George Saunders and the 900th draft
Saunders has lots of wisdom and kindness for anyone engaged in the nitty gritty of creation
George Saunders probably doesn’t need much of an introduction: author, famous, well-loved. For all of the award-winning writing he’s done, I haven’t read much of it. (he does have a substack that is worth checking out if you’re into writing) However, in the last few weeks, I have listened to a ton of what he has to say about how he writes and how he teaches other people to write.
Being 1) good at what you do and 2) being able to explain what you’re doing to others aren’t necessarily a package deal. As far as I can tell, Saunders has both 1) and 2). Which is lovely for us!
I’m going to highlight a few ideas he has shared* that have recently found a welcome home in my own composing and revision processes.
*Note: quotes hereafter are often verbatim but sometimes remembered/summarized from several podcast interviews with Saunders. I can’t remember where each quote came from but I’ll be sure to share all the interviews I’ve listened through in the recent past.
You don’t need to have a good idea
This is related to the idea of lowering the barriers to doing the work. I often will avoid starting composing or sketching on a given day because I have nothing good in mind.
Sometimes to get started, we hold ourselves to such a high standard, such as “I need a really good idea to being.” No, you just need somewhere to start, a germinating seed. A bad or mediocre idea can sprout something much better than itself. Then you can go back and edit and improve the original idea or leave it out if it no longer fits.
Saunders seeks to set the bar for getting going much lower, but not at a less meaningful place. This is a lovely thought to keep in mind:
A more helpful orientation is “I hope I can make an offering that hits someone at the right moment so that it does something even incrementally positive for them. Here’s a joke. Here’s a small moment you might like.”
For Saunders, once there is that small moment or a first draft, the juggernaut of his editing process kicks in and over many many iterations, a river polishing a stone, something often totally different and higher quality emerges. More on that below.
Polishing the stone
Once Saunders has an idea or a draft, he returns to it many many times:
Look at the work you created yesterday and think about how it strikes you today and make the smallest little changes to see what you can do to make you like it just a bit better.
Your subconscious can tell you about the quality of your work via small opinions—this thing works well, that thing I’ve really loved for the last couple of days is no longer working, cut it out. Put the initial idea on the page then let the subconscious go to work on it a little at a time with its small nudges and opinions.
Nudges, opinions, and style
When discussing opinions, Saunders often references a deservedly well-known quote by Ira Glass about the gap between your opinions/taste and your creative output:
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have.
Saunders highlights learning to listen to those opinions and disappointed voices as one of the most important and challenging jobs of a writer:
You have a lot of opinions that most of the time you override or miss. Can you slow down a little in your visioning process and find out what those are and then radically honor them? That’s what makes a writer distinct. There’s not that much to it really other than cultivating that state of mind.
A first-time reader
A key part of Saunder’s editing regime is to be able to inhabit the mind of someone who is for the first time coming across his writing and trying to see overall if that someone is having a positive or negative reaction to it:
I like to read my work as if I didn’t write it, as if I just found it on a bus seat and then all the time another part of the mind is watching that meter that showing positive or negative thinking “what would a first-time reader be feeling right now? Are they in or out? In or out?” There’s a certain feeling I’m hoping for which is a kind of amused engagement, kind of like “yeah, yeah, okay, sure”. Then you hit a bit of ice like “ugh” and suddenly the needle on the meter goes into the negative. Something about the sentence just feels like it isn’t right. Sometimes it’s a feeling like it’s too banal, like it’s a sentence anyone else could have written. Or sometimes the logic feels off, like something you’ve said isn’t true.
And this is where that challenging and important bit about hearing and listening to your opinions comes in:
At that point you’ve got some choices: one is to say to your internal meter “Bullshit! You’re wrong! It was perfect yesterday.” That’s not the best response. The other thing is to say sort of gently “ah, okay, alright. Duly noted. How about if I just go past you and I read it again in an hour or so and see if I still agree with you. If so I’ll make a change.” Or the best thing is if in an instant reflex you go “Oh! I can just cut this phrase. And if I cut the phrase that moment of resistance would be less.”
In a given writing/edit session, Saunders will go through a short story with this mindset a few times, making changes, creating a new copy, reviewing it again—before calling it quits for the day. It all relies on him being able to listen to and honor how he’s reacting to what he’s written, even and especially when that reaction means something (maybe significant) needs to change.
The best version of yourself
Many creatives talk about not knowing how they wrote a character that’s so much smarter than them or music that seems so much more sophisticated and expressive than they think of themselves as being. Saunders demystifies it some:
The act of faith is that if I do my reviewing and reacting many many days and weeks and months at some point I can get through the whole thing with the needle up in the positive area.
Over all that time, you’ve brought many different “yous” to the table—you brought the anal-retentive you, and the self-celebrating you, and the grouchy you…the person who is present in that 900th draft is somewhat above me on the intelligence scale and on the compassion scale and on the wit scale.
For Saunders, this refinement and polishing and elevation by many “yous” over time is only possible when you trust that if you listen to those nudges and opinions long enough, eventually the many yous will be quiescent and you’ll be left with a work that has a solidity and integrity because there is so much of you in it.
There’s more
There’s so much more in these conversations with George Saunders. I sincerely hope that he or someone more eloquent than me strings these and other things I know I missed all together into a book. In the meantime, there’s more lovely insights to be had below: