“It’s strange but I remember every hotel we stayed at, where we went, the buses we took. I fell in love with Nepal. My wife and I are Buddhists and there was a sort of purity about the trip. I want to visit Nepal again,” he says.[break]
There’s a long line of people waiting in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s Student Center to have their copy of George Saunders’ books autographed after his talk on art and writing. His book, “Persuasion Nation”, was selected by the university’s Honors College for the spring semester.
Saunders shakes hands with each person, asks a question or two about spelling their names, throws in a joke or short anecdote, all the while drawing a cartoon of some sort to go with the autograph.
Author of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Persuasion Nation, Saunders received the MacArthur Fellowship – a.k.a. Genius Grant – and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.
He teaches at Syracuse University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. Before he received an MA in Creative Writing from the same university, Saunders earned a BS in Geophysical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines.
Writing wasn’t really what he set out to study. Growing up in the south side of Chicago, Saunders didn’t think much of writing as a career. He didn’t know any writers, but a nun gave him a Johnny Tremain book to read.
“I had such pleasure reading the book and I still remember some sentences – ‘On rocky isle gulls woke’,” he says, “but I was a dumbass and went back to wanting to be a hockey player.”
But his literary ambitions were starting to germinate. He picked engineering because it seemed more “manly”.
But even as a geophysics student, he would sneak into the library and read Hemingway. He imitated him and thought that writing was going off to an exotic place, having something happen, and then returning and reporting what happened. So at 22, he went to Sumatra with an oil exploration crew.
“We lived away from the nearest village. The extremist Muslim movement was starting. It was a great material for a writer,” says Saunders. He kept a journal and later decided to write a story based on his Sumatran experiences.
It was during this “Asia” time that Saunders grew more interested in politics. One night in Singapore, drunk and decadent in a club, he saw old ladies hauling boulders from an excavation site so the workers could work the next morning. The sight made him think about the vast differences caused by poverty.
He also became more aware of how expatriates abused locals.
“I was raised Catholic and something got in under my skin. We Americans had money and power but they didn’t,” says Saunders. He read Jack Kerouac, and in the spirit of Kerouac, quit his job, returned to America and hitch-hiked.
He worked as doorman in Beverly Hills, roofer in Chicago, convenience store clerk, country band guitarist, and knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse.
“I worked only eight days in the slaughterhouse. There were men there who had worked eight hours everyday for 30 or 40 years,” says Saunders.
He returned to Chicago and read contemporary fiction. Hemingway was the most contemporary author he had read until then, and he knew that was a handicap. He read Stuart Dybeck’s Hot Ice, and it felt that everything he’d read until then had been black and white.
“Hot Ice felt like color, it was fiction that had a 3-D thing and how fiction should be read,” says Saunders. Dybeck had gone to school with Saunders’ father and written about Chicago as Saunders knew it. It was then that Saunders decided to apply for an MA in Creative Writing.
As an aspiring writer, he thought a writer’s job was to conceive an idea, then set out to write it. “That’s wrong. When the controls are in the writer’s hand, it’s ‘intentional fallacy,’ ” says Saunders. “It doesn’t work. It’s a wooden approach to writing.
“It had been eight years since I had written anything I was happy with. I had two daughters and was working as a photocopy operator,” he says.
He attended a wedding in Mexico where he met fascinating characters who would be great material for a story. He returned home, told his wife not to worry, drank pots of coffee and wrote for hours everyday before going to work.
This went on for seven months, and when he had a 750-page manuscript, he gave it to his wife and asked her to read it. She tried. She turned a page or two and let her head fall on her hands.
Six months after the disastrous episode of the manuscript, Saunders was asked to write a transcript of a conference call. He sat down bored with the phone in one hand and doodled around the edges, writing rhymes.
After the call was done, he left the transcript on the table and went into another room when he heard laughter, genuine laughter. It was his wife who had read what he’d written on the transcript.
“Why don’t you write like this?” she said.
“That’s when I realized that I’d kept my best self from my writing,” says Saunders.
“I was always funny when I did something wrong or apologized or anything. In my neighborhood, nobody said anything straight. Sarcasm and insult was a form of affection. It made me think: what was I leaving out from my writing? Why when it came to the most important thing – art – did I leave out having fun?”
Saunders cautions about a strict formula when it comes to defining or talking about art. “The thing itself is so much more complicated,” he says.
Saunders has followed his instincts ever since the transcript incident. In the next six years, he wrote what was fun for him, and what he wanted to write about. The result became his first story collection, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline”, a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award.
The film rights to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline were bought by Ben Stiller’s company, Red Hour Productions.
Saunders emphasizes on focusing on sentences.
“I write one sentence and ask, Is it compelling? Then I put the next one after that and ask the question again. One sentence after another – It’s incredibly liberating,” he says.
He once asked the New Yorker’s fiction editor what he liked about his writing. “I read one line and I like it. So I read the next one,” said the editor.
“I find that if I don’t worry about theme, plot and characters, and instead focus on the sentences, they appear magically. That’s how it happens. Persuasion Nation took me some seven years. Ninety percent of the time, I was just being funny. I looked at what I had to see if there was an organization theme in the stories and took out ones that were weak,” he says.
“I didn’t have a plan about the book. It was just about trusting, that at the end of seven years, I’d have something.”
For Saunders, working on art everyday is leaving a stamp of your personality on it. Much like the space you may live in that eventually begins to borrow from your personality and becomes your place. “The job of an artist is to not know. If you did, that would be so boring.”
Writers and artists, he says, must make mistakes and be able to inhabit their own stupidity. Each story is different, and your personality plays into writing.
Saunders never thinks of first sentences. “I don’t even think about it. I start to write. I don’t think of endings, either. It all works out.”
Audience? Saunders is his own audience. As a writer, one must hold himself to high standards but not be so hard on oneself. “Balance is a skill in recognizing valid manifestations of you,” he says.
As for editing, when something seems “fat”, he cuts it out. “You scan the line and find the quickest line through the thought.”
Saunders is often criticized for his cynical view of commercialism in his writing.
“But I don’t feel that way,” he says. “We live in an advertisement-heavy market, and I don’t mind it; but that’s just how it works when I start writing a story. Art isn’t there to say what I like or not. On one level, our society has become materialistic, but I like it. The human mind is so powerful that you can have more than one opinion at once.”
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