Key ideas from George Saunders

• "Creativity is reaction" - Saunders describes writing as cranking out material, then reacting to it with pencil in hand the next day
• Great Russian writers in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain made thousands of micro-choices without intellectually knowing what they were doing
• Lincoln in the Bardo started with just a two-line outline: Lincoln visits his son's crypt while the son exists in an afterlife state
• "No worthy problem is ever solved on the plane of its original conception" - stories must evolve beyond their initial premise
• Fiction can be more true than nonfiction because it allows writers to explore darkness without hurting real people's feelings
• "Avoidance moments" in drafts - bad language or factual errors - signal the subconscious protecting the story from going wrong
• The best stories start with almost nothing and grow outward through revision rather than from predetermined big ideas
• Short stories create their own context and meaning, landing in ways the writer couldn't predict, unlike novels with through-lines