Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - George Saunders

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

George Saunders is an author known for his inventive short stories and the Booker Prize–winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo. His works include the collections Tenth of December and Liberation Day and the craft book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. This week, he released Vigil, a new novel that follows his trademark blend of imagination, compassion, and dark humor as it explores life, death, and moral reckoning in the twilight hours of a dying oil executive’s life. Named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, he has received numerous honors, from a MacArthur Fellowship to the National Book Foundation’s 2025 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Saunders teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University, where he has mentored generations of emerging authors. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: AG1 https://DrinkAG1.com/tetra ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarepace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

tetragamatin. Actually, honestly, the last few years, my whole intake has changed. I don't know if it takes more time doing it work. I feel a little more delicate outside of it. Like, I'm a little more protective about what I'm listening. So I think when I was younger, I was like, I got to hear everything, I got to read everything. And the last few years, I'm like, maybe you don't.

Maybe, you know, can kind of be a little quieter. And I'm doing this substack, which is we do a story every two weeks. So that means pretty much I'm reading that story for two weeks, which shuts out of stuff. How did the substack start? I wrote that book about the Russian short story

and then I just kind of enjoyed that. There was a different modality. Swimming the pond. I love that book. Yeah, thank you. I'd been teaching all those years, you know, that Syracuse, and I came back from a tour,

and I had my first class, and it was like the kids left, and it's just like the chalk dust in the air. I'm like, I love this. I didn't, I always knew I liked it, you know, but I had this notebook that was like an accumulation of all the notes I'd taken and teaching those Russian stories over there.

20 years and nobody else could make any sense of it. It's just scroll. But I thought, you know, if I kick it right now, all that goes away. And it wasn't only me. It was all those generations of students that were giving me feedback. And so, so anyway, I wrote that Russian book and then really missed it when I was done. And somebody said, would you like to do a subject? And I thought, yeah, I could do it on storycraft. Like what is, like always going back to, okay, forget everything you know, what's a story really. And especially experience. what is it, you know? So the whole idea of kind of, which you explore in your book, like, what is the mind on art actually doing? And at some point, when you watch what the mind

on art is doing, it's what the mind is always doing. And so that opened a door from me, I was a kind of a working class person. So I had a real anxiety about art. Like, that's the thing that everyone else can do, but I, I'm not smart enough. And somehow thinking that this way, it's like, well, you can perceive, you can perceive your perceptions, you can adjust, you're an artist, you know, like that. Is that the way you find out what you think through, you surprise yourself when you're speaking and come to understand your worldview? Yes, although I also notice it's not necessarily a worldview I'd endorse,

but it's the one that's most authentic or it gets spit out by my process. So that's interesting to, I sometimes also, well, I'm starting a story to demonstrate this aspect of my worldview. The story goes, no, you're not. We don't do that here, you know? So you start tweaking it and working with it. Then at the end, it says something, and you're like, oh, is that what you mean to say?

And the way you check that is you, you know, you check all the seams. And if everything holds up, you squeeze it all tight, and then that's what you said. And is your worldview? I think it's a leader. It sometimes will show me what I ought to be thinking. Yeah.

Yeah. In a swim in the pond, there's a lot of wildly analytical detail. Do you think that the writers wrote knowing those things or no? Depends how we define knowing. I think not intellectual. I don't think they said,

I'm going to do this. They couldn't explain it to you. No. I would even say they might not even know that they did it. Yeah. But somewhere you think inside they knew? Yes. And I think it's through my theory is.

And again, all this is just based on my, you know, my thing. And I'd love to hear how it is in the studio because sometimes you just keep microchusing this over that, this over that, this over that. And I would say being a great artist has something to do with creating the maximum number of choice points. Because if you're choosing one time, that's only one dollop of you. But if you're choosing a thousand times over the course of the thing, a lot of you is getting in there. And you don't necessarily vet those things. You just go, you prefer A to B.

So I think with these great Russian writers, I think they did things. I think they'd laugh at me talking about it as analytical as I do. But it doesn't mean it's, you know, it's not. It may be accurate. Yes. So there are ways of knowing that are deeper than the ones that you and I can explicate right now. Yeah.

And that's for me, the beautiful thing is I don't, you know, it's 66. I'm kind of, I'm kind of know this guy and I'm like, yeah, yeah, I can predict his neurotic behavior to some extent. But the person that comes out when I'm doing this writing process is more interesting. So I think you can have a, by having microattention to the thousands of choosing points. And even then, you're not saying. what fits my theme or what you're just saying I like the optometrist I like this better than that if you do that a thousand times in six pages there's a lot of you in there and it's not this you it's

some other you so to me that's the enduring kind of addictive thing is you to keep luring better parts of yourself out under the page you know would you say that's the editor part of you yes although at this point I don't really make much separation between I mean I've been thinking lately, if I had to boil down creativity, I'd say it's reaction. So I crank out some crap this morning, doesn't matter what, tomorrow I look at it and I react to it with a pencil in my hand. That seems to me where creativity actually happens. Not so much in that first, well, also I've kind of been thinking lately that one of the things we do with craft is, at least for me, is I'm trying to get my anxiety down. I'm very anxious person. So my artistic approaches aren't necessarily true,

but they are anxiety reducing. So for me to say, don't worry about what you put down on the blank page. That's a real anxiety reducer. Yeah. Type any old thing. Because you're such a good reviser that tomorrow you'll look at that mess and go, oh, poor baby, you know, and you'll start tweaking. And you'll find something in there that's got some life on and on and on.

So yeah, it's editing, but I don't really make up at this point a big distinction between editing and writing. It's just referring. Is anxiety a big issue in your life? it's been a slightly under the surface issue my whole life and to which I would say when I was young I responded by being very jovial you know like just always I can do it you know puppy energy but yeah it is it is and especially artistically it was because when I was younger I had that terrible lockup of like

which artists am I going to be I have to decide and then you can't be any of them except the one that you haven't found yet yeah so there's a lot of you know obsessing over which lineage and should I be funny or not and so on and So I think as an older person, I can kind of say, well, all that deciding is in the realm of conceptual thought, which can be helpful, but it can also kill you, you know, because I don't think what we do works on. I mean, you can describe it conception, but I'm not sure you can make it conceptually. So to say, I don't know what I am, I don't know what lineage. I don't know whether I'm going to be funny or experimental. And they keep saying that till you're dead.

That seems to me the tricky part, you know, to say, I'm going to start a story tomorrow. as much as I can manage, I don't have any concepts about it. I'm going to go to it and see what it wants to tell me. So that's all good. But then, of course, I'm sure you felt this. You're a master. So don't you have some theories? No.

Yeah. Well, I do, you know, trust them. When you sit down with the blank page and you write some not great stuff like may have happened this morning, where does the starting point come from? Yeah. It's usually as little as possible. You know, if I guess here, somebody say something funny,

put that down in biology, the seed crystal, you put the seed crystal down and it kind of just spontaneously accretes outward. That's the best case. Some little funny line of dialogue, you don't even know who said it, you put it down,

and you react to it over and over. But other times, there are bigger, like with that Lincoln and the barrow, it was just like a two-line outline. Lincoln comes to the crypt, interacts with his son's body and leaves. meanwhile the sun shouldn't be here and he is that's it you know so that's a whole lot way but for me the less what is it's the word precess is that the word if the if the thing is

front loaded with meaning then I don't like it it'll end up being too narrow yes yeah the sentence already did that it's like why continue right he wrote your book already yeah yeah there's that thing I always quote Einstein I don't think he said this but it was no worthy problem has ever solved in the plane of its original conception so if you do that it's a buzzkill for everybody. So I think that's part of the, as a young person with literary aspirations. You think your job is to be super smart, have a worldview, and then just shit it down on people, you know, and that's how they'll know you're powerful. And then it turns out that's not it. I love the idea of the reaction being what creation is about. Also, I haven't thought about it in that way

before. And it's a helpful framing for moving forward. And it's true. And everything we do is in reaction to something. And I love the idea of writing a sentence and then the next sentence is a reaction to the last sentence. Right. That's a different way of looking at the process. Yeah. And it also, I think it mimics what the reader's doing. The reader, you know, you have a sentence that's a little wobbly on its feet. Yeah. The reader notices. So what do you do with the readers noticing? That's the reaction to. So I don't know, is it true in like in the studio? Is there other analogs to this? When you're producing somebody, are you reacting? Always.

If whatever's happening makes me lean forward and want to hear what happens next, it's good. And if something happens I wasn't expecting, it's very good. If it starts and I lean back and nothing happens, chances are I want to stop it. So, because I haven't thinking about this in terms of my teaching, what does the corrective look like? I would say, what else can we listen to? What else do you have? In that case. That's, yeah.

Or I would listen to the whole thing and say, it got interesting to me at this point. How do we make the whole thing feel like this? Yeah. See, that's something in my, I teach at Syracuse, and I talk a lot about specificity of response because, you know, in a workshop of someone says, this is boring, it's hurtful. And also, you can't work with that. But if you push down and say, where is it boring and do you have a different word for boring? Yes.

Then, oh, it's repetitious on page six. We can fix repetition. Agreed, by the way, on specificity. when I'm making notes, the more specific I can be in comments that I give, the more helpful they are. Yes. Yeah. Early in my career, I would state what I thought the solution was, and now I don't do that. Yes. And the solutions turn out to be much better when I'm not suggesting them. See, that's a beautiful idea, because I think part of the reader-writer thing is intimacy and trust. So if I say something on page six, then all the energy goes to the writer. And they usually know.

actually. So that move where I say, I trust you to find out. That's, you know, and it's likewise, if I'm writing something and I do three repetitions of the same idea because you might not get it, my theory is you subtly feel that as condescension, which is disengagement, and you like me a little less. So if I, a lot of the editing is going, you know, let's pretend that my reader is actually 12% smarter than me, make cuts on that basis. A little scary because sometimes you might, you know, have to trust more than you feel like it. But if it's a little bit of you. it works, then you get that thing where the reader is having a normal day, picks up the book and goes, oh, shit, this person likes me and respects me.

And this experience is coming out of a shared pool of experience. We've both been here. He knows that and he's speaking to the hire me. So the hire me comes out and you get this kind of engagement of, I always think of it as the ghosts, like ghosts coming out of the writer and the reader, and they meet up in that high territory where, and then afterwards they go back. How did you come to that? Just through feeling it, like, it's like nothing mystical but, you know, the sacramental space of hard work, like, bra, blah, blah, bar, bearing down on the manuscript and you look up and you go, whoa, that ghost did some good shit today, you know.

