The following interview was conducted by___ and appeared in Missouri Review.
This interview was conducted on Friday, November 17th, 2000, in a lounge of the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino. The night before, [George] Saunders had given a reading at the Clark County Public Library in the Jewel Box Theatre that was sponsored by both the UNLV Creative Writing MFA program and the Nevada Humanities Committee. Saunders read Sea Oak to a standing-room only crowd while a meeting of the local Society for Creative Anachronism was conducted boisterously in the adjacent theater.
JW: Last night, Douglas Unger called your admission to the Syracuse Creative Writing program a grand experiment that he and Tobias Wolff had to fight for, one that has obviously paid off. Given your non-literary educational background, did you feel out of place as a student there?
GS: A little bit. I was always aware that I didnt have quite the intellectual guns that a lot of the other students had. But, at the same time, the atmosphere was open enough with Doug and Toby that I felt it didnt matter all that much. They encouraged me to get up to speed with whichever writers worked for me without worrying about being comprehensive in my catching-up. They encouraged me to just find two or three writers I loved and go from there.
I didnt know I was a grand experiment at the time. I felt more like a clerical error. I didnt know that Doug and Toby had had trouble getting me in, though I was aware that many of the other students were from Ivy League English departments, whereas my undergraduate degree was in geophysics, from the Colorado School of Mines. So while the other students knew all about Shelley and Keats, I knew about Alfred Wegener, the father of plate tectonics, who we affectionately used to call Big Al. But, you know, fiction is open to whoever comes in the door, as long as you come in energetically, and so I had a feeling there was room for me. The atmosphere was set up so that I didnt feel ashamed of myself. Or at least not any more than I usually did, which was plenty, being a former Catholic.
JW: Vonnegut wrote something about the best education for a writer not being in English Literature. Would you agree?
GS: It depends on the writer. Theres Flannery OConnor, who got an English degree, and who I think went into an MFA program directly after graduation, and nobody has ever suggested that her work might have been stronger had she, you know, gone out and worked on a shrimper.
My background was unconventional in that Id been educated at an engineering school and had worked in the oilfields and so on, and wasnt particularly well-read, at least not in any comprehensive way. I think the working experience was invaluable, in that it gave me a low-level rage, or at least a sense that there was injustice in the world and that this injustice was playing out, every day, on the bodies and minds of the people towards the bottom of the heap. In other words, all that work and travel gave me a certain moral stance, which eventually evolved into a certain prose style and set of thematic concerns, etc. Also, those years gave me a certain kind of confidence to invent things, to exaggerate, to make some claims about our culture, etc. On the other hand, almost all of the work Ive done in fiction has been to compensate for my shortcomings, some of which, Im sure, have to do with how restricted my reading experience is, and how late in life I did much of that reading.
Anyway, I think that for me it might have been a good thing to have come from a non-traditional background, because Im not exactly an intellectual giant, and I suspect that if Id had a more extensive background in English before I started to write, I might have ended up just badly parroting other writers. But because I hadnt read enough to even now who to parrot, the experiences of my own life were what drove me to fiction, and then the task became to find a style that would do justice to these experiences, and wouldnt require too many big words or complicated flashbacks.
JW: Your work is consistently characterized as satirical. Yet you said in an interview once that, for you, writing is an exercise in compassion. Dont you think that satire and compassion are kind of mutually exclusive impulses?
GS: No. I think theyre manifestations of the same impulse. For me, they are. By compassion I dont mean that kind of soft-touch, lovey-dovey kind of compassion. I mean plain sight. I mean if you see something plainly, without attachment to your own preconceptions of it and without any aversion to what you see, then thats compassion, because youre minimizing the distinction between subject and object. So then, whatever needs to be done, you can do it quickly and efficiently to free up whatever the suffering is in that situation. And satire, for me, is a way of encouraging clear sight. Teasing is a way of encouraging clear sight.
The only problem I see in it is that certain satirical modes preclude getting into certain spaces. For example, I have two kids and a wife who I love like crazy and my life is very very good right now. But Im not sure how to write that. Someone once said that happiness writes white, and I think thats true.
