Boldtype editor Toby Warner chats with writer George Saunders about his new collection of stories, Persuasion Nation, his ear for everyday language, and his inner nun.

BT: In your writing, you often obsess over imagined worlds. In Persuasion Nation you seem to be taking it even further. There's a reality TV show that never ends, a farm where trendsetters are coddled from birth, and even creepy shoes that expose us to targeted advertising. What draws you to such cheeky dystopian fantasies?

GS: Honestly, I just really have fun with those modes. After the fact, I can think up conceptual rationalizations, but at the moment that I'm writing it, that direction feels the warmest, the most interesting, the most fruitful. If I pretend that the action is all a reality TV show, then somewhere in my head there's a surge of material that's available to me out of which to create the real story. If I try to write a realist story, the language goes flat and the energy is just gone. When I give myself permission to be goofy, then the story has more energy in it.

BT: You say you have difficulty with realism, yet your stories are bursting with that kind of banal and absurd language that we use everyday. It seems snatched right from contemporary American life.

GS: To me there's nothing emotionally realistic about describing a divorced couple, where the pattern on the couch is a metaphor for their lives. If you try to tell it like that, you're neglecting a flavor that's crept into American life. When I was trying to do Hemingway, it was almost inadvertently comic. You can't do Hemingway in the Wal-Mart. Realism is a funny thing, because it's just a collection of agreed upon attitudes. You can have a sentence like, "Frank and Jim sat in the nicely decorated midtown apartment." But who has ever lived that reality? There is some quest for truth in my work, but the truth is something weird, and the feelings that we actually have on a given day in America are pretty wild.

BT: You pick up on a sort of campy but unsettling beauty in the way we all agree to talk in conversation, in meetings, on TV. How do you go about making that literary?

GS: I never had a sense of what literary language should be like, and when I tried to do it, it always came out like Thomas Wolfe on quaaludes — where you describe the same thing three times. "The black table... The flat ebony plane..." So then I started to think that maybe the natural, inadvertent poetics was right. I suppose for me it came out of my unconventional background as a writer. Everywhere I went, expression was imperfect, but expression was also poetic. In Chicago, where I grew up, people didn't often sit down and express their feelings directly. There were always these beautiful indirect expressions. And in the corporate world there was this weird indirection, as well. Even when I overhear somebody on their cell phone up here on campus. If you forget the phone, and just think of it as a poem, it's unbelievable: "Mom, I told this fucking guy I was too hungover! What are you talking about, Mom? I was too wasted, I couldn't call you." The idea is that you have to listen, and then you purify it a little bit.

BT: Speaking of cell phones and overhearing chatter, how do you come up with some of these phrases? One highlight from this collection for me was "please unveil your privacy opening." Are you constantly eavesdropping for material?

GS: I used to be the person who would take notes all the time, but then I thought the notes were leading the story. So I basically keep my ears open, and if something clings to me after a certain amount of time, then there might be something in it. When I was growing up in Chicago, we had something we used to call doing voices. You could imitate a teacher, or imitate Howard Cossell. It was the next best thing to being actually popular or an actor — being able to riff on voices. Every so often, I still find a voice that I can do, and if I'm lucky it's one that I don't really know the origin of, but one I do endlessly. It's sort of a mysterious, weird, not necessarily enviable ability to riff in a certain voice. Those phrases just kind of pop out while you're doing it.

BT: So do you plot out where the story is going, or do these voices call the shots?

GS: I'm really not the brightest bulb, so if I start with the plot it's always exactly what you expect. It's just a little too linear. So I try to confuse myself a bit, not think ahead as much as possible. I find that the more ideas I have about a story, the less likely it is that I'm going to finish it. So when I'm working at my best, I just trust that I don't have to decide, that the story will decide for me. That was a very hard lesson for me. I thought the idea was that you knew what you were going to do and then you did it. Like a plumber. "That's problem 6B. Let me fix it." After I had written 3 1/2 books under that assumption, at some point I permitted myself to be funny. I had held that back. But you know, if you're in some new town and you get that feeling of "lets go out and find a new bar" — that's a really good energy. That's something you can trust. But if you're sitting at home with the guidebook, that's a lot less euphoric. Or if you went on a date with index cards: "7:30 — compliment her hair." That would be a bad date. But if you go instead with the confidence that you'll be able to respond in the energy of the moment then there's a lot more flexibility.

