How to be the most interesting writer in Fiction | Amor Towles

32:03I could have told the exact same story under a dictatorship in South America, let's say. I could do it in China to set it today in China, where there are still artists under house arrest. But I wouldn't have done that because I don't have that decades of granular familiarity with those environments that I had with Russia. And so it was sort of a good place to draw from. Now, you know, my instincts are, as you're trying to find the right image or find the right reference to fit into a narrative like you're talking about, you know, like the scissors being similar to the dancing of the cassock or what have you.

32:45The Hopak dance. Yeah, thank you. If it doesn't come from a place of deeper knowledge or familiarity, it's not going to sound right. You know what I mean? If I Googled, you know, oh, what would be, you know, this, and then plop it in, it's going to feel that way to the reader. It's something about it that doesn't feel quite, you know, organic enough. And so I'm wary about, that's part of the reason I'm wary about research, is that it's hard once you're doing it to sense as the writer, where did I just put in something that's going to sound inorganic? Because it's right, but it may not sound organic to the reader in a way that the genuine expression would.

33:26And so I do try to draw on stuff I know. Now, I think writers are like this. We read a lot. We're observing the world. with intent, right? And so it doesn't mean that we're smarter than anybody, but we're taking in

33:48weird things. Different kinds of language are very interesting to writers. And so you read a legal brief and you're like, oh, that's interesting. That's how they construct sentences in the legal brief. And that's the tone of it. That's the pace of it. That's the way they make a point. This is what's missing. What are all these things? Where are all that stuff? And then you see a politician in the South, and you hear him talking, and you're like, oh, that's, wow, to hear that Southern oratory, that's its own thing. And then you hear a technical person, and you're like, oh, so that's what technical language sounds like.

34:30So every time you kind of hear that, you're kind of absorbing a little bit of it. And being, if I had to write a Southern political speech, those are the elements that would sort of be keynotes to help me start to craft something that made it seem authentic. But you can kind of, many Americans wouldn't necessarily remember it or think about it in those terms, but when you're a writer, that's what you are listening to and listening for. And that gives you a little bit more facility in using a different type of language that's not yours to bring to life a person who you are not. and i think there's i think there's two other things that are helping you with constructing the the language in this is that a you've spent all this time creating the story without thinking about language and you've created all this you've spent all this time thinking about the character so that when you're finally writing the book it's almost as if you've outsourced plot and character to your prior self from the pot you know the past two three years whatever it was and so you can focus on then layering in this language as opposed like and it's a legitimate thing like many writers write write their first draft from beginning to end and then start working it out but you can't you can't really have the depth of language if you write in that linear fashion it has to be a little maybe perhaps a little bit more cliffhanger focused like yeah okay i'm ending a chapter what's the cliffhanger and then i drive into the next chapter and there's nothing wrong with either approach but i just i really appreciated it in your novels because you could see that now that you explain how you layered it it makes sense like because i was was wondering like how is he just weaving these it's like each paragraph's like a poem the way you're writing these these characters it's really amazing james i really appreciate that question because you're absolutely right and it's one of the things uh i talk about planning and outlining and all these things.

36:29And it may sound very, uh, oh, he, you know, it's, it's scientific or whatever, but you're absolutely right. There's a counterintuitive aspect there, which is that I do all that just as you described so that when I get to the writing of a chapter, all the decisions are made and I can free up, uh, the most poetic part of myself to do the actual crafting of the sentences and the final imagining of imagery, et cetera. and I mean to put it in technical science you know modern science uh by planning I'm trying to diminish the influence of the left side of my brain which is the decision making logical portion and to free up the right side of the brain which is subconscious and poetic and dream you know where that originates and whereas as it just like you said if I did not do the planning when I got to the chapter and you're sitting there having to say okay well what happens and what does the room look like?

37:21And wait, who's this guy that comes through the door? What's his name? What did he do yesterday? What does he want? What are they saying to each other? That's suddenly this decision-making part of the mind, which takes over and it can overwhelm the other side, which is the one you want to rule the day in the crafting of sentences. You want the poetic side to sort of surprise you with the word choice, surprise you with the image, to come up with a parallel that you had never thought of before. And that can be, when the subconscious is really kicking it, you know, it can be very powerful. You know, a good example, I think, of the gentleman in Moscow is when the Count, there's a big turning point in the early part of the book.

38:07I needed something to happen which would make him really depressed or feel like, I feel like his time was over, basically. And after, during the design, after trying many different things, eventually, I'm like, oh, I know. He's going to go to dinner at the fancy restaurant, and he's going to ask for a fancy bottle of wine, and they're going to tell him that there's only red and white wine now. And he's going to be, what? And they're going to take him down, the maitre d' is going to take him down to the wine cellar, and they will have removed, the Bolsheviks will have removed all the wine labels from all the bottles, arguing that, you know, that this old sort of prestige type of wine drinking was really out of step with communism.

38:43And, of course, it's the straw that breaks the camel's back for him at that moment. And now I know this in the planning stage. I figured this out, this design. And I kind of even have this image of he's going to arrive into the cellar with Andre, the maitre d', and he's going to walk the aisles. And what he'll do is he'll go down into one of the rows of wine bottles and he'll take one of the wine bottles in his hand, like Hamlet holding the head of York, the skull of York, and he'll say, he'll reflect. And when I'm doing the design, I'm like, oh yeah, and he'll reflect. Like, I don't need to know at that point what he's going to say.

39:22I'm, you know, I'll figure that out later. So when I'm doing the actual writing and everything's planned and imagined in advance so that I'm now just doing the poetry of that scene, when I got to that moment where he took the bottle in hand, everything that yet follows that came really fast in the moment as I was, I am imagining myself as the person I am not, the count, in a situation I have never been. And the count suddenly takes over. And he's like, his observation in that moment is that the wine is the perfect distillation of individuality. And we know that this is the way that wine works, right?

