George Saunders on the art of the short story

We’ve got a load of good public domain short fiction compilations at Standard Ebooks;[1] the favourite that I’ve produced has to be Leonid Andreyev’s work.[2] He’s often referred to as the Russian equivalent of Edger Allan Poe, but he has his own definite flavour. “The Wall” is a good example.[3]

[1] https://standardebooks.org/subjects/shorts

[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/leonid-andreyev/short-fict...

[3] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/leonid-andreyev/short-fict...

Saunders' "Sticks" is one of my go-to flash fiction recommendations. https://www.unm.edu/~gmartin/535/Sticks.htm

I've been writing short stories all year and it's a great challenge. It's quite different from writing code. https://conorbarnes.com/stories

I’ve read about 40 short stories over the last 3 weeks. On the one hand, I’m glad to see a thread about them in here — that is awesome! On the other, a lot of my favourite stories have been from lesser known authors and it feels bad thinking of how hard it would be for one of them to get a lot of upvotes like a famous person would

For those who don’t know, indie publishing is extremely arduous, yet a lot of the work is excellent. Some time, go out and pick a short story collection by a group of authors you have never heard of and check it out! You might be surprised by what you find (provided the editor was good).

Note: there are often 10-100 submissions for every one that gets accepted too, so you are already having the less interesting ones filtered out for you, if you ever worry about that

I think Saunders has perfected the part of fiction that speaks the language of memory. It's somewhere between a joke at its smallest, and a feeling about oneself that replays as a landmark of who we are as the effect of its longer forms, like 'the time I spent in that place reading that novel.'

Such a pleasure to see this on HN. I could see short stories having a renaissance because there is no reason to justify selling people a bunch of paper anymore, and nobody wants things that are too much.

My favorite part is how he describes his creative process.

> I go through the story again and again until I feel increasingly satisfied with everything in it. This process tends to happen such that the beginning sections get “done” first, and then that sort of narrows the choices as I near the end, if that makes sense.

> I’ve sometimes compared it to painting a floor (although I’m not sure that’s really a thing). But … you keep going back and touching up the room until the whole thing looks good to you. Then, at the very end, there’s just that area around the door. You give it one last swipe of the brush as you step out.

> In a story, it’s a feeling of being able to get through it with pleasure from start to finish—no hitches, no little bumps of resistance. With experience, I think a person can get better at feeling even the slightest bumps. And weirdly, those are places where the story is really trying to ascend to higher ground.

There is a power in honest story telling, which is missed in academic work, or work that is purely theoretical.

One of my goals is to tell true short stories about life at startups, to teach lessons about management or leadership. While there are many high-level academic books about management that I like, I find that they tend to be too abstract. They are often bloodless. They miss the real-world conflicts that managers have to deal with. They skip over all the moments when someone loses their temper, as if such moments don't exist.

I feel strongly that we need more honesty about such conflicts, both when managers lose their temper and also when employees lose their temper. How do such situations play out? How should they play out? What is allowed?

For example, here are 3 books about leadership that I like, but I'm also wary of how abstract they are:

The Discipline of Teams, Jon R. Katzenback and Douglas K. Smith

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.

Semper Fi: Business Leadership the Marine Corps Way, by Dan Carrison and Rod Walsh.

I like these books, but I often think they would be better if they had more specific stories about the real-world uses of the tactics they promote. I'd like to see more personal stories.

Of these, only Jocko Willink is associated with telling personal stories, and indeed, I think some of his popularity is exactly because he tells honest stories about the kinds of conflict that come up among people who work closely together, under great stress.

My first book (How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps) was fairly popular with the readers of Hacker News, and many have commented on the big screaming rage-filled argument at the end. Some have said I should not have tolerated a boss who screamed like that, but the important point is that such situations really do occur, and we need more honest writing about such conflicts.

Likewise, after the last 7 years of doing high-level tech consulting, I decided to write up everything I've learned about management in my book "One-on-one meetings are underrated; group meetings waste time" and here especially, I was determined to tell short stories, and to try to honestly convey how much conflict comes up at work, and how people tend to deal with that conflict, and what styles of conflict management seem to lead to success.

In Japan, there is a genre of manga that is focused on telling stories about business life. I've often wished that America had something similar. I'd like to see more books of true short stories about business life, and I think all of society would benefit.

Short stories are a really under appreciated art form. Everybody loves the novel or multi book epic, but there is something wonderful about a short story that changes your perspective or punches you in the gut.

Saunders collection Tenth of December is great.