BT: I know you get this question all the time, but how did your background as an engineer play into your development as a writer?

GS: It helped in a couple ways. One was that it got me into situations that a writer wouldn't normally find himself in. I worked for an oil company in the '80s. I worked for environmental engineering companies that were basically trying to get corporate clients out of trouble. We went to Air Force bases and compiled lists of all the pollution and mistakes they had made. I worked for a slaughterhouse. Also on a crew in Sumatra that was basically doing earth-raping — tearing up jungle where people had never set foot before. Well, we weren't, but the parent company we were working for was taking all the oil money and exporting it to the central government in Jakarta. I wasn't a writer at that time, so I went into these worlds with no irony and no distrust. For whatever reason, I was working a series of jobs that a kind of idealized liberal sensibility would see as symbolic of oppressive, late-stage capitalist decadence. But then, on the inside, you see that the people doing that are just people really trying to take care of their kids, and they aren't unaware of what they're doing. They make elaborate rationales for being there. Nobody wakes up and says, "time to destroy!" They usually wake up and say "I'm going to do really well today!" It made me feel that the world is really complicated, that good and evil are really complicated. So that technical background as an engineer got me into some places you don't normally go. When I was there, I was just part of the scene. That's what led me to appreciate that strange language of an engineering company conference call. It's almost not even English at a certain level. If you were to transcribe one of these meetings it would be almost unintelligible, but when you're there you can tell that person A is trying to shit on person B, and B is resisting.

BT: So do you think of your writing as being a bullshit-detector for certain kinds of rhetoric?

GS: Well, as I said, it's something fun for me, but there is always an agenda behind the degraded syntax. If a reader senses that inflation of tone, it becomes a kind of grindstone. You're sharpening your knife if you read bad syntax and you notice it. There's a certain moral valence to the imprecision. Sometimes it seems like people talk about fiction as if its purpose were to document. But it's a transformative tool, really. The idea is that you go into this room called the short story and come out different. I don't really care what's in the room, as long as when you come out, you're 6% more aware, more happy to be alive, more appreciative, more curious, instead of closed down. My basic mentality is very catholic and very vengeful, so I have to make these justifications up for why I can write this crazy shit. That's really the chief one: if you can make a little room for a person — the writer and the reader — to be temporarily transformed.

BT: Can you give me an example?

GS: Because of my funny reading habits, I had never read The Bluest Eye until I was 35. I sat down and read it. There was something about the book that reminded me of the way I used to think about people when I was a little kid in Catholic school. It had to do with empathy. It had something to do with this: if you resist your initial projection about another person, and reside in considering them, then you'll see that they're more like you than you thought in the first place. When I read that book, it kicked in again, and has stayed in place ever since. So that was a book that literally did something to my brain chemistry that has made my life afterward better. That was the high-water mark for me: you walk into that room and it does something and thereafter your life isn't the same. That kind of change is huge and can be built upon. So that's what I aspire to anyway. That's why you get a story with talking Doritos in it. It's a stretch, but...

BT: Sometimes it takes a talking Dorito.

GS: Sometimes it does.

BT: Last year, you published the novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. Have you ever been tempted to try a novel?

GS: Well, I interviewed Jhumpa Lahiri here last night as part of the Syracuse lectures series. She said something really interesting: that when she went from the story to the novel she could just feel that the DNA of it was different. And I don't know that I've really felt that — with Phil or with the other novellas. My initial tendency is always to rush to the door, finish the story, and get the hell out. But with the novellas I realized that, while I still did want to rush to the door, I had these six bags that I had to move one at a time. So it really wasn't fundamentally different in the execution. It's funny, in each case, I would try to go for 50 more pages, but no way. There's some sort of fundamental switch that has to be thrown before it can go for three of four hundred pages. You can't just keep the exposition going at the price of the rising action. So in that story, I had all this nice side stuff, but it just slowed everything down so it had to come out.

BT: It's interesting that you work on such a small scale but there's still so much that doesn't make it in.

