In a Particular Place, With Particular People, Under Certain Conditions

Have been reading Helen MacDonald's lovely and haunting Vesper Flights before bed, but another conversation about writing to begin today: Ezra Klein's interview with George Saunders. Lots of things to learn from the conversation as a whole, but two that are especially useful this morning. The first is Saunders' resistance to what we could call 'grand theory,' the sorts of things that are true in all times and all places. Instead:

Fiction is a great discipline of saying, if you start a story, a bunch of people were somewhere, that story is not going anywhere. But if you say, there were four Presbyterians in a bomb cellar, suddenly there’s something.

And it’s all because the story has been grounded in a particular place, with particular people, under certain conditions. And the wisdom, or the knowledge, the understanding is going to come out of that situation is directly related to how specifically it’s been enumerated.

One of the things I've been talking with the graduate students in my seminar about involves the relationship between theory and context: To what extent can (or should) our theories about the world stand apart from the contexts in which they're developed? Or to what extent is theory always place-based, embedded in and woven into specific times and places. What does that wisdom look like?

The second involves Saunders' discussion of his own approach to writing, his own sense of himself as a writer. I was listening to this on headphones while in the grocery store last night, bagging up and tagging herbs and garlic and bananas, and I remember stopping a moment, just to listen:

So my usual state is running around the house with my little monkey mind talking about my latest experience, or aspiring to some victory, or defending myself.

When I sit down to write fiction, because my attention is focused on an object, which is a paragraph or something. And it’s done in what I would call almost an athletic stance, where I’m not theorizing or conceptualizing. I’m just in it.

Like, I’m hearing it a little bit my head. And I’m messing around with it a little bit. But the monkey mind goes quiet because I think the neural energy is being all channelled to that the concentration on the prose, about which I have very strong opinions.

So in that experience, the ruminating mind goes somewhat more quiet. And that’s great. Now, in meditation, I think something similar happens. And I’m not experienced enough exactly to say what that is. But the common thing would be a concentration on a task, and then a related reduction in rumination.

The mind is so busy all the time. And what it’s really doing is it’s basically creating yourself, it’s creating you, this illusory thing called you. And when the thoughts die down, then that self creation gets a little less energetic. And in my experience, something else happens or something else rises up in that space that you’ve created. And that’s true, I think, in meditation and in writing.

So there's a different way to continue the notes I was making yesterday: Quiet the little monkey mind and get to work.