On the other hand, lately, Im realizing more and more that its not necessarily fictions job to be photographically representative of reality. If I want to make a world where theres no kindness, this doesnt mean I believe theres no kindness in the world. In fact, what it may mean, is that you very much value kindness. Like if you make a painting in which only greens are allowed, it wouldnt mean you dont believe in blue. Youre just saying: Wow, look at green. Ive heard it said that comedy is the indirect praise of perfection. So if you make a world in which compassion is absent, you are, via its absence, praising compassion.
My sense is that if you go far enough in any stylistic direction, you can make a beautiful and complex representation of reality, although that representation may not be linear. God knows weve got enough linearity in our representations of our world. So much so that, in my opinion, weve tremendously overvalued analytical knowledge, rationality, etc.
To me, the process of writing is just reading what Ive written and, like running your hand over one of those mod glass stovetops to find where the heat is, looking for where the energy is in the prose, then going in the direction of that heat. In this way, for me, the process of writing becomes an exercise in being open to whatever is there, to what youve done, truly open without attachment to yesterdays vision of what was there, and then trying to respond to it in that full-bodied, visceral way that a reader does, paying attention to where youre suddenly leaning into a chapter or where you suddenly feeling like throwing the whole thing out the window. So I sometimes wince a little when I start talking about what Ive written I feel very acutely that the part of the brain that wrote the story and the part of the brain that is prattling on about it are very different, and dont get along all that well, and as I prattle, the part of my brain that wrote the story is sort of tapping its foot impatiently and looking at its watch...
JW: Do you ever get the itch to test your chops at a more conventional realism?
GS: Unfortunately yes, which is how I spent the years from 1987 to 1990. It started when I got to Syracuse. I had written this crazy story to get in the program. Then I thought Id be a real writer and write nice, realistic stuff. But what I eventually found out was that, in realist mode, the life went out of my writing. I got no sense of that overfullness that I think is the most satisfying part of writing a story that space where you honestly dont know what the heck youre doing, the story is sort of getting away from you, but it feels honest and urgent. So I had about three or four years of this, where nothing was really working for me. This was my Hemingway-if-Hemingway-had-never-been-to-a-war-and-was-working-as-a-tech writer-and-was-actually-sort-of-a-wimp-phase. All these stories with titles like: In Parking Lot K, A Hard Rain Is Coming, or In the Employee Cafeteria, Across From Employee Relations. It was a bleak time. It was about the time our second daughter was born, and I was getting a little desperate for some power, any kind of power - and in that desperate mode, all of my South Side of Chicago impulses came back, and I started simply trying to be funny. I still have this dilemma, this Funny vs Earnest polarity. I love, for example, Chekhov, but I know by now that if Im going to honor human beings in that way he does, in their weirdness and sweetness and so on, I have to drop the realist convention and go down a wackier avenue. In my work, I think, and in my psyche, theres this very sentimental, traditional, conventional side thats always in argument with a more radical, sarcastic side. So some of my stories are really sentimental, but theyre layered over so much weird, satirical stuff that you dont necessarily think: Hey look, its freaking Kahlil Gibran. Like the story I read last night, Sea Oak, is really a very straightforward story about the haves and the have-nots, about, really, one of the have-nots saying: why didnt I get anything? So to get away with what could be a saccharine, sentimental arc, I cover it with all this dark perverse stuff that makes the reader mistake me for a scatological cynic.
You know, in my old neighborhood, the people were very passionate and sentimental, very loving. But they would never say, you know, Gosh, Cal, you are certainly very important in my life. Instead, they, Cal, you son-of-a-bitch, come over here so I can kick your red head up your ass, you jagoff. But you understood that this was code and that they were crazy about you. So theres a little of that in my work. On one level, I am a total softie, sort of depressed and afraid of losing the people I love or failing them, a little pissed-off and confused at the way economic realities and so on impact our grace, and then, to disguise that, theres all this weird, harsh, poop-centric, external swagger, full of nastiness its sort of like a cloaking device.
