Transcript for:
Paul Harding's Writing Philosophy

i interviewed Paul Harding who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his very first novel called Tinkers And now unlike most novelists Paul's not really interested in plots He's only halfway interested in characters So then what is he interested in well he's interested in describing the wonders and the mysteries of life And he's going to teach us how to describe reality more vividly How to see how to hear how to feel and then how to take all those sensations and translate them onto the page You do not write with outlines You see writing as basically a process of improvisation And I want to talk about your drumming later on But why do you write like that and do you teach people to write like that that's the perfect question because one of the dangers of being a teacher is modeling your own what you know what works for you is being normative because the danger is it's easy to teach that way you know um and it's it's dangerous when you're teaching younger or newer writers because they've you probably get them at a point where they've realized that writing is really hard and so they're looking for like the magic bullet they're looking for the you know um and um so one of the things I do is I just say look what I'm doing is I'm modeling kind of the thoughtfulness that's required the self-awareness that's required for you to be um to to observe yourself as a writer and to figure out what works for you because ultimately at its base it's it's aesthetics It's my taste I love to just light out for the territories without a compass without a map without I just love seeing what language gives me and what experience gives me So I often think of like those old Buster Keaton movies where he just you know he's he's up on the you know skyscraper that's under construction and you just put your foot out into open space and you just hope the iron girder you know I I love that just kind of flying by the seat of my pants And that then is you know for me that leads to what the physicists call emergence you know which is the idea that for any system of a certain amount of complexity there will arrive you know once you put that system into motion um there will emerge properties that could not be predicted prior to the system right being set into motion to me I think that's a perfect metaphor for what happens when I start writing a sentence so Get concrete with me What are you teaching like how are you training people to think like that yeah Well I don't train them to think like that So this it's it may sound koi right because but it's what I teach what I I mean kind of at the root what I teach you know literal and concrete and say look this is actually a skill that you need to step back and understand as a skill and understand that you need to actually work it you know which is the power of observation just being observant and being able to devote the the best um uh uh um quality of observation you can that has to do with um uh uh dropping any kind of presumption Um you it means you have to drop all all um all use of uh received acculturated or habituated language because a lot of what we think is thinking and a lot of what we think is sort of using language is just you know um you use words you know through um through because you recognize them in common usage all the time right or you get like phrases that are you know off the rack pre-fabricated for you and you're used to deploying them but that's because you've got to get up and you've got to put your shoes on and brush your teeth and go to work right like just that kind of language that you use to get through your day that will not work in good writing you know so if you're going into a sentence if you're going into a scene or whatever whatever you're writing you need to go in and say "Okay I know I'm attracted to this but I don't know what I'm going to find." You can't come in with a repertoire of language that you're just going to deploy So I don't mean to get all heady here but like at some level we all have to work with received wisdom Like every single word that I speak is actually built upon like a like a tower of etmology a foundation of etmology right so like how do you get your brain into a place where you have those raw sensations yeah You have to sift you have to sift down a little bit into and part of it is that's that you know the you know saying okay I actually have to I have to work up my chops of observing things pre-linguistic and right and part of that is you're not used to just slowing down because so much of what we have to do dayto-day moment to moment is yeah I got it I know that I got it already you're not thinking about it it's just reflex it's just muscle memory you can't bring that into so I say you got to get your head into a space where You have to like just be patient and observant and and say no what what you know what do you actually see what is actually there when you're in the scene Give me an example of when you did this and walk me through sort of where you started where you ended up and how that became writing Um that's um it's because I feel like I do it for every sentence Um let's say like the opening of um of my first novel Tinkers Um it's about a guy who is kind of in the la last days of his final illness Um and he's been brought home um to uh to um to to die to pass away um in his home So he's in a hospital bed in his living room Um and at one point he begins to hallucinate He sees cracks in the ceiling of his of his um of his house That is actually a factual thing When my grandfather was dying he says "Where did those cracks come from?" and we were just like he there are no cracks in the ceiling and he he goes and and that moment just passed but then when I was using that as kind of the starting off point not for the novel at that point I didn't know what it was I just working on writing that day and just had that that idea in my so I just thought oh okay well he was just hallucinating and then the the day and I just said no no no wait what happens if I stick with him and the cracks got bigger you know and then what would happen if the crack if the whole house if there's a crack in the in the FL so then I thought oh well the ceiling would cave in and then oh okay you know but before I left I was like well then what would he see i thought the wires and the plumbing and all that the second floor you know then what would happen if the roof caved in well he'd see the clouds and the sky Well then what would happen next then well the clouds would fall out of the sky and then what's left just the blue So what would happen then then the blue would drain out of the sky Well what would that be then it would be the stars and and you know the the black sky and the stars What would happen next the stars would fall out of the sky And then what would happen next when you just got the black it's like oh that's his funeral shroud Huh It's the black velvet curtain that comes and drapes over the whole thing You end up with almost like him in his coffin with a black curtain I was like that's one of those things you're like you know and people to this day say what does that mean I'm like I don't know but it means something you know and so but that was that just that very literal I didn't leave the it's that in that case it's an extended metaphor you just keep you just keep testing it until you get to the end point y but every one of those things is super literal right I just I just pursued and just was think and that's what I mean about like I was just remembering my grandfather's house and just cuz I had put all the ID put all the insulation in I'd done a lot of the plumbing you know stuff like that with him And so it was just pushing on observation getting a hold of it not presuming I knew not rushing towards oh it's symbolic What do you like lie down on your couch you just sit in your chair you go for a walk When I'm do that I'm probably new things emerge Yeah Yeah And sometimes it it takes like that I remember it's like pulling the yarn on your imagination Yeah Yeah And sometimes it's like pulling teeth Some of the like that particular two or three page thing I probably wrote it and practically didn't have to revise it It was one of those weird things that just just came out But there's plenty of other stuff that you know that's another reason why you revise and revise and re So everything just seems like it's seamless Yeah But any given passage could have taken me years you know just keep going back to it and keep going back to it and you finally kind of f find something you calibrate something one day and you realize oh there's the right expression there's the you know so you have to be dogged that's what you keep going it's just like you have to be you have to be patient and thoughtful and not in a hurry so you have to slow down you have to be observant you have to give your best attention um and then you have to learn how to sustain the attention you you know so that when you come when you come upon something you can stay with it so if I were to come to you and last time we went to the Boston Commons we're just walking around look at the swan boats and if I want to put words to that experience and I went out with you and we're together and I were to say "I really want your help describing this experience I don't want you to give me the language but I want you to guide me through this almost like a guided meditation type thing What would we do together so that I could put words to that experience?" We had a full day We have 10 hours together to sit there Do we write do we paint do we talk do we walk what do we do all of the above you know i mean so this is another thing to go back to teaching It has to do with um you know I could describe what I would do and and over the course of a semester over the course of a couple years you know an MFA program or whatever um I just try to flood my students with a million different ideas and then what sticks I say whatever sticks or whatever appeals to you you try that you know and you come up with your own repertoire of what works for you because again it goes back to my aesthetics I love doing that I don't outline I don't like plots Um but if you love to outline and you love plots knock yourself out I love to read highly plotted you know books It's so it has to do with you figuring out who you are as a writer But I think there are that you know going back to what we were just talking about this that there is that fundamental you know like sit down and pay attention to the swan boats sit down and pay attention to the squirrels the little kids what you see And then I think like what I do is I often just I model what I do and say you can find your own version of this but I think like a painter a lot of the times I think oh because when I think of you paint with words yeah and I teach I teach near the common so I spend a lot of time in the common and I'm just always in the commons I I think of the common is like um layers and so I think of a lot of like horizontal layers of color and light and so I just start thinking about how would you stack that up so that the reader would get that and it would be like a painting It would be like