{"id":1363,"date":"2020-01-10T22:55:28","date_gmt":"2020-01-11T03:55:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pmbaxter.com\/?p=1363"},"modified":"2020-01-10T22:55:28","modified_gmt":"2020-01-11T03:55:28","slug":"george-saunders-on-writing-method","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmbaxter.com\/index.php\/2020\/01\/10\/george-saunders-on-writing-method\/","title":{"rendered":"George Saunders on writing method"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI discovered that I could make a fairly ambitious story via fragments,\u201d he told me, in the interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI didn\u2019t have to have a through line or a plan, didn\u2019t have to know where it was going\u2026 If you trimmed all the fat out of a bit, it would start to thrum with meaning\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, if you cut all the lazy shit out of a story, what\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">~ from \u201cHow to Imitate George Saunders\u201d by Benjamin Nugent<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/01\/06\/how-to-imitate-george-saunders\/\">\u201cHow to Imitate George Saunders,\u201d The Paris Review<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI discovered that I could make a fairly ambitious story via fragments,\u201d he told me, in the interview. \u201cI didn\u2019t have to have a through line or a plan, didn\u2019t have to know where it was going\u2026 If you trimmed all the fat out of a bit, it would start to thrum with meaning\u2014and then, &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/pmbaxter.com\/index.php\/2020\/01\/10\/george-saunders-on-writing-method\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;George Saunders on writing method&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advice","category-writing"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pmbaxter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pmbaxter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pmbaxter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pmbaxter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pmbaxter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1363"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pmbaxter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1364,"href":"https:\/\/pmbaxter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions\/1364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pmbaxter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pmbaxter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pmbaxter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}