Pushkin, I wrote a novel. I've forgotten, I'd forgotten I wrote a novel, tells you how bad it was. What happened was Liar's Poker came out and everyone's saying, you have all of the gifts of a novelist. And the problem was maybe that was true up to a point, but the point where it wasn't true is I had no ability to make things up. And so when you can't make things up, you got problems as a novelist.
The thing is is like, there's no structure when you're writing fixture, because you just could do any You just do anything I know, and then to change it, you could just make it totally different. So like, how do you know what's good and what's not. It's baffling. Here is hot my contract with Hotter and Stoton for a novel that was going to be called Tokyo Rocks, and it says it's marvelous to have this novel on board. Oh my god, I wrote one hundred couple one hundred pages.
The research department felt hollow when he arrived, with everyone still in the morning meeting. The offices along the padded corridor were as dark and barren and full of the loneliness, loneliness of empty ambition, as the cleaning ladies had left them the night before. The Loneliness of Ambition could have been a title instead of Liar's Poker. I'm Michael Lewis and welcome to other People's Money. A Liar's Poker companion. This is our fifth and final episode. We're gonna call
it Tokyo Rocks, the name of the novel. I think we're all a little bit relieved that I never finished. It's funny how we tend to forget about failure. We remember the successes, and we look back on our life as this chain of the things that work. But the things that didn't work are actually the things that guided you on the path it worked. In some ways, they're more important than the things that did work. They channel us, They give us the guardrails that define our career and
help us to kind of move forward. I mean, that's why I wanted to talk to George Saunders. He's the author of Course Lincoln in the Bardow, for which he won the Booker Prize. He also wrote several collections of short stories, including Pastoralia and Tenth of December, his most recent book is called A Swimming a Pond in the Rain, in which four Russians give a masterclass on writing, reading, and life. George wrote the book, but the book is really the story of George learning from the Russians how
to write a short story. He's an absolutely breathtakingly wonderful writer, and it's hard to imagine that he ever had trouble producing anything other people would want to read, but he did. He's someone who started with a failure and learn from it. I want you to start by telling me the story
as if you've never told it about Leboda the Eduardo. Yeah, thanks for bringing up that painful subec No, No, it's really it's I think that it's something universal about Leboda the Ordoardo, and I want to hear the story about just from the beginning, like what is this thing? So a friend of mine got married in Mexico and Paula was nice enough to, you know, stay home and the baby and let me go. So I go. And it's a really fun, beautiful wedding in central Mexico, really kind
of wild, and I took copious notes. I had a notebook, I had a tape recorder, and I'm just you know, recording all these sort of details. And I come back and I say to her, basically, you know, don't worry, honey, you're sitting on a gold mine. I got this. So I'm working full time and we have a baby, and it's just like Madhouse. But every night, you know, I'm a pretty hyper person anyway, but I would have a pot of coffee after she went to bed, and I would stay up for as long as I could writing
this book about the wedding. And you know, sometimes only eleven, sometimes two or three. Then have to get up and go be a tech writer during the day. So at the end of some period I don't know how long it was, I had seven hundred pages and the book was called Leboda Day Eduardo, which I think is just like Ed's Wedding. Wait, let me stop you. So it's you had seven hundred pages that you generated out of this single experience of a visit to Mexico to attend
a wedding. Yeah, it was like a four day to visit. I suppose, you know, everything was described her, you know, so I thought seven hundreds too much, so I cut it down, you know, in hemingway as style to whatever a very lean three hundred, and I was just like, I did it. I can't believe it. I did it, you know. And then I handed it to Paul and I did the thing that all writers do, which is, don't worry, there's no rush, just take her time, and then I hit around the corner waiting for her to start,
you know. And when she did read it, I just I looked in and she couldn't have been any more than one page five or six, and she just literally had her head in her hands, like, oh my god. This is what made this last year such a misery. He was always so tired and grouchy. And it was as soon as I saw that reaction, I'm like, okay, and something just dropped, like, oh yeah, I knew that wasn't good, you know. I could feel that there was
nothing in it but labor, you know. So that was Lebota de Eduardo, which I looked at a couple of years ago, and it's just as drudge inhaminated as I remembered it. But this was going to be in your mind in the beginning. This was going to be your first book, Oh my breakout. Yeah, I was gonna sell it and stopped working as a tech writer, and this was going to be it, you know. But it was so funny because literally, you know, there's I think when
we aren't writing, well we kind of know it. And so in her reaction there was just no joy, There was nothing but oh and as soon as I saw her face on, yeah, I know that, I know not to dwell too long on a painful experience. But all you did was go attend to wedding. It's not like you went to war or or worked as a longshoreman or these four days and whether you thought that was
going to be enough, yeah, it was no good. But but again I thought the the what I needed in my life is something unusual, you know, and that was certainly a beautiful unusual experience. You didn't trust your own self, no, and your own experience, and so what is yours? What are you doing at that moment? What is your job? I think at that point, I was working as a tech writer for a pharmaceutical company in Albany, So I was just taking these reports like these really kind of sad,
these almost hideous reports of tests done on animals. And then I'd start with a big pile of those and have to summarize each one of them into a report that would go to the FDA. So it was just you know, and then the weird thing was these tests were actually being done in the basement of the building, so if you happen to take a shortcut downstairs through there, you'd see, you know, these beagles and slings and these rabbits,
and I think there was monkeys and you know all that. So, I mean, all of that stuff was pretty rich, but I guess I had never seen it in literature, so I didn't. It was just stupid old life. So there was no way for me to you know, know what a pivotal moment it was in my life. I mean, had a young family, we had no money, all these things, but that didn't seem like literature. That was just life.
