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philipshay · 7 years ago

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all of the writing questions 1-54

1. Favorite place to write.

my bed lmao

2. Favorite part of writing.

that moment when you just frantically have to get something out??? and the words just spill out like crazy and idk its amazing

3. Least favorite part of writing.

having to write the boring chunky stuff thats essential for plot

4. Do you have writing habits or rituals?

not really tbh

5. Books or authors that influenced your style the most.

maggie stiefvater and lauren oliver definitely

6. Favorite character you ever created.

so shes my current mc for my trilogy and her name is isla and i just really fucking love her

7. Favorite author.

lauren oliver

8. Favorite trope to write.

i love angst idk if thats a trope??

9. Least favorite trope to write.

probably like.....idk tbh i dont have anything that i dont like when it comes to tropes

10. Pick a writer to co-write a book with and tell us what you’d write about.

i would die to write a book with lauren oliver like i would write anything she wanted to write

11. Describe your writing process from scratch to finish.

step one: frantically write a paragraph or scene

step two: frantically try and fill in around that first thing

step three: leave it alone for a while

step four: finish when the motivation returns

12. How do you deal with self-doubts?

the only way to deal with them for me is to just. let them be. i know im gonna have them, and that i cant get rid of them, so i just work around them. i write regardless of them.

13. How do you deal with writers block?

take a break for a little while. read something. watch something. wait for it to become easy to write again.

14. What’s the most research you ever put into a book?

for my first book i did hours of research on amputations and prosthetics and stuff because my mc was an amputee

15. Where does your inspiration come from?

everywhere. songs or quotes or shows or books.

16. Where do you take your motivation from?

readers and just myself. i enjoy the writing and it makes me feel good to do it.

17. On avarage, how much writing do you get done in a day?

i try and write a little each day. but some days it doesnt work and i have to just set it down.

18. What’s your revision or rewriting process like?

look...i fucking hate revision and i grumble through it and hate it

19. First line of a WIP you’re working on.

its for an evak fic btw:

Something that Isak Valtersen has tried to accept over the last year is that sometimes love isn’t enough.

20. Post a snippet of a WIP you’re working on.

from my book:

One of her hands came up to cup my head, and she held me tighter than she ever had before. It reminded me of when I was small, on the nights I was afraid and young and didn’t understand why I had to stay downstairs.

The small basement had seemed so big when I was a child. Monsters lurked in all of its corners. Demons waited in the shadows.

I myself was a monster, but I didn’t know it yet. I was a different type of monster; I was the type that couldn’t be killed. I was too human for that. I was the dredge of humanity.

But the thing is, when half of the population is as well, it’s much harder to hunt us. It’s much harder to hunt us when we share the faces of those that are good.

Before I knew what I was, my mother would come downstairs and tell me that one day I wouldn’t be scared, that one day I wouldn’t have to spend every day downstairs. She’d hold me and whisper empty promises.

Even then, as she held me, there was another empty promise on her lips. She didn’t say it, as I was far too old to believe it, but I knew what she was thinking.

21. Post the last sentence you wrote in one of your WIP’s.

from my current book too:

Because it was a lie. My freedom was a beautiful, beautiful lie.

22. How many drafts do you need until you’re satisfied and a project is ultimately done for you?

okay so honestly im a 1 draft kinda girl and then i go in and edit.

23. Single or multi POV, and why?

it really depends but currently i prefer single.

24. Poetry or prose, and why?

prose. it has more freedom.

25. Linear or non-linear, and why?

i havent written non linear but i really love it because its so complex and theres so many ways to slowly reveal things and idk its amazing

26. Standalone or series, and why?

ive noticed that most books that are in a series are never as good as book 1. but, that said, there are some worlds that i love to live in and will totally take multiple books.

27. Do you share rough drafts or do you wait until it’s all polished?

usually wait until its polished

28. And who do you share them with?

i have a writing friend amy who i used to share everything with and other than her i guess tumblr? idk

29. Who do you write for?

myself.

30. Favorite line you’ve ever written.

this sounds conceited but there’s so many that i like. i guess one of my favs is:

Sometimes people leave, and sometimes they’re lost. And sometimes we don’t ever find out why. That’s a darkness that just doesn’t go away.

