George Saunders

It's not often you get to talk to one of your favourite authors. And when you do, you have a few options: do you dazzle them with your in-depth knowledge of their work, even the obscure stuff, trying to outwit them with deeper understandings of their writings than even they have? Or do you resort to sycophancy? When faced with short story writer, former Guardian columnist and raconteur extraordinaire, George Saunders, I plumped for getting the job done. We talked about his writing process and about his new collection of stories, Tenth of December.

There are moments that are impossible to transcribe so in short, the things you won't read in this interview are: tips on how to help a cat write a CV, the latest developments in skiing for beginners and the best songwriter George Saunders hadn't heard of till the night before the interview.

What you do get from the author of Pastoralia, Civilwarland in Bad Decline and the much-loved weekly column American Psyche, is talk on how he writes, what he writes, how he chooses what he shows the reader and what he's read this year to impress.

I give you... George Saunders.

So… to the new collection, Tenth of December. Are you pumped?

I'm pumped, I'm psyched, I'm stoked. I'm really happy about it. That book was started in 2006. It's been a long time. During that time, I made the decision to limit the other kinds of writing I was doing. In 2006, I had a Guardian column and doing a screenplay. I reigned all that back in. Once of the benefits of that was because I was only writing fiction now, I was able to get deeper. It's a nice feeling to have something coming out.

It's a Darwinian selection - whatever lives to be completed gets to be considered for the final book

Just going through the stories, a lot of them have appeared in different places already. Was these particular stories always seen as a collection or were these just the best stories you'd written since 2006?

That process of selecting stories, it happens on the fly. I'll have two or three things going on and only one of them will live to adulthood. That tells me that story has an essential link with my subconscious. For some reason that story was important. Then another two or three will start and two more will fall by the wayside.

It's a Darwinian selection - whatever lives to be completed gets to be considered for the final book. Usually then a couple more will drop away. It's not like I set out at the beginning to say, I want one of these and I want of these and I want of these. It's more like putting a bunch of baby chicks in a coliseum and seeing which ones live. And once I have twelve of them, I've got to see which eight live.

This book especially… when I was working on it, a story I was writing would suddenly become really important to me, partly because I wasn't working on anything else. So, each story was artistically important and when I came to pick them, I knew which ones were going to be in the collection.

It's not a high concept collection. I don't have one that I can articulate anyway. I hope the effect of the book is subtle enough that to articulate it would be to reduce it.

I interviewed Kevin Barry about his last collection and he said he liked to write 12 short stories a year over a period of three years and then pick his greatest hits. As long as he's writing a short story a month, he feels he's have a great collection at the end of it.

I think what Kevin says is right but my numbers are lower. On average I'm completing two stories a year. And there's not six others, there's usually two others. And of those others, they either get nipped in the bud early or I just go, that's not working. Sometimes they get folded into another story. This thing I'm working on now, is something I started in 1994 but set it aside because I wasn't ready to do it yet. I like Kevin's approach and I think I have the same one.

If I started filming your life right now and filmed everything you did for five years, and then at the end of it, I said I was going to make a feature film but it's only going to be an hour and ten minutes long, let me go in and pick Nikesh's greatest hits, your best moments, your highs and lows - then that would a pretty cool and artistic distillation of who you were. I just don't have the ability to finish a story a month. It's more laborious. I'll get caught up in a story and get stuck and I'll have to wait a while and finish it later.

There's a quote attributed to Einstein: "No worthy problem is solved in the plane of its original conception". What do you do when you're not writing?

I don't do much else. I spent the same amount of hours on writing as everyone else. In the new book, there's a story called 'Escape from Spiderhead'. It's a pretty long story. With that, I started it in the spring, had a good run on it then I had an idea to turn it into a novella, so I went into another direction, more riffing, hundreds more pages, spent a whole summer seeing if it was a longer work. Then at the end of the summer, realised I'd investigated every hallway and it wasn't longer. The essential energy was a short story energy, so I finished it in another 2 weeks.

There's a quote attributed to Einstein: 'No worthy problem is solved in the plane of its original conception'. In other words, you start a short story and you think, 'It's about this'. And you get to a point where the story might be what you thought it was but that's a disappointment. The poet George Stern said it best. He said, 'if you set out to write a poem about two dogs f***ing and you write a poem about two dogs f***ing, then you wrote a poem about two dogs f***ing.' Part of the allure and adventure of being an artist is that you can stride into this arena with great certainty only to befuddle yourself. You try your hardest not to be boring, which means you can't get away with simply executing your intentions. That's uncomfortable because you go to do thing A and you get locked up and try to do something else. That takes time. For me, that takes writing alternate themes and trying to force the story into a hallway that it doesn't want to go into.

Well, it sounds like you're doing the right thing. I suppose, at some point, I should do the whole sycophantic 'Look, you're one of my favourite writers thing…'

I've been waiting and WAITING for the sycophancy…

There's a misunderstanding that if something has some comic exaggeration to it, it must be satire.I've been a massive fan of yours since I read a piece of yours in McSweeneys. I've seen people describe you as a satirist but I think what you do is more than that. Would you agree with the comparison?

That got tagged on early and when you're just starting out, you're happy for any comparison. That, and I got 'dystopian' as well. I never saw that as what I was doing. I've written some political pieces for The New Yorker and they're more like satire. There's your target and you give it a kick. With those labels, satirist, realist… it's like if someone asked you 'Hey, what's Frank like?' and you said he's a nice guy. And Frank would be like, 'Really? That's it? The wonder of me can be reduced to just a nice guy?' I think there are satirical elements but I think people say satirist when they mean comic. There's a misunderstanding that if something has some comic exaggeration to it, it must be satire.

Going back to 'Escape from Spiderhead'… I don't want to project my opinions on to what I think it's about, but I read it as an extended metaphor about online dating… But then stories like 'Home' which were equal parts depressing and funny. I do think saying the collection is satirical is a bit misleading.

In terms of meanings and so on, when I'm not thinking about that so much, I'm just trying to get Frankenstein's monster to walk by any necessary. It's more a line-by-line process trying to find the comedy. When you start writing, you summon up something, and that something is either too much or too little and then you compensate. And then that aggregate product is there, and it's either too much or too little and then you compensate. And then you look up and realise you're making a story and there's a theme. I never start from a theme or intention or idea, it's more piecemeal than that.

I'm just trying to get Frankenstein's monster to walk by any necessary.My intellectual background is very spotty. I was an engineer. I didn't have a proper undergraduate education so for me, the best procedure is to think of it as an entertainment enterprise and keep the conceptual stuff as small as possible. When you're done, there is some thematic work that has been done but I try to avert my eyes from that as much as possible during the process.

Do you read a lot of short story collections yourself?

No. I teach at Syracuse. My reading life is dominated by the reading I do for teaching. I teach a class on the Russian short story. I really like reading history. Mainly because I'm finally at the point where I realise my experience of life has been fragmentary and minor. And you look at all these books and think, if I read this, I could expand my sense of what this life on earth is about. As I get older, I get desperate for a wider view of what else is going on. As an American of my time and generation, I've had an incredibly sheltered view of things. I've been reading about the American Civil War. I try to keep abreast of fiction, but not so insanely. If I hear about a book two or three times, I'll go and get it. I just read The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus, which was amazing. I want to read fiction that gets me fired up to work and that reminds me of the vitality of the task.

Tenth of December is out now on Bloomsbury

George Saunders gives a lecture at University of Richmond