Humorist George Saunders has opened up about how he became a writer in a new piece in The New Yorker.
In the column, the author describes his life over the years from his early friendship with author Tobias Wolff and his Syracuse education to his early jobs as a technical writer and teacher. Here is an excerpt from the piece:
We’re not only allowed to think about audience, we’d better. What we’re doing in writing is not all that different from what we’ve been doing all our lives, i.e., using our personalities as a way of coping with life. Writing is about charm, about finding and accessing and honing ones’ particular charms. To say that “a light goes on” is not quite right—it’s more like: a fixture gets installed. Only many years later (see below) will the light go on.