The One You Feed - George Saunders on Writing and Transformation

Episode Date: May 18, 2021

George Saunders is the author of eleven books including, Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2013 (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short story collection). He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. George also teaches in the Creative Writing Program at  Syracuse University.In this episode, Eric and George discuss his book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Registration for the Spiritual Habits Group Program is open now! Visit spiritualhabits.net to learn more about how to bring forth real transformation in your life!  In This Interview, George Saunders and I discuss Writing and Transformation and…His book, A Swim in a Pond in the RainThat we are not powerless to decide what kind of person we’ll becomeSome key Cognitive Distortions from which we all sufferThe Darwinian Confusions that we haveLiving with the Ego while also renouncing the EgoThe question of can people change and if so, how?How and why small adjustments do matter in the grand scheme of thingsThe exponential impact of setting an intentionThe way he maintains a beginners mind amidst repetitionThe “urgent patience” he’s cultivated within himselfThe “cousins” of meditationValuing and blessing our own reactions to what we readHow to know when we should trust ourselvesGeorge Saunders Links:George’s WebsiteFacebookTwitterBiOptimizers: Just 2 capsules of their Magnesium Breakthrough taken before bed gives you all 7 forms of magnesium so that you sleep better at night. Go to www.magbreakthrough.com/wolf and use the promo code WOLF10 at checkout to save 10%.Skillshare is an online learning community that helps you get better on your creative journey. They have thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people. Sign up via www.skillshare.com/feed and you’ll get a FREE trial of Skillshare premium membership.If you enjoyed this conversation with George Saunders on Writing and Transformation, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Improvising in Life with Stephen NachmanovitchTodd HenrySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In every moment, the mind is asking you what you want it to do. And if you say, you know, let's neurotically obsess about all the ways in which we've been shortchanged in life, then the mind is happy to do that. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.

We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor what's in the museum of failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. and love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability,

and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that will resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go-to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections.

Tune in and join in the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is George Saunders, the author of nine books, including 10th of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize for the best work of fiction in English. He was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. Today, George and Eric discuss his book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,

in which four Russians give a master class on writing, reading, and life. Hi, George. Welcome to the show. Nice to be here, Eric. Thanks for having me. It is a real pleasure to have you on. I'm such a big fan of your writing, and we'll be talking about your latest book, which is called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, in which four Russians give a masterclass on writing, reading, and life. But before we do that, we'll start the way we always do with a parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One's a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it. And he looks up at his grandfather. He says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, that's a beautiful one. You know, I'm just reading this book called Livewired about the brain, and it literally proves the truth of that parable. It says that whatever you do with your body and your mind during the day, the brain then remakes itself to honor those

things or to enable those things. So, you know, I have some experience with different meditation practices, and I think what you're doing there is you're sort of artificially summoning up a positive state of mind, and then I think the brain takes the cue from that, and then it reforms itself, and then that state becomes more easy for you to attain. In every moment, the mind is asking you what you want it to do. And if you say, you know, let's neurotically obsess about all the ways in which we've been shortchanged in life, then the mind is happy to do that. And then I think the idea is it makes a kind of rut in which it can do that more easily, and pretty soon you're that person. Whereas if you just slightly can enforce a change in the habit to where in a quiet moment your mind might turn to gratitude, then I think theoretically that rut

will be dug and you'll be a more grateful person. I think that's what that parable means to me anyway. We're not powerless to decide what kind of person we'll become. I love that. We're not powerless to decide what kind of person we will become. There are so many different places I could take this conversation with all your different writings, with the latest book, with your interest in Buddhism, but I want to start with a line fairly early in the new book. And you're describing what these Russian writers are doing. And you say that they have the most radical idea of all, that every human being is worthy of attention, and that the origins of every good and evil Say a little more about that. Yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of the basis of fiction, which is that if you want to know the great truths of the world, you have two choices. One is to try to sort of conceptually generalize to them, which I don't think is very successful

because our mind is actually kind of small compared to the universe. The second route is a more homely route, which is just say, well, whatever is going on in this planet, it first starts in a single mind, any single mind, any mind is as good as any other. And then we have this ability to imaginatively focus on that person. We're going to try to imagine what they're imagining. And in that, you know, we're making a little scale model of the whole thing. If we look at a guy sitting at a diner counter, looking over at the pie his friend is having with envy, that's envy. You know, that's the whole history of human questing. Or if we look at someone and we're in his mind the first time he sees this person he's going to

fall in love with, that tells us so much about love. So for me, one of the reasons I'm attracted to fiction as a vocation is that in this very small way that's accessible to all of us, actually, we all imagine, we all project, we can work through some things in terms of questions like, well, why is it that we all want to be happy, but we tend to make each other miserable sometimes? Or how is it that even though in a given moment a person would never or almost never choose to be evil, we still do things that add up to evil? I would say all those answers are just available in the tiny little fluctuations of one's own mind. And those are actually what we're using when we make a story. We're just pretending that this guy over here is a different person from us. But of course, we're exporting all of our own thoughts and desires and stuff into that imaginary vessel. One point in the book, I think you're talking about a Chekhov story, and you say something that I love. You're talking about how the more we get to know this character, the less inclined we are to pass judgment on that person. You say, some essential mercy in me has been switched on.