31. Hardest character to write.

writing my mc marley from my first book was difficult because she had so much anger towards what happened to her and it blinded her to quite a bit. and as the author i knew she was going to get over that but the character herself didnt, and it was hard.

32. Easiest character to write.

so this is fic but tbh percy jackson because it was on him and the other pjo characters that i learned to write and i spent so much time in that world that i know the characters

33. Do you listen to music when you’re writing?

yep usually

34. Handwritten notes or typed notes?

typed

37. Most inspirational quote you’ve ever read or heard that’s still important to you.

probably “The promblem isn’t your thighs. The problem is your head.” because it reminds me that my eating disorder is the real enemy, not food.

39. Do you base your characters of real people or not? If so, tell us about one.

definitely on real people. there are pieces of people i know in all of my characters. like the nurse that helped marley in my first book is based off my friend amy.

40. Original Fiction or Fanfiction, and why?

both. they both have their perks and their cons.

41. How many stories do you work on at one time?

so many. so so so many.

42. How do you figure out your characters looks, personality, etc.

it comes in pieces. like, i just figured out a few days ago that my mc wasnt a redhead after all. it just happens naturally. it occurs to me randomly tbh.

43. Are you an avid reader?

i used to be. i do love reading but i dont do it as much anymore.

47. Do you start with characters or plot when working on a new story?

it depends.

48. Favorite genre to write in.

i love dystopian and contemporary.

49. What do you find the hardest to write in a story, the beginning, the middle or the end?

the beginning.

52. How did writing change you?

it showed me who i was. it gave me purpose and showed me what i wanted to do and idk it made me into the person i am.

53. What does writing mean to you?

everything. writing is so important to me like....its everything.

54. Any writing advice you want to share?

“Comparison is the thief of joy.” it truly is. comparison is the enemy. try not to take part in that shit.

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thebrightestringaroundthemoon · 7 years ago

