answer then is not to just walk away but to ask why it’s too much, and address that. Usually the problem is not that something is too weird but that it’s overdetermined — I already know what it means. I know what it represents and am using it as a sort of cudgel, or it’s (merely) the first-order thing. My feeling is that weirdness ought to be earned — it ought to be in service of some larger goal. For me, that goal is emotional. I’m trying to say something true, that moves you and somehow speaks to your actual, lived, experience. To do that (sometimes) the story asks you to introduce something that is not real. But you’re not doing that in order to be weird; you’re doing it over your own objections, because the story insists that you need to do it — it’s the quickest way to be truthful.

You are famous for spending years writing a single story, such as the 14 years you spent writing “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” How do you manage to avoid becoming frustrated or impatient with how long a story is taking during that time?

Well, I usually have other stories going on at the same time. That way, I program in some patience. When I hit the wall on Story A, I just shrug and go, “Well, at least I haven’t screwed it up yet,” and turn to Story B. The one thing I feel I’ve really learned over the years is patience. If something isn’t that great, and you refuse to pronounce it finished — you win. It might still be great, in the future.

How do you know when a story’s finished after all that time? Fourteen years is obviously a long time, so is it all intuition and gut-feeling where you say, “Okay, I’ve done all I can, I think this is right,” when it comes to the final draft and after all that time has passed?

For me, it’s a feeling of being able to get through it, page after page, feeling something like, “Yep, yep, that’s good, I’d still be in it if I were a first-time reader.” During revision, there’ll always be some place where that feeling goes away. It’s just a slight deflection of the needle into “meh” territory. But late in the game, that point keeps getting pushed deeper and deeper into the story, and then you’re on the last page, and here’s that feeling, and you fix that, and then you’re at the last paragraph, and you have a really keen sense of what bowling pins are in the air….

And then you read it a few more times, to make sure you’re not kidding yourself.

In the end, there has to be a little playfulness, a little, “Ah, it’s just a story,” feeling. But…not too much and not too soon. And maybe that’s one of the biggest things we learn: how do our stories feel, when they’re finished? How much revising (for us) is too much? Too little? There’s a bit of a Goldilocks thing going on — we’re trying to do it “just right.”

I have a similar question then about how many stories you typically work on at one time? As most of your stories take sometimes years to complete, do you typically alternate between stories as you work on them — like you focus on one story one day, and then focus on another one the next day? Or do you work on a story until you hit a wall, and then work on another story in the meantime?

No, as mentioned above — I love to have several things going on at once, just so I can let a story sit awhile if it wants to do that (that is, I can avoid torturing it when it doesn’t want to play).

But usually there’ll come a point where a certain story seems to want to be finished, and I know then to give it my full attention because, in that state, it’s ready to confess everything. It’s like I’ve given it enough deep attention, and now it’s ripe. Like all of this stuff — that’s just a feeling I’ve learned to recognize and that may be what any writer is trying to accumulate — a set of feelings, very personal to her, that tell her where she is in the process and what she should do next.

Something really unique and entertaining about your stories and that you keep coming back to is the inclusion of amusement parks in your work. What is it about amusement parks that you keep coming back to in your writing?

I really have no idea. They just unlock a certain potential in the language. A story is never “about” a theme park (or a country, or a relationship, or the Holocaust) but, rather, we might say that a story uses those things in order to start riffing, so it can find out what it IS about (which had better be something complex and irreducible).

So….it’s maybe like a musician who finds he can always come up with something if he tunes down the low E to D and plays in Dm. Who can say why? But the real originality exists behind that — the “choosing to play in Dm” doesn’t contain any meaning, but is the means to an end…

You previously described yourself as having been influenced by Ayn Rand and her theory of Objectivism, and said you were a bit more right-leaning politically when you were younger. Now, you describe yourself as “Eastern Liberal.” Can you describe the transition you underwent from Ayn Rand to liberalism? Did you develop more and more liberal ideas from the books you were reading, or just through your writing and everyday living?

Mostly from living, I think — traveling in Asia and seeing the poverty and the beauty and then coming home and seeing friends and family in various states of struggle with money and addiction and all of that. I’d say a certain feeling of mercy and pity got unlocked in me and I saw that Rand and Reagan and that whole movement was based on…something else….this delusional idea of radical independence, which was often used as an excuse for turning one’s back on someone in need and seeing yourself as separate from everything else and better than it. In other words, a fundamentally frightened and selfish movement, from my perspective. It didn’t match with the reality I saw all around me; it wasn’t workable or kind.

Reading your piece in “The Braindead Megaphone” about Dubai, I was struck by a lot of your first-hand descriptions about some aspects of the city, which almost seemed straight out of one of your short stories, such as the Wild Wadi waterpark, or the all-night construction crews composed of South Asian laborers living in labor camps on the outside of town because they can’t afford to live in the city. As you were exploring Dubai, or even when you were writing the piece, was there ever a moment where you like, “Oh my god, it’s like I walked into the setting of one of my stories?”

Yes, for sure. (I think that’s why they sent me there. ☺). But I think we can pick up traces of all of that in the U.S. too. (That water park in “The Wavemaker Falters,” for example, was in Dalllas). I worked in a slaughterhouse for a short time and to leave that hellhole, slightly smelling of blood, and drive home past these Texas-style McMansions was an education in…something. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and you see it everywhere — this crazy inequality capitalism creates and blesses and dresses up as “award for accomplishment” that is so extreme, sometimes, as to seem dystopian. Only…we’re used to it.

Speaking about the similarity of Dubai to your own writing, do you believe your trip to Dubai had any effect on some of the stories you wrote after your trip?

Yes, for sure — everything I do and see, I hope, eventually gets into the stories, albeit, you know — reformatted. I imagine I have this big vat over my head and everything I read and watch and observe in the world goes in there and then I forget about it, but it’s directly feeding the subconscious so that it’s ready to come into a story.

You mentioned briefly in your “Buddha Boy” story your “acid days.” Certain writers — Robert Crumb, William Burroughs, Ken Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson, just to name a few — have mentioned how important hallucinogens have been to their work, with Crumb mentioning the artistic style he wanted to use in his work was greatly influenced by his LSD use. Do you believe hallucinogens have influenced your own writing or worldview at all?

Well, to be clear, my “acid days” were exactly….two. Or, one, really. I guess it helped me understand something that I could have figured out from having a bad fever: the mind makes the world. There is no fixed, solid “me.” There’s the mind, in a certain state, creating certain appearances. And therefore the manifestations in the world are infinite. And I’d say starting meditation would teach that to a person a lot better and deeper and more beneficially than hallucinogens.

I was listening to a radio interview with David Foster Wallace recently, who was obviously someone you were close to and respected as a writer. In that interview, Wallace said that writing, to him, was all about what it means to be a human being. I was wondering, as a writer whose style and ideas are very similar to Wallace’s, what would be the main explanation for why you personally write?

To be really honest, I do it because I’m good at it and get power from the world for doing it AND because, by doing it, I get into better relation with me and the world. It’s fun — I mean, that’s probably really the answer. I enjoy helping order come out of chaos — that feeling where, on Monday, it’s a bunch of clever typing and then by….well, the next August….it’s something coherent, that is surprising me and teaching me things I didn’t know I knew.

Lastly, have you read or watched anything during quarantine that you recommend people check out?

I have a new book out called “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” in which I analyze seven great Russian short stories so, for most of the pandemic, I’ve been obsessively reading and re-reading (just) those stories. I just finished that Carlo Rovelli book about physics and am about to start Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “71/2 Lessons About the Brain.” I am getting a copy of Joshua Ferris’s new novel in galleys soon — big fan of his. And am reading “Don Quixote” every night.

We loved “The Great” and are huge fans of “The Good Place.” We just re-watched the whole series, from beginning to end. We just got the 1965 Soviet version of “War and Peace” and that’s looking pretty wonderful. That Mr. Rogers documentary was lovely. We’re also big fans of “Queer Eye.”