40:02That wine, the flavor of a wine is totally determined by the 50 square feet in which it's grown. or a hundred square feet, you know, because of the minerality of that soul, the slope of it, the altitude of it, its exposure to sun on average, its exposure to wind and cold, all those things are what define the flavor. And that changes like every 10 yards, you know, to some degree. I was wondering, even when you wrote that, and I remember that scene perfectly well, and there's a couple interesting things about that scene. Yeah. but with what that line that you specifically were referring to, how did you know that?

40:44Like, I don't know anything about wine, for instance. So you must know about wine. Yeah. And again, in this sort of catalog of writerly stuff. So like, you know, someone at some point, you go to a vineyard in Napa Valley for the first time in your life. And the guy says that, you're like, oh, that's interesting. That gets stowed away deeply because it's sort of like, oh, that's an intricate way in which nature works. Wow. I didn't know that. But you don't know. I didn't you know when I learned that I didn't think how am I going to use that you know what I mean it just gets logged away and then so as you say in the subconscious it suddenly presents itself and you're like oh yeah this is perfect it's a perfect sort of beautiful speech that the count is going to give to himself about the tragedy of this is that that wine is this unique thing and when you remove all the labels it's it's as if it is as if it's just drops in the ocean but you know but the added thing was that as I was finishing the count's speech and I hit the final period, I was suddenly like, you know, I was like, well done, Count.

41:38That was a beautiful little observation. And when I hit, then all of a sudden I'm like, wait a second, the Count's description of the wine and what's happened to it, you know, this unique individuality of the wine and then the removal of the labels, which treats it as if it's a drop in the ocean, it's exactly what was happening in the Soviet experience to people, right? That is what happened in the Soviet experiment is that the individuality of humans was diminished in favor of some sort of universal ideal. And they had, and so then you're like at some deep subconscious level, not only did my brain pull out this wine metaphor, as you say, because it's a nice poetic moment for the count, but it did it in a way that actually it resonates with the overall theme of the whole frigging book.

42:25Right. And I could never plan that. Could never plan that. Right. And that, That was what was so beautiful, comparing that to the decline in individuality.

42:49I don't want to give away any spoilers for the book and also for the series coming up, so let me try to do this in a way that doesn't give away any spoilers. it's not really a big spoiler anyway but the the person who first confronts him with the question of red or white and in such a way that it becomes confusing to the count because it doesn't have all this you know uh subtlety anymore that that's like the one character the count sees in almost a two-dimensional way you refer to this as omniscient i'm third person um not third person omniscient but third person from the count's point of view this is the one character we don't really get a sense maybe of who his parents were yeah that's right did you do that on purpose because that's also how the count is seeing him whereas with everybody else the count tries to bring out the best in people yeah he's kind of a nemesis and and actually one of my favorite moments in the book a favorite moment is and again no we won't give anything away but late in the very late in the book, like in the final 50 pages, the count and that figure have a confrontation.

43:56And for the first time, that figure describes in some detail how he sees the count and, you know, and sort of the root of his animosity towards the count. And the count is taken aback. And he's sort of like, oh my God, you know, listen to that, you know, because I think, you know, I think you're right. I didn't think of it consciously, but self-consciously, unconsciously, I think you're right, that the limited description of that antagonistic figure was really an extension of the Count being somewhat dismissive of him. And so what I like about this moment is that it's sort of like the Count realizing, oh, yeah, right.

44:37This guy's got this whole, he's got his own viewpoint, his own background, and his own thing, which has informed why he's been doing what he's doing. is not just a jerk, you know, that there's this other thing behind it, you know. And I would say that, so I think in the case of, and it's the bishop, it's the character, I think that, you know, that's what happened there. But this kind of brings up an interesting bigger point, which is that I'll write a first draft, and then the revision process is quite active for me. So the second draft, I will change, you know, I don't know. There's not a page in the second draft that has not been changed.

45:16But there may be as much as a quarter of the book that I remove and an additional 25 % that I'm putting back in that's brand new, right? And the removal is, it's about economy. I'm taking the first draft and I'm saying, okay, this chapter goes on too long. This paragraph is redundant. This character, this scene is, is, is happens, is a replay of the other scene. It should be one scene and we'll combine the two concepts. Well, you know, you're constantly sort of looking for better economy and shrinking the text to make it you know the same amount of you know of energy and and thematic power in it but with fewer and fewer words in essence and and sometimes that means their whole removal of a chapter the removal of an entire character you know the remover of the first 40 pages you know it must be challenging for you because you probably have to kill as they say many darlings because the i love that prose is beautiful i i don't yes right you know and so like i i i that phrase kind of drives me crazy so i'm not trying to say it about you but you know like i said writers you got to be willing to kill your darlings well that's kind of true but but like a gentleman moscow would not succeed if it didn't have my darlings on every page you know so you know it's you're killing a few you know but yes you have to get used to as an editor being objective and cold-hearted and being try it you know kill it and see now take a step back start read it fresh and be like oh yeah you know what it works better if I just throw all that out.

46:40And it's a better experience for the reader. I was explaining too much to the reader. I was giving them too much information. The reader, which diminishes, that's a paradox of writing, the more I describe the character or the situation, the less alive it's becoming, right? So you've got to pare that down to its bare bones where the electricity is. And then for the reader, it's got to, you know, it feels alive, right? So that's the first part of the editing of the first draft. Take it down. Then you start to say, wouldn't it be interesting actually if this element was added, if this was added? Now, one of the big things that gets added in draft two is that in draft one, I have over-described the three or four principal characters.

47:24There's too much about them, about what they think, what they feel, what they've done, what's happened to them, what's going to happen to them, you know. And the secondary characters are not as fully realized as they should be. So through the economy thing, I'm shrinking the amount of material dedicated to those four leading characters, but they're actually becoming more brightly and sharply drawn. That frees up space, and I can use that to start doing justice to these secondary characters. And it's almost a nagging thing. Like, you know, they'll say, oh, I'll say, you know, like Marina. In the first draft, Marina, the seamstress, plays a smaller role, much smaller role than the second draft.