And then I love this line. You say, what God has going for him that we don't, is infinite information. That's just so cool, this idea that if we take the idea of God as loving all of us, the reason that God is capable of doing that is he can see all of us. Yeah, God is kind of a master of cause and effect. So in other words, you're walking down the sidewalk and somebody roughly bumps into you. Instantly, I know that person's political party, I know certain things about his mind. Of course, I don that person's political party. I know certain things about his mind. Of course, I don't really. And I think there's this idea that if you could follow that person home, and if you could even leap into his mind and see, as some famous poet said, his secret fears, I think what happens is as you fill up with information like that,

the causality that led him to be the person he is becomes clear. You know, it's kind of like when you have a fight with your partner. Before you have a talk about it, you have an idea in your mind of what happened. Then she explains it to you, and suddenly you go, oh, okay, so my initial model wasn't quite right. And actually, from her point of view, it makes sense. And the more information you exchange, the more you see that, of course, it happened the way it happened. You know, how otherwise could it have happened given the entire history of the universe up to that point? So with fiction, we get this rare opportunity to sort of slow time down, for one thing, to sort of play at the skill of omniscience. So Chekhov, for example, will go into this character's head and stay there for nine pages really beautifully and convincingly with a high degree of specificity.

So we get to do on the page what we never get to do in life, which is fully, fully know somebody. I think when we fully know somebody, it's not that we don't have opinions about them, but the opinions are kind of full of this on the other hand thinking, you know, when we want to make a two-faceted judgment, some fact comes along and goes, well, you know, you have to also consider this. And so from my point of view, this makes us wiser, you know, maybe a little along and goes, well, you know, you have to also consider this. And so from my point of view, this makes us wiser, you know, maybe a little slower to act, which is probably a good thing in most cases. It makes every decision more fraught because we know more.

So to me, it's just something we can simulate on the page. And I would claim that it's just good for us to go through that exercise almost like sacramentally. 100%. I've always been really interested in this. There's a cognitive bias out there. It goes by a couple different names, but one of the ones it's known by is the fundamental attribution error. And it's one of my favorite ones because it basically says,

when I do something bad, I know all the circumstances. Well, I didn't get enough sleep and Ginny's mom had a psychotic episode this morning with her Alzheimer's. I know all the reasons why I acted like a jerk, but when you do it, it's because you're a jerk. And I love cognitive distortions because, and you talk a lot about this and we'll get to it in a minute, we don't see the world correctly. But it's really hard to know in what ways am I not seeing the world correctly. And so

I've always found cognitive distortions interesting because they allow me to sort of identify some of those ways that I don't see the world correctly. And the fundamental attribution error is a really common one. And one that if we can start to not do is so powerful. Yeah, especially when you see that one's attribution error tends to have a pattern. You know, so in other words, when someone does something we don't know why, we'll supply reasons. And those reasons, surprise, surprise, will tend to reaffirm our existing view of the world. So if I have an idea about the way things are, someone offends me, they are given reasons by me, which in a sense takes you even a step further from whatever the truth is. That's one of the things that I wanted to talk about.

You bring this up in a lot of different places. wanted to talk about, you bring this up in a lot of different places. You bring it up in this book, you bring it up in your talk on kindness that you did that's so lovely, but you basically talk about the sort of very built-in Darwinian confusions that we have. Can you share a little bit more about what those are, what that is that you're talking about? Sure. It's basically the sense of self that we have from the minute we're born. And that I think in my case, anyway, I tend to have built it up more and more with every passing year. You know, on one level, we know that that is an illusion because if nothing else, we see that this person doesn't last very long, you know, pretty soon they're gone. But I think, you know, what neuroscientists are working toward

is kind of the same thing that Buddhists have known for a long time, which is that the self doesn't actually physically exist anywhere. It's kind of a process. I mean, you know, you could say it's an illusion or a delusion that is constructed. And I suspect it's done because the species wanted to survive. So if I believe that I'm primary in this world and I'm so important and I'm George, you know, I'm constantly telling myself my own dramatic, lovely victory narrative, you know, then when the wolf comes to eat me, I'll resist a little harder, you know, that makes sense. And it's beautiful. Actually, it's no problem. But the problem is, it's also not true. So we all, you know, at different times in our lives, and certainly at the end of our lives, we run into the toll taker for this lifetime of living within a

delusion, which is that, you know, oh, by the way, George, it's the day of your death. And this guy that you've held dear for so long is not going to be with us. And by the way, I can't really tell you where he's going. Oh, well, you know, so I think that's really the essence of it. And it's not horrible. I mean, I think in a way, these things comprise a kind of owner's manual for the mind that we have. But most of us, I think, are so thoroughly seduced and charmed by the illusion of self that we don't, you know, often step outside of it. It's very hard. I mean, the ego is so bright and so adaptable. And it doesn't really, I think, in a certain way, doesn't really want us asking those questions. So that's what I mean. And again, I don't really despair of it. But I think as I get older, I'm a little more tired of it. I'm tired

of being trapped within what I know is kind of an elaborate magic trick. Yeah, and I love the way that you describe it because I've talked a fair amount on this show about some of these ideas of non-self, and they're sort of abstract, short of experience. They don't necessarily make a lot of sense. But you say a description here that I really like. You say the mind takes a vast unitary wholeness, the universe, selects one tiny segment of it, me, and starts narrating from that point of view. And just like that, that entity, George, becomes real. And he is, surprise, surprise, located at the exact center of the universe. And everything is happening in his movie. And I love that idea that that center of the universe piece, is happening in his movie. And I love that idea that that

center of the universe piece, I think is so interesting because we all think we are. It's the point of reference. And we'll get to some of these points a little bit later, particularly, hopefully, if we get to the Tolstoy story, Master and Man. But it's not that that view is necessarily wrong because there's a certain rightness to it. It's just that it's a very, very limited view. It's a perspective that's very small. Right, right. I've heard it described once that a lot of these apparent conundrums can be addressed by thinking in terms of the relative and the absolute.

