The One You Feed - How to Find Real Life in Stories with George Saunders

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

In This Episode, You'll Learn: How slowing down the mind and increasing concentration leads to freshness in the creative process Why we need to pay attention to both our natural and habitual tendencies Why there is power in moments of uncertainty and how we can one navigate them How fear and doubt are common struggles when trying to create something meaningful How specificity leads to higher levels of thinking and less reactive behaviors To Learn More, click hereSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you really believe in the sacredness of a given moment, you wouldn't want to waste it chasing phantoms. And a lot of our thoughts, a lot of our worries, I think are phantoms, actually. They feel very real. Welcome to The One You Feed. 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 reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is George Saunders, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is George Saunders, an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. He's a professor at Syracuse University and a four-time winner of the National Magazine Award, as well as winner of the World Fantasy Award, Story Prize, Folio Prize, Booker Prize, and others. Today, George and Eric cover many topics, including his new book, Liberation Day Stories.

Hi, George. Welcome to the show. Eric, nice to be back. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's such a pleasure to have you back on. I was so excited to have you on the first time and excited again. I think you're such a fabulous writer. And one of my things I'm trying to do with the podcast is get more fiction writers on because I love to read fiction. And the nature of my job is that I read so much for the show that if I don't have fiction writers on the show, I don't get to read a lot of fiction. So here we go. And Liberation Day is your latest book. It's a great book of stories. I think we had you on before we were discussing your book about Russian literature. And today we'll be discussing more original stories from your latest work. But before we do that, we'll start like we

always do with the parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent 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. Well, you know, since the last time we talked, that's been in my mind, it's everything really, you know, this idea that the mind is kind of this incredible tool,

but it's also pretty susceptible. So if we put a positive aspiration in front of it, it'll mold around that. And I'm kind of struck by how even small little positive aspirations can be helpful. So, you know, I've noticed that my mind is kind of a dread mind. I've got a lot of doom and dread in there. You know, sometimes just at particular moments, I'll think, well, what's the dread about? You know, could you put something hopeful in there instead? And it actually does really work. So that's a deep parable for me. Boy, there's a lot of directions to go there. And one of them that I want to go to would be a lot of your work makes it difficult. I think it questions our ability to know which wolf we're feeding. And I want to go there in

a second, but I want to stay with the dread for a second because, you know, a tendency in your work is to always turn things to darkness or to negativity. You know, it's something you've recognized as a tendency of mind. And so you don't want to indulge it all the time. It's also a strength of what makes your writing what it is. And so I guess my question would be, how do you think about these things that seem to be somewhat natural and wired into us, part of our personality, that we want to use them where they're useful, but we don't want them to get out of control. How do you think about that in your own life? Yeah, that's such an interesting question, because you're right. You know that one's natural tendencies are kind of what you exploit in art, I think.

That's what makes you unique, I guess. So my experience has been that if you take that natural tendency towards darkness, and if I can just stay within a minute and kind of subdivide that kingdom, okay, there's some of it that's an authentic, defensible response to the situation we find ourselves in in life. And there's some that's habitual. It's autopilot. So in other words, if I'm having written books that investigate the first part, I might

develop certain habits to revert to that or to veer toward it. That second part, I think, needs to be interrogated with each work. You know, in other words, am I just auto-darking here? You know, am I reflexively doing this? And in that, if I was, then I would be missing certain other paths that the story might want to take that might actually be more authentic to it. So it's a little bit like if you're not paying attention to that, you're kind of overriding the natural energy that the story is presenting you with. And it's presenting it rather hopefully like, look, we could do something new here. So if you're too wedded to darkness as a virtue, say, then you're going to run right past those exits. So for me, all of that comes down to the line by

line rewriting. So maybe 20 times you've gone past an exit, you know, powered by your habit. Then maybe on the 21st time, something, maybe it's just your own resolve to be open, will suddenly show you, you know, a path that you didn't see before. So that's what, for me, it's all that granular revision type stuff that I'm always talking about that makes that possible, if that makes sense. I think that's interesting. If we were to pivot that to our personal lives and our tendencies of mind, right? You know, you talk a lot about this revision process, right? You go in and examine things very closely and you keep sort of, as you say, revising, re-editing. And I think that's some of what I think real change in life results from is a willingness to kind of keep looking at the same thing again and again and again, and seeing how it might change a little bit. So let's say it's, I want to be more patient with my children, right? It's to continue to stay with that to continue to look at it, we have a tendency to be like today, it's I'm going to be more patient with my children. And tomorrow, I'm going to focus on patient with my children, and tomorrow I'm going to focus on this, and the next day I'm going

to focus on that. And we're kind of all over the place. Whereas with you and a story, you're kind of right in that same place again and again. And out of that, something really powerful emerges. Yeah. And I think for me, what it does is it takes you right back to the central question, which is how do you maintain freshness in a situation like that? Because, you know, with your kids, you try to be better. No doubt you'll develop certain maxims and kind of mantras and credos. Okay. But those can get smoothed over pretty quickly too. So how do you get to freshness? And for me, part of it is if there's some relation to, well, to reliance on concepts, you know, so if I'm reading a story and I have an idea of what it's about, that's going to not help me in being fresh because now I'm referring to a secondary thing,

not to the primary thing. And for me, that's also related to monkey mind, to having a lot of active thoughts about things. In the past, when I've been able to get my monkey mind quieted a little bit, it's almost like that freshness just is there. In other words, it's always there, but your monkey mind has made a kind of a veil between that moment of freshness and yourself. So in writing, this is hard to talk about, but there's something about the mind state I feel myself going into during revision where a lot of the normal ruminative habits are sidelined a bit. And I think it's just from literally from the act of concentrating on the page and trying to read it in a certain spirit, which has to do more with feeling than ideas.