48:04And I love her and I love her personality. And she, as you said, she's the one who's blunt to the count. And so that's a very powerful thing to bring into the story. And so like in, from draft one to draft two, probably the word count for Marina doubled or something like that, you know? So, so that you have this kind of thing where on the one hand you're going in the draft, you're diminishing the amount of language to these characters to make them better rendered. And you're adding, you know, words to these other characters to bring them into better life. And so, uh, and you know, and you're right, the Bishop is kind of a funny case because of, of the Count's prejudices towards him that I never really give him what he's due until that sort of that final confrontation.

48:46And even then he sort of gets shortchanged. Well, well, but it's interesting. And, and I know we're spending a lot of time on Gentleman in Moscow. I want to talk about the rules of civility and of course, table for two which is which is being released but look gentleman in moscow again is going to be a netflix series in a few days so not netflix not netflix oh not paramount paramount plus all right sorry about that i've seen the trailer on youtube but i didn't know what network it was on um uh you know one one thing i was curious about was uh the character of mishka you know you mentioned this is again third person uh in the point of view of you know the count but there is one point when i was just curious about this there is one point where it seems like it's actually mishka's point of view for the only time in the novel and i wondered if you did that intentionally yes so um and it was only one page yeah like 90 of the book as i say is is from this Count's perspective.

49:49But what you, there's a secondary narrator who plays a major role in the overall experience of the book. And that narrator appears initially in footnotes, sort of stepping in and making observations. Then that narrator often opens major chapters to orient you. What's happened during the Second World War? What's happened during the purges? There are addendums at the end of chapters where you leave the hotel and you follow Nina into the countryside or Andre home to where his son has died during the Second World War. And it's sort of those are being given by this other narrator. And as you say, one of them is Mishka walking on the way to the hotel after doing time and sort of beginning to see Russia from his new sort of jaded, hard-hearted point of view, you know?

50:43And, and so, yeah, so there's these sort of, so it's not, it's, it's that other 10%. And this is, again, it's one of those things like without that 10%, it would be a vastly weaker book. You know, the 10 % punches way over its weight because it gives you this counterbalance to the Count's optimism, to the limitations of what he sees, to his natural good nature towards others, to the centric quality of the story from his point of view, these sort of are beginning to show you what's going on outside the hotel. What are people, what are the challenges people are facing? What is the other kind of version of witnessing those events in, you know, either darkly or sarcastically or cynically through, you know, an experience of disappointment?

51:30And so you get this kind of thing. And with Mishka, We see it when he goes and fights with his editor over the Chekhov story. We kind of follow him into this meeting where he has a confrontation. And so I don't, there's no, you know, like I feel like part of the pleasures of reading over time is you realize that it would be very easy for an instructor to say, oh, well, when you've chosen the narrator, that should be the narrator. And if it's from the count, the count wasn't there, then we shouldn't see that. How can we suddenly shift and hear it from somebody else's point of view for one page?

52:09But when we read books where that happens, you're like, oh, you can do that. If you do it well, you can do it. Right. Like every rule, I guess, is made to be broken. You just have to be careful because it's a risk. Yeah. You have to be judicious about when and how you do it. And again, I've kind of said it, it has to be the kind of thing where the break allows this one page to have big emotional or intellectual impact for the reader, you know, where it's not just, you know, random. It really is something that it deserves to be told in that different way at that moment. it's so interesting because now that you describe it this way again like you mentioned the footnotes the footnotes were a great way to to make it almost um a third person omniscient because the footnotes are very passive it's like the footnotes of any book it's just like oh by the way we have a little more explanation here here it is don't worry about it you just you know here's some facts that fill in the context so it's almost a little more passive than the the passionate point of view of the Count.

53:18And then that's why it struck me that it was outside of the footnotes, the Mishka aspect. But at the same time, Mishka is almost this weird counterpoint to the Count. Like they're almost intertwined as two sides of one character in a weird way. Although Mishka plays a much smaller role, but that's why maybe you felt, okay, I could take the risk with this compact with the reader because Mishka is the Count in some way. Yeah, and we deserve, because you're right, And you think about it thematically or historically, actually. The revolution was there were many intellectuals and sort of members of the aristocracy or related to the aristocracy who were in favor of the revolution.

54:04Because like many revolutions, it starts with the intelligentsia. It doesn't start with the peasants. right it's a group of people who have been schooled who have had access to things who have become morally outraged and who are writing the manifestos and and begin printing out the leaflets right and uh so it wasn't uncommon for uh at that early stage to have you know two people who were basically had a very similar upbringing and may even been friends and quite close who were suddenly on opposite sides of history. And so Mishka is, you're absolutely right, he's sort of a personification of that branch.

54:44Now, that branch in Russian history, as in many revolutionary histories, walked in full of optimism, full of vision, full of confidence, and ended up very dispirited, disappointed, disillusioned, right? Because the revolution did not fulfill its promise in the way that they imagined it at the beginning. And so I wanted to have someone who was like that part of the Russian experience, that part of the experience in a moment of historical transition. And so you do get, it does become important to leave the count for a minute, to sort of taste in a way the bitterness, you know, that sense of deep disappointment from the person who's like, we're going to change the world and feeling like it's going to happen in the first part of the book.

55:38In the second part of the book, it begins to get this illusion and finally is just completely broken by the disappointment that Russia did not become what it could have become. And so it's important to have that as a separate thread. And like Nina, who's a young girl when the Count meets her, is again, it's like a different personification of an aspect of Russian history or of revolutionary history anywhere, which is that she was born at the time of the revolution or basically shortly before. She's like today's Gen Zs. Yeah. She grew up with the internet. Yes, right. So everything's second nature to her.

56:19Of course, communism's great. Of course it's great. And of course it's the only way to be. And because that's what she's been schooled in. And so she has a different kind of optimism from them, the Mishka, who's the intelligentsia from the 19th century, looking, you know, looking to the future. She's the one who's bought it hook, line, and sinker because she's a communist youth, you know, and, and, but she's going to have a different, you know, they get disappointed in a different way, right, you know, and, and may never completely, and even though they may be disappointed with the outcome, they may never turn their back on the party, you know, that kind of person, right, who says, my husband's doing time, but it's important for the revolution to make certain sacrifices towards this mission we're on.

