George Saunders on how to get your writing fairer, funnier, and smarter

Saunders: "With revision, you’re deciding what is truer, what’s more vivid, what has less deception in it."

Ezra Klein interviewed author George Saunders, a very funny writer (and great interviewee), and Saunders discussed the power of revision. A lot of what he says applies to doing standup bits over and over again too. Repetition leads to drilling down which leads to things getting fairer, funnier, and smarter.

With revision, over the course of a document, thousands of times you’re deciding what is truer, what’s more vivid, what has less deception in it. And over the course of revising it, the whole story comes up and it starts to become a more intense, honest investigation or whatever you’re looking at. That’s kind of what I think happens.

And again, I’m really kind of slippery on this subject, because I don’t really understand why it should be that way. But I just have the experience that an early story of mine will be kind of facile, and probably politically charged with a lot of obvious liberal conceits. And the basic mechanism is me and the reader are mocking somebody down below us. And then over the many, many drafts, the thing actually changes and becomes fairer, and funnier, and smarter, and so on.