george saunders essay on kindness

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How George Saunders became literature’s Mr Nice Guy

The author of Lincoln in the Bardo on US politics, his “limited talent”, and the curse of being seen as the Tom Hanks of American letters.

By Erica Wagner

George Saunders suggests we meet at the La La Land Kind Cafe. White and hyper-modern, selling lavender matcha lattes, it’s on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, and there’s something about it that calls to mind the surreal, post-postmodern settings of many of his stories. Then, of course, there’s the name of the place. For Saunders – named by the New Yorker in 1999 as one of the best American writers under the age of 40, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, winner of the Booker Prize in 2017 for Lincoln in the Bardo – has come to be perceived as the Tom Hanks of American letters, a man whose niceness is an impenetrable carapace.

In 2013 the commencement address he gave the graduating class of Syracuse University went viral. “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness,” he told his young audience. He urged them to “do all the other things, the ambitious things – travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness . Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.”

During the run-up to the American election in 2016 he travelled to rallies for the then presidential candidate Donald Trump and talked to Trump’s supporters, kindly, rationally; his thoughtful analysis was published in the New Yorker on 4 July, four months before Trump’s victory. “LeftLand and RightLand are housemates who are no longer on speaking terms. And then the house is set on fire. By Donald Trump. Good people from both sub-nations gape at one another through the smoke,” he wrote.

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Sure enough, here at the La La Land Kind Cafe, Saunders is being super-nice, buying my lavender matcha latte when I should be buying his, apologising profusely for taking us to sit outside in the broiling Los Angeles-heatwave heat because he is still being Covid-cautious: his wife, Paula, has to be mindful of her health. He knows I have a book coming out and asks about my own writing, thoughtfully, genuinely. Is it a burden, I wonder, being the Patron Saint of Nice?

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He laughs. “Yeah, it’s a curse!” he says – but then, as is his way, approaches the question with care. “My job is to be aware of that, and be a little sceptical of it and try to poke it. But here’s the truth: your ego loves it. I mean, as a former Catholic, sure why not, I’ll be a saint, that’ll be great! And then you see yourself doing some shitty thing or having some errant thought, and you have to go, ‘Wait, that shtick is not true.’ So, one: don’t believe it; two, interrupt it.”

Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas in 1958 – though there’s no trace of the state’s signature twang in his warm, pleasant voice. His background is not typical for a literary writer: his degree, from the Colorado School of Mines, is in geophysics and, according to his author biography, he has worked “as a geophysical prospector in Indonesia, a roofer in Chicago, a doorman in Beverly Hills, and a technical writer in Rochester, New York”.

He was not raised among what’s often called the liberal elite; his empathy with those at the opposite end of the political spectrum comes from his upbringing as well as his early inclination. It was his own process of self-education that moved his political leanings away from hard-line conservatism. As a younger man Saunders fell for Ayn Rand, whose 1943 novel The Fountainhead is a talisman for those who believe in the triumph of the individual over the collective. “When I was young I thought, ‘She’s great.’ I couldn’t find a flaw in it. Then I started reading more, and now I can go back and say, ‘Oh, syntactically, this has got a big red flag out saying: I’m lying to you.’”

British readers may know him best from his only novel, Lincoln in the Bardo . It is a symphony of more than 150 voices, most of them ghosts who populate a Civil War-era cemetery visited by a living President Lincoln who searches for the spirit of his dead son, Willie. Yet Saunders has been, primarily, a master of the short story. His first collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline , published in 1996 – now in development as a television series – is full of the extraordinary combination of innocence and darkness that makes his voice unique.

His literary agent, Esther Newberg, tells me: “No one is like George. Period.” She has represented the author since his first story appeared in the New Yorker , in 1992. “He is as kind as anyone I have ever known,” she says, and cites the “humour and gravitas” of his fiction. “I think he is a genius. Lincoln in the Bardo ? How did he even think he could make that a book?”

Saunders’ work is often set in what seems to be a not-too-distant future in which American society has been – surprise! – brutally divided between the haves and have-nots, the latter imprisoned in dystopian theme parks or dead-end jobs that are both banal and terrifying. That early work is prescient: we seem increasingly to be living in George Saunders’ world, helpless as huge forces beyond our control drive us towards dysfunction and, perhaps, extinction.

The aura of oracular niceness around Saunders is peculiar, given the actual nature of his work. You don’t have to read much of it to observe that it is, simply put, full of terrible shit happening to folks who have, for the most part, done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

In the title story of Liberation Day , his new collection, the narrator, Jeremy, is enslaved by a pleasant middle-class couple and their adult son. In their version of our world, pleasant middle-class families don’t sit in front of the TV streaming Netflix; instead, a troupe of humans, memories of their prior lives having been somehow totally wiped, are pinioned to the wall of the family’s pleasant middle-class home. There they are made to perform elaborate narratives, in a ritual known as “Speaking”. The performers feel no hardship for they have no knowledge of their former lives. Their enslavers don’t believe they are doing any wrong.

Part of what makes the story so disturbing is Jeremy’s equanimity. “I love my work. I aspire to always be feeling more, thus Speaking with more gusto, thus evoking greater emotion and engagement in my Listeners,” Jeremy tells us. His situation – I won’t give any more away – is clearly horrifying; yet the reader seeks a place to locate her horror, because the narrator himself resists it. The tension in Saunders’ work arises from realising how powerful is our wish to be comforted, even in the most awful situations. Nearly all of his characters are trapped and must make the best of it. But then, that could be said of all of us.

“That’s what I’m starting to realise,” Saunders says. “So: do not ask for whom the bell tolls, because to a greater or lesser extent, yes, we’re trapped. I think that’s always been my move, to talk about trapped-ness. And to really come to ask: what if the trap is stronger than you? I write myself to a point where a spectacular escape is about to happen – and I know how to do that – but what if this is one of the times where it doesn’t? Then where’s the compassion? What becomes of the person? That was an interesting corner to get into.”

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Despite living in California – he and his wife moved west six years ago, ground down, he says (only half-joking, I can tell), by the unrelenting terror that they might fall down on the icy driveway of their home in upstate New York – he still teaches on the graduate writing programme at Syracuse. It was from that programme that A Swim in a Pond in the Rain emerged. In the book, published in 2021, four Russian writers give, as the subtitle promises, “a masterclass on reading, writing and life”. Saunders leads the reader – as he has led his students over the course of more than two decades – through the short stories of Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol, his humane, open-hearted analysis offering the kind of welcoming education many of us feel we missed along the way. It’s a project he has continued in “Story Club with George Saunders”, his Substack subscription course.

What comes through in A Swim in a Pond and his newsletter is the sense that he’s talking to himself as much as he is to his audience; that he’s still learning. In the course of our conversation he refers to “a limited talent like I have” – and this pulls me up short. How do you see your talent being limited, George?

“It’s from two directions,” he says. “One is my early training was weird and my reading is not as deep as it should be. The second is my personality.” His tone is frank, a little apologetic. “The strength of it is: I’m an entertainer. The weakness is: I’m an entertainer, so there’s something in there that’s always hyper-aware of what you’re thinking of me – which sometimes is good for a writer and sometimes is not so good, because I know too well what you want. And there’s a third thing: I always feel like I’m somebody talking about the splendour of the world in a really limited diction, which can be funny, and that’s who I actually am. But that, I think, is different from what a certain kind of writer can do, a writer who can just walk up to the splendour and get it.”

Yet is it precisely that “limited diction” that gives his work its sense of absolute sincerity. In the new collection this is most apparent in “Love Letter”, which originally appeared in the New Yorker. Dated “February 22, 202_”, it takes the form of a letter from a grandfather to his grandson Robbie. It is set in an America we recognise, or almost recognise; one where a lack of loyalty to the government can result in the loss of a job – or much worse. The grandfather refers to the political situation as “this thing”. He is careful in his letter only to name people by their initials; he tells Robbie that he himself has had his activities surveilled. Robbie wants to know whether he should try to intervene on a friend’s behalf; in offering counsel, his grandfather describes his own apathy as the political landscape changed, inch by inch, around him, until it was too late.

It did not seem (and please destroy this letter after you have read it) that someone so clownish could disrupt something so noble and time-tested and seemingly strong, that had been with us literally every day of our lives. We had taken, in other words, a profound gift for granted. Did not know that the gift was a fluke, a chimera, a wonderful accident of consensus and mutual understanding.

“Love Letter” dispenses with the stylistic effects that can mark (and, often, illuminate) Saunders’ work: unconventional grammar, unusual elisions. He tells me that an original draft was trickier; Deborah Treisman, the New Yorker ’s fiction editor, advised him to try to “write it plain”. “It was an interesting thing,” he says to me, “that you don’t always have to be dancing.”

But then, the moment does not always call for dancing. Did he think, after the writing he did about Trump in 2016, that we’d still be living in such polarised times – that they would be worse? That the US Supreme Court would be packed with Trump-appointed justices, that rioters would have tried to overrun the Capitol, that Roe vs Wade would have been overturned?

“No,” he says simply. “But that’s because I misunderstood the moment we were in from the beginning. Even in that piece, you can see I’m going, ‘Gosh, everybody’s so mean!’ But really, back-reading to the Civil War, none of this is new. It’s got a different leader, but I’m amazed that I didn’t see it more precisely at the time. I have often said, ‘Don’t write the overtly political’ – but in a time like this, what’s political? They’re coming for rights, that’s a factual truth: that’s as factually true as”– he points towards the foliage that surrounds us – “that planter is off-white. So, if somebody declined to write politically because of some dictum that they had, you’re defaulting because you’re not writing about reality.”

His art speaks to the dreadful present; his open-handed style, his skill as an educator, offer hope by encouraging each individual voice to find courage to speak. In his Substack column, he advises readers to seek their own “radical preference”: what we like just because, well, we like it.

The idea is that, when we write and revise, we are trying to get in touch with, and honour, and use, and play around in, these radical preferences. They are all we have. They are what differentiate us from every other writer in the world. Isn’t that at least part of what you love about your favourite writer? The sense that she is joyfully indulging herself in preferences she isn’t bothering to defend? And that eventually these make perfect sense?

It must make sense; it’s all we have. Sitting in the heat of a Los Angeles afternoon, George Saunders puts the task simply: “The job is: put yourself to the test, eliminate the part where you go, ‘I don’t know.’ Just trust and launch in.”

“Liberation Day” by George Saunders is published by Bloomsbury on 18 October

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The Kindness Person: A Conversation with George Saunders

On the moral imperative of writing, kindness as realism, how not to despair, and why he doesn't write about animals and other beings he likes..

Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds .

As means of an introduction, I’m tempted to write simply: George Saunders . I believe those two words alone convey the deep humanity, kindness, and humor as well as the astounding level of talent, craftsmanship, and delightfully-tender-and-fanciful imagination that he possesses. But for the person who might not be familiar with George’s work, I’ll add a bit more.

George has written twelve books including Lincoln in the Bardo which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize; A Swim In A Pond In The Rain in which George takes apart gorgeous, classic Russian short stories so we can learn to write our own hopefully-gorgeous, hopefully-one-day-classic short stories; Pastorali which was the first of his books I read and by which I am forever changed ; and Tenth of December which is basically perfect.

His latest book, Liberation Day , a collection of short stories which is also basically perfect, was just released in paperback. As with all his writing, George carefully ushers us into often unfamiliar terrain: there are people pinioned to a wall telling epic stories, other people living in an amusement park that never has visitors, and still others in more recognizable office spaces and home kitchens. But what is always familiar is the human longing, gentleness, despair, cruelty, compassion, fear, hope, and ultimately kindness that comprises most of us. This is what I most love about George’s work: no matter how utterly bizarre a situation may be, somewhere—sometimes dead center, sometimes tucked way-way-way in a corner, sometimes a mere drop inside a character’s cells—there is kindness.

George’s stories appear regularly in The New Yorker . He’s received both MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. He teaches at Syracuse University—where Cheryl Strayed was once one of his students. And he writes the wildly popular Story Club with George Saunders here on Substack.

An important update: This interview and all newly published interviews moving forward are now 100% free for their first week. I hope you enjoy and share them! Coming up next week, I’m sharing an incredibly poignant and useful deep dive on writing advice from George, and it will be paywalled. If you haven’t upgraded your subscription yet, now is a good time !

I want to start with kindness. So much of your writing is centered around it, including how many of us struggle with it. Why is kindness important to you?

One of the first images I received of Jesus was this idea of somebody who was so aware of where he was and so selfless that he could intuit what was needed in a given situation to make it better. When I was younger, it hit me that that would be a superpower if I could do that.

Then I got drafted into doing my daughter's sixth grade graduation speech. And I thought, Well, what do I really know as an old fart ? It was not much, actually. Except when I scanned back over my life, I had a couple of regrets. They almost all had to do with not being kind enough, which for me often meant being preoccupied with something else or being anxious or being too insecure to step up and do what somewhere in my body I knew was right.

I shared that with the sixth graders, and a few years later gave a version of that to the Syracuse group . At that point, I wouldn't have said that I was that interested in kindness. But you make a speech like that and it gets attention. Suddenly you're The Kindness Person.

For me, it's the practice of trying to believe that the person on the other side is just as real as you are. You happen to be seeing things through these eyes. But theoretically, you could flip around and see them through the other person's eyes, and it would be the same universe.

