Paul Harding spent 15 years writing a novel that dozens of publishers rejected. Then he won the Pulitzer Prize, which changed his life forever.
Some highlights from our conversation:
Your writing can only be as good as the best stuff you’ve read.
Don't write for bad readers. Don't write for readers who won't like what you're doing.
You don't rewrite a sentence 20 times. It takes 20 times to get it right.
Get allergic to pre-fabricated phrases: So much language is spoken unconsciously. It’s riddled with cliches. It’s fine to use it in your day-to-day life but bringing it to the page is a recipe for terrible writing.
How can you break free from pre-fabricated language? Try the counterpoint technique: If something is liquid, describe it as a solid; if something is white, describe it as black; if something is quiet, describe it as loud. You get the idea. This simple exercise will break you out of the linguistic autopilot that so many people are stuck in.
Want to observe the world more carefully? Slow down. That’s where the magic lives.
Paul’s mantra for good writing: Maximum density, maximum readability. It means packing as much meaning into every sentence without making it feel like a mountain.
Get intimate with your favorite books. Literature is the only art where people say 'I read that once.' Nobody says that about their favorite album.
Paul Harding tried writing political novels because he thought that’s what he was supposed to do, only to realize that they were awful. Then he surrendered to his artistic grain and started writing what he actually cared about (and only then could he have won the Pulitzer Prize).
The biggest barrier to quality writing is the idea that you already know what you’re looking at. Drop that presumption. Drop all use of received, acculturated, or habituated language. Writing is a fight against the brain’s tendency to categorize the world and move on.
Good writing shouldn’t feel cluttered, but it’s fine to have a very cluttered first draft because it’s so much easier to remove things than add things over time.
The problem with answers, as opposed to questions, is that they can close off thinking as opposed to opening it up. Paul says: "If somebody reads my book and gets what the point is, they never have to think about it again."
Give yourself permission to be ridiculously ambitious. Melville was just trying to write a book as good as Hamlet. Shakespeare is just trying to write a book that was as good as the Joseph story in Genesis. Paul says: "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?"
Ambition isn’t the problem. Being an egomaniac is. But too many writers confuse the two and run away from ambition, which hurts their work.
Transcript
Table of Contents
Introduction
Training Observational Writing Skills
Example of Observational Writing Process
Physical Process of Writing
Music and Rhythm in Writing
The Importance of Revision in Writing
Finding Meaning in Ambiguity
Writing and the Mystery of Life
Writing as a Spiritual Practice
Introduction: I interviewed Paul Harding, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his very first novel, Tinkers. 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.
David: 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?
Paul: That's the perfect question because one of the dangers of being a teacher is modeling your own what works for you as being normative. The danger is it's easy to teach that way, and it's dangerous when you're teaching younger or newer writers because they probably get them at a point where they've realized that writing's really hard. They're looking for the magic bullet. One of the things I do is I just say, look, what I'm doing is I'm modeling the thoughtfulness that's required, the self-awareness that's required for you to observe yourself as a writer and to figure out what works for you. Because ultimately at its base, it's aesthetics. It's my taste. I love to just light out for the territories without a compass, without a map. I just love seeing what language gives me and what experience gives me. I often think of those old Buster Keaton movies where he's up on the skyscraper that's under construction, and you just put your foot into open space and you just hope the iron girder. I love that, just kind of flying by the seat of my pants. And that, then, for me leads to what the physicists call emergence, which is the idea that for any system of a certain amount of complexity, there will emerge properties that could not be predicted prior to the system.
David: Right.
Paul: Being set into motion. To me, I think that's a perfect metaphor for what happens when I start writing a sentence.
Training Observational Writing Skills
David: So get concrete with me. What are you teaching? How are you training people to think like that?
Paul: Well, I don't train them to think like that. It may sound coy, but it's what I teach. What I mean, at the root, what I teach is literal and concrete. 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, which is the power of observation. Just being observant and being able to devote the best quality of observation you can. That has to do with dropping any kind of presumption. It means you have to drop all use of received, acculturated, or habituated language. A lot of what we think is thinking, and a lot of what we think is using language, is just using words through because you recognize them in common usage all the time. Or you get phrases that are off the rack, prefabricated 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. That kind of language that you use to get through your day will not work in good writing. If you're going into a sentence, if you're going into a scene or 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.
David: So I don't mean to get all heady here, but at some level, we all have to work with received wisdom. Every single word that I speak is actually built upon like a tower of etymology, a foundation of etymology.
Paul: Right.
David: So how do you get your brain into a place where you have those raw sensations?
Paul: You have to sift down a little bit. Part of it is saying, okay, I actually have to work up my chops for observing.
David: It's like pre-linguistic.
Paul: Right. And part of that is you're not used to just slowing down. Because so much of what we have to do day to 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 it. So I say you've got to get your head into a space where you have to just be patient and observant and say, "No, what do you actually see? What is actually there when you're in the scene?"
Example of Observational Writing Process
David: Give me an example of when you did this and walk me through where you started, where you ended up, and how that became writing.
Paul: That's, I feel like I do it for every sentence. Let's say the opening of my first novel, Tinkers. It's about a guy who is in the last days of his final illness, and he's been brought home to die, to pass away in his home. So he's in a hospital bed in his living room, and at one point, he begins to hallucinate and he sees cracks in the ceiling of his house. That is actually a factual thing. When my grandfather was dying, he said, "Where did those cracks come from?" And we were just like, "There are no cracks in the ceiling." That moment just passed. But then when I was using that as the starting off point, not for the novel, at that point I didn't know what it was, I was just working on writing that day and just had that idea in my head. So I just thought, "Okay, well, he was just hallucinating, and then the day—" I just thought, "No, wait, wait, wait. What happens if I stick with him and the cracks get bigger?" And then what would happen if the whole house—if there's a crack in the floor? So then I thought, "Oh, well, the ceiling would cave in." And then, "Oh, okay. But before I left, I thought, "Well, then what would he see?" I thought, the wires and the plumbing and all that, the second floor. Well, then what would happen if the roof caved in? Well, he'd see the clouds and the sky. Well, what would happen next? 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, then it would be the stars, 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. It's the black velvet curtain that comes and drapes over the whole thing." So you end up with almost him in his coffin with a black curtain. I was like, that's one of those things, and people to this day say, "What does that mean?" I'm like, "I don't know, but it means something." That was just that very literal—I didn't leave. In that case, it's an extended metaphor. You just keep testing it until you get to the end point. But every one of those things was super literal. I just pursued and was just thinking, and that's what I mean, like, I was just remembering my grandfather's house and just because I had put all the insulation in, I'd done a lot of the plumbing, stuff like that with him. And so it's just pushing on observation, getting a hold of it, not presuming I knew, not rushing towards, "Oh, it's symbolic."
Physical Process of Writing
David: What do you, like, lie down on your couch, you just sit in your chair, you go for a walk?
Paul: When I'm that, I'm probably sitting.
David: New things emerge.
Paul: Yeah, and sometimes it takes.
David: It's like pulling the yarn on your imagination.
Paul: Yeah, and sometimes it's like pulling teeth. Some of 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 came out. But there's plenty of other stuff that that's another reason why you revise and revise so everything just seems seamless.
David: Yeah.
Paul: Any given passage could have taken me years. Just keep going back to it and keep going back to it, and you finally 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 and you keep going. 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, and then you have to learn how to sustain the attention so that when you come upon something, you can stay with it.
David: 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. 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?
Paul: All of the above. This is another thing to go back to teaching. It has to do with I could describe what I would do, and over the course of a semester, over the course of a couple of years, in an MFA program or whatever, 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. But if you love to outline and you love plots, knock yourself out. I love to read highly plotted books. So it has to do with you figuring out who you are as a writer. But I think there are, going back to what we were just talking about, there is that fundamental. Sit down and pay attention to the swan boats. Sit down and pay attention to the squirrels, the little kids, what you see. What I do is I often 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. I teach near the Common, so I spend a lot of time in the Common. I think of the Common as layers. So I think of a lot of horizontal layers of color and light. I just start thinking about how you would stack that up so that the reader would get that, and it would be like a painting. It would be like something that a landscape painter would have done. Then you again, then as a character, experiencing that sort of thing.
David: So what does this mean then? Character is always being refracted through description.
Paul: Yeah, so that's one of the things in my own experience, people are off. People would be struggling between how do you move back and forth between the interior and the exterior? Interiority and exteriority. Over the years, I was just like, I don't like the feeling. 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 going to stop, and now we're going to go to the outside. Then we're going to go back to the inside. So I just thought of one of my favorite words from my favorite 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 co-extensive. And so then description of, say, the way that the Boston Common is layered in the different colors and then what's going on in the different layers and the ecosystem. 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. As I get to know the character better, I can use those descriptions of the Boston Common to render character. Description actually becomes character. So I'm never doing something just to make a nice rococo, painterly, like, look at Paul. He can write like paintings.
David: A lot of insecure writers, they show off, right? 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.
Music and Rhythm in Writing
Paul: 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 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 get a lot of these polymathic writers who are virtuosic in that way. That's just a matter of because I know plenty of people who love to read and write those kind of books. I always think of the great jazz writer for the New Yorker, Whitney Balliet. 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. 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. All these things we're talking about are things for you to think about. They're choices that you make.
David: So you're giving people seeds.
Paul: Exactly. That's another thing. As a teacher, 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, fantasy." I'm just 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 prose, and we're all writing fiction, which is narrative. Narrative prose works in, you know, it always works in the same ways. The things that will make a sci-fi novel better are the same things that will make a quote, unquote, literary.
David: So, with your students, what is the thing that they continually struggle with the most? 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?
Paul: I've told you a million times.
David: I need to sear this idea into your head. What is that message?
Paul: Two words. They're going to be on my headstone. It's relevant almost 100% of the time: slow down. Just slow down, slow down, slow down. Everybody wants to see a book in the world with their name on it, because then I'll be a real writer. People worry about imposter syndrome and all that. I know in my private time, 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.
David: What kind of patience?
Paul: Just that patience 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, get your characters to hit their marks, all of that sort of stuff, or taking, coming up with messages and meanings and symbols and trying to induce it onto the material. If you're patient, that's a leap of faith, which is you can't not write about what you want to write about. People are like, "Oh, I'm afraid it won't get on the page unless I force it." You are always going to write about what you care about. For example, when I started writing, I wanted people to know I was into justice and that I cared about equal distribution of wealth and all this kind of stuff, and that I care about all these sort of causes or anything. Whenever I tried to write books like that or stories like that, it was just propaganda, just crap. Then I started writing much more like transcendentalist again, pastoral, lyric pastoral. 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."
David: So, what you're saying is that there's an intrinsic grain to your artistic sensibilities that you actually need to surrender to?
Paul: Yeah. Your brain is like your fingerprint. One of the reasons that people can read your books and dig them is because they're 99.99% the same, but then whatever that fraction of a percent of your brain is, 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, in a way that if you're really paying attention and you slow down and you really let the real words that you really get as experience goes through your brain, you bring it back out into the world as prose. When I was a drummer, I did the same thing, but I was sitting at a drum set. That's one of the things where you should go, "Oh, my God, how did you write like Faulkner?" You never open a page of Faulkner and go, "Oh, is that Ann Beatty?"
David: Right?
Paul: Faulkner was letting it go through him, and then he had to put it in the world in a certain way. That's what I mean about slow down, devote the best of your attention, sustain the best of your attention, and then you'll start finding that you have a way that the world goes through your consciousness and comes back out into the world as works of art or fiction.
David: 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 years tweaking and doing whatever. I don't know if I'm ever going to make it as a writer, and then what happens?
Paul: Well, then as writing, I was teaching for the first time the IRA Writers Workshop, spring of 2010. It was like a Tuesday afternoon or something. I was going to teach my seminar that afternoon, teaching the Beast in the Jungle, Henry James story, amazing story. I knew they were going to announce the Pulitzer that day, so I thought I'll just find out who won. Because as we all know, prize-winning is a really rowdy spectator sport, very partisan. You know, if author X wins the Pulitzer, you're like, that's it for art, we're dead. You know, if that person wins it or somebody wins it, you're like, oh, that's so cool, art's safe for another year, whatever. It's like winning the lottery in a lot of ways. So I went online, and they hadn't announced it yet, so I just kept refreshing the page. I think it was Elizabeth Strout was Olive Kitteridge. So I was just doing something getting Olive Kitteridge.
The Importance of Revision in Writing
David: That's who won the year before.
Paul: Yeah. And then suddenly, I was like, Tinkers. I skipped to another window or something like that, and I just did it. I was like, oh, somebody's playing a joke on me, where are the cameras? You know, that was a moment where literally everything in my life up to that point was just speeding away in the rearview window. It was like, this is, you know, I sort of fainted. I was in the crappy little apartment, and I sort of just ended up on the floor going, whoa. And then 90 seconds later, I was interviewing with the Associated Press.
David: Like, holy cow, I just won a Pulitzer.
Paul: It really was. I went to the workshop, and Marilyn Robinson was there, and she just said, well, it's the closest thing in the United States we have to knighthood, in that you have a title now for the rest of your life. I can't remember who it was, Jim McPherson, somebody said, you know, now you know what the first line of your obituary is going to be. It was crazy, and it was huge. It was big, but it was really big at the time. It was very ironic to me, my first debut novel, but I was like 43 or 45, 44.
David: And you started working on Tinkers when you were 30.
Paul: A short, storied version of Tinkers was the story I submitted when I got into the MFA program. Then I was lucky to have a seven-month fellowship when I got done with my MFA, where I just took Tinkers and expanded it from the inside out. 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 original story, and I just expanded it. I was in my 40s, and I had toured all around Europe and North America as a drummer in a band and done lots of press. I knew how to go on a book tour. I knew how to do shows every night and do interviews. 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. At the end, you're like, I don't want to give them back. This is actually pretty nice. I didn't have the distance to be like, this is just happening to you. It's strange to be the protagonist of this. I actually remember at the time thinking about William Kennedy and Ironweed, his novel Ironweed. It was another thing, like he couldn't get it published. A million publishers said no, and that won the Pulitzer. So it's just like, oh, isn't that interesting? This round of that, you're the one who's that author. 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 people are like, how are you going to write the follow-up to your Pulitzer Prize-winning debut? I was like, if my biggest problem is figuring out how to follow up my Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel, life's pretty good. That's another skill, which was I had to learn how to not think about that. Literally, discipline yourself so that when I go back down into the next manuscript, all that has to go away. That's a mind thing that you actually literally have to, it's a very concrete thing that you have to work at to be able to do.
Finding Meaning in Ambiguity
David: What do you say to your students? Don't write your books for bad readers. Write them for brilliant, big-brained and big-hearted people who will love you for feeding their minds with feasts of beauty.
Paul: Take Faulkner or Shakespeare, or somebody. One of the things that I love is that you can't get the whole thing the first time you read Absalom, Absalom. I think sometimes when you're younger, it's almost taught as if it's a provocation, like, oh, if you keep working, you'll get smart enough to understand it all. Really, the more as an author, the more I'm like, I want to give my readers that richness of meaning. To me, it's an act of generosity on the part of the author. Just think about people who love to read. To me, it's like, this is your brain on art. The filament lights up. That's what I mean about turning people on. 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 idea, too, that 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. You can't get a reader to that state of mind by using off-the-rack language that you're just habitually pasting onto characters.
David: That's one way to think about the difference between propaganda and art. Propaganda gives you everything at the beginning, and you get it kind of right away. Whereas really good art has a way of growing on you, and you can return to it and keep coming back. I can't tell you how many people I know who've read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance like six times. They're like, that guy Persig, Robert Pirsig, every time I come back to that book, I just get something new from that guy because it's just this endless well that you can keep drawing water from.
Paul: Yeah, and you're different every time you go through it because you've had a couple of years of experience in between the last time. That's what I mean about the richness of language and meaning. Imagine every good-spirited, big-minded, open-minded reader will 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 what you think it is. You can go deeper and deeper and deeper into it. That's what I'm looking for. You get that with Melville, too. Moby Dick. The language hits this super-saturation point where every sentence is connected to every other sentence, and they're all just like this organism or this tissue that is doing it aesthetically, but it becomes infinite in a certain way. You're not just reading sentence after sentence and getting it like data. It's experiential. It's an experience to run Melville's sentences through your brains. Even the quality of finishing a book maybe for the first time and being like, I don't know what just happened, but something just happened. Hopefully, you have a good reader, and the reader wants to go back to the beginning and think, I've got to go through that again and think about that. Writing and literature are the only art forms I know where people say, oh, I read that book once, like nobody says that about their favorite album or their favorite movie. The Godfather, favorite movie, that one time I saw it, it was amazing. I say that to my students. 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 spent up after you know what the plot is. That's why I go back to like, I don't care about the plot. That's why with Tinkers, I was so afraid of, oh, I don't want to save a plot point to do a big ta-da ending. So, I made the first sentence the whole story: eight days before he died. He's not going to be saved. The whole book is a countdown. So then it's like the story is in the telling.
David: Tell me about this ambitious reading because that's something that you really focused on. You said, okay, I'm going to go read The Sound and the Fury. I'm going to take on some really hard work. I'm going to get really into Magic Mountain and War and 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.
Paul: Undergraduate English major, UMass Amherst, and my ambition was to be a good reader. I think that kind of is not as common anymore. I remember running into a lot of 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, I think of Quentin Crisp, "Darling, TV is not something one watches. TV's something one is on." You'd miss that. But in my case, in my experience, I think that your writing can only be as good as the best stuff that you've read. Furthermore, it can only be as good as the best readings that you can give to the best stuff. So you're always, again, it's that idealism, like you can always be a better reader. You can always be a better writer. I think it's a fine line between humility and humiliation. But I think 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 Faulkner. Everybody has their own personal canon. You think of your own favorite writers, but compare your writing to them, and you can think, "Oh my God, how is my favorite book way up here, and then my writing is so far down?" Then you just try to get a little bit of what? Then that loops into influence and how you use people that came before you. You want to be a part of that tradition, but you want to add to it. You just start thinking, why is there such a distance between my favorite stuff that I've read and my own writing? That goes back to another thing I'm always telling my students: you want to evolve from being self-conscious about your writing to being self-aware about your writing.
David: What's the difference?
Paul: One of the ways that self-consciousness often precipitates into the classroom is people sort of not wanting to be accused of wanting to write as well as Faulkner. 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?" That's something to be self-aware of. You're only a jerk if you say you did it. But that idea of, like, "I'm not trying to write a crummy book. I'm trying to write a book."
Writing and the Mystery of Life
David: 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. Otherwise, what's the point?
Paul: Yeah, Melville was just trying to write a book as good as Hamlet. Shakespeare is just trying to write a book that was as good as the Joseph and his brother's story in Genesis. 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? When people read my books and they say, "Have you been reading Shakespeare in the Bible and Emerson?" I'm like, "You bet your bippy I have, and I want you to know it." I want to be. I consider all those people my aunts and uncles, my great aunts and uncles.
David: Well, I love the idea of the permission to take on a grand project.
Paul: Yeah. Because there's a difference between that ambition and kind of being an egomaniac because you think I'm kind of all that.
David: One is rooted in thee, the other one's in me. Like a kind of reverence. Like, I want to recreate that. That did something for me. I want to build that, and it's actually not about me. It's actually about the creation itself. The other one is I want to be the person who has written that, and then you care more about the end than the means to get there.
Paul: Yeah, I couldn't have put it better. That's exactly right. And the idea that you have to be utterly, totally selfless and humble, but also self-confident.
David: Do you get a lot of feedback with your writing? That's not something you've brought up. It seems like a very sort of internal process.
Paul: That's another thing I talk to students about a lot because I will avoid my agent and my editor for years at a time until they finally sort of tree me, 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, learning how to observe things, learning how to pay attention, part of that is not being distracted and not hearing outside voices. That's another thing I say, you actually have to develop the skill to go into your writing, into the dimension of your writing, and not hear outside voices. What do editors want? What are the agents? Even when you're in workshop, you're just like, oh, I'm gonna make it a dog because Sabrina hates cats, and I can just hear her complaining about cats. Because to me, the greatest authority on the meaning of the work is the work. So all of the stuff that I would ask of your editor, your agent, whatever, I just want to ask that of the work. Now, as a teacher, I have to be very careful and say, you have to think about what works for you. Because I know absolutely amazing, wonderful writers who have a dozen readers. I've got chapter four with Susie, chapter three with Tom. It's a feedback loop and a circuit, and they thrive on it and they make brilliant books. That's another thing, being conscious of what 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. A lot of people are like, what would a real writer do? That loops back into the, I don't, I'm self-conscious. I don't want to do something a real writer.
David: Real writer trapped by identity.
Paul: Yeah, exactly. What a real writer would do is anything it takes to get it onto the page. You can't be self-conscious or embarrassed about things. You have to be really honest with yourself, not in a heroic way, in a very quiet, sober, patient, slow, deliberate, thoughtful way. You have to be all in. When I became a writer, I grew up as a kind of lower middle class autodidact with Nietzsche. All my friends were like, you bourgeois, blah, blah, blah, blah. When I finally got to the kind of stuff that I actually write, I could hear them all howling in mockery because I actually write these quiet little transcendentalist sorts of things. But what was powerful is when I actually started writing the way that I was writing, I would go back to it a week later and go, who wrote that? That actually works that good. So I did just jettison that identity, being like the wise acre guy, that kind of identifiable sort of identity people choose for themselves.
David: Walk me through what you do on any given Tuesday. You're working on a book, you're slaving over some paragraphs. What is your sunrise to sundown kind of day?
Writing as a Spiritual Practice
Paul: I just modeled this by saying, you do whatever works. I grew up when the teachers would say, you have to face the blank page every day. You have to sit there.
David: They were always saying that in that voice, "You have to face the blank page every day."
Paul: It's like, nothing's coming over the wire today. I think I'd actually just rather watch a baseball game. Part of it is just you gotta know yourself. I'll go for months on end where, to all appearances, I'm napping on the couch. I call it riding the updrafts. But I'm always reading. I've got books all over the place, and I'm reading a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of this. I'll just spend time letting the language, the books, and the music, the paintings. I've got tons of coffee table art books, and I have the stereo on all the time, and I'm trying to listen to all sorts of different kinds of music, whatever books. I try to let them all become coextensive. I just think about the cello suite that I just listened to and the painting I just looked at, and the novel scene that I just let it all go into the pot. You're letting all sorts of different idioms interact. As a thought exercise, I'll think, how would I describe that passage in Bach or Mozart or AC DC, whatever I'm listening to that I'm digging? How would Keats have described that? Because it just breaks language out of received usage. You just start thinking about what if I describe the clouds in terms of something that's very uncloud.
David: To try to describe the clouds in a way that's very uncloud, like, where would your brain go?
Paul: Oh, in that case, often I think of counterpoint. Counterpoint and juxtaposition are really, really powerful. So if something, like clouds, the essence of clouds—they're vaporous or whatever—I think of them. What would they be like if they were stones? You know, what would they be like if they were a mountain that can look like a mountain range or whatever? 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. Because then what you find—because so much happens in the verbs—you realize we get habituated to. You only use these verbs when we're talking about the clouds or this or that. Like, clouds are silent. So I would think, what would the clouds sound like? What do they look like? I say the barking clouds. Is that, you know, just like riff?
David: Yeah.
Paul: Just think about what if.
David: Clouds could talk to us? They were all in conversation with each.
Paul: Other, and the clouds are stampeding, right? So they sound like buffalo. So what would a bunch of buffalo, the roar of the clouds? The stampeding clouds roaring across the sky. You can't think of that. You can't come up with that stuff if you're thinking habitually. It kind of will snap the reader out of, 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 sky. And you just keep feeding it back in and seeing what you get and seeing how it evolves.
David: Tell me about reading dictionaries. You got two copies, an old one, a new one. Tell me about going through them.
Paul: Yeah, I read the dictionary every day.
David: Every day?
Paul: Yeah, every day. Every day. I don't look for exotica. Here's dictionary nerd. I was reading the 12-page definition of the suffix LY, which is bonkers. Now you think, oh, my God, this is going to be so boring. Then you start going through it and you think, what could be like watch paint dry instead? I haven't digested it; I haven't processed it yet. One of the things that was interesting is that LY turned nouns into adjectives that described somebody or something that 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 century.
David: So we would have had happily, but not sadly.
Paul: Yeah, exactly. Cowardly, you wouldn't have cowardly, but you'd have heroically. I don't know what that means, but that's bizarre. The more I work with language, the more language is a mystery to me, and tracing the kind of morphology of words and meaning. Temptation originally meant a true test of character.
David: Of course it did.
Paul: Like in Wycliffe's translation of the Bible. And God tempted Abraham.
David: Abraham has temptation, Moses has temptation, Jesus has temptation.
Paul: And then somewhere it turned into something that was insidious. So you lure somebody into doing something that's bad by diluting them into a true test of character. That's how you approve your mettle. That's what Hamlet's ghost does.
David: So how has it changed? It used to be a true test of character.
Paul: And now it just means that you're luring them into bad behavior at their own expense, by lying to them, by saying it's a noble, true test of character.
David: Do you feel like language has been stripped of its contours?
Paul: I think usage does. I think a lot of advertising language, it's weird because we're flooded with more language than ever because people are on social media, all that sort of stuff. But algorithms tend to, it's just the lowest common denominator. Nuance gets stripped out.
David: I use the Webster's 1913 dictionary on my computer. Phenomenal. And then I do the same search on Google. Look at the word solitude in the Webster's 1913 Dictionary versus what you see on Google. We have reduced the dynamic range of language so much.
Paul: It's like those old definitions are almost like poems.
David: Yes.
Paul: And then I just read all the quotes, and I just follow the word back to whatever the earliest sorts of, the earliest instances of it that they can find. Because that's another thing: when you're composing sentences, I don't look at exotic words. I mean, I look at them, but if you know what a word is a little bit more deeply than just 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. I never use a version of a word or an archaic meaning of a word that's so obscure that the reader will be... I'm always thinking that the reader will immediately understand it means something out of the context, 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.
David: 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.
Paul: Some of that just goes back to my armchair interest in physics and quantum physics and causality and all that. When I was writing Tinkers, I was just thinking, if there's too much plot here, there's too much machinery where you'll lose the mind or the soul of the character. If you're just running the character through a lot of plot, there's not enough time and space to saturate the page with the character's consciousness or experience of it. So I have a very simple plot, and I've just found 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 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, then it's going to be Wednesday morning. Because then what I can do is I can make the novel elaborate itself in a way that doesn't just look like it's mechanical cause and effect. It's associative. 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. You can go here, there, then, now, everywhere, just like that. Again, what kind of associations a character makes is one of the places you make character. I think of thought and experience and description. I'm describing experience. I'm describing a character's experience of what is this or that moment like. As I get to know a character over the years of writing a novel, every character, if they're working and pulling their weight, there would be patterns of association that they have, which I think of as, "Oh, that's how I'm getting character onto the page."
David: 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 power?
Paul: And this character wouldn't even notice this or that aspect of a room or a scene. But again, to me, I don't want to go in and twist their arm and say, you only notice red things because you're like a bull. It's more just live with them. I always feel like I'm just behind them. What is that like to you? What would you say? What do you know? Then each character ends up, over time, you start realizing, oh, this character uses a certain repertoire of verbs. You find, oh, they're always in a certain kind of light or there's certain colors around them. There's a sort of palette to their character and their disposition. So you start making them more distinct. Once I realize, oh, this character often thinks about buffaloes and stampeding or whatever, just to use the example from the clouds, then no other character will use any of those verbs or nouns. That's only for that character. The same goes for locations. When we're down at the beach shack, there's a repertoire that it's almost like because when you're down there, it's like a certain painting, but then that character's repertoire refracts through the place's repertoire. Then you synthesize out, you find a language for when that character is in that situation and just trying to follow that. Again, this is 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.
David: 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. For you, you were doing that really ambitious reading, but there's a lot of things that you rejected. It's funny to me that War and Peace would be one of your big influences, but you're just going to write short little 150-page books. You're going to really try to communicate the density of lived experience, and just pack, pack, pack information. So it's dense, so it's just filled with meaning. That's what you're going to try to do.
Paul: I'm going to try to do that though. I'm going to make it maximum density with maximum readability. Every sentence shouldn't be a mountain that you feel like you're going to climb. I want it to read with lucidity and clarity, and again, make it be like pure experience. That's a challenge. That's part of the fun: how much meaning can I get into this without it just becoming sodden or belabored or overdone. It still should be clear, and every word should be apt. There's no showing off, no funky. Sometimes the only word that will do is really an obscure word. I ask that of the reader sometimes. My favorite books to read are the big blockbusters, War and Peace and Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra. 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. Sometimes your favorite authors, you don't write like them. Part of what's interesting is figuring out how you can incorporate their influence into your writing. My books are only about 200 pages long, so I'll try to make them 800 pages deep because they're not 800 pages wide. It would be like, again, it's an ideal. I would like my reader to leave my 200-page book feeling like they had something as substantive as War and Peace. I don't think I've achieved that. But that's what you're shooting for, that kind of thing. What would that look like? How would that read? How would that work?
David: Why don't you try to communicate lessons in your books?
Paul: Well, first of all, I live in terror of 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. That would be explanatory. A lot of times what messages or lessons prove to be are just tautological, they're trivial. Be kind to strangers. I didn't need to read your book to get that. A lot of it's that kind of pedantic received opinion, right thinking, or high sentiment. I want somebody to come out of my book being like, wow, that book resonated with me because a lot of times we don't know what the lesson is. Most of my walking around time, I feel like I'm in the middle of just vast realms of meaning to which I have no direct access. I know that we're in the middle of whatever reality with a capital R is. Even what we think of as zillions of light years away is not that. Distance is just a function of our perception.
David: 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. That's a great opening of a door.
Paul: You arrive at something that's like, okay, we've gotten to a place, and then the book kind of opens you, dilates you, your perception, your thinking.
David: It's funny you use the word dilate. This is what is nice about a dialogue: you're constantly thinking about, was this person right? Was this person right? Was this person right? The author doesn't try to give you an answer. He says, I'm just showing you different perspectives.
Paul: That's what I want. I'm always just trying to pursue a moment, a scene, an experience of the character. I feel like I want to be like, I got it, and then I go back. Essentially, what I'm doing is saying to the reader, come here. I'm going to bring them down and just get them to that point and go, look what I found. 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. Just look. This is this amazing, crazy moment that I got to with language. I think of the books almost like galleries, like art galleries. I'm just moving things around, like, look at that, here's this, here's that. It's just in the way that a gallery will just show you. You curate this experience, the reader going through them. But then whatever they make of it is whatever they take out of it.
David: So then in doing that, what tools do you have as a fiction writer that you wouldn't have if you were writing nonfiction?
Paul: With nonfiction, I automatically think a novel doesn't have a thesis, or my novels don't have thesis. I'm not testing. I don't have a hypothesis or a thesis. I'm not trying to prove anything, so it doesn't work by argumentation. The way that you persuade through poetry or aesthetic fiction is by recognition, where the reader will say, oh, my God, I totally recognize that. That's absolutely true. I've just never seen anybody put it in words before. I love that idea, same with teaching, which is that I'm not giving you new data that you're just putting into the data bank. 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.
David: And what's an example of that?
Paul: Just like the stuff that we're talking about, the idea that we know better than how we act. Just having a character just saying, here I go again. I can't believe it. I know better. Having the reader say, that's exactly right. I also think 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 for the dignity of their soul. I don't want them to think that anything that I achieve in my books is at the expense or belittlement of their humanity. Somebody in the most remote geographically, even temporally, 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. The way you do that is just put those experiences, you describe those.
David: It's so vindicating. Especially with negative emotions. If you feel the vengeance that comes with betrayal, and you felt that knife in your stomach, like a real sense of somebody spiting you, you feel this internal weight, this internal tempest going on inside of you. 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.
Paul: Yeah. And as simple as I take it, I teach the Old Testament: vengeance is mine. The reason vengeance is God's is because God's vengeance is setting his creation back into a state of equilibrium. Human vengeance is revenge. So it just always amplifies violence. You never take an eye for an eye. If you kill my brother, we're going to come and we're going to exterminate your town, your village, that sort of thing. But then you read the Psalms, and the psalms are like, I want revenge. It recognizes part of the reason why you need those breaks on revenge is because you feel the impulse towards revenge when you are slighted. If somebody insults you, you're like, oh, when I get my revenge on you, you humiliated me once. I'm going to humiliate you to orders, degrees and exponentially more than you humiliated me. It's never, I'll just get you back with another zinger. So that idea of allowing for real human sentiment and feeling.
David: Well, that you see at the beginning of Genesis, right, with the revenge, it goes 7, 77.
Paul: Yeah. And for God, 7 is enough, but for Lamech, it's 77.
David: 77. It's the escalation. You see that in Genesis 5 or 6.
Paul: Yeah. The way the author did that was not big and symbolic. They just let Lamech say 77. The attentive reader will say, if 7 was enough for God, then that is a dramatic enactment of the idea that humans will always go off the rails that way. I always think of Prospero at the end of The Tempest, Shakespeare's last play, and what he does. He's the one king that says, I will not take revenge. I'm going to forgive everybody who usurped me and left me for dead because somebody has to stop it. I don't think it's a coincidence that the biggest forgiveness scene at the end of The Tempest is beat for beat, a retelling or reenactment of Joseph forgiving his brothers.
David: How about that?
Paul: Prospero has his coat of many colors. Can I have a scene where somebody forgives somebody? At the end of the poem, at the end of the Book of Job, God's like, where were you when I did you know, are you going to take the Leviathan? Moby Dick is just a meditation on the Leviathan. Faulkner's novella, The Bear, is the way. There are lines in The Bear that say the woods were his Harvard and his Yale, and that's what Ishmael says in Moby Dick, the whaling boat was his Harvard and his Yale. That's Faulkner saying, yes. Suddenly you're looking at Faulkner looking at Melville, looking at Shakespeare, looking at Moses, looking at Babylon. So I love that. It's like these telescoping lenses. I love the idea of, going back to what you're talking about, don't write for bad readers. Don't write for readers who won't like what you're doing. When I read Marilyn Robinson, I feel like I'm watching Marilyn Robinson watch Faulkner, watch Melville, watch Shakespeare, watch Moses.
David: I think what you're saying is dare to write with depth. The reason why you need to dare to do that is that a reader who just wants the quick hit, all this is going to go over their head. Most readers aren't going to want that, but there's going to be a few that are going to say, I want that. I want to work for it. I want this story, this novel, these characters, this language. I want to actually let it churn in my head.
Paul: That's another leap of faith. I tell my students all the time there are readers out there who want that. I can often work with the fact that they've self-selected and they're around the seminar table with me. I always say to my students, the minute I write a sentence down, I can hear billions of people stampeding for the exits. But then there are 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. If you try to get everybody, you're going to please no one. The people who are like, "Oh, that would have been a really amazing transcendentalist novel," are like, "Ah, he kind of pulled his punches with it." The people who wouldn't like transcendentalist novels are going to think, "Yeah, that sucked." Be self-aware, give yourself over to writing the kind of book you'd like to read. The best thinking, no matter what the idiom—theology, literature, whatever—the best art is like 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, coherent work of art that has its own fullness and integrity to it. You can keep moving through it in all these different ways, and it will always be reinforcing. I'm just inspired by great theologians, great musicians, great scientists, great people who take whatever idiom grabs them and use it to push deeper into human experience and the nature of reality, as it were.
David: Why did Marilynne Robinson say to you when you were leaving Iowa, "You really need to learn how to write grammatically correct prose?" That feels so far off from everything we've talked about.
Paul: I knew her well enough that I just loved her so much. I thought, that's the perfect thing, because with writing, there still clings to it this kind of romanticism of, like, you don't want book learning. You gotta just go out there and light yourself on fire and hop on the motorcycle, Beat Generation baby. Knock the headlights out and just, you know. It's a little showy, and I was younger and whatever, and a little stagey, a little bit of that, like, "Look at me on the clip." Then you realize, oh my God, that's about as interesting as watching the 8-year-olds make you watch them do cartwheels.
David: It's sort of like the teenager who wears Hot Topic. You're different in the most cliche way.
Paul: It also came too when I realized I was writing kind of lyrical pastoral stuff. The problem with that is if you're not really paying attention, it just turns into pretty, just ornamental rococo baloney.
David: Right?
Paul: That was another leap of faith I had to take, which is, what is beautiful, and what is attracting me to it 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. But I was terrified that if I did that, it would turn into clinical, surgical-sounding prose. It didn't. It turned into much more beautiful, astonishing.
David: Wait, break that down for me, because I was very surprised when you started talking about precision. That seems like something that a doctor would do.
Paul: Yeah, it's very strange. I was terrified that if I did that, it would take all those.
David: So why am I having that misconception? What are you seeing that I'm not seeing?
Paul: I've spent a lot of time out in the woods thinking about the objective correlative. I went through all my formative experiences walking through the woods on the North Shore. When I was this age, this age, this age, this age, you know, you're brokenhearted, you're 16 years old, you hate school, you don't like sports anymore. You're walking through an Audubon sanctuary, and it's like 4:15, and the way the light is going out under the tree, the bare trees, it's so freaking beautiful, and your heart is broken in the middle of that. So you start thinking, I want to get the heartbreak of that. You write all this. You slather it. Really what it is is to have faith in the reader and have faith in the description. I'm just trying to figure out how to describe light. How do you add calculus to it so that the light moves, and what does the light change into? What do the trees look like? Just get that real, almost like a botanist's precision of description. Again, because I'm writing fiction that's going through a character, then the character is noticing different depths of field. As a writer, you can keep moving in and out of those. What are you noticing? What layer of the canopy are you noticing?
David: David, there are elements of reality that to describe precisely is to fill them with wonder, mystery, and awe.
Paul: Yeah, totally. It's just really weird, and it's having faith that the world means itself.
David: What does that mean?
Paul: You can move your reader, and your reader can find it striking if you give them the thing itself. 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 writer's, the character's, experience of it. That's what we talk about. Give them the literal thing. Put them in the middle of a beautiful 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 character's experience of it is. So you let the, you don't coerce 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. Like, "Oh, that looks perfectly fine. It's a nice creek. It's a nice willow tree, this or that." And then the character says, "It means death." You know, you're like, "Okay, something's going on with this character because I didn't get, I didn't read that." So again, that's that refractive kind of thing that you can work with those vectors.
David: To describe something is not to explain it. To know something is not to understand it.
Paul: If you go back to physics, we know that we can only have access to 4% of reality. We don't know why and can't explain anything. The practical way that I teach that kind of idea to my students is that 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 to, because they're above, and they have to be conducting, choreographing the whole thing. Mixed into that is some degree of I'm obligated to explain what's going on. You just know that this character left his family in Tinker's. All I knew is that he left. So I just started writing about it. I didn't have to understand it to know 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 it was like for the characters and the consequences for the person who left and the people who were abandoned. One of the things I say to my students is, "Think about it." 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 writing portraiture. If you think of painting or writing a portrait of somebody, that's not explaining them. You don't have to understand them. You're just depicting them with a certain amount of richness and descriptive, experiential richness. There's room for all sorts of degrees of that, but that's the kind of thing that I'm always doing. I also think of this too. I end up more and more with this idea from my own writing as a consequence of teaching. When I'm with my students, I try to be as solicitous of them as writers and as students as I am of my readers. Over years and years of teaching, I think, "I don't want to do violence to your imagination. 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 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.
David: At what level is becoming a better writer just about sitting down and doing the dang thing?
Paul: It's at every level. I think writing is just iterative. You can't think your way to being a better writer. There's nothing theoretical about it. You're going to have to revise. A lot of people think of that as a prison sentence, but to me it's an insurance policy. You're not going to get it right the first time. A lot of times the first time you get it down, it's so excruciating you want to burn it. 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. Conceptually you can reason your way to rewriting the greatest book in the world, but if you can't actually put it on the page for the reader to get, it's no good. Be self aware, don't be self conscious. You are going to write a lot of really crappy prose. I'm 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. I can get to these places faster now because technically I don't have to worry about some of the chops, the moves, but it's still pages and pages and pages of painful prose all the time. I'll often write for a week or a month and write 150 pages and go, that's exactly what this is not about. This process of elimination, chiseling away until you get the thing. You have to get it wrong in a particular way.
David: So for 150 page book, how many pages do you think you write?
Paul: Easily a thousand.
David: Easily a thousand.
Paul: Yeah. I print up the entire manuscript like once every six to eight weeks and I just read it. I have a blue pen. By the time the book is published, I've read and reread and probably revised.
David: Tell me what's going on here.
Paul: That's the first page of my reading copy of Tinkers, the copy of Tinkers that I took all around the world. This is what I do. I just mark stuff up endlessly. Even when I was first out doing readings of Tinkers when it was published, I would be rewriting scenes as I was almost reading them out loud. There was some point in Tinkers where they were going to do a reprint, and they said this is one of the reprintings where if you want, you can go in and you can make any changes you want to the manuscript before the next printing, as long as the changes isn't more than like a line long. I think I made 250ish changes.
David: You are obsessed.
Paul: I was a drummer, so I think of beats, the tempo, the accents, and the dynamics. I'd go back and I'd read a sentence, I'd be like, that's one extra eighth note. That eighth note should not be there, or the accents on the wrong part of the sentence. Just little, that principle that you can always look at and just find it a little bit more precise, a little bit more finessed, a little bit more elegant, a little bit more just moving, just finding the right note if you're a musician.
David: I cut you off. Is there anything else you want to say about writing a thousand pages and cutting it down to 150?
Paul: I love it. If you're trying to be efficient, if you're writing fiction, I think you have to get over. You have to make a lot of false starts. There's a lot of cul de sacs you end up in and that sort of thing. In my case anyways, I kind of follow them to see because I'm always afraid I might have missed what the best part of the novel was. I'm happy to let a thousand pages of prose onto the page because I'm just always interested in what the language is doing. You just distill it down, and then it builds back up again, and then you distill it back down. I love that process, the systole and diastole of the whole manuscript. One of the ways that I write is I let everything I'm interested in at the moment I'm writing into the book. I let the paintings I'm into, this other Eden. There's a bunch of scenes in a meadow that's just been hayed, and that 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, aspen trees look like they're different trees, but actually they all have the same root system. It's actually one organism.
David: Oh, cool.
Paul: Aesthetically, this is what I mean about writing: if you think something's cool, do it. 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.
David: 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.
Paul: Right, so choreography.
David: Because you see it all the time in interior design. It's like you went too far here; you went too far here. And really, a lot of maximalism done right is it doesn't have that overwhelm. And a lot of it is because they get the depth right.
Paul: Yeah.
David: I don't know, but I would imagine that you could have clutter in writing.
Paul: You can. I'm not afraid to have a very cluttered manuscript, partly because it's easier to have too much clutter and pull back and make something. 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. When you look at it, it's all coordinated, but it spends a lot of time. I think of it as collaging and trying this next to that. If you're interior decorating, what does that light look like? What does it look like when I put this color next to, even like color theory? Colors look different depending on what colors they're around, and I even think about that when I'm describing color. Just experiment. 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 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. That's what people would call revision. I rewrote that 20 times, but it took me 20 times to get it right. If my goal for revision is precision, perfect precision of expression, that in my experience anyway has been a great insurance policy against that kind of ornamentalism because you're always trying to get it exactly right. One of my goals is just an ideal that you inevitably fall short of. But the idea of, I want the reading to be so utterly lucid that the reader forgets they're reading prose on the page. But I also want it to be as rich as possible. It was cool getting there 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. When you get it wrong, you get it wrong in a very particular way. But then that's practical. That means, okay, purple didn't work. So why didn't purple work? You go back, oh, because purple wouldn't be. So then you try, and it's just that, okay, now it's a little bit closer, but it's not quite there, and it's not quite there in very particular ways. That needs to be a little bit better. I haven't thought about what it smells like, just these little things. So you just keep layering it, and then there's a certain point where you go back and you read it, and you're like, it's all there.
David: I want to try something. What I want to do is play like 10 seconds of drums from one of your songs.
Paul: Oh, God, no.
David: And I want to.
Paul: I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
David: I want to hear how the drums that we're hearing in the music found its way into your writing.
Paul: Oh, sure. Yeah.
David: Okay, so here we go. So I hear a lot of guitar in that, but what's going on with the drum?
Paul: Well, when you're the drummer, you're the timekeeper, so 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 technically in time, but you can kind of make it breathe. You can also double the time, half the time, all that sort of stuff. 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 half-time; you can write in double-time. It has to do with tempo and pacing and dynamics. Often, when I write—because I kind of write lyric—that's why I think of it as lyric, is that I often think of what the tempo is, what the rhythm is, what the beat is. So I'll know what the musicality and the rhythm and the tempo of a scene is, depending on its mood and the characters. 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 how many beats are in a sentence before I know what it actually literally means. I'm trying to think of when I discovered that I was doing that and how to do that. There's a passage in Tinker's, the first novel, that is describing this character who's a door-to-door salesman. I started thinking about he's Tinker, and it's something like "Tinker bird, coppersmith, but mostly just a mush, a mop, and brush drummer." It's just like riffing, almost like scatting. Sometimes the rhythm can suggest the type of words. You're using a lot of single-syllable words; it's very monosyllabic. Then there are other things where, if it's more tumbling and really fast, you have a lot more fluent words that are polysyllabic, and you can move the reader through them.
David: He tinkered tin pots, wrought iron, solder melted and cupped in a clay dam, quicksilver patchwork, occasionally a pot hammered back flat. The tinkle of tin sibilant, tiny beneath the lid of the boreal forest, tinkerbird coppersmith, but mostly a brush and mop drummer.
Paul: That's just drums. That's just straight. But you have to be careful because you don't want to make it too singsongy, so it stops and then lurches. You don't want it to be quite as symmetrical because then it can be too singsongy. When you're writing prose, you have to be really careful about internal rhymes because it can get cutesy rococo too quickly. You want to make it angular and a little choppy, but also kind of funky. I wanted that to be like he's got a little bit of a badass. There's a little sway and swagger funkiness to it, but not too much, just like a heartbeat going on. I was thinking in terms of almost like that's how he would describe himself if he was the poet that he wished he was. He'd be a little bit more of a badass than he actually is, and that loops back to his very modest life. Emerson thought we all wish that people saw us as we wished we were seen, so you give him 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. Then the reader is like, oh, there's that—there's his soul there.
David: I want to know how the spirit of different writers has been infused into your work. Let's start with Emerson.
Paul: Emerson. My favorite sentence in Tinkers is the sentence that after all those years of writing Tinkers, I finally wrote a sentence that when I was like, that's a sentence I think Emerson could have written, and it just was the best feeling in my life. The sentence is, behold and be a genius. I was like, oh, that's cool. That's almost as cool as something Emerson. So it's just, you know, writing in the spirit of. One of the things I love about his essays is that they are not arguments. They're not rhetorically constructed like the way that arguments. They're associative, and they are written like sermons. If you study Emerson for two weeks in your sophomore survey class, and you even hear that he was a minister, it's almost mentioned in order to be passed over. But he wrote many. 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 heartening and tonic for your soul. I want some of that quality in my book. Tinkers is harsh and it's stark, but I want it to be beautiful in that way where you finish it and you go, that's really true. That book didn't jive me. There's something dignified about all these people's lives whose lives in the real world would be passed over without a word. There's a democratic thing too. Melville writing about a bunch of sailors.
David: Tell me about Melville.
Paul: 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. Then after I was teaching Shakespeare in the Old Testament, I went back and read it. I was like, holy mo. The more I knew about what was in that, the more it was what I already thought was wonderful. Now as a writer, I think, if you go through and you know you're Shakespeare and your Old Testament or ever, 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.
David: How about Shakespeare?
Paul: 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, but here's art that was the most sophisticated art of its kind that we can find an example of.
David: Very accessible.
Paul: It was written for regular people would go see it. You had the king up on the top and then you had the groundlings, and he wrote presuming the intelligence of his audience. Another thing about him is just reverse engineering a lot of the Shakespeare scholarship. I don't read any of it. I just read the plays and teach the plays. But every line means exactly what it says. The characters speaking them don't always mean, but every line is literally true. All the meta-figurative stuff is how he takes those lines and just keeps moving them and recycling them. One thing will happen and one character will say, that's lechery. Another character will say, no, that's love. One character will say, that's cynicism. It's all being done with very literal meaning, so even just starting with that literal, it stands on its own. Then it's what you do in the arranging and the choreography that gets that kind of figurative and symbolic and kind of meaning with a capital M sort of thing.
David: Let's end with this. How did the Transcendentalist teach you how to consult your own soul?
Paul: I very much remember the first time that literature blew my mind so much that I was stunned for a couple of days. It was actually reading Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, I think. I haven't read it since, but I just remember going so deep and it was activating all this stuff in my brain. I want to be able to do that with writing.
David: Yeah.
Paul: You know, it would be amazing to be able to do to a reader's brain what that work of literature just did to my brain. I think with a lot of writers, you start off life as a reader. I just loved 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 think. I write literary fiction in the sense when I think the term literary fiction, literature is just that is fiction that was inspired by and is in conversation with other literature. And then I just expanded that to art because I throw paintings and music and all that kind of stuff into my... Going back to that, your brain is a fingerprint kind of thing. In some ways, my novels are no more, no less than just literary MRIs of my imagination, of my brain.
David: It's a cool craft.
Paul: Yeah, I love it. It's amazing. I mean, a lot of dark nights of the soul, but it's worth it. That's why I just slow down and be patient.
David: When you say dark nights of the soul...
Paul: Being an artist is one of the 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'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 just cruising along with what you already can do. You're always saying, "Okay, how do I?" So you're just up against the brick wall, like, "How do I get around this? How do I get through it?"
David: And sometimes you get stuck.
Paul: Yeah. And then sometimes it's just like there's that voice. The wall isn't there. And you think that sounds stupid. So it's a lot of that kind of just kind of groping around. And so it becomes there's a way in which it becomes harder and harder. But it almost becomes the harder it is, the more precious it is when you think, "I got it. I chased it down into the language." Thank you, man. What a great conversation. Just wonderful.
