George Saunders

15:44Rick Rubin:So it's more of a voice thing. If I do that, if I say, okay, I'm now this person, the voice comes alive in a way that it doesn't, if I'm me out here looking at them. So it's just a kind of a trick. But it's still always your imagination of who that person is.

16:00George Saunders:It's not really who that person is. You're not channeling them.

16:03Rick Rubin:Right. And mostly they don't exist anyway. I mean, if I write about Lincoln, I mean, the real Lincoln would be kind of unknowable to us. But you could say, I'm me in a Lincoln suit.

16:11George Saunders:When you write characters, are they often based on people you know or know?

16:15Rick Rubin:No. I mean, some of that gets in. But my thing is it's like, so a story will be going along and it has a certain need at a certain point. so I need somebody like in Lincoln Lincoln would be walking across the graveyard and I need him to turn over here and see a ghost I don't have any thoughts about who which one just somebody start talking to me I think oh okay the word hunter comes into my mind and I start saying okay he's a hunter what would a hunter's afterlife look like and suddenly spontaneously there's this big pile of dead animals all the animals he's killed in his life so it's not anybody I ever knew but it's kind of just being generated.

16:53But other times I will see that I've put someone's speech patterns in

16:57Rick Rubin:there, somebody I know, or an anecdote that somebody told me will get in there. But I think with stories, there's always like, why do you need this thing? So the quality of the thing would be colored by why you need it. So let's say that the hero has a goal and I need somebody to impede him for moral reasons. Well, that person has to have that quality. And so then once I figure that out, I start throwing in bits from my own life. And it could be something from you and something from my uncle even put into the same package. I'm not a writer who says, I want to write a book about this person, but sometimes they just, stuff just gets in there.

17:35Rick Rubin:And if it's authentic, then like there's a story called Sea Oak. And there's a, the moment in the story was the character is a real working class guy, has got a girlfriend who's a little bit above him, and he's going to have to lose her. And he's going to have to lose her for class reasons. It wasn't an idea, but that's the way the story was set up. So I was looking for something that could happen to somebody for class reasons that would, you know, and I thought back to my own youth. I had a friend who was actually an ex-brother-in-law who was really an alcoholic. And one time I was on the couch with this girl I was really in love with, who was a couple notches ahead of me and this guy comes in just blunders into the house and starts pissing on the wall you know and and i'm there with this really happened it really happened yeah and there's this i'm there with this person i really kind of cherished you know and she's seeing this so all i could really say was this doesn't usually happen or you know but so that was a painful you know like embarrassing memory well ceo comes along and i need something i'm like okay you're in but at the same time i'm going to alter it to make it apropos of that situation so it was different.

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21:01Rick Rubin:How much of a story do you know before you start? Ideally, none. Literally, the best stories are the ones that just start with a little something, and then it grows outward. Sometimes, I mean, there are times when I do know a little more than that, but I think the move for me is to look really askance at that idea. Like, okay, yeah, yeah. You claim you're the story, but can you just wait out here a little bit while I investigate? If I find myself clinging to that, then it's going to be, I think Gerald Stern said if you start to write a poem about two dogs fucking and you write a poem about two dogs fucking then you wrote a poem about two dogs fucking you know so I think mostly the idea is I'm really dubious I just think you stay out

21:40George Saunders:it sounds like you could literally start with anything and the story that you are to tell will reveal itself

21:52Rick Rubin:regardless of where you're starting that's exactly it yeah exactly it

21:56George Saunders:That's really cool.

21:57Rick Rubin:Yeah. I mean, and it's, again, it's anxiety reducing because I don't have to have any ideas. I just have to have a first line. Yeah. I always say, you know, if we wanted to write a story, we could make that coffee cup talk, that glass of water talk, and your baseball hat talk. And if we spend enough time on it, all of our personal stuff would come out. Of course it would. Because if you revise enough, I mean, what are you revising from? Your own stuff. So I think a lot of young writers and I certainly get locked up on this idea of what's my great idea. I need a great idea. And you won't get one because there's no such thing, actually.

22:30Rick Rubin:There's no, the great idea is the one that allows you to grow it, you know, and it becomes a different idea. And is that, is that, I mean, I'm wondering is musically, if someone just goes in and plays a riff, can that sometimes lead to? Absolutely. Even when an artist has well-written material, I might suggest that they spend time just jamming.

22:50George Saunders:And then out of the jams, something comes up unexpected. No one's trying to write a song. They're having fun making music. And from that, something happens.

23:01Rick Rubin:Because in literature, it's not really the first line. I throw the first line at you. You go, oh, okay. You throw it back at me and I throw it back at you. It's the path that the story follows. it's actually interesting so again that's cool because it means there are no beautiful ideas or if there was you could put it in there but the story is going to start poking at it and it's going to start tearing it apart and it's going to be so in this sense a story is a dynamic it's like a linear temporal experience that unfolds this way and like a roller coaster you're not on the roller coaster going what does this mean you know you're just going oh shit we're going

23:37George Saunders:Do you ever think about what does it mean or not until after it's all done?

23:41Rick Rubin:Honestly, yeah. And this is the kind of cool thing. The kind of purest answer is no, never. But of course you do because you want to finish it and you want it to be good. So it's kind of like the voice that says, I know what it means. Would you like to know? They're like, yeah. Okay, come on in. It's about patriarchy. Oh, all right. Duly noted. Step out in the hall again. We'll find out. But it would be silly to not let that guy in.

24:06George Saunders:He knows something about it. When that happens, do you say, okay, I know it's about patriarchy now, or do you think, okay, it might be about patriarchy?

24:14Rick Rubin:Yeah, I know it's about patriarchy now, but we're going to see if it continues to want to be. There's a great Chicago writer named Stuart Dybeck, and he said the story is always talking to you, but you just have to listen. And so the story is saying, I think I'm about patriarchy. And you say, good for you. You might very well be. I hope you are. But at the same time, the minute I say, oh, yes, it is, then what happens with me is procedurally you know you have five pages and it's about patriarchy all right then since you know that you now know the next five pages and you're dead because the reader feels when you checked out and went on autopilot so you have to say yes conditionally you are but let's keep going and and stay fresh and see what else you want to be about you know and to me the fascinating thing is even that's not theoretical it's it's in this rereading process you know your little meat in your head i like it i like it i like it and suddenly i don't like it so to say in the spirit of specificity okay we don't have to panic you know we're not suddenly a bad artist having difficulty on page eight but i always like have an imaginary voice to the story like oh what's going on you know and the story says nothing just i'm fine just keep going no no really what's what's happening well i'm kind of boring you are boring poor baby you know and then then you can kind of go well yeah let's just not use boring and let's look a little closer and then the story will say it's basically saying i'm discontent with your over management of me and therefore i put in a cloudy section or i put in an alien invasion or some weird shit because i don't like where you're going and i'm i'm stopping in in the road so i kind of developed this idea of avoidance moments which is if a story has bad language or sometimes a factual error something that couldn't be true or like an unwarranted flashback or forward or change the point of view that's often the subconscious being very smart and saying i want the best for you if you keep going you're going to fuck up the story so can we pause here i'm going to make you pause by injecting something yucky in a traditional workshop format that would be an error and you would fix it but now i'm like no that's actually your layers of your subconscious process revealing yourself this is a draft six tendency totally honorable let's just note it you've got to to be continued sign up there on page six and one on 11 and one on 12 don't panic just remember they're there yeah and weirdly those places often speak to each other if you fix one you know them very much yeah and i note them and i also will kind of provide a technical description of why i stopped why it affected my reading energy so sometimes it's often semantic it's just a the sentence goes haywire just so i just make that correction and then and as you were saying i used to fix it but now i just say you know this is alone yeah and nine times out of ten the writer already knew it you know they knew and so you just say page nine and a half i know i know i love the idea that

27:14George Saunders:those roadblocks along the way speak to each other that's really a helpful idea because then it's the opposite of when it coming up you feeling like oh you've failed it's more like oh another clue to unlock the whole picture exactly it's great yeah and there's also i notice

27:29Rick Rubin:a pattern to that like as i get further along the revision process those become more specific and more aglow like i've got three now i've been working on this for six months i've got three places that you know on a scale of one to ten when i hit them they're like sixes the rest of the story might be eight or nine it's a six so at first you say well we can have a few sixes can't But then you say, well, you can, but what if you don't, you know? And then, yeah. And those are always sort of like, I wouldn't say thematically, but they're causally related. If you fix one, it throws light on the other two and limits the range of possibilities that you could do to solve them, you know?

28:07So that's cool because then when you have problems, you're like, in a certain way, the more problems I have and the more unsolvable they are, the better the story is going to be.

28:17Rick Rubin:It's got kind of bigger shoulders. It's like Houdini. You know, like if Houdini said, I'm going to now, I've got a windbreaker on, I'm not going to take it off. You'd be like, well, okay. You know, but if he really, you know, it's got chains and he's at the bottom of the Hudson and he's drunk or whatever, then he's got a real problem to get out of. So whenever, now, whenever I get a story that has really impossible problems that I would have, that would cause me to bail when I was 30, I'm like, oh, good. Now we're, the subconscious is giving me a higher place to go on the mountain. I love that.