And then, and also feeling that you, you would meet people at readings and they would talk about a certain story. And we met in another place, the two of us, you know. I love the idea that you talk about the writer and the reader, ghosts come out of each of them and meet, but it's nothing mystical or metaphysical or metaphors. physical. Yeah, no, it's completely. Like, okay. I understand. Very cotidian, cotidian ghosts.

Tell me about your spiritual life. Well, I'm practiced Tibetan Buddhism and the Nyingma tradition. I'm a little laps at the moment. I don't quite know why. But my wife and I lived near a community for many years ahead. At that time, a really intense three, four hour, a night meditative thing, which kind of changed my... When did you get into it?

Well, I was about 40. And my wife went, actually, she was turned on to Tickna Han by a Catholic nun. Yeah. And then she went to a Tibetan empowerment, which was very exotic and strange. And then came out kind of saying, yeah, that's pretty weird stuff. And then I started practicing. And there was this big change in her that I, you know, as a husband, you're like, how come we're not having fight 9A anymore, you know?

And I thought, I want some of that. So I started kind of messing around with kind of just homemade meditation. And then we eventually found a teacher. And it seemed to me. I mean, that's so much like that I'd already been a Buddhist before I knew what it was, just from writing. So that's been a real interesting cross-firing, you know, to say this aspect of Dharma has a corollary in writing.

Maybe this one doesn't quite as much yet, but I could try, you know, and that. Did you have any spiritual life growing up? Catholic and like seriously beautiful Catholic experience for me. You know, it was in Chicago, kind of south side of Chicago, kind of Dorothy Day, progressive Catholicism. And I remember, well, I think probably getting into some kind of meditative state during the long masses. And then there would be, you know, stations at the cross. They were visualizations, basically.

And so, and I think I also, I remember kind of being stunned by some of the stories about Jesus being super empathetic, like the woman at the well. You know, what I took from that, I don't know whether a nun told me this or I just took, but is that that Jesus was sort of a novelist in that sense, because he could approach person that other people didn't like and judged. And just by being in the presence, he could pick up on a lot of data that a normal person couldn't pick up on. And that increased data made him fond of her. And the fondness made her open up and then brought up a ghost, you know. So I love that idea. And I think when I started to read more, I thought, oh, that's kind of what my job is a novelist is I can put anybody in front of me,

even if in real life I can't stand them. And by contemplating them, through revision, basically, I can find a way in and sort of recognize that they're me on a different day, briefly, you know, while on the page. Do you have to do that to be able to write them? I don't think so, because I think there are a lot of people who do it a different way. But I like to do, okay, you know, there's that Samuel O'Connor thing. She says, a writer can choose what he writes, but he can't choose what he makes live. So you can have all the plans for how you're going to be, but if it doesn't work. So for me, what works is, I call it third person ventriloquist where it's like, if I'm going to write your story,

I'll start off Rick said in the yard, you know, but then I have to quickly get into your voice and your head, also your limitations and your aspirations and all that. So it's more of a voice thing. If I do that, if I say, okay, I'm now this person, the voice comes alive in a way that it doesn't, if I me out here looking at them, so it's just kind of a trip. It's still always your imagination of who that person is. It's not really who that person. is. They're not channeling them.

Right. And mostly they don't exist anyway. I mean, if I write about Lincoln, I mean, the real Lincoln would be kind of unknowable to us, but you could say, I'm, I'm me in a Lincoln suit. When you write characters, are they often based on people you know or no? No. I mean, some of that gets in, but my thing is it's like, so a story will be going along and it has a certain need at a certain point. So I need somebody, like in Lincoln, Lincoln would be walking across the graveyard, and I need him to turn over here and see a ghost. I don't have any thoughts about which one. Just somebody start talking to me.

I think, oh, okay, the word hunter comes into my mind and I start saying, okay, he's a hunter. What would a hunter's afterlife look like? And suddenly, spontaneously, there's this big pile of dead animal, all the animals he's killed in his life. So it's not anybody I ever knew, but it's kind of just being generated. But other times, I will see that I put someone's speech patterns in there, somebody I know or an anecdote that somebody told me we'll get in there but I think with stories there's always like why do you need this thing so the quality of the thing would be colored by why you need it so let's say that the hero has a goal and I need somebody to impede him for moral reasons well that person has to have that quality and so then once I figure that out I start

throwing in bits for my own life and it could be something from you and something from my uncle won't even put into the same package. I'm not a writer who says, I'm gonna write a book about this person, but sometimes stuff just gets in there. And if it's authentic, then I'll, like there's a story called Sea Oak, and there's a, the moment in the story was,

the character, he's a real working class guy, has got a girlfriend who's a little bit above him, and he's gonna have to lose her, and he's gonna have to lose her for class reasons. It wasn't an idea, but that's the way the story was set up. So I was looking for something that could happen to somebody, for class reasons that would, you know, and I thought back to my own youth.

I had a friend who was actually an ex-brother-in-law who was really an alcoholic. And one time I was on the couch with this girl I was really in love with who was a couple of matches ahead of me. And this guy comes in, just blunders into the house and starts pissing on the wall, you know. And I'm there with this. It really happened. It really happened. Yeah.

And there was this person I really kind of cherished, you know, and she's seeing this. So all I could really say was, this doesn't usually happen or, you know. But so that was a painful. You know, embarrassing memory. Well, CO comes along and I need something. I'm like, okay, you're in. But at the same time, I'm going to alter it to make it apropos of that situation. So it was different.

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Do it today. How much of a story do you know before you start? Ideally, none. Literally. The best stories are the ones I just start with a little something. And then it grows outward. Sometimes, I mean, there are times when I do know a little more than that, but I think the move for me is to look really askance at that idea. Like, okay, yeah, yeah.

You claim you're the story, but can you just wait out here a little bit while I investigate? If I find myself clinging to that, then it's going to be, I think Gerald Stern said, if you started to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking, then you wrote a poem about two dogs fucking, you know. So I think mostly the ideas I'm really dubious. I just think you stay out. It sounds like you could literally start with anything. And the story that you are to tell will reveal itself regardless of where you're starting. That's exactly it. Yeah.

That's really cool. Yeah. I mean, and it's, again, it's anxiety reducing because I don't have to have any ideas. I just have to have a first line. Yeah. I always say, you know, if we wanted to write a story, we could make that coffee cup talk, that glass of water talk, and your baseball hat talk. And if we spend enough time on it, all of our personal stuff would come out.

Of course, it would. Because if you revise enough, I mean, what are you revising from your own stuff? So I think a lot of young writers, and I certainly get locked up on this idea of what's my great idea. I need a great idea. And you won't get one because there's no such thing, actually. The great idea is the one that allows you to grow it, you know, and it becomes a different idea. And is that, I mean, I'm wondering, is musically, if someone just goes in and plays a riff, can that sometimes lead to? Absolutely.

Even when an artist has well-written material, I might suggest that they spend time just jamming. And then out of the jams, something comes up unexpected. No one's trying to write a song. Right. They're having fun making music. And from that, something happens. Right. Because I know in literature, it's kind of like, it's not really that, you know,

the first line, it's, I throw the first line at you, you go, oh, okay, you throw it back at me and I throw it back. It's the path that the story follows. It's actually interesting. So again, that's cool because it means there are no beautiful ideas. Or if there was, you could put it in there, but the story's going to start poking at it, and it's going to start tearing it apart, and it's going to be. So in this sense, a story is a dynamic, it's like a linear temporal experience that unfolds this way. And like a roller coaster, you're not on the roll across, you're going, what does this mean? You know, you're just going, oh, shit, we're going up, you know? Do you ever think about what does it mean or not until after it's all done?

Yeah, honestly, yeah. And this is the kind of cool thing. The kind of purest answer is no, never, but of course you do, because you want to finish it and you want it to be good. So it's kind of like the voice that says, I know what it means. Would you like to know? They're like, yeah, okay, come on in. It's about patriarchy. Oh, all right. Duly noted, step out in the hall again. We'll find out. Yeah. But it would be silly to not let that guy in. You know, he knows something about it.

When that happens, do you say, okay, I know it's about patriarchy now, or do you think, okay, it might be about patriarchy? Yeah, I know it's all patriarchy now. Yes. But we're going to see if it continues to want to be. Yeah. There's a great Chicago writer named Stuart Dybeck, and he said, the story is always talking to you, but you just have to listen.

And so the story is saying, I think I'm about patriarchy. And you see, you might, good for you. You know, you might very well be. I hope you are. But at the same time, is the minute I say, oh, yes, it is, then what happens with me is procedurally, you know, you have five pages and it's about patriarchy. All right. Then, since you know that, you now know the next five pages and you're dead because the reader feels when you checked out and went on autopilot. So you have to say, yes, conditionally you are, but let's keep going and stay fresh and see what else you want to be about, you know.

And to me, the fascinating thing is even that's not theoretical. It's in this rereading process, you know, your little meat in your head. I like it, I like it, I like it. And suddenly I don't like it. So to say, in the spirit of specificity, okay, we don't have to panic. You know, we're not suddenly a bad artist. Having difficulty on page 8. I always have an imaginary voice to the story like, oh, what's going on?

You know, the story says, nothing. I'm fine. Just keep going. No, no, really. What's happening? Well, I'm kind of boring. you are boring poor baby you know and then then you can kind of go well yeah let's just not use boring and let's look a little closer and then the story will say it's basically saying i'm discontent

with your overmanagement of me and therefore i put in a cloudy section or i put in an alien invasion or some weird shit because i don't like where you're going and i'm i'm stopping in the road so i kind of developed this idea of avoidance moments which is if a story has bad language or sometimes a factual error will get in something that couldn't be true or like an unwarranted flashback or forward or change a point of view that's often the subconscious being very smart and saying i want the best for you if you keep going you're going to fuck up the story so can we pause here i'm going to make you pause by injecting something yucky in a traditional workshop format that would be an error and you would fix it but now i'm like no that's actually your layers of your subconscious process revealing you so this is a draft 6

tendency, totally honorable. Let's just note it. You've got to be continued sign up there on page six and one on 11 and one on 12. Don't panic. Just remember they're there. Yeah. And weirdly those places often speak to each other. If you fix one yet. Very much. Yeah. And I know them. And I also will kind of provide a technical description of why I stopped, why it affected my reading energy. So sometimes it's often semantic. It's just a the sentence goes haywire. So I just make that correction. And then. And as you were saying, I used to fix it, but now I just say, you know, this is... Leave it alone. Yeah. And 9 times out of 10, the writer already knew it. You know, they knew. And so if you just say, page 9 and a half, I know, I know, I know. I love the idea that those roadblocks along the way speak to each other.

