240 | George Saunders' Storytelling Masterclass

George Saunders is a writer of novels, short stories, and non-fiction, whose work has amassed a collection of awards, including The Booker Prize for his debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. His essay collection A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which focuses on the storytelling prowess of four Russian masters, was not only a bestseller, but invited passionate responses from his readers, who are as obsessed with story math as we are. George is the ultimate story junkie, as evidenced by his wildly popular Substack, Story Club, which features his musings about the mechanics, mystery, and magic of great storytelling.

CHECK OUT GEORGE'S SUBSTACK: https://georgesaunders.substack.com/

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Meg: Hey everyone, welcome back to The Screenwriting Life. I'm Meg LeFauve.

Lorien: And I'm Lorien McKenna, and today we are absolutely thrilled to welcome George Saunders on the show. George is a writer of novels, short stories, and non fiction whose work has amassed a collection of awards including the Booker Prize for his debut novel Lincoln in the Bardo.

Meg: Just like us, George is a story junkie. His essay collection, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which focuses on the storytelling prowess of four Russian masters, was not only a bestseller, but invited passionate responses from his readers. So George started a wildly popular Substack Story Club. Check it out if you haven't checked it out.

It's amazing. And it features his insights into the mechanics, mystery, and magic of great storytelling. So George, welcome to the show.

George: It's so nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

Meg: I mentioned before we went on air that I'm a little starstruck, so, just to, to our listeners, if I'm fumbling, bumbling around, it's because George Saunders is here.

Okay. Okay. So before we dive in with him, we're going to do our weeks, or what we like to call adventures in screenwriting. We'll let Lorien start. Lorien, how was your week?

Lorien: My week was fairly good. I am trying really hard to have fun with my writing and to figure out a space where I can take the pressure off myself so that I can actually get into the enjoying it instead of, is this going to sell? Who's going to listen to this? Who wants it? What's the market?

And I battle this all the time, but like, well, what is it that I want to talk about? And what are these characters trying to accomplish? And how do I relate to it? And not worrying so much about who I'm writing for. And it's been really fun when I can find that pocket.

And so it's about trusting myself that I know the stuff. Like I know structure and craft and all the questions instead of starting from there and sort of trusting that'll mostly be there and then I have to figure it out. Which is fun. I don't know that I feel at the end of the day as productive as I would normally feel because it feels a little wandery sometimes, but I'm working on letting that go to as well and not focusing so much on what have I accomplished and more on being a human being.

And then the other thing I'm doing is that I'm researching a project in a world that I know nothing about. So it's really been fun to talk to people in that industry and in those jobs. And one of the best questions I've asked is, in your job, You know what is a shit day and what is a great day and it's revealing like what's in their control, what's not, you know what they value in themselves and others and like what their personal professional goals are and it also when they get to start talking about it and they're really passionate. That's a great day. It's really fun. It's, I mean, it's great just to talk to people who are passionate about what they're doing and why they did it which has been really helpful with plot for me.

Those two questions have revealed so much about character and want and plot and all that. So I am always in an existential crisis and this is where I am this week. So that's what I'm journeying on.

Meg: I like this existential crisis. It's a good one this week.

Lorien: Yes.

Meg: George, how was your week? What existential crisis are you in or not?

George: Well, I think a lot of the same ones. We were down in Santa Monica and the air was a little funky. So we came up to a place we have near Santa Cruz. So I've been up here trying to, I've got this kind of two years, a little less than two years, short novel I'm working on. A supposed short novel, it might just be a bunch of scrap pages but the one thing that's, I mean, it seems kind of small, but I guess in this life, sometimes the small things are big.

When we're in L. A. I, we have this beautiful older dog who is kind of thriving and I take her on five walks a day. Up here, we're way up in the woods and she, and there's nowhere for her to walk, except we go down once a day at kind of a 20 minute drive into town, walk her for an hour. So, that means I've got, like, a much more Unbroken writing day.

So I've got a little shut up there and I've just been going up there and really getting, lost and frustrated and losing vision and finding it again. But I'm just finding that unbroken time has been a real friend. I think there are probably difficulties with this book I wouldn't have figured out had I not come up here because I got a chance to sit with them and be in misery about them for hours on end.

But that's kind of what I'm doing. Just basically it's just editing, editing endlessly. And every so often, the editing will kind of clear a patch of weeds out and there'll be a little place to put a flower. And I'll burst it out and then, and play the guitar a little bit. Go down and walk the dog.

Lorien: I love that you're driving your dog to walk the dog. I have an older dog too with some issues and there is all these accommodations we have to make. I love that. Get in the car. We're going to go 20 minutes away.

We're going to go for a walk.

George: Well, it's so sweet because she really doesn't like, I have to lift her into the car, and she really doesn't like it. But you can see she's made a calculation that, okay, if that dude picks me up once, then I get a nice hour long walk. So it's very sweet, very, but I have a lot of, I mean, as an obsessive person, I have a lot of time management issues and that's something I had to sort of deal with over the years.

Meg: I love that you're having that time. I would like that time. I'm feeling inspired that I need to make that time for myself. Even if I have to, I have a, I have kids and stuff, so I would have to like, get the sitter and like go away, but I think maybe I need to do that with my writing partner. I think we're so segmented in terms of and now we're flipping because there's two of us it's you do that and I'll do this and we're not kind of like you said sitting in it long enough to even feel comfortable because like my week has been... last week it was from pitch to outline, and realizing, oh yeah, we didn't even pitch any of the second half of the second, of the movie.

Like, it's just like, there's nothing there. And now it's kind of carding it and realizing, oh, not only is there not stuff there, but, this doesn't even line up, and who is he? And, all the stuff that when you're talking about it and dreaming about it, you can just kind of skip. And I'm also finding, I don't know if it's, I'd be so interested, George, if this is the same when you're writing a novel, but when you're writing a screenplay, everything has to be so kind of distilled.

One scene has to have like eight things going on, so part of the process is, well, what are the eight things? Right? And so you, I always end up in this spot where I have too much and not enough. Meaning I have too much stuff, I have too many relationships, the dreamer kind of went crazy. Now there's two of us writing, so wow, there's a lot of dreaming going on, right?

And what if we did this? And oh man, this would be so cool. And this is so emotional. I would feel so much if that happened. And we're just going and going. And now when you card it, you're like, okay, well, I mean, it doesn't go together. It doesn't hold together as a single thing. There's like 17 stories in here.

Or are there? Or are they subplots? And would that be a subplot that could come in? And what is the A storyline? And you're just starting to, especially when you have somebody else you're working with, you're realizing, Wait a minute, are you doing a rom com? Because I'm not doing a rom com. I'm doing, like, Titanic.

Like, it's just this, Dreamer Abundance. Which is the part I like. But I also have this taskmaster engineer in my head who's like, none of this goes together. Everybody stop dreaming. What is this form? What are we doing? What is the form? So it's not that comfortable a place to be, but I know I've been here before and I keep reminding myself if you just stay in the muck of that too much, not enough, you will find the path that maybe a lot of this can stay in, though a lot of it might have to go. I don't know, is it the same when writing a novel, or are you allowed to take little divergence and have things like that, or is it the same?

George: I think it's, for me, I'm sure every writer's different, but for me it's that I'm writing prose to find out what the next thing that happens is.

So, but if I think too much at the beginning about what happens, it's just that. It, whereas if it, so for me that the entree is the kind of richness of the language, like, or sometimes just jokes or kind of a sentence that goes, oh yeah, that's really, that's got to stay in and then, so there's a kind of a blob of that kind of writing and then a bunch of obsessive rewriting by a standard that I can't exactly explain, it's just like, I think Van Halen used to call it the brown sound, like, oh yeah, that's it.

So once I get, so I'm really, I mean, early on, just trying to take that blob of prose and make it into something that, the word I always think of is undeniable, like, okay if anybody read this, they'd be with me. They'd see what I'm asking them to see, they'd have nice little moments of surprise.

And then that, it's kind of weird. If you, as the blob gets refined, it also starts throwing off future event.

You know what I mean? So, so it's I always, I'm amazed by screenwriting because I, I can't think with that big overview outline mind, carding it as you say. I just can't do it.

Because if I do, I get so literal that the machine is working, but it's a corpse, it's like, it's got all the Yeah, so for me it's all, it's just prose quality. And then at some point you go, Oh yeah, so actually I've got some forward momentum here. I've got something, somebody I care about.

But for me, it's always, it's like an ear thing really, and of course everything you're saying it's true. It's true that all these all the things I read about in screenwriting books or in fiction books about structure and plot and causation. It's all true, but my experience is it's almost like, if you made an outline of the best sex you ever had and you described the six parts of it, yeah, that's true.

But if you go into an encounter, like, okay, let's concentrate on number four. It's not gonna be very good. So I think the thing is, for me, it's experiential first, and then the truisms are there going, See, I told you. But if I tried to get there by the truisms, it's nothing. Everything's too literal and analytical.

Meg: I love that. I do have the Walking Dead corpse sometimes, where I'm like, oh my god, my engineer came in and they just engineered this whole thing and there's nothing special, alive about it, and then you gotta kind of start over.

But I did want to ask you about that. I think with this is within the same realm of that in swim in the pond, the storytelling book that you wrote, you crafted a term pattern story when a main character faces a series of thematically linked obstacles centered around a single question. And I think that's a lot about what we talk about on the show in terms of screenwriting or TV writing that kind of central question.

We sometimes call it theme. Or we actually call it lava because it's usually very personal and deep and might feel burned to get too close to it and yet it has to kind of rudder everything else. Can you talk a little bit about that from your point of view?

George: Yeah, well for me, again, everything, I had a period as a young writer where I was just, I wanted it so badly, and so I would study the writers I loved and I would have these edicts that I would have gleaned from Hemingway or whoever and then at one point I had a breakthrough and the gist of it was you have to pretend you're reading it for the first time.

You're still yourself with your own taste, but you're reading it for the first time. How would it, What would it cause to happen in your brain if you just found this text on a bus and started reading it? So the patterning to me is just that if I say Once there was a guy who always ate too much pasta.

You're like, okay. Got it. That was fun. All right. Now if somehow if pasta overeating or obsession never shows up again, you could say that sentence was a waste you prepped me, you made the first portion of this organic machine, and it involves someone who obsessively overreads, and apparently, you would, it must cause them some hardships.

So patterning, in a sense, is built into our awareness of what a reader is going to be made to expect. by what we just told her. That kind of thing. So a lot of these things for me they really do boil down to I'm going to go back tomorrow, pick that stupid book up, read the first paragraph and see where it leaves me.

And then if I can make it through some number of pages, hopefully all of them with a sense of growing meaningfulness, so lack of a better phrase, then. You get to that last page and you're happy because it's been an upward arc the whole time. So I do think you can identify these things like pattern stories, but I suspect that all of these symptoms, they get traced back to the same cause, which is your person sits in the theater, your movie starts to show, at the moment they're in blank land.

And then two minutes later, they were already altered, and they're either with you and slightly have a crush on you and can't wait to hear what you say next or like, Oh my God, Hollywood. So I mean, and you prefer the former.

Meg: Let's hope for the first!

Lorien: Quote for the show: oh my God. Hollywood. So much depending on your tone. Right. It's just, it's all.

George: No, this is a famous story. When our kids were little, I took and they were young. two daughters, young, and they, we went to some movie, I don't know what it was, but it was one of, it just, for my taste, it had a lot of gratuitous oral sex references.

And I actually, as kind of a young father, I said, oh, thanks for that one, Hollywood.

Meg: Which is also I did that during Brave with the bear attack. I was like, oh, thank you. Thank you for the next six months of nightmares. Thank you so much.

Lorien: You're welcome. Meg. I just want to say.

Meg: Exactly. Yeah.

Lorien: I had a question going back a little earlier that I think relates to this as well. You saw, you talk about writing the blob and then the rewriting. Are you writing the whole blob and then rewriting? Or are you rewriting as you're blobbing?

George: I'm writing mini blobs. Sometimes there are paragraphs, sometimes there are a page.

It's just kind of, like I I've kind of, I'm sure this is not unfamiliar. Like you just recognize a certain fullness. I always feel that almost at the back of my throat. Like, oh, I got something to say. And you blurb it out or blob it out. And it has a pulse. And I can kind of recognize when I've gotten to the end of the natural pulse and I'm forcing it a little bit.

Like, oh, that was pretty good. I'll keep going. Then there's a little voice that goes, don't keep going because you're just going to cut it tomorrow. So there's a little, there's a pulse. And then usually I guess if I'm thinking about it, that pulse has got kind of a metafunction. Like, for example, I have a guy snap at his, at the cashier.

Okay, now I have to sort of, okay, now I'm going to have a blop that explains why. And I, blah, burst it out, so that, so it's there for some function. But other times, they'll just be, especially if I'm deep into a project and my mind has been working on it, the blop will just come out of nowhere, like, oh, his childhood churchgoing experience, blop.

And then it sits there for months at the end of the document, like, oh, do you need me yet? Put me in, I'm ready. So it's really interesting, I think, I always say that I feel like my stories are kind of perfect in my subconscious. And then I start to tell them and I drop them and they break into a bunch of pieces.

So a lot of, for me, revising is a lot of just putting things in, putting them back together. That doesn't go with that. I thought it did, but it didn't. So it takes a lot of patience, actually, and a lot, and faith that this process, which sometimes seems pointless, the world's going on around you and you're up there cutting and pasting, but the faith that it's someday that's going to pay off and make something that's better than you are, smarter and funnier and all that.

Yeah.

Meg: I love that. I love when those blobs and those plops come like while you're brushing your teeth because like you said your brain is working on it working and you don't even know. I love them.

George: So those are super, it's super useful. I think Mamet talks about this that when you have that in that mode of just imagining like what I should have said at my graduation or the way I should have gotten you know, unbroken up with, or whatever.

Those are very clean. They're very pure because they're coming directly from your emotional core. They're not, there's none of that kind of plotting that you do when you're, I need something for act three. It's just like a spontaneous blop, that has a lot of authenticity in it. And then, and if you get that, it'll always go somewhere, I find.

It's, there's somewhere in the story that it wants it. So then the second order of task is, I have this pretty good blop. It comes even more alive if I put it in the right spot, that feeling, suddenly something that's been pretty nice writing becomes absolutely beautiful when you've arrayed it and you put it in the right place.

Meg: God, I love that.

George: Weird job.