GS: It's mostly that inner nun. A voice that says "Come on! What are you doing messing around? Let's get this going!" You might have material and a scene, and both are really good and funny, but there's an extra element. A kind of illumination from inside that only comes when it's essentially feeding the plot in some way. In Hollywood, they have this idea that every scene has to be entertaining in its own right and advance the plot. I think that's an overstatement, and you can think of a great many writers who don't hold to that. But it's kind of an interesting standard, and I think I had internalized it years before I heard it.

BT: Speaking of Hollywood, you've just adapted two pieces into screenplays. What was that like?

GS: In a funny way it's more minimalist than short stories, which I didn't think was possible. But there is, as I found out, a very low tolerance for any kind of repetition in screenplays. We did a table reading of the CivilWarLand script and it was an incredible opportunity. Because you write it and it seems fine, but then when you get actors reading it, you become really aware of when a bit is being repeated. If Jim's angry at the end of scene two and angry at the end of scene four — then you're kind of like, ok, we get it, I'm way ahead of you. In a movie it can be communicated without even a line of dialogue. The definition of being hit over the head is much more subtle even than it would be in a short story. It's almost unforgiving.

BT: Was there a steep learning curve?

GS: Well, I really loved working with Ben Stiller on the script, because he would send me edits, many of them were for things I would avoid in a short story. I've got that kind of artsy-fartsy tendency to avoid anything banal. Like a conversation between a husband a wife at a kitchen table — no thanks. I just skip right by that. And that's not a strength, it's kind of a defense mechanism, in a way. But in a script, you're writing for 15 foot-tall people, and it feels like a defect if they don't speak. You have to put them at the kitchen table and they have to talk. So that was an interesting thing for me to try. Given that they have to say something, could I make it not banal? Having tried that, it felt to me like the whole emotional tide rose, because in that story the guy still dies at the end but now he's a guy who had a talk with his wife at the kitchen table. It was interesting to see the way that reverberated throughout the whole story once I submitted to it.

BT: Was that difficult to get used to?

GS: Here's what I found to be the hard part. In a story, I'll write a page and I'll go away and come back later. Then I'll read it and try to simulate the first-time-reader's reaction to that page. That's the basis on which I edit. But in a screenplay you write two pages and at that point you're two minutes into a movie and you don't know what the viewer has seen because you're not directing it. So the farther you get into the script the less you know about the viewer's condition at that point. I found this really maddening because how am I supposed to know what to make happen on page 80 if I'm not sure where the viewer is? It was very different. I don't know how to write a movie, but I can write a script, so I tried to write the best script I could. But it was a lot of fun, and liberating, as well.

BT: Does that change the possibilities for humor?

GS: That's a very perceptive question. Because the first thing you try to do is take one of your jokes, you try to illustrate it. That means you spend about 30 pages trying to set up the joke. But then I learned you have to move it in cinematic ways. The difficult thing for me to realize was that nobody has to talk. If I have a scene in a story where six-thousand penguins take over the Vatican, the only way to sell that is by language. You have to do all these complicated things with the language to make it believable. But in a film, six-thousand penguins taking over the Vatican is someone else's job. You want the penguins to take over the Vatican? Fine, that's done — one sentence. It frees you up to think in bigger shapes than you might in a short story.

BT: What are you working on now?

GS: At this point in my life, I want to take the next big leap. I don't want to keep cranking out the same old stuff. I'm 47, so for however much longer I'm living my goal is to keep taking big chances. I've been reading Gogol a lot, I've been reading Dead Souls as much as I can. And Dickens, Shakespeare, Confederacy of Dunces. I would like to write a novel someday if I could get that switch in my mind thrown. The new book is the third in a kind of trilogy of short stories, so now that feels like that's out there now. I'm going to give myself permission to take six months and kind of read and fart around and type some things up. I've been doing some nonfiction writing for GQ. Some of that and the screenplay are subtly helping me let a little more of the physical world in. I also did a graduation speech for my daughter. She was in 8th grade last year. It was really interesting to write something for a more general audience than I'd normally write to. So those three are kind of working at me a little, but I don't exactly know how. My plan is to give that some room to take place.

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