Tenth of December

by George Saunders

I try to find some little nugget that, for whatever reason, is interesting to me. The less thematic or philosophical or political the better. Kind of like a seed crystal in Biology class: You put it in the dish and it starts to grow, organically and on its own. 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.

My first-level approach is to try and make my characters as much like me as I can. And then make things go badly and see how they do. 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.