28:47Rick Rubin:Amazing. Are you the best judge of your own work? Well, I think yes, because, well, only, only, I mean, maybe not once it goes out in the world, but no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm. During the process. Yeah, I'm a late show. I don't, I show nobody anything for a really long time. And it's interesting because I don't know how this must be in music because it's so communal. But for me to keep it private for a really long time, because then I can make those choices with complete openness. Like if someone says, I love your story, I can't change it. You know, it's harder to change it. Yeah, yeah. Someone says, I hate it.

29:18Rick Rubin:I just feel like throwing it out. So if it's me in private for a long time with it, I can mess it up. I can fix it. I can mess this part up and fix that part. And there's a lot of freedom. And then weirdly, at some point, all that iteration, it starts to solidify, you know, like at some point, like, yeah, okay, I'm not worried about that anymore. That's fixed itself. And then you get just these three little issues or four. And then I still feel like, yeah, everybody stay out. I'm going to decide this. And then at some point when I'm really done, I think I give it to my wife and she reads my work very emotionally.

29:50Rick Rubin:She knows me. She knows my cheap tricks. So if she has an emotional reaction, then I'm good to send it out. And if she says, oh yeah, pretty good.

29:58George Saunders:You know, then like, oh damn it.

30:00Rick Rubin:Yeah.

30:00George Saunders:Start over. Would she give you specific comments? Like I was with you up until page 40 or something like that? Not really. No,

30:06Rick Rubin:no. She just, at the end, she's either moved or she isn't. And I really value that because she's right. She knows. And so, and we, we both kind of came from kind of working class backgrounds and And art was a very specific thing for us, very important. And I think the kind of emotional aspect of it was important to us. We weren't necessarily so taken with wild postmodernism, but like Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolf, you know. So I trust her emotional reaction to it. She wants a work of art to be about something that we share, that people share instead of just like a pyrotechnics.

30:42George Saunders:Do you ever stop along the way to do research on something that you're writing?

30:48Rick Rubin:Sometimes. Well, it was Lincoln and the Bardo. I try not to get too in the weeds, but like, so I knew the date that that happened. So I had to kind of research what happened the two weeks before and what happened the next two weeks to see if some ideas that were in play made sense, which weirdly they did. But before I did that, it was just Lincoln on a graveyard on any old might. And then it improved in specificity because he was in a graveyard, I think, three weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation. And he was there four days after a big battle at Fort Donaldson where a lot of, like the Northern casualties were higher than they'd ever been.

31:23Rick Rubin:So then that specificity, out of all the stories about Lincoln in a graveyard, I'm telling this particular one. I think I'm more of a cartoonist, really. Like one of my big early things was Charlie Brown, the, you know, the peanuts thing. And that still works for me. Like kids with heads that are too big, you know, and no, the sidewalks come and go, you know, and I love that. And all of that in service of something that's, that's kind of deep when you get down to it, but it's cloaking the depths and a lot of sort of surface craziness. Is writing fiction and nonfiction the same thing? It ultimately kind of is.

31:55Rick Rubin:I feel, I feel less freedom with nonfiction as you would, but it's kind of the same except with non-fiction i go out and do a trip be cheap for 10 days and then just have a bunch of notes you know and recordings and stuff and then start writing it all and whatever glows gets in the story so the structure gets made by glow like these four things are even this one that shouldn't be important it's it writes really well so you're in the story and then the structure is just okay how do i connect those so that they kind of make sense and then sometimes with that you arrange the six glowing items and you go oh oh that's the meaning of that trip that i didn't even realize whereas with fiction you're kind of more well you're creating the incident and then trying to make it glow and so one of the real problems is which incidents are essential and do you ever know stewart kornfeld he was in la he was a stewart kornfeld really good he had been still a producer for a while and he had this idea he told me once it was like in narrative every structural unit has to do two things it has to be entertaining in its own right and it has to contribute to the meaning of the story in a non-trivial way so sometimes in fiction you you write something that's got a lot of jokes and it's funny and it's fast but it's just not it doesn't know what it's there for so that has to come out always well or you have to figure out why it's there and what i'll do is i'll take something like that and keep it in the back like you're really good i but stay outside is there ever a reason that a digression

33:27George Saunders:from the main story even if you don't understand it stays yes but but then kind of circularly

33:35Rick Rubin:therefore isn't meaningless it's just got a complicated meaning you know yeah you just don't know it right or you only know it in rereading like yeah that has to be there because you know one of the things with fiction it's we tend to reduce it to meaning but it's given off like a piece of music giving up incredible frequencies of nuance that it's not really meaning but it's flavor it's quality all that stuff so the beautiful thing is a reader even a just a kind of above average reader will catch all that stuff and she'll take it to the next thing so meaningless we wouldn't want to reduce meaning just to theme it's it's the whole thing you've received you're taking it to the next bit you know so yes i i say this in a way that makes it sound more mathematical than it is.

34:17Rick Rubin:But for example, if I had a really good bit, I would be really open to the ways that it was contributing, even if they weren't linear. Can fiction be more true than nonfiction? For me, yes. Yes. Because one reason for me is that I'm a person who, like, I don't like writing. This is weird. I don't like writing anything that would hurt someone's feelings. so if i was writing a profile of you it would be so complimentary and i would never have the impulse to go look what's the dark side i just don't i don't like it but with fiction i don't feel that compunction so i can let a certain pollyanna-ish part of me step aside for a minute and i can let the darkness and the kind of negative valences come in and then also there's something about a short story that is so free you know there's no like once upon a time what anything So in a certain way, it's almost like a mirror because if you start a totally made up story, which in my case is kind of cartoonish, then, well, what's the fuel of that story?

35:19Rick Rubin:It's a hundred percent my phenomenon. You know, it's, there's nothing else it could be. So I like that freedom. When I was raised Catholic, always was kind of a good kid, which is nice, you know, like socially it's okay. But when you, artistically, there's a, it takes a lot for me to be really honest, actually, you know. Yeah. So fiction, it's under the guise of being funny or entertaining. A lot of weird stuff comes out that I didn't know I... Do you think of yourself as a writer or a storyteller? I think a writer because I know a lot of people who can tell better stories than I can. A lot. And my stories, I don't have any good stories except when I start working on them.

35:53Rick Rubin:And again, the ones I make up are good. The ones that are like, here's something that happened to me, they're not good. Yeah. How are writing short stories different than writing a novel? Well, I think with the novel, at least I've only written one and there's one coming out. And the first one had a lot of white space, so I'm not sure. But for me, it was that the novel has some kind of through line, like with Lincoln, you know, that I'm going to put out there. And then I'm going to have fun fulfilling the through line. But I don't really know what it means. I don't know how I'm going to do it.

36:22Rick Rubin:With a story, in the best case, it's just literally just putting something down and then reacting to it. And, and the beautiful thing is out of that very playful process, something really serious can come out, you know, that something shaped and kind of momentous. So for me, the story is a little more, it's harder actually, because you don't know that it's going to work. It's like a joke sort of, you know? Yeah. And the story doesn't really like a novel. You know, if I say there's this guy named Gatsby and he wanted to meet his, you know, give his little girlfriend to go on. Okay. Did it work?

36:51Rick Rubin:And then I tell you in 280 pages, you find out. But with a story, you're not even sure what you're asking. The story starts, it creates its own context and its own meaning. And then it lands itself in a funny way that you couldn't have predicted. And a lot of times I think there's an overstory, which is, you know, will Okaki Okakievich get a new overcoat? And that's kind of novelistic. But then with a good short story, there's an understory that's coming up all the time that the writer doesn't even understand until it bursts through the surface. and that's when that story is a story. When you realize we were telling a story about this over here, but actually all along we were talking about this thing.

37:29Rick Rubin:Without knowing it while you're doing it. Without knowing it, yeah.

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39:10George Saunders:I read that your first published short story was one that basically was recounting a dream that you had. Is that true?

39:18Rick Rubin:that's true tell me about that yeah it was it was called a lack of order in the floating object room i had a dream of it was kind of like a theme park where you go in there they press a button and gravity gets suspended and stuff starts floating around so the narrator was the guy who runs that that place so that place came to me in my mind but also there was a narrating voice that that gave me these sentences were very unlike the ones i've been writing too modern and kind of you know yeah and so i just ah that's weird and i got up and started writing it down and found that i could continue in that mode and wrote for you know three or four pages and it's done you know and that's the story i got into syracuse with so that was the first time i ever had that experience of intuition being part of the yeah the game you know but it was in a way it was kind of bitter because i didn't it didn't sound anything like hemingway it didn't sound like anything classic or anything, but you know, that feeling of like, oh, I don't know what that is, but it's new.

40:13Rick Rubin:And in that newness, I'm like, well, that's, there's something of me in there that I didn't, that I maybe don't even like, but that's kind of what I've been hunting ever since. It's just that feeling of, of, I guess it's like blurting out. I had, I actually had a dream the other night of, I did an event with, in New York with Zadie Smith last week and on stage, she mentioned that book, Civil Warland and the voice of it. So in the dream, she was kind of saying, you know what you should go back to that i'm like how do i do it and the answer was i had in the dream i had the same feeling i had while i was writing that book which was fuck meaning fuck structure sound sound sound sound that's it if a sentence doesn't make sense if it's if it sounds good it's in and the sense will find me later yeah in general are you looking at the way the words look on the page or is it the way they sound that's a really smart it's a combination i never read aloud but it's like there's a voice reading it in my head that is also taking note of the look you purposely not read it out loud yeah because i don't my voice is kind of i would mangle whatever i you know and also i think i obviously a fast talker and i have a very quick monkey mind which is sometimes a real curse but when i'm reading on the page or when i'm doing this thing we're talking about where i'm kind of reading and it feels like i'm reading in the back of my throat while I'm not, I'm going a little faster than I could read it out loud and be understood.

