I interviewed a Pulitzer-Winning Stanford Professor (Richard Powers Interview)
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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? 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 because 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 Overstory in 2019. 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 shocked.

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, our brains have adapted to try to understand things.

the hidden motivations of other people. In fact, 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, of avoiding prey, 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

is keeping track of who's up and who's down, who's in and who's out. All the interactions. That's right. That's right. So we're all novelists in our own lives. We're all saying, 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 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 people in Playground still. 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? Was there something else that they wanted or needed that I didn't get to? So, you know, there's an odd way in which the character lives on in your sense of potential or prospect as you're telling stories. But, you know, the two central protagonists in this book, Todd Keene...

who is a North Side Chicagoan, white, privileged, wealthy, and Raffa Young, black guy from the South Side who's coming from a very different socioeconomic stratum and whose personal history is very different than Todd's.

In weird ways, I used them both as alter egos. 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 in collision with each other. Character leads naturally into drama in a way that we can talk about.

But I let them collide. You know, they formed a friendship that was tight, dedicated, but also highly competitive and with a certain degree of wariness and distrust, a certain degree of ribbing and relentless crap shoveling, as males do to each other. And the drama that arose out of that was,

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 and beyond. Character leads into drama. I think that's true. I mean, when we think of character, you know, I used to teach character using something like the Stanislavski 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 to-- An Actor Prepares is one of his works, and 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. 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 kid fish and Nemo wants to get out 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. And 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 prism of those characters. So I used to do this, and this also derives from the Stanislavski method, but I used to teach characterization as an onion.

So 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, displaying a lot of things, you know, negotiating a lot of things. But in terms of the psychic economy of that character, in the outer shell,

are the traits. And he's got a green shirt on, it's got a little insignia, a nice haircut, you know, he holds one-- You know, all the things that you can use to make a character visual and visible to the reader. But those traits come from somewhere, right? They derive from things that are farther in the interior of the onion.

And beneath that level of surface, you know, physical traits or behavioral traits, you might have mannerisms. Like he likes to unnerve people. Whenever somebody says something, instead of saying, all right, he'll say, what do you mean by that?

And that mannerism of 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, if you're talking about, you know, various cultures,

distribution curves of people, some of whom have very high emotional intelligence, are immediately aligned with reading other people. And then other people, you know, the cliché is the other end of the spectrum are people who do better with machines or mathematical concepts. I'm probably on that side of that spectrum. But I do think we can all, we are all conversant about

you know, to some degree with finding, you know, equivalents and analogs across the ways of knowing the world. So the next level inside of mannerisms would be what I call core inner values. And I get this again from people who have done a lot of thinking about the creation and inhabiting of characters. So a value has to be something like

honesty or fidelity or perseverance, right? So we're now seeing, oh, the reason he holds his hand like that is he has a manner where he wants to set other people at ease. And underneath that manner of wanting to set people at ease is the value of

complicity or attentiveness or whatever it is. But you see how multiple values can drive the same mannerism. Multiple mannerisms can lie behind the same trait. So 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 I would always challenge my students. 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 values honesty, but you know he also values fidelity. Now,

Put him in a place where he cannot have both. So now you've got to make a choice. What is your core inner value? And what one will fall by the wayside when push comes to shove because you've got to choose? I mean, the scenarios are obvious. You know, your friend has just done something wrong. Do you go to him and say, look, man, you've got to pay for that. You have to own up to that.

Or do you say, I'm a good, faithful friend. 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. Yeah. 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. And in the hierarchy of drama that I learned way back in grade school, back in the day, using very sexist language, that would be called a man versus himself. Okay. And that fundamental kind of interior instability happens

You know, when I go out into the tumult of the world, my sense of self has to readjust. My sense of what I think was most important to me has to change. 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. Right.

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.

You have core inner value that's very different than my core inner 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 you're voting for him. 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's 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 the reader has to say, if that were me. Which would I do? 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 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 a battle between humans in the aggregate and a world of which humans are only a very tiny part. And that level you would call man against the elements or man against life. So you have the psychological component of all stories,

you have the sociological or political element of all stories, but you also have this environmental or metaphysical element to all stories. 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 work, and I was reading especially contemporary novels,

In the 80s and 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 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 I started to look at the history of literary 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, bring it up to the present. What do you think, you know, what's the latest kind of great book in the American canon that you think really took seriously the idea of man versus nature?