JW: In a piece you wrote for FEED magazine, you wrote about a particular corner in Los Angeles where you realized the significance of a line from Terry Eagleton that says, Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body, and, it seems to me, that this idea underpins all of your work, from Civilwarland in Bad Decline through The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. Has this always been a conscious agenda of yours?
GS: No. In fact, when the jacket copy came back for Civilwarland in Bad Decline, Dan Menaker had written very wonderfully about fin de siecle capitalism and all that, and of course I was thrilled to hear that I had written about that, but it honestly hadnt occurred to me that I had. And in the reviews there was all this talk about down-and-out American dystopic losers, and I was like: I did that? That was just my life was at that time, althoug most of us down-and-out American dystopic losers didnt actually describe ourselves in those exact words. Wed just call ourselves, you know, Jodi or Bill.
But because of my the way my life has been, which is that Ive been working since I was fifteen, most of the decisions Ive made along the way have been saturated with issues of money or scarcity, or the fear of scarcity. I was looking at some old letters recently, actually from that L.A. period, which I remember as being sort of free and romantic and Kerouacian, but every other paragraph is about scrounging up fifty dollars to pay for this, putting together enough to get the car going again so I could drive to some nebulous interview dressed in exactly the wrong clothes, which Id had to borrow....Lately its really struck me how much of our energy in America, especially if youre from a working background, is spent just keeping your head above water, and how much this really saps your grace and your strength.
My dad is a fiercely intelligent guy, and, while I was a kid, he hadnt finished college yet he later went back and finished, but at that time - the mid 1960s, say, he was working really long hours for a coal company in Chicago. Anyway, he would bring home books like Machiavelli's The Prince or Michael Harrington The Other Side of America, or The Jungle, Upton Sinclair, and he would just leave them on my bed, saying, I think you should take a look at this. So, because this was coming from my dad, who I really looked up to, I just was all over this stuff. And my dad was very interested in the politics of Chicago, the wild energy of it, the comic side of it, and Id sit up with him late at night as he kind of interpreted the life of the city, the political life, for me. This was the time of Daley and the Democratic Convention, Jesse Jackson was around town, Mike Royko was writing in the Tribune. So politics got into my head as a noble thing, a noble way to approach things, something adults talked about and cared about. Understanding politics was a way, in our extended family, of getting respect, that and humor. Wed have these big Sunday dinners and everybody would be sitting around arguing about Nixon or Vietnam, and if you could handle the politics, or if you were funny, then nobody blinked: you were welcome to sit there and participate. And I thought that was very cool. Because, you know, I was a nerd. Dick Cavett was my big personal hero. I got very giddy at the idea that I was participating in an Intellectual Discussion. I actually had this recurring fantasy in which somehow, Dick Cavett got wind of this very bright little political wunderkind on the South Side of Chicago and flew me out to NY and made me his permanent sidekick, a la Ed McMahon, except I was in fourth grade at the time.
But in terms of fiction writing, I think that if you set out to write a political story, then that is what you will get: merely a political story. Your story will be confined by your ability to conceptualize it. And our concepts, our conceptual mind, is much less subtle and perceptive and joyful than our non-conceptual mind.
JW: Last night, you praised Douglas Unger for helping you become a writer and for being such a generous and committed teacher. And youre now a teacher at the very program where he helped get you admitted. If you ever reached a point where you could quit teaching to write full-time, would you?
GS: This is like when they ask the first-term Senator if he would ever run for President. No, no,of course not never in a billion years. I intend to teach, and continue writing letters of recommendation, from beyond the grave.
In truth, I could see cutting back some, but at this point I honestly think I would keep teaching. I have, at Syracuse, really amazing students. They are of course talented, but they are also real mensches, terrific people. I get a lot of energy from them. They are like really good friends, if those friends were 15 years younger than you and much more talented and better-looking, and yet you still were sort of the boss of them.