41:36George Saunders:Are you mumbling it even silently? Because you say you're reading it faster than you can read it.

41:42Rick Rubin:Yeah.

41:43George Saunders:So are you getting every word or not?

41:46Rick Rubin:Yeah, more so than if I read it aloud, weirdly. And I can also, it's hard to talk about, but I can feel the inefficiencies in it as I'm scanning it, you know, and. Yeah, how important is rhythm in that? It's everything. So like sometimes there'll be a sentence, it'll go like that last part lop that off and then you have the first rhythm and then the correct rhythm will present and then words will come in to fill that writing a song yeah yeah have you written songs i've written no i want to talk to you about that i've never written a good song because in songwriting the literal thing takes over i want line two and i think oh what should line three be yeah or have a good exercise for you to try oh i'd love to have it based on

42:29George Saunders:something you said it's amazing you said exact same thing as the exercise i'm going to tell you

42:33Rick Rubin:for songwriting oh but but so so there is it's it is sound and somehow reading it faster than i it helps me figure out the sound better it's almost like turning up the the speed of a tape and you hear the rhythm a little more acutely or something so yeah i've never i've never thought about this before but yeah in music when you slow the music down you can learn more about the rhythm

42:55George Saunders:and when you speed it up. Speeding it up tends to fix the slightest imperfections. Slowing it down amplifies the imperfections.

43:06Rick Rubin:Because there's also something about, okay, so I'm reading the work from yesterday. And lately I noticed there's a second part of my brain that steps aside and goes, how's your reading mind today? And some days I'm just scheming it. I can't read it. I've read it so many times I can't process it anymore and I don't like it. this guy goes okay just note that you're in a shitty mood today you hate everything yeah duly noted okay then other days i'm like wow i'm the greatest every even this coffee stain is so good you know do you ever put something aside when you have that feeling of nothing's good not really i usually just note that i feel that way yeah yeah and and i i'm like a little less willing to make a change maybe but part of the value of this approach is that even if you mess it up on Wednesday, you can fix it on Thursday.

43:52Rick Rubin:And I remember where I've altered it, you know, but so the idea that you have some awareness of how adept you are at reading that day. And then the dream day is when everything is landing kind of like you're a first time reader. Like, oh, I can really hear this today. And those days I just try to keep like reading, reading, reading. Do you only ever work on one thing at a time? No. With stories, it's usually like I'll have in a perfect world, I have three or four going, and then I just kind of go in the morning like, Which one? Anybody fun? You know, and if one says, no, but I'm, you should finish me.

44:24Rick Rubin:I'm like, yeah, no, I'm not good.

44:25George Saunders:If one isn't working that day, you wouldn't stop working on it to start working on a different one.

44:32Rick Rubin:Sometimes, yeah, sometimes, yeah. Lately, I've got one story at home that might be an exception, but if I start something, I feel like I'll finish it. It might take six, 15 years even, but if something presented and I like any part of it, then I'm just going to keep, you know.

44:47George Saunders:And if you finish it, it means you'll finish it or it means you'll finish it and share it with the world?

44:52Rick Rubin:If I finish it, I'll share it. That's kind of my psychology.

44:56George Saunders:Okay.

44:56Rick Rubin:So there's a feeling of like, if there's four things, I want the most fun one to come. The one that I feel like, oh, yeah, I can do something with that. Yeah. Whereas if it seems tedious or it seems like, ah, that's the one I'm locked up on, then I just wait. Is there a market for short stories? Yeah. Yeah. Where? The New Yorker is the best place. And then I published one in The Atlantic this year. And then collections will tend to, sometimes they catch on, they sometimes sell. And what I'm finding out with the sub stack, because it's all about the short story and they are like amazing readers of stories, people who really kind of live their life by, by short stories.

45:30Rick Rubin:So we, you know, we'll put a story up there like this week, we did a Tolstoy thing and we get hundreds of comments and they're so like measured and courteous and smart. And then sometimes I'll say, does anybody speak Russian? Yeah, they do. And can you look at this part in the Russian? And are we misreading it? You are, you know, or sometimes I said any neuroscientists out there. Yes, there are. I mean, it gives me a lot of hope because you can certainly feel that there's not a market for stories. Yeah. And it's not a huge market, but I think the people who are into them are really into them. And they tend to be pretty interesting people.

46:02Rick Rubin:Describe the home you grew up in. It was in a south suburb of Chicago called Oak Forest. I think my dad bought it when he was 22, kind of a tract house. I just remember it as a place of so much fun, really. We had a pretty verbal, funny, extended family, and doors were always open and people coming in and out. And he worked for a coal company in Chicago, so he was always downtown, and I'd come back with some really interesting stories. If you wanted to drive into Chicago proper,

46:32George Saunders:how long would it take? Probably 20 minutes. And how often would you go into town? Not that often.

46:37Rick Rubin:In high school, we used to go down to the Earl of Old Town. I was always trying to catch John Prine or Steve Goodman. I thought they'd just be hanging out down there. But yeah, not that often. It was kind of a, more of a suburban life of me. And tell me about your parents. They're both still alive. They're 88 and doing great. So my dad was, he was in the Air Force, met my mom in Amarillo, Texas. They got married at 19 and then moved to Chicago, had me when they were 21.

47:01George Saunders:And why did they move to Chicago?

47:03Rick Rubin:That's where he was from. And so that was just, and so he worked for a coal company. He would go to the landlords and sell them coal, basically. So did that when I was a kid. And then when I was in high school, he quit that job and opened some restaurants. Their franchise is called Chicken Unlimited. And so I was his delivery boy. And we just got my license and started working the next day just driving the chicken van around. That was the chicken van life. It was a 77 Chevy van that had, for no reason, it had the carpet on the whole inside carpet. And we had something called a crest core in the back, which is steam here so you could keep the chicken hot when you were delivering.

47:41Rick Rubin:Had a little stove. so it was just a dream you know like just a kind of i mean one of the things is as a delivery guy you got to stand in somebody's house for a couple minutes you know while they were getting the money i always thought that was interesting because you would be kind of just have a few seconds to look around and see what kind of family it was what the vibe was and you were kind of told that the suburbs were homogeneous but then as you go into individual houses you say oh wow is this a really It's a city, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And my mom was just a real sweetheart from Texas. Very loving heart, you know.

48:14Rick Rubin:And whenever I would be like in the Catholic church and they would talk about love and acceptance, I think of her. Tell me about your relationship to school over the course of your life. I was a real weenie, good Catholic boy. Loved Catholicism, loved the nuns, pretty good student. So I was really good. And then somehow when I got to high school, I just couldn't be bothered. that didn't study a lick. Because of what? What else was happening? Music. Music was happening. Weightlifting was happening. Everything seemed really boring. But then, luckily for me, my junior year, there was a great teacher named Sherry Williams was her name, an English teacher.

48:52Rick Rubin:And she had a way of teaching novels and stories that I really, everybody spoke to me. And then she had, at that point, a boyfriend that she married named Joel Limblum, a geology teacher. And they kind of took an interest in me and basically persuaded me to go to college. And he actually called and got me in. He literally called the school of mines in Colorado and said, you won't see it in this kid's record, but he's worth a look. And so, yeah, and this being the 70s, they went, okay, have him go to summer school for 18 hours, take all the technical stuff. And if he gets this grade point, he can come.

49:23Rick Rubin:So I did, I did it. And I never, I literally had never worked at anything except guitar a little bit in sports. So I went out there and the funny thing was I had my transcript and I went out to the school of mines in Colorado. And I said, basically, you know, I'm George, I'm here for college. And they were like, ah, okay, hold on a second. And they took the transcript in the back room. They came as, okay, you're, you're in, but that was for engineering because he was a geologist. I admired him so much that I just thought I'd do it. He did.

49:51George Saunders:When did you decide to become a writer? And did you want to do something else before that?

49:55Rick Rubin:Yeah. I think before that, I mean, I, I think I wanted to be a musician really. And in fact, I was in a band right before I met this couple and the guy, he was a really good guitar player and he knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody in the Eagles. That was the thing. And he thought he could get us on as the opener for the opener. So that's my career plan. And we practiced for a couple of months. And then I just, then I met these teachers and I just thought I got up. I had a couple of experiences that made me realize it was kind of full of shit. And that was very helpful. Like I took a classical guitar lesson at this community college in Chicago.

50:30Rick Rubin:And I had kind of quote unquote learned this, that capricho arabe, that beautiful classical piece was way above my level, but I could sort of play the first part. And so I went into this guy and I played and I just wanted a mentor so badly, you know, somebody, cause I could tell I was adrift. So I played it for him. I played it probably the best I ever had, but you know, I was waiting for him to kind of put the crown on my head. And he said, he leaned away and he said, I'm going to tell you something. He said if you don't change the way you're living you're going to be a very unhappy adult. And it just I mean it stung.

51:02Rick Rubin:Based on your guitar player. Yeah. Yeah. And he must have seen that I was kind of stung by it. And then he explained that my tone. I think anybody would be stunned by that. Yeah. Based on guitar playing. You're 17. You know. I have to do my best. But it was interesting because I still think about that guy and that was a long time ago. Yeah. And then what he did was he gave me those Segovia scales. You know it was really slow. And he gave me a metronome setting that was insultingly slow. It was so slow, you know? Okay. So I started doing it and sure enough, my tone got better and I could see that I wasn't a thoughtful player.