That's really a helpful idea. Because then it's the opposite of when it coming up, you feeling like, oh, you've failed. It's more like, oh, another clue to unlock the whole picture. Exactly. It's great. Yeah. there's also, I notice a pattern to that, like as I get further along the revision process, those become more specific and more a glow. Like, I've got three now. I've been working on this

for six months. I've got three places that, you know, on a scale of one to ten, when I hit them, they're like sixes. The rest of the story might be eight or nine. It's a six. So at first you say, well, we can have a few sixes, can't we? But then you say, well, you can, but what if you don't, you know? And then, yeah, and those are always sort of like, I wouldn't say thematically, but they're causally related. If you fix one, it throws light on the other two and limits the range of possibilities that you could do to solve them, you know?

So that's cool because then when you have problems, you're like, in a certain way, the more problems I have and the more unsolvable, they are that better the story's going to be. It's got kind of bigger shoulders. It's like Houdini. You know, like if Houdini said, I'm going to now, I've got a windbreaker on.

I'm not going to take it off. You'd be like, well, okay, you know. But if he really, you know, it's got chains. he's at the bottom of the Hudson and he's drunk or whatever. Then he's got a real problem to get out of. So whenever now, whenever I get a story that has really impossible problems that I would have caused me to bail when I was 30,

I'm like, oh, good. Now the subconscious is giving me a higher place to go on the mountain. I love that. Amazing. Are you the best judge of your own work? Well, I think yes, because, well, only, I mean, maybe not, once it goes out in the world, but no. Yeah, yeah.

But I'm. During the process. Yeah, I'm a late show. I show nobody anything for a really long time. And it's interesting because I don't know how this must be in music because it's so communal. But for me, to keep it private for a really long time. Because then I can make those choices with complete openness.

If someone says, I love your story, I can't change it. You know, it's harder to change it. Someone says, I hate it. I just feel like throwing it out. So if it's me in private for a long time with it, I can mess it up, I can fix it. I can mess this part up and fix that part. And there's a lot of freedom.

And then weirdly, at some point, all that iteration, it starts to solidify, you know, like at some point, like, yeah, okay, I'm not worried about that anymore. That's fixed itself. And then you get just these three little issues or four. And then they still feel like, yeah, I, everybody stay out. I'm going to decide this. And then at some point when I'm really done, I think, I give it to my wife. And she reads my work very emotionally.

She knows me. She knows my cheap tricks. So if she has an emotional reaction, then I'm good to send it out. And if she says, oh, yeah, pretty good, you know, then like, oh, damn it. Yeah. Start over. Would she give you specific comments? Like I was with you up until page 40 or something like that?

Not really, no. Now, she just, at the end, she's either moved or she isn't, and I really value that because she's right, as she knows. And so, and we both kind of came from kind of working class backgrounds and art was a very specific thing for us, very important, you know. So, and I think the kind of emotional aspect of it was important to us. We weren't necessarily so taken with wild postmodernism, but like Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolf, you know.

So I trust her emotional reaction to it. She wants to work hard to be about something that we share, that people share, instead of just like a higher techniques. Do you ever stop along the way to do research on something that you're writing? Sometimes. Well, with Lincoln and the Barrow, I try not to get two in the weeds, but like, so I knew the date that that, that, happened. So I had to kind of research what happened the two weeks before and what happened the

next two weeks to see if some ideas that were in play were made sense, which weirdly they did. You know, but before I did that, it was just linking on a graveyard on any old night. And then it improved in specificity because he was in a graveyard, I think, three weeks before the emancipation proclamation. And he was there four days after a big battle at Fort Donaldson were allowed in, like the northern casualties were higher than it ever been. So then that specificity, out of all the stories about Lincoln and a graveyard, I'm telling this particular one. I think I'm more of a cartoonist, really.

Like, one of my big early things is Charlie Brown, the peanuts thing. And that still works for me. The Kizma's heads that are too big, you know, and know the sidewalks come and go, you know, and I love that. And all of that in service of something that's kind of deep when you get down to it, but it's cloaking the depths in a lot of sort of surface craziness. Is writing fiction and nonfiction the same thing? It ultimately kind of is, I feel less freedom with nonfiction as you would.

But it's kind of the same, except with nonfiction, I go out and do a trip, Egypt for 10 days, and then just have a bunch of notes, you know, and recordings and stuff. And then start writing it all. And whatever glows gets in the story. So the structure gets made by glow, like these four things are. Even this one that shouldn't be important, it writes really well, so you're in the story. And then the structure is just, okay, how do I, connect those so that they kind of make sense. And then

sometimes with that, you arrange the six glowing items and you go, oh, oh, that's the meaning of that trip that I didn't even realize. Whereas with fiction, you're kind of more while you're creating the incident and then trying to make it glow. And so one of the real problems is

which incidents are essential. And do you ever know Stuart Cornfeld? He was in L.A. He was a Stuart Cornfield. He had been still a producer for a while. And he had this idea. He told me, once it was like in narrative, every structural unit has to do two things. It has to be entertaining in its own right and it has to contribute to the meaning of the story in a non-trivial way. So sometimes in fiction, you write something that's got a lot of jokes and it's funny and it's

fast, but it's just not, it doesn't know what it's there for. So that has to come out. Always? Well, or you have to figure out why it's there. And what I'll do is I'll take something like that and keep it in the back. Like, you're really good. But, Stay outside of it. Is there ever a reason that a digression from the main story, even if you don't understand it, stays? Yes. But then kind of circularly, therefore, isn't meaningless. It's just got a complicated meaning, you know.

Yeah, you just don't know it. Right. Or you only know it in rereading. Like, yeah, it has to be there. Because, you know, one of the things with fiction, we tend to reduce it to meaning, but it's given off, like a piece of music, given off incredible frequencies of nuance. that it's not really meaning, but it's flavor, it's quality, all that stuff. So the beautiful thing is a reader, even just a kind of above average reader,

will catch all that stuff, and she'll take it to the next thing. So meaningless, we wouldn't want to reduce meaning just to theme. It's the whole thing you've received. You're taking it to the next bit, you know. So yes, I say this in a way that makes it sound more mathematical than it is. But, for example, if I had a really good bit, I would be really open to the ways that it was contributing, even if they weren't linear. Can fiction be more true than nonfiction?

For me, yes, yes. Because one reason for me is that I'm a person who, like, I don't like writing, it's weird, I don't like writing anything that would hurt someone's feelings. So if I was writing a profile of view, it would be so complimentary. And I would never have that impulse to go, look what's the dark? I just don't, I don't like it. But with fiction, I don't feel that compunction. So I can let a certain polyana-ish part of me step aside for a minute,

and I can let the darkness and the kind of negative valences come in. And then also there's something about a short story that is so free. You know, there's no like once upon a time, what, anything? So in a certain way, it's almost like a mirror, because if you start a totally made-up story, which in my case is kind of cartoonish, then, well, what's the fuel of that story? It's 100% my phenomenon. You know, there's nothing else it could be.

So I like that freedom. I was raised Catholic, always was kind of a good kid, which is nice, you know, like socially is okay. But when you, artistically, there's a, it takes a lot for me to be really honest, actually, you know. So fiction, it's under the guise of being funny or entertaining. A lot of weird stuff comes out that I didn't know I. Do you think of yourself as a writer or a storyteller?

I think a writer, because I know a lot of people who can tell better stories than I get a lot. And my stories, I don't have any good stories except when I start working on them. And again, the ones that I make up are good. The ones that are like, here's something that happened to me. They're not good. How are writing short stories different than writing a novel? Well, I think with the novel, at least I'm only written one and there's one coming out. And the first one had a lot of white space, so I'm not sure.

But for me, it was that the novel has some kind of through line, like with Lincoln, you know, that I'm going to put out of there. And then I'm going to have fun fulfilling the through line. But I don't really know what it means. I don't know how I'm going to do it. With the story, in the best case, it's just literally just putting something down and then reacting to it. And the beautiful thing is out of that very playful process, something really serious can come out, you know, that something shaped and kind of momentous. So for me, the story is a little more, it's harder, actually, because you don't know that it's going to work. It's like a joke sort of, you know.

Yeah. And the story doesn't really, like a novel, you know, if I say there's this guy named Gatsby and he wanted. to meet his, you know, give his old girlfriend. You go, okay, did it work? And then I tell you, and 2080 pages late you find out. But with the story, you're not even sure what you're asking. The story starts, it creates its own context and its own meaning. And then it lands itself in a funny way that you couldn't have predicted.

And a lot of times, I think there's an overstory, which is, you know, will Akkaikovic get a new overcoat? And that's kind of novelistic. But then with a good short story, there's an understory that's coming up all the time. that the writer doesn't even understand until it burst through the surface. And that's when that story is a story. When you realize we were telling a story

about this over here, but actually all along we were talking about this thing. Without knowing it while you're doing it. Without knowing, yeah, yeah. In a world of artificial highs and harsh stimulants, there is something different, something clean, something precise, athletic nicotine,

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that you had. Is that true? That's true. Tell me about that. Yeah, it was called a lack of order in the floating object room. I had a dream of, it was kind of like a theme park where you go in there, they press a button, and gravity gets suspended, and stuff starts floating around. So the narrator was the guy who runs that place. So that place came to me in my mind, but also there was a narrating voice that gave me these sentences that were very unlike the ones I'd been writing, too modern and kind of, you know. And so I just, ah, that's weird.

And I got up and started writing it down and found that I could continue in that mode and wrote for, you know, three or four pages and it's done, you know, and that's the story I got into Syracuse with. So that was the first time I ever had that experience of intuition being part of the game, you know, but it was sort, in a way, it was kind of bitter because it didn't, it didn't sound anything like Hemingway. It didn't sound like anything classic or anything, but, you know, that feeling of like, oh, I don't know what that is, but it's new. And in that newness, I like, well, that's, there's something of me in there that I didn't, that I maybe don't even like. But that's kind of what I've been hunting ever since. It's just that feeling of, I guess

it's like blurting out. I had, I actually, I had a dream the other night of, I did an event in New York with Zaddy Smith last week. And on stage, she mentioned that book Civil Warland and the voice of it. So in the dream, she was kind of saying, you know what? You should go back to that. I'm like, how do I do it? And the answer was I had in the dream, I had the same feeling I had while I was right in that book, which was fuck meaning, fuck structure, sound, sound, sound, that's it. If a sentence doesn't make sense, if it sounds good, it's in. And the sense will find me later. Yeah.

