Things I Believe: George Saunders

In 2016 I interviewed George Saunders, the author of Tenth of December, a.k.a. the best short story collection you will probably ever read. George spoke to me about empathy, bad jobs and the benefits of swimming in monkey shit, and then I went away and edited that chat down into this here series of insights and life lessons, told in George’s own words.

Get old before your time

Growing up I was always interested in writing, but I was from a working-class part of Chicago and didn’t have any role models. Luckily two high-school teachers talked an engineering college into giving me a chance, so I became an engineer. I wasn’t very good at it, but during my breaks I would sneak away to the library to read, and I felt myself coming alive. Still, I was a lunkhead; it didn’t occur to me writing might be my vocation. So I followed the engineering path and ended up working overseas with an oil exploration crew. One day in Indonesia I went swimming in a river polluted with monkey shit, and I became deathly ill. It was a premature vision of old age. In that desperation and physical discomfort, you don’t have a lot of energy for nonsense or lying to yourself. Something snapped and I thought, I have to get out of this straight corporate life and become a writer.

Take bad jobs

Getting sick was a circuit breaker, but then I came home and bummed around, hitchhiking and taking low-level jobs as a roofer and a “knuckle puller” at a slaughterhouse. Working at a slaughterhouse, that’s capitalism naked. You have very low value, and what value you have is in ripping apart this carcass. For a writer, those kinds of bad jobs are great. Being short of money; being so tired you can’t even leave the house; not being able to open your hands because you’ve been holding hooks all day – it informs your understanding of class and politics, and gives you something to work with for the rest of your life.

Watch the clock

After five years of working crummy jobs I realised I’d still been running away from the one thing I said I was going to do: write. I had a fear of failure. You delay because you’re afraid that if you start writing and it’s not good, your dream is dashed. But by then I had two daughters and I could feel the clock ticking down, so I made a contract with myself to be efficient. If I could find 10 spare minutes at work I’d write, and edit it on the bus. The constraint helped that happen – there was no time for goofing around.

Bloom late

I didn’t have any success with writing until I was in my 50s. I realise now it was a blessing. When you’re born you think the show just started when you arrived, and you think you’re going to live forever. Then over the course of your life those delusions naturally get loosened; your body changes, your friends die and you realise that this stuff is not permanent. If I’d written a well-received book at 22 it would seem like the world was paying me its due. That’s the blessing of late success; it’s easier to see as something happening to you, and you don’t become full of shit.

You’re not running the show

When you get to a certain age you realise you’re not in control of space or time. The problem is that your ego wants you to be the master of your own story, but if you look back at all the stops and starts and unbelievable contradictions you’ve lived, it’s clear you’re not running the show. Only a bullshit artist could believe there’s any design in this.

The complication is the story

I’m struck since the 2016 U.S. election how important reading and writing really is. The post-truth era is having a destabilising effect on our relationship to basic facts. My gut feeling is that the internet is really making people insane; we’re projecting at a furious pace, with little regard for real-life data. It’s hard to exist in a confusing, ambiguous space and just sit there. You want to close the mind up and make quick generalisations to get out of that place. But we need to use the tools journalists use. Journalists go out and get first-hand data and hold off making simple judgments for as long as they can, because the complication is the story

Writing makes you empathetic

When you’re writing fiction you’re always asking yourself questions. “Why? How so?” This practice can bleed into real life. Somebody will cut me off in traffic and my anger flares up. Then the writing habit comes in and you ask, “Why would he do that?” Instead of thinking he’s just a bad person, you start to accept there must be some reason why he did that. That’s essentially what compassion looks like: you’re taking the time to regard someone dispassionately, and finding more in them than you did initially.

Be your multiple selves

Of course, regarding someone dispassionately can be very, very hard. But there’s a thought exercise you can do that helps. Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” So let’s say every human being has maybe 10,000 human beings inside him or her. If it’s a happy day all the positive ones come to the top, so maybe we can direct our attention to the subsection of those people that you genuinely love. And the ugly ones, you can momentarily forget they’re there. It’s a version of ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’. We’re not really fixed, as people; we come in and out of different personalities.

There’s strength in softness

A friend of mine once told me he thought certain virtues – sympathy, empathy, compassion – had been classified as ‘soft’ since the Reagan era, maybe as a response to the Carter years, while on the other hand, qualities like assertion, pragmatism and aggression had been masculinised and preferred. When I was younger I really wanted to be manly, but now I’m noticing these so-called ‘soft virtues’ are really powerful. A culture without them is dysfunctional. You’re restricting the range of tools you can bring to a complicated situation.

Enjoy the party

If you live long enough you almost become a Buddhist by default. You realise that the self is not permanent, that we are all headed for sickness and death, and that’s the truth whether we like it or not. It might sound bleak, but that knowledge can actually make you happier. You can pretend the party is infinite, but if you know it ends at 11pm you can comport yourself so as to maximise the fun. It’s a natural truth we know intellectually. We just need to move that knowledge from the head to the body.

Put yourself on Airplane Mode

You know when you’re saying goodbye to someone you love at the airport and you’re overcome by that soft “I hardly knew ya” feeling? What if that’s the mode we should exist in all the time? I feel more powerful in that mode because the world gets simple. You become spontaneous instead of calculating. If you could feel that state reliably, you would be really powerful. Of course, that’s hard to do; the next day you go back to your habitual mindset and anxieties. But we know from our occasional foray into that exalted state of tenderisation that the other mode is possible. Maybe we should try and get into that airport state of mind while we can. It’s hard, but we have a whole lifetime to figure out how to do it.

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George Saunders is an American short story writer and essayist. His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, won the 2017 Man Booker Prize.

This interview was published in Smith Journal vol. 24