something that you know like a landscape painter would have done and then you again then is a character experiencing that you know that sort of thing So what does this mean then character is always being refracted through description Yeah So that's one of the things you know um in my own experience people are off people would be struggling between what's the you know how do you move back and forth between the interior and the exterior right interiority and exteriority and just over the years I was just like I don't like I the feeling I I could whenever I was trying to when I was thinking of it that way I could always hear the gears shifting and clanking and like okay now we're gonna stop and now we're gonna go to the outside and then we're gonna go back to the inside right and so I just thought of one of my favorite words from my fave rave writer teacher friend Marilyn Robinson that's in her first novel housekeeping is co-extensivity I just thought what if I just don't think of there being any difference between the interior or the exterior they're just they're just co-extensive and so then description of you know say the way that the Boston common is layered and the different colors and then what's going on in the different layers and then the ecosystem of the Then you see all these little plots and all that and I start just thinking okay what if I'm thinking of that as that's what a character starts thinking Oh this is kind of like a painting and I'm noticing this and I'm noticing that And then what and then and then as I get to know the character better I can use those descriptions of like the Boston Common to um to to render character Description actually becomes character So I'm never doing something just to make like a nice racoo painterly like look at Paul he can he can write like paintings Well yeah A lot of insecure writers they show off right like they're not actually writing something in service of the reader They're writing something in service of themselves to get the applause of other writers to say "Oh my goodness look at what I can do." And that's when you have art where the artist is just trying to show off their chops rather than creating something for the viewer And even that's a stylistic aesthetic choice I mean we all know what it's like to finish a novel and be just devastated by you know like that was an amazing work of art It blew me away And then other novels you finish and you just think wasn't he the cleverest boy in class and the novel is about the writer you know and you get a lot of these polymathic writers who are you know they're virtuosic in that way Um and then there's just that's just a matter of because I know plenty of people who love to read and write those kind of books But um I always think of the a great jazz writer for the New Yorker Whitney Ballet One of the ways he described that kind of phenomenon is he was describing the drummer Buddy Rich and he called him a mere virtuoso Uh you know so the analogy in writing would be you know every word in the dictionary but you don't have anything to say This is what I'm always modeling for my students you figure out what you think is cool what interests you Like those you see I'm I'm telling you like all all these things we're talking about are things for you to think about Like they're choices that you make So you're giving people seeds Exactly Yeah Because that's another thing just again as a teacher um I didn't like the distinction between oh I don't teach genre writing I won't you know sci-fi Sorry can't help you You know whatever that you know fantasy I just am at the point now where it's like any piece of writing you bring to the seminar table I can help you make it better And I can help you make it better on its and your terms not mine Because we're all writing in English pros right and we're all writing uh fiction which is narrative and narrative pros works in you know it always works in the same ways You know the things that will make a sci-fi novel better are the same things that will make a quote unquote literary you know So with your students what is the thing that they continually struggle with the most like what is the thing that if you could just get up the first day of class and you're just like "Students dang it I've been teaching this for 15 years or whatever I told you a million times I need to sear this idea into your head." Like what is that message two word They're going to be on my They're going to be on my headstone It's And it's relevant almost 100% of the time It's slow down Slow down Just slow down slow down slow down But everybody wants to see everybody has this idea of like a book in the world with their name on it like because then I'll be a real writer and people worry about like um what do they call it uh imposttor syndrome and all that Just like I know in my private as my in my time as a private citizen I'm still as impatient as I ever was But patience is another skill that you need to learn if you're going to be a good artist You need to be What kind of patience just that patience of um of of slowing down and really taking in what you're looking at Really taking in what you're working on really going all in and not being in a hurry but just seeing what comes over the wire Take it as it comes Work with it as opposed to just trying to ram it through co you know like get your characters to hit their marks all of that sort of stuff for taking coming up with messages and meanings and symbols and trying to sort of induce it onto the material One thing I say is if you're patient that that's a leap of faith which is you can't not write about what you want to write about You know people are sort of like "Oh I'm afraid it won't get on the page if unless I you know I've got to force it." You know that's so it's like you're you are going to always write about what's you know what you care For example I you know when I started writing I wanted people you know I was into justice and that I cared about equal distribution of wealth and all this kind of stuff and that you know I care about all these these sort of causes and everything And whenever I tried to write books like that or stories like that it was just propaganda just crap you know And then I started writing much more like transcendentalist again pastoral lyric pastoral and I thought well I guess I'll just have to my art will be one thing and then my politics or whatever will be another So what you're saying is that there's a intrinsic grain to your artistic sensibilities that you actually need to surrender to Yeah Your brain is like your fingerprint right like one of the reasons that people can read your books and dig them is because you know like they're 99.99% the same But then whatever that fraction of a percent of your it's it's it's unique to you So the world description refraction goes through your brain in a way and refracts into the world as a novel or as a poem or as a short story as a song whatever Um in a way that if you're really paying attention and you slow down and you really let the word you know like take the time to let what the real words are that are going that you really get as experience goes through your brain and you you bring it back out into the world as pro Like when I was a drummer I did the same thing but I was sitting at a drum set So that's you know because that's one of the things where you go "Oh my god how did you write like Faulner?" You know like you never you never open a page of Faulner and go "Oh is that Anne Batty?" right like and that's because Faulner you know was letting it go through him and then he had to put it into the world in a certain way you know So that's what I mean about slow down you know devote the best of your attention sustain the best of your and then you'll start finding that you know people you know you have a a way that the world goes through your consciousness and comes back out into the world in our case in as works of art or you know fiction Yeah I think it's just your story of winning the Pulitzer is crazy You spend like five years on Tinkers You can't get the dang thing published You spend like another five year like tweaking and doing whatever Like I don't know if I'm ever going to make it as a as a writer And then what happens and well then I was I as um writing uh I was teaching for the first time the Iowa writers workshop spring of 2010 I was it was like a Tuesday afternoon or something I was going to teach um my seminar that afternoon Was teaching the beast in the jungle the Henry James story Amazing story Um and I knew they were going to announce the Pulitzer that day Um and so I thought I'll just find out who who won because as we all know you know prize prize winning is a really rowdy spectator sport very partisan you know because you know like somebody you know author X wins the Pulitzer and you're like that's it for art We're dead you know if that person wins the PL you know and or somebody wins it you're like "Oh that's so cool Art's safe for another year." Whatever It's you know it's all it's like winning the lottery in a lot of ways Um so I went online and they hadn't announced it yet So I just kept refreshing the page and I think it was it was Elizabeth Stout was Olive Kitridge So you know I was like you know I was just doing something getting ready and all of Kitridge and you know getting all of Kitridge all of that's who won the year before Yeah And then suddenly I was it I was like tinkers and I was like I like I I I I skipped to another window or something like that and I just did it and I was like oh somebody's playing a joke on me where the cameras you know and then that was it was that that was a moment where it was like literally everything in my life up to that point was just like speeding away in the rearview m rearview window like it's like this is you know I sort of fainted like I sort of was like in the crappy little apartment and I sort like just kind of ended up on the floor going whoa you know just like and then 90 seconds later I was interviewing with the Associated Press you know like like holy cow I just want a Pulitzer It really was And I went to the um workshop and Marilyn Robinson was there and she just said well it's it's the closest thing in in the United States we have to knighthood in that like you have a title Yeah Now for the rest of your life And I can't remember who was it Jim McFersonson Somebody said he said you know now you know what the first line of your obituary is going to be and it was crazy and it was huge I mean it was so it it was you know it's big but it was really big at the time It was very ironic to me but you know my first it was debut novel but I was like 40 I was 43 or 45 44 and you started work on tinkers when you were 30 a short storied version of Tinkers was um the story I submitted uh when I got into um MFA program and then um I was lucky to have a a um a seven-month fellowship when I got done uh with my MFA where I um just took Tinkers and like expanded it from the inside out into So if you go through Tinkers you can almost take the first five pages the dead middle five pages and the last five pages of the story and I just expanded it But I was in my 40s and I had been I had toured all around Europe and North America and as a drummer in a band and done lots of press and I knew how to you know go on a book tour I knew how to do one do shows every night and do interviews and you know I I was able to distance myself a little bit It's like you're the protagonist of this year's version of this So you have the tiara and the roses and actually at the end you're like I don't want to give them back This is actually pretty nice But but I had enough distance to be like this is just happening to you You just got it's strange to be the protagonist of this I I actually remember at the time thinking about you know William Kennedy and Ironweed his novel Ironweed It was another thing like he he couldn't get it published Million publishers said no and that one the Pulitzer So it's just like oh isn't that interesting this this round of that that's that's you're the one who's that that author Um but I think if it happened to me when I was 25 it would have popped my rivets It would have just blown my mind because then then people are you know like how are you going to write the followup to your Pulitzer Prize-winning debut and you know I was like if my biggest problem is figuring out how to follow up my Pulitzer Prizewinning debut novel life's pretty good Yeah You know but that's another skill which was I had to learn how to not think about that like I learn like literally just like discipline yourself so that when I go back down into the next manuscript all that has to go away Yeah And so that's actually a mind thing that you actually literally have to it's a very concrete thing that you have to work at um to be able to do What do you say this to your students don't write your books for bad readers Write them for brilliant big-rained and bighearted people who will love you for feeding their minds with feasts of beauty Take Faulner or Shakespeare or somebody Um one of the things that I love is that you you can't get the whole thing the first time you read Abselum Abselum And I think sometimes when you're younger it's almost taught as if it's a provocation you know sort of like oh if you keep working you'll get smart enough to understand it all And really like the more as an as an author the more I was the more I'm like I want to give my readers that that richness of meaning To me it's an act of generosity on the part of the author Um and just think about people you know people who love to read love to like you know the the old like the 80s where they have the the commercials this is your brain this is your brain on drugs And I think you know to me I'm still just sort of like this is your brain on art and it's just like the filament lights up And that's what my and that's what I mean about like turn people on like I'm trying to blow your mind and break your heart when I write a book I want you to just be like dang that is an awesome you know and that idea too that like you finish something and you go that's absolutely true I've always known it's true and I've never seen anybody put it into words Yeah You can't put you can't get a reader to that state of mind um by using off the rack language that you're just using habitually and just you know pasting on to characters Well that's one way to think about the difference between propaganda and art Propaganda gives you everything at the beginning and it you get it kind of right away Whereas really good art has a way of of growing on you and you can kind of return to it and keep coming back to I can't tell you how many people I know who've read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance like six times and they're like that guy Persik Robert Persik Every time I come back to that book I just get something new from that guy cuz it's just this endless well that you can keep drawing water from And you're different every time you go through it your birthday because you've had a couple years of experience in between the last time And that's what I mean about the richness of language and meaning so that that you imagine every reader every goodspirited big-minded open-minded reader can will go through it and we'll go through it in a slightly different way So it'll always be recognizable but every time you go through it it's even more you know what you think it is it's even more so You know that idea like it's still the same thing but it's you can go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into it And that's what I'm just looking for is that you know that you get that with Melville too you know Moby Dick like the language is so it hits this super saturation point where you're just like every sentence is connected to every other sentence and they're all just like this organism or this you know this tissue that is do it's doing it aesthetically but it's just it's it becomes infinite in a certain way right you know uh so you're not just reading sentence after sentence and you're not getting it like data you know it's experiential It's an experience to put to run Melville's sentences through your brains And then even that that idea of you know the quality of finishing a book maybe for the first time um and being like I don't know what just happened but something just happened something you know and and I hopefully you have a good reader you know and what the reader wants to do is go back to the beginning and and think I got to go through that again and think about that with writing and literature is the only art form I know where people say oh I read that book once you know like nobody says that about their favorite album nobody says that about their favorite movie you know The Godfather Favorite movie That one time I saw it it was amazing You know and I say that to my students I say "What about it is that the more you know your favorite movie or your favorite music the more intimate you are with it the deeper you go with it It's not it's not spent up after you know what the plot is." That's why I go back to like I don't care about the plot you know um that's why like with Tinkers I was so afraid of like oh I I don't want to you know I don't want to save a plot point to do a big tadada ending or whatever So I made the first sentence is just the whole sto eight days before he died It's like he's not going to be saved The whole book is a countdown Um and and then so then it's like the story is in the telling Yeah Tell me about this ambitious reading because that's something that you really focused on and you said "Okay I'm going to go read The Sound and the Fury I'm going to go take on some really hard works I'm going to get really into Magic Mountain and War in Peace and I'm going to do the work it takes to really read those books to really understand those books and like you said to get intimate with them." As undergraduate English major UMass Amherst And my ambition was to be a good reader And I think that kind of is not as common anymore You know you I remember running into a lot of you know people who were at the MFA program I went to who had a little bit of that Oh darling I don't read books I write them You know like I think Quent and Chris darling TV is not something one watches TV something one is on You know that's like you'd miss the But uh in my case in my experience um I think that your writing can only be as good as the best stuff that you've read And furthermore it can only be as good as the best readings that you can give to the best stuff So you're always you know again it's that idealism like you can always be a better reader you can always be a better writer you know Um and I just and I think it's you know it's a fine line between humility and humiliation but I think you really if you're serious you really do have to be continually saying and again this is you don't have to think it's Thomas Mann or Faulner You everybody has their own personal cannon You think of your own favorite writers but you know compare your writing to them and you could think "Oh my god how does my favorite book is way up here and then my writing is so far down?" And then you just try to get a little bit of what and then that loops into influence and how you use people that came before you and you want to be a part of that tradition but you want to add to it Um and you just start you know you just start thinking why is there such a distance between my favorite my favorite stuff that I've read and my own writing um and then that goes back to another thing I'm always telling my students is you you want to evolve from being self-conscious about your writing to being self-aware about your writing What's the difference one of the ways that self-consciousness often precipitates into the classroom is um people sort of not wanting to be accused of wanting to write as well as Faulner you know and I say "You're not trying to write a crappy book are you wouldn't you like to write a book that's as good as your favorite book?" Like that's something to be self-aware of You're only a jerk if you say you did it you know but that idea of like I'm not trying to write a crummy book I'm you know trying to write a book But this is a big point to actually give people the permission to be super ambitious about what it is that they're doing I am trying to write a book as good as The Sound and the Fury That's what I'm sitting here to do Yeah Like otherwise what's the point yeah And Melville is just trying to write a book as good as Hamlet you know shakespeare is just trying to write a good a book that was as good as like the Joseph and his brother's story in Genesis right moses was just trying to write a book that was a little bit better than the Babylonian cosmology that he cribbed for Genesis you know what I mean like that kind of like I I and when people read my books and they say "Have you been reading Shakespeare in the Bible and you know Emerson?" I'm like "You bet your bippy I have and I want you to know it." You know just part of you I want to be I consider all those people my aunts and uncles my great aunts and uncles Well I love the idea of the permission to take on a grand project Yeah Yeah Because it's there's a difference between that ambition and kind of being an egoomaniac because you think I'm kind of all that Mhm Well one is one is rooted in the other one's kind of in me Like a kind of like a reverence right like a reverence Like I want to recreate that Like that did something for me I want to build that And it's actually not about me It's actually about the creation itself Exactly The other one is I want to be the person who has written that and then you care more about the end than the the means to get there Yeah I couldn't couldn't have put it better That's exactly right And the idea that but then you have that interesting paradoxical experience that you have to be utterly totally selfless and humble um but also self-confident Do you get a lot of feedback with your writing i that doesn't that's not something you've brought up It seems like a very sort of internal process of that's another thing I talk to students about a lot because I will I will avoid my agent and my editor for years at a time until they finally sort of tree me you know um because I want to be alone I don't want you in my house while I'm building it Partly because that's another thing is that