In general, are you looking at the way the words look on the page or is it the way they sound? That's a really small. It's a combination. I never read aloud, but it's like there's a voice reading it in my head that is also taking note of the look. You purposely not read it out loud? Yeah, because I don't, my voice is kind of, I would mangle whatever I, you know. And also, I think I obviously a fast talker and I have a very quick monkey mind,

which is sometimes a real curse. But when I'm reading on the page or when I'm doing this thing we're talking about, I'm kind of reading it. It feels like I'm reading it in the back of my throat while I'm not, I'm going a little faster than I could read it out loud and be understood. Are you mumbling it? Not even silently because you say you're reading it faster than you can read it. Yeah.

So are you? getting every word or not. Yeah, more so than if I read it aloud, weirdly. And I can also, it's really hard to talk about, but I can feel the inefficiencies in it as I'm scanning it, you know. Yeah. How important is rhythm in that? It's everything.

So, like, sometimes there'll be a sentence. It'll go like, da-da-da-da-da-blah-la-la. Like, ugh, that last part. Lop that off. And then you have the first rhythm, da-da-da. And then the correct rhythm will present, and then words will come in to fill that rhythm. It's like writing a song.

Yeah. Have you written songs? I've written no. I'm going to talk to you about that. I've never written a good song. Because in songwriting, the literal thing takes over. I want line two and I think, oh, what should line three be? Yeah, or have a good exercise for you to try.

Oh, I'd love to have it. Based on something you said, it's amazing. You said the exact same thing as the exercise I'm going to tell you for songwriting. Oh, but so there is, it is sound and somehow reading it faster than I, it helps me figure out the sound better. It's almost like turning up the, the, the, the, the speed. of a tape and you hear the rhythm a little more acutely or something. So, yeah, I've never, I've never thought about this before, but yeah. In music, when you slow the music down,

you can learn more about the rhythm and when you speed it up. Speeding it up tends to fix the slightest imperfections. Slowing it down amplifies the imperfections. Because there's also something about, okay, so I'm reading the work from yesterday. And lately, I noticed there's a second part of my brain that steps aside and goes, how's your reading mine today? And some days, I'm just scheming it. I can't read it so many times I can't process it anymore and I don't like it. This guy goes, okay, just note that. You're in a shitty mood today. You hate everything. Yeah. Dolly noted. Okay. Then other days, I'm like, wow, I'm the greatest. Even this coffee stain is so good, you know. Do you ever put something aside when you have that feeling of nothing's good?

Not really. I usually just note that I feel that way. Yeah. And work through it. And I, and I, I'm like a little less willing to make a change maybe. But part of the value of this approach is that even if you mess it up on Wednesday, you can fix it on Thursday. And I remember where I've altered it, you know. But so the idea that you have some awareness of how adept you are at reading that day. And then the dream day is when everything is landing kind of like you're a first-time reader. Like, oh, I can really hear this today.

And those days, I just try to keep like reading, reading, reading. Do you only ever work on one thing at a time? No. With stories, it's usually like, I'll have, in a perfect world, I have three or four going, and then I just kind of go in the morning, like, which one? Anybody fun? You know, and if one says, no, but I'm, you should finish me. I'm like, yeah, no, I'm not good. If one isn't working that day, you wouldn't stop working on it to start working on a different one.

Sometimes. Sometimes. Yeah. Lately, I've got one story at home that might be an exception. But if I start something, I feel like, I'll finish it. It might take 15 years even. but if something presented and I like any part of it, then I'm just going to keep, you know.

And if you finish it, it means you'll finish it or it means you'll finish it and share it with the world? If I finish it, I'll share it. That's kind of my psychology. Okay. So there's a feeling of like, if there's four things, I want the most fun one to come, the one that I feel like, oh, yeah, I can do something with that.

Whereas if it seems tedious or it seems like, ah, that's the one I'm locked up on, then I just wait. Is there a market for short stories? Yeah, yeah. Where? The New Yorker is the best place. And then I published one in the Atlantic this year.

And then collections will tend to sometimes they catch on. They sometimes sell. And what I'm finding out with the subject, because it's all about the short story. And they are like amazing readers of stories, people who really kind of live their life by short stories. So we'll put a story up there. Like this week, we did a toll story thing.

And we get hundreds of comments, and they're so measured and courteous and smart. And then sometimes I'll say, does anybody speak Russian? Yeah, they do. And can you look at this part in the Russian? Are we misreading it? You are, you know, or sometimes I said any neuroscientists out there.

Yes, there are. I mean, it gives me a lot of hope because you can certainly feel that there's not a market for stories. Yeah. And it's not a huge market, but I think the people who are into them are really into them. And they tend to be pretty interesting people. Describe the home you grew up in. It was in a south suburb of Chicago called Oak Forest. I think my dad bought it when he was 22, kind of a track house.

I just remember it as a place of so much fun, really. We had a pretty verbal, funny, extended family, and it kind of doors were always open and people coming in and out. And he worked for a coal company in Chicago, so he was always downtown and come back with some really interesting stories. And, yeah, so it was... If you wanted to drive into Chicago proper, how long would it take? Probably 20 minutes.

And how often would you go into town? Not that often. In high school, we used to go out to the Earl of Old Town. And kind of... I was always trying to catch... John Pryor, Steve Goodman. I thought they'd just be hanging out down there. But not that often.

It was kind of more of a suburban life than me. And tell me about your parents? They're both still alive. They're 88 and doing great. So my dad was in the Air Force, met my mom in Emerald, Texas. They got married at 19 and then moved to Chicago, had me when they were 21. And why did they move to Chicago? That's where he was from.

And so that was just, and so he worked for a coal company. He would go to the landlords and sell them coal, basically. So did that one. when I was a kid. And then when I was in high school, he quit that job and opened some restaurants. So their franchise was called Chicken Unlimited. And so I was his delivery boy. And we just, you know, got my license and started working the next day just driving the chicken van around. And so that was a chicken van. It was a, it was a 77 Chevy van that had first for no reason we could, it had the carpet on the whole inside. It's carpeting. And we had something called a Cress Corps in the back, which is a steam heater.

So you could keep the chicken hot when you were delivered. delivering, had a little stove. So it was just a dream, you know, like just a kind of, I mean, one of the things is as a delivery guy, you got to stand in somebody's house for a couple of minutes, you know, while they were getting the money. I always thought that was interesting because you would be kind of, just have a few seconds to look around and see what kind of family it was, what the vibe was. And you were kind of told that the suburbs were homogeneous, but then as you go into individual

houses, you say, oh wow, is this really, it's a city, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And my mom was just a real sweetheart from Texas. very loving heart, you know. And whenever I would be like in the Catholic Church and they would talk about love and acceptance, I think of her.

Tell me about your relationship to school over the course of your life. I was a real weenie, good Catholic boy, loved Catholicism, love the nuns, pretty good student. So I was really good. And then somehow when I got to high school, I just couldn't be bothered.

I didn't study a lick. Because of what? What else was happening? Music. Yeah. music was happening, weightlifting was happening. Everything seemed really boring. But then, luckily for me, my junior year, there was a great teacher named Sherry Williams was her now, English teacher, and she had a way of teaching novels and stories that I really, it really spoke to me. And then she had

at that point a boyfriend who she married named Joel Limbaum, a geology teacher. And they kind of took an interest in me and basically persuaded me to go to college. And he actually called and got me in. And he literally called the School of Mines in Colorado and said, you won't see it in this kid's record, but he's worth a look. Wow. And so, yeah, and this being the 70s, they went, okay, have him go to summer school for 18 hours, take all the technical stuff. Yeah. And if he gets this grade point, he can come. So I did, I did it.

And I literally had never worked at anything except guitar a little bit in sports. So I went out there. And the funny thing was, I had my transcript and I went out to the School of Mines in Colorado. And I said, basically, you know, I'm George. I'm here for college. We were like, ah, okay, hold on a second. And they took the transcript in the back room. They came and said, okay, you're in.

But that was for engineering because he was a geologist. And I admired him so much that I just thought I'd do it. He did. When did you decide to become a writer? And did you want to do something else before that? Yeah, I think before that, I mean, I think I wanted to be a musician, really. And in fact, I was in a band right before I met this couple. And the guy, he was a really good guitar player.

And he knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody in the Eagles. That was the thing. And he thought he could get us on as the opener for the opener. And so, all right, so that's my career plan. And we practiced for a couple of months. And then I just, then I met these teachers. And I just started out. I had a couple of experiences that made me realize it was kind of full shit.

And that was very helpful. Like I took a classical guitar lesson at this community college in Chicago. And I had kind of, quote unquote, learned this, that capriccio Arabe, that beautiful classical piece was way above my level. But I could sort of play the first part. And so I went into this guy and I played. And I just wanted a mentor so badly, you know, somebody, because I could tell I was adrift. So I played it for him.

And I played it probably the best I ever had. But, you know, I was waiting for him to kind of put the crown on my head. And he said, he leaned away and he said, I'm going to tell you something. He said, if you don't change the way you're living, you're going to be a very unhappy adult. And it just, I mean, it's stung. He's done your guitar player. Yeah, yeah. And he must have seen that I was kind of stung by it.

And then he explained that my tone. Anybody would be stunned by that. Yeah. Based on guitar playing. You're 17, you know, I had to do my best. But it was interesting, because I still think about that guy,

and that was a long time ago. Yeah. And then what he did was he gave me those Segovia scales, you know, it was really slow. And he gave me a metronom setting that was insultingly slow. It was so slow, you know.

Okay, so I started doing it, and sure enough, my tone got better, and I could see that I wasn't a thoughtful player. I was just, you know, doing it fast. And so he did me a favor, but I had a grudge against him,

and I couldn't really continue. But that, so that was one big thing. And then that teacher, Joe Limblin, took me to kind of all Chicago City science fair with kids my own age were doing this stuff. And he was such a sweet guy and he just took me there. And I hadn't done any work, literally, no work. And these kids were building, you know, nuclear power plants and I don't know, everything. You know, we just walked around and he let that sink in, you know, that these are people my age who were applying himself. Yeah.