51:30Rick Rubin:I was just, uh, you know, doing it fast. And so, so he did me a favor, but I had a grudge against him and I couldn't really continue. But that, so that was one big thing. And then that teacher, Joel Lindblom took me to kind of an all Chicago city science fair with kids my own age were doing this stuff. And he was such a sweet guy and he just took me there and I hadn't done any work, literally and these kids were building, you know, nuclear power plants and I don't know, everything. You know, we just walked around and he let that sink in, you know, that these are people my age who were applying.

52:03Rick Rubin:Yeah. The thing that I love so much is I get very moved by this because he never, there was not a single touch of judgment, you know, he just let me look at it. And he, he knew that it was getting in there.

52:14George Saunders:Was your reaction to that? I can't do this or I'm never going to do

52:18Rick Rubin:this or i need to focus more yes well actually the first reaction was oh shit i haven't done this yeah and they have you know what does that say about what i'm doing and then it wasn't really that i could but i had to try that was the feeling like and so then a lot of my ambition and i had a lot it got channeled into not flunking out of engineering school so i went to this place called the color of school of mines in golden which is a i studied geophysics so it was all all science all the time. So that was deep because I wasn't good at it. I really wasn't good at it. And I worked really hard, which was great for an artist, you know, to learn that effort doesn't equal results.

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54:38Rick Rubin:When did you start teaching writing? Years later So I was writing a little bit there But I wasn't reading well I was reading like kind of weird self-help stuff and Khalil Gibran and kind of. So I didn't start teaching until many, many years. I'd been out of the Syracuse program. I was working as an engineer and wrote my first book and had a chance to go teach there for a year. And I sensed correctly that that would be, would give me a lot more time to work. What was the first book? It was called Civil War Land and Bad Decline, book of short stories. Wrote it at work actually. And was it well received?

55:12Rick Rubin:Critically, yeah. It didn't sell very much, but it was critically, had a couple of good reviews that kind of made it. Yeah, and I wrote that one at work. I was just at this engineering job and stealing time here and there. So it was a big, and I was 38, so I wasn't a prodigy, you know. But so that got me this chance to teach at Syracuse for a year, which then grew into a full-time gig. It was nice because by that time, we had our two kids, and I already had a sort of a life being a tech writer. And so there was a lot of the stuff that I still write about was already in my experience, you know, from being.

55:44Rick Rubin:How do you learn to teach writing? I think it was gradually, you know, you first you think the job is to find mistakes and fix them for your value system. That doesn't work. And then slowly you see what works, I guess. It must be like you see if I do it this way, the kid stiffens up and leaves in a huff. If I do it this way, they lean in and the next draft is more interesting. So it became less and less talking and more listening over the years. How long did it take to get good at teaching it? I think I'm still working on it, but I would say there was a big jump after five years or so because then I just got kind of sick of the sound of my voice haranguing somebody or coaching somebody.

56:32Rick Rubin:Like if I had a conference with somebody, we were talking about their work. If I could just shut up for the first three minutes, they would tell me and they would always identify exactly what I had identified if I gave them enough time.

56:45George Saunders:Yeah.

56:46Rick Rubin:Then you're not the person saying there's something. You're not the doctor saying you're sick. You're the doctor saying, oh, you feel that you're sick. And then your advice is.

56:55George Saunders:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

56:56Rick Rubin:Yes, but it took a long time because the insecurity of being somebody who wasn't exactly trained in English, you know, in English education, being faced with these, we get like 700 applications and pick six people. So they're great. So early on, I was so intimidated by that that I thought the only way to counter the intimidation is with information, you know. So it's been a sweet part of it is to go, oh, yeah, actually 98 % of the work is being done by the student.

57:21George Saunders:Yeah.

57:22Rick Rubin:Yeah. Is that something that brings? Absolutely.

57:26George Saunders:Yeah, yeah, yeah. The less my fingers are involved in the process, the better it's going to be. It's only like in an emergency situation do I step in. Right, right. You know, someone's drowning. Right, right. In general, in the best versions, it sort of happens by itself. And if there's something that I feel when I'm listening, I can share what I'm feeling. but it's never mistakes or what could be better right it's more like let's look at this part like this part may not be as good as the rest why is that or it seems like there's a better way to do this yeah you know what about this the sonic things because there are

58:17Rick Rubin:And I think there's a corollary in writing. There are things happening off the page in a sense. They're very real and they're actually what makes great and good different. But with what I do, you just kind of, it's there and you let it stay or you subtract from it. But at some point you're making decisions on what the sonic landscape looks like, right?

58:36George Saunders:I try to have it be as whatever they bring. Like there was a time earlier in my career when we would try to make it sound like something that we liked the way it sounded. Right. And we don't do that anymore. Like the idea of the best snare drum sound is on this album. So if we try to make our snare drum sound like the sound on that album, that's going to be best. Yeah. That is never best. That's my Hemingway years. And that's that thing about, about. Yeah. It's always for what we have, what's the best version of what it is, not trying to make it anything else. Right. Same. Same. Yeah.

59:19Rick Rubin:Yeah. I find that with that mindset, you can let it be a lot more things. Yeah. At the outset. For sure.

59:25George Saunders:And it also takes patience because it's not formulaic in any way. Right. It becomes what it wants to be over time. Right. but if there's any expectation it's going to be good tomorrow or in a week, that's totally out of our control. Right.

59:43Rick Rubin:Scary. And I think that's what a listener feels is that you went to the scary place and you, you know, I think Toni Morrison, my wife studied with Toni Morrison. At one point she said something about in the early part of her books, she's kind of digging out a foundation and she doesn't control how deep it goes. But the deeper it goes, the higher the building. And the reader feels that.

1:00:03George Saunders:How important is setting when you're writing, where the story takes place?

1:00:07Rick Rubin:For me, not that much. And I think that's actually a reflection of a kind of value system I have. I don't really write very well. Like, I had to describe this beautiful place. I couldn't. It would be kind of so beautiful, you know.

1:00:21George Saunders:So you say you don't have a descriptive style.

1:00:23Rick Rubin:I don't really. Okay. Except what happens is, so that means I have to emphasize something else, which is usually action or dialogue, something to happen. Then a lot of times the description will come in just very lightly, almost just like one line of something that sets you in a certain place. So I had a line in a store called ComCom, which the guy's walking through some woods, woods, I don't know anything about trees, you know? So I just said, well, there's, I don't remember the line, but it's like there's three toilet seats with price tags on them there. So that's setting. I think what I do a lot is I assume that if I say graveyard, you give me a graveyard.

1:00:58And then there can be some individualization of the graveyard. Earlier, you gave an example of Abraham Lincoln is walking over a bridge.

1:01:08George Saunders:He notices something, he looks, and you say, it's a hunter. You decide it's a hunter. If your first thought is, it's a hunter, is it always a hunter for the rest of the story? Or do you ever say, okay, it's a hunter, and then you play that scenario out, and then you realize, no, you know, it's not a hunter. it's going to be something else.

1:01:28Rick Rubin:It could, yeah. You know, it's funny. Sometimes those ideas, they come in through the window and they trip.

1:01:32George Saunders:Yeah.

1:01:33Rick Rubin:And it's evermore, it's an idea that trips and it's got a little, it doesn't quite communicate. So those I definitely will adjust. But in the ideal case, like that one, it was a ghost of this guy, a hunter. The idea came up and the words just came right in behind it. And that had a kind of, had a kind of authority that doesn't go away, you know? Yeah, yeah. So there's, that Russian writer, Isaac Babel said something like, a good sentence is like, You throw the switch once and there it is, you know, whereas a less good sentence is you're kind of deciding and you're thinking and you're conceptualizing and it kind of comes up a little lumpy.

1:02:06But for me, there's a moment where the, you asked earlier about how the words look on the page.

1:02:11Rick Rubin:And I think that is important. Sometimes the image or the thought and the sentence wrapping come just the same moment. And that has authority and authority in that sense. it's also respect for the reader somehow and that it's the glue that pulls them in so there are times when that just happens and you go just leave it alone you know and other times you have to work towards it i think a little bit but when it happens you didn't decide that it happened it happened it just happened yeah yeah but it's almost like two trains coming to the station at once you know the the idea and the sentence and boom they're just there and then i can go through hundreds of drafts and that sentence just stays there because it's authentic you know yeah would

1:02:52George Saunders:your creative writing class be similar to other creative writing classes?

1:02:58Rick Rubin:I think it's pretty, it's that workshop model. So it's pretty similar. And the only thing that I think it's not just me, but a lot of people do are doing now is kind of critiquing that method because that's a little bit of a, I mean, it's an economic construct that they came up with in the sixties to get writers and readers paid, you know? And, you know, you think about like the way we're talking about this, if there were seven people here and we're talking about Fred's story, that discourse is always beneath the level of mystery. You know, you're articulating. So you're, you know, so there, it's a little bit good to be suspicious of the form itself.