So in a relative sense, I definitely exist, which I know if I stub my toe, you know, or I get a nice review, you know, I very much exist. But rationally, we can see that, yeah, you know, you flared into existence. You're never the same moment to moment. And in time, something will take you out. And that consciousness will, we don't know, but, you know, certainly the consciousness that we've known all these years will not be there anymore. So the thing is, both are true. You hear sometimes people say, oh, my self doesn't exist, and so therefore it doesn't matter if I steal your cookie or whatever. But that's not really fair. Both things are true. So that's the conundrum, is to try to figure out how to live and enjoy and be fruitful in this life, while at the same time knowing that a lot of

the motivations that make you want to do that are actually just contrivances, Darwinian contrivances, really. Right, right. We are driven very much on some level by survival mechanism. Yeah. You know, as a former Catholic, part of me, once I've said that, you know, we're contrivance, I get a little dour. But then another part of me says, yeah, but that's how we are, you know, we are given hunger. We are given lust. We are given the desire to go to the carnival. Why would you refute those things? They're there for you to enjoy. I think the trick is for me at 62, I'm a writer. So I could go to spring training with the White Sox and follow those guys around and listen to them talk.

And I could write a piece that would really be full of pithy information about baseball, but I still couldn't hit the ball. No matter how much I can talk about the physics of it, I can talk about how one gets better, but I'm still not going to be a very good hitter. This is also the case for me with the spiritual stuff, is I can lay out a pretty good system intellectually, but that's sort of neither here nor there. What's important

is to get that knowledge into your body somehow. And that is, I suspect, the work of many lifetimes. And so at this moment in my life, I'm kind of perched on that. Like, well, you know, you're not 25. You have some number of years left. You know very well what a big job it would be to actually get your ego to reduce. But in fact, what you're doing is sort of gradually making it bigger, you know, by doing this writing thing and kind of trotting after that. So it's, you know, kind of a crossroads moment, but it's a moment I've been at for the last 20 years. So it's not that urgent or scary. That brings up a really interesting point. And I have talked about this a little bit over the last several years, I had several pretty, really powerful mystical type

experiences that, you know, we would say that is part of what we're aiming for in spiritual practice. The actual realization that the self that I am spending all this time protecting just isn't worth protecting in the way that I'm trying to protect it. And these very, very powerful moments. I've described it as feeling sometimes stuck in the middle. And what I mean by that is I've had powerful enough experiences and enough time that I go, well, that stuff isn't really that important. And my level of ego, if we think of it as how am I perceived in the world diminished greatly, but it didn't diminish all the way. And so what I find is that a lot of the ambition, what used to drive a lot of my activity in the world, it was reduced, but it

wasn't reduced enough that I didn't care at all. And so I sometimes describe it as stuck in the middle. You know, I don't have the previous ambition fuel I once had, but not to the point where I don't care at all. I don't know if that relates at all to what you were just kind of saying. those ambitious energies. For me, that's not quite right, because then you can get into kind of a new age aesthetic thing where you're just, I don't care about anything. But you kind of do, and you kind of should. You know, I don't think, I mean, it'd be weird if someone said, I don't do hunger anymore, man. I'm against hunger. Right. Bullshit. You aren't. You know, you're pretending. So I think for me that the trick is somehow, again, it's beyond me, but it must have something to do with one's relation to those ambitious energies. How are you fielding them? And how are you submitting to them? Like

after I write a story and it gets accepted, for example, there's a really important moment there where I either kind of lean into it in this kind of victory dance feeling, which reifies the self, you know, I'm winning, I'm winning after all. Or there's another move, which is to kind of, I always think of it as sort of tossing it in a backpack, like, yep, okay, that's good. But then recalibrating myself to recognize that the real moment of pleasure and power is back when I did it, you know, being in the middle of the creative process was a more reliable place to be as opposed to, you know, standing under the goalpost dancing. But all of these things, I mean, there's such interesting questions, and I certainly don't know,

but the sense I get is that, you know, it would be simple to completely lean into being ambitious and be Gordon Gekko. It would be simple to completely renounce all worldly ambition. I think both of those are autopilot in a way. For me, it feels like anyway, there's some middle ground there, as you say, where you're celebrating both, you know, you're celebrating the whole shebang. I haven't been there, but maybe for a couple minutes a day, I'm in the right place. You know, it's a big question. To me, there's something not quite right about denying one's essential energy, because then how are you going to do anything? I talked to my students about this, you know, that a lot of them have a lot of mixed feelings about their very palpable desire for fame. And I'm like, well, if it's palpable, it's real. So you could certainly do the Catholic thing

of suppressing it, putting your foot on its throat. But I think there's a more mature thing to do, which is to sort of affably accept that that's in your toolbox, and you've got to figure out how to use that energy. Yeah. And that's a perfect transition, I think, into the Tolstoy story that, for me, was an incredible story. But the way you broke it down, I was like, can I just have George come? Like, can we read War and Peace together, you and me? And you can just kind of break down every chapter a little bit. Because it really brought some things together for me that

were really powerful. Can you give a brief summary of the story without giving too much away? Yeah. I mean, to me, it's a cousin to A Christmas Carol, which is a story that says, okay, once upon a time, there was a really miserable human being that we're going to use as a stand-in for evil. And then we're going to go on a little adventure with this person. And the question hanging over the story is, can such a person change? You know, and then the secondary question is, if so, how? And, you know, that's a story that is fun on two levels. One, it's kind of fun to see a jerk in the world. It's fun to see a jerk depicted. But also, I think the story is, at a deeper level, speaking to everybody. Because we

all, as we just were, should be thinking about the question of how can I change? You know, how can I, who don't consider myself an evil person, but I'm a limited person, how can I change? And if I did, what would that actually look like? So that's kind of the understory. The story itself is so beautifully specific and real and visceral. They go on a trip into a blizzard, and hilarity ensues. Yeah, so what blows me away about this story, we can actually kind of skip by too much of the parts of the story, but I want to bring up a couple things that you bring up here because I am very,

very interested in how people change. That's probably the heart of what 350 episodes of this show is about. How do people change? I'm a former heroin addict, so I have undergone dramatic change in my life. I do a lot of one-on-one coaching work with people, create workshops, so I'm very interested in how people change. And this story is very much about can this person change? And if so, how does it happen? And you say that what creates the illusion of a changed mind here is a simple pattern. What once worked for Vasili stops working. Did I pronounce his name right? Is that the correct pronunciation? I think, yeah, it does. I don't know. I've pronounced it four or five different ways along the path. In class, we just call these guys by their first name, just for simplicity, V, V and N. Yeah, that would be a good way to do it. I'm always mispronouncing things.