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anyway time to use this blog for what i created it for i guess and type out a big long thing about how im a worthless piece of shit and should pour myself a nice big glass of creamer, sugar, and clorox. i literally serve like? no purpose? in life? at all? im a completely directionless failure that operates with about the complexity of a fucking roomba, running into the same goddamn couch over and over again and slightly redirecting. if i get lucky, i run into a different couch, but nothing fucking changes. i do the exact same thing over and over again: surround myself with wonderful, fantastic people, fuck it up and make them hate me, and then spiral into a pit of my own pointless fucking despair until i realize im such a fucking failure of a person i cant even muster the energy it takes to fucking die so i just get up again in the morning and go again. rinse and fucking repeat. and its not like i have some horrible life or anything, im just profoundly unfit to exist on this planet. i have wonderful friends who actually, honest to god care about me and its evidently not good enough for me?? so i just respond to everything by assuming the worst, spiralling, and being too much of a dumb bitch to fucking talk to A N Y B O D Y about A N Y T H I N G cuz i guess i’d rather make a dumb edgy tumblr blog named after the lyrics to a fucking asia song than actually solve any of my problems. i guess its too much to solve a problem when the fundamental core of who you are as a person is the fucking problem. i mean, there is a solution, but ive already covered why nobody needs to be worried about me doing that! bnobody needs to be worried about me doing anytuhing! accomplishing anything! ever becoming anything! ever managing to do much more than drag myself out of bed in the morning and inspire a profoundly sad mixture of pity and annoyance in everyone iv’e ever come into fucking contact with! im sitting here debating fixing the fucking apostrophe in the last sentence and its driving me fucking mad while real people have real fucking problems and my cardboard cutout ass bad edgy teen novel stupid bitch excuse for a person ass is sitting here doing THIS with my fucking time. I have things i shuold be doing, could be doing, but this is legitimately all i can bring myself to fucking contribute to society at this point. the surest sign that the people around me are fucking saints is that theyve stuck around this fucking long but honestly i dont fucking undeerstand. i guess thats the whole point of shit like saints, you arent supposed to be able to understand, its superhuman compassion, even for those who dont fucking deserve it. or maybe its just because i fundamentally dont work. i dont have any sort of actual power when it comes to my life. these are the idle musings of a bewildered spectator, the one person who comes to the party, stays sober, and sits on the sidelines and watches the fucking idiocy unfold. except instead of drunkenly stumbling around and telling my friends how much i love them, im stone cold sober and sitting on the sidelines watching myself fail to take even the most basic fucking steps towards fixing literally any problem that im dealing with. broken. non functional. i dunno if i was born a failure, though. i think that might be giving myself a little too much credit. other people were dealt infinitely worse hands than i was and they turned out fucking wonderful. i know a couple of them. no, i think im the way i am because of me. i probably had all the chances i needed to become something resembling a human being, and instead im whatever i am now. how can i be excited about some sort of future for myself when i can barely manage a relatively privliged day to day existance? i have friends, im not starving, im in college, i have an apartment. im far from rich but im able to afford to go to college. that should be enough. why the fuck isnt that enmough. why cant i just be fucking satisfied why cant i muster some sort of positive fucking emotions why does joy last a few moments why can i do this so much easier than writing anything positive about my life why does this flow like it does like a fucking river why cant i stop my hands why why what the fuck why why am i like this why was i born why am i who i am it flows so easily it just comes out but i cant tell anyone and i cant rely on anyone because im not anyone in noone im the fucking nobody that people keep around them to make themselves feel better and the only reason i have the slightest bit of doubt about that is that i love my friends too much to ever accuse them of something like that but then again does it fucking count when its someone like me do i qualify as a fucking person does it count as hurting someone’s feelings or using them when that someone isn’t a someone is just an empty fucking shell that was only gifted with the capacity to retain HURT thats all i can fucking remember thats all that sticks with me HURT i cant fucking be rid of it and its not some sort of innate inherent biological failing its who i am as a person i did this to myself i do this to myself i dont know that i will ever stop doing this to myself. all i can hope for is that one day i gain the strrength the fucking self esteem and self respect to kill myself. maybe it isnt self respect i need for that but respect for my friends. its selfish to put them through me. the pain they’d feel from my death would last a short time if at all. it would be so much better than forcing them to know me for however long this failing fucking body will carry my empty shell of a spirit onwards thjrough a world that i dont deserve to fucking inhabit. my inner monologyue put on paper sounds like a fucking evanescence song and i hate myself for it so much jesus fucking christ. i fundamentally do not like myself. as a person. on any level. i do not like myself. i wouldnt be friends with me, and ironically i hate myself for that too. but who would? who the fuck would? why does anyone? do they? maybe thats my one fucking talent. convincing people im likable. worming my way into their fucking lives until they trust me only to realize that i am not a human being. im an empty shell, a fucking roomba of a person. i can tell when ive run into something and back up so i can run into it again. i cannot solve my own problems. i cannot even conceptualize them. im something below a human cursed with the fucking ability to think at the level of one. my ocd is really really desperately trying to get me to scroll up and fix all the spelling and grammar errors but i dont know if itll hurt more to ignore them or to have to read the dumb ashit i just wrote. earlier i said that i wanted this to flow less easily and here we are i guess. though earlier i meant it in the context of only being able to properly conceptualize negative feelings and never being abkle to hold onto anything piositive i feel, and that hasn’t been magically fixed or anything, im just having trouble feeling anything at all now. im a completely blank slate. i havent even cried once troday. i cant. i cant care about my own fucking inadequacy and failure as a very basic human being enough to even fucking cry. i cried about an anime a couple nuights ago. i can muster emotion for that. but as soon as i look inwards i dont see ahyuthing thEres NOTHING FUICKING THERE THERE IS NOTHING FUCKING THERE THERE IS NOTHING FUCKING THERE I AM NOT A HUMAN BEING I AM NOT A HUMAN BEING I AM BROKEN I AM EMPTY I AM A {PLAGUE ON WHOEVER HAS THE PURE FUCKING MISFORTUNE TO BE A GOOD ENOUGH PERSON TO TAKE PITY ON ME i dont want to die, even. too many steps, too much feeling, too much. i just want to stop. to end. i want to no longer be. ill lock tghat away with all the other things id love to happen but know never will. that ones at the forefront though. it always will be. until i grow the fucking compassion to put others out of my misery. my roomate just texted me an innocuous questiona nd i texte d bacjk normally emojis and all im normal dont you see everyone im normal nothings wrong with me. oh sure sometimes i have a bad day but im fine everybody IM FINE you aren’t you have to put up with me ill fucking worm my way into your life and convince you im a real human being you can hold a congersation with only to snatch the fucking rug out from under you as soon as you actually attempt to engage with me on any level and i just end up eiother hurting you or revealing accidently that there is no such thing as luna thats not a fucking person its a name assigned to a loose collections of disorders, bad habits, and a gaping emotional black hoile from which nothing can fucking escape, jammed into an ugly broken body thats going to kill me early and doesnt even compensate by making me hot. wHEE. and of course, unable to be happy with anything, i will simultaneously complain about my own impending death due to horrific nutrition, subastance abuse (just the fun kinds so people dont realize anything is wrong WHEEEE) and some fucky illness that ive now gone and stopped medicating because im a stupid worthless bitch, AND I WILL COMPLAIN ABOUT THIS WHILE SIMULATENOUSLY WANTING TO DIE what do i want? who the fuck knows! not me! that’s a redundant statement, of course “me” doing know bercause thats not a thing im not a person! id love to blame it on my complete and total internal faliure as a person that i always end up hurting people, but honestly its probably because i dont put enough fucking effort in. even right now,. literally hours after a good friend of mine ostaroted feeling like shit in a way that is almost for sure my fucking fault, im doing THIS instead of trying to right the situation (to b fair she made a point of not inviting me but inviting the rest of the group?) or did she am i just reading into this? who knows! who the fuck knows! everyone but “me”! ejveryone else knows! becayuse its probably REALALLY FUCKING SIMPLE BUT NOOOOO I CANT EVEN MANAGE THAT CAN I I CANNNOT EVEN FUCKING MANMAGE TO MANAGE THAT CAN I thats too much for lil ol me! i am aggressively pointless! i am the single least important collection of fucking atoms on this planet! every last fucking rock i stepped on walking to and from the class that i skipped half of today is more important and has contribtued more to the grand scheme of things than i ever have or ever will, and thats jkust the inanimate fucking objects on the ground. lets not even get started on all the actual people whose time my existance waste, who i am a fucking affront to by sheer virtue of being in any way associated with them at any point in time ever. i guess this is it, this is what i get when my entire personlaity is a loosely cobbled together collection of self deprecating jokes and a fake ego, desperately attempting to patch over an interior that has holes in it less than it just is one giant fucking hole. i was, am, and will be nothing, not even enough to earn the use of “I” at the beginning of the sentence. dinner is in 15 minutes. my friends will be there. im paralyzed. i belive every word i wrote above so why

