“I discovered that I could make a fairly ambitious story via fragments,” he told me, in the interview.
“I didn’t have to have a through line or a plan, didn’t have to know where it was going… If you trimmed all the fat out of a bit, it would start to thrum with meaning—and then, all of a sudden, it would have something it wanted to cause. So there would be these, like, vital bits on the page, not linked to anything yet. And then structure became just linking up those vital bits, looking for the simplest way to connect them.
So, if you cut all the lazy shit out of a story, what’s left will tell you what structure to put in place so that none of those good bits need to be lost. And then you are trying to arrange them so that they are in causal relation to one another.”
~ from “How to Imitate George Saunders” by Benjamin Nugent