Complete aside here, but a lifetime of reading, particularly when I was young, got me to the point where I knew all sorts of words and I knew what they meant, but I'd never heard a human being say them. Yeah, yeah. I would go to use it for the very first time and I'd be like, I don't even know if that's right.

Yeah, that's a sign of somebody who's read ahead of their life, which is really nice. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

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So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Amanda Mull, who writes our Business Week buying power column. Very few companies who go viral are like totally prepared for what that means. And Zoe Tillman, senior legal reporter. Courts are not supposed to decide elections.

Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. So V, in this case, you describe the first pattern here is that what works for him stops working and i think this is so fundamental to human change yeah there's a section where he starts trying to wait out this freezing cold night and the person who so far has never had any fear or self-doubt suddenly gets some actually harder to depict than you might think because if you've made a person who's convincingly arrogant and confident, you know, you can't just reform him instantaneously. So here what Tolstoy does is just he establishes certain

thought patterns that Vasily has, which we all do, that kind of mental recounting of our various victories, you know, I'm such a good writer, I won this award, blah, blah, blah. Later, he marks the sort of interim moment where Vasily falls asleep. And we all know that feeling of falling asleep in the cold, and then you wake up even colder and sort of like, oh God, I'm still here. And then Vasily revisits those same exact thought patterns, but now suddenly they're not giving him any sustenance. There's just something so skillful about that. And it kind of ties into what happens at it's wearisome, you know? So that might make us think, okay, I'm stuck.

I'm stuck forever in this guy. But what Tolstoy is saying is, no, no, no. You're actually an amalgam of different energies and impulses. Almost like those, what, Pachinko games or whatever, you know? The marble comes down. If it goes left instead of right, it's still using its same energy. So this is what the lesson of this story is, is he's not going to suddenly become a perfect person who has no resemblance to who he was before. But a lot of his habits can just move over a half inch. And in that way, he's completely

transformed by the end. Yeah, it makes me think so much of a concept in behavior science of the habit loop. I don't know if you're familiar with the habit loop, but the habit loop basically says, right, you've got a stimulus or a trigger, you've got then the thing that you do, and then there's a reward on the other end. So if your thing is smoking, you know, you get a trigger, I'm stressed, you smoke, you feel a little bit better. And the simplest thing to do is you just change that middle part. You can't change the fact that you're going to get stressed. And you also can't change the fact that you're going to want relief from that stress. So recognizing those things are going to remain the same, you try and change that middle element. And that's kind of what you're

pointing to here. And that the character in this story doesn't suddenly change his essential energy. His essential energy is an energy of doing. He is a doer. He also thrives on a feeling of self-pride, you know, a victory. And the funny thing is even, and I won't give the story away, but even at the end, he's doing, he's still doing, taking a lot of pleasure in that work energy. And he's still congratulating himself. You know, he's congratulating himself though for something different. And before when he congratulated himself, he was doing it for being a rich guy, a clever guy, you know, better than everyone else. Now, he still thinks he's better than everyone else. He's just really good at saving people, you know. He's really good at being selfless. You know, that is something very familiar to me. Like, you know,

I wrote that talk on kindness, and I went on tour for it. And so everyone is saying, oh, you're so kind. And of course, I go, yeah, I am. I'm pretty cool. There's the ego, you know? So nobody, you know, can exactly get away from that. But in his case, he's still enacting the same patterns of wanting to be victorious and wanting to feel good about himself. But the objects of those things have just changed slightly. And of course, in the story, one of the things that helps him get there is that, you know, he's in extreme fear and he's in extremely dangerous situation. And that's like that thing, you know, that the knowledge that wanted to be hung in the morning has the effect of clarifying the mind or whatever. The universe gives him this great gift, which is that he's in terrible peril, you know.

Right. As you're sort of walking us through this in the book, you tell a story about you being on a plane. Can you share a little bit of that? Yeah. I mean, this was quite a long time ago, but I was on a book tour and I was coming home on the last leg from Chicago to Syracuse and make a long story short, some geese flew into one of the engines and knocked it out kind of catastrophically. And it was, I think, really dangerous because the crew stopped communicating with us and there was a lot of energy and terror in the air. So I just blanked

out. I mean, I literally might not have been able to recall my name. You know, you hear people saying, I was so scared, I pissed myself. And I'm like, oh yeah, that could happen. That's not just a hyperbole. That actually could physically happen. Because suddenly, you know,

you're a guy going home to see your family and then you're not suddenly, you know, all of that future is gonna be over. And I remember looking at the seat back ahead of me and going, okay, I gotta get out of this body now and that's the thing that's gonna do it to me. And I remember looking at the seat back ahead of me and going, okay, I got to get out of this body now. And that's the thing that's going to do it to me. And I can't help it. You know, I really can't help it. I have no power here. So the reason I brought this up in this context was that, you know, after a few minutes of this, I noticed that there was actually a 14 year old boy sitting next to me. And he looks over at me and he goes, sir, is this supposed to

