Tenth of December

by George Saunders

As soon as I start steering toward some moral or intention, my stories tend to go flat. Part of the artistic contract is: no preaching. And knowing how a story is going to end before you start it, and why it has to end that way, and what it will “mean,” is (at least when I do it) a form of preaching.

I think a character who is basically like the writer and the reader (good, sensible, intelligent, well-intentioned, and so on) is going to produce a more deeply felt ride. Fiction gets under our skin most, I think, when we find it impossible to distance ourselves from the narrated dilemma. What creates distance is when we look at a character and think, “Nope, not me, I would never have reacted that way.” Whereas if the character does pretty much what we would do in the given situation, and thinks the way we would think—then we can’t step away from him when the shit hits the fan.