Meet Pulitzer-Winning Stanford Professor (Richard Powers Interview)

character is complex and I I would always challenge my students I would say push them to the wall push them to the wall yeah and that's where the drama of being alive is can you live with yourself if you have to do something that you ordinarily would hate to do but the circumstance makes it necessary for you so you got person against themselves person against person is that it no there's a third level of drama tell me about these relationships with characters so if character drives drama and voice drives character what drives voice H and

this might be lesson number one of craft so when you're writing what are you doing to make it feel alive read the first sentence again cuz you'll see a little registral trick there okay tell me when to stop each child's tree has its own Excellence stop Richard Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for the over story in 2019 and and I had some friends who recommended it to me they said wow the writing is so alive so I walk into a bookstore one day I pick it up and I start reading the sentences and the paragraphs

and I was in awe of the descriptiveness The Wonder of his writing so that's a major part of what we talked about in this interview but also we spoke about the three different kinds of stories there's people against people people against themselves and people against the environment and he walked us through all three and then he said but we also need to talk about characters I want to show you how drama conflict voice and dialogue can bring a character to life so if you're somebody who's trying to write better stories and write with more life

in your own work well you're going to love this conversation with Richard Powers character is complex and we all do this in course of Our Lives you know we our brains have adapted to try to understand understand the hidden motivations of other people in fact there when when you talk to evolutionary biologists there will be some who say we needed the big brain because we were social you know we had I mean mammals have by and large solved a lot of the problems of predation avoiding prey you know um you know responding flexibly to change

you know you can get by on a lot less Hardware but what you need a lot of hardware for is keeping track of who's up and who's down who's in and who's out who that's right that's right so we're all novelists in our own lives we're all saying I this guy is remembering what happened between us 20 years ago right and he's holding a grudge or I haven't seen her in a long time I wonder if she's also a little bit in the nostalgic about the road that we did not take you know all those

kinds of things that we do with each other all the time those are the underlying skills that we use to assemble character when we're creating stories who's a character in a recent novel that you still feel like you have a really intimate relationship with well I'm very close to the to the people in playground still um and one of the great joys of being a novelist is you get up in the morning and you say how are they going to surprise me today one of the great sadnesses of a novelist is you have to come

to an end and you have to surrender the manuscript at some point and it becomes this fixed thing and yet your heart is still saying did I do right by them uh was there something else that they wanted or needed that I didn't get to you know so you know there's an odd way in which the character lives on in in your sense of of potential or Prospect as you're telling stories but you know the the two Central protagonists in this book uh Todd Keane who is a a Norths side chicagoan white privileged wealthy and

Rafi young black guy from the South Side who's coming from a very different socioeconomic straum and whose personal history is very different than Todd's in weird ways I I used them both as alter OS you know I used them almost psychoanalytically to get to various things in my personal past that I wanted still to work through here at the age of 67 I put them I put them in collision with each other um character leads naturally into drama in a way that we can talk about but I let them Collide I you know they formed

a friendship that was tight dedicated but also highly competitive and with a certain degree of weariness and distrust a certain degree of um ribbing and uh Relentless Uh crap shoveling as males do to each other um and the drama that arose out of that was naturally a kind of extension of all the unfinished drama of my young life you know from the age of 10 to the age of 30 uh and Beyond character leads into drama I think that's true I mean when we think of character you I used to teach character using something like

the stanislowski method I don't know if you've had writers who have approached it that way but he was a great theoretician of acting and how how to uh an actor prepares is one of one of his works and you know how how to inhabit a role of someone on stage who isn't you and how to locate in the role something in the core inner values of that character that you yourself can identify with knowing full well that you don't you are not that person you do not belong to that world but somehow abstracting it enough

so that you can use your own inner experiences and core inner values to inhabit and participate in that other characters uh and and of course what an actor does to inhabit a role is not that different than what a novelist has to do to create a character so make this concrete for me I don't know why I was thinking of Nemo and Nemo is you know this little kidf fish and Nemo wants to get out right and go do things go explore the ocean and then you have what's his name Marlin the dad Marlin I

think is his name Marlin is this super overprotective dad and Marlin says to him very early in the movie he's like are you sure you want to go to school today because it's the first day of school he's trying to say stay home stay home because he is this just gripping on the life of his young son so if we take that tell me about what you're saying through the Prisma of those character so I I used to do this uh I and and this also derives from the stanowski method but I used to teach

characterization as an onion so you you have on the outside of a person I don't necessarily mean the outside in the way that they perform themselves in the world because that's always a delicate and elaborate dance hiding a lot of things uh displaying a lot of things you know uh negotiating a lot of things but in in terms of the the psychic economy of that character in the outer shell are the traits H and he he's he's got a green shirt on it's got a little Insignia uh nice haircut you know he he holds one

you know all the things that you can use to make a character Visual and visible to the reader yeah but those traits come from somewhere H right they derive from things that are farther on the in the interior of the onion and uh the beneath that level of surface you know physical traits or or behavioral traits you might have mannerisms like he likes to uh unnerve people right whenever somebody says something instead of saying all right he'll say what do you mean by that and and that mannerism of of uh uh challenging or subverting or

undercutting somebody man there's a sensitivity of awareness that you must really have to have and is that something that you're cultivating I think it can be cultivated because I don't think I ever came by any of this naturally you know I if if you're talking about you know various uh distribution curves of people some of whom have very high emotional intelligence are immediately aligned with uh reading other people and then other people you know the cliche is the other end of the spectrum are people who do better with machines or or mathematical Concepts or I'm

probably on that side of that Spectrum but I I I do think we can all we are all conversent you know to some degree with finding you know equivalence and and analoges across the ways of knowing the world so the next level inside of mannerisms would be what What I Call Core inner values and what I I get this again from people who have done a lot of thinking uh about the creation and inhabiting of characters so but by a value has to be something like honesty or Fidelity or perseverance right so so so we're

