
George Saunders on REVISION and CAUSALITY

Revision is the writer’s reading,
Verlyn Klinkenborg • Several Short Sentences About Writing
The movie producer and all-around mensch Stuart Cornfeld once told me that in a good screenplay, every structural unit needs to do two things: (1) be entertaining in its own right and (2) advance the story in a non-trivial way. We will henceforth refer to this as “the Cornfeld Principle.”
George Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
How, then, to proceed? Skipping over, for the moment, the first draft, assuming some existing text to work with, my method is this: I imagine a meter mounted in my forehead, with a P on this side (“Positive”) and an N on that side (“Negative”). I try to read what I’ve written the way a first-time reader might (“without hope and without despair”). W
... See moreGeorge Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo
the essence of the process is revision.