It's funny how hard it is to figure out what's interesting. Yeah, I think, um, you know, for a young writer, I just had um, you know, kind of a thought cloud with all these Hemingway stories in it, or Isaac Bobble
maybe at that point. And you know, it's hard to make that jump from I mean, you can even sense that your life is interesting, but how do you actually you know, get it and I think voice is the key to that, because this Lebota de Eduardo was very kind of stentaurion and serious and modernist, you know, and lots of admitted articles and stuff. Um, but it was there was nothing new about it. It was all me trying to do somebody else, basically, and not just even
not even one writer. You're Hemingway in some places and Joyce in other places. Yeah, it rotated. It depends, you know, I'd give up on him and oh no, that's imitative, and then I go imitate Joyce or you know, there was a there was a heavy caroact thing at that point, and so that was the other thing is you know, the idea of kind of scrolling through these other voices, that's not it. I mean, when you look back on it,
do you think it served? It's a purpose that imitative period when you're trying to be Hemingway or trying to be Joyce or could you have much better launched your career if you've never gone through that fave. No, I think I had to go through it. One reason is in that, you know, it's funny. It seemed to me like if you are writing in a boring voice, a voice that does, you know, favors, then you might actually get better at stuff like plot and causation, because that's
kind of all you've got. Your voice isn't helping you any So I think I got better at just the sort of basic story stuff of a leading to be, leading to see. And then the other thing it does, which is really powerful, is it made me so frustrated, you know, so anxious, And so it was like a building up of frustration because I knew their writing was the only thing I had to do, really, I only I really liked. And it made me crazy. And I know you'll you'll symptize with this that I didn't sound
like myself. That drove me nuts. And then this small thing happened where I was in at work transcribing a conference call. It kind of was like the note taker, and that wasn't really slow. So I just started writing these little poems kind of after a doctor SEUs. And they were real silly. They had no hemming away quality at all. They weren't serious. They were kind of scatological, and they were sci fi, you know, and they were
in that kind of Susian rhyme scheme, you know. And I brought those home, and Paula just happened to read them and she really liked them. She was laughing, you know, just so that was the first pleasure anybody had gotten out of my work in many years. And that kind of you thought of it was just a throwaway thing.
It was just a throwaway thing, you know. But I did it out of the same kind of energy that I used every day, Like when I was at work joking or or somebody was mad at me, I talk them down, or you know, the kind of everyday charms that I would use routinely without even thinking about it, or in that piece and way that they weren't in them, you know, the Mesco novels. So that kind of flipped a switch, coming up after a break, how George Saunders was singled out as a gifted child and I was not.
It took me a while when I started reading Liar's Poker as an audiobook to figure out why it was taking me so long to do it. Why I kept stopping and interrupting myself and questioning it and wanting to rewrite a sentence here, or wondering why this character wasn't developed. And I realized after a while it was because I was reading myself going through a process very like the process George went through with his wife in private, only
I was doing it on the page. In public. I was sort of learning to write a book book by writing a book, and all of it ended up in print, and I had these sensations of, Oh, I know what was happening there, And if I was just more in touch with myself as a writer, I might have done it just a little bit differently, like when I was reading the top of Chapter two, which is set in Saint James's Palace in London. First we're going to hear from the book, and then you'll hear my reaction to it.