So it's kind of like in trying to read the passage to see how I would feel about it if I hadn't read it before. That quiets the rumination, increases the concentration. And in that moment, there's freshness. You can get in somehow. I don't know. That sounds kind of wacky, but that's basically how it feels. Yeah. Well, I think it's a really important point, which is how do we stay with fundamental issues or things in life or in art? We're sort of jumping back and forth between life and art here and keep them in a fresh

way. You know, when I was deep in Zen practice, one of the things my teacher did a really good job of was like, we're staying right here, right here. You're going to read this hundred page book and we're going to read it for six months. Right. How do you approach it the third time you're reading it fresh? That's the art is how do you actually do that? I mean, I find that very difficult in things that I do. If I'm writing something or working on a script for something that we're going to do with the podcast, it's like after the second or third time I've read it, I almost feel like it's really hard to read it. Oh, it is. Yeah. Yeah.

There's a skill to that. I don't think I have developed, certainly to the extent someone like you who does it all day, every day has. That's really astute. For me, it's an article of faith that one can get better at that just by trying it. You know, in other words, I don't think there's a lot of construction about it, intellectual construction, but it's just, you know, I always think about that commercial that said, I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV. So for me, it's like, I'm not a first time reader, but I'm pretending to be a first time reader. And that, I think, somehow giving myself permission to do that for all these years has made it easier somehow. So in other words, when I'm reading

something that I wrote, I drop into a mind state that's, well, it's not analytical, but it's very responsive. It reacts to what was already there. And so I guess a long way of saying, I don't think we can will it, but I think we can practice it. I'm sure much like meditation, someone can list the benefits of it, but you really can only feel that from the other side once you're in that state for a couple of seconds. So I think it's something like that. But for me, in the writing realm, the biggest obstruction I think people have is because we read a story and we feel all kinds of intellectual responses arising. So then the natural assumption is that the root of the thing must be

intellectual ideas. But I think that's not actually true. I think the intellectual ideas or the political ideas, whatever, those arise out of the item. But I don't think that the story isn't full of those things because you consciously put them there. It's something much different than that on the creative end. So what I find with my students is you have to kind of dissuade them of the idea that they have to know what the thing is about before they start. And quite on the contrary, it's going to be more powerful if you don't know. So maybe to answer two questions ago, one of the ways you can do this in terms of craft is develop methods for confusing yourself. So for me, often I'll start a story with just a voice, a weird voice that I can do that's kind of funny, that I can sustain, but I don't know whose voice it is yet. So I'm

concentrating on just sustaining the voice, finding it while sustaining it. And then at some point, you have to explain who's talking. That leads you forward, but you don't already have the answer. So I think that is freshness, really, because you just don't know. I mean, there's nothing more fresh than not knowing. Yeah. There's another thing I know we talked about with the Russian book is that it makes intimacy between you and your audience, because if they sense that you don't know, then they say, oh, we're on an exploration together. Yeah.

It's not this guy who knows the answers, who's cramming them down my throat. It's rather that he doesn't actually know. So I'm going to follow behind him and we're going to sort of experience it simultaneously, really. And I think where I'd like to go now is this idea of not knowing, because I said earlier after we talked about the wolf parable, that one of the things I think your work does really well is it engenders a sense of not knowing. I mean, I'm reading your work and I'm like, well, I think this,

now I think that, now I think this, now I think that, right? It sets this whole thing up, you know, where we just don't know what is, you know, kind of coming up. I mean, in Lincoln and the Bardo, there's so many great things about that book, but one of them is that you bring in historical sources to talk about Abraham Lincoln throughout. And what I love about it is that I've got a couple of them here. One of them says, the night continued dark and moonless. A storm was moving in. That's one person's interpretation of the event. Another person's interpretation of the same event is the guests began to depart as the full yellow moon hung among the morning stars, right? You've got this very basic thing.

It should not be a matter of debate about whether the moon is out or not. And yet, all throughout, you show these people who remembered this very basic thing very differently. If we can't know whether the moon is even out or not, how do we leap to much deeper and stronger conclusions that are based on flimsier even evidence. I just love that idea. And it brings us to this not knowing. There's a Zen koan. Not knowing is most intimate. Wow. That's beautiful. Wow. I got to write that down. Thanks for that. That's amazing. Yeah. From the story Love Letter. God, that's a good story. Thank you.

I saw that Stephen Colbert read it online somewhere and the link to do it is no longer available. So I couldn't see him doing it. Yeah. I think they took it down after a week. I think they gave us a week and they took it. Yeah, it was pretty amazing. Yeah.

