George Saunders

But again, I think, you know, we'd want to avoid that idiotic compassion of in somehow in our attempt to understand them, we enable them.

That's also a danger of narrating.

Or we excuse them.

Or we excuse them, yes.

But what is the... I think the idea, and again, I get this from writing workshop and from writing.

If you move towards specificity, facile judgment goes away.

So in a workshop, for example, somebody will say, oh, I think your story is boring.

You can't work with that.

So then you ask, be more specific.

Where is it boring and what do you mean by boring?

And as you go through that process, it becomes diagnostic.

You know, it's, oh, actually there's a thought that's repeated three times in the paragraph on page six.

Oh, okay.

Could you choose one of those repetitions?

And a writer can hear that.

They can hear eliminate one repetition.

That's all good.

Whereas you're boring is, you know, less appealing.

I mean, the example I've thought of before is if you had, you know, five Republicans and five Democrats on the town board.

and you ask them to discuss immigration, you're going to get a fight because they're all pre-programmed with their media inputs.