1:03:30Rick Rubin:So we do a lot of talking about how are we doing as a group? Are there things we're missing? Something I've done lately is to say, let's not go longer than we have to, because that's one thing in those kind of meetings is you got an hour and a half. So you do all the essential work in 45 minutes, and then suddenly you're talking about the color scheme or something that's not, it's more context so i think i just try to be a little wary of the how far below the activity the articulation falls you know like because i mean you know i'm sure if you're having a session that's really like up here and then someone's oh that was good and you start yapping about it somehow it's not i think it's okay to talk about it yeah but at the same time like if you just had your peak sexual experience you could talk about it and maybe you would like to but it's not the same

1:04:14George Saunders:yeah are there any accepted rules of writing that it would be better not to learn

1:04:20Rick Rubin:i think don't worry about plot that is a word that gives people a lot of conniptions and i don't think it's avoid plot or the word plot you're still going to have plot i mean a lot of the ways that we talk about writing are post-writing descriptions of things that happened that were magical and now we're going to name them yeah so that's okay and that's criticism and it's important. But then when you think about the moment that you did it, I'm not ever thinking about plot or theme or character. That's not how it works. So you do a student a disservice if you say, well, how's your plot? You know, who could do that?

1:04:55Rick Rubin:So it's interesting because the one thing that might be different in my classes, I really want to talk about, as you did in your book so beautifully, what does it feel like in the moment of creation? What's your mind doing? And what can we do to nurture that state? What are the things that peck at it and take us down from that state? Hard to talk about, but when you, with writing, it's nice because you have the text. So in editing it, you can sort of say, if six people are editing a text and everybody loves page three, then you can say to the writer, think about where were you, you know, what was going on when you wrote that?

1:05:31Rick Rubin:That's probably a good state for you, you know, that kind of thing. I think of it as telescope like there's the critical end of the telescope which describes and elucidates and analyzes and that's really useful and it can help the creative but the other side of the telescope is something much more mysterious are you superstitious no no i got rid of that because i that first book i wrote at work so it was like there was no time for it yeah i couldn't design the ideal writing moment. So I just forget it. Are you superstitious about anything in life? I'm OCD, which is kind of similar, but no, I'm not.

1:06:09Rick Rubin:Describe the OCD. It's kind of mostly in the positive sense, it's rewriting with no limit. In the negative sense, it's kind of a self-suspicion, I guess, which is very close to being a good editor, but not quite. Are you a perfectionist? Yes, yes. But I think also, honestly, I would say maybe from Buddhism, I've become a merciful perfectionist, which is to say perfect really is the enemy of good. So pretend to be a perfectionist until you start being a pain in the ass and then stop because you're going to drive yourself into the ditch. Because I published late, I had a real palpable period where I was like, okay, all your life you thought you're going to be a writer.

1:06:50Rick Rubin:It looks like you're not. Are you okay with that? you know and so once i got going i was like okay somehow i just said i'm not gonna let neurosis get in the way of productivity can we agree on that and for once in my life is that i agree with myself yeah we can so i don't tend to be superstitious or like if i have a book that's successful i have about two days of going oh no you peaked and i'm like that's so babyish don't do that that's selfish and it's kind of it's contradictory to the experience you had while you were writing it, which you, the self went away. So don't be all babish about that.

1:07:24Rick Rubin:This, you've got some gifts to keep giving. So, so, so in many, many ways, there's a kind of a, I would say for me, fairly high functioning productivity mind that says, if that's going to get us in the weeds, let's not do that. You know? Yeah.

1:07:38George Saunders:Are you OCD outside of your work? A little bit, probably not clinically, but. In what ways might it show up in?

1:07:45Rick Rubin:Mostly just, I'll, I'll go to a party and say something and go, oh my God, what did I say? or feel negative about things that I've said or done that in the light of day weren't much. So I think that's a form of ego, actually, and imperfectionism. I couldn't possibly be the guy who says something stupid at a party.

1:08:01George Saunders:There's Parton Swim in the Pond where you're commenting on a section of Tolstoy and you say the writing leaves you with envy and resentment. Yeah. Was that sarcastic? No. Tell me about that.

1:08:15Rick Rubin:That's actually receding a little bit as I get older. When I was young, it killed me. when somebody was so good. Really? Yeah. Yeah. It was very egotistical. I just, I just wanted to be the only good one. I think that was, yeah. And then. Are you competitive in life? Yes. Although less and less. I, I think at that point I hadn't done anything. I see. So I just wanted to be the best at this thing I'd never tried. And then as I, as you get into it, it's a de-ego-fying practice. And so you go, well, it doesn't matter if, if I did it, it matters that it got done. Yes. And now, of course that comes and goes.

1:08:44Rick Rubin:Then when you're done, you're like, I did it. But, but no, for sure. I, I think I read Tolstoy now. I'm like, God. But for the first time in my life, I'm like, yeah, he's great. He's greater than you'll ever be. And that's okay. But when I was younger, that really got under my skin somehow, you know, but the more I did it, the less that feeling was. Do you pray? I meditate, which is, yeah, very similar. Yeah. And how do you meditate? Well, lately not enough, but we have practices that are called pujas. They're kind of, they're actually very similar to a Catholic mass. So they're kind of guided visualizations with chanting and you just.

1:09:17Rick Rubin:Do you listen to something or no? Yes, I do because I don't, it's in Sanskrit. And so I, there's a text and then there's a tape or a recording. And is it melodic? Is it chanting? It's kind of melodic, but in kind of pentonic, you know, it's like, it's not wildly melodic, but it's, yeah. Would you say it's hypnotic? Not really. No, no. I don't know how, actually, you know, I'm, I had a friend who was a really serious practitioner and he said, well, I would describe you as a fellow traveler, you And I talk too much about it and know too little. But for me, it seems like it's really similar to the Catholic Mass, which was, as I experienced it, it was a, you were imagining making offerings.

1:09:57Rick Rubin:You were imagining getting blessings. Yes. And somehow the effect of that when I was doing it more was that a certain kind of ambient negative part of my mind that I thought was me would kind of just go quiet. And then I said, oh, look, there's something else there. So it was like a de-identification process. And then in the absence of that strong identification with self, something else would come up that was very positive.

1:10:24George Saunders:If it wasn't for your time in the church, would you be a different person today?

1:10:30Rick Rubin:Oh, yes. I think the sacraments, it's the first time that you realize your everyday mind isn't the only.

1:10:38George Saunders:Yeah.

1:10:40Rick Rubin:And so you go there every week to just get that reminder every week. And I had some... It's like practice. Yeah. Like any sitting practice, same. Exactly. Because you can't, you know, because it's funny how quickly you just go back to your regular self. But then the ghost, you know, you see that. Were you a spiritual young fellow?

1:10:56George Saunders:Were you... I learned to meditate when I was 14. Wow. And I was always interested in metaphysical things before that, but I didn't have a form to practice. And then when I learned to meditate, it took over. And it was a real miracle that I got to learn because no one in my family did it. No one I knew did it. It just worked out.

1:11:14Rick Rubin:And what tradition are you, would you describe? I learned TM at that time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. I mean, I just remember the first time I was out 40 and we had our kids and I, I didn't have a technique, but I was just trying, I was trying to make my thoughts stop. That was the goal. Just noticing that little split second between thought and speech suddenly just, oh, what a blessing when you have little kids, you know, you can have an urge to correct and go, that's incredible.

1:11:37George Saunders:Or the need to say how you think it is. Yeah. Right. Who cares? Who cares? And if you don't say it, the moment goes by and you're... And what's something that you don't believe now that you believed when you were younger?

1:11:52Rick Rubin:So many. Well, it's kind of what we were just talking about. When I was younger, I came from Chicago, kind of working class, had a little macho periods. And I think I was much more a believer that one did great things. One must. You asserted yourself by talking and acting. And that, thankfully, has started to fade. And one of the things about having a public life is that that delusion gets re-enlivened. Sometimes you get a lot of attention. You're like, oh. But I really like the fact that if I looked at myself at 18, I just wanted to be noticed. I wanted to be great at something. And it was all me, me, me, me.

1:12:34And thankfully, it's kind of a little more like you can sort of watch the river go by

1:12:38Rick Rubin:and the river still goes by and you don't have to, the river doesn't care that you're watching it, you know, or that you're talking about it. But so in writing, it's interesting because then it purifies the activity to where maybe even 10 years ago, I was on a kind of a, I wanted to write my great book. and then now i'm kind of like well yeah i do but only to see if it can be done you know because it's that feeling of something secret then flowing out through process and being real i love that and whether it's credited or not or whether i did it or not i don't care as much i would actually like to just finish that one and do that do the next one and tell me something

1:13:20George Saunders:you've changed your mind about recently?

1:13:23Rick Rubin:Well, it would have to do with, we have a dog at home who's sick. And I can feel my sense of myself as being a flawless person or a flawless caregiver giving away. And just I'm like, what? It's hard, you know, she's old. You're going to make mistakes, you know? And so that, I mean, that's an ongoing thing. But on the good days, I feel like I'm such a great owner, such a loving, compassionate person. And then on the bad days, I'm like, you're fucking everything up. And I'm a little more comfortable with that flux now. Like, oh, yeah. So, so whoever you are, you're not exclusively either one of those two things.

1:13:58And then noticing the way that my sort of day-to-day pleasure has to do with identifying with the first one and subduing the second one.

1:14:07Rick Rubin:And so I'm trying, I'm thinking, I wonder what it'd be like if I really was really free of ego and really could say that guy's going through a hard time or that guy's doing a good job instead of you know denying the difficult valences and i'm not sure if that makes sense but i've changed my mind about i guess well one thinking of myself as someone who never never fucks up but two with that that might be you know okay yeah yeah in general would you say you're hard on yourself yes yeah except when i'm way too easy but yeah i think i think i'm pretty hard on myself and would you say you're equally hard on other people or no It's only you.