I have no idea. You gotta go back a ways. And you gotta go back to Moby Dick, or you gotta go back to the frontier-- American frontier novel. It's been that long, huh? Well, I mean, there are always exceptions. -Sure. -Right? But there's a dip. There's a real dip where, you know, from 1851, when Moby Dick's published, to, you know, 1914, the start of the First World War, 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, it's 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 war. In fact, we're losing 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 in the eyes of the people who wanted to be practitioners of literary fiction, right? But now, now...

Where it would have been strange for me in 1980 to pick up 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 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 fuse together.

And I know that in your research process, you just spent a lot of time in the woods. And I would love 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. You mentioned mythology, indigenous stories, and of course,

I found it also by recovering my own earliest sense of narrative. So, you know, I've often said that young children are animists, you know, or, you know, they take seriously

these magical creatures around us. You know, I just looked at some crows flying past, and looking at these marvelous locusts out of the window, you know. And a child 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 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, with understanding them in the full context of who we're not.

You know, and 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 and

by this cultural colonialism that said, "No, no, no, don't-- 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 became the same enterprise. Well, what's wild about the overstory is how articulate you are about trees. Let me just read this.

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.

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 ways of knowing the world that we think are incompatible or inimical, you know, opposite or in opposition to each other.

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 they actually are commensal, that they actually depend on one another. So in the passage that you read, this character Patricia Westerford, she's an outsider, right?

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 didn't grow up liking novels very much. It was not... I didn't read novels. It just wasn't super compelling to me. And...

Reading this now, it's something about 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 autumn, whatever. And you're giving them life and vitality again through the language. And that's the great grace of the form, the novel form. You could have come across those facts in a very well-done popularization of the new forestry and, you know, all the discoveries about...

symbiotic relationships in a forest that have come over 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 affect and feeling than we can by statistics and graphs and arguments. In fact, the word emotion is interesting etymologically. So it means

to move, to move someone, you know, a mover, right? To move through something. And 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 that

you know, that argument cannot. There's odd experiments that, you know, make you wonder how fragile and labile mankind is, you know. Like, they'll have subjects

reading two different texts or three different texts, you know, with control text, and a text about, you know, a story about someone who does something good for someone else. And 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 move you, to break your heart and make you cry a little bit. And the ostensible 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 questions, you know, please take your exams down the hall and deposit them 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 bunch of... They're carrying a bunch of goods, and they make a mess. 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 for a moment anyway, to be more empathetic, to identify more with this person who's now in a moment of suffering. Right. 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 be connected, to be empathetic, to be helpful to another person. Hey, I want to tell you about a new site that I built called Writing Examples. 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, well, go to writingexamples.com.

And if you go there, you enter your email, I'll send you my three favorite additions 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 phrases.

in order to create that effect in the reader. Yeah, so when you think about a good book, a good novel, there are a lot of dogs pulling the sled. You know, there are a lot of horses in harness. And some are-- Some of the concerns of crafting a novel are what I would call low level or very, very granular. Diction, register, syntax.

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 should the scene be? And what is the flow and the shape of the scene? What is the tempo of the scene? And those emerge out of the layers underneath.

So you have language as one way of, you know, as one of the dogs in the pulling sled. And you have drama and you have character and you have form and you have structure. 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 character guy, you know. I just want to see if these people feel robust and vital and three-dimensional." You know, and the story, yeah, I'll read for plot, but it's basically, "Do I know this person? You know, can I recognize myself in this person?" And there were other people, and for a long time I was in this category,

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? And, you know, 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 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, 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 over all the others.

I think 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 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. Forrest Gump from a movie is a great example of just the way he speaks and the simplicity of his language is a place where voice really then leads to character. So if character drives drama,

And voice drives character. What drives voice? And the answer is you're starting to get down to the nuts and bolts of your tool chest, which is the words, the individual words, and the way they are aligned in a sentence. Huh. Right? So...

I'll do the first one first, although typically I would try, you know, with my students, I did it different ways in different years, but I would show the inseparability of these things. I'd show the questions of register and diction are also the questions of syntax and cadence and pacing. But the easy ones, the lowest level is text.

