Saunders: I think that’s one of the pleasures of that move into the future: The reader feels that it comes out of an organic, narrative need that your story has created. This sort of thing happened with my story “Escape From Spiderhead.” I had written a first few pages purposely running at about 70 percent articulateness. I was trying to do a kind of slightly dumbed-down voice. I can’t really even remember why. I just had some text where the guy was sort of a fumbler. But I’d done voices like that in a few previous stories and was getting tired of it, and felt like goofing around in a higher verbal register. So I wrote some prose that was, you know, almost like Henry James on stupid pills, but it was the best I could do. So then I had that text sitting alongside some of that 70 percent text. And thought, How might I get those two modes of expression into the same story? Just, mechanically, how can I justify having those two first-person monologues attributed to the same character? And I thought: Oh, a drug. And whatever that drug was, it had to allow his diction to go from this to that — from low to high — to express what he’s perceiving with more precision, and in a better vocabulary. And then this name popped into my head: Verbaluce™.

Egan: How can I get a prescription? When I think about a book like “A Clockwork Orange,” which I really loved, the weird hybrid language is what I remember most. And even though I don’t start with language like you do, I’m happy if I can somehow get to different language when I imagine forward. In a way, that was what writing a chapter in PowerPoint did for me in “Goon Squad.” I had been dying to use PowerPoint as a genre for fiction, but I found that using it in any present-day story felt completely lame: static and mannered and corporate, but it felt strange and interesting, like a different language, when I was telling a future story. Was “A Clockwork Orange” an important book for you?

Saunders: It was. I found it thrilling because it seemed that, as Anthony Burgess focused his attention on inventing a new language, that process was simultaneously creating a new world. It felt like language and world were sort of co-creating each other.

I’ve always had, since I was a little kid first starting to read, an aversion to language that felt flat, or too “normal.” I remember having that response to some of our reading books: “David, a kindly stout boy, walked up his street, past trees and houses.” And I just felt like, first, “Kill me,” and second, “That is a lie.” That flat language is not doing justice to reality. I just have no interest in writing in a style that complies too closely with what I’ve heard called “consensus reality.” This is maybe a bit of a neurosis of mine. So as you try through revision to depart from that flatness, what you’re really doing, ritually, is destabilizing your lazy habitual perceptions.

If you write (God forbid): “Jim, a successful insurance executive, walked into the Holiday Inn lobby in a happy, cheerful spirit,” and read what you’ve written, and almost throw up, well, what you’ll want to do in revision is purge the prose of whatever it was that sickened you: “Jim (happy, cheerful Jim) once again dragged himself into the freaking Holiday Inn.” So now Jim’s happy cheerfulness reads as something he’s tired of, and faking. Which is, to my ear, at least, a little better. And if you feel, as I would, an aversion to now having to laboriously try to describe a Holiday Inn, you might shake things up by invention: As in: “Jim (happy, cheerful Jim) once again dragged his tired, divorced ass into the freaking Macomb, Ill., Holiday Inn, MindGetting (out of sheer boredom) ‘April 1, 1865/this geog/pretty girl,’ and then, thankfully (for the 10-second window allowed by his ‘Premier TimeTravel’ pass), was transformed into Maggie O’Doole, who stood looking down at her hoop skirt, then up at the lobby, which now was a Midwestern meadow, one lone hawk circling overhead.”

What the hell does all of that (which just now came out in a spontaneous language lurch, away from banality) even mean? Well, it would appear that Jim has a computer in his head, and that he “MindGets” (a verb, seems like) a subroutine designed to transform him into a PRETTY GIRL, on APRIL 1, 1865, in THIS GEOGRAPHY (i.e., the meadow in which the Holiday Inn now stands). This is what I heard a young writer recently describe as “revising via contempt.” My unhappiness with what I’d written led to that lurch, which led to: the future, or something that sounds as if it’s meant to be the future.

Egan: I think form has worked that way for me — as a bridge into a different world that can comfortably and naturally contain it. It happened with Twitter. I’d been interested for a long time in using it to write fiction — not so much because of the small structural units, which Twitter obviously didn’t invent, but the sense of these utterances appearing digitally one after another from some distant place. I kept thinking, what kind of story would need to be told that way? How can it not just feel like a conventional story broken down and delivered sequentially?