The only problem I have with teaching is that it is located in the Land of Analyses. Unless youre really careful and really energetic, its very easy to forget that writing, the writing process, is nearly impossible to talk about. Because, you know, thats what you do when you teach, you talk about writing. When things are going well Im writing a lot, and its going okay then I find it easy enough to be honest, to say very often that the process is mysterious, etc etc. But at other times, the pull to Dogma is very strong. In other words, its much easier to resort to cant and theory and the language of science, of rationalism, but your responsibility is to undercut that at every opportunity. So if things are going well, you can teach in this really sensitive way that is more akin to mentoring or coaching. But then, towards the end of the semester, when youre a little overloaded, you fall into this dogmatic mode where youre just basically barking, Show, Dont Tell! or Id Like to Know More About the Mother! I think maybe the best way to teach writing is to bombard the student with alternative approaches, different ways of thinking, in the hope that something you say will resonate with their own innate approach and sort of hasten things along.
One of the things I do is constantly remind my students to remind me that we cant really talk directly about writing. We can allude to it; we can catalyze it and get certain wheels turning. But we really cant talk about the actual doing of it. Any mastery you can achieve in writing is, first, totally personal and, second, incredibly nuanced. So, after fifteen years of doing this, what I know about writing is nothing I could actually say to you.
Its sort of like boxing, maybe. A good boxer could tell you, you know, Always keep your hands up, or Its important to be a good counter-puncher. But the reason the good boxer is a good boxer is not that he can articulate those things, but because he can do them, instantaneously, and also of course because he has great abs and can jump rope for like three hours straight..
Being a teacher of creative writing is like being a teacher of personality, in a way. Im trying to coax out of my students the most raw and real energy that they have, which is not going to be the same kind of energy that I have. Luckily, we have such great students that its a pretty low-risk deal. If we gave them three years on an island, with computers, and replaced ourselves with parrots, theyd still produce great writing and learn very quickly and so on, plus theyd get better tans.
JW: Did you begin The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip with the idea that it would be an illustrated childrens book?
GS: Yes I did. Ive always wanted to do an illustrated book. Im not sure why. I had tried and failed a few other times, primarily because I had that common idea that the difference between kids books and adult books is that, when writing a kids book, you could be stupid and sloppy. So I wrote, like, Tommy the Miffed Pink Bunny or some nonsense like that, and even my own kids were rolling their eyes. So when I started this one I tried to approach it pretty much the same way as I did the other two books, using as complex a diction as I liked, and trying to be dark and funny and satirical, the only difference being that, in this book, I saw myself talking consolingly to someone, maybe a kid, who really needed to be consoled. My normal approach is more to talk chidingly to some adult who needs to be chided (actually, that adult is my Inner Adult, the part of me that gets complacent and self-pleased and so on). When I tell my daughters stories, they prefer the ones that are wiseassed and dark, with many fart jokes, and talking body parts that march off in the dead of night to become stars on Broadway, only to realize the error of their ways after the first time they seem themselves in a leotard. That sort of thing.
JW: So youve read the book to them?
GS: Actually, when we first got finished copies, their favorite babysitter read it to them. And they really enjoyed it. I had this great moment when I got home and they came running down the stairs saying, like, Daddy, you wrote a good book! That was a nice moment.
JW: Youve published two collections of short stories and a childrens book. Do you feel any pressure to produce a novel?
GS: One of the wonderful benefits of energetically pursuing a writing career is that Ive come to really understand the staggering limitations of my abilities. If there are Three Hundred Things That May Be Done in the writing kingdom, I can do like three, and when I try to do any of the other 297, things start getting broke in the writing kingdom, and readers start dozing off, but dozing off in a state of mild irritation. So one way I cope with this humbling state of affairs is via this little mantra: If I just stay fully engaged in whatever has presented itself, things will be fine. That is, I really try not to think about things like: Next, I begin MY NOVEL! Because I have a bloated, full-of-crap streak that, if it thinks its working on A NOVEL, will start smoking a pipe and doing months of pointless research, and writing inefficiently so as to fill up the required 208 pages more quickly.