Meg: So, I think connected to this, because you're also talking about the choices we're making, to blob right here or to go to the, like, we're making choices as a creator, but our characters need to make choices too. The short story, Master and Man that you talk about in, in the Swim in the Pond book, which just for our listeners is about a landowner and his peasant get caught in a dangerous blizzard, and you created, you point out that it's the character's choices that create the story, not the conditions, i. e. the blizzard, landowner, peasant, those are conditions around them, that it's the character's choices that are making the story happen.

And we talk about this all the time. Like, I can't tell you how much we keep coming back to this. So those choices also, I'm assuming have to be driven by some sort of want, whether it's subconscious or not. So can you just dig into that a little bit more in terms of how you see character choices?

George: Yeah. I mean, I think I noticed early on in well, I think when I was younger, I thought, if something happens to you, that's a story. But actually it isn't. I mean, an iceberg fell on my head. That's not a story.

But then I said, everyone's always against me. Now we're getting story because they're, so that really was kind of enabling for me because I had no problem coming up with events and no one does when we realize that they're not important. They're not, I mean they're important, but they're not central, if you give me an event, I know I can make a story out of it, but it has to do with the reaction to the event.

And suddenly, when I was younger, I had this incredible self imposed pressure to create plot. Plot scared me because I didn't, I still don't know what it is actually, and when someone says, make up a good story with plenty of plot, I just go, oh my god. It's, that's going to be so over determined, but if I, someone says, make up three events and then link them with authentic human reactions, then you can start to get a story going. So in that story, he, okay, they go off the, they go off the road. At some point, big blizzard. And in a way there's both before and after stuff. There, there's, why did they go off the road?

And it turns out they have a lot to do with the power dynamic in certain places. And then they go off the road, that's just an event. What's the reaction after? Well, the rich guy blames the poor guy. And, the poor guy switches off even more, which means they're going to get even further lost. So I think what makes a story beautiful, and also makes it personal, makes it makes the writer feel like a lively presence, is those reaction moments, before and after.

And again, for me, most of my writing life has been trying to minimize anxiety. Minimize anxiety, which is also minimizing my feeling that I'm shitty, as a person and a writer and so, so if you say, well, actually yeah, events are easy, you can just make up any damn thing, any event, it doesn't matter Raymond Carver had that famous story about getting stuck in a story, and the phone rang or the doorbell rang or something, and he went to answer it, and there was a conversation.

He just came back and wrote that directly into the piece. Now why? No reason at all. Just to have something for the character to react to. So I'm always looking for ways to make myself feel less precious and less failure prone.

And so to say, yeah, make something happen and have a guy react to it. That's character. It's also a plot, it's also a theme, it's also a structure, it's so easy really for me, it's just easy. That's why I've been working on the same 10 pages for the last six months.

Lorien: It's also very easy for us in every screenwriting.

Meg: We have no anxiety about it. We never worry about failure. Never.

Lorien: There's never any imposter syndrome. We know exactly what's happening, where we are in time and space.

George: I've got to get into your job.

Meg: And when you talk about characters reacting, you mean they're going to actually do something, right?

Because a lot of times, in screenwriting at least, there's just reaction and then something else happens and they react and suddenly you're like, okay forget that the actors aren't gonna want to do this. But they're not creating the story at some point. Don't you feel like your characters have to start creating this story versus just what's happening to them?

George: Yes, but that's why, where thinking comes in but in short story world I mean, you know that the hammer I drop, the iceberg falls in my head And I go, perfect. This always happens to me. For example, when I was in fourth grade, and this is just internal monologue. Right. The effect of that internal monologue is to ratchet him up even more, and make him more angry and paranoid.

And then a nun, tiptoes into the room and brushes against him and he knocks her down because she's part of the conspiracy. So, so that, so in my way of thinking, there's an event and often, not always, but often there's reaction, which is thought. And then thought, I mean, as a Buddhist, thought is what makes you act.

And since we always think stupidly and incompletely and partially, it makes us often act in ways that get us in trouble. And that's, storytelling.

Meg: I love that so much. I can't even tell you. I'm writing it down.

Lorien: It's funny that you said you're going to get into our business because as you're talking, I'm like, I need to just go into prose writing, back into prose writing, because, it always feels easier.

When you hear someone talk about a master, talk about the thing you're doing, you're like, I can do that. Sure, that seems so much easier than me lying here on the ground crying about all these plot points and emotional beats and like trying to have fun and, anyway.

George: I'll tell you the one thing about fiction writing that I, because I've done a little like amateur level screenwriting and the one part about fiction I love is that I'm going to go back tomorrow, I'm going to work six hours and no one's waiting for it.

And when I'm, and I can because I heard at the beginning, it made me proxy anxious, this idea of who am I writing for, will they make it, that whole thing is, in fiction, is something you get to delay to the very, very end. So if my blop is no good, I got infinite time to get it to charm.

And what I found is, because I have a weird mind, and I know that by now. So from my, It has to really be with me a long time, and it has to be with only me for a long time. And then at the end, maybe sometimes I can find in there a way for it to be more universally charming, at which time I send it out and it gets taken or it doesn't.

But when I have tried to screenwrite, I just, I feel like, oh my god. There's money, you have to have money to make this thing.

Whereas with the book, actually you kind of don't. You kind of need a pencil. And so for me that's been really a nice liberating thing. I think what it means is, and I'm sure there's a corollary in screenwriting as well, with the confidence.

In fiction it means you can wait and wait and wait. And a thing can suck and suck and suck. And then one day it doesn't. Because you've given it time to sort of find its space. It's weirdness, and so I'm really grateful for that.

Meg: Yeah when you're writing on a job, that's the hardest part, is you don't have a lot of time to suck, and you're going to.

So, I mean, it's inevitable. You are going to suck. So, that is, I think, the hardest part for me, because it does create so much anxiety and expectation.

George: That'd be my, my Biopic is going to be "grateful for the time to suck."

Meg: Seriously. That's why I dream about, I'm just going to go in, write a novel, and nobody's going to have to look at it, or read it, or give me notes.

Lorien: Yeah, and it's funny, I say, oh, I'm going to go write a novel, but like, whenever I read a really good novel, I'm like, there's no way I can pull that off. Yeah, of course, I mean, it's, it's just such a totally different craft, and like, I have a question for you. In Story Club, you talk a lot about voice and we get this question a lot.

What is voice in a screenplay? And, so for you, what is voice? And how do in screenwriting, we talk about finding your voice or discovering your voice, which is sort of an ephemeral. I'm not quite sure, which is just Right? Like you talk or express yourself, tell the truth, but see, it's a terrible answer, but what what do you think voice is and how do you develop it or hone it?

George: Well, I was actually still going to ask a question. So when you talk about voice and screenwriting, that's something distinct from, but inclusive of the way that characters sound. But it's also, I would imagine, be the pace and the cutting.

Lorien: And the action lines and the rhythm of how it's told and are you using flashbacks?

Are you, is it? It's all of it, it's the experience of reading that piece so that hopefully when you read my script, you're like, Lorien McKenna wrote that. Right, right. Like it has this unique quality to it.

George: Yeah. That's the same in fiction. And the only thing I can see that might be different is in fiction I guess I kind of think of it as two things, as bringing one's personality forward.