That has a lot of moral implications, but it also has aesthetic implications. Meaning that story is like a snow globe that you can walk around and go, “Oh, if I imagined these events from this point of view, it would look like this. If I change the perspective, it looks like that.” In the end, the holographic view of the story would be infused with total compassion because you'd know every angle and they would all seem completely reasonable.

Speaking of the snow globe: So many of your characters are trying to be and do good. And it’s really complicated. What feels like doing good in one moment can change in the next based on something as simple as the character walks into a different room. Or we move into another character’s equally convincing POV that opposes or contradicts the one we were just immersed in. Is good something concrete and definable? Is there an Ultimate Truth to life?

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Erring in the Direction of Kindness: An Interview with George Saunders

Small acts of kindness can be a sort of ritual self-reminding of what we are and what we’re meant to do down here.

Interviewed by Chris Dollard

In 2013, Saunders delivered the commencement address at Syracuse University, in which he encouraged graduates to “err in the direction of kindness.” The speech was soon published in the New York Times , and it complements The Gottman Institute’s belief that “all individuals are capable of and deserve compassion” and that “compassion must begin with ourselves.”

When you gave your speech, did you anticipate the amount of attention it received, and do you hope that by engaging in small acts of kindness toward one another, we can foster a greater capacity for empathy within “the human family”?

The response that day was, to say the least, muted. I found myself pathetically wandering the reception crowd, fishing for compliments. The best I got was, “Hey, aren’t you the guy who gave that speech?” And then I said yes, and he sort of nodded in this noncommittal way and walked off to the snack table. Then the speech went on The New York Times website and seemed to really hit a nerve.

My belief is that, actually, this whole mess down here on earth only holds together via small acts of decency and kindness. We tend to overlook or minimize the effect of the small things, but that is really what a culture is – that collection of thousands of small, habitual, decent moves that collectively make life somewhat predictable and “normal.”

The small acts of kindness can be a sort of ritual self-reminding of what we are and what we’re meant to do down here. Although, of course, like any moral belief, this approach can also evolve into something automatic and irritating and reductive. I think “kindness,” properly understood, might, at times, be quite fierce. It would be “whatever produces positive results.”

Do you view kindness as an intentional behavior, and do you believe that it could similarly counteract negative interactions (which you term as “failures of kindness” in your speech) between not just romantic partners, but also between individuals and communities?

I think “kindness” can be understood in all sorts of ways. For me, the most useful thing is to try to remember to start each day saying: “The whole point of this gift of time I’ve been given is to try to be more loving and then act accordingly.” Of course, most days I forget to even have that thought and just get up and start running around servicing my ego and my anxiety and knocking things over and getting all irritated about how damn easy things are to knock over these days because of the big faceless corporations.

But I’ve found that if I can remember to have that intention, everything is more interesting. Because kindness is really a sort of “gateway virtue” – you start out with that intention, but then find yourself running into problems. It’s all well and good to say “be kind” but what is the kind choice if, say, you encounter a barista who, it seems, has been weeping? Comfort her? Inquire as to why? Just be quiet and leave her alone? Hard to know, in the abstract.

So, right away, we are into a different moral/ethical question, that might have to do with, say, awareness – being maximally data-receptive, so we know the right thing to do, for this person, at this moment. And that’s not something one could “phone in,” or prep for, by just saying to oneself, “Be kind.”

Your speech mentions that “your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving,” which implies that once an individual commits to being kinder and more loving, that will result in even more kindness as they age. Do you believe that, when kindness “snowballs” and begins to envelop a romantic relationship, that such kindness could transcend that relationship and radiate into non-romantic relationships?

Well, that’s a bit beyond my area of expertise, but I do think that trying to increase one’s loving nature can have a beautifully simplifying effect on one’s life. Again, I’m only rarely able to get there, but on the few occasions on which I’ve blundered into this state, it felt like I’d acquired a kind of superpower: all questions answered more easily, the world a simpler place.

I’ve also noticed that when a person is in a genuine, happy, confident, kindness-enabled place, people feel it, and react to him in a different and more open way – which, in turn, expands the range of outcomes possible from that interaction.

Toward the end of your speech, you offer a prediction for the audience in the form of a “heartfelt wish:” “[A]s you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE. If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won’t care what happens to YOU, as long as they benefit.” Could you explain this process of “self-diminishment” from your experience as a father?

This is the one part of the speech about which I often catch grief: “If you think people get kinder as they get older, you should meet my father-in-law, ha ha!” I suppose this was a bit of wishful thinking on my part. It seems, actually, that people get to a crossroads of sorts. As age begins to take its toll, some people get bitter and others…not. And I suppose that has to do with both disposition and luck.

My observation about myself has been that, as a person gets older and the body starts to fall apart/slow down/get less wonderful, it starts to sink in: “Ah, even I am not permanent.” And that gives a person a different and (potentially) fonder view of the whole thing. We’re just very briefly passing through, despite what our ego believes.

Likewise, having kids: once you’re entrusted with another life, you become newly aware of your usual self-absorption. You might start to see self-absorption as the freakish, Darwinian, appendage that it is. And you feel your fondness for this little kid trump your self-fondness – and what a liberation that can be. You vanish a little. Or, as we used to say in a Catholic hymn: “We must diminish, and Christ increase.”

We also encourage parents to prioritize maintaining their relationship, as Drs. John and Julie Gottman claim that “the greatest gift you can give your baby is a happy and strong relationship between the two of you.” Do you think that the process of “self-diminishment” also includes expressing more kindness and empathy for your spouse, which will model a healthy relationship for children?

Yes, for sure. Although kindness toward the people closest to us can be the biggest challenge. They know us, and we might have habits together that are hard to break free of. Easy to be kind in the abstract, but harder in the midst of a familiar fight, when you are completely sure of your rightness and good intentions, whereas that other person, etc., etc.

But: if a kid sees someone behaving lovingly towards someone they love, that gets into their bodies and they will emulate that behavior without even knowing they are doing it. I’ve noticed that in myself – my parents have some very good habits of mutual support, that I found myself trying to enact in my own marriage. And I also have seen how my wife’s patience with, and equanimity towards, me, has informed the way our daughters handle their relationships, with men and with friends and at work, etc.

In the title story of your recent short story collection, Tenth of December, the protagonist, after a near-death experience, finds himself deeply appreciating his relationship with his wife as he remembers a moment from whey they were newlyweds:

“Somehow: Molly. He heard her in the entryway. Mol, Molly, oh, boy. When they were first married they used to fight. Say the most insane things. Afterward, sometimes there would be tears. Tears in bed? Somewhere. And then they would—Molly pressing her hot wet face against his hot wet face. They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you always expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d ever—”

You once told me that this may be the most truthful thing you’ve written about love. Where specifically do you find the deep truth of love within this passage, and how did you come to realize its power and accuracy in describing a crucial moment within a marriage?

This was a big moment for me as a writer, simply because, at a moment when I needed this man to have a deep and sincere feeling about his wife of many years, instead of inventing something, I just turned to my own experience.

My wife and I have been married thirty years and have been through so many things together, and I know she has seen me at my worst – petulant, defensive, broken, pissy, etc. – and yet she’s always had my back, which is an incredibly powerful thing. Easy enough to have a good relationship when you partner is an attractive, in-control, nice guy, but what about those (more numerous) other times? The person on the receiving end of that sort of love gets quite a gift.

We always carry around an ideal vision of ourselves (the US we like) but we are also bothered by the existence and periodic appearance of that other US (the one we see as an unlikeable aberration). That sort of love basically says: “No, those are both you and both are acceptable.” Which, in turn, empowers you to really see and understand and improve the parts of yourself you’re not crazy about.

According to Dr. Gottman’s research, married couples who are happy can easily recall positive stories from their past, such as how and when they first met, while unhappy couples tend to remember more negative memories. In your speech, you ask the audience, “Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet.” Why do you think that kindness has such a powerful capacity to help us form and recall meaningful memories?

That’s really interesting. And makes perfect sense. Someone who feels, “This relationship is awful” will tend to interpret past events in that light. It makes me think that we are always “novelizing” – narrating the past to inform the present moment and enable the future.

So, I think we have to walk a fine line there. To tell a happy story about an unhappy incident in the past might be to falsify /propagandize. For me the most productive thing is to try and tell a true story about the past – one that doesn’t deny or cloak any negative or complicated elements, but allows them in…makes them part of the actual, and hopefully positive, present moment. I suppose the trick is to be bitterness-free, if possible. That is, to see any negativity from the past to have been, ultimately, instructive of useful to the present, positive, state of things.

In your speech, you encourage us to “[do] those things that incline you toward the big questions.” Recently, Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman raise some “big questions” in her TEDx talk that focused on how we can create world peace by beginning at home with creating positive and empathetic familial relationships, which could then push us to be more empathetic with others in the world. Do you see kindness as a potential force for good in the world, a force that could push humanity toward being more peaceful and cooperative?

I know that, in Buddhist practice, this focusing of intention is very important – to say, essentially, “I pray that whatever I accomplish here goes out to benefit all beings, and not just me.”

Small acts of sanity ensure that the world in one’s immediate area is…sane. I once heard the writer Tom McGuane say something along these lines – that a system of interconnected small sanity zones builds out and makes a sane world. And that has the benefit of being a workable approach – one knows how to start, at least. If nothing else, working towards sanity and kindness in one’s own world (one’s own mind) means that, when insanity occurs “out there,” we will have a sane outlook on it – might be able to avoid making things worse, via our agitated reaction.

But having said that (and believing all of that), I also like to remind myself to be a little cautious about the need to justify kindness by claiming it could have some big overarching effect on the world. I mean, I think it does – I know it does – but I also feel that, for me, sometimes those grand intentions can serve as a sort of place on which to solidify ego, as I mentioned above. (I recall that quote from Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts:” “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand.”) When I was touring for the book, I found that a lot of people were all for Kindness but not that always that great at kindness, if you see what I mean. (One guy on a radio interview sort of snarled, “I’ve always believed in kindness! But people don’t GET it!”).

I guess that’s the trick of any sort of moral stance toward the world – we have to stay off of autopilot.

For those who are having difficulties within their marriages and may feel lonely or disconnected, what sort of advice could you offer to them based on your experiences as a writer and reader of fiction, as a teacher, as a father, and as a husband?

The one analogy that comes to mind from writing is simply that, at this point in my career, it’s more interesting to assume that every story is workable, and send renewed energy at a story when it hits a snag – assume the best of it, in a sense. And often, with patience, that story will come alive again and rise to the (expanded) occasion. Which is always a happy outcome.

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A graduate of the Syracuse University MFA program in Creative Writing, Christopher Dollard is a former professor of literature and writing and an accomplished poet and essayist. Check out more of his work on his website here .

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"Failures of Kindness" Commencement Address by George Saunders

George Saunders is an American writer and winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo. Saunders delivered this speech about “failures of kindness” as the commencement address to Syracuse University’s class of 2013.

Speech Transcript

Down through the ages, a traditional form has evolved for this type of speech, which is: Some old fart, his best years behind him, who, over the course of his life, has made a series of dreadful mistakes (that would be me), gives heartfelt advice to a group of shining, energetic young people, with all of their best years ahead of them (that would be you).

And I intend to respect that tradition.

Now, one useful thing you can do with an old person, in addition to borrowing money from them, or asking them to do one of their old-time “dances,” so you can watch, while laughing, is ask: “Looking back, what do you regret?” And they’ll tell you. Sometimes, as you know, they’ll tell you even if you haven’t asked. Sometimes, even when you’ve specifically requested they not tell you, they’ll tell you.

So: What do I regret? Being poor from time to time? Not really. Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse?” (And don’t even ASK what that entails.) No. I don’t regret that. Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked? And getting deathly ill afterwards, and staying sick for the next seven months? Not so much. Do I regret the occasional humiliation? Like once, playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including this girl I really liked, I somehow managed, while falling and emitting this weird whooping noise, to score on my own goalie, while also sending my stick flying into the crowd, nearly hitting that girl? No. I don’t even regret that.

But here’s something I do regret:

In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her Convocation Speech name will be “ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.

So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” — that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. After awhile she’d drift away, hair-strand still in her mouth. At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know: “How was your day, sweetie?” and she’d say, “Oh, fine.” And her mother would say, “Making any friends?” and she’d go, “Sure, lots.”

Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it.

And then — they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing.

One day she was there, next day she wasn’t.

End of story.

Now, why do I regret that ? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her.

But still. It bothers me.

So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness .

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?

Those who were kindest to you, I bet.

It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder .

Now, the million-dollar question: What’s our problem? Why aren’t we kinder?

Here’s what I think:

Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and then, out there, all that other junk – dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real, o.k., sure – for you, but not for me).

Now, we don’t really believe these things – intellectually we know better – but we believe them viscerally, and live by them, and they cause us to prioritize our own needs over the needs of others, even though what we really want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more aware of what’s actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving.

So, the second million-dollar question: How might we DO this? How might we become more loving, more open, less selfish, more present, less delusional, etc., etc?

Well, yes, good question.

Unfortunately, I only have three minutes left.

So let me just say this. There are ways. You already know that because, in your life, there have been High Kindness periods and Low Kindness periods, and you know what inclined you toward the former and away from the latter. Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition — recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us.

Because kindness, it turns out, is hard — it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, everything .