1:14:43Rick Rubin:In fact, one of the things I sometimes will do if I get myself in a spiral is go, okay, if this was your friend, what would you say? But I think, you know, my students, I talk about this, that whatever manifests in yourself, I mean, naturally we judge it, but we can also use it. So for me, like I'm very hard on myself, which in editing is a great blessing.

1:15:05George Saunders:Yeah.

1:15:05Rick Rubin:I don't know how I would do it otherwise. So in that arena, I'm going to accept it. then when you get into some other area, can you be a little bit easier? And actually you can, you know, you can. Yeah. Let me ask you something. At this point, and this is relevant to my experience, when you get up in the morning and you're thinking about work, what's motivating you now at this point in your life? Just whatever is on the schedule for that day. I don't think passed. It just... Would you describe yourself as ambitious still or ambitious ever or is that a word that doesn't i want to do good things i feel like to live up to

1:15:46George Saunders:my purpose there's work to do i love that yeah yeah ambitious is not the word i would use right right ambitious would be what am i going to do to make the outcome happen and that's not what it is

1:16:00Rick Rubin:right when you look at a let's say a day a day in the studio or whatever you're doing yeah What are the pleasures? What are the peak pleasures?

1:16:10George Saunders:Yeah. When nothing sounds good and then all of a sudden it comes together, it's the most exciting feeling. And you know that when it happens. Feel it. Everybody feels it. Yeah. Everybody feels it. Yeah. It's a very exciting feeling. It's like, it's probably the reason to continue doing it. The feeling of nothing's happening and then all of a sudden something's happening, that moment of spark of creation is so exciting. Yeah. Thrilling. It's like magic.

1:16:38Rick Rubin:And you're having it with other people, which is beautiful.

1:16:40George Saunders:Not always. Sometimes I could be working on an idea myself. Right. And it just comes together. Right. Right. But most often it's with other people.

1:16:49Rick Rubin:I call that the, in the story, it's when the face comes out of the stone. It's just been some words and suddenly it's an actual wow. Man, okay. So I can answer this question, what makes music good? and I can say presence, authenticity, blah, blah, blah. But is there a stratum of descriptors above that that's more?

1:17:08George Saunders:Authenticity is a big part of it because when you hear it, you hear the artist's belief in what they're doing. It doesn't have to be true what they're doing. It has nothing to do with truth. It has to do with their truth. If someone is spilling their guts about something you don't agree with, it's still moving to us it's that it's someone being human and sharing being human what that feels like right it could be good or bad okay so david foster wallace used to talk about

1:17:41Rick Rubin:he said with young writers there's there's some people who think if they're feeling it while they're writing it it's good writing and then the more advanced idea is well you could use that feeling but it has to convey feeling to the reader in other words if i just feel like i'm in a yeah I'm stoned and I'm typing. Yeah, yeah. Doesn't necessarily communicate to you. So let's say that somebody's playing a guitar solo. I mean, presumably they could be thinking about something totally different. And yet authenticity is still there. Yes. So I can understand a songwriter emoting authentically and being in the moment.

1:18:17But say for a mix or for an instrumentalist, why was one solo sell and the other one doesn't?

1:18:25Rick Rubin:or move you. And I know it's kind of, you know when you see it, but.

1:18:29George Saunders:Yeah. I don't think it's an answerable question. That said, I now think, and this is a new thought, it might have more to do with rhythm than anything else. There was a time I would have thought, well, it could be the melody, could be the tone, could be the context. I'm feeling more and more the internal rhythmic feel

1:18:55Rick Rubin:is maybe the most important thing of anything. Now, does that have a relation to presence? Because in other words, if I'm kind of a...

1:19:03George Saunders:I don't know if it does. Maybe something else. Presence is another one of the things that when you feel it, you know it. It's hard to say what it is, but you can feel it. I would describe presence as someone truly inhabiting whatever the thing is. almost as if who they are is no longer around and just this thing is appearing. I would call presence like God steps in.

1:19:35Rick Rubin:Yeah. So that has nothing to do necessarily with the meaning of the song. It just has the moment of it.

1:19:40George Saunders:Yeah.

1:19:41Rick Rubin:Now that's beautiful. I love that. God steps in. And like in writing terms, there is a corollary because if I'm present as a person, then, you know, that moment we talk about where the trains come in together, if I'm on the track going, no, no, no, even a little bit, it impacts the feeling, which I wonder if that has something to do with this rhythmic idea. Like if somebody is fully... If someone's thinking about it,

1:20:06George Saunders:it won't be good. Right. It can't be. Right. The best version is they're gone. Yeah. And then only when they get to hear it back do they understand what happened. transcendent experience yes but see for me that it's interesting the transcendent if i would have

1:20:24Rick Rubin:heard that a few years ago i would have thought oh you're just like in some crazy mystical state but in writing it's not at all it's just you just step out of the room and for a second and then you're you're back you know you know you're not in control of it happening you can certainly get

1:20:41George Saunders:in the way of it happening but you can't make it happen right right you just have to wait yeah Yeah. Yeah. It won't happen if you're not participating. Right. You can't just think it'll happen sometime. You have to show up. Yes. But you can't make it happen.

1:20:58Rick Rubin:And in writing, that's right. And in writing, one of the ways you make it happen is to be a little conceptual. You're kind of going, oh, this is a story about patriarchy. Yeah. And then at some point your mind goes, step back. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible. I think that's where it kind of, it kind of brushes up against the meditators because in a given writing hour yeah you're doing all the things wrong and all the things right and it's kind of i can i can be working and just literally be gone do something go oh the new yorker's gonna love that i'm back so yeah you know do you write for one hour is that no no no i write for whatever i can what's your schedule or is there one it's kind of loose i i mean on a perfect day i would just get up and walk the dog and come up and just spend five or six hours.

1:21:42Rick Rubin:But there's kind of an inner rhythm. Like if I have a hard copy, marking it up and then put it in once, read it again and do that about three times. And then at some point I start to make mistakes. I can tell I'm just not sharpness isn't there. So just quit, but I can go usually four or five hours.

1:22:00George Saunders:When you're not working, do you ever have an idea and make a note? Yes. Right.

1:22:05Rick Rubin:How often? Not too often. When I was younger, I'd always be thinking about it and then have an idea which is different than if the idea just comes i find yes so i don't i tend to just if an idea comes to me out of nowhere there'll be a split second reaction like oh yeah then i'll do it but there's a slight degradation of that which is like it's a little more of a know-it-all feeling like here's what you should do you know and if that comes to me i know it's not going to work because it's you know it's almost like i think certain ideas come purely out other subconscious then when you go to put in it just folds in perfectly and others are like put me in put me in and you it doesn't the surface doesn't want it in there you know so i kind of learned a little bit to be really skeptical same with dreams like most dreams aren't stories but do you write your dreams no unless it's a good one yeah but i had the thing one time after that lincoln and the bardo came out i just had a tour and i was so happy but also a little bit anxious about the next thing and i had a dream and in the dream i could see the second book it was just huge book and everything and i woke up and i said i should write this down no i'll just write down the title that'll be enough and the title was custer in the bardo that didn't work out but yeah do you know that writer juno diaz he he's really good and he had a first book of stories that was really beautiful and he had a dream one night of of the eight stories in the book and they were all color-coded different sections were color-coded and he understood that i remember like all the purple stuff could be cut and he went in and took it out yeah that was like really

1:23:35George Saunders:bad stuff does your knowledge of past writers shape your work yes how probably well these days

1:23:44Rick Rubin:just it's like i read google and i think oh god i love this about that let's try to get in that party a little bit just just like that just almost like they're up on this high level and you say inspired by yeah or you know i think a lot about permission giving like i read google and his shit it's so crazy really you know and it just makes me think okay so you can do that you can go there but honestly the last couple years i'm kind of like i read them just to be kind of reminded that greatness exists and go okay i can't go there and that flavor but i can go there in my flavor so I hope I can, you know, just like that.

1:24:25George Saunders:Regarding Tolstoy, you said, after a series of fact statements, simple opinion stated in the same way has more credibility. Is that a usable trick? Or is it just something you noticed in the writing?

1:24:39Rick Rubin:I think it's true because if, okay, so in fiction, you know that I'm making it up. Yeah. And so if I say something really high concept and personal, you're going to go, oh, maybe, but that's your opinion. but if I describe the light on the table very well and I describe three or four other things that are very familiar to you, then you're kind of sitting over here with me. But Tolstoy also, he would be incredibly objective about even psychological states. He was so good at it that it landed in the same register as a description of a horse. And even when he would kind of cross over into opinion, he does it in the same syntactical thing.

1:25:17Rick Rubin:So it's a little tricky. He can fool you a little bit with that. And do you think he knew what he was doing or no? I think he was a person with a lot of authority, a lot of confidence. So whatever he said, he said it in a simple objective sentence because he knew it was true, including God and everything. So I think when you read descriptions of him, people really were like taken by his charisma and his certainty. So I think he, but the thing about him that's amazing is he can do that in one character and then he can run around to the other side of the table and do it from another character. point of view too.

1:25:50Rick Rubin:And they both sound equally certain and equally real. So I think that's what makes them so amazing. He's God going into your head and accepting everything he finds and describing it in these precise sentences. Then he comes over here in mine, he does the same thing, and then he just lets it sit there, you know, and you're kind of like, what's true? And he said, I'm God. It's all true.

