George Saunders

And I don't want to be the guy whose own grave says avoided that which he most longed to do.

So I gave myself kind of a six-month contract to try to make a big mistake if I wanted to.

And a big book as well.

So it was never going to be a short story.

No, I knew it would be something along... And in fact, I tried it as a play, and I'm not a very good playwright, but it felt that it could be more substantial than a story, for sure.

Yes.

First, they all were.

And then there were certain times where I just needed sort of a spanning quote.

And it was kind of funny because I thought, I really need to make one up.

And I thought, well, can I do that?

And then this voice said, well, it's your book.

You can do whatever you like.

So it became part of the fun of the book to have some

accurately quoted historical text, and then to try to make up others.

So it became kind of a really strange stylistic challenge to be able to write a convincing 19th century news release or diary entry.

And then also I thought, you know, since it became clear that the main narrators were going to be ghosts,

I didn't want to say, then the ghost said, blah, blah, blah.

So I just thought if you made it in kind of a, you read the text, and at the end there's an attribution.

And if the person is living, the attribution is capital letters.

And if they're dead, it's all lowercase.