would i inflict myself upon them but i

i cant not

i so deeply want to

to go sit in uncharacteristic silence and hope somebnody notices and asks me whats up so i can give them a dumb, abridged, mostly fake version and get the sad pity looks and then feel bad about exploiting them and then

rinse

repeat

because i am not a person

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viralhottopics · 8 years ago

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George Saunders: what writers really do when they write

A series of instincts, thousands of tiny adjustments, hundreds of drafts What is the mysterious process writers go through to get an idea on to the page?

Many years ago, during a visit to Washington DC, my wifes cousin pointed out to us a crypt on a hill and mentioned that, in 1862, while Abraham Lincoln was president, his beloved son, Willie, died, and was temporarily interred in that crypt, and that the grief-stricken Lincoln had, according to the newspapers of the day, entered the crypt on several occasions to hold the boys body. An image spontaneously leapt into my mind a melding of the Lincoln Memorial and the Piet. I carried that image around for the next 20-odd years, too scared to try something that seemed so profound, and then finally, in 2012, noticing that I wasnt getting any younger, not wanting to be the guy whose own gravestone would read Afraid to Embark on Scary Artistic Project He Desperately Longed to Attempt, decided to take a run at it, in exploratory fashion, no commitments. My novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, is the result of that attempt, and now I find myself in the familiar writerly fix of trying to talk about that process as if I were in control of it.

We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he wanted to express, and then he just, you know expressed it. We buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same.

The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.

A guy (Stan) constructs a model railroad town in his basement. Stan acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge, near that fake campfire, then notices hes arranged his hobo into a certain posture the hobo seems to be gazing back at the town. Why is he looking over there? At that little blue Victorian house? Stan notes a plastic woman in the window, then turns her a little, so shes gazing out. Over at the railroad bridge, actually. Huh. Suddenly, Stan has made a love story. Oh, why cant they be together? If only Little Jack would just go home. To his wife. To Linda.