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 levels.

casual in the middle, formal above it, and down and dirty, slangy at the bottom. Sure, yeah. And sometimes you'll see different approaches to answering this question of how register works. But when you think of the various ways that you can say, hand me that,

Right. Give me that. Yeah. Hey, will you please pass that? Yeah. Completely different. Yeah. And 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 at it. That's great. And you are performing a submit. You're requesting something specific that can be identified, but you're also sending signals beyond signals. Right.

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 voice, again, is what words, how formal or informal are you going for in terms of your word choice? It would often be eye-opening 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 built-in bilingualism. And they'd say, what do you mean by that? I 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 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. Maison and, you know, our English house were the same things. But, you know, because the Normans came over to England and conquered the local English people and set themselves up in court...

the Latinate through French words got a higher socioeconomic register. Right. And so immediately the words you use talk about your class. Yep. And

And when my students would make this realization, it was like, wow, I've got some power that I didn't have before. Maybe I could hear it in my ear when somebody's being snooty 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 the difference between freedom and

and liberty becomes more audible. Right. Right? So that's the word level considerations for voice. The other consideration is the sentence level. So, and I would try to teach this. It's a very complicated question because English grammar is not trivial, but it's immensely flexible. And you can create all kinds of different palette effects and color effects with

by using the flexible syntax and grammar of English. But I would say, 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 I was thinking, can I do 80% of the work with 80% of the effect with 20% of the grammar? And so I boiled it down to saying,

Think about sentences as belonging basically to one of three classes. So the heart and soul of sentence, call it a predication, is 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 predication is you give me that. So the subject drops away and you just have the command. 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 the

prosodically, the mental state that the speaker is in or that the narrator wants you to be in, that the sentence starts to participate in the affect 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. Mm-hmm. He pointed the gun at his friend, right? Mm-hmm.

There's a kind of front-loaded shock to that, right? Or the gun exploded and a whiff of smoke exited the barrel. These are clauses that have the action up front. The main subject, the 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 clause.

after a lot of modifiers. So if you want to put the reader into an entirely opposite mental state, you could say way back across the yard, near the fence, where a tiny brook ran along an old hedgerow she hid, right? And of course,

By having these modifiers, first the reader is in this suspenseful state. Yeah, it's like, what are you going to say? What are you going to say? What are you going to say? And 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 hidden in the physical space. I did not catch that. You have to wait for it, wait for it. 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 you can do this for all kinds of reasons, too. You can create suspense with that. You can create comedy with it.

Right. It's probably the rarest form. If you count the sentences in an average novel, most of them are going to be in the first species, you know, where the subject and verb are pretty upfront.

a smaller number are going to be this delayed predication and maybe the smallest. I don't know. I'd like to do that experiment sometime and actually get the data. But my intuition is that splitting the predication is the rarest, but it has a very powerful... And, you know, not only the effect in itself can create these different forms of delay or suspense or intrigue, but using it inside a paragraph when you've just had three sentences written

of, you know, a trailing sentence in a row. Suddenly stopping and changing that, changing it up, it's like a key change in music or going to a different chord. 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 because I think it's a good 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 vase-like spread of elm, the ironwood's fluted muscle. And 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 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're after. So think about that first draft as a note to yourself about what

you know, about the psychic state that you want your sentence, your descriptions to participate in. Now, when you go back, you can hide your footwork and you can make it more elegant. You can take out the ones, the notes that are a bit too loud or 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 introducing, it's almost like going back to Patricia Westford and saying,

There's subtle little elements of anthropomorphism in that sentence or pantheism or animism in those descriptions. The ironwood's fluted muscle. Yeah. And now it's like that trunk that's so visually distinct in that tree now becomes like a weightlifter. You see it flexing and you can see the sinews. So 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 shy or that, you know, all these projected emotions. Majestic. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But read the first sentence again, because 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. No.

It's like a great song where you hear the phrase and you think you know the way the chords are going, and then all of a sudden, at the end of that phrase, you hear a sudden and interesting change of color or change of instrumentation or change of pitch. The last thing you would think to apply to a tree would be some degree of excellent. Now, I always think, you know,

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. Each child's tree has its own degree of excellence, right? And the reader's unconscious. They're just reading along for the music of it and the color of it and 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, as we read along, we're constantly saying what's coming next, what's coming next. We're, you know, 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.