57:05And that happened, right? These young people who adopted the mission so deeply. There were the kids who turned in their parents in Russia when things got hot and did it proudly. It's crazy stuff. So you're kind of, and so again, it becomes important to not only meet Nina, see her evolution, but then get a glimpse of her as she leaves the hotel and goes into adulthood and has to face, kind of confront the realities of the Russia that she has admired since childhood. And what's great is she and many other characters exemplify this aspect of the story takes place in the hotel. It's like a painting of the hotel, but you get this sense the painting goes off.

57:52like you know some paintings are just a portrait you know you think that's the entire universe is just the portrait inside the painting but some paintings you know sunday in the park with george there's things happening outside of the scene we're seeing you just don't see them the painting focused on this part and so this is a painting in the metropole but but nina and other characters exemplify that there are things going on outside the metropole sometimes we might find out what they are sometimes we'll never find out what they are and that's part of the beauty of the the book as well. And sometimes it's foreshadowed and sometimes it isn't.

58:38this bridges me to the rules of civility which is your you know another you know that was your first published novel. And it's like a mirror image of A Gentleman in Moscow. It's about... By the way, I went into it thinking it was going to be about Eve, like all about Eve, because I had read Eve in Hollywood first. And I was like, oh my gosh, I'm going to read about where Eve came from. But it's this young lady who's rising up and kind of wants to fit in in, let's say, upper class Manhattan, wants to meet you know the love of her life in that in that class and and have a dream life and but but you get this sense in both books that what one of the things you're really talking about is not only these kind of transitions and and different stratus of society but also the the kind of roles we have to play in and and this is very clear in both books like in in moscow you have to kind of pretend are you going to be the the proletariat worker bolshevik administrator or are you going to pretend to be someone who could fit into this class of society or are you going to be the actress who has to wine and dine and pretend to be this in order to move from silent to talky and there's all these everybody's playing like a role and in rules of civility too very clearly everyone is kind of not themselves they're all playing roles and and and it's this is what's true in real life too we're all just playing roles most of the time it's hard to really even know who you are let alone be who you are and i just wonder how conscious you were during writing the rules of civility of this aspect uh i think generally you're right that that appears often in my work because i find it very interesting just in the way you describe it you know i find very interesting.

1:00:38In the United States, there isn't like an upper class, a middle class, a lower class, or a working class, or whatever you want to say. There's like 70 classes, right? And that's true everywhere you go, right? There's incredible gradations in the experience of life in this complicated society of America. And some of that is influenced by wealth, and some of it by upbringing and some of it by race and some of it by gender and by job. All these things are affecting how we're seen by others, how we present ourselves. And there's aspects of integrity and self-deceit which are bound in that and that our choices are either made actively or passively.

1:01:22And so I find that that's an infinitely interesting set of circumstances for me. And so the Rules of Civility, which is only this year in the life of Katie in 1938, and as you say, it's the year she's 25, she's beginning to understand or see how she might advance both socially and professionally in Manhattan. And you don't get to see the completion of it. You just begin to see how, okay, this is how this town works. And this is my opportunities for presenting themselves. and uh but as she's navigating that yeah she you're she is we're getting to sort of see she's bumping into different of these tiers and and beginning to understand the nuances between them and uh and the pluses and minuses around the choices that are made in order to participate or in order to you know uh to win you know win in that particular corner of new york life and um So I do find that, you know, fun and interesting and timeless too.

1:02:23And then, but then you see what the other characters like, okay, Tinker, who I can't say, sometimes it's hard to talk about novels on a podcast because you really don't want, like a nonfiction book, we could talk about everything. Fiction, obviously you can't. But, you know, this aspect of really how hard different people try to fit into different roles, you know, and I can't give even away the secret of the title. But then there's even the more conventional people in there. I'm forgetting the name of the guy. She dated for a short time who was younger. Dickie Van Der Waal. Yeah, yeah. Where you could clearly see he's playing his role, even though it fits more naturally to him.

1:03:04He was born and grew up that way. but it's still a role for him and he has to live up to it and whether he's good or not depends on his success at fitting into that role yeah and it was you know rules of civility i don't know if you made this comparison at all and and for me this is a compliment but it reminds me of valley of the dolls a little bit did you ever read valley of the dolls i haven't no it's a 1960s novel of course was tens of millions of copies yeah um and it reminded me of that too just kind of this array of young for first starting with young women but then array of the people they meet in new york as they're climbing in their 20s and what happens to them and uh it's again beautiful in the same way that gentleman in moscow is just really going in depth and you learn nobody's a cartoon even dickie you know at first i thought is this going to be a cartoon and we're never going to see this guy again but then you realize okay it goes more and more and i'm avoiding talking about tinker to talk about him but um it's the same thing yeah and i love you know one of my favorite i'll tell you two things about dickie van der Waal you know which i think you'll enjoy if you if you're not aware of it but the first there is a scene there where uh dickie is romantically he's very interested in the narrator katie you know he's in love with her and there's this other relationship that she's been interested in or whatever and and they they end up having a moment where he kind of she's been avoiding him and Dickie goes and finds her and they're sitting on the steps of St.

1:04:37Patrick's Cathedral in New York City and he says, you know, hey, what's going on? Like, you know, you haven't been, you know, in essence, haven't been answering my calls and so she sort of confesses, well, this is what's happened between me and this other man and, you know, where I was disappointed in his behavior and Dickie, what he should do at that moment is say, oh, what a cad that man you know what a terrible behavior of that you know him come back to my place you know we'll have a glass of whiskey and we'll let's put it behind us we'll have a good time you know like that's what he should do but what he and i remember writing this and think you know i i wasn't as i was writing it i he was changing the course of what he was going to say because suddenly you're like you know what that's not he would never do that and so instead what he says is ooh you know that's a tough one because that thing that you said about him i actually kind of impressed that by that and the other thing you say well aren't we all kind of like that you know and so he kind of totally against his own interests kind of takes the side of the other guy and and and it's a moment where and i like it in the book because of what you're describing which is that as you meet him he's very carefree and devil may care he doesn't seem to take anything seriously and and she even kind of likes that about him you know and and he seems like a lightweight a little you know to some degree and and this is a moment where he kind of turns the tables on her and you realize no, he's just like everybody else.

