George Saunders

So anyway, that whole process of taking anger and going, yeah, of course I'm pissed off, you know?

And in my work, that's exactly what I'm doing.

I think I'm taking...

darkness and neurosis and OCD and anger and all that stuff.

And then putting it on the page and trying to work with it.

Yeah.

I agree.

I think it was, I don't remember who said it, but maybe Tina Fey has said that you could say I'm nervous or you could say I'm excited and they're similar.

So the writers I work with at Syracuse, you can't truncate them.

You can't say don't be what you are.

But you can say, can we together reconceptualize that thing that you're naming in a negative way?

Just turn it slightly and see if it's not a virtue, because it has to be.

You know, for a person to write a book that's powerful, they have to take everything that they have.

And even the stuff that they've habitually labeled as negative,

can be turned.

So anger, well, really, in some situations, anger is just an appropriate reaction to injustice or to disalignment and misalignment.

But for me, writing, that's what you're doing in every second.

You're taking a sentence that's a little messed up and you're putting it on the table and going, oh, okay, let's make that more specific.

Let's just turn it a little bit.

And suddenly it pops into something that's more truthful.