What did Stan (the artist) just do? Well, first, surveying his little domain, he noticed which way his hobo was looking. Then he chose to change that little universe, by turning the plastic woman. Now, Stan didnt exactly decide to turn her. It might be more accurate to say that it occurred to him to do so; in a split-second, with no accompanying language, except maybe a very quiet internal Yes.

He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldnt articulate, and before hed had the time or inclination to articulate them.

An artist works outside the realm of strict logic. Simply knowing ones intention and then executing it does not make good art. Artists know this. According to Donald Barthelme: The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do. Gerald Stern put it this way: If you start out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking then you wrote a poem about two dogs fucking. Einstein, always the smarty-pants, outdid them both: No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.

How, then, to proceed? My method is: I imagine a meter mounted in my forehead, with P on this side (Positive) and N on this side (Negative). I try to read what Ive written uninflectedly, the way a first-time reader might (without hope and without despair). Wheres the needle? Accept the result without whining. Then edit, so as to move the needle into the P zone. Enact a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (rinse, lather, repeat), through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts. Like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via those thousands of incremental adjustments.

The artist, in this model, is like the optometrist, always asking: Is it better like this? Or like this?

The interesting thing, in my experience, is that the result of this laborious and slightly obsessive process is a story that is better than I am in real life funnier, kinder, less full of crap, more empathetic, with a clearer sense of virtue, both wiser and more entertaining.

And what a pleasure that is; to be, on the page, less of a dope than usual.

Revising by the method described is a form of increasing the ambient intelligence of a piece of writing. This, in turn, communicates a sense of respect for your reader. As text is revised, it becomes more specific and embodied in the particular. It becomes more sane. It becomes less hyperbolic, sentimental, and misleading. It loses its ability to create a propagandistic fog. Falsehoods get squeezed out of it, lazy assertions stand up, naked and blushing, and rush out of the room.

Is any of this relevant to our current political moment?

Hoo, boy.

When I write, Bob was an asshole, and then, feeling this perhaps somewhat lacking in specificity, revise it to read, Bob snapped impatiently at the barista, then ask myself, seeking yet more specificity, why Bob might have done that, and revise to, Bob snapped impatiently at the young barista, who reminded him of his dead wife, and then pause and add, who he missed so much, especially now, at Christmas, I didnt make that series of changes because I wanted the story to be more compassionate. I did it because I wanted it to be less lame.

But it is more compassionate. Bob has gone from pure asshole to grieving widower, so overcome with grief that he has behaved ungraciously to a young person, to whom, normally, he would have been nice. Bob has changed. He started out a cartoon, on which we could heap scorn, but now he is closer to me, on a different day.

How was this done? Via pursuit of specificity. I turned my attention to Bob and, under the pressure of trying not to suck, my prose moved in the direction of specificity, and in the process my gaze became more loving toward him (ie, more gentle, nuanced, complex), and you, dear reader, witnessing my gaze become more loving, might have found your own gaze becoming slightly more loving, and together (the two of us, assisted by that imaginary grouch) reminded ourselves that it is possible for ones gaze to become more loving.

Or we could just stick with Bob was an asshole, and post it, and wait for the likes, and for the pro-Bob forces to rally, and the anti-barista trolls to anonymously weigh in but, meanwhile, theres poor Bob, grieving and misunderstood, and theres our poor abused barista, feeling crappy and not exactly knowing why, incrementally more convinced that the world is irrationally cruel.

Illustration by Yann Kebbi for Review

What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which shes already done. There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly were adjusting that which is already there. The writer revises, the painter touches up, the director edits, the musician overdubs. I write, Jane came into the room and sat down on the blue couch, read that, wince, cross out came into the room and down and blue (Why does she have to come into the room? Can someone sit UP on a couch? Why do we care if its blue?) and the sentence becomes Jane sat on the couch and suddenly, its better (Hemingwayesque, even!), although why is it meaningful for Jane to sit on a couch? Do we really need that? And soon we have arrived, simply, at Jane, which at least doesnt suck, and has the virtue of brevity.

But why did I make those changes? On what basis?