1:06:01He's more sophisticated than she's giving him credit for. And he's hit a, made an observation, which really she has, has been, has not made, been, been willing to accept. And it completely changes the way she sees the situation. And, you know, and, and I love that sort of this tenderhearted, but revealing moment of Dickie. Well, so here's the other thing I want to tell you. So then she says, you know, that at some point we learned that that dickie end up all right he kind of grows you know he later on he's going to he grows up and all right well do you know he's he appears in a gentleman in moscow right do you know that oh my god is he the he's richard vander he's richard vanderwild right because he's my mind he's dickie in his 20s but by then it's after the second world war because that's almost like the american version of it you know he's he's he's counterpoint to the count almost yes from and he has all the old personality traits he's sitting in the bar he's taking on talking to the bartender he's having a good time but again he in that book he does the same thing there's a moment in which the count is very low and and dickie weighs in in this really interesting and thoughtful way in a way that the count might do yeah yeah exactly so anyway so that's the same character yeah that's the same character that is fascinating i want to say one other thing about this sort of topic, which is that I was just with friends with Michael Lewis.

1:07:21He was just interviewing me at the New Orleans Book Festival last weekend. And well, you know, he spent a year following around Sam Bankman-Fried with the intention of writing a book. And then just as he was about to begin writing, you know, SBF's entire thing world blows up, right? You know, crypto collapse, uh accusations of fraud well the thing i was going to point out is that what's interesting about it is that like seeing for those of you your listeners who know sbf i'm sure you do just from the press you know his whole thing of i don't comb my hair or get a cut i wear sweatpants you know that's just as sort of targeted a costume as you know dickie vanderwell in a tuxedo right It's the same thing, right?

1:08:12He had his own version of it. And in Michael's book, and if you hear Michael speak about SBF or if you read his terrific profile in the Infinity book, his last work of nonfiction, Sam, I don't know him, but SBF is kind of somewhere on the spectrum. And he is not very good at reading emotional cues or giving emotional cues. And so as he's kind of rising, he's getting more and more success. He sort of thought, you know, I'm going to trade stuff in a dark room by myself and maybe I'll get rich, but, you know, I don't have to deal with people. But suddenly he becomes this public figure for cryptocurrency.

1:08:55He's worth, you know, more than, you know,$10 billion. People are seeking him out, investors, sovereigns, politicians. He starts donating money. So there's suddenly a public life is required of him that he has no training in, and that he actually has avoided his entire life. And so what Michael talks about is that he starts to teach himself how to act in public. So he doesn't understand jokes, and he doesn't find them funny, but he starts teaching himself to smile when someone tells a joke, or to pretend to laugh. And he develops all these techniques, you know, to sort of nod an interest or to, you know, be worried about the young woman who's working for him where he doesn't care at all, you know.

1:09:37But because it's not in his nature to emote in that way, but it became essential to his behavior. So you have that. And then, you know, then suddenly the guy gets arrested, loses all the money, gets arrested, and now he's in a suit with his haircut, right? Right? So we've gone into a new costume, right? Because if he wore the sweats with the crazy hair, you know, to court, you know, then he might be judged badly. So now he's got a whole nother, you know, anyway, so like I say, this is, this is eternal stuff, you know, these, these ways in which we present ourselves and both in clothes, in behavior and in facial expressions, though the language we use, and it is, you know, it's loaded, it's, it's targeted, it's both conscious and subconscious, and it shifts.

1:10:21But I, I, what's interesting though, is I'm really aware of it in your books. I'm not necessarily aware of it in every novel I read, but perhaps because maybe in part your books are about this and the changing shifts of the roles, you know, the changing roles we play and how they shift and so on. Because that's part of what your books are about. I feel very aware of it. Like, you know, you ever watch like a James Bond movie and you get out of the theater and you feel like you're James Bond? Yeah. Okay. Yes, I do. Absolutely. Like literally I would read A Gentleman in Moscow and I swear to God, people would comment on my posture as I'm going into the next room.

1:11:04Like, oh, you're standing up much straighter. And I felt like I had a better vocabulary. I felt much more at ease with the world. Like so your books like, you know, put the reader into these roles very, very well. And that's part of what I enjoyed about them. And even, look, this is a good segue into Eve in Hollywood, which is kind of this spinoff novella. You know, so your book Table for Two is coming out. It's a bunch of short stories and a novella. The novella is almost a sequel to Rules of Civility. Not quite a sequel. I don't want to say that. Because, again, for me, Rules of Civility was like the prequel to Eve in Hollywood.

1:11:43But Eve in Hollywood is Eve herself. and now I see it having read afterwards where she comes from. It's almost like she gets into Hollywood and everybody else is playing a role, but she's not really. She's really feels, I feel like she's herself. She's got this integrity that's beyond the role. I don't know, people can't even understand her because she's beyond the roles of what happens in Hollywood. And I loved that about her character and following her. like she makes decisions that the average person would not make throughout the novella and that's right and it's an interesting way to see then hollywood through her perspective and your own perspective like oh my gosh maybe i would have taken the money there i would have taken this opportunity there and she doesn't because she's playing this this higher role which i guess she learns in the hidden pages of rules of civility yeah i you know uh this isn't early in rules of civility eve is in a car accident and so that's not it's not a big spoiler but you know it's it's it's early in the book and she's always very smart she's always sparkling among everybody and she's always kind of you know willful and and independent and and spunky and attractive but what happens is and then i kind of remember you know going back to this sort of imaginative cycles.