One thing in our favor: some of this “becoming kinder” happens naturally, with age. It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish — how illogical, really. We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality. We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be. We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now). Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”

And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE. If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won’t care what happens to YOU, as long as they benefit. That’s one reason your parents are so proud and happy today. One of their fondest dreams has come true: you have accomplished something difficult and tangible that has enlarged you as a person and will make your life better, from here on in, forever.

Congratulations, by the way.

When young, we’re anxious — understandably — to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you — in particular you, of this generation — may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can . . .

And this is actually O.K. If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously — as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.

Still, accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness . But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf — seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness . Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — your soul, if you will — is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Teresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.

And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been. I hope you will say: It has been so wonderful.

Browse more of history's greatest speeches →

About the author

‍ Daniel Scrivner is an award-winner designer and angel investor. He's led design work at Apple, Square, and now ClassDojo. He's an early investor in Notion, Public.com, and Anduril. He founded Ligature: The Design VC and Outlier Academy . Daniel has interviewed the world’s leading founders and investors including Scott Belsky, Luke Gromen, Kevin Kelly, Gokul Rajaram, and Brian Scudamore.

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The art of rough drafts with George Saunders (Transcript)

Listen along.

ReThinking The art of rough drafts with George Saunders October 31, 2023

[00:00:00] Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is George Saunders. He's a writer beloved for his short stories in The New Yorker, as well as his novellas and books, including his bestselling novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. Originally from Texas, George held odd jobs in his youth and took a bit of a winding road toward becoming a writer.

But today, he's won more awards for his writing than I can count, and been honored with Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. He teaches creative writing at Syracuse, and I'm a big fan of his newsletter, Story Club, where he shares wisdom on writing, creativity, criticism, and character. Those are the key themes of our conversation today.

George, are you ready for this?

[00:01:00] George Saunders: I am, Adam.

[00:01:02] Adam Grant: Well, I've been looking forward to this for a while.

[00:01:03] George Saunders: Me too, you know, I was on a flight, one of your talks was on there, and I turned it on and I was just mesmerized, so I was so excited when you showed up in the inbox.

[00:01:12] Adam Grant: Well, that's an honor. I've been mesmerized by your words for a long time.

[00:01:16] George Saunders: Oh, thank you.

[00:01:16] Adam Grant: I guess for starters, I'd love to hear a little bit about your career arc. It is not every day that a beloved fiction writer spends an early career as a roofer, a doorman, a geophysical prospector, a technical writer. How did this all happen? How did you land where you are?

[00:01:32] George Saunders: It was kind of, you know, a little bit of slight intention. Like, I sort of knew I wanted to be a writer from a young age, but because I didn't know any other writers, I didn't quite know that you could, you know. There was, there was a sense of like, well, I, I'd like to do this, but I have no idea how to start. So it was kind of just, uh, yeah, clumsy, clumsy, you know, groping in the dark kind of thing. I think at first I was kind of seeking, like, the accoutrements of a writing life, like to do, do exotic things. And, you know, and I thought maybe if I just, for example, went to work in Asia, then I just type it up afterwards, you know, and that would be a, a novel. So, it was definitely a slow, kind of an awkward beginning, you know.

There's something, I think it's in Hemingway, where he talks about somebody who went broke gradually and then all at once. Like, I sort of was stumbling towards writing and then I got really sick in Asia. I, I was working in the oil fields kind of writing a little bit at the camp when I could find the time and then I got really sick.

I went swimming in this river I shouldn't have been swimming in, and it just was like being 98 years old instantly, though I was 24, 25. And so there's a kind of that moment where you're like, well, you know, I've always said I wanted to do this. I don't have a whole lot of great other options. So maybe I should sort of double down and at that point I, I just happened to be at this crazy wild party in Amarillo, Texas and on a table, there was a People magazine that mentioned that Syracuse had an MFA program, or at that time was an MA program.

And I was like, “What? You can get paid for writing?” So just on a whim, I applied there and a couple other places, got into Syracuse. So I, I’d say it was kind of a path of one, gradually knowing more what I actually wanted and two, having circumstances line up so that I could actually, you know, make, make a run at it. But it was, you know, like a, a 10 year attempt, even to get to that point.

[00:03:13] Adam Grant: I think I first became aware of you in a way that was, I guess, deeper and bigger than your, your stories, uh, about ten years ago. I had just come out with my first book on givers and takers. And a just an unbelievable number of people sent me the graduation speech that you gave on your biggest regrets being failures of kindness. And I thought that was such a profound observation. I, I’d love to hear a little bit of the origin story of how you landed at that regret.

[00:03:41] George Saunders: I first wrote a speech like that from our daughter's graduation. And that was a very sort of special writing moment because I thought, ah, it's just for the small group of people that I love, especially for my daughter.

So it came from a different part of the writing mind than usual. You know, usually you construct a certain writing identity and then execute. But in this case, because it was, I thought, a one off, I was actually really honest. And, and as I was working through it, I thought, well, why should an old fart like me have the right to give advice to these kids who haven't made any big mistakes yet?

And when I really scrolled through that, I thought, well, the only reason is I have regrets. Time equals regret. So what are they? And I scrolled through a few that actually weren't that sincere. And then I finally thought, oh, yeah.

And I remembered one incident back when I was a kid. This new girl came to our school and she really struggled. She was kind of an awkward person and got picked on and kind of light bullied, you know, nothing too egregious. But you could see she was suffering, and I just logged that as a genuine regret that I hadn't had a little more guts and stepped up and, you know, kind of intervened for her. And I also remember that very strange feeling of kind of bargaining with myself, like, “Yeah, you could do that, but you're going to get nailed. So maybe you just do what everybody else does and kind of look the other way.”

So I wrote a speech about that for our daughter's class, and then I think about eight or nine years later, my university asked if I would talk at this graduation related ceremony, and I thought, “Oh, yeah, I'll just do that speech again.”

So I waited till about three days before and then found out I had lost it. It was somewhere in my disorganized file system. So I kind of just rewrote it from memory, and I think what was unusual about it maybe was that I kind of took that semi-academic moment to talk about something that isn't normally, at least at that time, wasn't taken as a serious academic idea, i.e. that kindness is an actual thing, and we can get better at it, and it's actually the way the world is kind of lubricated, you know, with, with small and large acts of kindness. So I, I gave the speech, and really, there wasn't much reaction, it was kind of a hot gym, you know, and everybody was anxious to get to the party.

And at one point it was sort of pathetic, because I thought it had gone pretty well, you know, and I really liked it. And I'm roaming around this sort of after party among all these strangers, and I'm like, waiting to be recognized. And at one point this guy said, uh, “Hey, dude, did you, did you give the speech just now?”

I said, “Yeah." He goes, “Oh.” You know, and that was the whole, the whole reaction. So I went home and then a friend of mine at the Times just posted it and it kind of went viral. And, and so that was the beginning of, uh, I guess this mode of being the kindness dude, which is, it's sort of a mixed blessing.

[00:06:16] Adam Grant: Well, I think one of the things you did for a lot of people was you reminded them that kindness is not weakness. It's actually a source of strength.

[00:06:23] George Saunders: Not only is it a strength, but it's also really difficult to cultivate. I mean, we all have a sort of natural ambient level of kindness, whatever it might be, ranging from none to a lot, but to sort of move the meter and become kinder is difficult for me, partly because in a lot of sort of rarefied air situations, it’s hard to know what kindness might consist of.

I mean, if somebody is about to get hit by a car and you grab them, okay, that's, that's good. But you know, I always talk about if you walk into a coffee shop and you see that the barista has been crying and you want to be the kindness person, well, it's kind of an open question of, you know, would it be kind to just leave the person alone, or is there an opportunity for engagement? So thinking about that in kind of a serious way made me think, well, it's actually then about a next virtue, which is alertness or awareness. Like in a given situation, how well can you discern what might make things better, which in turn is related to your own preset?

If you're like me and you're a former Catholic with a kind of savior mindset, you’re always rushing in where you shouldn't. You're always quote-unquote “helping” and maybe making it worse. So, it seemed to me that a kindness as a goal, very good aspiration is a gateway to a lot of other really interesting questions that I'm certainly still trying to puzzle out.

[00:07:37] Adam Grant: One of the things that reminds me of is a, a classic psychology experiment. It's a Darley and Batson study where seminary students are on their way to give a speech about being a good Samaritan. And they see somebody who looks like they're in trouble and, and might need help. And it turns out if they're just in a hurry, uh, and they're running a little late for the speech, it's enough to prevent them from being good Samaritans.

[00:07:59] George Saunders: Wow.

[00:08:00] Adam Grant: That just, to me, puts a point on the idea that alertness is a major driver. If you don't notice that somebody is in need, it's awfully hard to help them or, or show them kindness.

[00:08:08] George Saunders: Yeah, and that is, I hadn't heard that before. That's amazing. But I think it also speaks to your work because, you know, it seems to me like we have habits that come to mind in certain situations that we then honor because they're normal.

So if I'm rushing to an event, The normal habit is get to the event, and it, it dwarfs everything else. I think kindness in the American mind often equates with niceness, which means non-percussiveness, which means non-conflict mindset. It does for me. I mean, that's one of the reasons this kind of stuff comes natural, because I'm sort of a naturally passive person.

So, I'm finding myself at 64 working a little bit on that periphery where kindness might actually mean engagement, even if it's a little uncomfortable. You know, to say to somebody, “No, actually I disagree,” or, “You’ve got to stop doing that.” It's just amazing how, how these big moral questions come down to the decision of a moment or the impulse of a moment or the training of a moment.

[00:09:01] Adam Grant: I think the distinction you're raising between being nice and being kind is not something we talk about enough. I think that for me, at least, being nice is about making people feel good today. And being kind is often doing what's going to help them do better tomorrow.

[00:09:16] George Saunders: Yeah.

[00:09:16] Adam Grant: And those two things do not always go hand in hand.

[00:09:19] George Saunders: Right. Right. In the Eastern traditions, I think they're kind of ahead of us on this, which is they understand that our teachers can be quite wrathful at times and, you know, they're just trying to get you off the bad track and onto the other one. But it also occurs to me that this whole idea of like, even that, oh, so, so I meet somebody and I think, how can I benefit them long term?

For me, that quickly gets into a sort of arrogance where I'm the one who's going to see what they need and fix them. But it's just a tiny turn of the dial, you know, and some days I can feel like, yeah, I'm there. I'm listening. I'm not being over involved. Maybe my listening is helping and other days I'm like, “I'll tell you what you got to do.” So that, so that's another place where I think this desire to be kind kind of can lead us to a bigger question, which is, well, you know, to what extent can we know what's beneficial? And that's a real tough one, I think.

[00:10:08] Adam Grant: You’re reminding me of the, the Silicon Valley line where I think it was Gavin Belson says, “I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than I do.”

[00:10:19] George Saunders: That's really funny.

[00:10:21] Adam Grant: It’s such a great example of, uh, of benevolent narcissism. But I, I wonder if, if often, you know, people with a white knight complex or sort of a savior mentality are missing out on the fact that you don't have to assume that you're the person who's gonna fix the problem.

All you have to do is, is recognize that everybody has knowledge worth sharing. And I, I guess I've started to think about helpfulness more as, as an act of gift giving. When you give someone else a gift, you're not assuming that you have the, the answer to all their prayers. You're just assuming that you, you know, you have a perspective or an idea or access to a resource that they might appreciate and value.

[00:10:59] George Saunders: Right.

[00:11:00] Adam Grant: Um, and I wonder if that shift makes it easier to, to think about a long term contribution to say, “Do I know something or someone that might be a, a useful gift to this person?”

[00:11:09] George Saunders: Yes. And you know, Adam, that's exactly the mindset that I try to go into when writing something. If you have the, uh, “This story will change everyone's mind and fix things,” that’s going to be a, usually a boring story is what it's because it's a, it's a sermon. You know, I think Lewis Hyde wrote about this in his book called The Gift, you know, the idea that I, I hope I can make an offering to somebody that hits them at the right moment so that it does something even incrementally positive for them.

Just to say humbly, I, you know, uh, “Here’s a joke,” you know, “Here's a small moment that you might like.” That, that seems to me the right idea and it back filtered into the actual method because in the method of writing, what I find is it works best if I can keep my mind very quiet. And so I don't have savior complex.

I'm not thinking about, well, really no thinking about anything except the text in front of me that I've written yesterday, and I'm reading it to see how it strikes me today. And I'm making even the smallest little changes to make myself like it better. That's almost free of intention. It's almost all reaction in real time.

And depending on your mindset, if my mindset is, “I've got to get this thing done,” that’s not pure. That's not pure. If it's, uh, “This has gotta rocket to the top of the best seller list,” that’s not pure. If it's, “I've got to do better than this other writer,” that’s not pure. Any trace of kind of coaching in, in that mind is dangerous because really what I want is the, a pure reaction to what I've written.

So I think there might be an, an analogue into that barista scenario where I'm just trying to keep my mind quiet so I can see what, if anything, is needed and that thing will come out of the part of my mind that isn’t, I guess, ego-based as much as possible. So the thing I've loved about being a writer is it teaches me day after day that there is a mind greater than the one I'm talking to you with right now that actually reliably function, and I can access it. I can access it reliably, and it's smarter than me. Which gives me hope for the other 22 hours of the day.