On the basis that, if its better this new way for me, over here, now, it will be better for you, later, over there, when you read it. When I pull on this rope here, you lurch forward over there.

This is a hopeful notion, because it implies that our minds are built on common architecture that whatever is present in me might also be present in you. I might be a 19th-century Russian count, you a part-time Walmart clerk in 2017, in Boise, Idaho, but when you start crying at the end of my (Tolstoys) story Master and Man, you have proved that we have something in common, communicable across language and miles and time, and despite the fact that one of us is dead.

Another reason youre crying: youve just realised that Tolstoy thought well of you he believed that his own notions about life here on earth would be discernible to you, and would move you.

Tolstoy imagined you generously, you rose to the occasion.

We often think that the empathetic function in fiction is accomplished via the writers relation to his characters, but its also accomplished via the writers relation to his reader. You make a rarefied place (rarefied in language, in form; perfected in many inarticulable beauties the way two scenes abut; a certain formal device that self-escalates; the perfect place at which a chapter cuts off); and then welcome the reader in. She cant believe that you believe in her that much; that you are so confident that the subtle nuances of the place will speak to her; she is flattered. And they do speak to her. This mode of revision, then, is ultimately about imagining that your reader is as humane, bright, witty, experienced and well intentioned as you, and that, to communicate intimately with her, you have to maintain the state, through revision, of generously imagining her. You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: No, shes smarter than that. Dont dishonour her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.

And in revising your reader up, you revise yourself up too.

I had written short stories by this method for the last 20 years, always assuming that an entirely new method (more planning, more overt intention, big messy charts, elaborate systems of numerology underlying the letters in the characters names, say) would be required for a novel. But, no. My novel proceeded by essentially the same principles as my stories always have: somehow get to the writing desk, read what youve got so far, watch that forehead needle, adjust accordingly. The whole thing was being done on a slightly larger frame, admittedly, but there was a moment when I finally realised that, if one is going to do something artistically intense at 55 years old, he is probably going to use the same skills hes been obsessively honing all of those years; the trick might be to destabilise oneself enough that the skills come to the table fresh-eyed and a little confused. A bandleader used to working with three accordionists is granted a symphony orchestra; what hes been developing all of those years, he may find, runs deeper than mere instrumentation his take on melody and harmony should be transferable to this new group, and he might even find himself looking anew at himself, so to speak: reinvigorated by his own sudden strangeness in that new domain.

It was as if, over the years, Id become adept at setting up tents and then a very large tent showed up: bigger frame, more fabric, same procedure. Or, to be more precise (yet stay within my temporary housing motif): it was as if Id spent my life designing custom yurts and then got a commission to build a mansion. At first I thought Not sure I can do that. But then it occurred to me that a mansion of sorts might be constructed from a series of connected yurts each small unit built by the usual rules of construction, their interconnection creating new opportunities for beauty.

Any work of art quickly reveals itself to be a linked system of problems. A book has personality, and personality, as anyone burdened with one will attest, is a mixed blessing. This guy has great energy but never sits still. This girl is sensitive maybe too much; she weeps when the wrong type of pasta is served. Almost from the first paragraph, the writer becomes aware that a works strengths and weaknesses are bound together, and that, sadly, his great idea has baggage.

For example: I loved the idea of Lincoln, alone at night in the graveyard. But how is a novel made from one guy in a graveyard at night? Unless we want to write a 300-page monologue in the voice of Lincoln (Four score and seven minutes ago, I did enter this ghastly place) or inject a really long-winded and omniscient gravedigger into the book (we dont, trust me, I tried), we need some other presences there in the graveyard. Is this a problem? Well, it sure felt like one, back in 2012. But, as new age gurus are always assuring us, a problem is actually an opportunity. In art, this is true. The reader will sense the impending problem at about the same moment the writer does, and part of what we call artistic satisfaction is the readers feeling that just the right cavalry has arrived, at just the right moment. Another wave of artistic satisfaction occurs if she feels that the cavalry is not only arriving efficiently, but is a cool, interesting cavalry, ie, is an opportunity for added fun/beauty a broadening-out of the aesthetic terms.

In this case, the solution was pretty simple contained, joke-like, in the very statement of the problem (Who else might be in a graveyard late at night?).