1:26:09George Saunders:On some level, would you say you're all of the characters in your stories? Yeah.

1:26:14Rick Rubin:I mean, you could understand the story as just an argument objectified. You know, You have a story that takes up this topic and you let a bunch of people opine on it, but they're all coming from you. And I think what I'm starting to think now is that the highest level of that craft is, like I just described it, to let all those voices come out, calibrate the arguments so all of them are substantial. Instead of when you're younger, you want to put your finger on the scale and say, this is my belief. Yeah. But the Chekhov and that both are gooseberries. He just is happening as good or bad. Yeah.

1:26:47Rick Rubin:you have to believe what you're writing you have to believe in it from the point of view of the person who's saying it i think you know they have to believe they have to believe and you have to really get on their team yeah and let them believe it and articulate it in a way that's genuine to them and that's i mean it's tricky because it's stagecraft i mean if i'm if i'm trying to be a trump supporter i can get pretty far there but but then there's a little bit of mystery and so at that point you can make some mistakes you can make somebody more sympathetic than they should be you can make them less sympathetic you can give them a reason that isn't authentic so it's tricky work you know that inhabiting other people but i think to go back to the charlie brown thing i mean if i put six people around the table none of them are real they're all emanations of me and what we're doing is not trying to make a catalog of real people we're trying to get some energy going, you know, that's, I think sometimes a story is like a, like a board and it controls light, you know, so you're just adjusting the things to make the most light come off of the work of art.

1:27:51Rick Rubin:What does it mean? I don't know, but that's the brightest I can make it.

1:27:54George Saunders:Have you ever written anything and come to realize it means something different than you thought it meant? That's the, actually the goal, I think.

1:28:01Rick Rubin:Or maybe to find out there were overtones that you didn't know were going to come out, you know, and.

1:28:05George Saunders:If you write something and everyone who reads it thinks it means the same thing? Have you succeeded or failed?

1:28:14Rick Rubin:You know, Christmas Carol, everybody knows what that means and they're right, you know. So I think it can go either way. In my personal thing, I'm trying to get more where there's less agreement because my story sometimes will be, you know where you stand, you know where I stand, we all, and it happens, you know. And this new book I just wrote, it's interesting. It's giving off complicated light, which I was happy about.

1:28:37George Saunders:Yeah. It sounds more honest, like it's complicated.

1:28:41Rick Rubin:It's like Chico said, work of art doesn't have to solve a problem. It just has to formulate it correctly.

1:28:46George Saunders:Yeah.

1:28:47Rick Rubin:When you finish a piece, do you know where the pops are? Like in a six-minute piece, do you know where the listener is going to go? Yeah.

1:28:56George Saunders:I just know where I feel it, and I assume they'll feel it in the same places. But if they don't, or if they feel it somewhere else, nobody's wrong. It just is what it is. the only thing I have to go on is how I feel. That's my only metric.

1:29:12Rick Rubin:Right. Yeah. But what I've, I think I believe this is that if I'm, so if I'm reading my work, let's say it's revising my own piece. I read something happens on page five. I kind of assume that you're going to feel that too. And that's part of that communication thing. Like if I, if my heart rose at this place, I think my imaginary reader's heart is going to rise at that place. That's the contract. I think I have to, I have to have that idea. But in practice, it's just watching myself.

1:29:39George Saunders:Yeah.

1:29:39Rick Rubin:Yeah.

1:29:40George Saunders:You can't know.

1:29:41Rick Rubin:You can't know.

1:29:44George Saunders:What do you think it was about Khalil Jabram that spoke to you when you were younger?

1:29:48Rick Rubin:Well, I think at that age, I had a real desire to know something that nobody else knew. And he seemed to know. He seemed to be that guy, you know. And also, my friends wouldn't have liked him. So there was a little bit of elitism.

1:29:59George Saunders:It felt more like it was yours?

1:30:01Rick Rubin:That didn't really. but I just, I liked that he seemed to be speaking about something that wasn't just quotidian. Yeah. And I, at that age, I really was a kid who wanted wisdom. I wanted, I was looking around for, so like Zen in the Outer, motorcycle maintenance, and then later Ayn Rand, you know, that was big for me. So I wanted, I thought that the purpose of literature was to tell you how to live and Julio LeBron seemed to be, to be doing that. But I hadn't developed any ability to see what things felt like to me and then gauge it work by that i was all just well that sounds really big you know big and and if i if i am a cleo gabronite nobody can touch me because i know

1:30:41George Saunders:more than everyone else you know that funny you say that because i made a note in your teaching there's a great deal of wisdom i use the word specifically it's bigger than information where do you think the wisdom you hold comes from i i don't know that i really it's there i'm telling you it's there because i'm reading it i'll accept it i think i think it

1:31:04Rick Rubin:comes from a kind of trial and error so to have read as many stories i've read especially student stories and go okay take your knowing mind down a notch and just listen see what's actually happening there okay and after 20 30 years of that you do kind of know some things conditionally So I think to offer information conditionally is kind of like wisdom. You know, so if I say that sentence is no good, that's too certain. If I say it feels to me as if that sentence goes hazy at the end, that's more like wisdom because I'm not sure.

1:31:42George Saunders:I feel like I'm talking more about the actual content, not the writing.

1:31:47Rick Rubin:So the content of a story or content of the Russian book? The Russian book as an example. Well, that has to do with 20 years of teaching those stories, because you can have a class in 1992 that goes off the rails and it's no good. 1994, you correct it. And then you start noticing that every time you talk about that story, these are the issues that come up.

1:32:10George Saunders:Yeah.

1:32:10Rick Rubin:So you honor that and think. And then, yeah, so it's anticipatory, I think, a little bit. I know that I've had, you know, eight groups of really brilliant kids have read that Turgenev story and gone, oh, God, you know. So then part of your approach is to say, I know what you think. You think it's boring. And then maybe that feels like wisdom of some kind. But I'm sure, you know, for you, like you must have understanding of this stuff that is. Yeah, I don't know where it comes from, but I feel it. Yeah. Yeah. I think for me, it's a bit of, okay, so it's repetition, but it's also trusting. It sounds weird, but it's trusting other people.

1:32:50Rick Rubin:So I've had all those generations of students. They come in, they come in, they come in, they react authentically to these pieces. So there's a crossroads there. If you're a bad teacher, you go, well, these students reacted correctly and these reacted incorrectly. And I only want to talk about the ones who react. If you're a good teacher, you go, huh, there's a range of reactions. Okay, let's lean into that. And then with years, you start to see that that's a reliable thing. And it has something to do with that story. And then you can track that down. So I think it's, I mean, I'm glad you feel the way.

1:33:24Rick Rubin:I don't feel particularly wise, but I do know I used to feel wiser. And I used to be much more free with my wisdom.

1:33:30George Saunders:I think now you're getting wiser. Yeah.

1:33:32Rick Rubin:Yeah. I'm saying less.

1:33:35George Saunders:Because you get to see these really brilliant young writers year after year, would you say there's some part of it that they're mostly good at and some part of it that they're mostly not good at? or is it always case by case in new writers?

1:33:53Rick Rubin:Not that I can discern, but there's a trend in all writers, which is we all think we don't know the secret and we're faking it. And all our writing lives, we've been faking it better than most, but we are faking it. And so because of that, we're avoiding certain things, whether it's content or voice or something, we're avoiding something. So for me, the job is to just say, the minute the student comes in, And I don't say it, but I know you think you're not good enough.

1:34:21George Saunders:Yeah.

1:34:22Rick Rubin:Okay. Now let's find out what flavor you think you're not good enough. And then I'm going to do some judo. And I'm going to show you that the thing you aren't good at is actually a unity with the thing you're good at. And the only problem is you're denying so energetically the thing you're not good enough that you're stifling yourself. I mean, practically what that means is I'm quiet long enough for you to tell me what's bothering you about your story. And then I say, oh, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. I think everybody has that kind of fear.

1:34:50George Saunders:Yeah. You're describing a psychological state, and I was guessing you were going to talk about something technical about writing. Is there anything, not on the how they're thinking about what they're doing, but what they're actually doing? What's on the page?

1:35:05Rick Rubin:Yes. I mean, well, sometimes there's first-order imitation. They're imitating somebody and you can see it. They're avoiding, like we talked about earlier, sometimes the story wants to go here, but for some reason, usually it's an intellectual reason, they don't want to go there. And also what I find with my students is sometimes they are really afraid of being corny. And so at a moment, which is actually going to be an emotional moment, they're afraid of being schmaltzy. And so they take it off into some other area. So as an older person, you can kind of go, oh, I love that moment. That was so moving.

1:35:39Rick Rubin:And then I think you kind of got distracted from it and they'll go, yeah, yeah. So, so it's almost like maybe the wisdom has to do with seeing that pattern over and over again. Yeah. Someone who has come to literature because it has all the stuff in it, all the feelings, but they, they're a little afraid of being sentimental. So they veer away from that. And you just gently saying, Oh no, actually that's, that's what we do. Yeah. You know? So I can sort of, I would say I can see somebody before they do a little bit and go, Oh, okay. I get this. And then, then you can skillfully, I'm sure. I mean, it sounds like exactly what you're taught earlier.