now seeing Oh the reason he holds his hand like that is he he has a manner where he wants to set other people at ease um and underneath that manner of wanting to set people at ease is the value of complicity or or attentiveness or you know whatever it is but you see how multiple values can drive the same mannerism multiple mannerisms can be can lie behind the same trait so you have to find you have to find ways of making coherence so that the outward behavior of the person is both hiding and revealing things

that they need things that they want to preserve in the world and and I I would always challenge my stud I would say push him to the wall push him to the wall yeah so I'd say you know this guy is a good guy you know he he values honesty but you know he also values Fidelity now put him in a place where he cannot have both so now you got to make a choice yeah what is what is your core in value and what one will fall by the wayside when push comes to shove

because you got to choose and the the scenarios are obvious you know your friend has just done something wrong do you go to him and say look man you got to pay for that you have to own up to that or do you say I'm a good faithful friend I I you know I'm just going to support this guy I'll be with you no matter what yeah that's a story in fact that's 10,000 Stories right so what I'm hearing you say is you take these two values and you take them to the extreme you almost

make somebody fight those two values internally yeah what would it take what situation or challenge would it take to force that person to have to jump ship from one and embrace the other now that's drama and that's a very specific kind of drama it's interior drama um and in the hierarchy of drama that I learned way back in grade school yeah back in the day very sexist language that would be called a man versus himself okay and that that fundamental kind of interior instability you know when I when I go out into the tum of

the world my sense of self has to readjust my sense of what I think was most important to me has to change mhm that's the classic psychological novel how do we cope with the differences and the dramas inside our own head because look you know I don't want to have to choose between honesty and Fidelity I want to have both well life doesn't always let you have both right and that's where the drama of being alive is can you live with yourself if you have to do something that you ordinarily would hate to do but

the circumstance makes it necessary for you yes now I'm doing that and David's doing that too and here we are sitting in the same room right and you need something from me and I need something from you right you have core interv value that's very different than my core interv value so November's coming up let's say for point of argument that my core inner value is equality and your core inner value is freedom and now we have to go to the election box and we have to vote for one candidate I can't believe who you're

voting for you see what I'm saying now we have interpersonal drama now we have the sociological novel or the political novel where I can make you completely sympathetic to the reader and I can make myself completely sympathetic to the reader but now the reader is watching two people Collide in a way where they the reader has to say who's right the author doesn't necessarily have to say who's right but but the reader has to say if that were me which would I do well how would I jump I got to jump got to jump got

to put a vote in The Ballot Box so you got person against themselves person against person right is that it no there's a third level of drama which is that human beings want to have a certain story in the world they want to have a project they want to have they they have a conception of what a good life is and how we can best go about doing that on this Earth the rest of the world and it is a very large rest of the world a very big comprehensive and interconnected living planet might be

hostile to that idea of what it is that we want most it might be at best indifferent to it or it might be very sympathetic to it but there is battle between humans in the Aggregate and a world of which humans are only a very tiny part M and that level you would call man against the elements or man against life so you have the the the psychological component of all stories you have the sociological or political element of all stories but you also have this environmental or metaphysical iCal element to all stories MH now

if I you know when I was reading everything I could get my hands on and deciding that I was going to give my life to this craft and this this work and I was reading especially contemporary novels in the 8S and then the '90s and even into the early 2000s there were a lot a lot of novels that were exceptionally good at Psychology and very very good at sociology and and politics but almost never ventured beyond the human world almost never introduced the idea that what we want out of our lives on this planet might

not be commensurate with what the planet wants so the whole third kind of drama was disappearing from literary fiction we were getting extremely able and capable in our ability to tell stories about humans but only as if humans were autonomous and Inter independent from everything else right and it seemed to me that can't be right and and I started to look at the history of of liter fiction and then the history of world literature even before the novel and I was looking for that third kind of story and I saw I mean you can think

of great examples of it right I mean if I said tell me a book about man versus nature or Man versus you know the gods or Man versus the elements Greek mythology a bunch all of it almost all mythological Traditions now now bring it up to the present what do you think you know what's what's the latest kind of great book in the American Canon that you think really concerned took seriously the idea of man versus nature I have no idea you got to go back away yeah and you got to go back to Mobi

dick where you got to go back to the frontier American frontier no it's been that long huh well I mean there are always exceptions sure right but it there's a dip there's a real dip where you know from you know from 1851 when M dicks published to you know 1914 at start of the first world war you you see a trend for sure where that novel starts to seem quaint like the battle against nature you know it's like Jack London you know is well you know why why doesn't it seem literary to us because I

think the practitioners of Storytelling were under the mistaken impression that man had defeated nature that human beings had won that drama and now we could invoke that drama kind of nostalgically but it wasn't a real issue in our lives anymore our Technologies had gotten so powerful that it didn't seem like questions that we had to ask anymore now what happens in the last couple decades is there's a growing awareness that we didn't win that in fact we're losing in that war and we're in bad shape not just on the climate front but on the species