be happening? And just his vulnerability, you know, I had kids about the same age at that time. And I just reflexively said, yeah, yeah, no, no, it's fine. It's fine. You know, which is totally not true. But I was just being a dad, you know, being a teacher. The interesting thing was, as soon as I did that, just totally out of habit, I a little bit came back to myself like, okay, this is not the best, but you still have some power. You know, you can still act. So I talked to him a little bit and I noticed the woman across the aisle was nervous and I took her hand and I was still beyond terrified, but I had been reminded of the person I was before this happened. So I

think that's kind of what happens to Vasily in the story is through action, his habitual kind of manic, nervous, neurotic energy that he has, he rouses himself, you know, who he is. And suddenly that energy is now channeled in a more positive direction. He's means that it actually does matter what you do. Small adjustments in mind and action actually do matter in the grandest scale possible. It's the only way that things could change. him instead of inward neurotically. And that is such a powerful idea. There's a quote by the writer Richard Rohr, I love it. I won't get it right, but he says basically, anything that is pulling you up and out of yourself is acting for all intents and purposes as God for you in that moment. Beautiful. I love that idea. Anything that's pulling me up and out. And that ties in with what we said earlier, that you, that self, is actually a little bit rickety and delusional. So any chance we have to recognize that by moving away from it is a plus. Yep, yep.

And then that second piece that you said about changing incrementally being so important, this idea that we can change just a little bit at a time. I've reflected before on, you know, if you're going to film the movie of my life, there would be this really dramatic scene at 24, me and arrested for a bunch of felonies. And there's another scene where I'm in a detox center and they say, you need to go into longer term treatment. And I say, no, I don't want to do that. And I go back to my room and I'm sitting there in the room and I have this, you know, in recovery called a moment of clarity where I'm like, oh God, I'm going to die if I go back out there. And so I go back to him and I say, I'll go into treatment, right? If we were filming the movie, that would be a big pivotal scene, right? But that scene is really no more important in my recovery than the thousands of other very small actions that I took hour after hour, day after day,

that kept moving me towards recovery. It's just that that one makes a great story, but they all matter, you know, back to that point of incremental change. A word I really love is granular. It applies for fiction writing all the time. And in the story, you know, you said you went into your room and then you realized or you changed your mind. You know, to extend the cinematic metaphor, if we could pan in on your mind at that moment, I would guess that many thousands of times before your mind had gone left in, oh, yeah, yeah, no, I don't need it, I don't need it, I don't need it. Now, on this occasion, it went right.

Maybe I do need it. That was prepared by many thousands of moments. Yes. And then even breaking it down one level further, there's probably moments when your mind went right, okay, we better change. And then the other part of the mind said, no, no, no, no, don't do that. Come back over here. And it did that. So it really is a small, tiny, tiny little thing. And in fiction, when you're rewriting a story, those are the kind of things you're looking for. You always want to ask, how so? Tell me more. And, you know, a moment that might have a kind of a big placard on it saying transformation, if you keep saying, how so? Tell

me more, the mind will cough up with increasing granularity, explanations, and specificity. And then we get down to the core of how things actually happen. This relates to what we said earlier about the more you know about something, the less judgmental you are, you know? Right. Somebody in that similar situation might feel like, oh, I don't have what it takes to make that decision. But your story tells us, well, you could, you know, depending on, again, and to go back to your parable at the beginning, if enough times in your life you fed the right thing, even scraps of food, you know, you might be preparing yourself for the one big decision where all the things are

lined up and the ball goes into the pachinko machine and falls in the right direction. Yeah, I love that idea that you just brought up, that that decision was prefaced on countless previous decisions. I love the idea in Buddhism of, and we talk about cause and effect, and we're like, okay, cause and effect, but I love that Buddhism essentially talks about countless causes and conditions. That, to me, gives a really rich picture of reality. I think it also gives us positive intention, because if your intention is right, then as those thousands of micro decisions come at you, you're more likely to feed them well. If your ambition in the morning is, I'm going to kick

the world's ass, I'm going to be so successful, then when those thousands of decisions come, they're a little confused by you. But if your intention is, I really want to help other people, or I want to be present, whatever formulation you have, and I think the best one is, I'm going to try to be here for the benefit of other people. Then when those decisions come, it's more likely that more of them are going to go in the positive direction. And then that's, I think, what they would call like you're kind of adding up merit, you know, over all those thousands of micro decisions are cumulatively changing the whole weather system inside your head. Yeah. I want to switch directions a little bit and talk

about a method that you described for how you work on a story, but I want to take something that you're doing in there and see if I can apply it more broadly. So you basically say that the process for you of getting through a piece of fiction is you essentially write it and then you reread it. We won't use the word countless, but a lot of times over and over and over. And each time you're sort of looking at each sentence and you're sort of going, well, okay, did this move me in a positive or negative direction? And you would work your way through. My question for you is how do you keep as much as possible approaching that work in a fresh way? Because I feel like if I reread something I've written, you know, it's an email that's going to go out

by about the third time, I feel like I'm barely even reading it. So I think there's a process of being engaged. But the reason I ask, taking this more broadly than improving a work of fiction, is that I think this ability to look at life freshly, to look at each moment freshly, as much as possible with the beginner's mind, is so important and so valuable. And so clearly, it's something you've really figured out how to do. So I'm kind of curious, how do you do it? Yeah, that's a beautiful thought. And that connection is exactly right. I think the first thing you do is you recognize that that freshness is hard to keep. In other words, you're absolutely right. By the third time you read something,

the brain has done something that distances you from a genuine experience of it. So the one thing in the practical sense as a writer, that's the thing that improves over time for some reason. I can generate a simulation of a fresh mind much quicker now than I could when I was 30. It used to take me a couple days. Now I can just sort of step away, get a cup of coffee and come back. And I wouldn't say it's really a fresh mind, but it's a simulation of a fresh mind. I can pretty much imagine the experience of a first-time reader. Second of all, I have an ongoing like QA guy who's going, how's your freshness? You know, and I can say, yeah,

