Saunders has spent decades teaching in the Syracuse MFA program and a bestselling book unpacking how great stories work. His advice keeps returning to the same few ideas, and almost all of them are about how you treat a draft once it exists.

The Direct Answer
Revise obsessively, distrust easy perfection, and protect the story's surprise.
It's the through-line of his teaching and his 2021 book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

Revision Is How You Become Yourself

Ask Saunders for the single most useful skill a writer can build and he'll point at revision. Not fixing typos, but genuinely living inside the story, going through it line by line and making thousands of small choices about what stays, what goes, and what could be sharper. He argues that those accumulated micro-decisions are what a voice actually is. You don't find your style by searching for it. You revise your way into it.

He's specific about what that looks like in practice. Read a line, notice your honest reaction, adjust, move on, and repeat that a few thousand times. It's slow and unglamorous, and Saunders is fine with that. The payoff is that the story slowly bends toward the writer you actually are instead of the writer you were imitating when you started.

That's also why he warns students off a specific trap. Beginners tend to assume that if a passage came easily, it can't be any good, so they overwrite and overcomplicate. Saunders thinks that instinct is backwards.

One of the psychological traps a lot of young writers get into is they distrust what's easy.

George Saunders, interview with Sixty Six

Be Kind to the Rough Draft

A lot of Saunders's advice is really about managing your own head. He says a rough patch in a draft isn't evidence that you're a fraud or that you lack talent. It's a normal stage, a spot that simply hasn't been solved yet. Writer's block, in his telling, usually comes from setting the bar impossibly high before you've written anything. Lower it. A first line that stinks is a place to start, not a verdict on your ability.

When he hits an awkward moment in his own drafts, Saunders says he tries to meet it with curiosity instead of dread. The rough spot becomes a small puzzle to solve rather than proof of failure. That shift in attitude, he argues, is often what separates a finished story from an abandoned one.

None of this is armchair theory. Saunders has taught in the Syracuse MFA program since 1997, sitting with student drafts week after week, and he draws the same conclusions from his own work that he offers a room of beginners. He also treats even a page of garbage as useful, because you can always revise garbage into something good, and he'd rather not know where a story ends, since certainty about the destination drains the tension out of getting there. You can see how the advice plays out day to day in the full George Saunders writing routine.

What You Can Steal