Extinction front and now that drama comes flooding back into the literary novel it never left the novel of Science Fiction it never left fantasy I mean fantasy is man against nature right it's telling that those things became second class those genres became subordinate genres genres in the eyes of the people who wanted to to be practitioners of literary fiction right but now now it where where it would have been strange for me in 1980 to pick pick up a a a new literary fiction that had a lot of non-human elements in it non-human agents or

non-human concerns or taking place seriously or taking other kinds of creatures seriously now it's rare to pick one up that it isn't addressing this question of how are we going to stay here much longer as you were thinking about the overstory and learning about trees and developing a kind of empathy for trees right I think of how big is the distance between you as the person and the dare I say consciousness of a tree it almost felt like your mind and the consciousness of trees fused together and I know that in your research process you

just spent a lot of time in the woods and I would to hear about that research but even more fundamentally how you developed that kind of empathy for trees and turning up the dial of just how real they were to you I found that in Old literature I you mentioned mythology um indigenous stories and of course I found it also by recovering my own earliest sense of narrative so you know I I've often said that young children are are animists you know or or uh you know they they have they they take seriously these magical

creatures around us you know I was just looked at at some crows flying past I'm looking at these marvelous locusts out of the window you you know and a child will could look at that and know that that creature is alive in really profound ways that adults now stop taking seriously no it's just wood it's just wood right so to go back to my own childhood of pantheism and to go back to the stories that underwrite world literature that know that you can't talk about human beings you can't understand human beings except in conversation with

the neighbors you know with understanding them in the full context of who we're not you know and our our fascination with the non-human world is that somehow we can see qualities in these other ways of being in the world that resonate with our own values so to look at the non-human world is also to understand interior drama so it's not just a question of giving trees voice it's a question of remembering those voices inside human beings that were suppressed by this cultural colonialism that said no no no don't you know pay no attention to the

world behind the curtain it's just us so to recover to recover that amazement wasn't a separate thing than you know to than to go deep into character for me for the creation of that book they they became the same Enterprise well what's wild about the overstory is how articulate you are about trees let me just read this we we found that trees could communicate over the air and through their Roots Common Sense hooted us down we found that trees take care of each other Collective science dismissed the ideas Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons

of their childhood and set buds accordingly Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life that a tree learns to save water that trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and Bank resources and warm kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from Attack I mean Richard for somebody who didn't know a lot about trees before he started writing this book to then getting to a place where you could see that feel that put that into language and then do it lyrically and poetically it's just astonishing and I

just need to understand how you did that well my whole project from the beginning has been driven forward by these these ways of knowing the world that we think are incompatible or in inimical you know opposite uh uh or in opposition to each other the the way of knowing the world through empiricism and Science and the way of knowing the world through intuition and the spirit I think the greatest science writers know that these aren't really combating programs that that that they actually are commensal that they actually depend on one another so the in the

passage that you read this character Patricia westerford she's an outsider and she's not afraid to anthropomorphize which drives a lot of scientists nuts even now although there are interesting ways in which that attitude is changing because it has prevented us from seeing certain things about the world Beyond us but she uses a vocabulary that's very lyrical and very poetic very spiritual but every claim that she makes in that catalog that you read has some kind of empirical backing in peer-reviewed journal articles that I researched when I was reading the book so to me that's going

to be our Salvation we have to know the world the way a scientist knows the world and we have to know the world the way an animist or pantheist child knows the world and if we can get those both going in our individual selves and in our culture as a whole we might have a shot of sticking around for a while and I think that this is so I I didn't grow up liking novels very much it was not I didn't read novels it just it wasn't super compelling to me and reading this now it's

something about reading out reading it out loud is really showing me what the novel can uniquely do I'll read a little bit more a forest knows things they wire themselves up underground there are brains down there ones our own brains aren't shaped to see root plasticity solving problems and making decisions fungal synapses what else do you want to call it link enough trees together and a forest grows aware and I mean it almost brings tears to my eyes and what it's doing is that language is giving life to something that I've seen 10,000 times and

like you were saying earlier you just become an adult you're like ah it's just a chunk of wood and some leaves they fall every every Autumn whatever and you're giving them life and vitality again through the language and that's that's the great grace of of the form the novel form you could have come across those facts in a very well done popularization of the new forestry and and uh you know all the discoveries about U symbiotic relationships in in a forest that have come out the last several decades and you could have grasped them intellectually

but I think as psychologists know the apprehension of fact and a shift in values are not the same thing and that we can be seduced much more by emotion and AFF effect and feeling than we can stand by statistics and graphs and arguments uh in fact the word emotion is interesting atomically so it means to to to move to to to to move someone you know a m a right the to to move through something or uh and there this has been verified again in so many Laboratories using so many experiments but the smallest appeal

to affect and to identification can make people do things you know that argument cannot and there's odd experiments that you know that make you wonder how how fragile and La labile mankind is you know like uh they'll have they'll have subjects reading two different texts or three different texts you know with with control text and a text about you know a story about someone who does something good for someone else and and the ostensibly the experiment is about comprehension so someone reads some data and someone reads a control neutral narrative that has no bearing on

you know the question of emotion and someone reads a fictional passage that you know has the potential to to move you m um to break your heart and make you cry a little bit and the the a sensible experiment is we want to test your reading comprehension please answer the following questions so all three groups answer the following questions and when you're done answering the questions you know please take your exams down the hall and deposit them at this at this door and meanwhile a Confederate is walking down the hall in the other direction and

they dump their pencils on the ground as if by accident you know they've got a a bunch of uh they're carrying a bunch of goods and they make a mess the the group that has read the story is far more likely to stop and help the person who just dumped their goods all over the hallway and it doesn't really have that much to do with you know with the temperaments of the individuals in that group they've all been Baseline shifted to for a moment anyway to be more empathetic to to to identify more with this

person who's now in a moment of suffering right um and that's what fiction does it invites identification it invites you to say who would I be if I weren't myself but that guy and simply the act of doing that increases your desire to to to be connected to to to to be empathetic to be helpful to another person hey I want to tell you about a new site that I built called writing exam exles we take writers like Steinbeck Orwell Seinfeld and break down what makes their writing so good if that sounds like it's kind

of your thing we'll go to writing examples.com and if you go there you enter email I'll send you my three favorite editions right away all right back to the episode as I was reading that I started I really felt how attentive you are to Rhythm and pacing and language and the different Hues of a paragraph and I'm curious how you think about sentences and in order to create that effect in the reader yeah so so when you think about a good book a good novel um there are a lot of dogs pulling the sled you

know there there are a lot of horses in harness and and some are you some of the concerns of of crafting a novel are what I would call lowlevel very very granular um addiction register syntax uh and then you know you work up to the kinds of things that you're talking about sentence level pace and Cadence and then the scene grows out of that and how long is should should the scene be and what is the flow in the shape of the scene what's the tempo of the scene and those emerge out of the the

layers underneath so so you have language as one way of you know as one of the the dogs in the in in the the the pulling sled and you have uh drama and you have character and you have form and you have structure and and different readers attach themselves more happily or more easily to different elements of fiction right you know like you know people can come right out and say I'm a I'm a character guy you know I just want to see if these people feel robust and vital and threedimensional you know and the

the story yeah I'll read for lot but it's basically do I know this person you know can I recognize myself in this person um and there there were other people and for a long time I was in this category I I didn't care about characterization I didn't care about plot I didn't care I just wanted beautiful language that's how I am isn't that funny you know because because identification with character is the dominant way of consuming a novel now in this culture at this moment people can look at us and and cite that fact as

if it's a little freakish or a little offbeat I like that and descriptiveness yeah because setting a scene you know uh even before there are human agents or non-human agents in that scene for me can be you know some of the most glorious kinds of fictional experiences you can have whereas if you go to an MFA program you're likely to hear people say things like show don't tell which means don't spend a lot of time setting the scene just get people in there doing things right yeah so something is lost when you privilege one aspect

of a fictional experience overall the others I think the the the the ideal strategy is getting all those elements pulling in the same direction and feeding on one another so the question is we talked about how drama grows out of character well character grows out of voice to to a large extent we come to know the people on the Page by how they're explaining themselves sure and how they're performing themselves for other people and what they're asking from other people so the moment you hear somebody you start to hear somebody you can also start to

see that person Forest Gump from a movie is a great example yeah of just the way he speaks and the Simplicity of his of his language is a place where voice really then leads to character yeah so if if character drives drama and voice drives character what drives voice H and the answer is you're starting to get down to the nuts and bolts of your tool chest which is the the words the individual words and the way they they are aligned in a sentence huh right so I'll do the first one first although typically I

would I would try you know with with the my students I I did it different ways in different years but I would show the inseparability of these things I'd show the the questions of register and diction are also the questions of syntax and and Cadence and pacing but the easy ones the lowest level is what is the register of that word and you know what does that word mean and to answer those questions is far from trivial when you say the register of a word what do you mean by that so linguists will talk about

the levels of speech that people use and sometimes you'll see three uh casual in the middle formal above it and you know down and dirty you know uh slangy at the bot sure yeah and uh sometimes you'll see four you know you'll see different approaches to answering this question of you know how register works but when you think of the various ways that you can say uh hand me that right give me that yeah hey will you please pass that yeah completely different yeah and there there are a dozen more I mean there's no end

actually to the ways that you can say that yeah I mean you can literally just say yo and then point out it that's that's great and you are you are performing a submit you're you're requesting something specific that can be identified but you're also sending signals Beyond signals about who you are about who you think the other person is about the kinds of values that you want to manifest to the other person about the kinds of values that you want to encourage or suppress in the other person all of those come out of voice and

and voice again is what words what what how formal or informal are you uh are you going for in terms of your word choice it would often be eye openening to my students when I would come into class and I'd say you know you're because you're speakers of English you have a kind of builtin bilingualism they say what do you mean by that they say for historical reasons you have the possibility of drawing on two completely different histories and Origins of words in order to create registral and color effects are you talking about Latin and

Anglo-Saxon yeah absolutely so if if if you say I live in a mansion right or if you say I live in a house why does one sound more expensive than the other right I mean back all the way at the beginning they were the same thing Mao and you know our English house were the same things but you know be because the Normans came came over to England and conquered the local English people and set themselves up in court the the the latinate through French uh words got a higher socioeconomic register right and and so

immediately the words you use talk about your class yeah and when my students would make this realization it was like wow I've got some power that I didn't have before I maybe I could hear it in my ear when somebody's being snoody or somebody's trying to establish their street cred but now that I know the actual rules for making that work my ear becomes better right and uh the difference between freedom and liberty becomes more audible right right um so that's the word level considerations for voice the other consideration is the sentence level so and

I I would try to teach this it's a very complicated question because English grammar is not trivial and but it's immensely flexible and you can create all kinds of different pallet effects and color effects uh by uh by using the flexible syntax and grammar of English but I I would say how can I how can I teach to my students where they don't have to go back to this subject that they hated when they were in sixth grade but they could get the meat and potatoes of it and and I was thinking can I do

80% of the work with 80% of the effect with 20% of the grammar you know sure and so I boiled it down to saying think about sentences as belonging basically to one of three classes so the the heart and soul of sentence call it a predication is the it's the main subject and the main verb every sentence has these now you might have an implied main subject and maybe an imperative verb where you know give me that would be an example right give the the predication is you give me that so the subject drops away

and you just have the the command uh but every sentence is built around that kernel if you can find on the page or in your ear that kernel then you can build the sentence in the way that allows the sentence to recreate emotionally pratically the mental state that the speaker is in or that the narrator wants you to be in in that that the sentence starts to participate in the AFF of the thing that it's describing right so if I start with my predication and I put in a lot of other modifiers that creates a

certain kind of syntax M he pointed the gun at his friend right there's a there's a kind of front-loaded shock to that right y you know or the gun exploded and uh a whiff of smoke uh exited the barrel you know these are clauses that have the action up front you know the the main subject main verb get delivered like that and then we see the consequences of those things now that's a very different thing than delaying the predication after a lot of modifiers so if you if if you want to put the reader into

