George Saunders Quotes

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

There are two questions that you ask yourself as a writer, and one of them is, 'But why?' The question that takes the book forward is, 'What if? What if x y or z happened? How would those characters react?'

No, you don't have to start your play with a premise. You can start with a character or an incident, or even a simple thought. This thought or incident grows, and the story slowly unfolds itself. You have time to find your premise in the mass of your material later. The important thing is to find it.

I usually start with an ending, then outline high points of things that happen, and kind of make up the rest as I go along. Occasionally, the characters surprise me, and I wonder how we got here. Other times, the characters are stubborn and won't do something I want them to in the story.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

When I write fiction, I have the illusion of being able to control these fictional worlds and these characters, and to make them say what I want them to say. Of course, the problem is that it is an illusion, and by the end of it you realize that you're not in control of it at all; the characters have taken over, and they're driving the vehicle.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

My forte is the plotting. You sit down, and you work out a plot.

I always struggle with making the technical aspects of the plot fit with the story that's unfolding in my imagination.

You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

There's this sense of excitement because you invent and control the characters. You decide whether they live or die. I find this type of creative process tremendously stimulating.

When you're a writer, you're always looking for conflict. It's conflict that drives great stories.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

Settings are obviously important - and as a writer, you have to respect what was real at the time of the story you're writing. But the real key to success lies in finding the right characters to carry that story.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.