Exactly. You got it. You can play off that expectation. You can, you can set it in motion and then say, nope, this way, that way. So how's it different say when you're describing a person? So that one was about trees, but then you write the farm was where Nick first started sketching the pencil dreams of boys, rockets, outlandish cars, masked 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 and the grain of floorboards. Yeah. And you know, it's interesting to read something that I wrote now seven or eight years ago. I'm in a different place. The world is in a different place. That book exists and, you know, its 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 reader is listening to them, because enough time has passed for me to forget how that passage worked. So I hear 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 all 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 do with airplanes, but something about the similarity put me back to being an eight-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 individual words in the syntax and say, what is he doing to put me in that mental state beyond the simple 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, 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 do you rewrite those sentences? Oh, gosh. Now, see, now 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 week and you've got a chapter and you read the chapter 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, might have been drafted a dozen times or more.

And then you send it off to your first readers and they say, eh, it got a little slow for me from 140 to 200. And now you say, well, how do I pick the pace up? And you go back and you redraft it again. But all I'm saying is,

Accept that as part of the glory of the process of writing. Don't fight it as something you wish you could finally make it right, because there's no final right. You know, 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 I don't know what this person's trying to say or how they should be trying to say it. It could be 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 disagreeing about this matter, but now that I see them both in context...

I'm not sure they would be. So you're constantly having to course correct. You're constantly having to discover the things that your unconscious knew. Sometimes you can't discover it. So the ways of going wrong are infinite.

And the ways of going right are not final. So ride it, you know. It's so definitely like surfing. For me, the craft tip here is relax. Forgive yourself. 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, stand in front of a tree, you know, breathe the air, you know, drink the drink. Relax the perfectionism that says, I need to get this in a perfect final state. Let it be process. I want to talk about introductions, just how you think about where these books begin.

For Overstore, 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 Taaroa. 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. But I also, you know, I'm imitating a certain kind of cinematography too. Like great films that start with a really distant, wide, establishing shot. Yep. Yeah.

and then, you know, go to a mid shot and then go to a close. That, in my ear, I want to say, here is 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 that opening can be kind of cosmic,

then you earn the right to tell a local story and let it germinate and grow into the larger frame that you've set for the story. But I'll tell you, I love opening lines.

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 see or anticipate. I mean, Romeo and Juliet, two houses, both alike in dignity, in Feverona, where we lay our scene. You get, I mean, just right at the beginning of that... Yeah.

Two people, they're very similar, but uh-oh, stuff's about to happen. Right? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. You know, 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 discovery. The overstory line, first there was nothing,

then there was everything. I mean, if you're not sympathetic, you could say...

That's kind of philosophical mumbo-jumbo. 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. And these sort of, you know, linguistic play with the metaphysics of what's being expressed. Well, that line actually comes from one of the last sentences of

that a dear friend of mine and a brilliant American poet said on her deathbed. And as she was drifting in and out of consciousness, and her loved ones were standing by, and she would talk, and they would lean in, and what is she saying? She said something, they couldn't hear her, and they leaned in. She said, first there was nothing, then there was everything.

And I thought, you know, what a better way to memorialize the life and work of this friend than to take that and promote it to the start of this book. If I remember correctly, you wanted to be a poet or you were very interested in poetry early on? I still want to 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 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 drama generates form and structure. But in poetry, you see, most of your job is to create visceral sensation through the musicality of your words.

I mean, there are a lot of other jobs that poets do. And of course, poetry itself is a moving target and historically has been interested in different things at different times. And, you know, what's considered the central preoccupation of poetry has changed so much even in the course of my lifetime. But how does drama create form? Yeah. So we've seen these three kinds of collisions. And in any collision, what you're talking about, the primary variable is tension.

Mm-hmm. In a collision, you go from a low tension state to a high tension state, right? And then you can relax that tension as the drama is resolved. And then it starts up again somewhere else and the tension goes. So you're dialing in and out

of something that most of us can read intuitively as the stakes, right? And 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 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 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...

What if this guy said this to this guy? Right? 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 a time, there was a prince, and the prince rode out on 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. It wouldn't make any sense. You know, and the finale being, and then he killed the easiest dragon in the country. It would never work like that. Makes no 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 physiological thing, as part of this, you know, adaptive power that we have to intrigue other people with story.

