On the “writer’s writer,” George Saunders:
“We talked for a while about his relationship to Wallace. For all the ways in which their fiction might seem to be working similar themes, they were, Saunders said, ‘like two teams of miners, digging at the same spot but from different directions.’ He described making trips to New York in the early days and having ‘three or four really intense afternoons and evenings’ with, on separate occasions, Wallace and Franzen and Ben Marcus, talking to each of them about what ‘the ultimate aspiration for fiction was.’ Saunders added: ‘The thing on the table was emotional fiction. How do we make it? How do we get there? Is there something yet to be discovered? These were about the possibly contrasting desire to: (1) write stories that had some sort of moral heft and/or were not just technical exercises or cerebral games; while (2) not being cheesy or sentimental or reactionary.’”
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