At the end of the meal, the eighty four year old Queen Mother tottered out of the room. We the eight hundred insurance salesman, the two managing directors from Solomon Brothers, their wives, and I stood in respectful silence as she crept towards what I first took to be the back door. Then I realized that it must be the front of the palace, and that we fundraiser types had been let
in like delivery boys through the back. Anyway, the Queen Mother was headed our way behind her walked Jeeves straight as a broom, clad in white tie and tails and carrying a silver tray. Following Jeeves in procession was a team of small, tubular dogs called corgis that looked like large rats. The English think corgis are cute. The British royals, I was later told, never go anywhere without them. Let's tell you know, let's take a moment, just talk about
this for a second. Can we do that? Yeah? So, um, I was in a Dickens phase when I was writing this. There are two things I was reading. I was reading a lot of Charles Dickens, and I was reading what I took to be brutally straightforward memoirs um education by Henry Adams Russeau's Confessions, and it reeks of Dickens. It's like I'm a young man looking for a position. But you can see you can I can see the pros in this chapter smells. I would never write anything like
this now. It feels a little mannered and who is suitable for the for this setting? Maybe? But I think when I'm reading who is this little snot? And I have a feeling that there are awful lot of people who read it at the time, is it? Who is the little not? I don't know. Actually want to be too hard on myself. I mean, everybody has influences. And George Saunders and I talked about this a lot. Just rewind the tape a little bit for me and explain to me how you even get the idea that you
want to be a writer? Yeah, I think, um, I mean, in retrospect, I think it was reading this book called Johnny Tremaine by Esther Forbes, and a nun gave it to me in third grade and she I was kind of in love with her, and she pulled me aside and she said, this these magic words to any Catholic kid. The nuns. Some of the other nuns and I have been talking about you in the convent. It's like, what you know, it's like and she's, I think you're reading
at a higher level than your classmates. Try this, She said, it's really hard. Some of the other nuns think you can't handle it, but I think you can. You know. So that's a throw down, you know. And yeah, so I just read it and I did love it. Actually, Forbes is a great stylist, and I just noticed how she was doing weird things with syntax to kind of risky things that I felt even then, these things she was doing with the syntax made me see the world
more immediately. I remember walking around the parking lot, you know, where we would have a recess, and in just thinking in Forbes's diction, you know that feeling of just like everything I saw, I would describe it the way I thought Forbes would. I had an experience with Johnny Tremaine, and my experience with Johnny Tremaine puts my character in a really unflattering juxtaposition to your character. So you read Johnny Tremaine as a precocious third grader and start thinking
about syntax. I didn't get to Johnny Tremaine till my really appropriately named seventh grade English teacher, mister Downer was his name. Mister Downer handed me Johnny Tremaine along with everybody else in the class, and said we had to write a book review of it. And you have to trust me when I say everything that follows was done in total innocence. I got home with Johnny Tremaine and I looked at the back cover, and the back cover
had an excellent book review of the book. It was just you know, two hundred and fifty words it described what the book was about, and so I thought, this is the efficient way to do it. I'll just copy this down and hand it in, because this is if he wants a book reporter John Tremaine, he couldn't get a better one than this. So I copied it out and I handed it in and it came back to me a few days later and the grade was an A, but it said, in big, big red ink, see me.
And so I went to see mister Downer and he said, where did you get this? And I said, oh, I just copied it off the back of the book. You said you wanted a book review, and it seemed like an excellent one, so I thought that was the best way to do it. And he said, that's plagiarism. Now, I'd never heard the word plagiarism. He could have said it it's it could have been yeah, it could have been baculism, it could have been it could have been anything.