A simple rising action isn't really the most satisfying kind of story anyway, especially for long form, right? So, you know, 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 happy.

Because, you know, 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,

knowing that eventually you're going to get an explanation of something that right now is completely mysterious to you. So I would teach the tension graph as having four parts, a hook where at the beginning tension is just a little bit higher, artificially higher, right? In order to say,

"Here's what's-- This is gonna draw you into this world. There's some stakes early on that you're gonna immediately be viscerally interested in." And once you get the reader hooked with that higher level 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, 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. Mm-hmm. Once you,

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 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 first episode itself.

So you go up this ladder and 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 follow-on 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 inner value and seen the way that they have to now live with the consequences of their choices. You release that back into the world. We use a French word for this in narratology, the denouement.

which we think of as the revelation or 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? In 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 back of a bus here in the city 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. It would be chaotic and incoherent. And, you know, we depend on certain conventions, right?

And 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 conventional expectations that have been established for dialogue at this moment. And you don't have to go back very far to start leaving your comfort zone in dialogue. You know, if you're every day, if you're cutting your IT and you're just living on

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 like that. But all you're saying is, I've lost my context, my decoder ring for understanding how these dialogues were. 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 narrative. When we read, we sub-vocalize. You're hearing it sub-vocally. And that's why sometimes for authors, it's tough to listen to their own audiobooks

because they've just spent a couple of years sub-vocalizing all these characters, and now they have to hear 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? But 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, testing it 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 register, the tone, the color, the cadence, the realism, 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 practitioners that are amazingly varied. Like, you can get a writer like Ann Patchett, whose characters, you even forget that they're characters. You know, because she somehow can participate in the way that they speak

so vividly and so virtuosically that the performance disappears entirely. And you just say...

"Oh yeah, that's my neighbor. That's the woman that I lived with for 11 years." You're doing all those things just through her ability to let them speak themselves to each other. But then you can also get a writer who's aesthetically completely different, like Don DeLille. And you can look at a book like White Noise, and you could look at the dialogue in that book, which is crazy. 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 not realism. In some ways, it's kind of surreal what he does with dialogue. But it's so real in terms of recognizing 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 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? And we talked a great deal about those two different appeals, the appeal to logic and reason and rationality and the appeal to the guts. Yeah, 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 find this true to the present day. You know, I can give the manuscript to my brother and he can return it a couple of weeks later and say, interesting. 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 does that make? 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 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 overstory, 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 wrote Overstory...

I had 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 Overstory, that path started to look like this. Red oak, maple, hornbeam. And then as I got deeper into Overstory, 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 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 all-in-one. And I like 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 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 the elements in your repertoire chosen in such a way that they're supporting one another. 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 think I have to expand the formulation just a little bit.

moving in and out of solitude has been the strategy. 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 dictate or I'll use a pen, you know, I'll turn the light out and do it in the dark. 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 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, crises 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. Right.

So you start to make a character, you start to create a scene, and you need that sensory deprivation to get going and to get traction. But now 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've got to give up your solitude. You've got to go back down into the maelstrom. 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 and 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 because you were just talking about

the typewriter or the keyboard. There's handwriting. 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 what I go to at each moment. It's also dependent on my state of mind. But, I mean, think of it the way that a musician would...

use different instruments. 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 woods and sing a cappella for a new third kind of song. Or you might rotate. You know, you might try different combinations in sequence or in parallel.

I think the same 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 speed up, be more lively. And 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 you set deadlines for yourself? How does that work? It's changed enormously over my 40 years and 14 books.

I have always been a person who's most alert in the morning. And I always, for 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 desire to read yesterday's news or to check my feeds and simply get to work while my brain was freshest.

And 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. Something happened. I became a different kind of writer. I can point to the moment where it started. I can point to the moment where it started to accelerate. But basically, I now no longer see...

my day, my primary job is getting a 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 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, to see myself through the non-human 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 after a short time of being quickened and revived by 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 scenes will start to come. And a lot of times, you know, I'll be four miles down a trail and realize I've got to get home as quickly as I can because I can't hold it all in my memory anymore. So the writing now is a supporting process, right?

for trying to keep me growing as a person in a world that keeps growing. That was such a fun interview. Thank you so much for doing this. Oh, my pleasure. It was great to meet you. Thanks, David. Yeah. Yeah.