In a piece titled “On Process”,
George Saunders discusses several interesting ideas about fiction. Saunders
starts his process by looking at a single sentence and repeating it until a
next step appears. Ideally the next step should come should come unwilled.
Saunders hopes that the forward movement of his stories feels natural,
instantaneous, and unstoppable. However the mechanism of this process is
mysterious. Where do narrative impulses come from and can their quality
improve? Saunders cares deeply about the quality of his writing, as most
fiction writers do, so it behooves him to understand process as much as
possible.
An enabling characteristic of
Saunders’ mentality is zero investment in the writing. Saunders wants to feels
like he is reading a piece for the first time. Saunders cares not about the
piece’s success or quality and focuses only on the story’s natural energy
divorced from any thematic aspirations. Saunders wants to keep it interesting
and believes that the most interesting connections come from the mind of
someone with zero previous experience with a given story.
The other critical idea for
Saunders is iteration, or repeating the process over and over until a story
becomes its own unique thing. On a given day, Saunders averages about three
readings, each followed by integrating changes into the text and generating a
new printout. Yet Saunders runs into trouble when he says, “the result will be
more like you, the writer, than even you, the ‘person’ is.” It’s difficult to
pinpoint what Saunders means by this.
He obviously supports the iterative process, but how does making
something more like the writer than the person improve quality? To clarify, I
think Saunders wants to keep his “real self” out of his writing because deep
down, he considers himself a boring person.
So what is the point of fiction?
Why go through the trouble of Saunders’ intensive writing process? Well have no
fear because Saunders is here to give us the answer:
“Most of us, at a certain point in
our lives, come to understand that we are here to grow. To grow in love, patience, gentleness; to become more able
to deal with the harshness and victories of life with aplomb and generosity.
But how to do it? Art can be a way of training ourselves in these virtues – not
in a holy or precious or dogmatic way, but in the same way that a crazy night
on the town, or a catastrophic love affair, or a close brush with death, can
train us. Reality says: here I am. Likewise in a story, the truth says: here I
am, albeit in a strange garb.
Here is what I think Saunders is
getting at. To grow in virtue, people need “reality” checks. Normally people
get this from formative experiences but fiction can also provide it. Fiction
should mirror reality. The work should be an accurate encapsulation of a
realistic situation. If something is an accurate depiction of reality, it is
more likely to resonate
Ok, that is enough for now. I want
to stop before I jump to any more conclusions about what George Saunders may or
may not be trying to say. You can find the piece on the Kenyon Review website.