But that can be dangerous, but also maybe as bullshit reduction, because like when I go back and look at the stuff I wrote in my 20s, it's very bullshit heavy because I was trying so hard to be something I wasn't, Hemingway namely, mainly, but so if, I think if you can kind of reduce the amount of falseness in your style as a prose writer, that could be said to be voice, I think.

Or if you have if more urgency to communicate as a parent, that, that's another thing, so, so for me over the years, there's a certain kind of mental stance that I get into when I'm about to write something. And I would say actually in the truest sense, that's where voice resides. It's like a certain mental arrangement before I go to type that has something to do with speeding it up.

Something to do with spicing it up so that a reader can't quite put it down. Which might, for me, have often to do with like the use of vernacular or slang or something like that. But, it's more, it's for me voice right now has to do with feeling. Sometimes it's just like dropping off a paragraph or two and then going, and refining that into something I like and then going, okay book.

That's where you start. Now, you can't stay there. The voice, I don't think it should be static. But if you start with two paragraphs of pretty convincing voice that you've revised into being interesting, then you've got a template for the rest of the book. And so I'm not really, I'm not really sure, actually, I mean, for me, it was a, when I first did, quote unquote, find my voice, that was a big day for me, and I write about it in that book. And now, it's one of those things, I kind of don't think about it too much, because I don't want to, Also, I'm trying, I don't want to be, you wouldn't want to be trapped by it.

After I wrote my first book, which is very voicey it got a little scary because if you know the voice you're trying to hit, you might just hit it and then you're repeating yourself. And the spontaneity and surprise that went into it the first time is gone and you're just self mimicking, which is death. So.

Meg: Well, let's talk about that first book, Lincoln and the Bardo, which I'm just such a huge fan of, it really just has stayed with me my whole life. And you, thematically, obviously, there's a question of you're looking at loss, immense loss. And I think you have been quoted as talking about, how do you love when the object of that love is conditional?

I mean, it can die, it can leave, it can go away. And the image that I have stayed with me of so many images from the book is, of Abraham Lincoln's grief over the death of his son, Willie. And I know that it was the inspiration for you of the book is that fact that Lincoln would go to the grave at night.

And Bardo being this kind of purgatory, stuck in that loss and grief. So, we talk a lot on this show about to get to that authenticity you're talking about, past the bullshit. That there is a beautiful vulnerable risk in that because you're trying to put yourself forward. Right? So you were inspired by this image of loss.

How is it personal to you or insights? Were you, did you have the insights that you started to write the book or was the book about finding the insights to more?

George: Yeah, it's more the second thing for sure. Cause I think if you know where the insights, what the insights are they're static because you're having in the abstract.

Whereas if you have if somebody comes across a dead raccoon on the street, just like earlier we talked about reaction moments, that's an opportunity for an insight. But if it's not set up in advance, I think it's more authentic. So with that Lincoln book, my, I had a real simple outline, which was just Lincoln comes to the graveyard, somehow interacts with his son.

And simultaneously, his son's spirit is there, shouldn't be, and either goes or doesn't. That was the whole thing. So then, what that allowed was a lot of practical stuff. I had to get Lincoln to the crypt. I had to, he had to go in there. At some point he had to leave for some reason. Why would he? That kind of stuff.

And then, within that is where, The opportunities for what we're calling insights presented, so suddenly I've got the book, let's say, to the point where Lincoln spontaneously reaches in and takes his son's body out and cradles it and sits. Well, there's some insights nascent there, what does a father, what does anybody think about in that moment?

It's also like soliloquy land, you know what I mean? Which I, which was, and earned soliloquy I love. So I think for me it was mostly just staying within that broad outline and just looking around for opportunities, for reactions really, and so in a certain way, because you set it in a graveyard and you have a lost child and a grieving father, there's gonna be automatically opportunities for insights.

And so, but for me, the trick was one, you kind of wanna hide it. If you think it up in advance, you can't hide it very well. But here, it was authentically hidden. I didn't know how it was going to play out. And then suddenly you find yourself also making asides about other weird things that you didn't even know were going to be there.

So for me, the main thing is to be kind of alert to where the story is asking for more. Like, often in editing, I'll go, Oh. Oh, wow she just fell off a cliff and didn't say anything about it. That's weird. Wouldn't she? So, so that book was really, it was, in a weird way, it was pretty spontaneous.

And I kind of knew that given the theme, it would be plenty deep, and then maybe the other thing I'd say is that I think for me, I got, I had a period in my into my thirties where I was writing my ass off and nobody liked it, nobody cared, and that's terrifying as we all know, that, and so some, somewhere along there, it got tuned into my head that you can't just write for your own pleasure, you have to take into account that somebody's on the other side, and there, and the second part is they're just as smart as you, Mr. Arrogant.

They've lived as much, they care as much. There's no way in which they're worse than you. In fact, let's assume they're a little better. Now please that person. And so, so that to me is the guidance. It's like, I wrote a thing today and it was very charming, three page blop. And I got about six lines into it and went, nobody's following you in this deep, dude.

It's not that interesting. You're writing for your own glorification, you're not trying to communicate, so then that has to be cut, so with Lincoln there was always that feeling of, I want to write to people like me who love and are afraid of loss, and we're all going to be in this together, and that's a really good, for me, a pretty good editing guide to do.

Meg: Well, I have another quick question about that because it links to this. So when I was a young writer at college, I had a teacher who after about three months of the class took me into his office hours and said, I need to tell you that you're only here because you wrote one good sentence. And honestly, I don't even feel like I should be spending time responding to your work.

And it was, I didn't write for years and years after that. So I do think there's another kind of not writing for the audience in terms of when they give you their opinion anyways.

George: Right,

Meg: but In those 30 years, if somebody says to you, What are you doing? You clearly don't have it.

Like, I, like, what's the I don't know. I don't, I feel like you also, you need to listen to the outside voices for sure. And there's certain voices you really should not listen to.

George: A hundred percent. Thank you for that. Yeah, that's a great point. I would say, and maybe we clarify what I mean by audience, which is me, on a different day when I hadn't read the book, which also to me is the same as saying, Oh, that guy's so smart. He's so, so, so it's definitely, I don't have a whole lot of worries about actual, I mean, it sounds funny to say this, but you know, I've gotten nailed a lot for my writing. Not that much, but you know, even one is enough.

And I don't really care about that. I, what I feel like is if I have listened to my to myself and to this sort of imaginary person we're talking about and worked it through to the very end, then, okay, I mean, so, so I totally agree with you, and I think that's terrible teaching, by the way, because teaching is not Being the judge behind the bench thumbs up, thumbs down.

Teaching is helping you get better, and maybe something, I've had students when I was teaching undergrads, especially, who weren't going to get that much better. But they were doing something. They were spending energy on this. And they deserve to be taken seriously.

And craft is one way to do that. To guide somebody a bad writer, like a young kid who isn't very talented. What they're really, the problem really is that they're lost in Mistruth, they're saying things that aren't true, aren't authentic. So even if that person is never going to publish you can lead that person to a method of refining, so that they're more in touch with truth, I think.

But that kind of thing is I found that teachers who do that are so insecure. If you have to shoot down a student, you don't have enough going on in your own life, and you, there's no fucking way anybody can tell from an undergraduate manuscript what the future of that writer is, I promise you.

Cause I'm proof of that. I read some of my undergraduate stuff recently and, no. But this is a profession of potential, infinite potential. So I'm sorry that happened to you.

