The Great George Saunders On The Importance of Kindness
Check out this beautiful animated video inspired by George Saunders’ commencement speech given at Syracuse University. The same speech inspired the book Congratulations, By The Way.
George Saunders
Kill Those Trees!
Sorry, but you have to die, tree.
I know, I know. But before you pick up your green placards, please hear me out. To begin with, these are not my words (not that I need to pass the blame), but these words come from Amina Gautier, whose work, especially her short story collection, At Risk, I have come to admire.
Yes, Gautier is very environmentally conscious. At the same time, she recognizes that the same way a painter requires a canvas and a sculptor wood, clay, stone or metal, a writer needs paper. Granted, this is the electronic age and almost every industry is going paper-less, but for a writer, the use of paper is still an indispensable part of the craft.
If you have ever proofread, you will agree that it is so much easier to catch errors on a printed page than it is on the computer screen. Gautier’s recommendation to use paper, however, has to do with craft, perfecting one’s work. In the revision phase, she recommends printing multiple copies of a story and revising each stack for a single element of craft. This means components that work together to bring a story to life, such as character, mood, setting, voice, conflict, dialogue, imagery, scene vs. summary, and so forth, must be compartmentalized. In this way, you give undivided attention to each aspect of craft, revising with specific questions in mind.
Practiced writers know that you cannot underestimate the value revision. Reading Isaac Babel’s story, You Must Know Everything in one of The New Yorker’s fiction podcasts, George Saunders said that what he admires most about Babel is that he can tell that Babel was extremely disciplined, a heavy editor and was hard on himself. This is exactly what Gautier says writers must be if they are to produce memorable stories. She says the same way that models and actors spend money on photo shoots, writers must use up reams and reams of paper in the revision process until that masterpiece comes to life.
Image source.
Lectores Series Available on YouTube
One of the great benefits of the University of Tampa MFA program is the visiting authors and publishers. In the first term of the nascent program, superstar crime fiction author Michael Connelly dropped by the program and talked about story construction and concepts of literary merit in the sometimes unfairly termed “genre fiction.” Then, in the evening, he gave a reading from his 2011 work, The Drop, as a part of MFA program’s Lectores public readings series.
Well, my description of this event no longer has to be the sole record of it online. The UT program wizards have uploaded video excerpts from the Lectores readings, includings Connelly’s reading from The Drop:
Connelly shattered a lot of our expectations that first residency period. He, more than most, gives popular fiction a good representation, both in the quality of his work and the depth of his insight.
View also, if you’ve the time, Arther Flowers’s singular presentation, an excerpt from Tibor Fischer’s hilarious The Thought Gang, or a typical, fantastic reading from George Saunders.
You can find the rest, of those so-far uploaded, on the MFA’s web page here.
A tup of the hat to D.A. Hosek for pointing out these videos had gone live.
George Saunders on Voice and Voices
George Saunders, perhaps the most important living short story writer in the English language, served as a guest lecturer during the Tampa MFA program in the June 2012 residency, and as a component of his visitation, he delighted fans and acolytes alike with a reading of a few of his short stories.
After the readings, which were quite the highlight of the residency period, one of my colleagues mused: “Perhaps I would not have liked that particular story so much if he had not been reading it.”