I really wanted to see that. So the part I was thinking of is my page numbers may not be right because I've got it in a Kindle, but I think it is starting on page 97. You asked if you're supposed to stand by and watch your friend's life be ruined. And I was thinking up through, I never want you around that kind of person. Sure. Yeah. So this is from a story called Love Letter. And it's a letter from a grandfather to his grandson in some unspecified future time where the authoritarian impulses has gotten the upper hand in our country. So his grandson has written him a letter asking for some advice. He's got a chance maybe to intervene on

behalf of a friend, but given the political climate, it might be risky. So the grandfather writes him this long letter, and this is from the middle of it. course understand why a young, intelligent, good-looking person, perpetual delight to know, I might add, would feel that it is his duty to do something on behalf of his friend, Jay. But what exactly? That is the question. When you reach a certain age, you see that time is all we have, by which I mean moments like those springing deer this morning and watching your mother be born and sitting at the dining room table here waiting for the phone to ring and announce that a certain baby, you, had been born. Or that day when all of us hiked out to Point Lobos. That extremely loud seal. Your sister's scarf drifting down. Down to that black briny boulder. The replacement you so generously bought her in Monterey. How pleased you made her with your kindness. These things were real. That is what, that is all one gets. All this other stuff is real,

only to the extent that it interferes with those moments. Now, you may say, I can hear you saying it and see the look on your face as you do, that this incident with Jay is an interference. I respect that. But as your grandfather, I beg you not to underestimate the power slash danger of this moment. Perhaps I have not yet mentioned this to you. In the early days of this thing, I wrote two letters to the editor of the local rag. One overwrought the other comic. Neither had any effect. Those who agreed with me agreed with me. Neither had any effect. Those who agreed with me agreed with me. Those who did not remained unpersuaded. After a third attempt was rejected, I found myself pulled over up near the house for no reason I could discern. The cop, nice guy, just a kid really, asked what I did all day.

Did I have any hobbies? I said no. He said, some of us heard you like to type. I sat in my car looking over at his large, pale arm. His face was the face of a kid. His arm, though, was the arm of a man. How would you know about that? I said. Have a good night, sir, he said. Stay off the computer. Good Lord, his stupidity and bulk there in the darkness, the metallic clinking from his belt area, the palpable certainty he seemed to feel regarding his cause, a cause I cannot begin, even at this late date, to get my head around or view from within, so to speak. I do not want you anywhere near or under the sway of that sort of person ever. That whole story is this basic dilemma of, to me, do you do something in service

of the greater good society, which may have zero chance of success? It might do something. which may have zero chance of success. It might do something. Or do you protect who's close to you, who you have a better chance of protecting? And I also loved it because my son and I have these kind of conversations. He's about 23. You know, he's out there like, let's change it all. And I'm much more like the grandfather. I'm a little more cautious. Like, what does that really, I don't know if that's going to really happen. But that tension in that story really brings us to not knowing what's the right thing to do. And I think with questions of morality, for me, I don't like not knowing, but it feels like the right place to be to keep wondering, am I doing the right thing? Yeah. Say a little bit more about that. I love that. We don't like not knowing, but we're the better for it. You know,

Chekhov says something like, you know, the job of a work of art isn't to answer a question, but to formulate it correctly. So what can happen, I think, is you keep asking a question and because of the storytelling, the question gets elevated. So your original easy answer is invalidated and all the way up the chain. And until we're in the best stories. I think you're left in a moment of going, not this is the answer, but thus it is. You know, that's oh, that's actually how it is. So I think with this story, I felt that not much happens in the story. And I think you could argue that he starts to come off of that position a little bit, but I'm not sure.

bit, but I'm not sure. So yeah, I think that can sometimes be the work of the story is to kind of say the mind with which you answer questions like this one easily is not your best mind. And you can actually, through a story or through certain ways of thinking, you can move up to higher and higher levels of thinking. And I think as you're pointing out at the end of that, your highest state is being able to abide with the uncertainty incrementally longer. I think that's really the thing. So one thing is in that mode, you'll be acting with the most information you could possibly get. You'll be in full mindfulness of the complexity, which means you'll be in mind of the risks. And also you'll be in mind of the things that you sacrificed by having a position. You know, you've turned your back on one side of it. That's going to cost you

something. So in all ways, I think it's better. It's just so damn hard, though. You know, in real life, it's really hard. Oh, yeah. And that's what's so great about the story is it makes it very difficult to know what the right thing to do is. And in the story, let's say you're 15, 20 years on from sort of losing of democracy, right? And sliding into, I don't know if it's a dictatorship, I don't know quite what you would call it, but a much less free society. And the grandfather's looking back and saying, well, what would you have had me do? I'm not the kind of person who would take up arms. I mean, you know, I called my senator when they still answered the phone, I donated money, you know, and it raises this question as we look at perhaps the crumbling of democracy, of this beautiful thing.

This is my own personal question. Should I be doing more than I'm doing? And if so, what would that be? And is there even any point? It may be worthy to die on certain hills for certain causes, but is it worthy to die on a hill for a cause that you know is going to have zero effect? And I think the answers to all that is, we don't know. But it reminded me of one of my favorite songs of all time. And it's a song by an artist named Dan Byrne, and it's called God Said No. And in it, he basically is saying to God, like, send me back, send me back to Berlin. Let me kill Hitler, right? And God is saying, look, if I sent you back, you'd take a lover, you'd get distracted, right? Then he's like, send me back to Kurt Cobain. Let me help him see his glory. He's like, if I sent you back to Kurt Cobain, you'd ask him to help introduce you to somebody who could get you a record deal. And you say this quite directly in the story.

We think we would know what we would do in certain historical situations because the lens of looking back makes it seem easy. The complexity of being in it is a whole different animal. Yeah, I guess true across the board in our desire to be righteous. We look backwards and we simplify those battles. And I think that's really to our detriment because there are battles going on right now that we may not even know we're in. You know, we're blowing it right now. We maybe don't know it. So, again, I think one of the things that fiction is wonderful at doing is to remind us that certainty has some relation to specifics of time and condition. So, in other words, if you say to me in the abstract, should one intervene to try to stop an unrighteous system?

The right answer is tell me more. Like, you know, which system? on which day? Who am I? You know, and actually, it's amazing how you can always say, tell me more, almost always tell me more. Then at some point in the real world, you do have to act or not act. But I think it's a really powerful thing to not leap too soon on anything, you know, to ask for more information. So fiction, for some weird reason, storytelling, when you know that my story is made up, then suddenly certain things get really valuable, like specificity is a huge one. And specificity is kind of the medicine that saves us from the mistakes we make from generality.

Should a person ever do X? I don't want to answer that question. Tell me which person and tell me the situation and keep telling me and keep telling me. At the end, maybe I'll act. But more often than not, you know, you find out that you don't really have to have an opinion about a lot of things. You know, I remember on 9-11, I had a whole morning where I hadn't heard about it. I was working and I wasn't on the internet or anything. So it was over for about three hours before I heard about it. And that whole time I was up happily working on a story and looking out the window and our dog was sunning herself on the sidewalk, you know. And then as soon as I heard the news, I went into full thinking person mode, asking questions, fighting, debating. But it was

interesting that most of the questions I ended up asking, they didn't have any real life corollary for me, you know? Yeah. So I guess it's sort of like, if you really believe in the sacredness of a given moment, you wouldn't want to waste it chasing phantoms. And a lot of our thoughts, a lot of our worries, I think are phantoms, actually. They feel very real. 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...

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podcasts. The specificity thing, I think, is really important. And there's a story early in the book. I think is really important. And there's a story early in the book. I think it's the first story in the book. Is the first story called Liberation Day? Yes. And I'm not going to set the whole story up because there's too much to it. It's impossible.

I've tried it about a million times and you can't do it. Yeah. But there's a line in it where one of the characters is saying, speaking of her beauty so often with such high specificity made her beauty real to me, made me notice it. She really is so beautiful. So that specificity is a way back to our earlier conversation about how do you keep things fresh, right? One way is specificity. I spent a lot of October learning more about gratitude because I was teaching a workshop on it. And one of the

key things with gratitude is to avoid it becoming a rote exercise is specificity, right? If you can be very specific about what you're grateful for, why down to the most granular details, you can actually feel it. Whereas if you're just like, well, I'm grateful for my wife and not much, right? So specificity really is a language of, I was going to say love, maybe that's the right word. I don't know. Yeah, no, that's interesting. Somewhere I came across this idea that if you ask someone to picture a rabbit, that's one thing. You say, picture a white bunny with a blue spot on its ear. Somehow the brain can do that better. I don't really know why, but I expect that there's some Darwinian component, You know, as much as abstract thought is useful to us, sometimes the brain, you know, the way it works is it makes a general first draft in the back of the brain.

I read somewhere that then it passes that first draft up through the front of the brain where it's refining it by specificity. It's looking at the actual data and refining that model. So I think it's innate in us that specificity is what our mind needs to function at its highest level, maybe. I'm not sure about that, but it feels that way. Yeah. You've got a new project called Story Club. It's a sub-stack newsletter and group where you study short stories. And in it, you recently answered a letter from someone who wrote to you about their friend who was a writer who wasn't really writing in that moment. And you said, even if you're not actively writing because you're too busy, you are still a writer because of the way you regard the world with curiosity and interest and some sort of love.

And I think the real benefit of learning to see the world as an artist, even if the art you create isn't anything particularly special, right? Because there's something about viewing the world through an artist's eyes that I think does bring us towards greater specificity and does bring us towards greater love. You know, I was comparing it late to in The Matrix when they have those really super slowed down fight scenes. And then, you know, when he's in that mode, what's his name, Neo, is a really good fighter, of course,

because he's moving at normal speed. So I think in some ways, at least in stories, there's a lot of that where you have a situation where, you know, somebody is maybe not the most likable person. And in your first draft, you kind of poke some fun at that person and it's a good time. But then, you know, because you have other sections to write, you have to take a second, third, fourth, fifth look at that person. But you're doing it in this kind of slowed down environment where you are creating that environment through the sentences you write. So the sentences, for reasons we don't know, seem to glow better when they're specific. So as you're trying to populate that story with specific sentences, that's exactly equal to looking closer, you know, and it's looking closer with a kind of

artificial tool that you don't maybe use every day. You know, if I'm trying to describe an irritating person, that's like, I'm grateful for my wife. Okay. He's irritating, but you haven't proved it to me yet. Give me an example. Okay. Then suddenly there's a matchstick that he's using as floss. And I'm suddenly irritated. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Got me. But as you try to prove that someone's irritating, suddenly that matchstick is a presence in the story. That guy's got to put it down somewhere when he gets up, you know, he's got to do something with it. So all of that somehow, it's really weird. I can't quite explain it, but in my experience, if you're trying to make a sentence that's good, you know, it's atypical or has muscle, you know, then you're going to be

drawn to specificity. You're also going to be drawn, as we said at the beginning, to your own kind of oddness. Like what's unique about the way you see the world? All those things are really just trying to make a sentence that doesn't suck, you know, that calls some attention or engagement with the reader. But that process is all about slowed down noticing, I think, you know. But the weird thing is it's not necessarily noticing the real world. Like I don't remember ever seeing somebody do that with a matchstick, except maybe in a movie. But somehow it was there when I needed it, you know, so there's something very deep about it. Yeah. And I don't really understand it. But I think to your point,

