Steadily Better

“There’s no rule that says you get steadily better.”

~ Margaret Atwood, from Bad Writing

 

George Saunders, from the documentary: My sense is that it has a lot more to do with the ways that someone is naturally charming. You know, so if you fall in love with somebody and they’re leaving town and you have two days to somehow change their mind, in that kind of life or death situation you bring forth certain traits of your personality. In my case, I would be telling jokes and I would be talking fast and I would be trying real hard to anticipate her reason for leaving and undercut them in a real energetic way. Those are all things that I would do in prose as well. I would definitely try to anticipate the reader’s objection to the story and build in a defense. I would try to be funny; I would try to be fast. So for me, the big breakthrough moment for me, was when I said to myself, ‘The reader is a person who you need to charm. You better bring your good shit. Because they don’t have time to wait around for you to work through your Hemingway phase.’

Not in the Artist's Power to Know

George Saunders on KCRW's Bookworm (12.27.07):

"...my earlier ideal, which was the writer knew very well what he wanted you to feel at the end of the story. It was a Hemingwayesque model where I thought, I really thought and loved this idea, that I went to Spain, was gored by a bull, was made impotent, went to World War I, and drank Absynthe. Then the idea was that what I wrote was going to cause you -- a person I never met -- to be in approximately the same emotional state and sensual state that I was in at the end of the process.

I really thought that's the way it worked. So, as you can imagine, that's impossible for a writer to -- I think Mamet talks about the intentional fallacy -- how do I know how to move you from Point A to Point B? Maybe some people can do it, but I can't. It's almost like trying to move something delicate with extension robot arms. I don't know how to do it.

So when I dropped that idea and just thought, I'm going to try to make an intense experience for myself as I write it, try to radically inhabit certain principles [plain language, compression, etc.], then I don't really know what happens to you out there. In a way, I don't care.

I want you to be moved from Point A to Point B and I think, really, since writing is in large part a form of very beautiful entertainment, the whole idea is that you've got to be moved from A to B. And I think actually, where you end up at B is actually not in the artist's power to know. I think.

Now I'm not positive about that, but I think the times that I thought I knew where I wanted you to be, those are always failed experiments. When I said, I'm going to pay really close attention to this sentence and this sentence and make sure that there's not falseness in there, then there does seem to be emotion at the end. And I think it does have, weirdly, a roughly moral trajectory."

[See also: CarrollBlog 5.16.08]

Manifesto

Excerpts from a great essay included in The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders:

Last Thursday, my organization, People Reluctant To Kill for an Abstraction, orchestrated an overwhelming show of force around the globe.
...

Who are we? A word about our membership.

Since the world began, we have gone about our work quietly, resisting the urge to generalize, valuing the individual over the group, the actual over the conceptual, the inherent sweetness of the present moment over the theoretically peaceful future to be obtained via murder. Many of us have trouble sleeping and lie awake at night, worrying about something catastrophic befalling someone we love. We rise in the morning with no plans to convert anyone via beating, humiliation, or invasion. To tell the truth, we are tired. We work. We would just like some peace and quiet. When wrong, we think about it awhile, then apologize. We stand under awnings during urban thunderstorms, moved to thoughtfulness by the troubled, umbrella-tinged faces rushing by. In moments of crisis, we pat one another awkwardly on the back, mumbling shy truisms. Rushing to an appointment, remembering a friend who has passed away, our eyes well with tears and we think: Well, my God, he could be a pain, but still I'm lucky to have known him.

This is PRKA. To those who would oppose us, I would simply say: We are many. We are worldwide. We, in fact, outnumber you. Though you are louder, though you create a momentary ripple on the water of life, we will endure, and prevail.

Join us.

Resistance is futile.