I remembered an earlier, abandoned novel, set in a New York State graveyard that featured wait for it talking ghosts. I also remembered a conversation with a brilliant former student of mine, who said that if I ever wrote a novel, it should be a series of monologues, as in a story of mine called Four Institutional Monologues.

So: the book would be narrated by a group of monologuing ghosts stuck in that graveyard.

And suddenly what was a problem really did become an opportunity: someone who loves doing voices, and thinking about death, now had the opportunity to spend four years trying to make a group of talking ghosts be charming, spooky, substantial, moving, and, well, human.

There is something wonderful in feeling the presence of the writer within you, of something wilful that seems to have a plan George Saunders. Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian

A work of fiction can be understood as a three-beat movement: a juggler gathers bowling pins; throws them in the air; catches them. This intuitive approach Ive been discussing is most essential, I think, during the first phase: the gathering of the pins. This gathering phase really is: conjuring up the pins. Somehow the best pins are the ones made inadvertently, through this system of radical, iterative preference Ive described. Concentrating on the line-to-line sound of the prose, or some matter of internal logic, or describing a certain swath of nature in the most evocative way (that is, by doing whatever gives us delight, and about which we have a strong opinion), we suddenly find that weve made a pin. Which pin? Better not to name it. To name it is to reduce it. Often pin exists simply as some form of imperative, or a thing about which were curious; a threat, a promise, a pattern, a vow we feel must soon be broken. Scrooge says it would be best if Tiny Tim died and eliminated the surplus population; Romeo loves Juliet; Akaky Akakievich needs a new overcoat; Gatsby really wants Daisy. (The colour grey keeps showing up; everything that occurs in the story does so in pairs.)

Then: up go the pins. The reader knows they are up there and waits for them to come down and be caught. If they dont come down (Romeo decides not to date Juliet after all, but to go to law school; the weather in St Petersburg suddenly gets tropical, and the overcoat will not be needed; Gatsby sours on Daisy, falls for Betty; the writer seems to have forgotten about his grey motif) the reader cries foul, and her forehead needle plummets into the N zone and she throws down the book and wanders away to get on to Facebook, or rob a store.

The writer, having tossed up some suitably interesting pins, knows they have to come down, and, in my experience, the greatest pleasure in writing fiction is when they come down in a surprising way that conveys more and better meaning than youd had any idea was possible. One of the new pleasures I experienced writing this, my first novel, was simply that the pins were more numerous, stayed in the air longer, and landed in ways that were more unforeseen and complexly instructive to me than has happened in shorter works.

Without giving anything away, let me say this: I made a bunch of ghosts. They were sort of cynical; they were stuck in this realm, called the bardo (from the Tibetan notion of a sort of transitional purgatory between rebirths), stuck because theyd been unhappy or unsatisfied in life. The greatest part of their penance is that they feel utterly inessential incapable of influencing the living. Enter Willie Lincoln, just dead, in imminent danger (children dont fare well in that realm). In the last third of the book, the bowling pins started raining down. Certain decisions Id made early on forced certain actions to fulfilment. The rules of the universe created certain compulsions, as did the formal and structural conventions Id put in motion. Slowly, without any volition from me (I was, always, focused on my forehead needle), the characters started to do certain things, each on his or her own, the sum total of which resulted, in the end, in a broad, cooperative pattern that seemed to be arguing for what Id call a viral theory of goodness. All of these imaginary beings started working together, without me having decided they should do so (each simply doing that which produced the best prose), and they were, it seemed, working together to save young Willie Lincoln, in a complex pattern seemingly being dictated from elsewhere. (It wasnt me, it was them.)

Something like this had happened in stories before, but never on this scale, and never so unrelated to my intention. It was a beautiful, mysterious experience and I find myself craving it while, at the same time, flinching at the thousands of hours of work it will take to set such a machine in motion again.

Why do I feel this to be a hopeful thing? The way this pattern thrillingly completed itself? It may just be almost surely is a feature of the brain, the byproduct of any rigorous, iterative engagement in a thought system. But there is something wonderful in watching a figure emerge from the stone unsummoned, feeling the presence of something within you, the writer, and also beyond you something consistent, wilful, and benevolent, that seems to have a plan, which seems to be: to lead you to your own higher ground.

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