it's a really wonderful way to just as I'm sure if you said to somebody, okay, you're grateful for your wife, tell me more. Well, every day she does this. Okay, tell me more. And pretty soon you'll have the whole story there. But just through those three holy words, tell me more. Yeah, those are holy words. This is coming completely out of left field. But I'm going to reference The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. You didn't see that coming. But he talks a lot in the book and I didn't get it until recently. And it just even clicked more in as I was preparing for this interview and, you know, reading some of what you have to say about writing. He talks about this fundamental

human attribute of imagination, and he is not talking about imagination in the sense of creating a work of art, but he's still positing imagination as a hugely important thing in living a good life. And I think it's for a lot of the reasons we're discussing here. It's the ability to imagine different situations. It's the ability to imagine complexity. It's the ability to imagine how we might act differently or better. That if we can really engage in imagination, it's not just this thing that's only for artists or for daydreamers. It's an actual really helpful tool

in living a better life. Yeah. In a sense, imagination is opposite of autopilot. Yeah. If I walk out here on the street and I go, oh, it's my street and I have a set of fixed ideas about it, then what I'm really not seeing is the specificity. You know, the way that this street today is different from yesterday, the way that my mind is imposing regularity on something that's actually a crazy various phenomenon. So I think for me, creativity and imagination, I get a lot of people saying, your imagination is so crazy. To me, there's a power in thinking that imagination is just reaction. To the extent that I'm creative in a story, it's just reacting to what I did yesterday. You know, if I think about the muse or something, that blocks me up.

But if I think, look, just say something and then tomorrow modify it. I would say all of the creativity is contained in that move there. Because if you say something, you know, yesterday I wrote something down. There's kind of two paths to react to it. One is to remember my concepts about it from yesterday and continue that, which is, that's habit. The other one is to see it anew. And the only way to see it anew is to react to it from a place of quiet mindedness. I would say, then you react to it, you're seeing it anew, that's fresh. So I think that's the crossroads in writing. You're at that crossroads all the time. I mean,

it's because you can't help but have ideas about what you're working on, thematic ideas. How do you get clear of those, you know? And I think in real life also, and I think as you get older, the brain gets encrusted with a lot of habitual stuff, you know? So how do you find the freshness in the moment? And for me, the only thing is to say, well, don't succumb to the bullshit of your habitual thinking about it if you can help it.

But that's really, really difficult. If I get a couple seconds of that freshness a day, I'm pretty happy, you know. Yeah. Reading about and hearing you describe your working process, you know, there's a couple things that come to mind as we're talking about this. One is you're not waiting for the grand idea, right? You actually have said like, I just get a couple lines and I just start with that, right? It's I just start where I am with what little thing I've got.

And then there's the trust that if I keep sort of doing my best to show up with that, it will become something. And I think that that's a beautiful parallel to just making change in life is just start somewhere with something, but keep coming back to it with love and things transform over time. I just love that idea that you are really taking away a lot of the, I was going to say grandiosity, but that's not exactly what I mean. You're taking away a lot of the very high expectation that you have to have something great now. It's that my process will enable me to sooner or later get to something that's good. Yeah. I mean, you know what I think it takes away from me is the anxiety because if I sit down here and say, okay, I've got to do something great. Forget it. That day is gone. When I was younger, I had this mantra, which is, I don't have to do everything. I just have to do something, you know. That's a beautiful mantra.

Yeah. And built into that is the idea that what we call grand, if we approach it that way, I want to do something grand, there's already a list of all the grand things. And they already have answers, you know. So in a sense, what we're doing is we're exploring. And the accretion of small moments of non-bullshit will be something, quote unquote, grand. Because if every moment is about something, you know, if you're kind of in some kind of creative awareness as you're writing a story, which, of course, I do by iteration many, many times. Or if you are, then by definition, it'll be about something.

Because every moment when it stopped being about something or became random, you would have changed already, you know. So in a certain way, you can sort of forget all that stuff. I tell that story about the first time I wrote something that I felt was authentically me, you know, I was kind of disappointed because I've been aspiring to be on Hemingway Mountain, this Kilimanjaro, you know. And instead I had this little shithill, you know, with my name Saunders kind of misspelled on the thing. But as you say, you go over and stand on your shithill and you keep working it and hopefully the shithole, you know, with my name Saunders kind of misspelled on the thing. But as you say, you go over and stand on your shithole and you keep working it and hopefully the shithole will rise. You know, that's, that's the, but for me, it's the anxiety is a big enemy of me. I have an issue with in general and certainly when I'm working. So when I look at it now,

a lot of my aesthetic positions are just anxiety reducing positions. If I can't produce work because I'm too anxious about it, then it's done. So the first step would be get the anxiety under control and write something. I agree totally. I mean, whenever I'm working on anything, whether it be something like preparing for an interview or, you know, creating a talk or something, there is inevitably multiple points in that process where I go, I don't have it. Yeah. Like it's not here, whatever I can do to reduce the anxiety enough to just keep working. Right. You know, just keep at it. And then knowing like that, that always happens. I've done it enough now that I'm like, yes, you think this is total junk. You think you're never going to find your way through it.

