Having a Marie Kondo moment, I’ve been clearing out old magazines, giving one last nostalgic look-through. We’re talking copies of Gourmet that go back over 50 years (before food processors, anyway), a magazine that ceased publication 16 years ago. There’s a stab of pleasure in seeing my notes written alongside recipes I cannot recall ever preparing (“good!” “this process works!” “too salty” “not as good as it should have been”).

I have a long shelf full of the short story magazine Glimmer Train too (1990-2019). At one point, every quarterly issue. It was hard to get through them, and I tended to read the stories and skip the interviews. I wasn’t writing my own fiction then, so they didn’t necessarily land with me. Now they do.

Winter 2015, the interview was with the wonderful George Saunders, lecturer and author, who won the Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, and wrote the absolutely-worth-reading-again A Swim in A Pond in the Rain, which dissects short stories of four Russian masters and why they work.

Glimmer Train interviewer David Naimon asked Saunders how he achieves his remarkable fictional “voice.” It was hard, Saunders answered, until he decided to loosen up and “just be funny, a little pop culture-ish, to be sci-fi.” While the stories may be dark, he’s trying to put his fictional world into some extreme circumstance “where things are going really badly, and then just see how people behave.” Not that well, as you’d guess.

His stories are infused with verbal energy, pizzazz. If you’ve read Bardo, you’ll remember how the multiple conversations among the dead are lively and often hilarious. It’s a performance, and a high-wire one at that. He believes that resorting to “extraordinary means” of entertainment are necessary to get readers beyond the surface, down to some truth about life.

There are certainly tropes in every genre—romance, mystery, etc. Some readers may find them comforting—they know how a story is likely to develop (and end); others grow to find them boring. For my taste, the domestic thriller/untrustworthy spouse tropes have become tired, as has the “collection of old friends who meet up in a place where they are cut off by weather or whatever, secrets come out, and people start dying.”

Saunders is often accused of being experimental, which we can think of as “not ordinary and trope-stuffed,” and he cites his teacher Tobias Wolfe as believing “all good writing is experimental, because, if not, why would you do it? If you aren’t venturing into something new, why bother?”

In other words, a good writer would not ride the trends, attempting to suss out the “next big thing” that will be the key to getting published. (Teenage vampires—I’ll do that!) These days, the chances are so low that a new writer or even a mid-list writer will get or keep a major publisher, and so low that a self-published book will become a best-seller, why not just swing for the fences? Figure out what you’re good at, says Saunders, whether it’s creating physical detail, plotting, creating characters, or whatever you do that has some energy behind it and play to your strength