1:13:06I remember in imagining rules of civility, I knew her as this sort of great Midwestern spunky beauty who was independent and, you know, won't be ruled by her parents or by anybody else. And then I actually sort of imagined, well, what if you take that person and you throw them through a windshield, you know, which is kind of what happens to her. And, and her beauty is damaged. You know, she loses some use of her leg, whatever. What I was suddenly sort of asking myself, what is, what's a steely version, you know, a hardened version of that person that we've come to know? Like as if, you know, the glass of the windshield is a wall and she, like, it's like the looking glass for Alice.

1:13:50You go through it and you carry with it all these personality traits, but it's suddenly a hardened version of it, you know, because in a way the accident was life cheating her, you know, in some weird way and, and, and her, you know, resenting it. Um, and, but also having to toughen herself up to now go on. And, and so what comes out is this sort of, as you're, as you're right, you know, she's, she's becomes a person who survived that kind of thing is, is no longer gives a shit about the little stuff. You know what I mean? Like, like it is, you know, she's moving forward at her own pace with her own mind and does not care about, you know, the expectations of others, about the polite thing to do, about, you know, she's not crass.

1:14:36But it's a freeing thing for her. You know, she becomes a more independent person by virtue of having survived this accident, you know. And so then I get to ask - But she could have also become, and perhaps in the rules of civility, a little of this happened, she could also have become bitter and grasping because if she doesn't grasp for it now, she'll always lose it. yeah that's right because of what's happened to her yeah so she has a choice in that sense you know and the and part of rules of civility is her grappling with who is she going to be in the aftermath of this accident and she kind of goes through some transitions um but but then you know part of the fun of writing eve in hollywood is is is uh is because even even hollywood you're right it's not a sequel but it does kind of in essence begin the day after rules of civility after eve or Eve.

1:15:26And, and it was sort of, you get to take this personality you've imagined and this sort of unique sort of combination of traits, which makes her both independent and willful and, and, and, and charismatic too, and drop her into Hollywood. Like what would happen? You know, and that's kind of what, that's why I wrote it, right? It's because that's, it was kind of bugging me. Like, you know, we know she goes to California, but like, I was like, what, what happens when you take her personality and drop it in late thirties Hollywood. And, and then you get to kind of, you know, that, that I spent, you know, years imagining all the things that would happen to her and then eventually, you know, got around to writing it.

1:16:03And, and why did you make that a novella? I mean, instead of a full novel, and that's sort of a naive question because you could do whatever you want with it. There's no expectation. It could be a novel, but you could have maybe turned that into a full novel. I, you know, it's a good question. It's great as it is. I'm not saying you should have. Thank you. And I think the answer is that it's clearly, it's written to some degree in the noir tradition. It's overlapping with the noir genre and in a variety of ways. And something about it, I love it, I love it. But it felt, in writing it, the ambition of it to tell that story, the story that it should be, was not going to be quite as intricate and layered and nuanced as a general in Moscow or Lincoln Highway or even Rules of Civility.

1:17:03I knew that. I knew it was going to be, you know, a little faster moving and a little more interested in, a little bit more impressionistic. We meet these people. We meet Prentice. We meet, you know, Litsky, the photographer. We meet, you know, Wendell, the weasel, you know, and you're going to kind of see them in this as sort of, in essence, criminal events unfold and at a rapid pace are resolved. And so all that made me feel like I didn't want to take that and say, well, let's add 200 pages of other stuff, you know, which felt like it would be, would maybe push it towards the complexity of a novel that I aim for.

1:17:45But on the other hand, would kind of undo a lot of what was there and the elegance of what's there and the sort of the freshness of what's there. So, yeah, so I ended up, you know, saying, you know what? It's going to be 200 pages. It's going to go through to its end. Which, by the way, is a full novel length anyway. I don't even know why I'm calling it a novella. No, no, no, you're right. I call it that. I mean, because you're right. My books tend to be 400, 500 pages, you know. So my novels are, you know, something like that. So it is shorter for me, you know. But here's what's interesting then.

1:18:18In the shorter fictions, again, I read those first and then I read the larger ones. But now looking back, did you feel constrained by the short story format? Like maybe you wouldn't be able to get as much characterization out of some of these characters? Or were you, you know, I don't know what you wrote first, honestly, the short stories or the... Those short stories were all written in the last 10 years. But I've been writing short stories, as I say, for, you know, 40 years or whatever. And a little bit more than that. And I think you've got a sense of this in reading. First of all, my short stories are a little longer than the average published short stories.

1:18:59Because the shorter length that you would find in The New Yorker or Parish Review or whatever is not long enough for me to do what I like to do. And so they might run along a little bit longer. But I think what they represent for the reader or for if someone's a fan of my work, you'll enjoy them even if you don't know my work. But if you're a fan of my work, what they do is they provide you a glimpse of, in essence, how I start things, right? which is that, because the nature of the short story is it is a glimpse. It might have a small narrative compared to a novel, but it's a glimpse of something, a glimpse of a person, a glimpse of a series of events, rather than this full drawn-out picture.

1:19:36But that's a perfect place for me to experiment with some of these things we've talked about. What's the setting? What's the tone? What's the tone of voice? What's the psychology of the narrator? What's the perspective in this story? and how do we bring to life the people that the narrator bumps into and how do we do it with efficiency and economy. And so the short story is a great place to experiment with those things. And so, you know, those six stories that are set in New York, the tone is shifting. The narrator, this type of narrator is shifting. It starts with omniscient, you know. And then it's kind of a series of stories where someone's observing somebody else.

1:20:13And then finally it's a story about something that's happening to the narrator. And so you have to make your choices about, I have an idea for a story. What is the best perspective from which to tell it? You know, which is, you know, in other words, am I in it? Am I watching it? Do I know everything about it? And what's the tone, which is different, right? The perspective or point of view is kind of how I'm situated at the events. What do I know about them? How close do I am to them? Whereas the tone might be, am I a sarcastic person or omniscient narrator with sarcasm? am I a generous one? Am I an impatient narrator?

1:20:50You know, what, you know, am I whatever? Because am I someone who, you know, narrator who never finishes what he's trying to say? You know, so those are choices that you're making in advance. And you're trying to feel out, I know what the story's about. I'm beginning to understand the characters and the events. But now the big question is, how am I going to tell this? From what angle? With what tone? And you start to experiment with different things. And you may rewrite the first couple of pages a number of times until you can kind of hear that voice. So as I say, these stories really provide, I think, the reader a sort of a window on the bigger process that's at play in the novel.

1:21:30And I'll say one other thing about it. I've been thinking a lot about this. I didn't used to think about it, but I've been thinking about it since I finished it. It's if you think about the novel as an art form, for the reader or for the writer, orientation is a very big component of it so that when you take any novel you know you love and go back and read the first 10 pages and i guarantee you there's enormous amounts of information in those 10 pages that you may not even be conscious of but that tell you no the where of it you know okay okay okay so this is you know michigan in the 50s or whatever it is you know okay it's paris in the 20s it tells you some of the main characters it gives you a glimpse of their backgrounds of their personalities.

1:22:12It might give you a sense of the stakes that are about to follow. Dad is sick, you know, or whatever the thing is. And are they on their way to the funeral? You know, I don't know. But the point being that there's a lot of that is going on very early in a novel, and that's basically about orientation. It's so that the reader who's about to go into this extended journey knows where they're starting, right? And so because if you go into it, if a reader goes into a book where it seems uncertain of where it is or who they are or where we're going, you'll only go on for so long before that becomes frustrating, right?

1:22:45And so you want to lay some of that down so the reader feels confident that they know where they are, and then they can start to see how things unfold. And the way that novels build meaning is very much in relationship to setting the reader comfortable in a situation and then shifting and providing more insight and deeper knowledge and, you know. So, but again, orientation is necessary to experience that unfolding that becomes the accumulation of meaning for the reader when taking in a novel, the emotional outcome, let's say, or whatever it is. Well, short stories, it's not that, right? You do not have the time to provide that orientation or to do this, to stretch out the culmination of events or the shifting emotions or the shifting whatever.

1:23:33It has to all come very fast. And so what happens as a result, I think, is that short story is very much one of the pleasures of the short story is that it's very much more, it's the opposite of orientation. It's about surprise. It's not about sort of having groundwork laid for me so I know where I am and now I can go on the journey. It's like, oh my God, wait, where are we? Wait, what did he say? Who is that? Who just said that? Where are they going? It starts kind of in the middle of things in a very strong way, you know, and you have to kind of catch up. And then you're only going to get the glimpse, right?

1:24:08You know, you're not going to see it all unfold. You're going to see everything, you know, in this half an hour of this person's life or in this three-day period. And you're going to try to have to kind of get a feel for where is this all headed in the long run, where I only have this little bit of information at my fingertips to gain a sense of that insight. and so but i think that's something you know it's a different type of reading experience but it's one that i think can be very enjoyable yeah and it's interesting seeing how you describe your process with the novels and then seeing how you do it in the short stories it's almost like you have to pick and choose in the short stories okay am i going to go deep into the ideas am i going to go deep into the character like you're not given the full rainbow so you're kind of trying to pick what colors you're going to use for each story.

1:24:58Whereas Gentleman in Moscow, I take that as the classic example. You've got this full Russian novel here from beginning to end. And yes, let's say the way it, like with a short story, the way it ends might be a surprise, but the surprise doesn't have to be as sharp. It doesn't have to be as harsh. Like a short story is going to most likely end in a harsh way because it's like a magic trick like you built up the short story and then you the rabbit's no longer in the hat where is it and you don't know the short story's over and yeah right like you know like i'm thinking i mean by the way i never would bookmark fiction i have your bookmarks all over your your your novels and and short stories but like I love the ballad of Timothy Touche or Touche.

1:25:53Touch it. Yeah. For one thing, I like how you are confronting issues in your own life in this short story. So like, for instance, we talked at the very beginning how, you know, you came from a, you know, let's say upper middle class to upper class family. You went to the great schools. You spent 20 years working in the finance business. and you see this character, Timothy, who wants to be a novelist from a very early age, he's asking himself, oh, he wishes his parents were alcoholics or got divorced at least or something so he can have something to write about. Instead, everything's kind of gone well for him.

1:26:34But then this is the only time I've seen you refer to yourself. You know, you say, you take, you know, you take about three or 400 words here to say, perhaps this assessment is too cynical in all likelihood is influenced by the author's own experiences with compromise and his unselfconscious desire to make his choices seem inevitable and so on you really go into yourself a little bit for a few paragraphs which you can argue for the sake of this story wasn't necessary but you decided to include it anyway like like you say short stories about being a little bit more uh i don't know how to say the word so i'll say a different word a little more minimal, like, so it could fit in the pages of a journal or whatever.

1:27:18But you allowed yourself to spend some words here on your own kind of dealing with this issue of not having, you know, maybe the conflicting background. Yeah. And, you know, and I, because I find that, I find that fun, you know. I mean, of course, in technical terms, it's whatever, you know, It's the fourth wall kind of thing, right? Where suddenly as a writer, you're addressing the audience as, you know, I'm the guy writing this, by the way. And, you know, I believed him when he said it too, you know, whatever the version is. And I've always enjoyed that when I encounter it in drama or we see it in television or what have you.

1:28:04But that disorienting shift when we think, okay, we know the rules of the story. We're going to hear from the narrator and this is going to happen. And then suddenly an area's like, no, no, I want to talk about myself for a second, you know. And, you know, I think it adds a little sort of strange energy to it. Now, my English editor, my primary editor is, of course, in America where I'm primarily published. But I will, my English editor may weigh in and say, oh, you know, about the mainstream. And she wanted to remove that. And I was like, what? Remove it? Are you kidding? That's my favorite part.

