A Practical Look at Saunders George's The Braindead Megaphone
Most people who pick up Saunders George's work are doing it because they've hit a wall with traditional creative writing exercises. The Braindead Megaphone operates on a simple premise: strip away the emotional embellishment and see what's actually left when you force yourself to communicate without decoration. It's not a novel. It's not a memoir. It's a methodology disguised as a book. As for finding a copy, you'll likely turn up nothing on Amazon. The "Unknown Edition" designation tells you everything you need to know. This was a small-run print job, possibly print-on-demand, possibly just passed around a tight circle of writers. AbeBooks sometimes has one. RareBookRoom occasionally lists them. If you're determined, try searching WorldCat to find which university library holds a copy, then use Interlibrary Loan. The whole process takes about two weeks and costs you nothing beyond your patience. I spent three months tracking down a copy before finding one at a used bookshop in Portland. The seller had no idea what it was and sold it for seven dollars with a coffee stain on page forty-three.
How The Method Actually Works
George's approach centers on a specific exercise format. You take a piece of writing — any piece — and you run it through what he calls the megaphone pass. The idea is to compress every sentence until it carries maximum informational density with zero ornamental language. You're not simplifying. You're removing everything that isn't doing structural work. Here's the practical part. Take a paragraph of your own writing. Read it aloud. Every sentence that makes you feel something when you hear it is usually wrong. Not always. But usually. The emotional response is the point George is trying to eliminate, or at least isolate. You want to know what the sentence communicates without the feeling attached to it. I ran a two-thousand-word short story through this method once. The result was eight hundred words that told the same story but read like a police report. My editor at the time hated it. The story was stronger in the compressed version, though, for pacing reasons alone. It moved with a speed that the original never managed.
The Counter-Intuitive Part Nobody Talks About
Most writers treat this as a editing technique. That's not what it's for. The megaphone method is diagnostic. You use it to identify which sentences are carrying actual meaning and which ones are generating warmth without function. The problem is that you can't reliably tell the difference on the first read-through. I learned this after wasting two full drafts on pieces I thought were tight when they were actually bloated. The workaround is to let the compressed version sit for at least forty-eight hours before you reintegrate anything. Read it again after that gap. You'll immediately spot which sentences you miss. Those are the ones that were doing real work in the original. Everything else you chose to restore was habit, not necessity. There's a specific edge case where this falls apart. When you're working with dialogue, the megaphone compression strips out subtext. That's not a bug in the method. That's the point. But if your material depends entirely on what characters aren't saying, you'll destroy your own piece by running it through the process naively. I encountered this with a scene that was fundamentally about avoidance. The compressed version made the characters sound like they were lying directly to each other instead of dancing around a subject. The fix was to preserve the first line and last line of any dialogue exchange untouched and only compress what happened in between.
Get the Full Details
What The Book Doesn't Cover (And Should)
George assumes you already understand basic sentence-level craft. He doesn't explain how to identify ornamental language. He doesn't walk through the difference between rhythm and decoration. If you're new to this kind of thing, you'll end up trimming healthy sentences because you can't tell them from fluff. The book mentions this briefly on page thirty-one and moves on, which is frustrating. Another gap: the method works well for prose that's already been drafted. It does not work for generating new material. Writers who try to compose directly in compressed form usually produce something that reads like technical documentation, and then they abandon the exercise thinking it doesn't work for them. It doesn't work for generation. That's a separate phase of writing that George never addresses.
Practical Timeline And Expectations
A single piece of moderate length (around fifteen hundred words) takes roughly forty-five minutes to run through one full megaphone pass and reintegration cycle. If you're new to the method, budget about ninety minutes. The second and third passes — which are where most of the actual work happens — each take about twenty minutes once you've internalized the process. The real bottleneck isn't the method itself. It's the mental friction of reading your own writing stripped bare. Most writers quit after the first compression because the result feels wrong emotionally. It's supposed to feel wrong. The discomfort is the signal that you've hit something honest. Push through it. If this approach doesn't resonate, consider looking into George's later work on the same theme. The principles carry forward, but the execution becomes more accessible for people who found the earlier material too abstract. Not every writer needs this method. But if you're stuck on pieces that feel warm but empty, it's worth the effort of tracking down a copy and working through it carefully.
