George Saunders On: Getting Un-Stuck, Calming the Inner Critic, and Building Empathy Without Becoming a Chump

What It Covers

Dan Harris interviews novelist George Saunders about his new book Vigil, exploring techniques for escaping creative stuckness, managing self-criticism through warm metacognition, and developing empathy without sacrificing boundaries. Saunders shares how writing about mortality and the afterlife informs present-moment living, and explains his revision process as a practice in reconsideration and mental flexibility.

Key Questions Answered

• •Warm Metacognition for Stuckness: When stuck in writing or life, step back to observe your mental state without judgment. Ask yourself how you're reading the situation today—are you overly critical or too generous? This creates distance from reactive thinking. Saunders applies this by questioning his manuscript daily, accepting all answers including fatal ones, which paradoxically reduces anxiety and increases productivity by 180 blank pages at a time.
• •Empathy as Strategic Tool: Understanding an opponent's internal logic makes you more effective, not weaker. Spend time reconstructing why someone holds their position—their fears, conditioning, predispositions—before acting. This doesn't require agreement or passivity. Like a mechanic diagnosing a car before fixing it, empathy provides tactical information. You can be fiercely opposed to someone's actions while understanding their psychological machinery, which actually sharpens your response.
• •Revision as Reconsideration Practice: Writing functions as slowed-down life where you can observe judgment formation in real time. Chekhov's stories work as brief reconsideration machines—they present information that makes you aware of your rush to judge before you actually need to decide. This trains the mind to wait, gather more data, and notice when facile judgment closes off understanding. The skill transfers from reading to daily interactions when practiced consistently.
• •Predestination and Reduced Judgment: Nobody chose their initial cognitive wiring, reading ability, work ethic, or capacity for change. These predispositions arrived unbidden. Recognizing this absolute view—that people are inevitable products of genetics plus environment—reduces harsh judgment of others and excessive self-praise. The relative view still operates: you have preferences, boundaries, and must act. But the absolute view softens reactivity and creates space for more skillful responses to difficult people.
• •Stretching Prevents Creative Calcification: After 67 years, familiar patterns dominate consciousness—same jokes, same thoughts, same moves. Combat this accretion by choosing projects you think you cannot write, forcing neglected abilities to activate. Pick something that creates anticipatory frolic mixed with impossibility. The harder the middle section, the greater the problem your subconscious is solving. This principle applies beyond writing: audacious projects prove vitality and access unexplored quadrants of capability.
• •Elevation Through Inhabiting Others: Spending five seconds truly occupying another person's consciousness would be life-changing. You'd experience what your self actually is by contrast—the particular jail you've inhabited since birth. Fiction approximates this through deep character work. Saunders spent months inside a climate-denying oil executive's mind, generating unexpected warmth despite political opposition. This practice reveals how consciousness constructs reality and how different minds generate different phenomenological worlds.