[00:13:01] Adam Grant: Well, this, I think this goes to one of my favorite posts that you've written for Story Club, which is about the courage of uncertainty. And how, when you sit down to write, you're not sure that you have something to offer, and you're not always even clear on where the story is going yet, and the difficulty of embracing uncertainty, I think, is amplified in those moments, but it's something we all grapple with. How have you learned to be both patient and, I guess, tolerant in those moments?

[00:13:29] George Saunders: I think it's just experience, because in that narrow realm of being at the writing desk, I, I've been doing it a long time, and I know that patience is an active virtue, like, like, to not need to decide right now.

We have a story where, uh, it's late in the development, and I know there are six places that are undetermined right now, and that's frustrating. But after all the years, I know that I have to let those six places kind of percolate a little bit. It, it's the one part of my life where I have sufficient experience to, to notice some pretty nuanced things about the way my mind works.

It's kind of weird and thrilling, and I think it's kind of Buddhist actually to be able to say, okay, I’m both the mind that says, “I hope this story is good.” That mind is accessing the subconscious mind that doesn't care. That's just reacting and responding in, intuitively. And there's a third mind that's kind of like the train conductor that's coaching those two minds.

I love to dip my foot into that pond every day a little bit just to remind myself that what's true at the writing table is also true out there. And so what we call George is a multiplicity that's pretty ornery and strange and, and swirling around, and…

[00:14:37] Adam Grant: As you're describing that, you know, sort of the multiple selves that are active and, and trying to get to the, the pure reaction, I'm thinking of the, the quote that I guess it originally traces back to either Graham Wallas or E. M. Forster or both, which goes, “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”

[00:14:54] George Saunders: Yes.

[00:14:54] Adam Grant: And one of my teachers, Karl Weick, used to advise us to basically sit down and enact our way into ideas. So, you know, you're staring at a blank page, you wait to see what ideas come, and every once in a while, I find that that's an extremely powerful experience.

And the rest of the time, I feel like a complete idiot afterward. I'm like, “I can't believe I've ever written a word!” And I vow that I'm not going to sit down in front of a computer until I have an idea and I know what I want to say, and then the words flow. And so I, I feel like there's this tension between having clarity and sitting down to write with it. And then using writing as actually a tool for gaining clarity. Um, do you also experience both of those modes and how do you navigate them?

[00:15:37] George Saunders: Yes. And that's beautifully said. I, I think what, I think the highest level thing is to recognize that both those modes are always switching on and off. I'll get into a mode where I am just reacting, just something's just coming through me, boom.

Then, the next second you go, “Okay, based on that, what's the next thing?” There you're having an idea, you know. So I think for me, the highest level is to go, “Yeah, of course, the mind has many modalities.” My job as the train conductor is to accept them all in turn. And if one is coming when I don't need it, I'm gonna just gently shoo it away.

You know, you can actually do that. You kind of toggle between a very intuitive reactive mind and one that's a little more analytical. That's the highest truth. Now, in a lot of the, the talks that I give, I, I'm emphasizing the intuitive one because I think most people, as they approach writing, overemphasize the analytical, the pre-decided mind, the one that thinks you have to have an idea and then execute it.


The, this idea about finding out what you think by writing, for me, that always involves a lot of iteration, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. And the beautiful side effect of that is, you know, your initial idea can be stupid. I mean, really stupid. It can be intentionally stupid. It can be just, uh, an incoherent phrase.

So that takes all the pressure off that beginning moment. All writers know that moment of “I can't start until I have a good idea because then the end product will suck”, but that's an amazing burden. Have a good idea that will rank you right up there with Dostoevsky. Oh, good luck. You know, that's going to be a long day.

So I think the better thing is to say, “Well, of course, my, uh, early ideas are dumb. Of course they are. That's coming off the top of my head, but I'm going to put it out there.” So the subconscious, that holy thing can mess with it over and over and over and over, and that's the article of faith is that that's not a random process if you let your subconscious and if you have trained your subconscious to look at something, and it always tells us things by way of opinions, small opinions.

That phrase is better than this one. That's actually… that phrase right there that I've loved for three weeks? Actually now that I look at it, it’s false. Cut it out. You cut it out. That makes a little linking place for something else to come in. So that process I think is maybe a, a prolonged version of what we're talking about where we write to find out what we think.

I don't think the initial blurt has much value, in, in, fiction anyway, you know, I've literally just sometimes had a sentence come to me in a kind of a dream state that's a completely meaningless thing. Put it on the page and then start hitting it with the subconscious and over time, over a lot of time. It starts to be something that's coherent, you know, that's very, it's so mysterious.

[00:18:07] Adam Grant: Like any writer, you've had to face criticism, and I'm curious about how that's evolved over time. So occasionally a critic might tell you that something you produce sucks. Uh, does that still bother you?

[00:18:18] George Saunders: Oh, yeah.

[00:18:18] Adam Grant: How have you learned to, to manage that?

[00:18:20] George Saunders: It still bothers me. And I think at, at heart I'm kind of a stoic, which I think, okay, I'm going to have a lot of thoughts in a day and a lot of inclinations. Let me just honor the ones that I want to honor, that I think will be useful.

So, with criticism, like, and this is a little bit full of shit because I don't always do it, but, but I try to say, “Let the criticism fall on me, and let whatever is going to be helpful stick.” Which it tends to do, and let the rest of it fall away, and I know that it takes some days, like if I get a really harsh one, I'm like, okay. I’m in for three days of refuting this thing. Blah, blah, blah, okay. But then, when the dust settles, sometimes, in a good review, there'll be something that hits you, because it basically came from inside your head.

You know, I had one critic say one time, in a pretty negative review that really was hurtful, and I was really had my dukes up about it, and it said, he said, “Saunders writes better from love than anger,” and I don't even remember who the critic was, but I remember that line, because he was right, you know? And it's helped me many, many times when I thought, “Oh, I'm just gonna launch a broadside against this or that.” That phrase has come out of my head and I thought, “Oh yeah, I could spend my time better in a different way.” Well, what are your thoughts on criticism?

[00:19:24] Adam Grant: The, the most valuable lesson that I've learned on, on facing criticism has really come from participating in the peer review process as a social scientist, where you get usually three thoughtful experts and then an editor telling you what's wrong with your work and, you know, hopefully pointing you toward ways to make it better.

And, yeah, when I first started writing responses to reviews, they were all rejection letters, and I was trying to fight with them and tell them they were wrong and I was right. And I didn't learn anything from that process. And as I started getting invitations to revise my papers, I realized, okay. My job is not to convince the reviewer that they're wrong and I'm right. It's to create a better version of my work.

One of my mentors, Jane Dutton would say, “You've got to dance with the reviewers. They're leading you in a particular direction and you don't have to follow them on every bid that they make, but you do have to show them that you're willing to dance.” I guess it started to become second nature at some point to say, okay, whatever criticism someone's bringing me, that's an opportunity to sharpen my thinking and get a different reaction the next time, whether it's on an iteration of this project or whether it's on something else I produce. Sort of imagining myself in a dance with the critic is my favorite place to go. And I can't dance. So this is a bad metaphor for me.

[00:20:38] George Saunders: No, that's beautiful. And you know, I, it always sometimes this idea of, of critiquing your critics is a little bit like when you ask somebody out and they say no, and you try to, you try to negotiate.

Well, you know, what I do, we do workshops. So these really talented writers at Syracuse; we get 700 applications and pick six people to come. So they're incredibly good. And then we have a class where a student puts up an excerpt from a novel or a story, and then we all talk about it in a workshop format. And it's interesting because in that setting, what you can trust is if all six students identify something on page eight, as either great don't touch it, or terrible take it out, you know there's something there. You know that there's some kind of energy there. And I've often said it, the most useful feedback for a writer would be a color chart that is somehow hooked up to the reader's brain, and it prints out green when everything's great, yellow when it's, they're starting to pull out, and red when the energy has been truncated.

And you don't even have to actually articulate what's wrong with it. But it's just a drop in energy that makes you aware that there's an issue. And nine times out of ten, the writer, the writer's subconscious is so far ahead that she's going to know what to do better than any critic will.

[00:21:45] Adam Grant: It dovetails with something that I've, I've often found myself telling my students, which is that the, the reason that other people can see problems you can't is you're too close to your own work, and they have distance.But that same distance makes them terrible at solving your problem—

[00:22:00] George Saunders: Uh-huh.

[00:22:00] Adam Grant: —because they often don't know what other problems they're creating. I guess this is another toggling challenge. To be close enough to your work that you know how to solve problems but far enough away from your work that you can see the problems.

[00:22:11] George Saunders: That's really a beautiful way of saying it. You know, when I was a younger, uh, teacher, I thought, okay, a student brings me a story. I've got to take it from wherever it is to 11 so that they can publish it, which may have meant a lot of covering the page with notes, but conversely, not much they could actually use. So as I become more experienced, I'm like, okay, if I could say one thing that helps the writer get to, from draft 11 to draft 12, that's really valuable. You know, no one can foresee where this work of fiction is going in a year. You know, with all the iteration.

[00:22:45] Adam Grant: You really are guiding them to chart their own path. As, as opposed to telling them, “Here's exactly the, the set of steps that you need to follow.”

I wonder if you have guidance on this distancing skill. I think one of the things that, that I see a lot with all kinds of creators, not just writers, is that they over identify with their work. And they think that somebody's criticizing them. I always want to tell people, “No, that's just a critique of something you produced. You created it, but it's not you.”

[00:23:11] George Saunders: I think that's something I, I have to work on myself all the time. I mean, the process of revising really helps with that. When I sit down to work later today, I'm gonna read something, I'm gonna mark it up. From whence is that marking up coming? It was perfect yesterday.

So, there is something out there that's helping us. It, it, it’s sort of a daily practice in getting some distance between you and your work because the work that right now is sitting over here on my left hand side perfect, is gonna prove itself to be imperfect in about an hour. And it's so powerful, because then, if you say the work is something that is delivered unto me, you know, by some force that is not me. Boy, you're open as can be. You know, you, you just want it to be better.

I do a lot of work with Deborah Treisman at the New Yorker, and one of the things that she does so magical as an editor is her edits always seem to come from that place. It's never any sense of anything but disinterested love of the piece at hand and the desire to make it its best self. And when, and so many times when I get her edits, she serves the function of saying, “Okay, George, if you weren't so close to this, you would see that this is actually your intention,” and to read those and just go, “Oh, shoo,” like a sigh of relief. Somebody caught it. That's really kind of wonderful.

I always tell my students that it’s, a work of fiction is kind of like it's perfect somewhere, like in your subconscious. It’s a perfect sheet of glass, so beautiful. Then in trying to tell it, you drop it. And it hits the ground and it shatters. Now, revi-revising is the process of putting it back together. So that means you have to be really patient. And you have to look for the connections.

[00:24:45] Adam Grant: You just used a phrase that I think is an incredibly powerful seeming oxymoron, uh, which is disinterested love.

[00:24:51] George Saunders: Hm.

[00:24:51] Adam Grant: Tell me a little more about that.

[00:24:54] George Saunders: It's that you have high hopes for the story, or the kid, or the student. You recognize that your emotions are creating a haze through which you can't see. So, you love it because you have the highest hopes in for it and faith in it, but you have to preserve a, an attitude of disinterest so you can actually see what it is so you can guide it. For me, emotion... Attachment to, to one's work, even ambition can be fog producers, you know? The, they stop you from seeing what's actually on the page because if I want this piece, for example, to be published this month, I, I’m not going to accept certain defects.

I have to ignore them. I have to deny them. And denial energy is something in writing that's really dangerous. There's a great Chicago writer named Stuart Dybek, and h-he always says, “The story is always talking to you, but you got to learn to listen to it.” You know, so if you have denial or you have an agenda, that energy is totally designed to help you not listen to your own story or, you know, your own partner or your own kid or your own colleague.

If you know the way you want things to turn out, and someone throws a complication at you, there's a pretty natural tendency to go, “No, no, no, we already dealt with that,” or, “That’s not relevant,” or, “I can't hear you right now.” And then, you're not in direct contact with the thing that you're doing anymore.

[00:26:15] Adam Grant: This is, this is such a great paradox that the, the very attentional filters that we raise to stay productive also keep out our best and most creative ideas.

[00:26:26] George Saunders: So it’s tricky. I mean, writing, it, it’s really so much about the mind state before you start. You know, when you sit in front of a blank page or computer. The mind is already leaning in a certain direction. It sort of has a, I guess, an acquired idea of what it should be like in order to soon start writing.

But I think that idea of where your habits are, they're certainly pre-verbal, I would think, right? Even in a quiet mind, I think there are habits floating around, you know? So that's pretty deep stuff.

[00:26:58] Adam Grant: Well, this is a good segue to the lightning round. So, I have a, a series of rapid questions, uh, looking for a word or a sentence. You can skip if you like. Are you ready?

[00:27:09] George Saunders: I’m ready.

[00:27:10] Adam Grant: Okay, first question. What's a book we should all read?

[00:27:14] George Saunders: Resurrection by Tolstoy.

[00:27:17] Adam Grant: Is there something you've rethought lately?

[00:27:18] George Saunders: My passivity. My habitual agreeability.

[00:27:24] Adam Grant: George, what’s the, the worst piece of writing advice you've ever gotten?

