How to Write Freakishly Well — Paul Harding

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. 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.

"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 may sound coy, 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 etymology, a foundation of etymology, 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 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. So I say, you've 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 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 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 was 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 floor? 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 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 thinking, and that's what I mean about like, I was just remembering my grandfather's house and just, 'cause 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 doing 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 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? 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 over the course of a semester, over the course of a couple of 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 think of the Common as 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, 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, 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, ra-coo, 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 Balliett. 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 prose, right? And we're all writing, uh, fiction, which is narrative. And narrative prose 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 words."

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? Imposter 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 an 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 bring it back out into the world as prose. 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 Faulkner?" You know? Like, you never open a page of Faulkner and go, "Oh, is that Anne Batty?" Right? And that's because Faulkner, 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 years 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, 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. 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 Strout was *Olive Kitteridge*. So, you know, I was like, you know, I was just doing something, getting ready, and all of *Kitteridge*, and you know, getting all of *Kitteridge*, all of that's who won the year before. Yeah. And then suddenly, I was, it was like, *Tinkers*. And I was like, "I, like, 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. 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," I sort of fainted. Like I sort of was like in the crappy little apartment, and I sort of 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, "Holy cow, I just won 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 McPherson? 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 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 story 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* was another thing like, he, he couldn't get it published. Million publishers said no, and that won 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 follow-up 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 Prize-winning 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-brained, and big-hearted people who will love you for feeding their minds with feasts of beauty."

Take Faulkner 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 *Absalom, Absalom!* 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 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, Pirsig, 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. 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 good-spirited, big-minded, open-minded reader, can will go through it, and 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, 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 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 I hopefully you have a good reader, you know? And what the reader wants to do is go back to the beginning 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 tadah 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 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 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.'"

As an 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 Quentin Crisp, darling, TV is not something one watches. TV is 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 Faulkner. You, everybody has their own personal canon. 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 Faulkner, 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, and when people read my books and they say, 'Have you been reading Shakespeare and 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 egomaniac 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. 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."

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 it's a, it's a, 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. Exactly. And they, it's like, "What a real writer would do is anything. 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, "All in." Um, when I, when I became a writer, I can, you know, I grew up as a kind of lower-middle-class autodidact with niche 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, but the, what was powerful is when I actually started writing the way that I was writing, the writing, 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?"

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've 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?" 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 un-cloud-like?" You know? Like, if we were to try to describe the clouds in a way that's very un-cloud-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 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 12-page 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, 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 Wycliffe's translation of the Bible, it's, "And God tempted Abraham." Yeah. I mean, Abraham has 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. 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 means 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, like, 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 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 they're, 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 describing, 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 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 palette 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 buffaloes 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've 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, sodden or belabored or overdone? You know, it still should be clear, and you should, 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 and Peace* and Carlos Fuentes' *Terra Nostra*. 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 of 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. It would be like, again, it's an ideal. It's just like, I would like my reader to leave my 200-page 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. Uh-huh. 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 tautological. 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 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. It's 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, "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 perspectives." 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 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 experience.

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 data 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 experiences, 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 spitting you, 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 again, as simple as I take that. I teach the Old Testament. You know, "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, you know, 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 of 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, 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 Lamech, or whoever it is, it's 77. And that's exactly what it is. It's the, it's the escalation. You see that in like Genesis 5 or 6. 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 Lamech 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*, 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 usurped 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 coat 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, um, at the end of the, the poem, at the end of the book of Job, God's like, "Where were you when I, you know, are you going to like take the Leviathan?" And, you know, and *Moby Dick* is just a meditation on the Leviathan, right? And Faulkner's, um, *Nolana*, um, *The Bear*. The bear is the way. You know? And there are lines in *The Bear* that say, "The woods were his Harvard and his Yale." And that's what, um, Ishmael says in *Moby Dick*. You know, "The whaling boat was his Harvard and his Yale." That's Faulkner saying, "Yes." And then so then suddenly you're looking at Faulkner, 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 when I read Marilyn Robinson, I feel like I'm watching Marilyn Robinson watch Faulkner 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 going to, 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 going to, 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, 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 itself." So 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 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 prose"? 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." 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 cliché 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, racco-bologna, 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 prose. 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 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 Audubon sanctuary, and it's like 4:15, and the way the light is going out under the tree, the bare 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 changes? 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 botanist'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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 self-aware. Don't be self-conscious. You are going to write a lot of really crappy prose. 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 prose, 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 250-ish changes. You are obsessed. And that was all just like commas and just like, "Oh, that." Because 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 cul-de-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 prose 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, systole and diastole 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, it doesn't have that overwhelm. 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, 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, "I want the reading to be so utterly lucid that the reader forgets their reading prose 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. 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." Uh-huh. 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 halftime. 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, coppersmith, 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 rhythm, you know, the rhythm can, um, can suggest, uh, the type of words you're using. A lot of, say, in that case, you're using, um, single syllable words. It's very monosyllabic. And so you can, and then there's other things where if it's more tumbling and and really fast, you have a lot more, um, fluent words that are poly-syllabic 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, sibilant, 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 sing-songy. 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 sing-songy.

When you're writing prose too, you have to be really careful about like internal rhymes and stuff because it, 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, Tinkers 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 and 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 choreography 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, Thoreau'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 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 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.