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"FacebookPinterestFacebookPinterest\n\nWe don&amp;amp;#x2019;t mean one of those block-jawed, Tony Robbins-looking loudmouths. Saunders is not interested in motivational mantras. He&amp;amp;#x2019;s not, as he puts it, into &amp;amp;#x201C;pulling up my big manure truck of ideas and dumping it on poor, unsuspecting you.&amp;amp;#x201D; What the celebrated writer does prescribe is the idea that we should approach every person and situation with unflinching kindness. This theme runs throughout Tenth of December, the year&amp;amp;#x2019;s standout collection of short stories. It&amp;amp;#x2019;s also central to his poignant commencement address at Syracuse University in May. Consider both required reading. In the meantime, get your guidance straight from the source.\n\nHow to Be Decent: The big kahuna of all moral questions, as far as I&amp;amp;#x2019;m concerned, is ego. How do you correct the fundamental misperception that we are all born with, i.e.: I am permanent, I am enduring, I am central. All of the nasty stuff in this life comes out of that misunderstanding. And I&amp;amp;#x2019;d say that&amp;amp;#x2019;s the central moral dilemma for men, women, children, old people\u2014you name it. Or to put it another way: the separation between ourselves and everything else that we all feel, deep in our gut\u2014is incorrect. So to the extent that we are rushing around trying to underscore that distinction and put distance between ourselves and others, and (once and for all!) &amp;amp;#x201C;win&amp;amp;#x201D; that game\u2014that&amp;amp;#x2019;s an error. But not one that I&amp;amp;#x2019;ve learned to stop making, at all.\n\nHow to Age: I would like to not accrue any cynicism as I&amp;amp;#x2019;m aging. If someone&amp;amp;#x2019;s in an anxiety-producing situation, it&amp;amp;#x2019;s sort of natural to act like you&amp;amp;#x2019;ve seen it all before or try to propose that nothing can surprise you. I&amp;amp;#x2019;m actually all about the opposite. To get up in the morning and go, &amp;amp;#x201C;Let&amp;amp;#x2019;s pretend you don&amp;amp;#x2019;t know shit about life. You&amp;amp;#x2019;re fifty-four years old, but nothing&amp;amp;#x2019;s happened to you yet. Everything&amp;amp;#x2019;s a blank slate.&amp;amp;#x201D;\n\nI feel myself judging less and being awed more\u2014I&amp;amp;#x2019;m interested in people and am more inclined to see this whole thing as a crazy beautiful display, and less as a problem to be solved. And I&amp;amp;#x2019;m more inclined, when evil does occur, to see it as a deeply regrettable playing out of pre-existing circumstances, by someone who, maybe in a very confused way, was trying to make himself happy. Something like that.\n\nHow to Write: Writing teaches the value of not being too sure\u2014this idea of being open to what actually is, instead of trying to force your version of events on to that reality. What I think good writing does: enlivens that part of us that actually believes we are in this world, right now, and that being here somehow matters. It reawakens the reader to the fact and the value of her own existence. How? By holding up the things of the world up for examination in a semi-sacred way.\n\nI try to keep myself as free of preconceptions about where a story&amp;amp;#x2019;s going or what it means from the very beginning. I tend to start with some little fragment that&amp;amp;#x2019;s almost not meaningful, or isn&amp;amp;#x2019;t overtly meaningful\u2014not thematically charged or something. I&amp;amp;#x2019;ll just start farting around with that piece of text. Trying really hard to keep any bigger tension out of my head. Weirdly, you do that and the direction will tell you what the next beat of the story is, or some question that it&amp;amp;#x2019;s raising. So for me, the whole thing is to be very, very unsure about what the story is going to do.\n\nWriting is great training for life\u2014this idea of being open to what actually is, instead of trying to force your version of events on to that reality. No autopilot\u2014we have to learn to continually live with uncertainty.\n\nHow to Teach: Every year is a reminder that talent is always with us. Maybe as you get older, you might tend to slip into that old guy mode\u2014&amp;amp;#x201C;Oh, the kids these days.&amp;amp;#x201D; But being around our students, you see that that&amp;amp;#x2019;s just false. Every generation is full of talented young people who are newly discovering the power of the word and are fired up about what it can do in its traditional form. It&amp;amp;#x2019;s just like having your faith renewed every day.\n\nThe thing I like to teach, if I can\u2014because it&amp;amp;#x2019;s kind of a superpower\u2014is revision. If you can open that door for a young writer, that&amp;amp;#x2019;s a lot. So this semester, I had a student who was a really amazing writer but wasn&amp;amp;#x2019;t big on revision. And we broke through that. I just made a bunch of edits and challenged her to try them\u2014and she was very courageous, and did it\u2014and in our conference I could see that that habit\u2014of cutting, and being bold enough to move bits around and so forth\u2014was now hers. She had tasted it and internalized it and would have that ability the rest of her writing life.\n\nIt&amp;amp;#x2019;s intense. These kids are so good that you always have to be at the top of your game.\n\nHow to be a Man: When I got married and we started our family, life got better and simpler, because the story of every day was: honor that connection, honor those people. It took a lot of things and attitudes off the table. I wasn&amp;amp;#x2019;t interested in the sort of surficial aspects of &amp;amp;#x201C;being a man&amp;amp;#x201D;\u2014being tough, being stylish, going out, being in control of all things, being Alpha, etc. The whole definition of &amp;amp;#x201C;man&amp;amp;#x201D; changed, from &amp;amp;#x201C;some sort of swaggering person always in control,&amp;amp;#x201D; to something more like: &amp;amp;#x201C;he who provides and honors&amp;amp;#x201D;\u2014and that, turns out, takes a lot more real toughness than my previous mode of being. Because whatever you have to do to make it work for your family, you do it. For me, that just meant working a pretty difficult and dullish job for eight years, while I wrote my first book\u2014a job that, at least in the beginning, I couldn&amp;amp;#x2019;t find any glamour or cool in at all. There was no way, in that job, to feel I was the master of my domain, is how I might say it. And that was great for me. Why do I have to be master of anything? So\u2014to learn to subjugate yourself to something bigger than just yourself\u2014I mean, that&amp;amp;#x2019;s the main thing for any adult, male or female.\n\nHow to be Himself: I&amp;amp;#x2019;m a pretty nice guy. I&amp;amp;#x2019;m kind of alright. I&amp;amp;#x2019;m funny sometimes. But when you let me have eight months, I can put together a refined and more intelligent and more kindly version of myself on the page. Fiction is the one place where you can go back and refine your expressions so that it&amp;amp;#x2019;s kind of you at your very best. I think it&amp;amp;#x2019;s a little bit like a recording studio. You can go in and do take after take after take. Then, at the end, you can select the ones that sound the most natural. In my real life, I&amp;amp;#x2019;m not so excessive or controlling. But in writing, that&amp;amp;#x2019;s the one place where I&amp;amp;#x2019;m a fanatic.\n\nWhat I&amp;amp;#x2019;m working on is to try and live on the assumption that other people are just as real as I am. When I meet someone, to try and notice what assumptions I&amp;amp;#x2019;m making about them and what defenses are springing into place and disable those to the extent I can. To feel: Oh, that person is just me on a different day (or, in a different life, or in the thrall of a different destiny or set of karmic circumstances.) So the idea would be to feel that the person was just as real and valid as I am. That he is interested in and worried about and afraid of the same things I am\u2014that he loves his family and so on just as much as I do. Is it always true? No. But as a starting place there&amp;amp;#x2019;s a strange kind of power in it. It&amp;amp;#x2019;s true much more than it&amp;amp;#x2019;s false, and it serves as a wonderful door opener. And this aspiration is a great connecting corridor to a lot of other moral issues.\n\nByard Duncan (@byardduncan) is a   GQ contributor."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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