I thought, like, what's plagiarism? And he said he made me go look at a dictionary and look up plagiarism in the dictionary and try to internalize what a horrible thing it was. I had done, and I still couldn't feel like I've done anything wrong, And so he made The first thing he did does is he makes me. He makes me go see the head master and the middle school head master, the principle who proceeds to throw me out of the school. Oh my god, I was
expelled from the school. But then I'm readmitted, and mister Downer, then in a huff, makes me write a thousand times over and over on a piece of paper, I will never played your eyes again. I will never played your eyes again. And you didn't feel you've done anything wrong, and hand in these thousand lines. And to this day I've never read Johnny Tremaine. So it does my heart. It warms my heart to know that book had a positive influence on someone's life. So back to the subject
of voice of like where this comes from. You see to be saying two things at once. One is that there's something that is essentially you on the page that you were evading when you're pretending to be Hemmingway. But at the same time, it's not as simple as just putting you on the page. That you're creating something that just isn't like other things, and that gets you to you. Yeah,
And I think it's the radical preferring. For example, when I was editing that first book and writing it, I was always trying to avoid the usual constructions, so, you know, just small things like this, this is civil war lands, yeah, bad decline. Right. So just like if I found myself typing a phrase that I felt a little tepid about it, or this seemed like yet, well it has to be there,
I would try to take it out. Same thing with events, like I was really trying to do that thing where I wasn't describing people coming into rooms, they were just there, you know. So it was sort of like I think efficiency was one of the watchwords. And then just unconventional juxtapositions. I mean, there are all things that I was feeling in my sort of in my chest more than thinking about. But the real thing was don't let this get lost in a pile. That was actually the way I thought
about it. The funny thing is that's not unlike my psychology, because always kind of a show off and kind of a ham you know, right, And I always knew in a crowd of people how to talk in a way that the attention would come to me. So it was of inadvertent allowing to the table of that which I
really was. When when you start writing in this new mode where you were self consciously not grabbing for Hemingway or Joice or someone else as a crutch, when do you get your first positive feedback apart from the Susian poems like when do you first? When do you first get the sense of like, hell, this could work? You know, honestly, Michael,
it was. It was as soon as I wrote the first couple of paragraphs, I'm like, oh, and the feeling was, I know what to do with this, you know, with the Hemingway stuff, I get a draft and go, I don't know. I wish there was somebody I could ask.
I wish Ernest was here, you know. But with this new mode, it was just like, I don't know how you'd say, It was like, you know, I kind of knew which way to go, you know, I knew which sentences a fit in which didn't in a way that was miles above with the Hemmingway, I just all I could do is kind of try to make it some more like him, but that's an idiots game. But with this stuff, no matter what I wrote, I knew whether
it belonged or not. So that's another thing I tell my students is one of the symptoms of writing in let's call it your voice, is that you have strong opinions about it. You're not having that terrible neurotic feeling of I don't know if it's good, I don't know what to change. You actually have really fierce opinion, maybe fiercer than you would normally admit. That was a symptom of it at first. It's a good it's a very good sign. Yes, I think it is now. I mean,
you know, you can have. I had some opinions about the Hemma, but this was different. And then I also had a secondary feeling, which was like I really don't care if anybody else likes it, Like I know this is what I'm supposed to be doing, and I just don't care anymore. I have a weird question for you. If I had been a fly on the wall and you didn't know I was there, and I was watching
you right Leboda dead WARDO. Then I came back and I watched you write the WaveMaker Falters, would I have you think I would have detected a difference in your demeanor. I think you definitely would have you know. It was like bent over sweating and weeping versus sitting up straight hoping nobody walks into my office and bust me because I'm on a good role, you know. But I also
knew I felt like, I just need fifteen minutes. If I can drop into any place on any story, I can improve it because I know what I like now and I don't. I didn't used to know what I like, but now I know. So that was a nice thing because it meant I didn't have to have a six hour block. I didn't have to be in any particular mood. I didn't feel like I felt like I could just It's sort of like if you put a shoe on, you know whether it fits or not. You don't have
to be in the right mood, you know. But it's also it's play. It's play, you're playing. You know. It's funny because Tabitha, my wife, she said, do you know that when you're writing, you're laughing. You're laughing all the time. Oh, I had no idea. I had no idea, and I said, basically, then I realized, I'm basically laughing at my own jokes, which is its own thing. But nevertheless I was saying
that was actually just laughing all the time. I'm wondering if you've had that experience where you thought, I wrote this story and it's about this, or it was supposed to be funny, or it was supposed to make you cry, and instead you got a completely different response from readers than you expected. Yes, And you know, when I was writing those the stories in Civil War Line, I didn't really know what anybody would feel. I didn't even know
what I felt. So I kind of developed this idea that what you want to do in fiction anyway, is you want to create this space. And I always call it a black box, like a black box theater. But you want to create this space. You're gonna go in and do this thing we've been talking about, like check out every sentence, check out every transition, make it fast, make it whatever. But I'm going to try not to think about themes, and I'm I'm gonna try not think
about politics or any of that. It's like I'm trying to make a roller coaster that's really intense. I mean, I don't think the roller coaster right thinks he's going to convince you of anything. He just wants to thrill you or you know out so then you can say, would admit, yes, I get your own meaning out of it, and he doesn't. He's gone, he's onto the next roller coaster. He does, you know, but he wants you to come out of it going WHOA, what the hell that was?