And that's the way you felt literally every time you've created anything, your way through it. And that's the way you felt literally every time you've created anything, right? Just trust in the process and do your best. I always quote this thing. I used to think it was Einstein, but people are telling me it wasn't. So I don't know who it was, but it's just no worthy problem has ever solved in the plane of its original conception. So when you start writing a talk, if you know what you want to say and you just say it, no one's having much fun. But if you think you know what you're going to say and then the piece overturns that and ascends, then you're into some cool stuff. But so, yes, I think recognizing that the familiarity, the process that's really important

is deep. You know, just trying to write a paragraph, everything is contained in that process, actually, you know. More and more to me, it's kind of about this awareness that there's somebody on the other end of it who's just as real as you are. That's a deep thing. That kind of conversation, you wouldn't want to phone that one in and would literally mean you'd have to be alert in every paragraph. When you're doing a talk, you know, when you said, I don't have it yet, that's you doing a really amazing thing, which is anticipating the response of a theoretical audience correctly. You know, that's a lot. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know 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.

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It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I always think it's interesting to have this sort of conversation with someone like you who is, by any sort of measure of, I guess, success, right? You've won countless awards, you know, your work has been featured everywhere. Anybody who is in the literature space thinks George Saunders is a hell of a writer, right? So I'm not trying to puff you up here. What I'm actually saying is that I think it's really important for everyone to hear that even someone who's got that level of previous success still faces the battle of it, of art day to day to day. Because I think there's this sense that oftentimes

people have, which is, I just can't do it because I'm not as good as so-and-so. And the fact that I feel that way is part of the reason I can't do it versus realizing that everyone feels that way when they're engaged in anything meaningful. I'm sure you could sit down and be like, well, I am George Saunders and I won the Man Booker Prize. But your brain at the very least would go, yeah, but that was then, what about now? Right? And so you still are in the trenches with your anxiety and your doubt,

despite all your previous success. 100%. And I think, you know, the person who doesn't have that is somebody who's not doing good work anymore. You know, like when you said a minute ago, you're working on a piece and you go, I just don't have it yet. That kind of humility, that's very useful. The person who doesn't have that, the person who always thinks he's got it, that's a terrible writer. So for me, part of the dispositional, like I would kind of like to get to a place where I wasn't so anxious about it, but I'm glad I'm not.

If you have doubts about your abilities, that's a great editing tool. That's a way of being respectful of the reader to say, I can't just give her any old thing. I have to really make sure that it works. So that's really important. But on the other hand, you can break that into two halves. There's the part that's useful, which is you have high standards for yourself. You don't want to send a story off before it's done its thing. But then I also see writers who have that imposter syndrome so badly that they want that addressed before they can start. Yes. And that can't be, you know, so, so then it becomes a friend of mine called it backdoor ego. You have such high opinion of yourself that you can't start

anything. Yeah. Backdoor ego. That's great. Yeah. Because I mean, truly, you know, it's sort of a cliche in a personal development world, but it's a cliche because it's so true, which is the thing that you're afraid to do. We keep waiting until we're not afraid, but that is simply never going to come. Yeah. That's not how it's going to happen. How it's going to happen is, okay, I am afraid and, I find some way of working in spite of that or working with that. Yeah, yeah. And I think sometimes, you know, for me, I'm not a particularly courageous person, but I can sometimes reformulate the situation. So it's not so scary. So for me to say, I'm really afraid I'm going to write a book that won't do well. I'm like, yeah, no shit, you know, of course. But to say,

okay, I'm really hopeful I could write a book that is beautiful, that I can get excited about, you know, or like if you're sitting in front of a blank page, I really don't want to screw this up and be mediocre. And then your little voice in my head goes, yeah, of course, let's not do that. You talked earlier about, you know, being familiar with your own process. By this point, I kind of know that it's totally fine to have a first draft that doesn't have legs. That's totally fine. That's normal. There's no stress about that. Of course, I'm writing my shitty first few paragraphs. Yeah. But I know that I can revise it into something I like. So therefore, courage, I would say doesn't quite enter into it, because I'm such a chicken shit that I want to outsmart the fear. So yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I wonder if we could have you read another passage from the book. And this is in the mom of bold action. And I've really wrestled with what to have you read here. But I think it starts with, and there it was, forgiveness. Maybe you could set this one up for us too, a little bit. Yeah. So in this one, a woman with her husband has kind of participated in something that ended up causing harm to this old kind of possibly homeless person. And she's now going to do a little visualization to try to get us off the hook, I think is the idea of it. A flock of geese came out of a low cloud, emitting this weird non-goose sound. A second group joined from the left and a third from the

right, and the greater flock flew off imperfectly in the direction of the high school. She imagined a beam of white light shooting out of her forehead. An apology beam, charged with the notion, I am so sorry. It traveled across town and crossed the river and roamed through the woods until it found the two guys and, having briefly paused above them because they looked so damn similar, entered the innocent one. Instantly, he knew her. Knew her pain. Knew about Derek's long thing and how out of step he was with his classmates, how he sometimes went to school with a stuffed bear in his shirt pocket as if he thought that was a good look, poor dear. And the thing was, knowing her this completely, it all made sense to

the guy. And there it was, forgiveness. That's what forgiveness was. He was her. Being her, he got it all, saw just how the whole thing had happened. How could he be mad at her when he was her? A green forgiveness beam shot out of his forehead and flew back over the town, charged with the notion, to tell the truth, I never expected much from life anyway, and given all the crap that's happened to me, most of which I caused, a slight limp is, believe me, the least of my worries. Plus, the pain is making me really attentive to every moment. The beam entered the car, hung there near the glove compartment. Although I do have one request, it said. Go ahead, she thought kindly. Forgive my cousin, the beam said, as I have forgiven you.

