{"id":11539,"date":"2025-08-13T08:04:23","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T12:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11539"},"modified":"2025-08-13T08:04:23","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T12:04:23","slug":"swing-for-the-fences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11539","title":{"rendered":"“Swing for the Fences”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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George Saunders,<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Having a Marie Kondo moment, I\u2019ve been clearing out old magazines, giving one last nostalgic look-through. We\u2019re talking copies of Gourmet<\/em> that go back over 50 years (before food processors, anyway), a magazine that ceased publication 16 years ago. There\u2019s a stab of pleasure in seeing my notes written alongside recipes I cannot recall ever preparing (\u201cgood!\u201d \u201cthis process works!\u201d \u201ctoo salty\u201d \u201cnot as good as it should have been\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have a long shelf full of the short story magazine Glimmer Train<\/em> 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\u2019t writing my own fiction then, so they didn\u2019t necessarily land with me. Now they do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

Glimmer Train<\/em> interviewer David Naimon asked Saunders how he achieves his remarkable fictional \u201cvoice.\u201d It was hard, Saunders answered, until he decided to loosen up and \u201cjust be funny, a little pop culture-ish, to be sci-fi.\u201d While the stories may be dark, he\u2019s trying to put his fictional world into some extreme circumstance \u201cwhere things are going really badly, and then just see how people behave.\u201d Not that well, as you\u2019d guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His stories are infused with verbal energy, pizzazz. If you\u2019ve read Bardo<\/em>, you\u2019ll remember how the multiple conversations among the dead are lively and often hilarious. It\u2019s a performance, and a high-wire one at that. He believes that resorting to \u201cextraordinary means\u201d of entertainment are necessary to get readers beyond the surface, down to some truth about life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are certainly tropes in every genre\u2014romance, mystery, etc. Some readers may find them comforting\u2014they 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 \u201ccollection 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saunders is often accused of being experimental, which we can think of as \u201cnot ordinary and trope-stuffed,\u201d and he cites his teacher Tobias Wolfe as believing \u201call good writing is experimental, because, if not, why would you do it? If you aren\u2019t venturing into something new, why bother?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, a good writer would not ride the trends, attempting to suss out the \u201cnext big thing\u201d that will be the key to getting published. (Teenage vampires\u2014I\u2019ll 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\u2019re good at, says Saunders, whether it\u2019s creating physical detail, plotting, creating characters, or whatever you do that has some energy behind it and play to your strength<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having a Marie Kondo moment, I\u2019ve been clearing out old magazines, giving one last nostalgic look-through. We\u2019re talking copies of Gourmet that go back over 50 years (before food processors, anyway), a magazine that ceased publication 16 years ago. There\u2019s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40,174,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-first-draft-blog","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-307","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11541,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11539\/revisions\/11541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}