You know, he doesn't want you to come and go, oh interesting. It's about pure you know. You know that's right, should be a little unable to speak for a few minutes. So that was kind of the my basic models. Let me just jangle somebody in here and know that when if the reader gets spit out on the other end and it's jangled, I've done my job. And there will be all kinds of things to say about it. You know. If you want to talk about it in terms of politics,
we can. If we want to talk about it esthetics, sure, but the main thing is the difference between the writers we love and the writers we sort of hopeful and send us anything. Is the jangle, I would say. And then at the end, if you've done that, you've also at the same time sharpened the meaning of it. Now maybe it's not a meaning that you can articulate. Hopefully, it's not hopefully it's it's something more than could be said, you know, in one sentence. Otherwise just write that sense.
But there is some weird thing where honoring the sort of internal dynamics of the story, trying to make it give off the most light, also makes it say something. And the thing that I live for is that it says stuff that I did not believe. Yes, where people come to you and they're almost enlighten you about yourself. Yeah, yeah, or you or even sometimes at Dana, I'm like, oh god, yeah, I do believe that. I just didn't. I didn't know that was a thing, you know, I didn't know this
simple belief could actually have an articulation. I have this rap of being good at explaining complicated things. That's supposedly what I do, and it's so different what I think I do. I think I explain only what I need to explain to make the story work and to satisfy certain demands that the character has made, the characters have made on me, and that to deliver the characters, I need to explain this stuff. And I actually don't even think this is a horrible admission that I have a
responsibility to explain the complicated thing. I think I have the responsibility to make the reader feel like it's been explained, which is different, make the reader feel like they can move on happily and they understand the situation the character is in now and we don't have to worry about that anymore, and never mind about you know, collateralized dead obligations right now. See that's beautiful. And I think what I'm hearing you say is that you're basically serving the
structure of the story. And so when someone says you explain complicated things, well, you're thinking, well, no, what I actually did was I meant I explained the minimum I needed to set up the structure of a story and
to make the story move ahead. And I think that's related to voice two, because when we're reading one of those sections of yours, what I'm feeling is the the courtesy and the efficiency you're writing it, saying, I know I need this for this down the road, So you're doing it efficiently, and you're doing it with an eye to my taking away from what I need to but that you know. I think efficiency is another part of
voice that's really important. Is the voice serving the needs of the story, or is it serving the needs of the writer to show off a little bit like Lebota de Darda was full of flourishest that didn't no work, you know, and I think a reader you know by the time we're done there, because it'd be a massive market for Lebota the Worst. Ye so that, George, this is a fabulous talking to you and it's me too. I love it. I don't know what to say at
the end of this whole series. It's been a total gas going back over my first book and being able to express in the form of five podcast episodes my responses to it and process it with writers great as Ira Glass and George Saunders. I guess I just want to thank everyone who participated in it, especially the secret characters from Liars Poker who had no reason to be exposed. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you
again soon. When we launched season three of Against the Rules, Other People's Money was written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by Lydia Jeancott. Katherine Girardo is our showrunner and sound designer, and Julia Barton edits the scripts and also serves as our chief unboxer. Matt Weineger composed the music and Beth Johnson checked facts. Mia Lobell is
our executive producer. We record at Berkeley Advanced Media Studios, with engineering by Tofa Ruth Special Thanks to Brendan Francis Newnham and the rest of the book's team, including Jasmine Faustino. Thanks also to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, John Snars, Carl Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Jason Gambrell, and Brant Haynes. Our marketing and operations team includes Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Mary Beth Smith, Royston Breserve, Maya Kanigg, and Daniella Lacan. Brianna
Brady provided research. Additional scoring by Pamela Lawrence Other People's Money as a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. If you don't like the show, please don't define More Pushkin podcasts listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can buy our new Liars Poker audiobook, unabridged and read by me the author at Pushkin dot Fm, Slash Liars Poker and also at Audible.
I'm gonna leave these boxes here so they can do take pictures when we want to take pictures of them, and okay, but I can leave it here still, right, okay, all right? Anything else, Julia, No, no, thanks for doing It's great. I think is there think there's stuff we can use. Yeah,