The thing that I love so much is I get very moved by this because he never. there was not a single touch of judgment, you know. He just let me look at it. And he knew that it was getting in there. Was your reaction to that, I can't do this or I'm never going to do this, or I need to focus more? Yes.

Well, actually, the first reaction was, oh, shit, I haven't done this. Yeah. And they have, you know, what does that say about what I'm doing? And then it wasn't really that I could, but I had to try. That was the feeling like I had.

And so then a lot of my ambition, and I had a lot, It got channeled into not flunking out of engineering school. So I went to this place called the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, which is a... I studied geophysics, so it was all science all the time. So that was deep because I wasn't good at it. I really wasn't good at it. And I worked really hard, which was great for an artist, you know, to learn that effort

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When did you start teaching writing? Years later. So I was writing a little bit there, but I wasn't reading well. I was reading like kind of weird self-help stuff and Khalil Gobron and kind of. So I didn't start teaching until many, many years. I'd been out of the Syracuse program. I was working as an engineer and wrote my first book and had a chance to go teach there for a year. and I sensed correctly that that would be,

it would give me a lot more time to work. What was the first book? It was called Civil Warland and Bad Decline, book of short stories. Wrote it at work, actually. And was it well received? Critically, it didn't sell very much, but it was critically,

had a couple of good reviews that kind of made it. Yeah, and I wrote that one at work. I was just at this engineering job and stealing time here and there. So it was a big, and I was 38, so it wasn't a prodigy, you know. But so that got me a chance to teach at Syracuse for a year,

which then grew into a full-time, It was nice because by that time, we had our two kids and I already had a sort of a life, you know, a tech writer. And so there was a lot of the stuff that I still write about was already in my experience, you know, from being. How do you learn to teach writing? I think it was gradually, you know, first you think the job is to find mistakes and fix them for your value system. That doesn't work. And then slowly, you see what? works, I guess. It must be like, you see, if I do it this way, the kid stiffens up and

leaves and a half, you know, if I do it this way, they lean in and the next draft is more interesting. So it became less and less talking and more listening over the years. Yeah. How long did it take to get good at teaching it? I think I'm still working up, but I would say there was a big jump after five years or so, because then I just got kind of sick of the sound of my voice, harassed. ringing somebody, you know, or coaching somebody. Like if I had a conference with somebody, we were talking about their work, if I could just shut up for the first three minutes,

they would tell me, and they would always identify exactly what I had identified if I gave them enough time. Yeah. Then you're not the person saying there's something, you know, you're not the doctor saying you're sick. You're the doctor saying, oh, you feel that you're sick. And then your advice is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes. But it took a long time because the insecurity of being somebody who, wasn't exactly trained in English, you know, in English education being faced with these. We get like 700 applications and pick six people, so they're great. So early on, I was so intimidated by that that I thought the only way to counter the intimidation is with information, you know. So it's been a sweet part of it is to go, oh, yeah, actually, 98% of the work is being done by the student. Yeah. Yeah. Is that something that rings? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The less my fingers are involved in the process,

the better it's going to be. It's only like in an emergency situation, do I step in? Right, right. You know, if someone's drowning. Right, right. In general, in the best versions, it sort of happens by itself.

And if there's something that I feel when I'm listening, I can share what I'm feeling. But it's never mistakes, or what could be better. It's more like, let's look at this part. Like, this part may not be as good as the rest. Why is that? Or it seems like there's a better way to do this.

Yeah. You know? What about the sonic things? Because there are, and I think there's a corollary in writing, there are things happening off the page in a sense. They're very real, and they're actually what makes great and good different. Yeah.

But with what I do, you just kind of, it's there and you let it stay or you subtract from it. But at some point, you're making decisions on how, what the sonic landscape looks like, right? I try to have it be as whatever they bring. Like there was a time earlier in my career when we would try to make it sound like something that we liked the way it sounded. Right.

And we don't do that anymore. Like the idea of the best snare drum sound is on this album. So if we try to make our snare drum sound like the sound on that album, that's going to be best. Yeah. That is never best. That's my main way years. And that's that thing about, about. Yeah, it's always for what we have, what's the best version of what it is, not trying to make it anything else.

Right. Right. Same. Yeah. I find that with that mindset, you can let it be a lot more things. Yeah. For sure. And it also takes patience because it's not formulaic in any way.

It becomes what it wants to be over time. But if there's any expectation it's going to be good tomorrow or in a week, that's totally out of our control. Right. Right. Scary. And I think that's what a listener feels is that you went to the scary place. And you, you know, I think Tony Morrison, my wife studied with Tony Morrison. At one point, she says something about in the early part of her books.

She's kind of digging out of foundation, and it doesn't control how deep it goes. But deeper it goes, the higher the building. And the reader feels that. How important is setting when you're writing, where the story takes place? For me, not that much. I think that's actually a reflection of a kind of value system I have. I don't really write very well. Like, I had to describe this beautiful place.

I couldn't. It would be kind of, it's so beautiful, you know. So you say you don't have a descriptive style. I don't, really. Okay. Except what happens is, so that means I have to emphasize something else, which is usually action or dialogue, something that happened. Then a lot of times the description will come in just very lightly, almost just like one line of something that sets you in a certain place. So I had a line in a story called Comcom, which the guy's walking into some woods, woods, I don't know anything about trees, you know?

So I just said, well, there's, I don't remember the line, but it's like there's three toilet seats with price tags on them there. So that's setting. I think what I do a lot is I assume that if I say graveyard, you give me a graveyard. And then there can be some individualization of the graveyard. Earlier, you gave an example of Abraham Lincoln is walking over a bridge. He notices something. He looks. And you say, it's a hunter.

You decide it's a hunter. If your first thought is, it's a hunter, is it always a hunter for the rest of the story? Or do you ever say, okay, it's a hunter? you play that scenario out and then you realize, no, you know, it's not a hunter. It's going to be something else. It could. Yeah. You know, it's funny.

Sometimes those ideas, they come in through the window and they trip. Yeah. And it's ever more, it's an idea that tripped and it's got a little, it doesn't quite communicate. So those I definitely will adjust. But in the ideal case like that one, it was a ghost of this guy, a hunter, the idea came up and the words just came right in behind it. And that had a kind of authority that doesn't go away, you know. So there's that Russian writer.

Isaac Babel said something like a good sentence is like you throw the switch once and there it is, you know, whereas a less good sentence is you're kind of deciding and you're thinking and you're conceptualizing and it kind of comes up a lumpy. But for me, there's a moment where the, you asked earlier about how the words look on the page and I think that is important. Sometimes the image or the thought and the sentence wrapping come just the same moment and that has authority. And authority in that sense. it's also respect for the reader somehow, and it's the glue that pulls them in.

So there are times when that just happens and you go, just leave it along, you know. And other times you have to work towards it, I think, a little bit. And when it happens, you didn't decide that it happens. It happened. It just happened. Yeah, yeah. But it's almost like two trains coming to the station at once,

you know, the idea and the sentence and boom, they're just there. And then I can go through hundreds of drafts, and that sentence just stays there because it's authentic, you know. Yeah. Would your creative writing class be similar to other creative writing classes? I think it's that workshop model, so it's pretty similar. And the only thing that I think it's not just me, but a lot of people are doing now is kind of critiquing that method. Because there's a little bit of a, I mean, it's an economic construct that they came up within the 60s to get writers and readers paid, you know.

And, you know, you think about, like, the way we're talking about this, if there were seven people here and we're talking about Fred's story, that discourse is always. beneath the level of mystery. You know, you're articulating. So you're, you know, so it's a little bit good to be suspicious of the form itself. So we do a lot of talking about how are we doing as a group,

other things we're missing. Something I've done lately is to say, let's not go longer than we have to because that's one thing in those kind of meetings is you got an hour and a half. So you do all the essential work in 400 minutes and then suddenly you're talking about the color scheme or something that's not,

it's more content. So I think I just try to be a little wary of the, how far below the activity, the articulation falls. You know, like, because I mean, I'm sure if you're having a session that's really like up here and then someone's, oh, that was good. And you start yapping about it. Somehow it's not. I think it's okay to talk about it. Yeah.

But at the same time, like if you just had your peak sexual experience, you could talk about it. And maybe you would like to, but it's not the same. Yeah. Are there any accepted rules of writing that it would be better not to learn? I think don't worry about plot. That is a word that gives people a lot of connoptions. Plot. Avoid plot. Or the word plot.

You're still going to have plot. I mean, a lot of the ways that we talk about writing are post-writing descriptions of things that happened that were magical, and now we're going to name them. Yeah. So that's okay. And that's criticism. And it's important. But then when you think about the moment that you did it, I'm not ever thinking about

plot or theme or character. That's not how it works. So you do a student, a disservice if you say, well, how's your plot? You know, who could do that? So it's interesting because the one thing that might be different in my class is I really want to talk about, as you did in your book so beautifully, what does it feel like? In the moment of creation, what's your mind doing? And what can we do to nurture that state? What are the things that pack at it and take us down from that state?

Hard to talk about. But when you, with writing, it's nice because you have the text. So in editing it, you can sort of say, if six people are editing a text and everybody loves page three, then you can say to the writer, think about where were you, you know, what was going on when you wrote that? That's probably a good state for you, you know, that kind of thing. I think about a telescope. Like there's the critical end of the telescope, which describes and elucidates and analyzes. And that's really useful. And it can help the creative, but the other side of telescope is something much more.

mysterious. Are you superstitious? No, no. I got rid of that because that first book I wrote at work. So there was like, there was no time for, I couldn't design the ideal writing moment. So I just like forget it. Are you superstitious about anything in life? I'm OCD, which is, which is kind of similar. But no, I'm not. Describe the OCD. It's kind of mostly, in the positive sense, it's rewriting. with no limit. In the negative sense, it's kind of a self-suspition, I guess, which is very close to being a good editor, but not quite. Are you a perfectionist? Yes, yes. But I think also, honestly, I would say maybe from Buddhism, I'd become a merciful perfectionist, which is to say,

perfect really is the enemy of good. So pretend they'd be a perfectionist until you start being a pain in the ass and stop, because you're going to drive yourself into the ditch. Because I published late. I had a real palpable period where I was like, okay, all your life you thought you're going to be a writer, it looks like you're not. Are you okay with that? And so once I got going, I was like, okay, somehow I just said, I'm not going to let neurosis get in the way of productivity. Can we agree on that? And for once in my life, I said, I agree with myself. Yeah, we can't. So I don't tend to be superstitious or like if I have a book that's successful, I have about two days of going, oh, no, you peaked. And I'm like, that's so big.