Meg: I think that our side is also a profession of potential. And that's honestly why we have this whole podcast and why we do all this.

Because even if, yes, maybe you aren't going to write, a Marvel movie, but you're going to need to know yourself, and you're becoming an artist, and that's never a bad thing.

George: Never. And we get the heart, the cart before the horse sometimes, if I write this movie, I'm an artist, but actually, it's a practice, and it's the habit of thinking like that makes a person an artist.

And it's sort of something that I think in our time, that idea is becoming a little degraded. I mean, in so many ways, we live in such a materialist, linear culture where only if you succeed, do you matter? And that's bullshit. And and we're suffering as a culture, I think because of it, if we only believe in the absolute winners, then you're doomed.

Lorien: Yeah. That's something I've been struggling with lately that I think a lot of us do, especially in American culture, which is, if I'm not defined by my accomplishments. How do, who am I? How do I want to be seen in the world? Which is in screenwriting, it's, I'm a writer. What do you write? I write TV.

What have I seen? And it's like, you know, cause the career is so different. I write. I sell TV shows, I write the pilot, it doesn't go to series, so it's like I'm making a living as a writer, but those are those successes or failures, so it's really hard in screenwriting to prove that you're doing it in a way, and there is this it's a business.

It's a job, right? So there is that pressure to generate material, to sell something, to have an audience. Is there that same pressure in your world to prove it or that it's a job? I mean, it's a job. You make a living as a writer.

George: Yes.

Lorien: How do you separate those things?

George: Right. Let me first say, I think you guys live in an admirably high risk atmosphere.

It's, I think it's kind of so wonderful that you are you're staking so much and it may not get made. It doesn't mean it's not good. So that's really admirable. And I, I think, here's something, let me kind of go from the other angle. My thought when I was younger was, I really want attention.

I really want to be known. I want, and I just, I was such an idiot that I didn't even know that was maybe not so great, but but I tell my students, we have to be able to take both things. One is if you have a lot of ambition, that's great fuel. And woe betide you if in this difficult job you neglected any source of fuel.

You're gonna need every last ounce. So, I still, even at this ancient, grisly old age, I'm like, I want more attention. Yeah, I really kind of do. How do I get it? I write another book. And so for me, at this point, all the things have kind of congealed together. So ambition Artistic artistic ambition craft, all that stuff is kind of one thing.

And I kind of feel like if I just try to write better books, all that stuff will happen. But I also know I'll sometimes talk a good game and then, a little voice inside of me is going, you don't live like that at all. So for me, I am so,

Lorien: You mean, you don't take all of your genius advice?

George: I know, right, exactly.

Lorien: How many times on this podcast have Meg and I talked to somebody and then we look, we're like, Oh my god, I'm not doing that. Crap, I have to actually, like, do the thing I'm talking about?

George: Yeah, yeah it's, I, for me it's that I can say, it doesn't really matter. I'm just an artist and I don't care.

But the times when I've had stories rejected, or gotten bad reviews, I take that shit very hard. I remember when I was My first book was coming out, Civil Warland and Bad Decline, and there was a novella that ran in Harper's, kind of ahead of the book. And it got piled on in the letters to the editor.

There was another article that was called The Decline of American Fiction, and this letter writer said, thank you for supplying such a lively example. And I just went, ah, and I didn't have a book out, and my kids were little, and. And I just ran in the basement and I cleaned the basement of our rental house for two straight days.

I mean, so, so,.

Lorien: I mean, that sounds legit. I just bought a handheld steamer and have been going to town on the tile in every room that has tile. And it is the most satisfying, amazing thing.

George: Yeah.

Lorien: I mean, I get it. It's how I'm dealing.

George: Yeah. But, I mean, I do, I think I can see now that I, as we tend to do, I built a kind of edifice of approval and that little voice in your head that says you're doing good. You've got X number of books out, you're doing good. And you talk about conditionality, I mean, that always ends, if only because you die, but often it ends, you stop being productive and the world goes on or, you die in great shape and six years later you're forgotten.

And so all of that is true and so that's one of my struggles at this stage of life is to say as much as I love writing and as much as I really enjoy being successful at it, I have to start coming to some accommodation with the person I am when not writing, not succeeding, not questing, and I have had zero luck with that so far.

Lorien: I Totally relate. I mean, it's this, that's part of the exist, constant existential crisis is who am I if I'm not a writer, and what does that mean? And it means nothing, but it means everything. And, and am I a writer if I'm not actively doing that for a living? It's all of that swirly stuff that's what I mean at the beginning when I said I'm trying to have fun, which is trying to find a little suitcase to pack all that bullshit into so that I can actually like write because there's so much of that.

All the time swirling around. And so it's super fun. I'm doing great and everything's fine.

George: Yeah, good. That's good.

Lorien: How do you so how are you when you're writing, when you're blopping or what did you say? You said blopping, right?

George: Yeah, I think blopping. Yeah.

Lorien: Blopping. How are you managing the balance between expectation, right?

Like giving the audience, you, what you want to feel satisfied about the storytelling, but then like, The surprises, right? The twists, like sort of keeping an audience, keeping a reader engaged, keeping yourself engaged, I guess, is more the question.

How are you, how do you approach that? Or is it one of those things where you're just in it and you, it's coming to you in that discovery process.

George: I, I think it's kind of that, but also part of the part of the thing is that, I mean, in a certain way, the surprises are part of the way that you would compel somebody to keep going. Like it's, you know how it is like when you're reading something, and you go, okay, I see where she's going.

And then she does, that's a buzzkill. And you, and mainly once you're, for me, if I'm on a riff and I know where it's going, I start feeling like I'm being condescended to, and I check out. So for me, editing would be, editing that passage would be to go, okay oh boy, I'm really starting to get boring here.

I need a surprise. And then, and again, that, it's a little more, that's makes it sound a little more rational than it is, but you can feel like, ah, it's like if I use this example, you go on a date and you see the person start to look at their phone or nod off or something or, or strike up a conversation with somebody at the next table and you're like, okay, wait a minute, I've got to do something now to liven this up.

So for me, editing is a lot of that actually. It's just like saying, would a reasonable person be charmed? If not, I better knock over my water glass. So it's really kind of the same thing. I don't think we, we progress through a work of prose without it. Constantly buffeting us with surprises and contradictions and little verbal surprises and stuff.

So it's kind of the, in a sense, that's what I'm looking for all the time. Now I think with screenwriting it might be different because I know you have structures and that kind of thing, but.

Lorien: I love your approach, what you're talking about, charming, like you're being charming and I love the idea as a writer.

That I'm charming my audience. Hey, look at this character. Look what, look who they are. You have a crush on them. Whether it's, it's the asshole character or a jerk or, someone who's doing something crazy. Like you want to spend time with them. You want to see what they're going to do. And that, that the, it's charming, that I, and it's not in a twee way.

It's like...

George: Right. That's not, I use that word and it's not quite what I mean, but I always think of it. Like if you have, I've done this in class. You have the lights go down, show the first six minutes of any movie, and then stop and say, are you still there? I am. Why? And if they're being honest, that's a mini seminar in storytelling.

And of course, the same thing with the first two paragraphs of the story. We, I did a thing where I photocopied the first pages of six different stories from the same little magazine, blot out that title and the name of the writer, and pass it out. And just say, okay, guys, read these. I'll be back in a minute, and we're gonna rank them.