JW: You mentioned last night that the movie rights to Sea Oak have been purchased and that youre doing the screenplay. How far along is that project? And how does writing a screenplay affect your sense of structure in fiction?
GS: I havent started yet. Im still in that euphoric period where you go around saying, you know, God, Ive just got to get started on this darn screenplay, you know, this screenplay from which an actual, you know, director is going to, using, actual actors, make, you know, a movie and all, and havent yet progressed to the place where Im going around saying Jesus Christ, why do the people in my screenplay sound just like those people in Threes Company if the people in Threes Company were indented all wrong?
JW: What does the rest of your family think of your work? Do you ever get their input while youre writing?
My wife is a great great reader for me. She reads everything and always sets me straight. Shes able to read my stories in this really deep way she knows when Im slacking off or being Johnny Denial, trying to sugar-coat something. Shes very smart and knows me very well, which is a dangerous combo if youre trying to get away with something, which I usually am. We met in the Syracuse Creative Writing Program as students way back when, and got engaged in three weeks - so our connection is very very deep and I trust her completely, even when she is pointing out that the last three months work has been a total waste of time.
JW: There was an older woman in the front row during last nights reading of Sea Oak,and I was noticing her reaction to your story.
GS: Yeah, it was an older couple, right? I talked to them after the reading. They were the sweetest people, and they both said, Young man, you have a very jaded view of life. And we talked about that. I tried to convince them that I actually like life quite a bit. You know, in criticism now, both formal and informal, theres this sort of literal-mindedness....this assumption that, if you have a pirate in your story and a rock drops on his head, then you must have something against pirates. In other words, theres this assumed linear relationship between fiction and the writer. If your story turns out happily, then you are an optimist. But I dont think art really works that way. Theres a different and more complex economy at work. For instance, if a story is funny, then that itself is a value. Funny is life-affirming. Funny honors the human spirit. Even if the subject matter is doom-and-gloom, and everyone is dying of typhoid and cheating with their neighbors wives and giving them typhoid, if the story is funny, then the wonderful side of life has been represented. It isnt necessary, I dont think, for a Good and Kind Doctor to come in and cure everybody, or for a Pure Moral Voice to come in and, while not curing anybody, lecture everybody about what Cads Theyve Been. The narrative voice alone can fulfill this balancing function.
You cant be funny if you really really hate life, I dont think. Being funny is a joyful thing. So is being compressed. Or laconic. Or lyrical. Any of those things, done well, is a hopeful thing.
But I was very aware of that elderly couple as I was reading, and I knew which lines they would think were disgusting and gross, and judging by their wincing, I wasnt wrong. And of course, being a former Catholic, even though there was a room full of people who were laughing and seemed to be enjoying themselves, all I could think about as I was reading was how much those two elderly people must despise me, and what theyd say about me in their Lincoln on the way home.
And of course, I was wrong: they were very nice people, and got a sort of perverse kick out of the reading, and probably had an Acura.
JW: Your work is always described in very non-realistic terms, but your characters face the same foibles that Chekhov and Shakespeare wrote about: fear, desire, love, etc. And your work is also seen as very dark, and Im thinking of that section at the end of The 400-lb. CEO. Does that darkness signal any real pessimism or misanthropy on your part?
GS: Well, a story like The 400-lb. CEO doesnt say, I dont think, that life is always shit, though it does say that some peoples lives are sometimes shit. It says that a shit-life is a possibility. And I think thats true, and important. Its important to remember, if happy, that our current happiness is not permanent and is not due to any intrinsic goodness on our part. This seems to be something that American society is uncomfortable with, this idea that some peoples lives are difficult past the point of sanity and that they arent necessarily to blame.
Theres no way you can argue that everyone has a difficult life. This is an incredible culture the majority of people live in amazing comfort, with real dignity, maybe more comfort and dignity than any other culture in the history of the world. We live relatively safe and sane lives which, if youve ever loved anybody, and therefore feared for them, is a wonderful thing. Its a wonderful thing to be reasonably sure that those you loved will be safe and sane for years to come. But I think part of our moral responsibility is to keep in our minds those whose lives are unsafe and insane. In this way, fiction can be like a meditation, a way of saying: Though things are this way for me, right now, they could be different later, and are different for others this very moment.
Lets say that in some hospital somewhere, Baby One and Baby Two are born, side by side. Baby One has intelligent and loving parents, is healthy and without defects, and is smart and beautiful. Baby Two has abusive parents, is missing a leg, is stupid and ugly, and has an obnoxious personality. If you extrapolate from that point, then Baby One, no matter what you throw at it, is going to have more reserves and more good fortune, while Baby Two is going to, statistically, come up short. Whatever troubles are thrown his or her way, are going to cost Baby Two more than the same troubles would cost Baby One. So who is to blame? At what point did Baby Two screw up? When he or she came out of the womb? A month before? Three years after? Of course, its absurd. Seen this way, Baby Two is the inevitable flowering of a chain of events that literally goes back to the beginning of time. Therefore, the order of the day is compassion, and I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, towards compassion.
JW: The typical fiction workshop model is that one or more students posts their work and the class then critiques it, and this classroom critique is then supplemented with individual meetings with the instructors. How are your own workshops different?
GS: We basically work within that model. The only thing I try to do is to constantly be reminding my students (and myself) that this whole workshop thing is really just an economic construct. Historically, it was (and is) a great way to get older writers paid to teach and younger writers paid to write. And this form can severely affect the result, that is, the fiction. Theres that committee-tendency. So we just try to constantly deconstruct the process itself. The other thing Ive been playing with is the idea of getting away from the traditional lets-all-crap-on-Hals-story approach and use exercises and close readings of very short text portions and so on to open things up a bit.
What I find myself doing more and more is approaching a story as a manifestation of energy and trying not to say whats Good or Bad about it, but focusing on where and how a story is attempting to manifest itself. That is, I try to look at how the strengths and weaknesses of a story are intimately bound up together.
Its like New Orleans. The last time I was in New Orleans, the main attraction was this ninety year-old guy with a foot-long tongue who makes his living by wandering around drunk, simulating oral sex. He was just this wino who people would egg on with drinks or whatever. Well, a couple of weeks later I was in Disneyland in the New Orleans section, and its so beautiful and clean, and needless to say there are no ninety year-old winos simulating oral sex there outside of Pirates of the Caribbean. But the truth and its a profound truth is that you cant have Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane and jazz without also having junkies and winos. Its all tied together. Thats the way human beings are. The same energy that makes a person practice scales twelve hours a day can turn someone else into a wino or a heroin addict, if that energy is just off by a quarter-turn. So the point is, you cant simply separate out the so-called negative energy and then eliminate it, without also affecting the so-called positive energy. But thats a very American thing to try. Thats what theme parks are about and what this part of Vegas is about: sanitizing a complex energy. Well, in writing workshops, we try to do this too, in that workshop-inspired editing thing we do, where we rush to eliminate the bad parts of a story without considering how those bad parts are related to the good parts.
Ultimately, I think that workshops arent something youre supposed to do your whole life. I think of it as two or three years of shock therapy that you wont ever repeat again. Sometimes, I think the whole point of workshops is to humiliate you and frustrate you into a corner until you come to the realization that you are the only one who can figure this writing thing out for yourself. Thats how it was for me. After two years of workshops, I was totally convinced that I was going to have to do it myself, and that I was never going to negotiate with someone about my stories again.
JW: So much of your fiction is charged with social import. Given our recent political upheavals, have you ever thought of writing overt political satire?
GS: Im not very interested in that kind of satire, because it works on the assumption that They Are Assholes. And I think fiction works on the assumption that They Are Us, On a Different Day.
JW: Do you think being funny can be taught?
GS: No. But you can take someones innate funniness and show it to them, which almost always involves compression. You can say: this is funny, and you can show them how their humor is actually their ticket to a deep, interesting, sophisticated place in their work. I think most funny writers long to be serious. I know I did. I distrusted humor, because it came easy, and all my writing heroes were the big serious brooding guys who, I believed, at a party, coming upon a little wormy ostensibly funny guy like me, would scoff at him and tell him a story about the Spanish Civil War, and steal the wormy guys girl and take her off the Cuba to run guns. So the best thing anyone ever did for me and Toby and Doug both did this for me was steer me towards funny writers who did big moral things with their funniness (Gogol, West, Kafka).
You can also help someone learn to discipline themselves so they know how to cut out all but the funniest bits. Bill Buford at The New Yorker, for example, is great at showing me the things in my stories that are practice runs for funnier bits. For instance, in Sea Oak, theres a reference to a TV show called The Worst That Could Happen, which is these computer simulations of tragedies that havent yet occurred but theoretically could. Well, Id originally included a couple of other similar T.V. shows, which were essentially rough-drafts of that show. But I left them in because I liked them. And Bill pointed out that those other shows were just lame versions of that first T.V. show, and, by cutting them, I could make that first show even funnier. So you can show a writer what his 5.6 (on a scale of 10) looks like, and what his 8.9 looks like, and encourage him to get rid of anything thats not at least a 9, which strengthens the whole piece, and makes him seem more intelligent and likeable, which is what all of us ostensibly funny, wormy guys really want, ultimately.
JW: The Falls is a story that has a very open ending, and, given that John Barth asserts that it is the function of fiction writers not to create worldviews but to create worlds, I was wondering how complete the world of that particular story is. In other words, do you, as the author of The Falls, know what happens to Morse and those little girls after the story ends?
GS: I dont know. What was important about that ending for me was the fact that he jumped. It really doesnt matter if he saves them that depends on wind and water currents and that sort of thing, which, in the world of the story, are just random elements. What matters - what we feel matters - is if hes going to be able to extrapolate from his own son to those two nearly-dead kids, and transcend himself. At least thats how I felt about it when I stumbled on that ending.
I was teaching my students the Vonnegut story, Harrison Bergeron, and Id gotten a copy of it out of an anthology and given it to my students. But when I actually sat down to read what Id passed out, I realized that the version in the anthology was truncated by about three pages.
So as an exercise, I told them about the truncation and had them write a new ending. And the amazing thing is that every kid in that class wrote a decent ending, even the kids who really couldnt write. So my point is, the ending of a story is just a kind of flourish. Its the first two-thirds of the story that really matters; to use a lame juggling analogy, its the throwing of the balls into the air that matters. (Thats right, young writers, throw your balls, but for Gods sake do it correctly). Anyway, if there are the right number of balls and theyre sufficiently interesting, it almost doesnt matter in which order they come down. Or if one of them gets stuck up on the roofbeam.
JW: Has your publishing success affected your relationship with other writers?
GS: I dont think so. I hope not. Its a pretty mild success really. And most of the writers Im friends with now were friends from long before anything happened for any of us, so those friendships are pretty deep and immune to dopiness on either side.
Success is nice because then you dont have to worry so much about having been unfairly robbed of your very-richly-deserved success. Success is bad because momentary good fortune can temporarily hide the fact that you are still, despite your success, full of shit. So, with enough success, you could easily go through your life, never aware that you are full of shit, until the very end, when, choking your life away, staring over at that dusty shelf with your stupid miserable six books on it, you realize it: Yikes, I am full of shit, and I always have been.
One of the great blessings Ive had was the period while I was writing the stories in CivilWarLand, when I had given up all hope of publishing anything and was just going to my job and typing a few paragraphs a day, then riding my bike home from work to my wife and kids it was an amazingly happy time, even though nothing was going right careerwise ...maybe even BECAUSE nothing was going right careerwise. I couldnt have felt any dorkier or foolish, running my little photocopier in too-tight brown corduroys, writing Environmental Health and Safety Assessment Plans, but even so, life was all around, and it was good, and I was enjoying it. And so when things started to heat up, and stories started to sell and so on, I pretty much knew what was what.
JW: Thank you for your time.
GS: Thank you.