Don't do that. That's selfish, and it's kind of, it's contradictory to the experience you had while you were writing it, which is you, the self went away. Yes. So don't be all babish about that. This, you've got some gifts to keep giving. So in many, many ways, there's a kind of a, I would say for me, fairly high functioning productivity mind that says, if that's going to get us in the weeds, let's not do that. Yeah. You know, yeah. Are you OCD outside of your work? A little bit. Probably not clinically, but. In what ways might it show up in a lot? Mostly just I'll go to a party and say something and go, oh my God, what did I say? You know, or feel negative about things that I've said or done that in the light of day weren't much. So I think that's a form of ego, actually, and imperfectionism, you know. I couldn't possibly get a guy who says something stupid at a party. That would, you know. Is Parton Swim in the Pond where you're commenting on a section of Tolstoy and you say the writing leaves you with envy and resentment? Yeah.

Was that sarcastic? No. Tell me about that. You know, that's actually receding a little bit as I get older. When I was young, it killed me when somebody was so good. Really? Yeah. Yeah, it was very egotistical.

I just wanted to be the only good one. I think that was, yeah. Are you competitive in life? Yes, although less and less. I think at that point, I hadn't done anything. I see. So I just wanted to be the best at this thing I'd never tried. And then as you get into it, it's a de-ego-fine practice.

And so you go, well, it doesn't matter if I did it. It matters that it got done. Yes. And now, of course, that comes and goes. And when you're done, you're like, I did it. But no, for sure, I think, I read Tolstoy now. I'm like, God. But for the first time in my life, I'm like, yeah, he's great.

He's greater than you'll ever be. And that's okay. But when I was younger, that really got under my skin somehow, you know. But the more I did it, the less that feeling was. Do you pray? Meditate, which is, yeah, very similar. Yeah. And how do you meditate?

Well, lately not enough, but we have practices that are called Pooja. They're kind of, they're actually very similar, to a Catholic Mass, so they're kind of guided visualizations with chanting. And you just... Do you listen to something or no? Yes, I do because I don't... It's in Sanskrit, and so I... There's a text, and then there's a tape or a recording.

And is it melodic? Is it chanting? It's kind of melodic, but in kind of pentonic, you know, it's like it's not wildly melodic, but it's... Would you say it's hypnotic? Not really, no, no. I don't know how... Actually, you know, I had a friend who was a really serious practitioner, and he said,

well, I would describe you as a fellow traveler. You know, and I talk too much about it and know too little. But for me, it seems like it's really similar to the Catholic Mass, which was, as I experienced it, it was a, you were imagining making offerings. You were imagining getting blessings. Yes. And somehow the effect of that when I was doing it more was that a certain kind of ambient negative part of my mind that I thought was me would kind of just go quiet.

And then I said, oh, look, there's something else there, you know. So it was like a de-identification process. And then in the absence of that strong identification with self, something else would come up that was, you know, very positive. If it wasn't for your time in the church, would you be a different person today? Oh, yes. I think the sacraments and it's just,

it's the first time that you realized your everyday mind isn't the only. Yeah. And so you go there every week to just get that reminder every week. And I had some... It's like practice. Yeah. Like any sitting practice, same. Exactly.

Because it's funny how quickly you just go back to your own, right yourself. But then the ghosts, you know, you see that. Were you a spiritual young fellow? Were you... I learned to meditate when I was 14. Wow. And I was always interested in metaphysical things before that, but I didn't have a form to practice.

And then when I learned to meditate, it took over. And it was a real miracle that I got to learn because no one in my family did it, no one I knew did it. It just worked out. And what tradition are you? I learned TM at that time. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing.

I mean, I just remember the first time I was out 40 and we had our kids and I, I didn't have a technique, but I was trying. I was trying to make my thought, stop. That was the goal. Noticing that little split second between thought and speech suddenly. Just, oh, what a blessing when you have little kids. You know, you can have an urge to correct and go, that's incredible. We're the need to say how you think it is. Yeah.

Right. Because it cares. You cares. And if you don't say it, the moment goes by. Yeah. And what's something that you don't believe now that you believed when you were younger? So many. Well, it's kind of what we were just talking about.

When I was younger, I came from Chicago, kind of working class, had a little macho periods. And I think I was much more a believer that one did great. things one must you asserted yourself by talking and acting and and that thankfully has started to fade you know and one of the things about having a public life is that that that that delusion gets reenlivened sometimes a lot of attention you're like oh but I really like the fact that if I looked at myself at 18 I just wanted to be noticed and wanted to be great as something and it was all me me me me and thankfully it's kind of a little more like you can

sort of watch the river go by and the river still goes by and you don't have to the river doesn't care that you're watching it, you know, or that you're talking about it. But so in writing, it's interesting because then it purifies the activity to where maybe even 10 years ago I was on a kind of a, I wanted to write my great book. And then now I'm kind of like, well, yeah, I do, but only to see if it can be done, you know, because it's that feeling of something secret than flowing out through process and being real. I love that.

And whether it's credited or not or whether I did it or not, I don't care as much. I would actually like to just finish that one and do the next one. Tell me something you've changed your mind about recently. Well, it would have to do with, we have a dog at home who's sick.

And I can feel my sense of myself as being a flawless person or a flawless caregiver giving way. And to something like, what, it's hard. You know, she's old. You're going to make mistakes, you know? And so that, I mean, that's an ongoing thing. But on the good days, I feel like,

I'm such a great owner, such a loving, compassionate person. And then on the bad days, I'm like, oh, you're fucking everything up. And I'm a little more comfortable with that flux now. Like, oh, yeah, so whoever you are, you're not exclusively either one of those two things. And then noticing the way that my sort of day-to-day pleasure has to do with identifying with

the first one and subduing the second one. And so I'm trying, I'm thinking, I wonder what would be like if I really was really free of ego and really could say that guy's going through a hard time or that guy's doing a good job instead of, you know, denying the difficult valences. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I've changed my mind about, I guess,

well, one, thinking of myself as someone who never fucks out, but two, with that that might be, you know, okay. Yeah, yeah. In general, would you say you're hard on yourself? Yes, yeah, except when I'm way too easy. But yeah, I think I'm pretty hard on myself. And would you say you're equally hard on other people or no? It's only you.

In fact, I want to think I sometimes will do if I get myself in a spiral is go, okay, if this was your friend, what would you say? Yeah, what would you say? Beautiful. But I think, you know, my students, I talk about this, that whatever manifests in yourself, I mean, naturally we judge it, but we can also use it. So for me, like, I'm very hard on myself, which in edit. is a great blessing. Yeah. I don't know how I would do it otherwise.

So in that arena, I'm going to accept it. Then when you get into some other area, can you be a little bit easier? And actually you can. You know, you can. Yeah. Let me ask you something at this point, and this is relevant to my experience, when you get up in the morning and you're thinking about work, what's motivating you now at this point in your life?

Just whatever is on the schedule for that day. I don't think past. It just... Would you describe yourself as ambitious still, or ambitious ever, or is that a word that doesn't? I want to do good things. I feel like to live up to my purpose,

there's work to do. I love that. Yeah. Ambitious is not the word I would use, though. Ambitious would be, what am I going to do to make the outcome happen? And that's not what it is.

Right. When you look at, let's say, a day, a day in the studio or whatever you're doing. Yeah. What are the pleasures? What are the peak pleasures? Yeah. When nothing sounds good and then all of a sudden it comes together, it's the most exciting

feeling. And you know that when it happens. Feel it. Everybody feels it. Yeah. It's very exciting feelings. It's probably the reason to continue doing it. The feeling of nothing's happening, and then all of a sudden something's happening, that

moment of spark of creation. Right. It's so exciting. Yeah. Really. It's like magic. And you're having it with other people, which is beautiful. Not always. Sometimes I can be working on an idea myself. Right. And it just comes together.

Right. Right. But most often it's with other people. I call that in the story. It's when the face comes out of the stone. It's just been some words and suddenly it's an actual, wow. Okay, so I can answer this question. What makes music good? And I can say presence, authenticity, but, but is there a stratum of descriptors above that that's more...

Authenticity is a big part of it because when you hear it, you hear the artist's belief in what they're doing. It doesn't have to be true what they're doing. It has nothing to do with truth. It has to do with their truth. Right. If someone is spilling their guts about something you don't agree with, it's still moving to us. It's that it's someone being human and sharing being human, what that feels like.

It could be good or bad. Okay. So David Foster Wallace used to talk about, he said with young writers, there's some people who think if they're feeling it while they're writing it, it's good writing. And then the more advanced idea is, well, you could use that feeling, but it has to convey feeling to the reader. In other words, if I just feel like I'm in a, I'm stoned and I'm typing, doesn't necessarily communicate to you. So let's say that somebody's playing a guitar soul. I mean, presumably they could be thinking about something totally different,

and yet authenticity is still there. So I can understand the songwriter emoting authentically and being in the moment. But say for a mix or for an instrumentalist, why was one solo cell and the other one doesn't? It's our cell or move you. Yeah. And I know it's kind of, you know when you see it, but...

Yeah. I don't think it's an answerable question. That said, I now think, and this is a new thought, it might have more to do with rhythm than anything else. There was a time I would have thought, well, it could be the melody, could be the tone, could be the context. I'm feeling more and more,

the internal rhythmic feel is maybe the most important thing of any. Now, that's interesting. Does that have a relation to presence? Because in other words, if I'm kind of a... I don't know if it does. Maybe something else. Presence is another one of the things that when you feel it, you know it.

It's hard to say what it is. Yeah. But you can feel it. I would describe presence as someone truly inhabiting whatever the thing is. Right. as if who they are is no longer around and just this thing is appearing. Right. I would call presence like God steps in.

Yeah. So that has nothing to do necessarily with the meaning of the song. It just has to the moment of it. Yeah. Yeah. Now that's beautiful. I love that. God steps in.

And like in writing terms, there is a corollary because if I'm present as a person, then, you know, with that moment we talk about where, the trains come in together. If I'm on the track going, no, no, no, so, you know, even a little bit, it impacts the feeling, which I wonder if that has something to do with this rhythmic idea. Like if somebody is fully... If someone's thinking about it, it won't be good. Right.

It can't be. Right. The best version is they're gone. Yeah. And then only when they get to hear it back, do they understand what happened? Transcendent experience. Yes. But see, for me, that's interesting.

