This is an intriguing interview George Saunders did with Stephen Colbert on The Late Late Show recently. Even though I haven't read his new book of short stories Liberation Day which he's plugging here, I've become an avid follower of Saunders' Substack blog called Story Club.
Some of the themes and approaches he advocates in chatty, witty form during the interview are explored in more depth in the weekly posts of Story Club, often via the prompts of a famous short story he wants to examine or by thoughtfully responding to an email from a reader or aspiring story-writer. The importance of seeing where the story takes you without too strict a plan or structure in place; the pre-eminence of discovery and risk-taking over premeditated invention or having a point to prove (or something unitary to say); the embrace of fun, surprise and humour in how you approach your writing, rather than seeing it as a tortuous, self-lacerating process.
I really warmed to how, in one of his posts, Saunders described his own evolution from a struggling stylist endeavouring to write like Hemingway or Tolstoy or one of his other realist masters and not having much success in terms of publication and not feeling he was getting anywhere artistically; but then pretty much giving up on trying to write "great literature" and (with a sense he had nothing to lose) instead starting to just "goof around" and write more intuitively and spontaneously, seeing what would come out. Only then did he start getting published and begin to garner acclaim, ironically discovering his own voice just when he'd given up on trying to find it.
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