[00:27:28] George Saunders: You know, I don't think I've ever gotten a bad piece of writing advice. I, because even the bad ones, you go, “Bullshit.” I heard a story once, a teacher, a visiting writer came in to teach a class, and she was very full of this kind of, uh, dictatorial, you may not, you should not, you cannot, or you can't start a sentence with the proper noun, blah blah. And the students were so unhappy about it, and they complained, and the, they were in this pitch battle the whole semester. The next semester, the students reported that actually they had a quantum leap in growth just from the process of opposing all that quote-unquote “bad advice”.

So I don't know whether it was intentional or not, but she solidified their actual beliefs because she, she forced them into a corner, you know? So I'm not, I can't really think of a piece of bad writing advice really.

[00:28:16] Adam Grant: What do you think is more important? The beginning of the end of the story?

[00:28:19] George Saunders: The end.

[00:28:19] Adam Grant: Good. I'm glad to hear that.

[00:28:21] George Saunders: Yeah.

[00:28:21] Adam Grant: Briefly, why do you think the end matters more?

[00:28:22] George Saunders: Well, I mean, on a practical level, it's because the ending is actually bringing the beginning home. They’re, they’re really the same thing, but the end just happens—in linear time—later. When you're saying, “Is that a good story?” your opinion is heavily weighted to the last page.

You know, how did it send me out into the world? How did, but that makes sense because you're saying, how did the story justify itself? How did the story make the case that all along it was an organic system? You know, a highly functioning machine. If the ending doesn't work, then the beginning doesn't work either. It’s the whole thing doesn't work.

[00:28:54] Adam Grant: Given that you have mastered the short story, is it really t-true that it takes longer to write a shorter letter?

[00:29:01] George Saunders: Yes. Well, to write a shorter good letter, you can write a shorter crummy one pretty quick, but no, it's really true because the, um, to, to, to take a thought down to its essence is also to get closer to the truth. Which then makes more problems for you because you've just said a truth that maybe you didn't intend to say in that short letter. So I, I think that's absolutely, absolutely true. Yeah.

[00:29:24] Adam Grant: What's a question you have for me as a psychologist?

[00:29:27] George Saunders: Well, I, okay, here's what I'd like to know. One of the, the difficulties with writing is that there are all kinds of habits that are hard won. I've learned to write a story a certain way by trying and trying and trying and getting it. How then, at this late stage, does one mechanically strip away those habits and see what else there might be? Are there ways to sort of challenge one's existing mindset when approaching a task?

[00:29:56] Adam Grant: I never thought about framing it this way, but this was very much what I was trying to explore in, in my last book, Think Again. And I think the biggest thing I took away from all that research was that it's helpful for all of us to think a little bit more like scientists and say, okay, as a writer, if my opening move is a hypothesis, there are alternative hypotheses I haven't tested yet, and I need to figure out what those are so that I can then run experiments with them.

What's been most helpful for me to, I guess, to break form, um, is to really internalize the styles of other people that I admire and say, okay, you know, like if I were to sit down and try to, y’know, mix up or shake up my writing style, I would start by asking: how would George Saunders write this story? How would Margaret Atwood tell this story? Um, and even, like, how would Stephenie Meyer tell this story? Uh, you know, really just to try to bend styles and genres quite a bit. And so, I wonder if actually internalizing other people's moves is a way to get out of your own.

[00:30:53] George Saunders: Something I've told my students is, you know, you're actually trying to kill the father. So if you love Hemingway, you do your best to master Hemingway. Someday you're going to find out that you're always going to be a couple of feet below him, you know, because he, he pioneered it and then you say, “Okay, Ernest, what do I know about life that you don’t?” Meaning where, you know, when I'm reading your work closely, where do I feel the slightest tug of resistance that you're leaving something out that's real to me?

That’s kind of where a person's originality is often centered. I mean, most of us, you know, we love our, the writer, a certain writer, and we don't want to disrespect that writer. But there is that moment when you're allowed to, to say, okay, be really frank here. If you could have Hemingway in the room, what would you chew him out about? You know, what did he miss about your life?

[00:31:37] Adam Grant: This is such a fun experiment to run to not only internalize the styles of different role models, but also to ask yourself, well, what fight would I pick with each of them?

[00:31:45] George Saunders: We can get better at discerning our micro opinions. These very tiny resistances that we have when, for example, reading a work or listening to someone or being in a conversation, those little tiny moments when we slightly fall out of agreement, those are really valuable.

And in my work, when I find one of those, I really say, “Oh, good,” because if my feeling of liking the work has gone from an 8 to a 4, then that 4 is a place with a TBD sign on it. Like, okay, some, this story is waiting to tell me something really important, but it's not ready yet. It's shy. And it's shy because I'm only on draft 80. And if I keep working on it, eventually at draft 106, that moment will want to reveal itself to me.

[00:32:29] Adam Grant: You have written that fiction writing is the practice of coming to despise nobody. Why and how?

[00:32:36] George Saunders: You have a character. And the character has to do something bad, you know. Your job, first of all, it has nothing to do with empathy.It has to do with function. I've got to make Adam believe that this bad guy is real. I've got to put this bad guy in three dimensions. And weirdly, what I found is that if I work on making that language interesting and energetic and fun and, and make it come to life, that is exactly equal to increased sympathy or empathy.

[00:33:06] Adam Grant: So, maybe, maybe trying to channel a little bit of that lens. What would you say to the, the parents and politicians who are currently trying to ban books and are busy attacking librarians?

[00:33:18] George Saunders: I would just make a strong argument for the idea that ideas are not scary. If we are good readers, if we train ourselves to be good analytical critics, no idea is scary. And even the worst ideas aren't scary because we can collapse them with close reading. And I would make the case that if they want to protect their kids, you have to teach them close reading because then, like, that's a superpower. No bad idea can get into your head if you're a good analytical reader, you absolutely have, have fail safe defenses.

Whereas if you take away the scary books or the books, the books that you don't agree with, your child has been left with no perimeter. Any idea can come in there and knock them in the head and they go, “Oh, that sounds good.” Whereas if you’re someone who's trained to read analytically, you've got a perpetually alert guard at the gate.

You don't want your kid to go into the world unprepared. So for sure, expose them to stupid ideas. And you talk about Lincoln and all, all the founding fathers. They had an innate trust in our ability to analyze and deflect bad ideas. That's the whole. That's the whole program. So this move is actually profoundly anti-democratic because it's gonna make us stupider and it's gonna make us afraid.

Also, I would just point out to them in my gentle jocular way that about 70 or 80 percent of the books that are being banned or made more difficult to get involve people of color and LGBTQ people. Is that random? You know, and then I would finally say, “How many of those books have you actually read?” And the answer is gonna be none.

So then we conclude you're banning them on the basis of content, and you're making a very important artistic mistake because form and content can't be separated. At which point they would say, “George, you know what? You're right. You are right.” That’s how that would go.

[00:35:06] Adam Grant: Okay. I think the conversation would play out exactly as you've scripted it.

[00:35:09] George Saunders: I think so. I, you know.

[00:35:10] Adam Grant: No, I think, I mean, in some, in some ways, for me, the most compelling point is, is that engaging with uncomfortable ideas is how we develop critical thinking skills.

[00:35:21] George Saunders: You said it much more succinctly, but 100%. That's it. And you're, you know, you're really vulnerable if you don't develop that skill. You're just like afraid of everything. Any idea that comes in that seems scary, you have to run away from it or destroy it, you know, and that's really dangerous.

[00:35:36] Adam Grant: So where do you stand on AI?

[00:35:38] George Saunders: I, I think the job of the fiction writer is very safe as long as people are good readers. When I turn to Chekhov, for example, I really want the guy in the baggy pants who walked around Russia talking to people, and I want that sensibility so inflected with actual experience.

And when he writes a story that seems to contain wisdom, it’s coming from that guy. Can AI walk around the world experiencing things? It can't. I, I think in fiction, in fiction terms, it could probably come pretty close to sounding like someone who has, but that's profoundly different. It's always going to be less. The bigger danger, I think, is that the people who are creating AI, I think, are not being very mindful about why they're doing it in, in terms of the creative arts.

And I think to me, it's part of a bigger thing, which is that the people who are now somehow financially in charge of producing art seem to be somewhat out of touch with how that's actually done and what it’s higher aspirations should be. And that's, that's a problem I, I definitely have my eye on.

[00:36:40] Adam Grant: George, this has been such a delight. You are, um, exactly the wise, humble person you present yourself as in all of your writing, which is, uh, not always the case, as you well know.

[00:36:51] George Saunders: Well, well, thank you. I've loved being with you and I could, I could feel like I could talk to you for hours.

[00:36:59] Adam Grant: I'm left reflecting on our discussion of kindness. We have to be careful that we're not so focused on giving a good Samaritan speech that we forget to be good Samaritans. If our scarcest resources are time and attention, then there's no greater act of generosity than giving our time and attention to others.

Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and produced by TED with Cosmic Standard. Our team includes Colin Helms, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winik, Aja Simpson, Samiah Adams, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng, Hannah Kingsley-Ma, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rodgers. This episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard.

Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Hsu and Allison Leyton-Brown. All right, down with the people pleasing.

[00:37:45] George Saunders: Yes. No, no, Adam, no. That's not correct. That's not what I mean.

[00:37:51] Adam Grant: You’re growing red here, right now.

[00:37:51] George Saunders: You're over the line.

[00:37:52] Adam Grant: It just happened. Success. It’s a milestone for today.

[00:37:53] George Saunders: Now I'm just a grouchy old turd.

A Process for the Transfer of Energy and Feeling: George Saunders on the Key to Great Storytelling

By maria popova.

We move through a storied world as living stories. Every human life is an autogenerated tale of meaning — we string the chance-events of our lives into a sensical and coherent narrative of who and what we are, then make that narrative the psychological pillar of our identity . Every civilization is a macrocosm of the narrative — we string together our collective selective memory into what we call history, using storytelling as a survival mechanism for its injustices. Along the way, we hum a handful of impressions — a tiny fraction of all knowable truth, sieved by the merciless discriminator of our attention and warped by our personal and cultural histories — into a melody of comprehension that we mistake for the symphony of reality.

Great storytelling plays with this elemental human tendency without preying on it. Paradoxically, great storytelling makes us better able not to mistake our compositions for reality, better able to inhabit the silent uncertain spaces between the low notes of knowledge and the shrill tones of opinion, better able to feel, which is always infinitely more difficult and infinitely more rewarding than to know.

That is what George Saunders explores throughout A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life ( public library ) — his wondrous investigation of what makes a good story (which is, by virtue of Saunders being helplessly himself , a wondrous investigation of what makes a good life) through a close and contemplative reading of seven classic Russian short stories, examined as “seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art — namely, to ask the big questions.” Questions like what truth is and why we love. Questions like how to live and how to make meaning inside the solitary confinement of our mortality. Questions like:

How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?

Noting that “all coherent intellectual work begins with a genuine reaction,” Saunders frames the central question of his investigation: what we feel and when we feel it, in a story or in the macrocosm of a story that is a life — a framing that calls to mind philosopher Susanne Langer’s notion of music as “a laboratory for feeling in time,” for all great storytelling, as Maurice Sendak observed, is a work of musicality , and all that fills the brief interlude between birth and death is, in anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson’s lovely phrasing, the work of “composing a life.” In this sense, a story is instrument for feeling — something Saunders places at the heart of his creative theorem:

What a story is “about” is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.

Considering this consonance between storytelling and life, these parallels between how we move through the fictional world of a story and how we move through the real world, Saunders writes:

To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it behaves in relation to another mind (i.e., the writer’s) across space and time… The part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality.

With an eye to how a story makes its meaning — small structural pulses appearing in sequence, at speed, to give rise to a set of expectations and resolutions — he writes:

A story is a linear-temporal phenomenon. It proceeds, and charms us (or doesn’t), a line at a time. […] We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the trick, in the later pages, is to use that energy. […] The true beauty of a story is not in its apparent conclusion but in the alteration in the mind of the reader that has occurred along the way.

This transfer of energy, this transmutation of understanding, is, of course, the mystique and mechanism by which all art moves us — a story, a song, a poem, a painting. Learning to be present with it, to notice the pulses that move the mind into thought and feeling, refines our ability to attend not only to art but to the world — for, as neuroscientist Christof Koch readily reminds us, “consciousness is the central fact of your life.” Saunders writes:

A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were… We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it. And that part of the mind is the one that reading and writing refine into sharpness.

A story is able to reach that honest part of the mind and move it only by dignifying the reading mind as such. A generation before Saunders, E.B. White — one of the most singular and splendid storytellers of all time, and one of the most beloved children’s book authors — insisted that in order to write well for any reader, but especially for that most alert and honest-minded of readers, the child, “you have to write up, not down.” (This I consider also the key to great science-storytelling, and especially to the rare intersection of the two .) Defining a story as “an ongoing communication between two minds,” Saunders observes:

A story is a frank, intimate conversation between equals. We keep reading because we continue to feel respected by the writer.

Performing an artistic anatomy of Chekhov’s spare and stunning story “The Darling,” Saunders examines how a writer makes this conversation compelling and offers his most direct instruction for storytelling:

Always be escalating. That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation. A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is (still) escalating. […] What is escalation, anyway? How does a story produce the illusion of escalation? … One answer: refuse to repeat beats. Once a story has moved forward, through some fundamental change in the character’s condition, we don’t get to enact that change again. And we don’t get to stay there elaborating on that state.