Oh, brother, in a pig's ass, like that was happening. Someday, maybe, although probably not. She didn't have that in her, just didn't. She hated that jerk, and always would. You forgave Ricky, the beam said. You guys know Ricky, she said. Ricky was worse, the beam said. Well, she said, if you knew Ricky. If you knew my cousin, the beam said. Anyway, it was all bullshit. There was no beam. She was just making it up with her mind. You are trapped in you, the beam said. Yeah, well, who isn't, she thought. you the beam said yeah well who isn't she thought there's so many great things about that but i just love the fact that she's going along on this sort of you know good feeling you know forgiveness moment until she's sort of asked to forgive it makes me think of uh as you were reading it the

lord's prayer flashed into my mind right, forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And that idea that she was like, well, no, I can't forgive that. And that they both are saying, you know, if you knew the person, then, you know, you'd know that they're a good person. Yeah, well, then also that counter voice is coming from her as well, because it's all a mental thing. So she's providing an argument and deflating it herself. There's a quote, I tried to memorize this for many years, but it's, I think it's Longfellow. And the gist of it is, you know, if you could know your enemy's secret sorrows and fears, that person wouldn't be your enemy. It's much more beautiful than that. But I think that's kind of what she's saying to herself. And yet she's not interested. The person in question had pushed her kid down at one point. So she's reached that kind of scary place where, yes, I know love, forgiveness,

compassion, but no, I can't, you know, and I think anybody could get there and we do get there and that's, that's tough. Oh yeah. I mean, those are ideas, you know, love, forgiveness, compassion that I deeply believe in. And there are just times where I bump up against it and I'm like, nope, you know, I can forgive nearly anything, but that littering, no, can't let that one go. I always say, when somebody cuts you off in traffic, you always know which political party they belong to, you know, but, but you don't actually, you know, you think you do. You don't, you don't. It's funny though. The littering joke kind of cracks me up because I mean, I sometimes feel like I get more bent out of shape about littering than I do mass murder. And I don't really understand why that is, but I guess it's that little thing phenomenon.

Yesterday, we were at this place and this couple cut in front of us in line and a cashier opened up, they rushed the window and then they kind of were doing that thing where you pretend you didn't know, you know, and it was, it was really galling for longer than it should have been. you pretend you didn't know, you know, and it was, it was really galling for longer than it should have been. So at the end of that, there's this sense of like, well, if you knew my person, you know, you'd understand why they did that and vice versa. And in Lincoln and the Bardo, there is this section that is really kind of amazing where all these spirits are talking about that they did what they did because of the circumstances they were raised in, right? One of the lines is, we were as we were. How could we have been otherwise or being that way have done otherwise? We were that way at that time and had been led to that place, not by any innate evil in ourselves, but by the state of our cognition and our experience up until that moment. That's really kind of remarkable. And it raises

this again, back to this deep sort of not knowing, right? You know, how do you judge people on their actions, recognizing that we don't all have the same capacities, the same starting places, the same opportunities, the same privileges, use the words you want. But at the same time, you know, further on down that one of the other characters in Lincoln and the Bardo says to be grouped with these accepting one's sins so passively, even proudly with no trace of repentance. I could not bear it. You know, must I even now be beyond all hope? Perhaps I thought this is faith, to believe our God ever receptive to the smallest good intention. Say a little bit more about that section. That's one of those oppositions we

talked about earlier, where I'm just like, yep, I agree with that. You know, there are two views that are right, and they can't really be reconciled. The only thing I've found that gives me a little peace of mind is this idea of the absolute versus the relative. So in an absolute sense, I really believe that first bit, a person who is born, you could call it karma, you could call it neurology or whatever, but there's biofates, there's something in that person that is wired already. Then they go into a specific world that proceeds in front of them in real time and changes them. So I think in some ways that there's not much freedom in that really. And I believe that the highest form of judging someone is to not, you know, to kind of

go, yeah, well, you did this because of everything that happened to you. That's true in the absolute sense. On the relative sense, you know, if the bear has your neck in his jaws, you can say, well, he's a bear, you know, he's doing what comes natural, but you want to live. Yeah. So I think that's the relative sense. The relative sense is once you have consciousness, you're rooting for things to come out a certain way. The bear is no good because the bear is trying to kill you. The Academy Award is good because they're giving it to you. So I think those things, they exist compatibly with or without the addition of consciousness. And so since we all have consciousness and ego, and it seems very hard to get rid of it,

for me, it's just to keep those two ideas in mind. Like yesterday when that couple cut us off there, I just mechanically said they are what they are. It's not worth it. If you just don't do anything for an hour, you'll have totally forgotten about it. And that will be the virtuous solution. You know, so I think that's one of those conundrums we talked about before. Yeah. In a similar part, very near there in the book, as these people are lamenting all the things that they did in life and how they couldn't have done differently. And then someone says, well,

you know, do you think that justifies it? And one of the people says, and I'm paraphrasing here, but basically, no. And then another character says, well, then your punishment is having its intended result, which is your punishment is causing you to reflect upon your behavior. That made me then think of a conversation I had with a gentleman recently. His name's Father Gregory Boyle. Oh, yeah, sure, sure. Yeah, he's great. Yeah. Somewhere in there, you know, you're talking about he works with gang members who lived in horrible conditions, but have also often done horrible things, you know, and he makes this distinction that punishment doesn't really make sense, given if you take their history into account. But you also have to stop them, you know? And I love that sort of, it's kind of like you and the bear, right? Like there's no sense getting mad at the bear. The bear is doing what it needs to do. Nonetheless, you got to get the bear off your neck. Yeah. Cause you're doing what you need to do also, you know, you're not any less than the bear.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. No, I think too, you know, there's also, there's a slight alteration. So if somebody is offending you or or you can live in a mind that says, my job is to judge that. But you could also move over a little bit and go, my job is to think about altering it. And those are two different mindsets. With the littering example, to say, ah, that bastard, you know, and walk away. You've taken all that inside yourself. Or if you said to him, you bastard. Okay, well, you brought it out. That's maybe a little bit better, but it may not go well. But if you said, I am going to do something and I'm going to think about alteration, how could I alter this? Now, again, specificity, given the situation,