And I don't say on what basis. I come in, and because they're young writers, they're, they all have strong opinions, and we rank them. And the fun part is to go, okay, why? When did you check out of number three? And in that kind of honest mode, it's amazing. And the answers are both shocking and truthful.

Like, this guy has too many plants in this sentence. I hate descriptions of plants. All right, or alliteration, kill me, or most interestingly, I feel smugness. By line six, I feel smugness. Interesting. Why? Let's not use the word smugness. Where, where does this thing called smugness start to manifest?

And then you be, you get all the way down into style, and so it's just that, I mean, with streaming, especially, when you check out and that's a pretty good...

Meg: so do they.

George: Yeah.

Meg: They are also tracking when you checked out. Yeah.

George: Oh, that's so funny. Yeah. Yeah. So, so of course this also has, there's a shadow side to this, which is you get so compulsively audience centered, that you get facile.

But anyway maybe for me the life's journey has been try to find the right setting in my mind for between honoring an audience and kissing up to them and kind of stay in that groove.

Meg: In your own truth. So I don't know that there's an answer to this question, but I really wanted to ask it because I'm interested if there is.

So our listener Rick asked, what are your thoughts about interiority? Meaning, as screenwriters, we don't get to go inside the heads. We do not get to do that. Of course, there's flashbacks, but a lot of people don't even want you to do flashbacks. So if you can't do a flashback, so you can't see what they're thinking is there any when you were writing screenplays, did you find any ways to still know the character and make it emotional and all the stuff that the interior, as if you were a novelist, you'd be able to do.

George: Yeah, I think one answer might be, oh, here's how I would approach it if I was adapting. I would say, well, I have this section here of interiority that is psychologically convincing, this happens, our character reacts to it, and then he does this other thing. I think in the best screen, the best movies, you feel that even though it's not there.

In other words, the connection between action 1 is complex, and you can infer interiority from it, I guess. So I mean, I have had times where I'm thinking, well, I have half a page of interior monologue. I can actually give you an example. I wrote a script called Sea Oak for Amazon. We did a pilot and then we didn't make it.

But there was a scene where Glenn Close is this kind of older, very working class woman who's just been humiliated at her job in front of her her nephew, I think. And In the story, there's a kind of nice bit of writing, and in the original script, actually, where he's kind of, either thinking, in the book, he's thinking about her, and what he'd, how he'd like to comfort her, or something like that.

And we had it, I'd written it into dialogue, and it was okay. And then there was a thunderstorm on the day we were shooting and that whole afternoon got wiped out and we were on a really tight schedule so we couldn't shoot the scene in the car where he says these things to her, which are essentially interior things that I exported.

So we talked to Glenn Close and Jack Quaid was playing the nephew and they huddled a little bit and they got the whole thing in a look that she gave him and he gave her. They really did. And I think they got it in part because the text had existed. And it was a beautiful example of, cinematic efficiency.

You didn't need all that yapping. You just had to look. so, I guess that, I don't know if that's really an answer.

Meg: Yeah. I love it so much. I absolutely love it. Our producer Jeff, who is a huge fan of yours he had a question. So, Jeff, take it away.

Jeff: It actually, George, connects to your book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, which is a book I love very much, I read it in college, and I feel like it's a pretty foundational book for me in terms of my taste, but it's pretty satiric.

What's interesting, I find, about your satire is, it has this tonally elevated sense to it, but you used the word smug earlier, it's not smug, and I don't find it to be kind of condescending or over intellectualized, it has a lot of heart and emotion to it. And when I read bad satire, it feels intellectual, and it sort of lacks the emotional truth that I think makes good satire interesting.

So for our writers who are interested in that type of work, what advice would you have for them about how to kind of do both? And I think the way that you do so well.

George: Oh, thank you for that. Yeah I think the, I mean, condescension is really the word that comes to mind. If I know my political position, and I'm gonna inflicted on you, like pulling up a big truck full of shit and just sit there.

I mean, then that's condescending. And I think the energy drops and we all know that feeling of like some, somebody from whatever side of the political spectrum lecturing us, no thanks, just write an essay and, and I won't read it. But so I think part of the the trick with those stories was that I always had a first person narrator with whom I closely identified.

Sometimes the person made mistakes and, but basically it's a rhetorical, okay, it's a rhetorical exercise of trying to make that person on the highest level you can make him. So let's say, I mean, Bicycle Theif might be a great example of that. He's a thief, yeah, but so, so in, in those stories, I was always saying, well, this guy, who's a bad guy maybe, or a little bit of a compromised guy, he's gonna be more palatable and more believable if I make him the most convincing version of that I can.

So you're kind, so that's where you're kind of getting inside the person saying, Okay, if I was to steal a bike, why would I do it? And if it's because I'm a Republican, that's not good. That's too easy that's a or a Democrat or whatever But if you can get inside the person and go, okay, if I George was going to steal a bike, you know I George is going to rob a bank.

I George is gonna say something rude to somebody. Can I locate myself? So so the reader can't Like, I often think of it, I said this in that Russian book, but you know, it's like the writer and the reader are on one of those double motorcycles, motorcycle with sidecar. So, if I'm going to go take a hard left turn, it's going to be, great for you if you're right there up against me.

I haven't given you any reason to pull out. I haven't given you a chance to say, George is condescending, George is preaching, George is making a political point. You're just like, oh my god, I'm with you. I believe everything you say. Then we go left or we go off the cliff and we go together and that's great storytelling.

Whereas if anything I've said or done or my tone has made the sidecar drift off, 50 feet away, Because you don't quite believe me. There's something I'm, some falseness in my prose. Then when I go around the corner, you're yeah. See you later, so I think that minimizing the distance between reader and writer would be one way.

And yeah, especially in satire, because satire, I actually, satire simply is preaching. I don't really want to do that. I want to criticize, and, but criticize with some affection, I guess.

Lorien: Love that. Now I want to go reread some Jonathan Swift maybe, or,

George: Or me, whatever.

Lorien: I mean, that's a given. I don't even know what you're saying. That is a given.

George: Swift isn't getting any, he's not getting any royalties still. So he can just wait. He's fine.

Lorien: Jonathan is fine. Yeah, sometimes I say the wrong names, but I am talking about like,

George: Oh yeah, no, perfect. Yeah.

Lorien: Okay. I get confused sometimes because I'm my age and I get distracted.

Okay. Can you talk about your approach to character introductions?

George: Oh, I've never been asked that. I, again, this sentence, like I need. Jeff to get in the room. I just say, Jeff walked in. And then sometimes you say Jeff walked in and immediately sat down on the love seat letting out a tremendous fart then I'm like, oh actually Jeff doesn't have to come in the room Jeff's already on the love seat. Actually, Jeff just farted on the love seat. Jeff farted on the love seat. There we go and you don't have to, you don't know who Jeff is yet except, you know he just farted on a love seat and then we get to go what does Jeff say next? You know?

He could like, he could say like a kid in my grade school, we're taking a test and he let one rip, as we say, and this poor guy, he was so sweet, he goes, and nobody knew who it was, except he goes, excuse me, and then he was nailed. So maybe Jeff does that. Suddenly, so I don't really, I don't do a lot of, I don't worry a lot about, you mean like the first time the character is in something?