Escalation is also what gives a story the undertone of causality — that satisfying feeling of things making sense, because a thing has been caused by some prior thing. All causality provides an answer, pacifying and stimulating, to the most primal question of every child, the child still living in each of us: But why?

Examining the art of escalation through the lens of his definition of a story as “a process for the transfer of energy,” Saunders returns to the rhythmic dynamism driving all great storytelling:

In a good story, the writer makes energy in a beat, then transfers this energy cleanly to the next one (the energy is “conserved”). She does this by being aware of the nature of the energy she’s made. In a bad story (or an early draft), the writer doesn’t fully understand the nature of the energy she’s made, and ignores or misuses it, and it dissipates. The preferred, most efficient, highest-order form of energy transfer (the premier way for a scene to advance the story in a non-trivial way) is for a beat to cause the next beat, especially if that next beat is felt as essential, i.e., as an escalation: a meaningful alteration in the terms of the story.

Coupling the importance of causality with his credo that the storytelling process is a matter of “intuition plus iteration,” Saunders echoes James Baldwin’s bellowing admonition to writers that “beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance,” and reflects:

I’ve worked with so many wildly talented young writers over the years that I feel qualified to say that there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t. First, a willingness to revise. Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality. Making causality doesn’t seem sexy or particularly literary. It’s a workmanlike thing, to make A cause B, the stuff of vaudeville, of Hollywood. But it’s the hardest thing to learn. It doesn’t come naturally, not to most of us. But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality. For most of us, the problem is not in making things happen (“A dog barked,” “The house exploded,” “Darren kicked the tire of his car” are all easy enough to type) but in making one thing seem to cause the next. This is important, because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning. […] Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.

Read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain , read the seven Russian treasures of storytelling in it and Saunders’s sensitive disassembly of their machinery of magic, then revisit Chekhov’s six rules for a compelling story , Susan Sontag on storytelling and how to be a good human being , and the pioneering cognitive scientist Jerome Bruner on the psychology of what makes a great story .

— Published September 30, 2021 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/09/30/george-saunders-swim-storytelling/ —

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Congratulations by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness by George Saunders

2016, Psychiatry

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Emma Willis , Alena Kavka

This editorial is divided into two sections: this overview of kindness, followed by an introduction of the issue’s articles. To begin, we wish to offer some preliminary qualifications of the concept of kindness – to think about what it is, what it does, what we do with it, and what other researchers have concluded about its uses (and abuses). This overview offers a mapping of the historical, philosophical and conceptual terrain within which the subsequent articles are located. The writings we reference employ a range of research methodologies; some undertake quantitative analysis to determine the state and value of kindness in different fields, while others pursue a qualitative approach, often looking to autoethnography to recount lived experiences of kindness. The richness and variety of research approaches in both the sources cited in this editorial and in the articles in the issue indicate the complexity of kindness – the ways in which it challenges and provokes – and it is the nature of this complexity that we are most interested in. We hope that the issue will contribute to ongoing conversations and scholarship about the value of kindness as well as its attendant cousins, such as care, compassion and empathy. Indeed, kindness shares with studies of care a fundamental concern with relationality – how we interact with one another – and with interdependence – recognising the enmeshment of our own wellbeing with the wellbeing of others. According to Joan Tronto, care is the interdependence necessary for the subsistence and flourishing of ourselves and our worlds. As she writes, ‘When our public values and priorities reflect the role that care actually plays in our lives, our world will be organised quite differently’ (Tronto, 1998, p. 16). Similarly, recognising, understanding and mobilising kindness, we suggest, has transformative potential.

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The Oskar Schindler Humanities Foundation established The Irving and Jeanne Glovin Award in 2003, to foster research into the meaning and underlying principles for “good human conduct.” The Foundation is interested in stimulating scholarly work that defines “good human conduct” with which all persons could agree, to explore its sources, and develop pragmatic educational strategies and ways of teaching children, to show by action, respect and acceptance of others by peoples of the world regardless of circumstances or background. This essay was written with these objectives in mind. Though this submission did not win it was ranked in the top three - not for research, rather for the pragmatic approach, ideas, and suggestions put forth. Ultimately this piece is an impassioned commentary and draft outline of a proposal for teaching upcoming generations "good human conduct" in the public school system.

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Kindness is an emotion-based motivation that promotes prosocial behavior without the expectation of a reciprocal benefit. Kindness may originate from a number of different sources including genetics, evolution and/or socialization. The disposition for kindness is a personal virtue and interpersonal strength that is highly valued in most societies. The motivations, emotional experiences, and dispositional traits that underlie kindness have long interested psychologists, and aspects of kindness have been studied under terms such as altruism, prosocial behavior, sympathy, love, gratitude, and compassion. Research on kindness as a distinct construct is relatively new, but kindness and kindness-related constructs are recognized as critical factors in the formation and maintenance of the strong social bonds that are vital to human life.

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Psych Today blog post lays out biological basis for kindness, with studies from Twitter on language and heart stress, from McGill U. on positive impact of maternal care/kindness and our genes, neural stem cells and immune function, to trust as a basis for society and business. Embedded links removed for easier reading and printing.

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Performance and Radical Kindness The origin of this issue lies in a research collaboration formed at the University of Auckland in 2018, "Agencies of Kindness." The interdisciplinarly group came together in response to what Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had described in a speech to the United Nations as a politics of kindness: "If I could distil it down into one concept that we are pursuing in New Zealand it is simple and it is this. Kindness. In the face of isolationism, protectionism, racism-the simple concept of looking outwardly and beyond ourselves, of kindness and collectivism, might just be as good a starting point as any" (Ardern 2018). Across a range of fields including politics and policy, education, social work, justice, creative arts and business, members of the group wondered what a politics of kindness looked like in practice: What does it mean to "do" kindness? For this issue, we ask how kindness becomes properly performative in the sense that we understand in performance studies-not simply a description but a powerful transformative action. The issue title, "Performance and Radical Kindness," reflects our interest in how kindness performed might not simply ameliorate suffering but also challenge the very structures that presage unkindness. To draw from Shoshana Magnet, Corinne Lysandra Mason and Kathryn Trevenen, we wanted to explore kindness as a "technology of social transformation" and a "microtechnique for both resisting and shaping power relations" (2014, 1-2). In this editorial, I want to consider some of the contextual factors-political and historical-that impact upon the ability of performances of kindness to effect such transformation. This comprises the first half of the editorial. I then draw from the insights of the articles themselves to offer a "lexicon" of kindness-a conceptual and linguistic mapping of the particular qualities involved performance and radical kindness.

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Following are the few excerpts from the Holy Qur'ân and the authentic Ahâdeeth to analyze our actions and sayings in there light, and figure out that where do we stand.

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Caring attitudes and behaviors are rooted in a person’s capacity for empathy. Research (Kestenbaum, Farber, and Sroufe 1989; Braze l ton and Greenspan 2000; Hoffman 2000) shows that quality of care and security of attachment affect children's later capacity for cognitive development, emotional regulation, and behavioral control. Nurturing caregiving in a safe environment allows for continued development of neural pathways, which in turn, allows for mastery of increasingly sophisticated cognitive skills necessary for emotion regulation, and social perspective taking (Selman 1980), prerequisites to empathic behavior (Bryant 1985). True empathy requires that an individual possess the capacity to discriminate another person’s affect, see a situation from another person’s perspective, and respond with genuine emotion (Minuchin and Shapiro 1983). However, contextual factors such as extreme poverty, homelessness, chronic exposure to violence, and insufficient nurturing or childcare pra...

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George Saunders on Kindness

The famed writer talks abou a failure of kindness and a convocation speech that went viral.

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True story: A longtime Western Buddhist was meeting with a famous old lama for the last time. The master beckoned the student to approach. The student came close, figuring he was going to receive the master’s pithiest and most secret instruction. The master whispered his final teaching: “Be kind.”

Kindness is, with wisdom, the essence of the Buddhist path, and of life itself. Perhaps there is only one thing we long for more than to be treated kindly. It is to be kind people ourselves.

Our deep longing for kindness is reflected in the surprising response to a simple eight-minute convocation speech. It was delivered by the great American writer George Saunders ( Tenth of December, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia ) to last year’s graduates of Syracuse University, where he teaches. Three months after he gave the speech, a transcript was published on the New York Times website, and it went viral.

I wanted to tell them that if I could go back in time, there was one thing I really would change—the times in my life when, because of anxiety or fear, I missed a chance to say a kind word or help somebody out.

Saunders told the graduates a simple story: of Ellen, a shy girl in his seventh-grade class, and his failure to be kind to her. His meditation on such “failures of kindness,” and why they’re our greatest regret, is now a small, inspiring book entitled Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness.

When I spoke to Saunders, he was shy about his unexpected role as a spokesman for kindness and humble—unnecessarily so—about his Buddhist practice. But in an era when values like kindness and compassion are often put down, he’s talking thoughtfully and bravely about what needs to be at the very core of our lives and our society.

—Melvin McLeod

How did you decide on the theme of kindness for your convocation speech?

I first gave a version of this speech to my daughter’s middle-school graduating class. Because I knew and loved those kids, and also didn’t want to look like an old fogey, my intention was to be really truthful with them, even at the cost of my own dignity.

First I considered the banalities you would normally use on an occasion like this. But, I thought, these kids are better looking than I am, they’re in a better school, and they probably won’t make the same mistakes I did. So anything I could tell them they’ll figure out on their own, and they need to make their own mistakes anyway. The only advantage I had over them was about forty years of living.

When I looked through those forty years, I found I didn’t really regret that much. But there was one thing that seemed urgent to say. I wanted to tell them that if I could go back in time, there was one thing I really would change—the times in my life when, because of anxiety or fear, I missed a chance to say a kind word or help somebody out. Scanning the horizon of my life, those were the deeply regretted bumps in the road I wish I could go back and change.

The personal “failure of kindness” you talk about involved Ellen, a girl in your seventh-grade class who was being bullied. You weren’t mean to her yourself, but you failed to be kind to her.

Originally, the conceit of the speech was, “What do I remember of being in the seventh grade?” But there really was nothing except this one thing, which stung. When I was a kid, I was a very enthusiastic Catholic, and this was the first time I felt myself fall away from myself. I kind of knew what Jesus would have done in that situation, but in the heat of the moment I thought, “I can’t do that. That’s too hard.” It’s like I was watching myself and was a little disappointed that I had failed in that way.

When the speech went out there, I heard from many people who said, “I knew a girl like that too” or “I had a similar failing in my life.” Maybe we all remember when we first fell away from that pure vision of ourselves, and it sticks in our memory.

If failures of kindness are our greatest regret, is that because being kind is our greatest aspiration, our deepest heart’s wish?

And it’s our greatest ecstasy. Those times when the differentiation between yourself and another person vanishes in a kind of spontaneous moment of outreach are deeply, deeply rich.

If you cast your mind toward the people in your life who’ve been kindest to you, you feel an incredible rush of warmth and gratitude that never goes away. I dedicated this book on kindness to my grandparents, who believed in me no matter what I did. Not for any objective reason, but just because I was me. They knew me inside and out and nevertheless approved of me. I think that creates a kind of gratitude you never forget.

When you’re young and have the feeling you’re loved, you sort of feel it’s the world loving you. The quality of that love gets turned around, and that’s how you regard others. So if someone has been kind and generous and selfless to you once, you know the possibility exists. You internalize that, and in your future dealings with the world, you assume that’s possible.

A couple of months after you gave this speech, it went viral on the Internet. What was your reaction?

Surprise, because on the day of the speech it was no big deal. I think about a third of the kids were asleep. It wasn’t a sensation. So I was gratified but mystified. I didn’t quite understand why it had that effect.

Actually, I was happy the talk was only eight minutes long, because I could tell a story about a failure of kindness and give a little idea of why it happened. If it had been a twenty-minute speech, I’d have been in trouble. At eight minutes, I could sort of say, Hey everybody, be kind! But the next step is real tricky. Let’s say we all resolve to be kind—what do we do? That’s where the real heavy spiritual lifting starts. How do we know in a given situation what would benefit somebody? How do we know that we’re not just being big egotists and intruding when we aren’t needed? The more I think about it, the more complicated it is. It’s like a trap door opens and you get led to the really deep spiritual questions.

Since the Reagan era, there’s been a concerted campaign to denigrate emotions such as kindness and compassion—things Margaret Thatcher called “wet”—and promote more “realistic” values such as strength, competition, and tough-mindedness. Perhaps the response to your speech means people are hungry now for more kindness in their lives and in our society.

I think the American psyche right now is a bit like someone who has left their house and left something valuable behind. And even when we do talk about kindness, we do it with a bit of an apologetic wince. Certainly politicians do. But a human being without some kind of striving for kindness is really hobbled. It is hard to know how to live if kindness and sympathy and generosity are considered second-rate virtues. We’re kind of not human beings in that case.

It’s really invigorating to just say it, you know. I’m a guy from the South Side of Chicago. I’ve been in a lot of fights in my life and I’ve done a lot of rough jobs, and I’m not afraid of being considered untough. It’s kind of nice to say that these are indispensible virtues and we can’t go ahead without them. There’s no point.

