On Political Writing
From George Saunders, on nuance and embracing complexity:
... See morethe writer doesn't have to have a fixed firm idea, but has to be able to take the reader on a journey to remind her that the world is complicated. From the very beginning, I understood writing to be about some kind of moral or ethical imperative. Absent that, I'm not that interested in it,
They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.
George Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, and (2) getting better at articulating that response.
George Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo
I tell my students to liberate a certain part of their mind that, because they are good, humble people they may have likely suppressed, and that's the part that wants to be known, that wants to be famous or rich or whatever. I say that part is not entirely separate from the part of you that wants to be a great writer. Which is not separate from the... See more
Jane Ratcliffe • Craft Advice from George Saunders
There Was Some Essential “Me-Ness” In It
For years, the writer George Saunders tried to write technically perfect stories. “I wrote story after story,” Saunders writes in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, “and everything I wrote was minimal and strict and efficient and lifeless and humor-free, even though, in real life, I reflexively turned to humor at
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