Meg: Yeah, like if we were writing in our script. Jeff enters, right? But what I love is your intuitive writer brain made an action happen. It didn't just start to describe him, right? It said he's walking in, which is already a choice to walk in. He's sitting down, he's farting, like a meet action tells us more about him than, his height and his, all of the other stuff that people think a character introduction is.

George: Right. Yeah. And again, I'm not a good screenwriter, so I don't know about that. But I in fiction, If I tell you that a guy is controlling, I get zero points for that. Jeff is controlling. Eh. Okay. Prove it. That's the first thing that the reader said. Prove it. Okay. Then you make Jeff do something. Well, he's, I guess he's not controlling if he's farting on the loveseat.

But, you first action. So in a and in secondary thought as character, but mostly action. So I just have let a person sit there until they do something. And then I go, Oh, okay. We're on the trail of character here. Jeff, for example, just told Stephen to shut up. He was talking.

And then two more times, Jeff interrupts Stephen and puts him in his place. Now we already, we have a lot of character there that you could. Probably have taken pages to get there. So I'm kind of a fan of action as character. And, but of course what that means is in my stories a lot of times there'll be a lot of explanation before the first action happens.

And then there's that difficult moment. You go, Oh crap. Okay. I don't need any of that. I'll take it out. And then you just boil it down to the action.

Meg: Yes. We do that too.

Lorien: Yes. Yeah. So I just want to say that I think you just created one of Jeff's best stories is the time George Saunders used him as an example.

George: Oh yeah. It was a Freudian slip. I didn't even realize.

Lorien: I'm pretty sure this is going to be dinner party.

George: No, actually, no, it's actually the person's name is Jonathan. It's Jonathan.

Meg: Jeff wants this. Jeff wants this.

Jeff: I do feel very exposed right now.

Meg: I'm a little jealous. I'm a little jealous.

George: No, I apologize.

Meg: I hope there's a Meg in your next story.

Jeff: I do have that love seat right there and I'm very tempted to go fart on it right now.

Lorien: No, I'm saying this is a highlight of Jeff's life.

George: Apology. Apology.

Jeff: No, are you kidding?

George: You know what's funny is when I do this a lot, my mind goes too fast. So the first thing I did was, okay, when you name this character, don't name it anybody here. And I thought I had named it something other than Jeff, so.

Jeff: I couldn't be more honored. This is, as Lorien said, this is a distinct highlight for me, so.

Meg: Honestly. She is, she's not joking. Highlight. Alright, so we have, I have one more craft question and then we're going to move to our final three, which makes me sad, but, because I know we don't want to, we only have an hour with you, but what do you do when you get stuck?

George: I don't admit that there's such a thing, actually.

You can always do something. You can write what you know to be a terrible paragraph, and it, I mean, in my, Epistemology, the blob that we're talking blob we're talking about. It doesn't have to be anything. It just has to be some words that I can then go through and judge and fix and tweak, so, so that never really happens, but if it, if, also, my thing is so revision heavy, so usually what happens is I start at the beginning of the day reading the thing from the beginning and, as soon as you react to a sentence, you're, I feel like you're writing. It doesn't have to be typing energetically or, spewing new stuff.

I think it's just like I, I pick up page one and, I mean, for me, that's often the bit, the hardest part is sit down. Oh, God, I, my whole reputation is riding on this page. And then you go, yeah, it is. Make sure it's good. Read it, stupid. So you pull it forward, you start reading, and then as soon as you react to it, and all of us who are language people, you can't even go by a road sign without reacting to it.

I don't know about that semicolon, so I think once you...

Lorien: apostrophes. Let's talk about those apostrophes.

George: That is maddening. It's maddening.

Lorien: Forget about the plastic straws.

George: But so, so the but you know, seriously, again, in terms of anxiety reduction, if I say, I'm just gonna read this thing, and if something leaps out at me, I'll just change it.

And voila you're writing.

And all the things that happen, those little moments of inspiration, and blurting things out, and that, those all happen within that context. So there's no need to worry about writer's block. I mean, David Foster Wallace, he said once that it's, writer's block is just having artificially high standards for oneself, which I think is right.

So if you lower the standards...

Lorien: I feel attacked. I don't know what to say. No. I'm like, what do you mean, artificially high standards? What are you talking about? I don't relate to that at all.

George: No doubt it means you have great taste. No, real seriously. It means you have great taste. And so.

Lorien: Oh, thank you so much.

George: No, but it does. And I know that feeling of going, I can't budge because I'll mess it up. But I, but for me, and that was such a strong thing. And I had such a mythology around the magic moment of creation that I had to kind of talk myself off the ladder. It's almost like if you're looking for the love of your life.

Ah, that's hard. Just have a drink, and see. So, for me, that's, it's just a strategy more than, I totally hear you on the judging mind is a real. It's a friend and an enemy, isn't it? I mean, it's how you make yourself excellent, and it's also how you freeze yourself in your tracks.

Meg: Before we get to our last three questions, I'm sorry, I'm going to put them in because Mike Jones, our mutual friend he said his question to you would be, what is a recent movie that took your breath away and why?

George: Oh, what is it? I'm trying to think. Actually, I, I saw Emilia Perez and I thought there were moments in there where I don't know if my breath was taken away, but I noticed how thoroughly conditioned I'd been by mediocre streaming movies, let's say, and so I was kind of shocked to find that I was out on thin ice with no direction where things were heading, which is a good aspiration, and so there's a couple times where I don't know what kind of movie this is, I don't know, but I, it's the kind of movie I'm gonna keep watching, that kind of thing, yeah. I react I react differently to movies, I think than I do to books. Movies will, almost every movie kind of, I, I get a kick out of it. But with prose, I, then books tend to take my breath away, I think.

Lorien: What book have you read recently that took your breath away?

George: Well, this is a very slow Well, actually, I'll tell you, I just read The Moon is Down by Steinbeck, which is, an old book, and it's kind of flawed in some ways, but reading it at this particular historical moment, there were things where I just sort of did actually gasp, like, oh shit, this is, this is eternal.

But there's also one called it's a place, called A Place of Tides and I'm going to get his name wrong, but I think it's James Rebanks, a British writer, and it's a very slow taking of the breath away That, it starts out, it's a non fiction book, and it's a long, slow story about a man who goes to live with this older woman who is she collects geese down out in, somewhere in Scandinavia, real slow, real, full of the natural world, and by the end, it's like this beautiful kind of, Elegy to what we've done to the world, both in terms of the earth, but also our attention and the whole thing it's kind of sneaks up on you. And yeah, But I'm not- honestly I'm not reading as much as I normally would because of story club and also writing,

Meg: You're busy.

You're busy.

George: Yeah,

Meg: i'm gonna ask you we ask every guest the same questions at the end of our episode. First question is what brings you the most joy when it comes to your writing?

George: It's the feeling of something coming out of the stone, like a few days ago it was just blops, it was just a bunch of typing, and then suddenly I've revised it and it's a thing that's happening that has importance, and it seems to be something bigger than I could have imagined at the beginning.

So that's a feeling I'm always seeking. And we talk about success and all that. That's all nice. But as I'm getting older, that feeling of bringing something out of nothing is really lovely. Especially because I find that I get a very intimate, quick look at who I actually am in those moments.

