Last month, we drove to Syracuse to meet the writer George Saunders. We found him seated, hands folded, at the desk in his office, at Syracuse University. Through the window behind him, it was snowing lightly. “At this moment, I haven’t written in a month, which for me is just—I’m noticing that I’m getting a little agitated.” He chuckled, unclasped his hands, and rubbed his beard. “You burn up a lot of energy in writing, you know? And you take a lot, too. I think I may have misled myself to think that that feeling was a thing of the past, but I’m seeing that it’s necessary.” Saunders’s most recent book, the story collection “Tenth of December” (parts of which first appeared in the magazine), was published this year, and he’s been on tour for months. Last summer, almost thirty years after he first arrived at Syracuse, as a graduate student, he spoke to the university’s class of 2013, and the commencement address, on kindness, went viral. In the coming months, Saunders looks forward to returning to the empty page. How does he begin? “Well, I don’t do it by willing it. And there’s a mysterious element, a magical element, right? And it’s not reducible. A lot of the process is positioning yourself to receive the moment of magic when it deigns to come to you.”