The transcendent, if I would have heard that, a few years ago, I would have thought, oh, you're just like in some crazy mystical state. But in writing, it's not at all. It's just, you just step out of the room for a second and then you're back, you know? You know you're not in control of it happening. You can certainly get in the way of it happening,

but you can't make it happen. Right, right. You just have to wait. Yeah. Yeah. It won't happen if you're not participating. Right. You can't just think it'll happen sometime.

You have to show up, but you can't make it happen. And in writing, that's right. And in writing, one of the ways you make it happen is to be a little conceptual. You're kind of going, oh, this is the story about patriarchy. And then at some point, your mind goes, step back. Yeah. It's incredible. I think that's where it kind of brushes up against the meditative,

because in a given writing hour, you're doing all the things wrong and all the things right. And it's kind of, I can be working and just literally be gone, do something and go, oh, the New Yorker's going to love that. I'm back. So, you know. Do you write for one hours? No, no, no. I write for whatever I can.

What's your schedule or is there one? It's kind of loose. I mean, on a perfect day, I would just get up and walk the dog and come up and just spend five or six hours. But there's kind of an inner rhythm, like if I have a hard copy, marking it up, and then put it in once, read it again, and do that about three times. and then at some point I start to make mistakes. I can tell I'm just not sharpness in there, so just quit.

But I can go easy four or five hours. When you're not working, do you ever have an idea and make a note? Yes. How often? I'm not too often. When I was younger, I'd always be thinking about it and then have an idea, which is different than if the idea just comes, I find. So I don't, I tend to just, if an idea comes to me out of nowhere,

there would be a split-second reaction, like, oh, yeah, then I'll do it. But there's a slight degradation of that, which is like, it's a little more of a know-it-all feeling like, here's what you should do, you know. And if that comes to me, I know it's not going to work because it's, you know, it's almost like I think certain ideas come purely out of the subconscious. Then when you go to put it in, it just folds in perfectly.

And others are like, put me in, and it doesn't, the surface doesn't want it in there, you know. So I kind of learned a little bit to be really skeptical. Same with dreams. Like most dreams aren't stories. Do you write your dreams? No, unless it's a good one. Yeah.

But I had the thing, one time, after that Lincoln and the Bardo came out, I just had a tour and I was so happy, but also a little bit anxious about the next thing. And I had a dream. And in the dream, I could see the second book. It was just a huge book and everything. And I woke up and I thought, I should write this down. No, I'll just write down the title. That'll be enough.

And the title was Custer in the Bardo. I was like, fun. That didn't work out. But, yeah. Do you know that writer, Juno Dias? He's really good. And he had a first book of stories that was. It was really beautiful.

And he had a dream one night of the eight stories in the book, and they were all color-coded. Different sections were color-coded. Wow. And he understood that, I don't remember, like, all the purple stuff could be cut. And he went in and took it out. Yeah, that was like really bad stuff. Does your knowledge of past writers shape your work? Yes.

How? Probably, well, these days just, it's like I read Gogol, and I think, oh, God, I love this about that. Let's try to get in that party a little bit. Just just like that, just almost like they're up on this high level. Would you say inspired by? Yeah, or, you know, I think a lot about permission giving. Like I read Gogol and his shit, it's so crazy, really, you know, and it just makes me think, okay, so you can do that. You can go there. But honestly, the last couple of years, I'm kind of like, I read them just to be kind of reminded that greatness exists and go, okay, I can't go there in that flavor, but I can go there in my flavor.

So I hope I can't, you know, just like that. Regarding Tolstoy, you said, after a series of fact statements, simple opinion stated in the same way has more credibility. Is that a usable trick? Or is it just something you noticed in the writing? I think it's true because if, okay, so in fiction, you know that I'm making it up. Yeah.

And so if I say something really high concept and personal, you're going to go, oh, maybe, but that's your opinion. But if I described the light on the table very well, and I describe three or four other things that are very familiar to you, then you're kind of sitting over here with me. Yeah. You know, but Tulsa also, he would be incredibly objective about even psychological states.

You know, he was so good at it that it landed in the same register as a description of a horse. So, you know. And even when he would kind of cross over into opinion, he does it in the same syntagical thing. So it's a little tricky. he can fool you a little bit with that, you know. And do you think he knew what he was doing or no?

I think he was a person with a lot of authority, a lot of confidence. So whatever he said, he said it in a simple objective sentence because he knew it was true, including God and everything. So I think he, I mean, when you read descriptions of him, people really were, like, taken by his charisma and his certainty. So I think he, but the thing on him that's amazing is he can do that in one character and then he can run around to you other side. the table and do it from another character's point of view too. And they both sound equally certain

and equally real. So I think that's what makes him so amazing. He's God going into your head and accepting everything he finds and describing it and these precise sentences. Then he comes over here in mine. He does the same thing. And then he just lets it sit there, you know, and you're kind of like, what's true? And he said, I'm God. It's all, it's all true. On some level would you say you're all of the characters in your stories? Yeah. I mean, you could understand the story as just an argument objectified. You know, you have a story that takes up this topic and you let a bunch of people applying on it, but they're all coming from you. And I think what I'm starting to think now is that the highest level of that craft is, like I just described it, to let all those voices come out,

calibrate the arguments so all of them are substantial. Instead of when you're younger, you want to put your finger on the scale and say, this is my belief. Yeah. But the Chekhov and that both are gooseberries, he just, is happening as good or bad. Yeah. You have to believe what you're writing. You have to believe in it from the point of view of the person who's saying it. Yeah. They have to believe it. They have to believe it.

And you have to really get on their team and let them believe it and articulate it in a way that's genuine to them. And that's, I mean, it's tricky because it's stagecraft. I mean, if I'm trying to be a Trump supporter, I can get pretty far there. But then there's a little bit of mystery. And so at that point, you can make some mistakes. You can make somebody more sympathetic than they should be. You can make them less sympathetic. You can give them a reason that isn't authentic.

So it's tricky work, you know, that inhabiting other people. But I think to go back to the Charlie Brown thing, I mean, if I put six people around the table, none of them are real. They're all emanations of me. And what we're doing is not trying to make a catalog of real people. We're trying to get some energy going. You know, that's – I think sometimes the story is like a board. and it controls light, you know, so you're just adjusting the things to make the most light come off of the work of art. Yeah.

What does it mean? I don't know, but that's the brightest I can make it. Have you ever written anything and come to realize it means something different than you thought it meant? That's actually the goal, I think. Or maybe to find out there are overtones that you didn't know what were going to come out, you know. If you write something and everyone who thinks it means the same thing, have you succeeded or failed? You know, Christmas Carol, everybody knows that. that means and they're right, you know.

So I think it can go either way. In my personal thing, I'm trying to get more where there's less agreement, because my story sometimes will be, you know where you stand, you know, and it happens, you know. And this new book I just wrote, it's interesting, it's giving off

complicated light, which I was happy about. Yeah, it sounds more honest, like, yeah, it's complicated. It's like Czechos said, work of art doesn't have to solve a problem, it just has to formulate it correctly. When you finish a piece, do you know where the pops are? Like in a six-minute piece, do you know where the listener's going to go?

Yeah. I just know where I feel it, and I assume they'll feel it in the same places. But if they don't, or if they feel it somewhere else, nobody's wrong. Right, right. It is what it is. The only thing I have to go on is how I feel. That's my only metric. Right.

Yeah. But what I've, I think I believe this is that if I, so if I'm reading my work, let's see it's revising my own piece. I read something happens on page five. I kind of assume that you're going to feel that too. And that's part of that communication thing. Like if I, if my heart rose at this place, I think my imaginary reader's heart is going to write it, or rise at that place. Yeah. That's the contract, I think, I have to, I have to have that idea.

But in practice, it's just watching myself, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't know. You can't know. You can't know. What do you think it was about Khalil Gibram that spoke to you when you were younger? Well, I think at that age I had a real desire to know something that nobody else knew. And he seemed to know that he seemed to be that guy, you know. And also my friends wouldn't have liked him.

So there was a little bit of elitism. He felt more like it was yours? That didn't really. But I just, I liked that he would seem to be speaking about something that wasn't just quotidian news. Yeah. And at that age, I really was a kid who wanted wisdom. I wanted, I was looking around for, so like, Zan in the Outer motorcycle maintenance, and then later in Rand, you know, that was big for me. So I wanted, I thought that the purpose of literature was to tell you how to live.

And Leo Lebron seemed to be, to be doing that. But I hadn't developed any ability to see what things felt like to me and then gauge it work by that. I was all just, well, that sounds really big, you know, big. And if I, if I am a Cleo Gabronite, nobody can touch me because I know more than. everyone else. Funny you say that because I made a note in your teaching. There's a great deal of wisdom. I use the word specifically.

It's bigger than information. Where do you think the wisdom you hold comes from? I don't know that I really. It's there. I'm telling you it's there because I'm reading it. I'll accept it. I think it comes from a kind of trial and error. So to have read as many stories I've read,

especially student stories and go, okay, take your knowing mind down a notch and just listen, see what's actually happening there. Okay. And after 20, 30 years of that, you do kind of know some things conditionally. So I think to offer information conditionally is kind of like wisdom. You know, so if I say that sentence is no good, that's too certain. If I say, it feels to me as if that sentence goes hazy at the end, that's more like wisdom because I'm not sure.

You know, that... I feel like I'm talking more about the actual content, not the writing. So the content of a story or content of the Russian book? The Russian book, as an example. Well, that has to do with 20 years of teaching those stories because you can have a class in 1992 that goes off the rails and it's no good. 1994, you correct it. And then you start noticing that every time we talk about that story,

these are the issues that come up. Yeah. So you honor that and think. And then, yeah, so it's anticipatory, I think, a little bit. I know that I've had, you know, eight groups of really brilliant kids. I've read that Turganya's story and gone, ugh, God, you know. So then part of your approach is say, I know what you think. You think it's boring.

And then maybe that feels like wisdom of some kind. But I mean, I'm sure, you know, for you, like you must have understanding of this stuff that is. Yeah, I understand. I don't know where it comes from. But I feel it. Yeah. Yeah. I think for me, it's a bit of, okay, so it is, it's repetition,

but it's also trusting, it sounds weird, but it's trusting other people. So I've had all those generations of students. Yeah. They come in, they come and they come in. They react authentically to these pieces. So there's a crosser. If you're a bad teacher, you go, well, these students reacted correctly and these reacted incorrectly.