today it's not so good. And he goes, okay, well be humble then. And don't change anything too much. Or some days you're like, wow, I am really seeing this as if I've never read it before. And he goes, go use that, you know? So I think for me, that's most of it is just to be aware that there is such a thing as freshness and that we're not always in relation to it and in possession of it. That's a lot of the struggle right there, because even in real life, you can say, man, I'm projecting like crazy today, or I'm really grouchy. None of this seems fresh to me. But I think ultimately there are neurological slash spiritual ways to train ourselves to get fresh, you know, to have that beginner's mind, and also to be able to in real time assess how that's going, you know, to have that beginner's mind and also to be able to in real time assess how that's going, you know. I even have moments where I'm like, oh wow,

you're really in the throes of some pretty negative projections about so-and-so. I'm sitting here looking at the person. I'm going, oh yeah, look at that. Your mind is making up a backstory about this person that isn't helpful. I don't really have a tidy answer, but I think that's exactly the right thing. And it's what I love about fiction is it gives you a little practice space, you know, to come back to something fresh. And, you know, there's a beautiful moment where you're reading something you've read seven or eight or 20 or 30 times, and suddenly you go, oh, wait a minute, there's a moment right here I missed. You know, there's a little falseness here I didn't notice before, or there's a little rhythmic yuckiness that I didn't really hear before

And then the beautiful thing is when you poke at it, it often will give you something beautiful So even just that is a lesson, you know, if you're dissatisfied with something if something seems Not right and you poke at it with positive intention. Sometimes it pops out something nice for you, you know for me It's something that you can kind of use in life a little bit, you know. If you're having a conversation with somebody and it just feels a little stifled, even just the admission that it feels stifled is sometimes a big step forward, you know. Whereas in my previous life, you know, I was a real denier. I somehow had learned early on that if I felt uncomfortable, I should run away from that. And for me, that was often making the joke or doing a, you know, kind of a bit of standup or somehow I was uncomfortable with anything that was lumpy.

And fiction has made me more comfortable with it. You know, you don't have to be afraid of that. You can sort of just, you know, turn your attention to it. A couple of things you said there, if I were to summarize it for myself would be, one is practice, right? You keep doing it, whether it's meditation or mindfulness. If we were to extrapolate this to a spiritual term is to continue to practice. And then the second is I really liked that idea of the internal QA guy going, Hey, am I fresh? And sort of checking. And it's interesting. I heard a different conversation between a couple of meditation teachers recently. And one of them was talking about, he called it the internal auditor, was talking about

being mindful, looking out into the world, noticing something, and then having an internal auditor sort of looking out into the world and saying, I'm mindful of that tree. And the internal auditor saying, well, tell me a little bit about that tree. Are you really mindful? And then the more you describe it a little bit, it goes, okay, yeah, I guess, okay, I'm going to give you a check on that one. And I found it to be a really interesting practice to sort of look at something and then ask myself, am I really seeing this thing? And then looking again, I've been exploring a little bit how artists look at the world as a way of being able to see what's out my window differently, right?

Because I know that at least what neuroscience says is I'm not even really seeing what's out there. And Buddhism said the same thing a long time ago. You're not seeing what's out your window anymore. The minute you named it all, you don't see it anymore. And neuroscience says that my brain is essentially predicting what it thinks is going to be out that window. And as long as the sense data coming back is more or less in accord with that, that sense data never even makes it all the way up the signal processing chain. Right, right. And so some of the artist questions of where are the edges, where are the

lights, where are the shadows, for me, cause my brain to have to look more freshly. And I think that's probably some of what's happening with you in fiction is you probably don't even know what they are at this point, but you've got ways of looking that allow you to go deeper. Yeah, I mean, it's all language. You know, if you say, you know, Fred, the stupid Republican, and then you let that sit there and go, say, you know, Fred, the stupid Republican, and then you let that sit there and go, eh, and you know that your specificity seeker says, well, okay, but how so? Tell me more. And what it's really saying is, could you come up with a more interesting formulation of that?

Because that sentence is reductive and it's a little insulting. Then that's the equivalent of you looking out at those trees and saying, let me try to not think of that as tree, but let me think of it as, you know, what are the component phenomenon there? So as you try to, in language, rework Fred the Republican, you see that Fred has a scale model railroad in his basement. Huh, that's interesting. And Fred is a widower. You know, and so suddenly the single reductive signifier, Fred the Republican or tree, can be sort of fragmented into smaller and smaller things. And then you're coming closer to seeing Fred. And for me, it's all about language. It's all about just the process that you described earlier where you read a sentence and you just have to

really get quiet and say, am I satisfied with that? Does that sentence thrill me? And if not, where? And then just be sort of joyfully, kind of playfully making a little tweak to it. But you know, something you said made me think too, one of the things I struggle with as a teacher, and I think it's similar in other parts of life, if I could generalize, the Western mind, at least my Western mind, thrives on analysis and conceptualization and, in a sense, reduction. So we have pithy slogans about writing. A given writer has a sense of his lineage and different maxims and different catchphrases and so on. But that's all thinking, you know, and people can spend their whole lives refining the way they think about writing. But what I try to say in the book is that's a very different process from the writing. The

writing itself is accomplished in a split second from a direction we don't even understand, but getting better at that is what actually will distinguish one writer from another one. And I think same with a lot of spiritual things, you know, I think Trungpa Rinpoche had a whole riff about spiritual materialism and how we can spend a whole life accumulating books and visits to different countries and all that, and then find that you wake up and you're not that much different than you were at the beginning. So for me, especially as I get older, that's a really urgent thing to remember