entirely opposite mental state you could say way back uh across the yard uh near the fence where a tiny Brook ran along a a an old hedge R she hid right M and of course by having these modifiers first the reader is in this suspenseful State yeah I was like what are you going to say what are you going to say what are you going to say and the she doesn't appear until the very end so she is hidden from the reader in the sentence oh wow I did not catch that right yeah in the

same way that she's she's hidden in the physical space I did not catch that you have to wait for it wait for oh there she is right now the Third Way would be to split that predication down the middle and basically start with your subject and put a bunch of stuff in the middle and then a verb you know and and you can do this for all kinds of reasons too you can create suspense with that you can create comedy with it right uh it's probably the rarest form if you count the sentences in an

average number most of them are going to be in the first uh species you know where the where the subject and verb are pretty upfront um a smaller number are going to be this delayed predication and maybe the smallest I I don't know I'd like to do that experiment sometime and actually get the data but my my intuition is that splitting the predication is the rarest but it has a very powerful and you know not only it the effect in itself can create these different forms of delay or suspense or or Intrigue but using it

inside a paragraph when you've just had three sentences of you know a a trailing sentence in a row suddenly stopping and changing that changing it up it's like a a key change in music or going to different cord right tell me about writing descriptively because it's the kind of thing that people try to do and then all of a sudden they sound like they're trying too hard and I want to read this sentence cuz I think it's a good examp example of how you write descriptively and I want to hear how you think about doing

this you write each child's tree has its own Excellence the ash diamond shaped bark the walnuts long compound leaves the maples shower of helicopters the vasik spread of elm the ironwoods fluted muscle what's cool about that is I can see it I can see it I can see it I can see it you're almost cutting between different scenes but I find that whenever I try to do that the writing just sounds overdone it's like David why are you trying so hard well it's okay it's okay to try hard because you always have an edit where

you can make it look more effortless and you know to to push yourself in composition and say let me make a note to myself about the kinds of effects that I'm going after maybe they're too obvious maybe you know maybe they're too blocked out but at least you know now what effects it is that you after so think about that first draft as a note to yourself about you know about the psychic state that you want your senten your descriptions to participate in now when you go back you can hide your footwork and you can

you can make it more elegant you can take out the ones the notes that are a bit too loud or that that announce too clearly what your intentions are but in that passage you know one of the tricks is that the idea in that passage is to make each species of tree Vivid and distinct to give them characteristics that are different from all the other trees but to do it I'm I'm I'm introducing it's almost like going back to to to Patricia westerford and saying there's subtle little elements of anthropomorphism in that sentence or or

pantheism or animism in those description the ironwood's fluted muscle yeah and and now now it's like that that trunk that's so visually distinct in that in that tree now becomes like a like a weightlifter you see it flexing and you can see the Senus um so it's a it's a subtle invitation to elicit the animism in the reader oh yeah I've looked at a tree and I've thought that tree is evil or that tree is uh shy or that you know all these projected emotions Majestic right yeah yeah but read the first sentence again cuz

you'll see a little registral trick there too okay tell me when to stop each child's tree has its own Excellence stop were you expecting that word as the final word of that Clause no it's it's it's like a a great song where you you hear the phrase and you think you know the way the chords are going and then all of a sudden at the the end of that phrase you hear sudden an interesting change of color or change of instrumentation or change of pitch the the last thing you would think to apply to a

tree would be some degree of excellent now I always think you know the the beginning of a sentence and the end of a sentence are very powerful places to set a reader's expectation and then to surprise the reader's expectation that each child's tree has its own degree of Excellence right and the reader unconscious they just reading along for the music of it and and the color of it and the the images being created but the composer is saying that word raises the tension a little bit at the end of that sentence and it's not the

one that the as we read along we're constant saying what's coming next what's coming next we're you know we're we're like an AI what's the next most likely word we're like a large language model we have a model of the world and as I add each new word to this sentence you are deciding which way I'm going to go spin right exactly you got it you can play off that expectation you can you can set it in motion and then say NOP this way that way so how is it different say when you're describing a

person so that one was about trees but then you right the farm was where Nick first started sketching the pencil dreams of boys Rockets outlandish cars masted armies imaginary cities more Baroque with detail each year then Wilder textures directly observed The Forest of hairs on a caterpillar's back and the stormy weather maps in the grain of floorboards yeah and you know it's interesting to read something that I wrote now seven or 8 years ago I'm I'm in a different place the world is in a different place uh that book exists and you know it's trajectory

I could never have foreseen when I was working on it and I'm listening to those phrases on the one hand the way a brand new readers is listening to him because enough time has passed for me to forget what that passage how that passage worked so I hear that pencil the pencil dreams of boys and I don't know it's an odd metaphor for a second and then you get the catalog of things that boys might sketch and oh the pencil dreams of boys well what's so cool about this is I put it put me back

to being a kid I used to design airports in my room when I was a kid so this is about rockets and outlandish cars it has nothing to with airplanes but something about the similarity put me back to being an 8-year-old kid kind of messing around and sketching around and designing baseball this and football that and that is now that I'm rereading it so much of what makes this resonate with me yeah now you can look at the the individual words in the syntax and say what is he doing to put me in that mental

state beyond the simple uh literal conveyance of the sentence I have to say in all honesty and this might be lesson number one of craft I'm also listening and saying saying no I would do that differently Now give me a red pen you know because that's writing you are never done with it because you're a moving Target your reader is a moving Target the world is a moving Target you look at that sentence and you say give me another shot at that so you know when you say you look at your first draft and it's

frustrating for you I say that's not a bug that's a feature let that frustration be another form of seeing your desire so how many times you rewrite those sentences oh gosh now see now with with word processing it's hard to say 12 right or 14 it's just continuous it just keeps happening never ends you know you wake up the next day and you're reworking the previous day's material and then you get to the end of the weekend you've got a chapter and you read the and you rework the chapter again and then the whole book

is finished and now you say it's time to go do a second draft well that second draft is actually now you know depending on the various passages could might have been drafted a dozen times or more you know and and then you send it off to your first readers and they say it got a little it got a little slow for me from 140 to 200 you know and now you say well how do I pick the pace up and you go back and you draft it again and but the what all I'm saying is

accept that as part of the glory and of of of the process of writing don't fight it as something you you know you wish you could finally make it right because there's no final right you know I I take this book that was published yesterday I go behind the podium tonight I start reading from it I want to change it wow when you get frustrated when you're writing and you're agitated or tense because you're not getting something right what is the nature of the things that aren't quite right for you oh they could be anything

it could be deafness you know or deafness yeah like like I I I don't know what this person's trying to say or how they should be trying to say it it could be it could be uh a dramatic problem oh my God I just realized that I've been you know I've been counting on these two characters to be uh disagreeing about this matter but now that I see them both in context I'm not sure they would be so you could you you you you're constantly having to to course correct you're constantly having to to discover

the things that you're unconscious knew sometimes you can't Discover it um so the ways of going wrong are infinite uh and the the the ways of going right are not final so ride it you know it's it's so definitely like surfing for me the the the craft tip here is relax forgive yourself you know know because it always comes around to something more satisfying that all you need to do is let it breathe a little bit go out take a hike you know uh stand in front of a tree you know breathe the breathe the

air you know drink the drink um relax the perfectionism that says I need to get this in a Perfect final State let it let it be process I want to talk about introductions just how you think about where these books begin for over story you write first there was nothing then there was everything for playground before the Earth before the moon before the Stars before the sun before the sky even before the sea there was only time and taroa why do you choose those how do you think about that you're revealing something that I probably

had never consciously articulated about what I like in Beginnings um but I see it clearly in both of these I want to situate my stories in a mythological framework yes you know but I also you know I'm imitating a certain kind of cinematography too like uh great films that start with a really distant wide establishing shot yep know and then you know go to a mid shot and then go to close that in my ear I want to say here is the the size of the canvas now we're going to explore this but don't forget

that the canvas is all the way out here so if if that opening can be kind of cosmic then you earn the right to tell a local story and let it let it germinate and and grow into into the the the larger frame that you've set for the story but I'll tell you I I I love opening lines I I love looking at the books that I love and seeing how sometimes the entire book is contained in the microcosm of the first sentence or paragraph all the conflicts all the dramas all the characterization you know

are hinted at in a way that the reader can't possibly uh see or anticipate I mean Romeo and Juliet two houses both alike in dignity in fair Verona where we lay our scene you get I mean just right at the beginning of that yeah two people they're very similar but uhoh stuff's about to happen right it was the best of times it was the worst of all these lines that have become so classic because after the fact retrospectively we realize that's the story in a nutshell but you know I search and search and search and

I throw them out I start again I start somewhere else and it's all good you know it's all it's all discovery the the over story line first there was nothing then there was everything I mean if if you're not sympathetic you could say it's that's kind of philosophical mumble jumble and you know so the Gospel of John Works a little bit like that it could be a little bit of a mystification you know what in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God yeah and in these sort

of you know linguistic play with the the the metaphysics of what's being expressed well that line actually comes from one of the last sentences that a dear friend of mine and a brilliant American poet sat on her deathbed and as she was drifting in and out of Consciousness and you know her loved ones were standing by and she would talk and they would lean in and what is she saying you know she said something she they couldn't hear her and they leaned in she said first there was nothing then there was everything you know and

I thought you know what a better way to memorialize the life and work of this friendman to to take that and promote it to the start of this book if I remember correctly you you wanted to be a poet or you were very interested in poet want be a poet you still want to be a poet when I grow up yeah I may end up that way I don't know yeah but that's that's the place where those of us who love language first can focus on that as the primary Pursuit and there's also drama in

poetry there's voice and there's characterization there's structure for sure and form we didn't even get to how uh drama generates form and structure but in poetry you see most of your job is to create visceral sensation through the musicality of of your words I mean there's there are a lot of other jobs that poets do and of course of course poetry itself is a moving Target and historically has been interested in different things at different times and you know what what what's considered the central preoccupation of poetry has changed so much even in the course

of my lifetime but how does how does drama create form yeah so we we've seen these three kinds of collisions and in any Collision what you're talking about the the primary variable is tension in a collision you go from a low tension state to a high tension state right and and then you can relax that tension as the drama is resolved and then it starts up again somewhere else and tension goes so you are dialing in and out of something that most of us can can read intuitively as the stakes right and uh what we

call tension is the realization on the part of the protagonists that the stakes are going up now when you think of form as trying to address the potentials and the problems of tension now you're thinking what does a a writer want to do from page one to page 400 to manipulate the tension in the reader and of course it's going up and down all the time depending on the drama of individual scenes but we have the the ability to tell stories you know this weird adaptation that the human brain has for imagining creating imaginary spaces

and saying you know what if know what if this guy said this to this guy right um we know that when we tell even the simplest stories there's a kind of structure that makes sense with regard to tension and there's a kind of structure that doesn't make sense if I said once upon time there was a prince and the prince rode out on his his Steed and he killed the most challenging dragon in the country and then the next year the prince rode out on his horse and he killed a dragon that was somewhat challenging

right that wouldn't make any sense you know and the you know the the the finale being and then he killed the easiest dragon in the country it would never sense at all so we have an intrinsic which would actually it would Merit some investigation as to why that makes absolute sense to us to stack tension as a rising thing you know to think about that as a as a physiological thing as a as part of uh this you know um adaptive power that we have to Intrigue other people with story but a simple rising action