And I only want to talk about the ones who react. If you're a good teacher, you go, huh, there's a range. range of reactions. Okay, let's lean into that. And then with years, you start to see that that's a reliable thing. And it has something to do with that story. And then you can track that down. So I think it's, I mean, I'm glad you feel the way. I don't, I don't feel particularly wise, but I do know I used to feel wiser. And I used to be much more free with my wisdom. Well, I think now you're getting wiser. Yeah. Yeah. I'm saying less. Because you get to see these really brilliant young writers year after year, would you say there's some part of it that they're mostly good at and some part of it that they're mostly not good at?

Or is it always case by case? Yeah. In new writers. Not that I can discern, but there's a trend in all writers. Yes. Which is we all think we don't know the secret and we're faking it. And all our writing lives, we've been faking it better than most, but we are faking it. And so because of that, we're avoiding certain things, whether it's content or voice or something.

We're avoiding something. So for me, the job is to just say the minute the student comes in, I don't say it, but I know you think you're not good enough. Yeah. Okay. Now let's find out what flavor you think you're not good enough. And then I'm going to do some judo, and I'm going to show you that the thing you aren't good at is actually a unity with the thing you're not good enough. aren't good at is actually a unity with the thing you're good at. And the only problem is you're denying so energetically the thing you're not good enough that you're stifling yourself.

I mean, practically what that means is I'm quiet long enough for you to tell me what's bothering you about your story. And then I say, oh yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I think everybody has that kind of fear. Yeah. You're describing a psychological state, and I was guessing you were going to talk about something technical about writing. Is there anything, non-no, the how they're thinking about what they're doing, but what they're actually doing, what's on the page? Yes. I mean, well, sometimes there's, there's first order imitation. They're imitating somebody you can see it. They're avoiding, like we talked about earlier, sometimes the story wants to go here, but for some reason, usually it's an intellectual reason. They don't want to go there.

And also, what I find with my students is sometimes they are really afraid of being corny. and so at a moment, which is actually going to be an emotional moment, they're afraid of being schmaltzy, and so they take it off into some other areas. So as an older person, you can kind of go, I love that moment. That was so moving. And then I think you kind of got distracted from it, and they'll go, yeah, yeah. So it's almost like maybe the wisdom has to do with seeing that pattern over and over again. Yeah.

Someone who has come to literature because it has all the stuff in it, all the feelings, but they're a little afraid of being sentimental. So they veer away from that. And you just gently saying, oh, no, actually, that's okay. That's what we do, you know. So I can sort of, I would say I can see somebody before they do a little bit and go, oh, okay, I get this. And then, Dan, you can skillfully, I'm sure, I mean, it sounds like exactly what you were talking about earlier. You can skillfully move it to the point where they can discover it from themselves and then you bless it.

And that's it. I mean, it is technical. Yeah. I think what it has to do is having confidence. In the old days, I think I felt students didn't know how to be emotionally in touch, and I had to tell them how to do it. And now I'm just like, of course they know how to do that. They just haven't brought it into this realm yet.

Yeah. So the confidence that I know that you're a fully emotionally formed person. Now your art is impeding you a little bit, but that's okay. That's normal, you know. Then I think they feel that confidence that, you know, of course you can get there, you know. Would you say sometimes you have the confidence for them that they don't have for themselves? Yeah, I think so.

And sometimes I even will be a little overconfident just so they can, just to lure them out a little bit. I think we share that. Yeah. That's part of the, right, the mentoring, really. I think so. Because I know from my own experience, if I, this is sort of pathetic, but if I go on tour and I get a bad review, I'm flinchy.

If I go on tour, I get a good review, I'm confident, you know. What is on tour? It just, it means like book tour, you know, on book tour. And what does that look like? It looks like 18 cities and 20 days, just going to a little. a bookstore and then usually these days it's a Q&A it's like this we just sit in front of people doing Q&A sign books go to a hotel go to the next place do you enjoy it yeah I actually love it I maybe enjoy it a little too much but I love the meeting the people because then you're like

if you have any temptation to project negatively about your audience or fearfully yeah that washes it all the way they're so nice would you say most of the people in all the different places you go are relatively the same or is it different area by area well they tend to be left and they tend to be literary. I don't get a lot of people across the political spectrum, I don't think. But, I mean, in general, they're really nice. I mean, really open to ideas and very, and for me, that's kind of built up over the years.

So it's a very welcoming... And they're coming there because they like you. Otherwise, they wouldn't come. Yeah. Sometimes before I start something, I have to say that. Like, they came here, you know. They're doing it. When you write something funny, do you laugh out loud?

The first time. and then usually never again just kind of go okay but that got a laugh back in 1990 so you can leave it in there yeah yeah what's your expectation when you sit to write not much actually I mean I think to improve something somewhere but more I'm looking at how well I'm reading that day start something you know how well am I reading am I getting it do you equate how well you're reading it to how well you can write yes in other words if I can if I'm reading it Well, I'm correcting well. I see.

Because then I'm reading it the way you'll read it. Yeah, and if I'm a little out of touch with it, then I'm, it's almost like driving a little bit blind, you know. How are speaking and writing the same and how are they different? Well, writing is speaking over and over. You know, I can sometimes blurt out something kind of good, but if I talk for 10 minutes, it'll just be one little thing.

Yeah. I know a lot of people think, you know, one of the things that young writers are obsessed with is finding their voice. And I really was, too. And we always think it's voices, it's whatever you blurt out. But what I love is the idea that voice is achievable by subtraction. You know, you can have a page of mediocre writing, and by lining it out, you can make it really unique just by cutting.

You think if you have some mediocre writing and two different people edit it, you'll get two very different things? I think it's a good. It's a good editor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And might both of them be good?

Sure. And in fact, I think, I mean, really, you can be both people. So Monday, you can edit it in a certain flavor. And Tuesday, you come back and add a different flavor. And my theory is that over time, that model stabilizes, and you're getting the benefit of all your people. You know, yourself, goutchy, yourself funny,

yourself skeptical, yourself. That's a really exciting idea. Yeah. But when you're young, it's scary, because it doesn't work that way. You just keep changing it. But then over time, now, I can kind of like, let whoever's here today come and work,

and they won't hurt it. And tomorrow we'll do something else to it. And in the end, it starts to kind of lock in. How different are you from day to day? Not that different, but it's almost like around the edges. There are certain, like I'll go by a line 97 times, and the 98th time I'll find the joke. Like, oh, of course, boom. I guess like if you were in this yard looking for treasure, you just look and look and look and look.

And most days you don't find anything. And one day you find something, you know. So that's where the iteration comes in. And when you're looking for treasure, is it something that's already there usually? No, it's a reaction moment. There's a little something that I didn't see and then you react to it. So it's the new thing that you're adding. Usually, yeah.

Or just as valuable, you'll have a phrase, a three-beat phrase, and you go, that middle section is redundant, cut it out. And the two-beat phrase is much better. And the third is implied, didn't you have to say it. And then that can sometimes teach you the voice of the whole piece once you find one line that sounds, the right way, then you're like, okay, the rest of you guys have to respond to this in some way. Is there anything that can't be put into words? Sure, everything. So then what do you do?

You just try your, you know, it's just a fun game we're playing together. You know I can't put everything in words that's important. I know I can't. But let me try. And then we get sort of a simulation of that. Tell me about causation in fiction. I believe in it. It's just, how does it work?

I think it works. I think it's another fancy word. And what it really means is when I read you four lines, it changes your location. And now you're ready to receive something. And I'm alertly looking at you to see where I put you. And then I do the next thing. That's causation. And on a larger scale, if the first section of a story is, you know, Jerry had been in love for 50 years and never doubted his love.

You're like, all right. Now what? Yeah, something has to respond to that. So causality really is just the parts of the story being an alert communication with each other, that this part of the story has done something. It's clarified itself and it to do something to you as a reader. And as a writer, I can't make the next section as if this hadn't happened. But as we said earlier, that could be quite complicated, but it has to take it into account in some way.

Does the writer need to have something to say? Everyone does, I think. But also, it's not, I think a story isn't what you say. it's how you say it. So if you have a method of saying something, that's it. So I think everyone has something to say, but I wouldn't want to hear it.

I don't want to hear what I have to say. Because I hear that every day. But when you're writing, you're doing something else. You're making an object that gives off energy or something. Are there any basic rules about writing, like shorter sentences or better than longer sentences? The only thing that I honor in my work is that there's a kind of a hierarchy of complication.

So I always want to start with the simple. So first person, present tense, continuous time, one character. That's the first. Just because it's just like it's classic. It's grounding? It's grounding and it's simple and there's no tricks. Then at some point if the story says, you know what, this really shouldn't be first person. You feel obstructed.

Okay. Okay. It's a third person story, one character continuous time. Draft 15, you need a second voice here. Do I really? I don't think I do. Okay. Have another couple of weeks.

then you go, oh, actually, I do need a second voice. So in other words, you only go up the chain of complexity as the story demands it. I'd say that's something I've internalized. I mean, I don't like slop. Like if somebody is making a mistake and they don't know it, I don't like that so much and just in syntax and stuff. But other than that, I think it's, you know, since the story is mostly language responding to language,

you can do anything. I had a kid one time, one of my students, he was analyzing the metamorphosis by Kafka. And his essay, the first sentence, was upon Peru. moving this work of literature, I felt myself at a distinct tilt. I'm like, wow. So I put that in a story. I started writing around that. You know, it generated a whole story with really fucked up syntax. So really, there aren't any rules, except I think you have to be aware of what you're doing. Are you ever confused by strong emotions that come up when you're reading and not understand them?

Yes, but not in a troubling way. I just taught a story called a fabulous animal by this writer, Samantha Schoble, and it's so good. And I got to the end and I couldn't have said what I was feeling except the kind of gratitude, like, wow, you picked me up and lifted me and you never let me down until the very end. Then the analyzing is to go back and go, all right, why? Well, also, where? Where did that things happen? Where were my expectations fulfilled and subverted in that cool way? And then at the very end, after that, you can go, okay, now, what does this mean? Yes, I think that confusion is, in a good work of art, I think you feel a lot. and you don't know why, then maybe if you want to, you can go back and kind of try to suss it out.

But I think the roller coaster designer is the best metaphor. You know, you get off the thing and you're not exactly analyzing it. You're just feeling it. You just had the experience. Maybe you want to go on it again. And if you want it to, you could sit, you know, with some paper and go, oh, this is why. But so the trick is you, as a storywriter, you're trying to make that magical thing happen and not be reductive for a few minutes. is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetrogrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

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