Later, I went one step further, by putting in some invented "historical" bits [into the Lincoln in the Bardo]. And reading those alongside the actual historical bits was like looking into a sort of a painful mirror, because "my" parts were so show-offy at first. They stood out because they were so flamboyant.
Some of Buddhist texts say that, in the moment after you die, you think of New Jersey and you go to New Jersey or you think of 1820 and you go to 1820. Also, all your sort of inner-symbology gets writ large. So, if you're a Christian, you see Christian iconography.
Whole swaths of the book [Lincoln in the Bardo] are made up of verbatim quotes from various historical sources, which I cut up and rearranged to form part of the narrative.
All storytelling is kind of that - there's a bit of text that you put pressure on that spits out some desire that a character has and then you follow that. The other part is that every scene raises an expectation in the reader's mind - that's part of its job is to make you look in and be curious.
In Catholicism, we would say you're going to be judged, so therefore you should do better now. For me, Buddhism is somewhat more workable because instead of saying I have to do good, it says I have to notice what I'm actually doing.
I actually do believe in life after death.
The way I understood purgatory - and maybe you've got a different version - but in Chicago in the '70s, the idea was it was like detention. You had screwed up and you go over there in purgatory and you sit there until the end of days and then we'll decide. You'd made your mistake, and you were in prison, and it's not terrible and it's not great, and you feel a little crappy because you were not in the presence of God.
I always describe writing a story as throwing bowling pins in the air and then catching them.
You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.
You go to the marketplace and there are seventeen consciousnesses moving in and out. Sometimes you want the same shirt that I want, and our thought bubbles collide a bit and that makes plot.
I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.
![Later, I went one step further, by putting in some invented historical bits [into the Lincoln in the Bardo]. And reading those alongside the actual historical bits was like looking into a sort of a painful mirror,](http://cdn.quoteddaily.com/images/george-saunders/later-i-went-one-step-further-by-putting-in-some-invented-historical-bits-into-the-lincoln-in-the-bardo-and.jpg)
