Office Hours
A very sweet question, and thanks for it.
Q.
Congratulations on the pending opera of Lincoln in the Bardo. And thank you for pointing me (us) to the interview with Missy Mazzoli. I am always interested when artists, especially successful ones, are candid about their path and their struggles, and willing to share their vulnerability and doubts. I think that is rather fertile ground. I was struck by this quote of Mazzoli’s:
You can write something you think is great and everybody loves, but then the next day you've got to go sit down and come up with something new, and that is terrifying. It's always the question of, maybe I can't do this again.
It reminded me of when the StoryClubbers asked what you were going to do next, after the Liberation Day book tour - take a break or start writing? I know from your answers that you are writing. I know from your updates that your success and exposure are growing exponentially. By any objective measure, you are on a roll, killing it, living the dream. So my question is, what sort of worries pop up for you? What ghosts appear in the real life rooms you inhabit and what conversations do you have with them?
As always, thanks for considering this, thanks for your incredible generosity in Story Club, and thanks for being a mentor to all of us.
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A.
Well, thank you, for being here.
As far as worries go – apart from some larger existential ones – my main (artistic) worry has to do with how quickly the time is going by. Working for as long as I have has made me keenly aware that 1) I do have a talent and 2) it is limited and 3) it can be wasted. In other words, because my process takes a lot of time, I want to, at this stage, make sure that I don’t get off into the weeds.
I want to make sure I’m working on something big, something that will matter, something that will, somehow, let me get all of what I know and have lived into it. I’d like it to, as they say, “Comfort the oppressed and oppress the comfortable.” I feel like I’ve experienced so much and yet so little of that is reflected in my body of work so far.
And yet, past experience has taught me that, for me, “thinking big” leads to….not much. What has worked for me in the past is to start with something small, even trivial, and, worrying it by way of the process we’ve been discussing, build it out until it starts to be…not trivial.
Although, on the other hand, the one time I made an exception to this method, in Lincoln in the Bardo, I had possibly the best time of my artistic life.
So, if I’m worrying about anything artistically, it’s that. I’m kind of like someone about to set sail on what he knows will be a long, difficult, rewarding journey, and now he has to decide which way to point the boat.
However (to add one more degree of neurosis), I am, at the moment, happily involved in a fresh story that feels like something really new for me – so what’s to worry about? Or, why worry now? I can do that once I get this one nailed down.
Or, in the words of the immortal Alfred E. Neumann, “What, me worry?”
Another worry is simply that I wasn’t always a person who could publish what he wrote. As I’ve discussed here before, I became that person in my mid-thirties. I’m guessing that ability could also switch off someday, and so I worry about that, about keeping my work vital and new. This is partly in my control (not coasting or going on auto-pilot) but partly not. There’s an element of biology or karma that makes the way a person is writing and thinking either speak to the moment or not.
I try to use this worry, this anxiety, by thinking to myself: “Well, yes, that’s a valid point. All you can do is work hard and try to keep your heart open - to new possible approaches, to new curiosities, to criticism, and to what’s actually happening in the world and your mind.”
As for “on a roll, killing it, living the dream” – well, thanks for thinking that. The main deal there, I think, is to be grateful and keep things in proportion. I sometimes imagine that a person having success’s job is to be glad (yes, of course) but then mentally push that success (and the elation one tends to feel about it) over into….well, this metaphor is about to get complicated – I was going to say: push that elation/pride energy over into the pile of dough that is the forthcoming work.
So: take the energy of elation and pride, skim off a little for yourself, just for fun, then dedicate the rest of it, in the hope that the work to come will 1) be good and 2) leave somebody who reads it marginally better off.
One of those bigger existential worries mentioned above is simply that I really enjoy writing and really enjoy these successes, and sometimes feel I am hiding behind the enjoyment too much. In time, success ends, talent fades, the person who’s been doing all that typing slows down, loses interest, gets sick, dies. So…I want to make sure that the person there behind the slightly proud Accomplisher is solid and nice and happy and enjoying life and is getting better at reaching out to other people and so on.
I don’t think “writing” and “being a good and happy person” are separate but I do think that if a person is just slightly “off” in his orientation toward writing and career and success, it can mess with the “being a good and happy person” part. So I guess I’d say I’m working at getting that mix right.
P.S. Here’s a link to a new website that Random House has just very kindly put together for me and my work.
O.K., thanks again to all of you for being part of Story Club. Over across the paywall we are still working hard on “CommComm.” Each Sunday, I’m posting on the next section in the story, and my mission is to respond to every single question appearing the Comments. So far, it’s been a lot of fun and I think is a new way of talking about stories and how they get written, and also a nice way of trying, somewhat, to simulate actual one-on-one teaching.
This is, as you’d imagine, pretty labor-intensive, which is why I’ve cut back on Office Hours.
Come join us…
Re these messages that say I want to text you.....SPAM.
That isn't me. I do all of my texting right here AND, if I never need to get hold of anyone, I have the emails that you subscribed with.
I’m late to this conversation— and so looking forward to our next installment of CommComm— but I did want to say how much I appreciate the question— and the addition of the Mazzoli quote. Years ago I read (though have not been able to find it) that Dostoyevsky said, “Man loves to achieve, but hates to have achieved” (gender bias, notwithstanding.) Those Russians, refusing to stand on their laurels! Still it’s seems true. What I witness. What I personally know.
It makes the question/issue of time that George raises so touching. I recently saw Lizzie Gottlieb’s doc about her Dad (editor) and Robert Caro (writer), chasing the clock to get 5th volume of Lyndon Johnson series finished, but unable, given depth of research and fastidiousness with sentences, to hurry the work. He’s 87!!
As to publishing. The whole enterprise of bringing one’s work out into the world stirs my anxiety. I had a wonderful writing teacher who said, Look, Gail, we’re all thirsty. You go to your corner of the desert and bring back what water you find, you offer it, and hope it will quench someone’s thirst.”
I especially love a response from George here in the chat which encourages us to widen the ground between work and self as it goes out into the world. It’s consoling to think that what starts with myself, my imagination, my obsessions, through all those iterations and revisions, becomes, something other— .
And yet. Regardless how wide that ground, rejection is still somewhere between a pain and a puzzle. It’s great when it comes with a glint of what might be done to make the work better. But this rarely happens. When I was in my 40’s, I circulated a manuscript that was getting favorable attention, but no one would publish it— one publisher included a long letter of apology. One told me I was too old (they were looking for younger writers) I mean he put this in a letter!!! And I won’t say which imprint but you’d be shocked. Another said it was one of 10 final manuscripts sitting on his desk when they could only take 8. On and on like this.
It was hard to come back from all that- I still write prose and poems, but turned my creative juices to film - which has its own challenges ($$$), but which, for all its crassness, involves a more transparent process.
Part of the allure of publishing for me has always been being a part of a community of writers, getting a seat at the table for lively and thoughtful conversation. And now, I have this here with all of you. Thank you, George Saunders for putting all those extra leaves in the table so we could all sit down and feast.