George Saunders: “Build Your Own Shit Hill”
I had a dream that I was sitting in the front row of a George Saunders talk at the St. Louis County Library. He was so close to me -- or, rather, I was so close to him, for surely in this scenario I am the satellite and he the significant gravitational object against which I orient myself, not vice versa! -- that I would’ve been able to see the stubble growing on his chin had I remembered to bring my microfiber cloth to clean my glasses, which I unfortunately hadn’t.
[Link: My New Glasses Press Against My Greasy Forehead and Need Constant Wiping Off.pdf ]
In case you haven’t already guessed, this was no dream! This was real life! Living in the middlest, westernmost part of the Midwest, it’s rare for a well-known author to break the standard NY-Chicago-Portland-LA-Austin tour circuit and come to us. The 3.5 hour drive to St. Louis was well worth another chance to see The George (as I literally call him Him).
Saunders’ presentation was almost completely about the craft of writing and was loaded with tips and tricks for being a famous, Saundersesque author (”Just Add Talent!”). Sitting front and center, I was a little self conscious about taking notes for some reason (I guess I felt like I had to maintain steady, intense eye contact or he’d assume I was just like all the other talentless hacks in the room, having to rely on pen and paper instead of merely absorbing his words into my superior brain??), so please note that this advice is filtered through the unreliable memory of an extreme fan.
TIPS FOR BEING A FAMOUS WRITER ACCORDING TO GEORGE SAUNDERS [paraphrased]
Better to be king of your own shit hill than groveler on someone else’s mountain. I’ve listened to tons of interviews with George, and he is fond of his shit hill vs. mountain metaphor. It was still really cool hearing it come from his actual mouth IRL, and I still laughed at the appropriate places. The gist of it is this: as a young writer, he tried emulating Hemingway, and it wasn’t working for him because only Hemingway is Hemingway. After a few failed projects, rife with terse, Hemingwayesque sentences, he realized he was at his best when he was being himself, pursuing and nurturing his own style, building his own shit hill, as it were, taking inspiration from but not mimicking his heroes. It meant climbing down from the towering, verdant range of Mt. St. Hemingway and relocating to teensy Saunders Hill (labeled with a sign that looked like it was written by the Chik-fil-a cows), but it was honest, and the reader can smell dishonesty from a hundred miles away.
[Note to self: must stop baldly mimicking George Saunders.]
Story doesn’t have to do everything, but it has to do SOMETHING. Like most people, I have a chorus of rude/critical voices in my head. The loudest one is fond of shouting “Sit down, moron, you’ve got nothing to say!” This always cows me because...damn it, it’s true! I mean, I have stories I want to tell, but they seem like small, frivolous stories -- nothing that would advance humanity, and isn’t that what writing is supposed to do? Nope, says Saunders. A story doesn’t have to say heady things about environmentalism or human rights or what-have-you to be meaningful to the reader. It doesn’t have to be rife with intricate symbolism, it doesn’t have to be a coded map for our times, it doesn’t have to respond to the gravest political issues or tackle a previously unsolved philosophical quandary. It does have to do something, though. Something has to take place. I.e. it should avoid being a 5,000 word description of a character staring wistfully at themselves in the mirror or of a plastic grocery bag being whipped around in a Midwest thunderstorm (both scenarios I may or may not have explored in my earlier writings). I mean, you still have an obligation to offer your poor reader something of use, after all, even if it’s just momentary escape. A small story can still entertain, and entertainment in dark times is nothing to sneeze at.
You must have “the talent for having talent.” Well, you got me here, George. I’ve always known, even in my insecure heart of hearts, that I have some writing talent, but I seem unable to progress from being a person who once wrote a story that everyone liked in a college creative writing class to being a person who consistently finishes and publishes actual output. What is the missing element? Why can’t I get from here to there?! In his version of the “90% of success is showing up” adage, Saunders says it’s not enough to have talent, you have to have the talent for having it, meaning that in addition to the raw tools you also have to have the confidence, will, and most of all the self-discipline to wield them. There are probably many amateur writers out there who are more talented than Michael Chabon or Joyce Carol Oates or (shudder) Jonathan Franzen [Link: Franzen Sucks.pdf ] but who will never find literary success, because they are too lazy or too unselfish or they don’t have faith in their work. You can’t just sit there, being talented, and wait for a Man Booker to fall into your lap. You have to believe in your writing, first of all, and then you have to put in the work. As the years pass and my documents folder fills up with pretty-good first pages that I never have the heart to revisit or expand upon, I’m not entirely convinced that I have the talent to manage my talent, but maybe, with The George’s words in mind, it’s not too late to bully myself into believing that I do.
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