that the accoutrements of writing are fun, and they very much seem like writing sometimes, but in fact, they're not. That's another discipline I'm trying to enforce in myself. Thank you. you've talked before about the similarities for you between writing and meditation how they come together in certain ways and listening to you talk now it strikes me that one of them is there's a certain amount of patience that perhaps you developed through a lot of years of writing that as you entered meditation prepared you to enter it with a certain frame of mind. And for me, what I have to do is make sure it's an urgent patience. You

know, there's that feeling, oh, I'm just going to hang out today and read my stuff. That's not it for me. You know, it's better when I've got a real sense of like a fire in the belly. And then the patience is, I'm going to have the fire in the belly today. I'm going to make these great changes. And then I'm going to stop and be patient and come back tomorrow and do exactly the same thing again. So it's kind of a long-term patience. And when you say patience, what comes to my mind is a sense of saying, well, the story knows better than I do. So let me be a handmaiden to the story, serve its energy, which I don't know right now. I shouldn't know. I prefer not to know it. It's going to tell me what its energy is, and then I'm going to be there to help it. That's the kind of literary patience that I try to get to

because there is some weird thing where, you know, it sounds crazy, but a story, I would say, even from the first couple sentences, and even if those sentences don't wind up in the final draft, a story has a kind of DNA, and your job is to try to discover that DNA. And even if those sentences don't wind up in the final draft, a story has a kind of DNA. And your job is to try to discover that DNA. And the way you discover it is by trying to privilege the most high energy moments in the story as you stumble on them, or as you revise them into being. So that's a lot different than what I thought when I was young, which is you just have to know some shit and force it on the reader. It's much more exploratory. And that's really exciting, you know, but it means that you never get to be a master, you will get to be a schmuck,

you know, and you always have to be the person who shows up a little sheepishly going, I have no idea what's going to happen. You know, dear God, please help me to listen well today and be playful. And I don't think it is meditation. I think meditation is much more profound and can do more for us. But writing is sort of a nice cousin to that, that maybe, as you're suggesting, it preps certain internal moves that will come in handy when you do the more serious activity. Right. I'm interested to use the phrase you just used, what are the cousins of meditation? You know, what are all the various cousins?

Because I do think that meditation in the sense it's presented in a Buddhist context is an incredibly powerful tool. I've done it for a long, long time. And I think that it is only one tool. And for different people at different points in their lives may not even be the best primary tool. I'm not certain. So I'm curious, like, what are its cousins? And I think writing is a good one. I think creativity is in general a good one. I think creativity is, in general, a good one. But I'm kind of curious if off the top of your head, you think of any other close cousins. What this book taught me is that everything is a cousin of it, if you see it right.

You know, falling down the stairs is a good one, you know. Because, you know, in writing this book, I kind of noticed when we're reading a work of literature, there's something that our mind does I think is general. And what it is is, okay, it's in a relatively uninflected state. Say it's blank. You pick up the nine-page story. You start reading. Instantly, the mind is being altered. And it's being altered in a pattern of, roughly speaking, expectations are being engendered, and then they're being exploited, I guess, or used.

So you expect something. So when you're trying to analyze a story, in other words, when you're trying to understand what just happened to you, what are some gifts? Well, one is that internal auditor we talked about. You look back over the story and you can remember where you were. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you hello my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne knight welcome to really no really sir bless you all

hello newman and you never know when howie mandel might just stop by to talk about judging really that's the opening really no really yeah really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ...at each given point with some precision. Or, you know, in real time, you asked, you could describe where you are when you're on page six. The second thing, which is maybe a little bit under praise,

is just the willingness to bless that. You know, whatever your reaction is on page three, to go, yep, that's my reaction. I own it. You know, I'm not going to say I haven't read enough. I'm not going to say I'm stupid. I'm not going to say I don't know about the Russians. I'm probably wrong. I'm going to say, well, for better or worse, this is where my mind has been put. And that's what I have to work with. You know, that's what the artist has to work with. Where has he left me on page three? So blessing that.

And then finally, once it's all done, your ability to articulate what just happened to you. And that's really rich because the temptation, especially for somebody like me, who was a working class person and didn't have an early education in college in English, you're always inclined to give up your authority about your own reaction and cede it over to experts. So that's why in class a lot of times undergrads are trying to sound like somebody else. They're denying their own reaction in favor of someone they read somewhere or an acceptable way of sounding intellectual. That's a form of denying your own reaction in favor of someone they read somewhere or an acceptable way of sounding intellectual. That's a form of denying, you know, your own reaction. So what I've seen over the years with students is that it's a really exciting thing, starting with these Russian

stories, to help somebody learn to value and bless their own reactions, and then to try to articulate those just as they are without dressing them up, you know, trusting that if you have an experience and you describe it to me as succinctly and accurately as you can, that is by definition literary, you know, if one has read enough, you know what I'm saying. So that's really exciting. And it broadens out to say, you know, any of us is an authority and we are the watchers of our own minds. And when you go out into the world and whether it's a yard party or a revolution or a solar

eclipse or a passionate love affair, the same process is in effect, you know. We're there. We have a reaction. We bless it. We articulate it. So I think this is one of the arguments that you don't hear much anymore, but why literature is a great thing for a young person to train herself in. Because it's everything. It's everything.