1:36:13Rick Rubin:you can skillfully move it to the point where they can discover it for themselves and then you bless

1:36:17George Saunders:it and that's it i mean it is technical yeah i think what it has to do is having confidence

1:36:24Rick Rubin:in the old days i think i felt students didn't know how to be emotionally in touch and i had to tell them how to do it and now i'm just like of course they know how to do that they just haven't brought it into this realm yet yeah so the confidence that you i know that you're a fully emotionally formed person now your art is impeding you a little bit but that's okay that's normal you know then that i think they feel that confidence that you know of course you can get

1:36:49George Saunders:there you know would you say sometimes you have the confidence for them that they don't have for

1:36:53Rick Rubin:themselves yeah i think so and and sometimes i even will be a little overconfident just so they can just lure them out a little bit i think we share that yeah that's part of the right the mentoring, really? I think so. Because I know from my own experience, this is sort of pathetic, but if I go on tour and I get a bad review, I'm flinchy. If I go on tour and I get a good review, I'm confident. What is on tour? It means like book tour. And what does that look like? It looks like 18 cities in 20 days, just going to a bookstore. And then usually these days, it's a Q &A. It's like this. You're just sitting in front of people doing Q &A, sign books, go to the hotel, go to the next place.

1:37:31George Saunders:Do you enjoy it?

1:37:32Rick Rubin:Yeah, I actually love it. Maybe I enjoy it a little too much, but I love the meeting the people because then you're like, if you have any temptation to project negatively about your audience or fearfully, that washes it all away. They're so nice.

1:37:45George Saunders:Would you say most of the people in all the different places you go are relatively the same or is it different area by area?

1:37:52Rick Rubin:Well, they tend to be left-leaning and they tend to be literary. I don't get a lot of people across the political spectrum, I don't think. But, I mean, in general, they're really nice. I mean, really open to ideas and very, and for me, that's kind of built up over the years. So it's a very welcoming.

1:38:10George Saunders:And they're coming there because they like you. Otherwise, they wouldn't come. Yeah.

1:38:13Rick Rubin:Sometimes before I start something, I have to say that, like, they came here, you know. When you write something funny, do you laugh out loud? The first time. And then usually never again. Just want to go, okay. That got a laugh back in 1990, so you can leave it in there. Yeah, yeah. What's your expectation when you sit to write? Not much, actually. I mean, I think to improve something somewhere, but more I'm looking at how well I'm reading that day. How well you're reading. How well am I reading? Am I getting it?

1:38:43George Saunders:Do you equate how well you're reading it to how well you can write? Yes. In other words, if I'm reading it well, I'm correcting well.

1:38:55Rick Rubin:I see. Because then I'm reading it the way you'll read it. And if I'm a little out of touch with it, then it's almost like driving a little bit blind, you know.

1:39:03George Saunders:How are speaking and writing the same, and how are they different?

1:39:07Rick Rubin:Well, writing is speaking over and over. You know, I can sometimes blurt out something kind of good, but if I talk for 10 minutes, it'll just be one little thing. I know a lot of people think, you know, one of the things that young writers are obsessed with is finding their voice, and I really was too. And we always think it's voice, it's whatever you blurt out. But what I love is the idea that voice is achievable by subtraction. You know, you can have a page of mediocre writing, and by lining it out, you can make it really unique just by cutting.

1:39:37George Saunders:Do you think if you have some mediocre writing and two different people edit it, you'll get two very different things?

1:39:43Rick Rubin:I think if they're good, if they're good editors, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And might both of them be good? Sure. And in fact, I think, I mean, really, you can be both people. So Monday, you can edit it in a certain flavor. Tuesday you come back and add a different flavor and my theory is that over time that model stabilizes and you're getting the benefit of all your people you know you're so grouchy you're so

1:40:05George Saunders:funny you're so skeptical yourself that's a really exciting idea and but when you're young it's

1:40:09Rick Rubin:scary because it doesn't work that way you just keep changing it but then over time now I can kind of like let whoever's here today come and work and won't they won't hurt it and tomorrow we'll do something else to it and in the end it starts to kind of lock in how different are you

1:40:24George Saunders:from day to day?

1:40:25Rick Rubin:Not that different, but it's almost like around the edges. There are certain, like I'll go by a line 97 times, and the 98th time I'll find the joke. Like, oh, of course, boom. I guess like if you were in this yard looking for treasure, you just look and look and look and look and look and most days you don't find anything. One day you find something, you know, so it's, that's where the iteration comes in.

1:40:45George Saunders:And when you're looking for treasure, is it something that's already there usually?

1:40:50Rick Rubin:No, it's a reaction moment. There's a little something that I didn't see. And then you react to that. And then you react to it. So it's the new thing that you're adding. Usually, yeah. Or just as valuable, you'll have a phrase, a three-beat phrase, and you go, that middle section is redundant. Cut it out. And then the two-beat phrase is much better. And the third is implied. You didn't even have to say it. And then that can sometimes teach you the voice of the whole piece. Once you find one line that sounds the right way, then you're like, okay, the rest of you guys have to respond to this. in some way.

1:41:23Rick Rubin:Is there anything that can't be put into words? Sure. Everything. So then what do you do? You just try, you know, it's just, it's a fun game we're playing together. You know, I can't put everything in words that's important. I know I can't, but let me try. And then we get a sort of a simulation of that. Yeah.

1:41:40George Saunders:Tell me about causation in fiction. I believe in it.

1:41:43Rick Rubin:It's just, how does it work? I think it's works. I think it's another fancy word. And what it really means is when I read you four lines, it changes your location. And now you're ready to receive something. And I'm alertly looking at you to see where I put you. And then I do the next thing. That's causation. And on a larger scale, if the first section of a story is, you know, Jerry had been in love for 50 years and never doubted his love. You're like, all right, you know what? Yeah, something has to respond to that. So causality really is just the parts of the story being in alert communication with each other, that this part of the story has done something, it's clarified itself, and it's do something to you as a reader.

1:42:28Rick Rubin:And as a writer, I can't make the next section as if this hadn't happened. But as we said earlier, that can be quite complicated, but it has to take it into account in some way. Does a writer need to have something to say? Everyone does, I think. But also, I think a story isn't what you say, it's how you say it. So if you have a method of saying something, that's it. So I think everyone has something to say, but I wouldn't want to hear it. I don't want to hear what I have to say because I hear that every day. But when you're writing, you're doing something else. You're making an object that gives off energy or something.

1:43:02George Saunders:Are there any basic rules about writing, like shorter sentences or better than longer sentences?

1:43:07Rick Rubin:The only thing that I honor in my work is that there's a kind of a hierarchy of complication. So I always want to start with the simplest. So first person, present tense, continuous time, one character. That's the first. Just because it's just like, it's classic. It's like grounding. It's grounding and it's simple and I'm not, there's no tricks. Then at some point, if the story says, you know what? This really shouldn't be first person. You feel obstructed. Okay. Okay. It's a third person story. One character, continuous time. About draft 15, you need a second voice here. Do I really? I don't think I do.

1:43:43Rick Rubin:Okay. Have another couple of weeks. then you go, oh, actually, I do need a second voice. So in other words, you only go up the chain of complexity as the story demands it. I'd say that's something I've internalized. I mean, I don't like slop. Like if somebody is making a mistake and they don't know it, I don't like that so much just in syntax and stuff. But other than that, I think it's, you know, since the story is mostly language responding to language, you can do anything. I had a kid one time, one of my students, he was analyzing the metamorphosis by Kafka. And his essay, the first sentence was, upon peruvian this work of literature, I felt myself at a distinct tilt.

1:44:18Rick Rubin:I'm like, wow. So I put that in a story. I started writing around that, you know, and it generated a whole story with really fucked up syntax. So really there aren't any rules, except I think you have to be aware of what you're doing.

1:44:31George Saunders:Are you ever confused by strong emotions that come up when you're reading and not understand them?

1:44:37Rick Rubin:Yes, but not in a troubling way. I just taught a story called A Fabulous Animal by this writer, Samantha Schweblin. And it's so good. And I got to the end and I couldn't have said what I was feeling except the kind of gratitude, like, wow, you picked me up and lifted me and you never let me down until the very end. Then the analyzing is to go back and go, all right, why? Well, also where? Where did those things happen? Where were my expectations fulfilled and subverted in that cool way? And then at the very end after that, you can go okay now what does this mean yes i think that confusion is in a good work of art i think you feel a lot and you don't know why then maybe if you want to you can go back and kind of try to suss it out but i think the roller coaster designer is the best metaphor you know you get off the thing and you're not exactly analyzing it you're just feeling it you just had the experience maybe you want to go on it again and if you wanted to you could sit you know with some paper and go oh, this is why.

1:45:34Rick Rubin:So the trick is, as a story writer, you're trying to make that magical thing happen and not be reductive for a few minutes.

1:46:08George Saunders:Tetragrammatin is a website.

1:46:13George Saunders:Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

1:46:22George Saunders:What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammatin? Counterculture? Tetragrammatin. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammatin. The avant-garde? Tetragrammatin. Generative art. Tetragrammatin.

1:46:35Rick Rubin:The tarot. Tetragrammatin. Out of print music. Tetragrammatin. Biodynamics. Tetragrammatin. Graphic design. Tetragrammatin. Mythology and magic. Tetragrammatin. Obscure film. Tetragrammatin. Beach culture.

1:46:51George Saunders:Tetragrammatin. Esoteric lectures. Tetragrammatin. Off the grid living. Tetragrammatin. Alt spirituality. Tetragrammatin. The canon of fine objects, tetragrammatin, muscle cars, tetragrammatin, ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn.