George Saunders's Writing Routine

Lincoln in the Bardo won the Man Booker Prize in 2017. The first version of the idea appeared in Saunders's notebook in 1992. Twenty-five years of returning to the same story, revising it, abandoning it, returning again. The book that came out of that process is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. If you want to understand how he worked, that timeline is the first thing to sit with. Saunders revised until the text became what it needed to be, however long that took, and he never confused speed with progress.

Saunders is the counter-argument to Kerouac's spontaneous prose, and he knows it. His method is the opposite of the Beats' approach: patient, granular, obsessive about the reader's moment-by-moment experience. His A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, published in 2021, is essentially a book-length explanation of what he does and why, and it's the clearest account of a working writer's revision process that exists in the English language. Read it alongside The Tenth of December and you can see the method operating in real time.

The Interest-Drop Test

The core of Saunders's method is simple enough to explain in a paragraph. He reads a draft and pays attention to every moment when his interest drops, even slightly. A word that feels slightly off. A sentence that goes a beat too long. A paragraph that tells you something you already know. Each one gets marked. Then he goes back and fixes them, one by one, until the draft has no moments where his interest drops at all. Then he reads it again. More drops. More fixes. This continues until the text holds his attention all the way through, every time he reads it.

The test sounds simple, but its power is in its specificity. Most revision advice tells writers to look for problems: unclear passages, weak scenes, inconsistent characters. Saunders's test asks a different question. The question isn't "is this wrong?" but "does this hold my interest?" Those aren't the same thing. A passage can be technically correct and still produce that faint feeling of the mind beginning to wander. That's the thing he's hunting. The slightly long sentence. The slightly expected word. The moment where the story lets the reader off the hook before it should.

He describes this in detail in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, where he walks through the revision process on specific passages from the Russian masters he teaches at Syracuse. The interest-drop test is the through-line. Chekhov holds your attention because every sentence is doing something. When Chekhov's sentences stop doing something, he cuts them. Saunders is applying the same standard to his own work, and he's been at it long enough to catch very subtle drops.

The Ear over the Eye

Saunders reads his drafts aloud. Every draft, at every stage of revision. He's been consistent about this across interviews spanning his entire career, and his reasoning is specific: the ear catches things the eye lets pass. A sentence can look perfectly good on the page and reveal a rhythm problem the moment you say it out loud. A repeated word that the eye skips over becomes obvious when you hear it twice in six words. A transition that seems smooth in reading creates a stumble when spoken.

This is tied to his conviction that prose has a musical dimension that operates below the level of meaning. In his Paris Review interview he talked about the goal of each sentence being to keep the reader in a particular emotional and cognitive state, and rhythm is a large part of how that works. A sentence with the right rhythm keeps the reader moving forward with exactly the amount of speed the story needs at that moment. A sentence with the wrong rhythm creates friction, a tiny hesitation, a half-conscious reluctance to continue. You can't catch that friction on the page alone.

The implication for working writers is worth taking seriously. Reading your own work aloud is uncomfortable. It takes longer than silent reading, it forces you to slow down, and it confronts you directly with the sentences you hoped would pass. That discomfort is the point. Every moment where you feel the slight cringe of hearing a bad sentence out loud is a moment the scanner has found a problem the eye missed. Saunders treats that cringe as information rather than embarrassment.

Discovering the Story Through Revision

Saunders doesn't outline. He has said this in multiple interviews and explained why: the story has to discover what it is through the writing, and an outline locks in conclusions before the discovery has happened. For a writer whose method is to read back over the work and follow his own interest, the outline is a false map. The story tells you what it needs by what holds your attention and what doesn't. That only works if you're genuinely open to the story going somewhere you didn't anticipate when you started.

This creates a particular challenge for long projects. Lincoln in the Bardo spent twenty-five years in process partly because Saunders couldn't make the form work for a long time. The polyphonic structure, the hundreds of fragmentary voices speaking around the central event of Lincoln's grief, required a formal solution he hadn't yet found. He kept returning to the material because the interest was there but the form wasn't, and he trusted that the right form would eventually become visible. It did, eventually.

For his shorter fiction, the discovery process is faster, but the principle is the same. A Saunders story usually goes through many complete drafts before the final version. Each pass through the interest-drop test removes another layer of what the story doesn't need, and what's left after enough passes is the thing the story actually is. The process is closer to sculpture than construction. You're removing material until the form inside becomes visible, rather than building up from a plan.

Teaching as Craft Maintenance

Saunders has been teaching in the MFA program at Syracuse since 1996, the same year his debut collection was published. His first book came out while he was already a teacher, and teaching has been part of his practice ever since. The book that most directly emerged from the teaching is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021), which grew out of a course he's taught for years on the Russian short story masters: Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol.

The effect of decades of close-reading Russian stories on his own fiction is visible on the page. Saunders's prose has the economy and the emotional directness of Chekhov at his best. Sentences don't waste words. Scenes don't waste time. Every element earns its place by carrying freight for the story's larger purpose. That standard was refined through years of asking students why a specific word or image was in a text rather than some other word or image, and whether the answer held up under examination.

Teaching also keeps him honest about the interest-drop test. When he reads a story with a student and watches where the student's attention loosens, he's getting real-time data about where the text has a problem. A teacher of fiction who pays attention learns to read the room the way a musician reads the audience. That information goes back into his own drafts.

Sources

The primary source for Saunders's method is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (Random House, 2021), which is both a craft book and a direct account of how he reads and revises. His Paris Review Art of Fiction interview, from 2014, covers his background, his teaching practice at Syracuse, and his approach to revision in detail. His GQ profile from around the time of The Tenth of December's publication in 2013 documented the twenty-five-year timeline of Lincoln in the Bardo and his daily work habits. His Substack, launched in recent years, continues to discuss craft in a direct and informal register. See also: George Saunders on Wikipedia.

What You Can Steal

Saunders's method is patient in a way that can feel impractical until you test it. The tools are straightforward:

Mark every moment your interest drops, however slightly. A word that's almost right. A sentence that goes one beat too long. A paragraph that covers ground you've already covered. Each one is a problem. Fix them before moving forward.

Read every draft aloud before calling it done. The ear catches rhythm problems the eye ignores. A single reading aloud will surface more genuine issues than two silent re-reads.

Let the story discover what it is. Saunders doesn't outline because the form has to earn its shape. If you're committed to a plan before you know what the story needs, you'll defend the plan instead of following the story.

Trust the long timeline. The best work you're capable of might take years. Lincoln in the Bardo took twenty-five. The material that keeps pulling you back is worth the time.

Use close reading to sharpen your own standard. Study the sentences in writers you admire and ask why each word is that word and not another. The habit of question transfers into your own revisions.

The Routine at a Glance