{"id":141877,"date":"2020-01-06T11:14:36","date_gmt":"2020-01-06T16:14:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=141877"},"modified":"2020-01-08T16:49:55","modified_gmt":"2020-01-08T21:49:55","slug":"how-to-imitate-george-saunders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/01\/06\/how-to-imitate-george-saunders\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Imitate George Saunders\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The first time I met George Saunders, I got shivers of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. I\u2019d driven to his house in upstate New York, to interview him for this magazine<\/a>, and he\u2019d come out to his driveway to shake my hand. It was a crisp fall day in the wooded hills south of Oneonta, with a hard wind and bright blue skies, and the trees cast sharp, waving shadows on the hood of his Prius. There was something about the way he swung open his front door and ushered me into his mud room, wearing his wide Midwestern grin, that felt eerily familiar. Then I realized why: I was living out a fantasy I\u2019d indulged a hundred times. For much of my twenties, what I\u2019d wanted, more than almost anything else, was to get inside Saunders\u2019s mind, learn how it worked, and steal his secrets, so that I could write short stories that were as good as his short stories. My dream had been to sit down with him and ask him whatever I wanted.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t do that in my twenties, but I could make the surfaces of my stories resemble the surfaces of his stories. Present tense, first person, short declarative sentences, frequent jokes. Characters whose thoughts and speech were peppered with euphemistic neologisms. A working-class American suburb in a troubled near-future, a na\u00efve narrator with a good heart, a shopping mall. I could assemble those parts, but the result was never George Saunders. There was something else he was doing. He had a technique whose effects I could feel but whose workings were mysterious to me. After I had written a stack of bad stories in a fake-Saunders mode\u2014security guard finds gateway to hell in fountain of food court, et cetera\u2014I stopped trying to write the way he did, feeling I had wasted two years trying to pull it off. When I applied to M.F.A. programs, I got into the one at Syracuse, where he taught. He even called me and encouraged me to come, a great moment of my life. But I\u2019d decided he was dangerous, for me. Given how Saunders-derivative I was, the last thing I needed was more Saunders in my head. I went to the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop, hoping it would whip the Saunders out of me. A couple of times, my classmates submitted Saunders-y stories, and in workshop I enumerated everything that was imitative about them, surprising myself with my own prosecutorial zeal. I had expected Iowa to be mean at times; I just hadn\u2019t expected that the source of meanness would be me.<\/p>\n

Now I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self, It\u2019s okay to imitate Saunders, just not in the hapless, superficial way you\u2019re doing it. What you need is more Saunders in your head, not less, in the sense that what you need is a deeper understanding of what Saunders does. The interesting, generative way to imitate Saunders is to imitate what he does with the bones of a short story, not what he does with setting, dialogue, or prose. <\/p>\n

But \u201cbones\u201d isn\u2019t quite right. In fact, one of the most important aspects of the Saunders aesthetic is something that might be termed \u201cbonelessness.\u201d A boneless story doesn\u2019t begin with an idea for a central conflict, or with an outline, or with any other structural design. A boneless story has no skeleton. That doesn\u2019t mean that there\u2019s no action. To the contrary, Saunders\u2019s stories are packed with incident. But the stories accumulate beat by beat. As a general rule, Saunders doesn\u2019t conceive of plots in advance, but rather tries to write one funny, interesting moment, and then another funny, interesting moment, and so on. A Saunders story grows like a fungus. It wouldn\u2019t be totally accurate to say that it grows sentence by sentence. To use Saunders\u2019s words, it grows \u201cbit\u201d by \u201cbit.\u201d A bit is often a joke, but not necessarily. It can be a tragic occurrence, an incisive observation, a grotesque shock. It\u2019s anything that administers a stimulus to the reader.<\/p>\n

\u201cI discovered that I could make a fairly ambitious story via fragments,\u201d he told me, in the interview.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t have to have a through line or a plan, didn\u2019t have to know where it was going\u2026 If you trimmed all the fat out of a bit, it would start to thrum with meaning\u2014and then, all of a sudden, it would have something it wanted to cause. So there would be these, like, vital bits on the page, not linked to anything yet. And then structure became just linking up those vital bits, looking for the simplest way to connect them.<\/p>\n