isn't really the most satisfying kind of story anyway especially for long form right so you know you you have to sculpt that tension graph in a way that does Justice to your characters does Justice to your readers expectations and keeps your readers intrigued because you know there there's a certain kind of tension in just wanting to know what happens next there's a certain kind of tension in knowing that there are Mysteries early on in a story that you can't explain and so there's that reverse anticipation of of knowing that eventually you're going to get an

explanation that of something that right now is completely mysterious to you right so I would teach the tension graph as having four parts uh a hook where at the beginning tension is just a little bit higher artificially higher right in order to say here's what's here this is going to draw you into this world there's some Stakes early on that you're going to immediately be viscerally interested in y and once you get the reader hooked with with that higher level of of tension you can relax the tension a little bit as you move into what's

what I would call the exposition who's who who are they uh where you know what what is the the the crisis what is the the stakes you know where where are these people coming from getting everybody on stage you you've earned the ability to relax the tension and getting it get everybody on stage because you've had that little bit of a of a bait and switch once the reader is oriented in this world once a certain amount of things have been exposed shown to be then you can start to explore the instabilities of those people

in that situation now we go back to drama and and every every value creates an unstable counter value and every contact with another human being creates an instability in what those people want and need now you go through the great middle part of the book which is the rising action the stakes get higher every time something gets solved it produces a larger instability because the ramifications of solving that first little episode are larger than the ep the first episode itself so you go up this letter and you you eventually reach you can't you hit the

wall you can't raise the stakes any farther you've reached the ultimate dramatic conflict that's the climax of the book now typically we don't save that for the last page of the book we have this followon that says okay now that you've seen the final jumps that everybody's made now that you've seen what everybody has chosen as their core in value and seeing the way that they have to now live with the consequences of their choices MH you release that back into the world we use a French word for this in in nitology the dumal which

we think of as the Revelation or the you know the the the consequences but it literally means the untying so you've been wrenching the knot Tighter and Tighter and Tighter you get to the climax it blows apart and now what happens in the world suggests anyway the trajectory of these people who have gone through fire and now are different than they were before in what ways are they different and what ways will the world that they live in be different we need enough of that to know what the final consequences of that climax would be

have you picked up any similar tools for writing dialogue because dialogue is a representation of how people actually speak but it isn't it's far more efficient dare I say than actual human conversation it's highly stylized I mean if you were to sit on the the back of a bus here in the city and and just transcribe the way that people talk to each other and try to pass that off on the page you could make the claim this is the most realistic dialogue you'll ever hear it'd be terrible would be chaotic and incoherent and you

know uh that we depend on certain conventions and and by when we say real or Vivid we're not actually talking about empirically accurate we're talking about the recognition of certain narrative expectations that we've learned from the kinds of fiction that are viable in our culture right now conventional dialogue realistic dialogue is the dialogue that knows how to manipulate the expect the conventional expectations that have been established for dialogue at this moment and you don't have to go back very far to to to start leaving your comfort zone in dialogue you know at if you're if

you're every day if you're cutting your it and you're just living on fiction that's been written in the last 10 years and you're shaping your ear on those conventions and you go back 20 years or 40 years or 100 years you might say people don't talk talk like that you know but all you're saying is I've I've lost my context my my my decoder ring for you know for understanding how how these dialogues work so when you're writing what are you doing to make it feel alive without it feeling like you said empirically accurate to

how people speak I think you have to hear it out loud because I think that's the way that most readers are actually going to consume the The Narrative when when we read we subvocalize you're hearing it subvocally and that's why sometimes for authors it's tough to listen to their own audio books because they've just spent a couple of years subvocalizing all these characters and now they have to hear those these characters literalized by some other voice actor and they're going no no no that's not what I'm hearing in my head you know um but to

to create dialogue that can elicit different kinds of emotions from people is always furthered I think by actually saying it out loud and you know it testing it in the in The Crucible of your ear right so that when your readers do the same thing you at least have a little sense of the the register the the tone the color the Cadence the the realism the the socioeconomic accuracy of that dialogue I have no sense for this so who is someone who you really admire with dialogue and what is it that you admire about the

way that they write it that you're trying to chase or cultivate yourself there's they're practitioners that are amazingly varied like you can get a writer like Anne patchet who whose characters you even forget that their characters you know because because she somehow can participate in the way that they speak so uh vividly and so virtuosic that the performance disappears entirely and you just say oh oh yeah that's that's my neighbor that's that's you know that the the woman that I lived with for 11 years or you know you're doing all those things just through her

ability to to let them speak themselves to each other but then you can also get a writer who's aesthetically completely different like Don deil and you could look at a book like white noise and you could look at the dialogue in that book which is crazy you know and and highly artificial in one sense of the word artifice and yet you can say this man has the best ear of any living writer because he somehow can get to the absurdity of the way that we talk through each other you know or uh uh away from

each other yeah you know and it's it's not realism it's in some ways it's kind of surreal what he does with with dialogic but it's so real in in terms of recognizing the the the the crazy way that we play this language game with one another okay so what I want to do is I want to pop between some different quotes we'll we'll kind of do a fire round quote parkour first one the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's mind the only thing that can do that is a good story I

mean in order to move somebody you have to use emotions right um and we we we talked a great deal about those two different appeals uh the the appeal to logic and reason and rationality and the appeal to the guts yeah if you would learn the secrets of nature you must practice more Humanity the secrets of nature are where the secrets of humanity arise we can see one another we can understand ourselves as individuals through the difference that we have looking at another person but to understand what a human being is we have to look