Something, you go, I didn't know I thought that. Whoa, I do though. But I never would have said it. I never could have imagined it. Oh shit, I've just been revealed to myself. So, that's good.

Lorien: Beautiful. It's the exciting and terrifying piece of being a storyteller.

George: It certainly is.

Lorien: Yeah, like don't look don't get too close.

Oh my god. There it is.

George: Yeah.

Lorien: And then you're revealing it to other people too, right? That's the like am I brave enough to share this?

George: Yes.

Lorien: Okay. So our next question is what pisses you off about writing?

George: Nothing really, except I'm having it with this book when I when the clarity doesn't come Right away. That really bothers me at first. And now I'm like, okay, so maybe that's a sign of growth that at 66 years old You found a project that is defying you and that's awesome, But I think nothing really pisses me off about it I don't think.

I found the right job, I mean, there are all the frustrations that we have, but, I had a friend one time who was really good with cars and he said, when a car makes a noise, it's either a happy sound or a sad sound. And so I think with my work a lot, as I've done it longer, the difficulties are making happy sounds even, like you, I can get stuck on something and go, Oh, interesting.

This thing is not yielding to me because it's, wants to be more than I think it is. Okay. Or, Oh shit, I've been, I had, I've been. This book I'm working on now, I was at 40 pages for a year. Now they were different 40 pages, but I couldn't get past the 40 page mark and even in that I was like, okay That's interesting.

That's a first, maybe hopefully it's it's for a good reason, you know. Did something piss you off about writing?

Meg: Yes, every day.

George: Yeah. Yeah What is it?

Meg: I think frustrated is also-- it's more frustration. I would never want to do anything else not that level pissed off, but there is it's frustrating I wish I was better at it every day.

George: Yes, I wish I was faster because I, at the end, I'm like, Oh God, that was pretty obvious. But it took all that time to get to it. So I do wish, I also wish I had when I started out, one of the ways I, I got in to the kingdom was as, as Jeff said sarcasm, and a kind of an edginess.

And now as I'm getting older, especially with that Lincoln book, I'm like, Oh, wait a minute. I have other. I wish I'd had that confidence earlier because it's yeah, it's a big thing, to go that there's suddenly a whole room of my personality. I didn't know about it would have been nice to figure that out in writing and my in life.

I knew it. But in writing, I didn't know it until quite late, so that's that pisses me off. There you go. There you go.

Lorien: A whole room of, a whole room of a whole different personality. I'm like, Oh God, mine's a haunted house. I like, do I want to go in there and open my haunted door? Yes you do. Yes you do.

Go to the lava. You and Shirley Jackson. That's what's scary is that I have so many locked doors in my haunted house. Right? Yeah, go to the lava. Yeah.

George: I mean, I found early that, no one is ever going to know the real me in a linear way by reading my stories. But I think what you, what I am happy with is I do a little performance on the page.

It casts a shadow. The shadow, if you could back calculate it, it might tell you something about who I am. But in that way, you get to be, I get to be intense, but also actually not self revealing. Which I don't really care to do, actually, in a certain way. Except in that shadow on the wall sense.

Meg: So beautiful.

Okay, Jeff's going to ask our last question.

Jeff: George, the last question we ask is, if you could go back and have a coffee with your younger self, what advice would you give to that George?

George: Well, that's a big one. I, I think he wouldn't take much advice because he was a pretty intense person. I mean, seriously, he he didn't take much advice.

And the funny thing is, I thought, well, I would tell him to be more attentive as a father, but he was pretty attentive as a father. I mean, if you had asked that guy then, what's most important? Be attentive. So, I don't know really. I mean, I think well, I'll tell you, honestly, what I would tell him, which he'd ignore, is discover meditation sooner.

And don't put that side of your life off to the side quite as much, selfishly. Because that might be related to this bigger personality I was just talking about. When I started meditating a little more and taking myself more seriously as a spiritual person, the writing just sat right up. So I might tell him that, but again, he was a Lutheran at that point.

So he would have just...

Meg: I love that. Thank you so much for being here.

George: It was so fun.

Meg: Oh, I was so looking forward to you coming and you're here and it was amazing.

George: It was a total pleasure for me. Thank you. You made my week.

Lorien: Oh, okay. Can I ask you one more question before we go?

George: Yeah.

Lorien: Well, it doesn't have to be on the podcast.

We talk a lot about writing snacks. So, what is your favorite thing to nibble on when you're writing?

George: That's very easy for me. It's those big old pretzel, pretzels, or pretzel rods, either one, and or sometimes a combination of graham crackers. The honeycomb.

Meg: Oh, graham crackers.

George: When I was writing, finishing Lincoln and the Bardo, I had a writing shed set up from the house, and Paula was out of town, so I was there for a long time by myself, and I'd be working, and then I'd stop at some moment, like, okay, this is, stop, go over, have Pretzel Rods, blast either Wilco, Slater Kinney, or Aaron Copland's Lincoln piece and blast it just to get my standards back up. Then take three Pretzel Rods and go back and do another four hours or something.

Meg: Fantastic.

George: What do you guys, what do you guys, what do you guys eat?

Lorien: Cookies.

George: Do you guys know the writer, Linda Berry, she came, she came to Syracuse once and she told us that she had read some psychological study that said that people, artists tend to work in patterns that are related to the way they played as kids.

So if you were somebody who, whose mom would pop in every 15 minutes with a snack or to check on you. you'll tend to mimic that. So I see that myself. I'll get, I'll, it's the Catholic thing. Like, I'll get something going. I'll do something really good. And I have to pause because I don't want to get too big for my britches.

So if I pause, I get a snack. I come down to earth and I come back and see if it's still good.

Meg: That's fantastic. I have to think about that.

Lorien: That I, yes, I saw the parallel with my behavior around snacks, which is I hoover it all up really fast because I had to sneak, right, right, so I pretend like I didn't do anything and then I work.

Right.

Meg: It's all about rewards.

George: Yes. Yeah.

Meg: You do the hard thing, you get rewarded. Just get, sit here, and then you can have the Oreo. Just sit here, you get the Oreo.

George: Yeah, I have a whole coffee break thing that, I mean, actually it's an interesting thing because it is when you're writing, you're kind of in a dance with a certain part of yourself that's, that will perform.

And that thing, though it sort of wants to come and go as it pleases, and you're trying to go, Okay, come on, give me a little more, give me a little more. And I know it's, I mean, for me, there's a whole sometimes if I have some, if I get in a bad mood early, then I'm in trouble. Or if something goes really well off the writing page I kind of bring that little gust of happiness in and when our kids were little, we, there was a, we lived in Rochester and Syracuse and there's a store in New York called Wegmans and I dropped them off at school and then I knew if I went to Wegmans and just got a coffee and spent a little time people watching in the lightest possible way, I'd come out a little bit elated and then I'd go home and work.

So that's, all these tricks. Oh my God. So many tricks.

Lorien: I love it. Wow. Thank you for all that at the end there too. Oh yeah. That's a lot of insight into myself, but also characters.

Meg: I think we have to put that on the show. Just leave it right there. Putting that on the show.

George: It was such a pleasure guys.

Thank you so much.

Meg: Thanks so much to George for coming on the show today. His Substack Story Club is full of deep dive essays about writing and storytelling. If you like our podcast, I promise you will like that Substack.

Lorien: And remember, you are not alone, and keep writing.