So, if you cut all the lazy shit out of a story, what\u2019s left will tell you what structure to put in place so that none of those good bits need to be lost. And then you are trying to arrange them so that they are in causal relation to one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

How does one bit cause another bit? Consider this passage from \u201cCivilWarLand in Bad Decline.\u201d The story is set in a Civil War theme park beset by violent teenage gangs. The narrator, one of the park\u2019s executives, has asked Quinn, an actor hired to play historical figures, to expel the gangs from park property.<\/p>\n

…I hear gunshots from the perimeter. I run out and there\u2019s Quinn and a few of his men tied to the cannon. The gang guys took Quinn\u2019s pants and put some tiny notches in his penis with their knives. I free Quinn and tell him to get over to the Infirmary to guard against infection. He\u2019s absolutely shaking and can hardly walk, so I wrap him up in a Confederate flag and call over a hay cart and load him in.<\/p>\n

\u2026We decide to leave the police out of it because of the possible bad PR. So we give Quinn the rest of the week off and promise to let him play Grant now and then, and that\u2019s that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(A short digression: See how well those two paragraphs work on their own, cut off from the rest of the story? \u201cCivilWarLand in Bad Decline\u201d is like an octopus, an animal whose tentacles remain alive even when severed from the rest of the body, because each tentacle has its own brains, instead of bones. The whole creature is a sack full of brains.)<\/p>\n

The first \u201cbit\u201d is that the gangs tie Quinn to the cannon. (This is a Civil War theme park with only one cannon, we learn from the article \u201cthe.\u201d) The second bit, caused by the first, is that once the gangs have rendered Quinn helpless, they notch his penis, a highly specific, considered, psychological torture. The specificity and originality of the form of that torture cause the third bit, which is that the narrator orders Quinn to \u201cget over\u201d to the Infirmary to make sure his penis doesn\u2019t get infected, not the gentlest or most respectful response, and one that raises the comical question of what the Infirmary is like. Historically authentic, medically modern, or somewhere in between? The narrator\u2019s demand that Quinn go to the Infirmary on his own steam suggests the problem that Quinn is trembling and unable to walk, (\u201cabsolutely shaking\u201d in the narrator\u2019s office-speak) which causes the fourth bit, which is the narrator wrapping him in a Confederate flag and depositing him in a hay cart, as if he\u2019s a figure in an oil painting of wounded Southerners. The whole incident is so unsavory it suggests the fifth bit, the decision not to call the police because of \u201cpossible bad PR.\u201d Which leads to the sixth bit, the decision to give Quinn a week off and let him play Grant \u201cnow and then,\u201d which is enough to buy his silence.<\/p>\n

Just by letting one bit sprout another bit, Saunders gives us new details about the setting, a new turn in the plot, and an implied critique of late-stage capitalism, all as side effects, happy accidents. The development of political themes, and the escalation of hostilities between the park and the gangs\u2014these things happen organically, not by authorial fiat. If you start with good bits, the framework you develop to hold them together will be more interesting and fun than any framework you could think up in advance. Saunders told me how sweet it was to discover this way of working.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d been driving myself crazy with questions like, What do I believe about structure? and, What is my theory about character development? and, Well, what\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0a story, anyway?<\/p>\n

This new mode\u2019s whole idea was to put those questions aside. Just keep the reader reading, and all questions will be answered. And suddenly, as a bonus, I was blurting out things about my position in the world that I hadn\u2019t even known until I blurted them out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That may be the single most important accomplishment, for a writer: to surprise oneself with truths that were previously obscure.<\/p>\n

You can take the boneless mode and pair it with long, lyrical sentences. You can pair it with a realistic setting, or with autofictional reminiscences, or with any other un-Saunders-y surface. In fact, you probably should. That way, it will be Saunders-y in the best way possible, that is, it will be Saunders-y without anyone being able to tell.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read the Art of Fiction with George Saunders in our winter 2019 issue.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Benjamin\u00a0Nugent<\/span>\u00a0is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Fraternity, a collection of linked stories forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He\u2019s the recipient of the 2019 Terry Southern Prize.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imitating George Saunders is all but inevitable for any writer who admires him. Benjamin Nugent shares the best way to do it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1039,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow to Imitate George Saunders\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 by Benjamin Nugent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 6, 2020 \u2013 Imitating George Saunders is all but inevitable for any writer who admires him. 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