Yeah. There's a spiritual teacher by the name of Adyashanti who was hugely important to me. I mean, still is very important, but at a point so much. And the thing that he said, I mean, I've heard it a thousand times, right? But something about the way he said it finally drove it home. And it was, trust your direct experience, not the direct experience that you think you should have, you know, so he's a lot into inquiry. Who am I? Ask yourself that. But then of course, you know, you're going to want to answer that with the answers that you've read in books. You've got to trust your direct experience. You know, whatever that direct experience is, trust it. And then I love what you said. And the way you actually talk about doing in the book, notice that direct experience and then articulate it to the best of your ability. It's that real trusting process. Yes, you trust that thought. And I think part of the articulation is also to have a little

correct skepticism about your reaction. In other words, like when I was in engineering school, we were always taught that you do your experiment and part of your report is to reflect on the limitations of the experimental design so you don't assert more than you should. So I think, you know, for me, part of the book was to say, here are my reactions, they're just my reactions, and also they might be off a little bit, that little note of humility, because who's read enough, you know, who knows everything? And every time you read a story, you're in a particular state of mind and so on.

So I think that whole process with a little touch of, on the other hand, at the end, you know, is really powerful. I think that's so true. Maybe this would be the last point we'll touch on before we wrap up because I wanted to ask you about that in a little bit more detail. Because you say the writer goes through and, you know, you're revising your own work or let's keep it with revising your own work for now. And you sort of read this sentence gives me a positive or negative and, and you say that that writer's ability to trust themselves and their voice is really, really important. And I don't know if you brought it up in this book, or if I heard you talking about in different conversation, but talking about intuition. And I think intuition is a really interesting thing. And this idea of trusting ourselves is a really interesting thing, because I've had different experiences in life, experiences now as a hopefully healthier, wiser person where I sort of trust my intuition.

But I also know that there were plenty of times when I was 24 where I was absolutely certain that going and getting a shot of heroin and stealing somebody's purse was absolutely the right thing to do. That was my intuition. So I'm so curious about, in general, this idea of intuition, how to know when and where to trust ourselves, knowing that, as you're pointing out, on one hand, that voice, our internal voice, is the most important thing we have as a writer. I'd argue it's one of the most important things we have as a human. And as we've pointed out lots of different ways in this conversation, boy, do we have a tendency to get it wrong. And I think you touched on it there for a second in your last response, but I'm wondering if you could say a little more. Yeah, well, for me, you know, intuition might be, it's definitely an approximate word in terms of writing. I always imagine you've got a kind of cartoon bubble over your head when

you're writing that's telling you all kinds of things. In the worst case, it's giving you a big conceptual readout of your story and it's over controlling it analytically. That I can usually get rid of. Then you say, okay, is there anything up there still? Well, there is. There always is, you know, unless you're some kind of amazing genius. There's always little taints up there still? Well, there is. There always is, you know, unless you're some kind of amazing genius. There's always little taints up there. I trust my intuition to the extent that rumination has stopped. And for me, rumination stops in fascination. So in other words, if the story that I'm writing has pulled me into it by the force of a sentence

and convinced me that it's actually happening, rumination isn't a thing anymore. that it's actually happening, rumination isn't a thing anymore. And my intuition is just located in the microscopic way on the phrases that are coming by my eyes, basically. Those are small intuitions. And in that spirit, they're kind of free of rumination. And they're also free of a lot of the stuff in that cartoon bubble, like good writing should sound like this, or whatever. Now, when you had the intuition about stealing a purse my guess is you were heavily under the sway of a cartoon bubble that was full of all kinds of concepts that were so endemic to you that you may didn't even notice them i think you'd make the argument that that was either well that it wasn't your deepest intuition because it was clouded by that i don't really know you know but something like that but i think the beauty of writing is

you're asking the intuition to do a very small thing, which is to have an opinion on a phrase, you know, it's not giving you a worldview, it's just giving you, so maybe it's like training wheels, it can do that much, you know. That's a great way to say it. And I liked what you said a minute ago, too, about recognizing the limits, you know, when you're doing a study, here are the limits of the study, you know, I've been talking with some clients about this, you know, trusting yourself. And I said, Well, I think I trust myself. And I trust myself that if I need to make a big decision that I'm going to go get input and feedback from wise people. Now, I'm not going to necessarily take whatever they say, but I trust

myself enough, I've got a method of gathering information and filtering and thinking through it that I'll arrive at the right answer. It's not that I trust that out of my being immediately emerges the right answer. I love what you're saying there, that intuition being these small micro movements. Yeah, and it leads to another thing that I talk about in the book, which is iteration. So in writing, I trust my intuition on Thursday, knowing that I get another shot at it on Friday. And I'm not disavowing my Thursday reaction. I'm just building on it.

So in the same way, you know, I think we can act on our intuition with positive intentions, good faith. If we fuck it up, that's part of the story too. And it doesn't mean you're a terrible person. It doesn't mean you can't trust your intuition. It's just part of the process, the long-term process of trusting your intuition, which gives you chance after chance to hone it and to improve it. Otherwise, it's too much like Russian roulette, you know, but if you say, yeah, I'm going to take my best shot at it and forgive myself if I screw it up. And in writing, that's enacted literally by just showing

up the next day and reading it once more and going, oh yeah, I got that right. Oops, that's not it. So I think the big lesson for a writer is that you learn that you're not your writing. You're also not any one of those writers. You're all of those writers. All of the 20,000 writers that went into writing a six-page story, you've been all of those, and none of them are binding, you know. That's a beautiful lesson, and it means that you're never any one person. You're just an evolving series of people. And that, to me, gives me a lot of hope because otherwise it's too severe. If I'm stuck, if I'm really just one identity, I've already messed that up. And I think that is a absolutely beautiful place to wrap up. Couldn't say it better. So George, thank you so much. You and I are going

to continue in the post-show conversation where we're going to talk about what you get out of reading and kind of what literature does for you. Listeners, if you'd like access to that, other post-show conversations, ad-free episodes, and lots of other great parts of being in our community, go to oneufeed.net slash join. George, thank you so much. I've been so excited for this one and it's been really fun. It's been really fun for me too, Eric. Thank you for having me and thank you for your beautiful mind. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community.

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