George Saunders: Cause an intense reaction in your audience (anything but “meh")
"If I take a thing and obsessively work with it, it always ends up having 'me' in it."
Author George Saunders on how he “pivoted from pseudo-Hemingway to something that felt more authentic to me.”
I desperately wanted to be noticed, even if in a negative way. I wanted to cause some sort of reaction in the mind of my reader, even distaste, even rage, even a feeling that I was doing it all wrong – anything but “meh.”
Feeling this, I felt something open up in me…
I want to emphasize that swerve; I’d been writing one way (with a fairly rigid set of beliefs about how one was supposed to write, and how one was supposed to feel while writing) and then, in the face of all of that ongoing indifference, I felt a sense of revulsion and…..swerved (forcibly) away from that set of beliefs. Not because I suddenly felt they were “wrong,” or that they had been intellectually discredited – they hadn’t, not really – but simply because (damn it!) they weren’t working.
They were leading me to make a middling product, one that caused indifference in my reader, and I found that unbearable…
There is no “correct” approach, except the one that makes an intense result AND that, if the resulting work is intense, it will, almost automatically, have plenty of “you” in it.
This is maybe the most profound and inexplicable thing I’ve ever learned from a lifetime of doing art: if I take a thing and obsessively work with it, it always ends up having “me” in it. It doesn’t matter what I start with and I don’t require any ideas along the way except “keep making it better, in even the smallest way.”
Source: On Success from
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