George Saunders On Letting The Story Lead And Finding The Characters Within

When George Saunders was young, he read Hemingway and de Maupassant. He thought the short story was the rock-star form of writing. And he had dreams of creating a 900-page autobiography with no punctuation.

Today, Saunders is viewed as one of the most prominent American writers of our time. A recipient of the MacArthur "genius" grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Saunders won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2017 for his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. The writer will be speaking at Wake Forest University this week, and he chatted with WFDD's Bethany Chafin about the power of fiction.

Interview Highlights

On the allure of the short story:

You know, you can have written 30 stories, [and] the 31st story presents with a completely different set of rules including how to get out of it. But also, the wonderful thing is that you can never really achieve mastery. Mastery actually lies in being kind of a baby with each story. Now you come into it, and you say, "OK, you know, I kind of lay myself out at your feet, dear story. Tell me what tools I need. Teach me all over again how these particular tools work, and then you'll tell me when you're done with me." So it's a lovely practice and kind of self-immolation. If you really believe in the story form you have to kind of level yourself off after each one and say, "OK. Now I know nothing. Again."

On literature as a "form of fondness for life":

When I was young I had a lot of ecstatic moments kind of roaming around the neighborhood, playing baseball or whatever ... It was sort of just loving being alive. I had a lot of positive energy. But at the same time I had another thing, which is, I somehow felt inadequate always. Like I felt, kind of, [that] some version of the world is beautiful, but I'm not really good enough to be here. I think I was just born with that; I can remember it at a very, very young age. So, really for me art was sort of a compensatory thing. I felt something like if I can just achieve something in this form then I'll equalize myself. I'll be equal to the world. So that's not the most healthy impulse. But it's useful, and I still feel it. I still feel like this world is so sublime really. And I'd like to play; I'd like to be in it.

In writing, when I'm working on a story, the story gets progressively better by which I mean it gets smarter, it gets kinder, it looks at things with a more serious mind than I have in daily life. It's more correct somehow. It's more substantial. So, to be able to coax that part of yourself out of yourself ritually during a day is just, to me, a real blessing. And it is definitely a way of both noticing what's beautiful about life and also training yourself to be a more able receptacle of the positive.

On thinking about his reader:

That's my whole principle. I try to imagine a person on the other side of the story who's just as smart and good hearted and well-intentioned as I am and has traveled as much, knows everything I know and even a little more of all those things. My experience has been if I pitch my writing to that imaginary person, that's the right thing to do — to say I'm going to try to have an intimate conversation with this person I don't know who's smarter than me, to be a friend sitting side by side with the reader.

On whether Saunders "inhabits" his characters or writes alongside them: 

It's kind of both. It's hard to describe. For me it's more like you're looking inside yourself, and you're saying, "Hello? Are there any 80-year-old women in there embittered by their marriage?" Like, "Yeah, hold on a second." That person comes forward. Or I need a character who is intensely jealous. Do I have that? "Yeah, I've been jealous." So it's really almost like, I think, Whitman said, "I am large, I contain multitudes."