On George Saunders

Thank you, G.S. I'll take it from here.

THE FUTURE IS PRESENT by Jeffrey Gibson (2019, Source: MoMA)

No. 128: On George Saunders

As I drove home from Chicago last night, I started thinking about George Saunders. 

That writer has given me so much, inspired me so greatly, and made me rethink what’s possible in the realm of writing stuff and reading stuff. 

But things aren’t the same between George and me anymore.

I’m not really reading his stuff. I’m not thinking about his work constantly or trying to figure out how it works. I’m not taking his weekly craft essays as gospel. Put simply, he’s a smaller part of my life than he was. 

He’s a fond memory.

And that’s no slight against him.

His work is still, and will always be, astounding. 

The reason for the distance is personal growth, I think. 

He’s the Geppetto to my Pinocchio, and I want to be a real boy. 

Sometimes, I think creative people latch onto other creative people as lifelines. The great artist’s light shines so bright that, to the fledgling, it’s nearly enough just to sit there and bask in it. It’s a comfort to look at the great artist as proof of what’s possible, and it’s so simple to read their essays on how it’s done and feel like, yeah, that’s it.

But none of that is going to get me where I want to go. 

For one reason. 

For George Saunders to become George Saunders, he had to go and figure out what being George Saunders meant — alone.

Saunders, no doubt, had beacons of light in his life — people like Ernest Hemingway, Anton Chekhov, Tobias Wolff. 

We all do. The artists that came before gave birth to us. 

But at some point, I think we have to leave the nest. At some point, George Saunders probably had to distance himself from those writers to become himself.

And that must have been rough. 

But it’s informative. It makes me wonder, What did it take?

Struggle, confusion, radical individuality and authenticity, the bravery to shake-off the old, a start something new, I imagine.

That’s uncomfortable. 

But that’s the job of the artist, isn’t it?

There is no plan, no precedent, no correct way. We go into the unknown and hope to come back with something shiny, or something dull that we can polish up — or just … something. 

But what we cannot do is hangout for too long in the realm of what’s known, what exists, what’s already been done — not, at least, if we hope to introduce something new. That, to me, is what the greatest artists do. 

Their work is more than beautiful. It’s new. 

What blew my mind about George Saunders was how incredibly different his work felt.

I had never encountered anything like it, and that was a gift. 

That said, what service am I doing myself, or my readers, if my goal is to do anything less than what Saunders did for me? 

Also, what would I miss? 

As readers and writers, we tend to bask in the past. Most of my favorite authors are established, older, or dead. 

But they weren’t always established, and that’s the stuff we don’t see. 

Once, they probably had these same questions.

How do I become myself?

We’re at a disadvantage in that we only see the result.

So, yeah. I wonder.

I wonder if, by deliberating too much on past successes and past moments, we risk missing our moment, our generational mood, the exciting turns of event happening in the creative world right now, and every day, by today’s creators, ourselves included.

And while all this can be uncomfortable, it’s also the most liberating feeling in the world. 

If the goal is to do something new, then anything is on the table. 

Going where none have gone before is not a matter of right or wrong. 

It’s just a matter of doing it. ♦

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