Fiction as Simulation: George Saunders on Writing to be “Wilder”
This morning I had the delight of listening to the latest episode of the podcast Book Exploder, a spin-off of the well-regarded radio show Song Exploder, created and hosted by Hrishikesh Hirway (and adapted for Netflix a couple of years back). In Song Exploder, Hirway hands over the mic to famous, mostly popular, songwriters and performers, who “pick apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made,” per Hirway’s tag line at the start of each episode. Hirway, a musician himself, gets access to demos and tracks from the recording studio for the song that’s being dissected and analyzed. He edits the podcast so that we are hearing the layers as the songwriter describes them –– the bass line, the melody, the lyrics, etc ––and “piece by piece,” he reconstructs the song until we hear it at the end of the episode “in its entirety.” Hirway interviews artists across genre and era; this summer alone, his queue featured Rick Astley, Maren Morris, Sudan Archives, Madonna, Björk, and Panic! At the Disco.
With the author Susan Orlean, Hirway recently launched Book Exploder, with the similar aim of giving us a window into the creative process. Beloved books made it into the first wave of episodes: Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, and (my favorite) Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. These are author interviews, but what makes them special is that the writer hones in on a particular passage from their work and explain their inspiration, writing process, and more. They’re invited to turn a single passage, maybe a page or two in length, into a microcosm of the entire book — something we English teachers ask of our students all the time.
In this latest episode, Orlean and Hirway wisely invite the writer George Saunders onto the show to talk about one of his short stories from the 2013 collection Tenth of December. In summer 2021 I devoured his latest work of non-fiction, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, which is both an ode to the Russian short story (and its giants: Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Turgenev) and a satisfying translation of his writing pedagogy to the page. For each section of the book, Saunders ‘book-explodes’ a classic Russian short story and describes not only how it works, but how he teaches about those workings — the best kind of class, which is always a little bit meta.
One thing Saunders seems to deeply understand about his craft (and that of his boy Chekhov) is the mind-altering properties of reading, especially of reading fiction. While Ancient Greeks like Plato distinguished between mimesis (imitation) and diegesis (narration), where mimetic arts show and diegetic arts tell, Saunders seems to understand that fiction can blur those lines. In fact, by diegetically telling in a convincingly mimetic way, one can expand the frames of perception, the schemas, of the reader. Saunders explains this to Orlean in their interview on the podcast, after Orlean identifies a central question of his story as, “What is morality?”
Yeah. That's the only thing I ever wanted to do with stories. I don't have any -- other than that, I don't have any interest in them. Like I was an early Steinbeck fan. I remember reading The Grapes of Wrath one summer when I was doing manual labor. And it just, I thought, "Oh, that's really what literature is." It's a way of helping you through the day by making the day seem bigger, you know, seem charged. So, I think that's absolutely right. And then, for me, I just found early that if I sit, like I've got a pretty serious, really boringly serious reductive person inside me. If that person writes a story about morality, it doesn't prove anything. It's just -- it's a foregone conclusion with my stupid opinions in there. Whereas if I can figure out a way to leave that guy behind and do something wilder, then what happens is, the story writes itself into a space where I really don't know the answer.
“I’ve got a pretty serious, really boringly serious reductive person inside me,” he confesses here, but on the page, his narrator, his story’s consciousness, can “do something wilder” — can exceed him.
What better case for why we all ought to try to write fiction. But I also love this definition of literature for its acknowledgment that a good story, by virtue of both mimetic and diegetic processes, has a way of “making the day seem bigger… seem charged.” Its representation of consciousness is familiar, like a new acquaintance who reminds you of an old friend from high school, but that familiarity is undercut by the abiding knowledge that this is new — that it’s not Eric from high school, it’s this other person. Add in our awareness that art is artificial, and we get uncanniness, the thing that unsettles us, that opens up “a space where I really don’t know the answer.” Saunders describes the way that as a writer, he can access his own subconscious only when he is imitating, and when he hits something he calls “overflow mode”:
…as a kid, some of the first moments of artistic power I ever had were in school, uh, making jokes, you know, imitating a teacher or imitating a neighbor, sort of improv that depends a lot on inhabiting a character and then making that character real. That's still something that really comes alive for me. And you're exactly right: This piece came entirely from that impulse, first
to try to figure out what she sounded like. And then, there's something in the overflow mode that I go into when I'm doing an improv - Well, for me it's really good, because I tend to overthink things. But when you're riffing like this, your subconscious is really available and it's doing kind of crazy stuff that can't be planned.
Something I tell my students, which I learned from the poet Jane Hirshfield in her book Ten Windows (but who cites Robert Frost as her source), is that a writer must surprise themself if they are to surprise their reader. I’ve found this analytic of the “surprise” to be extremely useful, not only as a descriptor for what happens when you’re engaged with a story (you still believe you can be surprised; in fact, you want to be surprised), but also as a metric for when the writing process is going well. (As opposed to the metric of “my teacher likes it.”) (Spoken as someone who relied heavily on that metric throughout her entire formal education.)
If you’ve surprised yourself—if you’ve tapped into “crazy stuff that can’t be planned” as you channel the voice of a narrator—then you leave an imprint of that surprise on the page. That surprising element itself becomes memetic; it imitates an experience of surprise we’d have in reality, simulating the accompanying emotional experiences of awe, wonder, and openness. As Hirshfield puts it in her essay from Ten Windows, “Poetry and the Constellation of Surprise”: “In poetry, surprise deepens, gathers, and purifies attention…: the mind of preconception is stopped, to allow a more acute taking-in.” She uses the example of the Japanese poet Issa’s haiku: “Don’t worry spider—I keep house casually.” Hirshfield writes, “It is as if the walls of the room you are in were suddenly to drop away and the house next door—which, after all, you did know was there—were suddenly sitting companionably within view, except the neighbor is the spider, and the house your own.”
Do I have a point here? Thanks to Ann Friedman this week, I was directed to an essay by Oliver Burkeman (aka The Imperfectionist) called “Everyone is (still) winging it,” a follow-up to his 2014 essay, “Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time.” It was most worth the read for its problematizing of the term “imposter syndrome,” which he doesn’t like because “it makes it sound like an acute and debilitating psychological disorder” rather than a “far more widespread,” he thinks, “barely conscious background assumption,” a myth that we ought to interrogate: “that other people must have a better idea of what they’re doing than we do.” The effect of this false assumption? “It makes you hold back from doing things that might add meaning to your life, on the grounds that you’re still waiting for a feeling of full authority to arrive.”
Fiction as simulation, for reader and writer alike, has the potential to unsettle that feeling of full authority, displacing us into the land of another’s consciousness — which, resembling our own while remaining firmly separate, makes us safe to feel unsafe, free to feel surprised, and able to see the spider that was always there.
Works Cited
Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, Knopf, 2015.
George Saunders, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, Random House, 2021.
Hrishikesh Hirway, Book Exploder, podcast.
Oliver Burkeman, The Imperfectionist, online newsletter.
[Gratitude to the transcriptionist for this episode of Book Exploder! But I do recommend you listen if you are able; Saunders is a very engaging teacher.]
