Pretty interesting Authors@Google talk by official genius George Saunders. (You do know about the @Google talks, right? In which people of note or accomplishment — novelists, journalists, politicians, techies — speak at Google HQ and the results are recorded for free Interwebs distribution? An excellent way to waste a few hours.)

I’m not a Saunders obsessive (and he does inspire those), but he’s a very smart guy and a funny writer. Here’s one quote (about 10 minutes in) that meant something to me, as someone about to go spend three weeks reporting in Africa. He’s talking about his first real journalistic assignment, when a magazine sent him to the bizarro futureland of Dubai and told him to write something interesting. He had some rough ideas on what to do, but he didn’t want to get too constrained.

Before you go on a trip like that, as a writer, you’re anxious, because you don’t want to screw it up….for a writer, and I suppose for any creative person, the anxiety takes the form of massive conceptualizing on the front end — you want to know exactly what you’re gonna do before you do the trip. So for me the thrill was to have this sort of package story…and to go there and see the way it’s disrupted in reality. [Emphasis mine.]

A good lesson for me, at least, and I suspect other folks too — create a mental story line, yes, but search primarily for ways it’s wrong. I think that’s an excellent way to work in cases where your knowledge base is small (which it necessarily is in any parachute foreign correspondence).

Reminded me a bit of this Robert D. Kaplan piece from a few years back. (“The best writing, literary or journalistic, occurs under the loneliest of circumstances, when a writer encounters the evidence firsthand without anyone of his social, economic, or professional group nearby to help him filter it, or otherwise condition his opinions.”

Here’s the essay Saunders reads at the end.

While I’m linking Authors@Google videos, I’ll also recommend Friend of Crabwalk Rolf Potts, who has his usual sound advice. He also had a nice piece recently on his purchase of some prairie land in Kansas — plus this accompanying slideshow.

17 December 2007

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