learning how to observe things learning how to pay attention Part of that is not being distracted and not hearing outside voices And that's another thing I say is that you actually have to develop the skill to be able to go into your writing into the dimension of your writing and not hear outside voices You know what do editors want what are the agent even when you're in workshop you're just like "Oh I'm going to make it a dog because Sabrina hates cats and I can just hear her complaining about cats." And because to me the the greatest authority on the meaning of the work is the work So all of the stuff that I would you know like you ask your editor you ask your agent or whatever I just want to ask that of the of the work Um now that's when as a teacher I have to be very careful I have to say you have to think about what works for you because I know absolutely amazing wonderful writers who have a dozen readers and like I've got chapter four is with Susie chapter three is with Tom and and it's a it's a uh like it's a feedback loop and a circuit and they thrive on it and they make brilliant books That's another thing is again just being conscious of what do you what do you need to do and have to do to get the best writing on the page because there's no wrong way to do it because a lot of people are like what would a real writer do that loops back into the I don't it's I'm self-conscious right i don't want to do something a real writer would trapped by identity Yeah Exactly And they it's like what a real writer would do is anything you know anything it takes to get it on onto the page You know you can't be self-conscious or embarrassed about things You have to be really honest with yourself Again not in a heroic way in a very kind of quiet sober patient slow deliberate thoughtful way to be like allin Um when I mean when I became a writer I can you know I grew up as a kind of lower middle class autodidact with nichi under you know and all my friends were like you bge you know blah blah blah blah And when I finally got to the kind of stuff that I actually write I could hear them all howling in mockery you know because I actually write these quiet little transcendentalist sorts of things Um and but the what was powerful is when I actually started writing the way that I was writing the writing I I would go back to it a week later and go who wrote that that's actually that works that good M um and so I had to just jettison that identity you know being like the wise acre guy you know that kind of toward you know whatever that kind of identifiable sort of identity people choose for themselves Walk me through what you do on like any given Tuesday like what is a Tuesday like you're you're working on a book you're slaving over some paragraphs What is your sunrise to sundown kind of day yeah So here's another thing I I just modeled this by saying you do whatever it works I mean I grew up when you know it used to be a lot of the teachers would say you have to face the blank page every day and you have to sit there and I'm like no saying that voice ominous you have to face the blank page Yeah And it's just like nothing's coming over the wire today I think I'd actually just rather watch a baseball game you know So part of it is just you got to know yourself This is again that idea but because I'll go for months on end where to all appearances I'm napping on the couch I call it riding the updrafts you know but I'm always reading I've got books all over the place and I'm reading a little bit of this and a little bit of that a little bit of this And I I'll just spend time letting the language of the books and the music that I'm you know the paintings I'm like I've got tons of coffee table art books and I have the stereo on all the time and trying to listen to all sorts of different kinds of music and then whatever books I mean and I try to let them all become co-extensive in my you know and so I just think about you know the you know the cello suite that I just listened to and the and the painting I just looked at and the novel scene that I just you know and I just let it kind of all go into the pot and partly because that you know what you're doing is you're letting all sorts of different idioms interact And so what I'll do like as you know the sort of thought exercises is I'll think you know how would I describe you know that passage in Bach or Mozart or AC/DC or whatever I don't you know like whatever I'm listening to that I'm digging like h you know how would Keats have described that you because what it does is it just again it just breaks language out of received usage and you just start thinking about you know what if I describe the clouds in terms of something that's very unccloudlike you know Like if we were to try to describe the clouds in a way that's very unccloud-like where would your brain go oh in that case you know like often I I think of counterpoint you know counterpoint and juxtaposition are really really powerful So if something you know clouds the essence of clouds they're vaporous or whatever So I think of them what would they be like if they were stones you know what would be they be like if they were a mountain range they can look like a mountain range or whatever But taking taking things and describing them in verbiage that you would often apply to something If something is a liquid describe it as a solid or something as a gas describe it as a liquid And just because then what you find the ver because so much because we're writing narrative so much happens in the verbs and you realize we get habituated to you only use these verbs and we're talking about the clouds you know or you know this or that Like clouds are silent So I would I would think What would the clouds sound like well what do they look like um you know and I say the barking clouds Is that where you know just like riff You know just think about what if clouds could talk to us they were all in conversation with each other Yeah And the clouds are stampeding right so they sound like buffalo So what would a bunch of buffalo you know the the roar of the clouds you know the stampeding clouds roaring AC across the sky it's like you can't think of you can't come up with that stuff if you're you if you're thinking habitually Yep It kind of will snap the reader out of you know like whoa wait that's I don't quite know what it means but again it's just descriptive and what I do again because I loop it back in I think my character just thought that My character just thought of the clouds stampeding across the across the sky and you just keep feeding it back in and and seeing what you get and seeing how it evolves Tell me about reading dictionaries You got two copies Got an old one a new one Tell me about going through them Yeah I read the dictionary every day The old every day Yeah every day Every day And not I don't look for exotica I look for re like this is here's dictionary nerd I was reading the uh the 12page definition of the suffix ly which is really really one does bonkers No you think oh my god this is going to be so boring and then you start going through it and um you think what could be you know like watch paint dry instead but and again I don't even like I haven't digested it I haven't processed it yet But one of the things that was interesting is that ly you know turned nouns into adjectives that described um somebody or something that um that that um inhabited the ideal version of whatever that thing was So ly was never put on the end of words that had negative connotations for the first centuries So we would have had happily but not sadly Yeah Exactly Exactly Cowardly You wouldn't have cowardly but you'd have heroically I don't know what that means but that's bizarre Like this is another thing is like the more I work with language the more language is a mystery to me you know and just like tracing the kind of morphology of words and meaning Um temptation temptation originally meant a true test of character Of course it did Like in in Wickliff's translation of the Bible it's and God tempted Abraham Yeah I mean Abraham as temptation Moses has temptation Jesus has temptation and then somewhere it turned into something that was that was insidious And so it's a it's you lure somebody into into doing something that's bad um by making by by um deluding them into it's a true that's how you approve your character That's how you prove your metal That's what Hamlet's ghost does So how has it changed it used to be a true test of character and now and now it just mean if you tempt somebody it just means that you're luring them into bad behavior at their own expense but with the by lying to them by saying it's a noble true test of character Do you feel like language has been stripped of its contours well I think usage does I think like you know a lot of advertising language and a lot of liked language I mean we're it's weird like we're flooded with more language than ever because people are in social media all that sort of stuff But it's you know I think algorithms tend to you know it's just the lowest common denominator You get nuance gets stripped out Yeah I use the Webster's 1913 dictionary Y on my computer Phenomenal And then I do the same dang search on Google Like look at the word solitude in the Webster's 1913 dictionary versus what you see on Google And it's just like we have reduced the dynamic range of language so much Right It's like a those old definitions are almost like poems Yes You know and there and they're and then I just read all the quotes and I just follow the word back to whatever you know the earliest sorts of um the earliest instances of it that they can find So because that's another when you're composing sentences I I don't look at I don't look at exotic words I mean I look at them but um but if you if you know what a word is um uh um a little bit more deeply than just like what its most superficial like word recognition usage is like you're just using it in conversation Everybody knows what that word means No everybody knows what everybody takes that word to mean But if you can go a little bit deeper then even your sentences can just start to have a little bit more dimensionality to them a little bit more depth that you know I never use a version of a word or an archaic meaning of a word that's so obscure that the reader will be you know I'm always just thinking that the reader will immediately understand it means something out of the context you know in the context that I'm using it but it'll slow them down a little bit and let the meaning of the language kind of saturate their attention a little bit more So everything seems a little richer a little deeper So let's get into why you're not that interested in plot You say "I'm interested in character and plot emerges out of character I'm just interested in consciousness I think of plot as Newtonian physics It's mechanical." But I think of the mind once you get into a character's mind and its interior I think of the mind as quantum You say it's supra luminary It just moves instantly Yeah Some of that just goes back to like my my armchair interest in physics and quantum physics and you know um causality and all that You know when I was writing Tinkers I was just thinking if if there's too much plot here there's like too much machinery where you'll lose the m the mind or the soul of the character Like if you're just running the character through a lot of plot there's not enough there then you I would I just felt like I would lose the time and the space to sort of saturate the page with again the character's consciousness or experience of it And so I have a very simple plot and it's I've just found like the you know the more I get into interiority as it were the more I just need that like eight days before he died seven days before he died six days So there's that real spine to the thing that um the reader always knows no matter how far out into the character's mind I'm going to go it's always going to be Tuesday morning and it's going to be Wednesday morning and it's going to be um because then what I can do is I can I can make the novel elaborate itself in a way that is um that doesn't just look like it's mechanical cause and effect It's associative You know when you you know you can in all in one instant you can think about that time you were stung by a bee when you were three and then your mother when you were 26 and then you can go here there then now everywhere just like that and again that is and how what kind of associations a character makes is one of the places do you make character so I think of that I think of thought and experience and description you know so I'm desribing describing experience I'm describing a character's experience of what is this or that moment like and so then as I get to know a character over the years of writing a novel um every character if if if they're working and pulling their weight as it were um even there would be patterns of association that they have which then I think of as oh that's how I'm getting character onto the page Do you feel like your sense of perception say of like the color of trees in the fall and like the foliage do you feel like different characters give you a new lens and kind of expand your sensory palette yeah And this character wouldn't even notice this or that aspect of a a room or a scene you know and and you but again to me it's like I don't want to go in and twist their arm and say "You only notice red things because you're like a bull and you do you know it's more sort of like live with them And you know I always feel like I'm sort of just behind them you know just what is that like to you what would you say what do you know you you know and and then each character sort of ends up and over time you start realizing oh this character uses a certain repertoire of of verbs or of um certain um you find oh they're always in a certain kind of light or they're there's certain colors around them um there's a sort of pallet to their character and their disposition and so you start um you know making them more distinct by you know once I realize oh this character often thinks you know say you know about buffaloos and stampeding or whatever you know just to use the example from the clouds or something like that um um then no other character will use any of those verbs or nouns you know you just say that's only for that character but then you know and the same for like locations Oh when we're down by the you know we're down at the beach shack there's there's repertoire you know there's a repertoire that it's almost like because there because when you're down there it's like a certain painting but then that character's repertoire refracts through the place's repertoire and then you synthesize out you find a language for when that character is in that situation and just like trying to follow that Again this is just for the kind of stuff that I'm interested in but if you have too much plot going on you have to hurry them past those moments Yeah The thing that I've really taken from you so far is spend a lot of time with the greats Dare to take on something ambitious but do not be afraid actually almost insist on the idea that your brain is like a fingerprint and find your own style And for you you were reading doing that really ambitious reading but there's a lot of things that you rejected Like it's funny to me that war and peace would be one of your big influences but you're like "Yo I'm just going to write like 150 page books I'm going to write short little books and I'm going to really try to communicate the density of lived experience is what you say." And just like pack pack information so it's dense so it's just filled with meaning and all of that And you're like "That's what I'm going to try to do." Yeah And I'm going to try to do that though I'm going to make it maximum density with um maximum readability you know i don't you have to like every sentence shouldn't be a mountain that you feel like you got to climb and then you know I want it to read with lucidity and you know clarity and um again make it be like you know like pure experience So that's just a challenge you you know that but that's part of the fun is how much meaning can I get into this without it just becoming uh soden or belabored or overdone You know it still should be clear and you should the word every word should be apt There's no showing off no funky You know sometimes you you know the only word that will do is a relatively obscure word That's I ask that of the reader sometimes But I would love to be you know my favorite books to read are the big blockbusters War in Peace and Carlos Fentes Teranostra That's before I knew what books I liked I would just go into the bookstore and just find the biggest the widest spine and read it Um but that's another thing which is sometimes your your favorite authors you you don't write like them And part the what's interesting is figuring out how you can incorporate their influence into your writing even if so that's one of the things I think of is my books are only about 200 pages long So I think oh I'll try to make them 800 pages deep because they're not 800 pages wide So just think about it would be like again it's an ideal It's just like I would like my reader to leave my 200page book feeling like they had something as substantive as war and peace Like I don't think I've achieved that But that's again that kind of like what you're shooting for that kind of thing What would that look like how would that read how would that work why don't you try to communicate lessons in your books well first of all I live in terror of you know what's the point what's the takeaway what's the message because if somebody reads my book and gets what the point is they never have to think about it again Uhhuh Right As opposed to and again that would be explanatory Um a lot of times what messages or lessons prove to be are just they're toological They're trivial Be kind to strangers Like no kidding I didn't need to read your book to get that So a lot a lot of it's that kind of like um kind of pedantic kind of it ends up being sort of received opinion or you know you know it's right thinking or high sentiment as opposed to like I want somebody to come out of my book being like wow that really that book like resonated with me because a lot of times we don't know what the lesson is a lot of time you know again this is because most of my walking around time I feel like I'm in the middle of ju just vast past realms of meaning to which I have no direct access Again it's just but I know that I'm in the middle of you know we're in the middle of whatever reality with a capital R is you know and even that I just think about whatever we think of as zillions of light years away is not that distance is just a function of our perception So what you're saying is the problem with giving people lessons is it's final and you want your books to actually be the beginning of something actually opening of a door Yeah Yeah Yeah You arrive at something that's like okay we've gotten to a place and then it the book kind of opens you dilates you you know your perception your thinking It's funny you use the word dilate And I was thinking of this is what is nice about a dialogue Yeah Is that a dialogue you're constantly thinking about was this person right was this person right was this person right and the author doesn't try to give you an answer He says "I'm just showing you different perspective." Yeah And that's what I want I'm always just trying to pursue you know a moment a scene you know an experience with a character whatever So that like again I just feel like I want to be sort of like I got it And then I go back and essentially what I'm doing is saying to the reader "Come here." And I just kind of bring them down Bring them down and just get them to that point and go "Look what I found." And at that moment if I told them what to think it would be absolute fraudulence It would be the most violent thing you could do to the character to the reader to myself you know it's just like just look I don't I don't know Just look this is this amazing crazy moment that I got to with language And I think of the books almost like galleries like art galleries and I'm just moving the like look at that here's this here's that here's I don't know It's just in the way that a gallery will just show you you curate this exper So then in doing that what tools do you have as a fiction writer that you wouldn't have if you were writing non-fiction well again I I think like with non-fiction I automatically think like like a novel doesn't have a thesis or my novels don't have thesis I'm not like testing I don't have a hypothesis or a thesis I'm not trying to prove anything So it doesn't work by argumentation Huh The way that you persuade through poetry or aesthetic you know sort of fiction um is by recognition you know recognition with the reader with the where the reader will say "Oh my god I totally recognize that I totally That's absolutely true I've just never seen anybody put it in words before I've never been like I love that idea." Same with teaching which is that I'm not giving you new data that you're just putting into the datab bank It's I like when I I'm pointing something out that the minute you see it for yourself you go "Oh my god that's true I've just never had it pointed out to my attention." And what's an example of that i don't know just like the sort of stuff that we're talking about you know the idea that um that we uh that we know better than how we act you know and so just having a character just saying "Here I go again I can't believe it I know better." And having the reader say that's exactly Yes And I think that's the sort of thing where I I also think I want again an ideal that I'm having for my book is that I want any person who enters any of my books in good faith to come out the other end and feel like they have been paid nothing but the highest respect you know for the dignity of their soul So I don't want them to think that anything that in my that I achieve in my books is at the expense or belittlement of their humanity right and so I want that you know somebody in the most remote geographically even temporally you know somebody 100 years from now in a completely different culture can read a translation and say "I felt like that I felt betrayed I felt elated I felt arrogant I felt humiliated." And the way you do that is you just put those experiences you describe those experienc especially I feel it more with uh negative emotions you know like if you feel like the vengeance that comes with betrayal and you you know you felt that that sort of the knife in your stomach like a real sense of like somebody spiting you know and you sort of feel like this internal weight this internal like this tempest going on inside of you and then one day you read about a character who's going through the same thing it's not like "Oh great Now I can lash out." It's like "Wow somebody else feels like that I can't believe somebody put texture to that experience that I was never able to put into words." Yeah And that again as simple as I take that I teach the Old Testament You know the vengeance is mine You know the reason vengeance is God's is because when God's God's vengeance is setting his creation back into a state of equilibrium human vengeance is revenge So it's just always amplifies violence It's always making it's you know you never take an eye for an eye You know you come and you you you you know you kill my brother We're going to come and we're going to exterminate your town your village that sort of thing Um but then you read the Psalms and the Psalms are like I want revenge you know like you know it it recognizes part of the reason why you need that those breaks on revenge is because you feel the impulse towards revenge when you were slighted You know if somebody insults you you're like "Oh when I you know when I get my revenge on you you humiliated me once I'm gonna humiliate you orders degrees and exponentially more than you humiliated me It's never I'll just get you back with another zinger right?" And so again that that so that idea of just like allowing for real human sentiment and feeling and well that you see at the beginning of Genesis right with uh the revenge it goes seven 77 Yeah And and for God seven is enough but for Lamic or whoever it is is 77 77 And that's exactly what it is It's the it's the escalation You see that in like Genesis 5 or six Yeah And you just notice that that like the way the author did that was it's not big and symbolic It's just they just let lame say 77 and the attentive reader will say if seven was enough for God then that is just a dramatic enactment of the idea that humans will always go off the rails that way and that you know I always think of Prospero at the end of uh the Tempest uh Shakespeare's last play and what he does he's the one king that says I will not take revenge and I'm going to forgive everybody I'm going to forgive everybody who usurp me and left me for dead because if somebody has to stop it and I don't think it's a coincidence that the big forgiveness scene at the end of the Tempest is beat for beat a um a retelling or reenactment of Joseph forgiving his brothers How about that and Prospero has his code of many colors you know like like it's just like be it's you know and then I think can I have a scene where somebody forgives somebody you know that you know that you know um at the end of the the poem at the end of the book of Job you know God's like where were you when I you know are you going to like take the Leviathan and you know and um Moby Dick is just a meditation on the Leviathan right and Faulner's um nolla um the bear the bear is the way you know and there are lines in the bear that say the the woods were his Harvard and his Yale and that's what Um Ishmael says in Moby Dick you know the whailing boat was his Harvard and his Yale That's Faulner saying yes And then so then suddenly you're looking at Faulner looking at Melville looking at Shakespeare looking at Moses looking at Babylon you know So I love that it's like these telescoping lenses you know and so I love the idea of I you know again going back to what we were talking about like don't write for bad readers Don't write for readers who won't like what you're doing you know But I love with when I read Marilyn Robinson I feel like I'm watching Marilyn Robinson watch Faulner watch Melville watch Shakespeare watch Moses you know Well I think what you're saying is dare to write with depth And the reason why you need to dare to do that is that a reader who just wants the quick hit they're not all this is going to go over their head And most readers aren't going to want that But there's going to be a few that are going to say "I I I want that I want to work for it I want this this story this novel these characters this language I want to actually let it kind of like churn in my head And that's I think that's another sort of leap of faith But I tell my students all the time there are readers out there who want that And you know because you know I can often work with the fact that like they've self- selected and they're around the seminar table with me Like I always say to my to my students you know the minute I write a sentence down I can hear billions of people stampeding for the exits right but then there's a dozen people who come from the cheap seats down to the front row and they say "Yeah what happened next?" Those are the people you're writing your book for right and then you just because because if you try to get everybody you're going to please no one Yeah You're going to get you're gonna you know because the people who are like "Oh that would have been a really amazing transcendentalist novel." They're like "Ah he kind of pulled his punches with it." And the people who wouldn't like transcendentalist novels are going to think "Yeah that sucked right?" Because they're gonna you know you can't you can't you know So again that's and and that be self-aware Give yourself over to writing the kind of book you'd like to read because the best thinking no matter what the idiom theology literature whatever the best art again is um like with Shakespeare you can't get to the bottom of Hamlet No matter how deep you want to go the play basically says "Sure we can go that deep because it's self-consistent It's this closed um coherent um um work of art that uh you know that has its own fullness and integrity to it So you can keep moving through it in all these different ways and it will always be reinforcing as me So it's it's you know I just am inspired by great theologians great musicians great scientists great you know people who take whatever idiom grabs them and they use it to push deeper into human experience and the nature of you know reality as as it were Why did Marilyn Robinson say to you when you were leaving Iowa why did she say you really need to learn how to write grammatically correct pros that feels like so far off from everything we've talked about But I just I knew her well enough that I just loved her so much I was just like that is just that's the perfect thing for I think with writing it still clings to it This kind of romanticism of like you don't want book learning you know you got to just go out there and light yourself on fire and hop on a motorcycle baby Yeah Take a bottle of whiskey generation baby the headlights out just you know and and and and you know it's a little showy and I was younger and whatever Um and a little stagy and a little bit of that like look at me on the CL you know and then you realize oh my god that's about as interesting as like watching the eight-year-olds make you watch them do cartwheels Sort of like the teenager who wears Hot Topic It's like you're you're different in the most cliche way And it also came too with when I realized like I was writing kind of lyrical pastoral stuff Um and I was like "Oh well the problem with that is if you're not really paying attention um it just turns into um pretty just ornamental racoo bologoney right?" Um that was another leap of faith I had to take which is what is what is beautiful and what is in this that's attracting to me attracting me to it time after time after time after time If it's there if it inheres in the stuff itself then my job is actually to write about it very precisely I was terrified that if I did that it would turn into clinical surgical sounding pros and it didn't It turned into much more beautiful astonishing Wait so break that down for me because I was very surprised when you started talking about p precision I was like that seems something that a doctor would do Yeah it's very very strange and like I was terrified that if you if I did that it would take all the So why am I having that misconception what are you seeing that I'm not seeing i have spent a lot of time out in the woods thinking about like we know it's the objective correlative It's sort of like I went through all my formative experiences walking through the woods on the north shore Um and you know when I was this age this age this age this age you know and you're brokenhearted you're 16 years old you're like I don't I hate school I don't like sports anymore farm not you know this but and you're walking through an Ottabon sanctuary and it's like 4:15 and the way the light is going out under the tree the bear trees and it's so freaking beautiful and your heart is broken in the middle of that and so you just start and then thinking I want to get the heartbreak of that and so you write all this kind of oh and the this and the that you slather it and then really what it is is is have faith in the reader and have faith in you know the disc and so just more and more like just trying to how do I how do you describe light and then how do you add calculus to it so that the light moves and it ch you know what does the light change into what are the trees look like and what and just get that real almost like a you know botanical but botonist's precision of description but again because I'm writing fiction that's going through a character so then the character is noticing different depths of field and as a writer you can keep you can move in and out of those you know What are you noticing what layer of the canopy are you noticing well what I'm hearing you say is that no David there's elements of reality that to describe precisely is to fill them with wonder and mystery and awe Yeah totally It's just really weird And it's it's having faith that the you know the world means itself What does that mean it like you can move your reader and your reader can find it striking if you give them the thing itself You know then as a writer another thing is that you have the repertoire If you give the reader the thing itself and then you give the reader also the the writer's the the character's experience of it That's what we talk about You give them the literal thing Put them in the middle of a beautiful you know landscape and then you then have the figurative thing which is what the experience of the character has of that landscape So the reader gets to experience the thing itself and then gets to see what the what the character's experience of it is So you let the you don't coersse the reader give them what's actually happening and then you give them what's happening for the character That's also another dimension narrative dimension where you get character you know because you could describe something that objectively literally So like oh that looks perfectly fine It's a nice creek It's a nice willow tree This or that Um and then the character says it means death You know like okay something's going on with this character because I didn't get I didn't read that So again that's that's that refractive kind of thing that you can that you can work with those those vectors To describe something is not to explain it To know something is not to understand it Well if you go back to like physics or whatever we know that we can only have access to 4% of reality We don't know why Can't explain anything But you know the p practical way that I teach that kind of idea to my students is a lot of times students think they have to understand everything before they start writing They have to be in control of the characters They have to be smarter than they have because they're they're above and they have to be kind of conducting choreographing the whole thing Um and a lot of times mixed into that is is some degree of um I I'm obligated to explain what's going on And I just you know that you know this character left his family in Tinker like say you know just you know I I all I knew is that he left right and so I just started writing about it I didn't have to understand it to know it doesn't mean I understand it To describe it doesn't mean I'm explaining it Again it goes back to I'm just showing for my reader I just know this happened and I'm just describing what the what it was like for the characters and the consequences for the person who left and the people who were abandoned right and it's you know um this is when I start thinking of what you're one of the things I say to my students is think about it Again it's not this this is not the normative way but one way that you can think about it that I found fruitful is you're making portraits you're you're writing portraiture So if you're if you're if you think of painting or writing a portrait of somebody that's not explaining them that you don't have to understand them You you're you're you're just depicting them you know with a certain amount amount of richness and descriptive experiential richness you know there's room for all sorts of you know degrees of that but I think that that's that's the kind of thing that I'm that I'm always I I also think of the suit like I end up more and more with this idea for my own writing um as a consequence of the of teaching like when I when I'm with my students I'm I'm as I try to be as solicitous of them as writers and as students as I am of my readers and the more over years and years of teaching thinking I don't want to do violence to your imagin ination I don't want something that I say to dissuade you or to deflect you from what could have been the most brilliant writer you were because I said something to you that that that constricted your freedom of imagination and intellect and aesthetic and taste and all that sort of stuff I want to just keep opening possibilities and then you can kind of go through them and kind of find your own way Same way I think of a reader going through the book At what level is becoming a better writer just about sitting down and doing the dang thing it's um at every level At every level I I think writing is just iterative You can't think your way to being a better writer There's nothing theoretical about it This is another thing is you're going to you're going to have to revise But also that I think a lot of people think of that as a prison sentence but to me it's an insurance policy It's like you're not going to get it right the first time And a lot of times the first time you get it down it's so excruciating you want to burn it You know I say nobody ever has to read what stinks right but in order to get it right you have to get it wrong in a particular way because conceptually you can reason your way to you know you know rewriting the greatest book in the world But if you can't then actually put it on the page for the reader to get it's no good So don't be don't be don't be be self-aware Don't be self-conscious you are going to write a lot of really crappy pros You just are you're going to write you then again as technically all the kind of chop stuff that we talk about I just say I am better at writing first drafts but I still have to do the same amount of work I ever did for the fourth novel that I'm trying to invoke now as I did for any of the other three novels um I can get to these places faster now because technically I don't have to worry about like some of the again the chops the moves but it's still pages and pages and pages of painful pros you know all the time you know and I'll often write for a week you know or a month and write 150 pages and go that's exactly what this is not about you sometimes it's process of elimination chiseling away until you get the thing you know but you have to get it wrong in a particular way so for a 150 page book how How many pages do you think you write easily a thousand Easily a thousand Yeah Um I mean what one of the things that I do is um I print up the entire manuscript like once every six to eight weeks and I just read it I have a you know blue pen But then that means that by the end you know by the time the book is published I've I've read and reread and probably revised Tell me what's going on here Um that's the first page of my reading copy of Tinkers the copy of Tinkers that I took all around the world Um and this is what I do I just mark stuff up endlessly And even when I you know I was first out doing readings of Tinkers when it was published I would be I would be rewriting scenes as I was almost like reading them out loud Um and uh there's some I don't know because I don't know enough about the like the printing and addition process but there's some point in Tinkers where they they they were going to do a reprint and they said this is one of the reprintings where if if you want you can go in and you can make any changes you want um to the manuscript um before the next printing Um as long as the changes isn't more than like a line long I think I made 250ish changes You are obsessed And that was all just like commas and just like oh that cuz I write well because I was a drummer right and so I think of like like beats and the tempo and the accents and the dynamics and I go back and I'll read a sentence I like that's one extra eighth note that that eighth note should not be there or the accents on the wrong part of the sentence just little again it's just that that again that principle that you can always look at and just find it a little bit more precise a little bit more you know it's a little bit more finessed a little bit more elegant a little bit more um just moving you know just finding the right note if you're a musician you know that kind of thing I cut you off is there anything else you want to say about writing a thousand pages and cutting it down to 150 I don't know you know I've just come I love it if you're trying to be efficient if you're writing fiction Um I I think you have to get over you have to make a lot of false starts There's a lot of culde-sacs you end up in and that sort of thing But in my case anyways I I kind of follow them to see because I'm always afraid oh I might have missed what the best part of the novel was Um and that again has to do with like I'm happy to let a thousand pages of pros onto the page because I'm just always interested in what the language is doing you know um and then you just distill it down and then it builds back up again and then you kind of like distill it back down and and I love that process this you know systol and diastol of the whole manuscript Um so I and I also one of the ways that I write is I let everything I'm interested in at the g the moment I'm writing into the book So I let the paintings I'm into you know like this other Eden there's a bunch of scenes in a meadow that's just been hayed and that like literally is a painting that I like Putting stuff in and going well if it all comes from my mind and I'm interested in all of it it is going to be like a stand of aspen trees which are you know aspen trees look like they're different trees but actually they all have the same root system It's actually one organism Oh cool So I just aesthetically this is what I mean about ridic I love having a bunch of stuff that's just floating around in a manuscript for years and I'm like I have no idea how you belong but I think you do Well one of the ways that I think about my aesthetic is I like taking maximalism as far as you can go but I hate clutter Like I don't want clutter right so choreography right because you see it all the time in interior design It's like you went too far here You went too far here And actually and really a lot of maximalism done right is it doesn't have that overwhelm It and a lot of it is because they get like the depth right like you see I I don't know but I would imagine that you could have clutter in writing Well it it you can and that I'm not afraid to have cluttered a very cluttered manuscript Um partly because it's easier to have too much clutter and pull back and make something and you keep pulling back and you're like there it is It's perfectly elegant There's nothing ornamental It's not overdone All the depths of field are working you know all that sort of stuff that when you look at it it's just like whoa it's all coordinated And but it spends there's a lot of time I think of it as like collaging and trying this next to that And you know if you're interior decorating if you're doing that kind of thing like what does that light look like what does it look like when I put this color next to you know even like color theory like colors look different depending on what colors they're around and I even think about that when I'm describing color but you know just try and so just experiment So if I have to do 30 pages until I get that paragraph right where all the colors are there and everything's coordinated and choreographed those those 20 pages I wrote to get that passage absolutely perfect were not wasted pages Sometimes you have to write your way to the best expression Yeah And that's what I mean about that's all that people would call revision Oh I rewrote that 20 times It's like it took me 20 times to get it right That's all If my goal for revision is precision perfect precision of expression That in my experience anyways has been a great insurance policy against that kind of ornamentalism because you're always trying to get it exactly right You know one of my goals is just again it's just an ideal um that you inevitably fall short of but the idea of um I want the reading to be so utterly lucid that the reader forgets their reading pros on the page Um but I also want it to be as you know rich as possible It was cool getting there you know because you go it's purple it's this it's that You're like that's not right But that goes back to what we were just saying is you can't get it wrong theoretically You have to get it when you get it wrong You get it wrong in a very particular way But then that's that's practical That means okay purple didn't work in whatever instance I'm thinking of So why didn't purple work you go back Oh because purple wouldn't be So then you try you know and it's just that okay now it's a little bit closer but it's not quite and it's not quite there in very particular ways That needs to be a little bit better Oh I haven't thought about what it smells like Uhhuh you know just these little and so you just keep layering it and layering it and layering it and then there's this certain point where you go back and you read it and you're like it's all there So I want to try something What I want to do is I want to play like 10 seconds of drums from one of your songs Oh god no And I want to I wouldn't wish that on anybody I want to hear how the drums that we're hearing in the music found its way into your writing Oh sure Yeah Okay So here we go [Music] So I hear a lot of guitar in that but what's going on with the drum when when you're the drummer you're the timekeeper you know so you you've got the tempo you're setting the tempo but you can pull it back a little bit you can push on it you can still be you know technically in time but you can kind of make it breathe And um you can also double the time half the time all that sort of stuff Um when you're writing narrative fiction you're writing about time You're keeping time And if you're doing it you're refracting it through the character Time can slow down Time can speed up You can write in halfime You can write in double time So it has to do with tempo and pacing and dynamics and all that So often when I write again because I kind of write lyric like that's why I think of it as like lyric is that I often think of kind of like what the tempo is what the rhythm is what the beat is and so I'll kind of know what the like basically kind of what the um you know kind of like what the musicality and the rhythm and the tempo of a scene is you know depending on its mood depending on the characters that I write just on the level of the sentence So it's almost like playing drums for a measure at a time and just thinking I'll often know kind of like how many beats are in a sentence before I know what it actually literally means And I'll have the I'm trying to think of um when I discovered that I was doing that and how to do that There is a um there's a there's a um a passage in Tinker the first novel that um that that is describing this character who's a a door-to-door salesman And I I started thinking about he's Tinker um and it's something like um Tinkerbird copper smith but mostly just a mush a mop and brush drummer you know and so it's a just just again just like riffing almost like scatting Um and again that's another thing with sometimes the rhyth you know the rhythm can um can suggest uh the type of words you know you're using a lot of say in that case you're using um single syllable words it's very monoselabic and so you can ch and then there's other things where if it's more tumbling and and and really fast you have a lot more um fluent words that are polyelabic and you can move the reader through them you know that sort of thing He tinkered tin pots rod iron solder melted and cuped in a clay dam Quicksilver patchwork occasionally a pot hammered back flat The tinkle of tin sibilent tiny beneath the lid of the boreal forest Tinkerbird copper smith but mostly a brush and mop drummer So that's just drums That's just straight Yeah totally a little bit But you got to be careful because it's you don't want to make it too singongy So it it stops and then lurches and then you don't want it to be quite as symmetrical because then it can be too um like just singongy When you're writing pros too you have to be really careful about like internal rhymes and stuff because it it's it's it can get cutesy too quickly So you want to make it angular a little choppy but also kind of funky Like I wanted that to be like you know like he's got a little bit of a badass kind of and that like and there's a little sway and swagger kind of funkiness to it Um but not too much but just like this the heartbeat going on and that's even that the you know and and almost like him I was thinking in that terms of almost like that's how he would describe himself if he was the poet that he wished he was Yeah And he'd be a little bit more of a badass than he actually is you know And again that loops back to very modest life very you know but like like Emerson thinking you know we all wish that people saw us as we wished we were seen you know and so you give him kind of some of that badassery that he wishes he had And then you go back to him just being very modest and not very valued by the people around him and you know the reader is like "Wow there's that there's his soul there." You know I want to know how the spirit of different writers has kind of been infused into your work Let's start with Emerson Emerson My favorite sentence in Tinkers is a sentence that after all those years of writing Tinkers I finally wrote a sentence that when I I was like that is a sentence I think Emerson could have written And it just was the best feeling in my life It's the sentence is behold and be a genius I just like oh that's cool That's almost as that's almost as cool as something So it's just like you know the writing in the spirit of and you know when you read one of the things I love about his essays is that they are not arguments they're not rhetorically constructed like the way that argues they're associative and they are written like sermons Yeah If you study Emerson for two weeks in your sophomore sophomore survey class and you even hear that he was a um a minister It's to it's it's almost mentioned in order to be passed over but he he wrote many s I have a four volume set of his sermons and you see him arriving at these more and more elegant eloquent astonishing again kind of luminous and numinous moments that are just purely beautiful and inspiring and and you know and um um heartening and tonic for your soul that kind of thing And I was like I want I want some of that quality in my book I want you know Tinkerers is harsh and it's stark but I want it to be beautiful in that way where you finish it you go that's really true That book didn't jive me That you know um and there's something dignified about all these people's lives whose lives would be in the quote unquote real world wouldn't would be passed over without a word There's that democratic thing too Um um Melville writing about a bunch of sailors Tell me about Melville I read Moby Dick a bunch of times before I had read Shakespeare or the Old Testament and it was still like my favorite book And then after I was teaching Shakespeare and the Old Testament I went back and read it I was like "Holy m" So that idea of the more I knew about how what was in that the more it was what I already thought was wonderful And the idea that um that now as a writer I think of as if you if you go through and you know your Shakespeare in your Old Testament or whatever you're going to there's going to be all sorts of stuff you see in like my last book This Other Eden If you don't you won't be excluded from any of the meaning How about Shakespeare um there's something very democratic about not only the fact that he's always writing about all different classes of people and all this sort of stuff Um but that here's art that was the most sophisticated art of you know of of its kind that we can find an example of Very accessible But it was you know there were the groundlings like it was it was written for regular people would go see it Right Right And so you had the king up on the up at the top and then you had the groundlings and he didn't he wrote for you know presuming the intelligence of his of of his audience Um and then another thing about him too is just sort of reverse engineering a lot of the Shakespeare scholarship You know I don't read any of it I just read the plays and teach the plays But every line means exactly what it says You know the characters speaking them don't always mean but like every line is just kind of like literally true And then all the meta figurative stuff is how he takes those lines and just keeps moving them and and recycling them and you know one thing will happen and one character will say that's leery and another character say no that's love and one character will say that's you know cynicism and just the way that he but it's all being done with very literal meaning you know so even just again starting with that literal it stands on its own and then it's what you do in the arranging and the choreog biography that gets that kind of figurative and symbolic and kind of meaning with a capital M sort of thing Let's end with this How did the transcendentalist teach you how to consult your own soul i mean I very much remember the first time that you know the first time that literature literally blew my mind so much that like I was just like stunned for like that couple of days It was actually reading um Thorough's civil disobedience I think and I can't even I haven't read it but but I just remember going so deep and it was just sort of like it was just a activating all this stuff in my brain that I just like I want to be able to do that with writing Yeah you know it would be amazing to be able to do to other to a reader's brain what that work of literature just did to my brain you know and I think with like like a lot of writers you know you start off life as a reader I just loved my reading so much and loved my favorite books so much that it just got to the point where I had to start talking back I had to start being in dialogue with them And that's what I just think I write literary fiction in the sense when I think like the term literary fiction literature is just is that is fiction that was inspired by and is in conversation with other literature you know and then I just expanded that to art because I throw paintings and music and all that kind of stuff into my but you know and going back to that you know your brain is a fingerprint kind of thing I think in one you know in some ways my novels are no more no less than just like literary MRIs of my imagination of my brain you know It's a cool craft Yeah I love it It's it's it's amazing I mean a lot of dark nights of the soul but it's worth it you know That's why I just say slow down be patient When you say dark nights of the soul what well you know when you being an artist is one of the you know few professions or ways that you can occupy your life where your job every day is to sit down and confront your own limitations you know because you're always saying "How can I make that better how can I express that better how can I be a better writer how can I work with the language?" So you're never like just cruising along with what you already can do You're always saying "Okay how do I how do I you know so you're just up against the brick wall going "How do I get around this how do I get through it how do I you know and sometimes you get stuck?" Yeah And then and then sometimes it's just like you know there's that voice the wall isn't there you know or whatever And he's like "That sounds stupid I don't you know and so it's a lot of that kind of just kind of groping around." Yeah you know and so it becomes there's a way in which it becomes harder and harder one but it almost becomes you know the harder one it is the more prec precious it is when you think I got it I chased it down into the language thank you man what a great conversation just just wonderful Cool