you might decide that to alter it, you should just shut up. Just let the world do it. So I think the slight change, and the same thing with writing, you know, if you're reading your work and you're judging it, ah, I suck. I'm an imposter, that's just a dead end. But if you're thinking, reading it with to be a better person, I'm trying to whatever that thing is, you know, the judgment just leads to shame, which there's no learning that happens in that. But okay, I'm not going to be terrible to myself about it. I'm not going to punish myself. But I'm going to continue to try and alter myself. Yeah, when that's appropriate. Yeah, I think the word I try to think of more often is playful. Yeah, with writing for sure. But also in these things we're talking about, because the opposite of playful is ego, actually. You know, your story's no good, and you react with shame. That's backdoor

ego. You're just saying, I'm so great that I'm worthy of big shame, you know? Whereas if you were not so much centered in yourself, that would lead you to a more playful thing. Like, oh, this story is interesting. This story is kicking my butt a little bit. Ha ha. Isn't that a privilege to be in relation to this difficult story? So playfulness, I think, is another word I try to use a lot in my own mind. Because I can get very inward and kind of beat up on myself and in my writing stuff. But just to say, you know, this is all pretend.

It's all just for fun. And the same thing actually with personal development. It's all pretend, you know, it's all for fun. Yeah. I'd like to end by talking about a topic that Buddhists all over the world always talk about, which is we could use different words for it. Crypto. Exactly. Exactly. Ethereum or Bitcoin is the big question, George. Where are you leaning these days? Among the Buddhists? I don't know. Bitcoin is the big question, George. Where are you leaning these days? I'm on the Buddhist side or not. We could call it desire. We could call it clinging. We could call it craving. And I just want to bring up two points from the latest book. And one is the story Ghoul,

which is really funny. And this line is particularly funny, although out of context, it may not be so. But you basically say one evening that earlier described remorseful demon was sent tumbling down the cliffs of unceasing desire, which just cracks me up as a metaphor, the cliffs of unceasing desire. But then at another point, you say every man is born with a certain store of desire. It is a treasure he has been bequeathed that he must spend wisely over the course of his life. One moves through the world, finding objects on which to expend it. Blessed is he who So, they're sort of the case for desire, the case sort of against desire. How do you think about that? You're really good at finding those. No, I think that's right. I mean, I think I've felt it both ways. I mean, a life without desire, I think it's depression, you know, pretty much.

I mean, at least, I mean, I'm sure that if you were a great spiritual being, that might be different. But for me, when my desire and my interest and my opinions go away, that means it's a depressive state of mind. But similarly, you know, when I've put all my faith in my interest and my opinions go away, that means it's a depressive state of mind. But similarly, you know, when I've put all my faith in my desires, there's just nothing there. You know, like I think probably in my writing career, I've done that. When I was younger, I had some idea that like a fear of death and that somehow if I just wrote a great book, then what? I don't know what I thought, but it was like a veer. You know, I think about death and go, no, just write a great book. And so, you know, then at some point, like, it doesn't matter what you do. I mean, you're dying,

you're definitely dying. So your desire to write a book, a great book or a good book, whatever, you can do it. And then it'll just come right back, you know, or replaced by something else. So I think that's one, again, one of those conundrums that you think, is desire the most holy thing in the world yes is desire the great curse of living yes yeah so yeah but you know but with that in mind then i think you can assess a specific desire more intelligently so for example you know i just did a big 14 city book tour and before i started i was like okay two or three tours ago my mindset was i'm anticipating a great triumph and i'm going to enjoy the triumph.

Okay. Well, after living through two book tours, like that's not actually right. That's not it. What should I be thinking? Okay, maybe I should be thinking, I want to get through this with grace, you know, and I want to take every opportunity I can to be positive and helpful to people. Okay, that's better, you know. Yeah. Maybe at some level, and when I get good enough at it, I'll just go out there without any desire and just respond. But I think if you queue up these conundrums we've been talking about and let them resonate, and it's really hard to, I mean, I'm having trouble now even resisting the urge to come down to one side or the other. But I think that's what we're talking about, that holy state of going, yeah, it's difficult and stopping right there. Totally. And I'm going to stop right there too, because I am the same way. I want to come down

with some clarity, but we're going to, in the spirit of the entire feeling that the book gave me and a phrase you've used in talking about the book of holy befuddlement, we're going to just end in a state of holy befuddlement. That sounds like something that Robin would say to Batman. Yes, exactly. Holy befuddlement. That sounds like something that Robin would say to Batman. Yes, exactly. Holy befuddlement, Batman. Well, George, thank you so much. It is always such a pleasure to talk with you. The new book is wonderful. Listeners, if you like short stories, I could not recommend it more highly. And we'll have links in the show notes where you can find all that stuff. And again, thank you so much, George. I know you're busy. Oh, I love being with you. You

always give me so much to think about. I really love being with you. Thank you. Thank you. 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. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know 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?

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