Maybe it’s some kind of blowback from the Reagan era, but when someone talks about kindness, we think of a bearded guy in a turtleneck sweater playing an acoustic guitar and kind of whining. But Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela and all these great people weren’t afraid to be quote-unquote weak. Lincoln was willing to be mocked, to take the lower place, to be patient with his enemies. But really he was the strongest person in the room. He could endure a lot of abuse if he knew that in the long run, his acceptance of that abuse would bring about a positive result. His gentleness and compassion and patience were all symptoms of his great strength.

Many people feel that we live in a dangerous world, and we can’t afford to let our guard down.

Sometimes people say to me, in general I agree with you about kindness, but what about Hitler, what about terrorists? I think we’ve been misled—and I see this all the time on the news—by this idea that we always have to be girding our loins for the next big showdown with somebody or other. We act as if the wolf is always at the door, so we’ve got a gun pointing out the window. But actually the wolf is not that often at the door, so we can afford to go a little easy.

Ninety-nine percent of the time if you just do your best to be kind, you’re better off. It’s the basic things, like trying to have good manners, keeping your assumptions about the other person a little open, being willing to revise your opinion. And even these are pretty tricky. The times when you’re asked to do something about Hitler are pretty few and far between.

I don’t mean to be naive—there are obviously times when a person has to stand their ground—but I would argue that the best form of standing your ground is to be gentle.

I’m fifty-five years old and I’ve lived in a lot of circumstances, high and low, and I’ve never gotten into a really extreme situation. When I’ve come close and had the presence of mind to err on the side of negotiation and humanizing the situation, it’s always gone better than when I’ve tried to steer toward confrontation.

I keep in mind that quote from The Philadelphia Story: “The time to make up your mind about other people is never.” So I try to almost mechanically remind myself of that—to see when my resistance or temper flares up or when I find myself pigeonholing somebody. That would take up most of our life, just to try to do that much.

Perhaps it’s all a self-fulfilled prophecy. We live in an unkind world because we believe it’s an unkind world.

The thing I’ve noticed is that if you go out into the world ready for confrontation, then confrontations find you. But if you go out with a sort of diffusing energy, the world reads that and feels more friendly toward you. So I think there’s a circular effect.

In the media and in our political rhetoric, we’re told don’t be a sucker, be firm, be strong, push back, they’re trying to get you. If you buy into that—even on a molecular level—the world smells it on you. Whereas—and here’s where it sounds corny—the world responds to you differently if you go out thinking, alright, I’m going to pretend that everybody out there is my brother or my sister, and if they are temporarily behaving like they’re not, I’m going to pretend that they’re just confused. I’m going to insist, through my mannerisms and my tone of voice, that I see them at their highest.

I don’t mean to be naive—there are obviously times when a person has to stand their ground—but I would argue that the best form of standing your ground is to be gentle. It often takes a lot more guts to be gentle than it does to be confrontational.

Is there any connection for you between kindness and writing?

I do a lot of revising—hundreds of iterations—and I will work for years and years on a story. A really wonderful thing happens in that process. In the early drafts, you may create a caricature or a character that you’re looking down on, getting some jokes out of. But the story’s form doesn’t like that. The story’s form doesn’t like condescension or puppeteering, so it responds by being boring. The reader feels it’s a static story, that the writer is holding all the cards and dominating his characters.

As you try to address that in revision, the characters mysteriously become fuller, because as you reconsider them you’re actually loving them more. You’re paying closer attention to them. You’re listening a little more closely, and so the sum total of the story gets funnier, smarter, faster, and the characters come to be more equal to the author.

When you go through this process, you’re making the prose tighter and smarter, but also kinder. You’re looking with a little more genuine curiosity at the character, and you do it through the prose.

That’s what dharma is—really, really trying to get to the bottom of this with no deflection and no confusion and no agenda

For example, you might start off a story with “Jack was a jerk.” But the story says, “That’s a kind of a boring sentence. Can you give me a detail?” Okay, let me revise: “Jack snapped at the waitress.” That’s a little better. But it’s still a bit foggy, so your subconscious might say, “Jack snapped at the waitress because she reminded him of his dead wife.” And suddenly you’ve come a long way in terms of sympathy, from “Jack was a jerk” to “Jack was out of sorts because he was thinking about his dead wife.”

I think that process can sort of train the writer to enact the same procedure with real people. Maybe somebody bumps into you at the airport. Your first impulse is to say, “Asshole.” But because you’ve trained yourself in revision, you say, hmm, let me think about this a second. I wonder why he did that. Then your mind gives you all kinds of reasons because you’ve done it yourself so many times. It’s a good way of training oneself in the flexibility of judgment that we talked about earlier.

To what extent was your speech inspired by your Buddhist practice, or was it simply a reflection of who you are as a human being?

Hard to distinguish between the two, I guess. I’m really a beginner, but I do try to keep my ears open, and that was a place where my actual experience and the tenets of Buddhism suddenly came together.

In my writing work, I’ve noticed that if you do anything with real intensity, and with a real interest in the truth of the matter, then it ends up being dharmic somehow. Whether it’s basketball or photography or whatever, if you’re really, really interested in the truth, then you’ll end up with something that looks and feels very much like dharma, it seems to me.

Yet you do offer some specific Buddhist analysis. You told the students that we fail to be kind because of three fundamental misunderstandings about who we are: we believe that we’re the center of the universe, that we’re separate from the universe, and that we’re permanent. These are classic Buddhist definitions of ego.

When I thought about me and this little girl in the seventh grade, I turned my mind to what was wrong with me, to what was my problem. I think the answer is that, at that age, I believed so strongly in my own separateness from her, my own primacy, and in protecting my own status that I wasn’t able to make the right move. And those are dharma principles.

Originally I had laden this section with some Buddhist terms, but my wife said I should take them out. She said I shouldn’t make it seem overthought or dogmatic. And of course, the dharmic ideas are so beautiful and pure that anyone who had lived and experienced these things would see the basic truth of them. Because for me, that’s what dharma is—really, really trying to get to the bottom of this with no deflection and no confusion and no agenda.

This points to one of Buddhism’s great strengths. It doesn’t simply tell us to be kind. It shows us in concrete terms why we’re not, which gives us a path forward.

That to me is the most wonderful thing about any vital spiritual practice. It doesn’t necessarily say, stop doing that. Or if it does, it says, here’s how to stop doing that. Because you can only get so good with sheer willpower. You have to look into the way things actually work to empower yourself to do better.

Here is a wonderful metaphor I sometimes use with my students. Imagine you’re on a cruise ship in heavy seas. You’re the only person who’s stable, and everybody else is moving around in a crazy way. You decide to have mercy on them, and that’s pretty good, right?

But I think a better model is to imagine you’re on a cruise ship, and the surface is made of ice, and you’re carrying six trays, and you’re wearing roller skates, and you’re drunk. And so is everybody else.

So nobody’s the boss and the situation is unstable. There’s no fixed point. When I think of life that way, it sums up the proper level of mercy and tolerance. We really don’t know what’s going on, so our feeling of sympathy or empathy is related to our mutual lostness. Everybody’s lost at once.

Advice to Graduates (and all of us)

From Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness , by George Saunders, published by Random House

Here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?

Those who were kindest to you, I bet.

It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.

Melvin McLeod

Failures of Kindness by George Saunders Speech Analysis

As George Saunders stands in front of Syracuse University’s class of 2013,  he shares his life experiences that shaped his beliefs today, the true importance of being kind. Seemingly simple, yet so difficult for some. He has been through continuous ups and downs and at his age, he has had many experiences  to grow from his mistakes and regrets of not being  kind. In George Saunders speech, “Failures of Kindness”, he conveys the deeply rooted societal issue, that everyone is inherently selfish and has failed in kindness, but as you grow as a person, so will your heart and compassion. He supports this through selective diction and his own immersive narrative.

Starting off, George Saunders uses diction to persuade us to break our natural habits of selfishness. As he writes, he italizes many words or phrases, primarily to emphasise his key ideas. He chooses to italize things such as, “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness”, and “Try to be kinder.” (pg.2) Italizing has significance, bringing attention to what he seems to stress as the main idea and also the title, “Failures of Kindness.” What he didn’t do, his regrets, George hopes to encourage others to do differently. After italizing “try to be kinder”, Saunders allows us to be insightful. It brings up a rather obscure question the reader/listener wants to answer, what does it mean to be kind? In the same way, he explains that our natural selves are greedy and being so wrapped up in our own lives, we can’t even go out of our way to be kindhearted. Furthermore, the developed idea is that true measure of growth as a person is when you grow in your compassion. “And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love,” and, “It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish- how illogical,really.” (pg.3) The speaker/authors’ diction is strong and allows his point to come across. The colon creates emphasis of what comes after it in both quotes, describing that as time passes by, after experiencing it all, you are able to be good-hearted, or you can stay your selfish ways.The words, “diminish” and “selfish,”  are powerful words that make the audience more attentive. He chose the word,“selfish” because it is the opposite of kindness and illustrates that at a point, there is no use in thinking about yourself all the time. That the biggest regrets in your life will be not caring enough for others. 

Along with diction, throughout his entire speech/writing, he likes to use his own narrative or point of view. He is knowledgeable through his stories so that the audience knows he is credible.  We respond to stories because they cultivate emotion and a sense of togetherness- a connection. It allows to connect on a deeper level with the audience. This is precisely why he uses it. “But here’s something I do regret: In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class… So she came to our school and our neighborhood and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased. I could tell this hurt her… Sometimes I’d see her hanging around in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded… sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.”(pg.2) While Saunders uses his personal experiences, the last sentence creates a sense of guilt. Although he didn’t have bad intentions, he regret how he didn’t act. Applying to our own lives, it makes us question how many incidents where we stood by, and why? Maybe it's because it's inconvient. Maybe because we are too worried about what others will think of us. Pushing past these worldly troubles makes us stronger as a person. Several other examples are incorporated in his speaking/writing, as he talks about accepting yourself as a big step to loving others the same way. That with the right motivation, anyone can be kind.

Overcoming these anxious anticipations and our egotistic habits to have growth in graciousness is the ultimate step into becoming warm hearted person. Though it's difficult to understand the benefit of being nice on yourself, we learn that sometimes it's the best thing to do. With the use of word choice and person anecdote, George Saunders, in his speech and writing, “Failures of Kindness”, characterizes humanities’ nature of selfishness and advises us to grow in our character, and our kindness will grow with us.

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Congratulations, By the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness

George saunders. random house, $14 trade paper isbn 978-0-8129-9627-2.

Reviewed on: 03/03/2014

Genre: Nonfiction

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Liberation Day by George Saunders review – a hell of a ride

The characters in these absurdly funny stories are trapped by hyper-capitalism and their own foolishness, as Saunders investigates the prisons we make for ourselves

“T he land of the short story is a brutal land, a land very similar, in its strictness, to the land of the joke.” George Saunders was writing about the unforgiving nature of the short form, but he might as well have been referring to the worlds in which his characters are trapped. Why is such a nice man so mean to the nice people he invents?

In interviews, Saunders comes across as a benignly thoughtful regular guy, a practising Buddhist who constantly tries for kindness. Some part of his writing day, however, is spent imagining complex and original ways to punish the people he has created. They are trapped by their own foolishness, or by the dreams of hyper-capitalism. They are also sometimes locked up underground, or suspended in intriguing configurations. “Suspended” here does not just mean “existing between one state and another” – though they are also that. It means hung up and left dangling, like abandoned puppets.

The 2012 story The Semplica Girl Diaries was a kind of signature piece for Saunders in his more speculative mode. In it, a man buys an “SG” lawn decoration which, we slowly discover, is made by stringing up immigrant women, as though on a washing line, by means of a micro-fibre inserted through their brains.

In this new collection, the eponymous story Liberation Day explores a similar conceit from the inside. In this case, the narrator himself is pinioned on a non-specific “wall” waiting to become an orchestrated voice in an evening concert conducted by his owner. As with the washing line, the reader is not invited to believe the hokum science; the explanation is kept loose. We do, however, keenly understand the sense of suspension, of a waking sleep or living death that this amnesiac chorus represents.

Saunders’ characters are happy in their difficulty, at least at first. In Ghoul, they are performers in a huge theme park that seems to have no limits, and they love their stupid jobs. These happy prisoners endure cheery degradations while holding outlandish props and, as in other stories, they are plucky, hopeful and hugely anxious to please. Their creator subjects these lovely, fretful people to pratfall and disaster, all of it brilliantly escalated, in order to show us lives made antic by denial. The result is both tragic and lighthearted. Even pinned to a wall and with their memories wiped, they are so darn proud and self-improving and willing to be good, you might say they are the best of America.

Saunders invents these joke prisons in order to remind the reader of the various prisons – economic, psychological and spiritual – which we build for ourselves. The first and last is the prison of the self: “You are trapped in you,” a voice says to the protagonist of The Mom of Bold Action, after an ordinary woman’s moral outrage goes awry. Even in this naturalistic piece, however, the voice enters her car as an imagined “beam of forgiveness” that is “green” and which lands “near the glove compartment”. When you are in the habit of making the allegorical physical, it is a simple step to hanging the poor and indebted on washing lines and walls.

Saunders characteristically begins a story with someone mid-thought, their diction fragmented, like jottings or notes made before their purpose becomes clear.

Why was she holding a can opener? Hmm. That could be something.

It’s as if the characters are making their lives up as they go along. Many are talking to themselves, their cadences running close to internal chatter, that repetitive self‑talking monologue that can be hard to shake out of your head. This sense of enclosure slows the reveal, both to the character and (at a wilful stretch) to the reader, of the conditions they must escape. On the way, there are vaudevillian bursts of delight, reverses, surprises and romance. These stories are not afraid of plot. Much of the pleasure of reading them comes from watching Saunders take an outrageous premise and resolve it by the rules of old-fashioned fiction in a bravura, high-wire act.

A pleasing thing about the characters in Liberation Day is how many of them are, in one way or another, artists and creators. They write emails or provoking essays; their fictions and opinions have an effect in the world. Some exist in the space between performance and creation and they love their work because it makes new meanings, and is sometimes beautiful. Liberation Day involves a runaway choral interpretation of Custer’s last stand, which remakes the myth of the lonely hero on the hill.

A nostalgia for American optimism runs through these pages, and this includes a nostalgia for half-decent capitalism, one in which the rich held their economic fodder in something like affection. Saunders is never less than political; he seems to say it is no longer possible to be otherwise. Love Letter, the simplest and most chilling story here, is dated 202-, and it shows the slide into an authoritarian society, as seen from a suburban front porch. No one seems to notice; they just feel a mild discomfort, like the slowly boiled frog.

In these punitive worlds in which people fail further, by choice and by misadventure, it seems impossible that they will find a way forward, but they do. By the end of a Saunders story, the characters know what is going on; they see their condition, and this awareness is a gift and the possible beginning of change. The resolutions are sometimes tiny. “What she had to do now,” thinks the mom of bold action, “was reach over, pick up the bag, open the car door, drop one foot into the grey slush.” That much she can do.

These characters are not redeemed or saved, they do not transcend: the hint is in the title – these stories are about liberation. In Mother’s Day a character dies right there on the page, and she finds wisdom and relief in the idea that she can now, finally, stop being who she is.

Saunders is the all-American Buddhist whose novel, Lincoln in the Bardo , described something that had never been written before: the release of the dead from the strictures of self. The same fusion of spirituality and patriotism makes Liberation Day a unique read. Saunders is funny and kind as ever, and his narrative virtuosity puts him up there with the best. I just hope he doesn’t feel too trapped by the perils and pleasures of the desk.

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By Gregory Cowles

• Feb. 1, 2013

“Writing short stories is very hard work.” That, at any rate, is what George Saunders had to say on the subject some years ago, in an essay about the postmodern master Donald Barthelme, and lest anyone raise a skeptical eyebrow — since by then Saunders had already proved himself to be one of the most gifted, wickedly entertaining story writers around — he continued to wring his hands, revealingly, a few pages later: “The land of the short story,” he fretted, “is a brutal land, a land very similar, in its strictness, to the land of the joke.”

I love how this makes Saunders sound like a nervous explorer, crossing thin ice to reach a distant smoldering volcano. The land of the short story! But it also captures something fundamental about his own brutal, jokey stories, which for all of their linguistic invention and anarchic glee are held together by a strict understanding of the form and its requirements. Take plot. In “Tenth of December,” his fourth and best collection, readers will encounter an abduction, a rape, a chemically induced suicide, the suppressed rage of a milquetoast or two, a veteran’s post-­traumatic impulse to burn down his mother’s house — all of it buffeted by gusts of such merriment and tender regard and daffy good cheer that you realize only in retrospect how dark these morality tales really are.

And “Tenth of December” is very dark indeed, particularly in its consideration of class and power. It’s been seven years since Saunders’s last collection, “In Persuasion Nation,” and in the interim America has settled into a state of uncertain financial gloom that seeps into these stories like smoke beneath a door. Money worries have always figured in Saunders’s work, but in “Tenth of December” they cast longer shadows; they have deepened into a pervasive, somber mood that weights the book with a new and welcome gravity. Class anxiety is everywhere here. In “Puppy,” a woman whose marriage has lifted her from dysfunctional roots is so horrified by a poor family’s squalor that she finds empathy impossible, with tragic results. In “Home,” a soldier returning from the Middle East drops in unannounced on his ex-wife and her much richer new husband: “Three cars for two grown-ups, I thought. What a country.” In “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” a father broods that he can’t provide his children with the same luxuries their classmates have: “Lord, give us more. Give us enough.” Elsewhere he confides to his journal that he does “not really like rich people, as they make us poor people feel dopey and inadequate. Not that we are poor. I would say we are middle. We are very very lucky. I know that. But still, it is not right that rich people make us middle people feel dopey and inadequate.” (What identifies this as a George Saunders story, and not, say, a Raymond Carver one, is its deadpan science fiction gloss: the luxuries in question are third-world women strung up as bourgeois lawn ornaments.)

Yet despite the dirty surrealism and cleareyed despair, “Tenth of December” never succumbs to depression. That’s partly because of Saunders’s relentless humor; detractors may wonder if they made a wrong turn and ended up in the land of the joke after all. But more substantially it’s because of his exhilarating attention to language and his beatific generosity of spirit. “Every human is born of man and woman,” one narrator reflects, in what sounds suspiciously like an artist’s statement. “Every human, at birth, is, or at least has the potential to be, beloved of his/her mother/father. Thus every human is worthy of love. As I watched Heather suffer, a great tenderness suffused my body, a tenderness hard to distinguish from a sort of vast existential nausea; to wit, why are such beautiful beloved vessels made slaves to so much pain?”

This “vast existential nausea” is Saunders in a nutshell. Yet he subverts and mocks his own humanist idealism both by presenting it as the product of a drugged mind — the narrator here is a prisoner, medicated against his will to become more eloquent — and by having a lab assistant gently deflate it a few paragraphs later: “That’s all just pretty much basic human feeling right there.”

Fans of Saunders’s three earlier collections, beginning with “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” in 1996, will immediately recognize the gonzo ventriloquism that gives his work such comic energy. By tapping into the running interior monologues of his hopeful, fragile characters, Saunders creates a signature voice that’s simultaneously baroque and demotic — a trick he pulls off by recognizing just how florid our ordinary thoughts can be, how grandiose and delusional and self-­serving: “Did she consider herself special?” a teenage girl asks in “Victory Lap.” “Oh, gosh, she didn’t know. In the history of the world, many had been more special than her. Helen Keller had been awesome; Mother Teresa was amazing.” This is Alison Pope, age 14, who speaks to herself in beginner’s French and entertains innocent fairy tale fantasies of meeting a boy she thinks of, generically, as “special one.” Instead, she’s abducted by a would-be rapist with romantic delusions of his own: “In Bible days a king might ride through a field and go: That one. And she would be brought unto him. . . . Was she, that first night, digging it? Probably not. Was she shaking like a leaf? Didn’t matter.”

If a damsel-in-distress narrative seems a creaky vehicle for Saunders’s spirited wordplay and high moral inquiry, well, it’s true there’s nothing especially sophisticated about his story lines; up close, his volcanoes turn out to be fizzing with baking soda and vinegar. And his brand of straightforward dramatic irony — we see the delusions the characters don’t — tends to put the reader (and the author) in an uncomfortably superior position; at his worst Saunders can come off as a little smug or complacent, like somebody with a bumper sticker reading “Mean People Stink.” But beneath the caricatures his best stories are animated by true fellow feeling and an anthropologist’s cool eye for the quirks of human behavior: a boy in an Indian headdress, racing down a school hallway; a wife’s fond memory of “that laugh/snort thing” her husband does in her hair; the patriotic piety that leads everybody the veteran meets to thank him for his service. Saunders hears America singing, and he knows it’s ridiculous, and he loves it all.

The title story, which closes the volume, is in many respects a companion piece to “Victory Lap,” which opens it. Another dreamy adolescent is lost in fantasy until physical danger intrudes, this time in the form of actual thin ice. The story ends on a hopeful note, as so many of the stories here do — this book, with its cover divided neatly into black and white like a semaphore yin-yang symbol, is at least as interested in human kindness as it is in cruelty. It’s no accident, I think, that Saunders has chosen to set the story on this particular day, or to name the collection as a whole after it. Why the 10th of December? It’s not the solstice yet; the days are drawing shorter, but things aren’t as dark as they could be; even now, there’s still a glimmer of light.

TENTH OF DECEMBER

By George Saunders

251 pp. Random House. $26.

Gregory Cowles is an editor at the Book Review.

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George Saunders pp 153–171 Cite as

Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction

• Michael Basseler 4  
• First Online: 26 March 2017

Part of the book series: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century ((ALTC))

This essay explores the ethics and aesthetics of George Saunders’s work, and particularly the ways in which his short stories engage the reader in a compassionate relation with the characters. It investigates how Saunders employs a number of narrative techniques to enable an imaginative perspective-shifting that may have a long-term bearing on the reader’s ethical decisions. Drawing on recent theorizing on “narrative empathy,” I argue that despite his inclination toward satire and postmodernist playfulness, Saunders’s style is foremost motivated by his aim to achieve compassion and intersubjective understanding. Saunders’s version of narrative empathy strips off the habitual and thereby makes us sensitive to the experiences and perspectives of others. Taking into account the socio-cultural and literary-historical contexts his short stories are situated in—a shorthand for which would be neoliberalism and postmodernism—I demonstrate how narrative empathy works both at the levels of story and discourse in his short fiction.

I would like to thank Philipp Löffler for carefully reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this essay.

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Basseler, M. (2017). Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction. In: Coleman, P., Gronert Ellerhoff, S. (eds) George Saunders. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49932-1_9

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The New York Times

The 6th floor | george saunders’s advice to graduates, george saunders’s advice to graduates.

It’s long past graduation season, but we recently learned that George Saunders delivered the convocation speech at Syracuse University for the class of 2013, and George was kind enough to send it our way and allow us to reprint it here. The speech touches on some of the moments in his life and larger themes (in his life and work) that George spoke about in the profile we ran back in January — the need for kindness and all the things working against our actually achieving it, the risk in focusing too much on “success,” the trouble with swimming in a river full of monkey feces.

The entire speech, graduation season or not, is well worth reading, and is included below.

Down through the ages, a traditional form has evolved for this type of speech, which is: Some old fart, his best years behind him, who, over the course of his life, has made a series of dreadful mistakes ( that would be me ), gives heartfelt advice to a group of shining, energetic young people, with all of their best years ahead of them ( that would be you ). And I intend to respect that tradition. Now, one useful thing you can do with an old person, in addition to borrowing money from them, or asking them to do one of their old-time “dances,” so you can watch, while laughing, is ask: “Looking back, what do you regret?” And they’ll tell you. Sometimes, as you know, they’ll tell you even if you haven’t asked. Sometimes, even when you’ve specifically requested they not tell you, they’ll tell you. So: What do I regret? Being poor from time to time? Not really. Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse?” (And don’t even ASK what that entails.) No. I don’t regret that. Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked? And getting deathly ill afterwards, and staying sick for the next seven months? Not so much. Do I regret the occasional humiliation? Like once, playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including this girl I really liked, I somehow managed, while falling and emitting this weird whooping noise, to score on my own goalie, while also sending my stick flying into the crowd, nearly hitting that girl? No. I don’t even regret that. But here’s something I do regret: In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her Convocation Speech name will be “ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it. So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” — that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. After awhile she’d drift away, hair-strand still in her mouth. At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know: “How was your day, sweetie?” and she’d say, “Oh, fine.” And her mother would say, “Making any friends?” and she’d go, “Sure, lots.” Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it. And then — they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing. One day she was there, next day she wasn’t. End of story. Now, why do I regret that ? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her. But still. It bothers me. So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly. Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet. It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder. Now, the million-dollar question: What’s our problem? Why aren’t we kinder? Here’s what I think: Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and then, out there, all that other junk – dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real, o.k., sure – for you, but not for me). Now, we don’t really believe these things – intellectually we know better – but we believe them viscerally, and live by them, and they cause us to prioritize our own needs over the needs of others, even though what we really want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more aware of what’s actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving. So, the second million-dollar question: How might we DO this? How might we become more loving, more open, less selfish, more present, less delusional, etc., etc? Well, yes, good question. Unfortunately, I only have three minutes left. So let me just say this. There are ways. You already know that because, in your life, there have been High Kindness periods and Low Kindness periods, and you know what inclined you toward the former and away from the latter. Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition — recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us. Because kindness, it turns out, is hard — it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, everything . One thing in our favor: some of this “becoming kinder” happens naturally, with age. It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish — how illogical, really. We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality. We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be. We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now). Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.” And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE. If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won’t care what happens to YOU, as long as they benefit. That’s one reason your parents are so proud and happy today. One of their fondest dreams has come true: you have accomplished something difficult and tangible that has enlarged you as a person and will make your life better, from here on in, forever. Congratulations, by the way. When young, we’re anxious — understandably — to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you — in particular you, of this generation — may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can . . . And this is actually O.K. If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously — as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves. Still, accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended. So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness . But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf — seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life. Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness . Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — your soul, if you will — is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Teresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly. And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been. I hope you will say: It has been so wonderful. Congratulations, Class of 2013. I wish you great happiness, all the luck in the world, and a beautiful summer.

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