In a new post on his Substack, George Saunders shares his thoughts on freakification: writing with the intent to be noticed. Many writers seek to portray the world as it is or how we imagine it should or could be, but Saunders says we might sometimes want to explore, rather than expound, and to compel the reader through a story not with a promise of explanation, but with the power of unique, original, percussive writing. “What if – and here’s where I want to tread lightly – but what if we were writing intentionally in such a way that would get our prose noticed? And that was it?” he asks. “What if we were trying to make our prose so distinctive (freaky) that it couldn’t be ignored.”
Saunders acknowledges that many writers would find this showy, if not nauseating. Others will write prose that is freaky, but only freaky. For his writing, Saunders believes that being noticed is a pathway to revealing human truths.
Early in his career, Saunders focused on the freaky without the statements. “I was bent on freakifying my prose so that, when the editor of one of the small journals I was sending to back then started reading the story, she wouldn’t be able to stop reading,” he says. “But, in my approach at that time, there was no sense of trying to write truthfully about some place or describe something I’d lived through. The task was to make a sentence that seemed new and then honor whatever ‘world’ that sentence had started to create, with another freaky/unusual sentence, and so on.”
As he wrote the stories that were eventually collected in CivilWarLand, Saunders’ focus was calling attention to his prose. “That was my benchmark: is there anything new/jarring/undeniable happening at the sentence level?” he says. However, this didn’t require that he surrender meaning. “What I found, finally, was that, for me, the goofing around/showing off was the only way to mean something; it allowed me to move away from a certain somber, stolid, overdetermined quality that I, as a working-class kid, had always associated with Literature,” Saunders explains. Instead, it was “a way to shake off my too-conventional first thoughts and plans for stories, to allow my subconscious to get into the story and push aside the merely rational and throw a little joy around the place.”
Saunders acknowledges that this raises an intense question about our opinions on prose, ours and others’. “We might, in this spirit, see ‘acquiring a style’ as exactly equal to ‘radically doing what we like’ or ‘being very proactive about allowing our unjustifiable likes and dislikes to shape our prose.'” he says. “In this one zone of our lives (the artistic zone) we’re allowed to be wildly and indefensibly opinionated and self-indulgent (which is also called ‘having a style’).”
