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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.

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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.

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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.”

I have heard it said that writer’s do not always make for good readers, and I myself am an advocate for reading a piece yourself before hearing the author’s rendition (see “The Odd Dangers of Writers as Readers”). But George Saunders, you see, is quite good at public readings. He reads in multiple voices and knows the material well enough to read it with confidence and comfort (and nothing is more uncomfortable, we should note, than an author who jerks the audience from the story some ten or twenty times to offer footnotes and corrections during a reading, an experience I have endured in recent months).

Saunders recently sat with the podcast virtuosos behind the new The Organist podcast and spoke for a good half hour on how he uses voice and how voice shapes his work. Listen to the full interview, if you will:

Saunders notes in the interview how others have approached him after a reading, saying how his own reading fully illuminated a short story, how his use of voice changed the piece in a way.

That issue of changed meaning and hue is my chief complaint against hearing writers read work, though Saunders creates sort of an opposite problem: improving a work we might otherwise enjoy less. But the fact that Saunders’ work has rivaled any other great short story compilation over the past two decades suggests there is something else at work here. Thousands of readers will never hear his voice, but will only read it.

Which to me says that Saunders is a master of the written voice. When I heard him read pieces with which I was already familiar, it was like the transition from black and white to color, or color to high definition — not from television to radio or smoke signals, as is the case too often when I hear a writer read their work and the reading alters it materially in a negative way.

Rather, his readings made quick the long-term goal of voice. Instead of reading 750 words and observing the speaker was neurotic, the audience can hear Saunders, who knows the character and knows how to read neurotically without sounding cheap or fake, present the character as neurotic within 50 or 100 words. There is an economy to his reading, but not a material alteration. Perhaps, then, the key to becoming a great public reader is becoming a great writer of voice.

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