George Saunders Has a New Mantra

Anyone who loves George Saunders’s writing can tell you about his wicked imagination: luminous, dark, wholly original, and quite frequently supernatural. Saunders is, after all, the man who gave us Lincoln in the Bardo, about a grieving president and the chorus of ghosts he meets in the graveyard; “Escape From Spiderhead,” a Huxley-esque vision of criminal justice and personal responsibility; and “Fox 8,” about a fox who begins to understand human language by eavesdropping on people’s bedtime stories.

The twin currents that run through these and all of his works, including his newest novel, Vigil, about a spirit tending to a dying oil executive, is large-heartedness paired with unsparing wit. Saunders is funny. Hilarious even. (See also: his short story “The Moron Factory,” published in this magazine last year.) I recently spoke with him about how his ideas come to him, karma, and fiction as a source of truth. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Adrienne LaFrance: Set the scene for me: Where are you doing your writing? What tools are around you? What do you see on your desk as you write?

George Saunders: Honestly, it doesn’t matter that much to me. I have a really low threshold for vibe. Just whatever. There’s something that happens, I think neurologically, where I’m just like, Okay, this is serious now. I can be on a bus or on a plane, and it’s just like some walls go up where I’m like, Okay, we’re not going outside of this sacred space. I do think of it as sacred. But you could probably say a little more honestly that it’s just where it has to happen, this space where I made my bread and butter.

So it doesn’t really matter. But I do have these little ritual objects. Like I have a quote from Ed Ruscha: Every artist wants to make a picture that will open the gates to heaven. And then there’s a picture that our daughter took of a restaurant in New York that had—I think the restaurant was called America—and it had an inverted American flag [where the stars and stripes have switched spots]. That excites me a little bit, like, Oh yeah, that’s what I’m trying to do.

LaFrance: You’ve said before that sometimes a line of prose will come to you almost in a dream. Do you actually wake up with a sentence or character that has come to you fully formed, or does it flow to you in pieces as you’re walking around?

Saunders: This is a really good writer-talking-to-another-writer question. It’s the interview I would conduct, too! The truth is, it comes so many different ways. And I think the skill that I’ve developed over the years is that, no matter how it comes, I can vet it pretty quickly. Like, I can feel something in the quality of the idea—if it’s a bullshit idea, or one of the ideas that you think about writing but probably should never touch. And then there’s another feeling like, Yeah, maybe. Come back tomorrow. And if it comes back a few times, then I start to take it seriously.