at the more than human the loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers I I find this true to the present day you know I C I can give the manuscript to my brother and he can return it a couple of weeks later and say interesting and and and yet I can turn my phone on this morning and get an email saying you don't know me but I'm studying forestry now because of you you know what sense is does that me that's just crazy yeah when you're sure of

what you're looking at look harder yeah yeah because when you're sure you're not moving and reality is always moving right if if you've arrived at a definitive irrefutable point of view it's because your point of view is stationary and that's not going to help you survive in a world where all points of view are constantly moving interesting when I read that what I was thinking about was I was just thinking of the over story and I was thinking of the infinite number of things that nature will reveal to you if you sit and you stop

and you look and look and look yeah attention is the most profound source of meaning that we can have and before I I wrote over story I had a a path that I would walk from my house to my office and it looked something like this tree tree tree tree and as I started to write a war story that path started to look like this red oak Maple uh hornbeam uh and then as I got deeper into into over story it was oh this guy you know it's not a red oak it's this guy and

he's doing something that I've not seen in the other Red Oaks in the neighborhood right so the the granularity the particularity the pleasure of the world depends on slowing down and looking harder yeah we have the sense that structure is inimical to emotion or that systems are inimical to individuals you know that a book can either be a heart book or a head book and my desire of course is to write something that's like us namely an Allin one and I like this I this idea that you're getting at which is that there can be

novels of thinking novels of feeling novels of character novels of ideas and this is one of the major themes of this conversation is the fusion of maybe even the right side and the left side of the brain in the work that you're trying to do the sled is only going to move when all the dogs are in harness and they're all pulling in the same direction but that's that's the craft of writing to find a way in which all those different approaches and it's far more than just head and heart I mean there are 300

regions of the brain right so what you want to do is get all all the the elements in your repertoire chosen in such a way that they're supporting one another other right that the levels are emerging from the decisions that you've made at the levels lower down and they're all in harness and in harmony I want to end by hearing about some of the time that you've spent writing in solitude you know when you wrote plowing in the dark you said I even wish that I could have gone into a sensory deprivation tank and it

seems that Solitude has been a major asset and strategy over your career I agree with that but I I think I have to expand the formulation just a little bit moving in and out of solitude has been the strategy huh right my composition process and certain amount of my revision needs to remove the overwhelming stimulus of the world in order to be able to create a richness in my own imagination so I write lying in bed I'll pull the covers up I'll I'll dictate or I'll use a pen you know I'll turn the light out

and do it in the dark I'll I'll look up at the bare ceiling as a way of repurposing all my sensory apparatus that would ordinarily be taken up with you know the the the amazing stimulus of the world and and now just going back in tranquility and recollecting places that I've been things that I've known uh crisis that I've survived so that requires solitude but if you stay solitary you're going to spin out of orbit eventually both literally and artistically because you won't have the world to test the products of your Solitude against so you

start to make a character you start to create a scene and and you you you need that sensory deprivation to get going and to get traction but now it's it's gained enough complexity and momentum on its own what you want to know now is is it true does it resonate and to do that you got to give up your Solitude you got to go back down into the melstrom and I think so many creators talk about that that boundary condition you know where you can control both the degree to which you can isolate and organize

the complexities in the chaos of the world and the degree to which you can plunge back into the bracing rejuvenating corrective of a story that you didn't tell yeah and you have to play the one off the other well it seems like you've really experimented with different forms of composition cuz you were just talking about speech the typewriter or the keyboard there's handwriting right how do you mix those and how does your language show up differently in different input formats it's kind of scene dependent and book dependent to some extent the ratio and and what

are go to uh at each moment it's also depending on my state of mind uh but I mean think of it the way that a musician would use different instruments you know you know if you're writing a song you might reach for a guitar for a certain kind of song you might sit down at the piano for a different kind of song go out in the in the woods and sing a capella for in a different a new a third kind of song or or you might you might rotate you know you might try you

know different combinations in sequence or um in parallel I I think the samees for writing I think the tools that we use to write we reach for them when we need them when we detect through our intuition or through our intellect that we need to slow down or be more quiet or or speed up be more lively you know and and each each tool has its affordances and allows you to get to different places last question be as concrete as possible with how do you actually think about your day-to-day structure when you're writing in solitude

I mean you were talking about I have this image of you just pulling the covers over your head and being there and letting your imagination wander and do set deadlines for yourself how does that work it's changed enormously over my 40 years and and 14 books I have always been a person who's most Alert in the morning and uh I I always uh for the maybe the first 25 30 years of my life knew that I was going to get best results if I had breakfast if I minimized my interaction with the world resisted the

attempt to you know the the the uh uh desire to read yesterday's news or you know um to check my feeds um and simply get to work while my brain was freshest and to to stay there until I had a thousand words that was the discipline that was what shaped the day I thought my job was getting a thousand words out every day it worked well for a long long time um something happened I became a different kind of writer I can point to the moment where it started and I can point to the moment

where it started to accelerate but basically I now no longer see my day my primary job as get is as getting thousand words I see my primary job as being in the world the Living World so the first thing I will do in the morning is check the weather report and and the calendar and ask myself what's going on out there at what elevation and where's the show and where can I learn something and that's my primary accountability now uh to see myself through the nonhuman world to remember all of my experiences of my life

through having this extended final chapter of meditation and presence and usually it means that if after a short time of being quickened and revived by uh all these amazements happening all around me without too much deliberation something that might have taken me a lot of forced effort earlier in my career sentences will start to come and and scenes will start to come and a lot of times you know I'll be four miles down a trail and realize I got to get home as quickly as I can because I can't hold it all in my memory

anymore uh so the the the the the writing now is a supporting process for trying to keep me growing as a person in the world that keeps growing that was such a fun interview thank you so much for doing this pleasure it was great to meet you thanks daavid do yeah yeah