1:28:37the only reason I could see why she wanted to remove it is because I wondered out loud I had to take a step back and ask was this good or bad not in a critical way but because you have to ask with a short story it needs to have like if I'm editing it I'm thinking of what to cut and this clearly was extra so if I were your editor I would have to give you permission to have extra in it yeah yeah and yeah that's right but okay i didn't really just decide if this is your choice but i thought it was a good thing because finally i get to see as the reader and you've written a lot of words this is this is an issue you're dealing with the issue that timothy's did and the issue that all writers deal with is am i interesting enough look jack kerouac probably didn't think he was interesting enough so he had to hitchhike across the country and pick up someone who was interesting enough you know dean variety you know so every writer you could see deals with this issue yeah marcel proust had to pretend to be in you know high society to to get stories uh truman capote had to interview murder murderers to get stories like writers go through this so this was seeing your glimpse into that yeah no that's right that's right and then of course i also there was something else in here, which is more subtly about you and about the process of writing, which is, okay, he's, how do I do this without?

1:30:06So he writes signatures of famous authors. Let's put it at that. And we don't know whether they're good or bad. We're kind of taking the word for it from one character. And then there's another character who has a different, maybe more impressive take on whether they're good or bad. And it's interesting to see these perspectives on not Timothy's ability as a writer, but literally Timothy's ability to mimic a writer's signature, which is perhaps metaphor for writing. And I thought that was a very interesting way to do that metaphor. Yeah, thank you.

1:30:44With short stories, you gotta be much more careful than novels about getting stuff away. I just enjoyed all of them, like the I Will Survive, the bootlegger. And I could see these are a little bit more you, particularly they're in New York, they're around now, they're happening. And it's fascinating. By the way, I read the stories before I read Eve in Hollywood. I wasn't quite sure if I was, am I in for the 200 page? I'm just reading short stories here. Now I'm gonna read a 200 page quote unquote novella, but I did and that led me to your other books and it was so pleasurable. So for everybody listening, table for two is is the is a must read of course the other books are as well how do you feel about i saw i saw the the trailer just a few minutes ago about a gentleman in moscow how do you feel about their translation into tv i think they did a terrific job and you know they're um you know menace you you you write a gentleman moscow is in a way like no longer mine It's now in the possession of readers.

1:31:49And one of the great things about the series, Gentleman in Moscow, is that the writer, the director, the head of costume, the head of set design, Ewan McGregor, the star, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who's the lead actress, and Ewan's wife, they were all very conscious of the fact that the expectations they had to meet were the readers. Not mine, not Paramount's. But the question was, and they read the book very carefully multiple times and carved it up and marked it up themselves from each angle of their craft. What does the hotel look like? What are people wearing? What are the thematics that we're trying to express?

1:32:28And they really did a beautiful job. So it's really an incredible visual experience to see it realized by them. And, you know, Ewan is amazing. And the series, Ewan, because he's the Count, is in almost every scene. You know, it's an eight-hour series, and he's in almost every scene. He ages 30 years. He goes through a wider range of emotions and experiences, and he is unbelievable. He's terrific. But I'll tell you a sort of funny thing about it. To give you a flavor for, like, how much he thinks about it, you know, we spent, he reached out before they were going into production and said, you know, could you have an hour or two to do a Zoom with me?

1:33:10because I want to know everything about the count and the hotel and the story that is not in the book. I've read the book, you know, multiple times. I want to know what's not there that could help me. And so, you know, in the course of this, you know, Zoom, we talked about different aspects and he asked questions and I, you know, I offered up different things that are not in the book that I thought would be interesting. And eventually we got to, he said, you know, how does it begin? Like, how does, and he, sort of like you were asking earlier. And so I walked him through kind of the process of inventing the character and where I started and sort of the iterative cycle of getting a richer and richer sense.

1:33:45And then I talked about the few sentences at the beginning of the book where I really sort of knew the count more sharply. Well, last week was the premiere in New York City. And so after the premiere, he and I were talking at the after party, And he came up and he said, hey, we were talking about one of the opening scenes. Sorry, one of the scenes in the first hour. And Azran B. says, hey, did you notice? You notice that when Halecki calls me to his office, did you notice? And I'm like, Ewan, notice what? And he goes, I took the stairs two steps at a time, as had been my habit since the academy.

1:34:30So he had logged this from our conversation, which was two years before. and much as I, you know, use it as a way as an orientation for myself in inventing the narrative, when I had told him that story, he was like, yep, I get it, you know, and he used it and he then said, you know, he said, it took me a while, I had to train myself to take the steps two at a time and he said, but he says, you'll notice that later in the series when I age, I start taking them one step at a time, you know, when I've lost that thing. and the book says i think it was 1946 1946 it says he starts taking them one step at a time and that's your way of saying he views himself as older which i thought yeah it was much better than him just thinking to himself oh i'm older now yeah so you can see it's not like just a payday for for you and you know whatever it is uh they he has internalized as best he can both the experience of the account the personality account and the language of the book as a way of trying to, through acting, you know, realize the character.

1:35:38You know, it's interesting because A Gentleman in Moscow, one of the attractive things about it is it's a weirdly aspirational kind of book in that all people have this feeling that they would like to be, I don't want to say aristocratic in a boring way, but people want to move up in wealth and class and be able to enjoy find things in life. So it's aspirational in the sense that here's somebody who, regardless of how you strip him of title and home and whatever, he has this quality to him, this personality to him. But also this idea of living in a hotel is very aspirational. I'll tell you, when I first moved to New York City as an adult, after a year or so, and I finally was making a little bit better living, I moved into the Chelsea hotel and stayed there for many years.

1:36:34Sure. Yeah. So I lived in a hotel for a long time and I kind of know that feeling of knowing the people who work in the restaurant for years, knowing the people who work behind, you know, the, the, the, the bell hop and so on, knowing all the bell hops and knowing the maids and knowing, you know, all the people, about half the people lived at that time in the nineties, about half the people lived in the Chelsea hotel and half the people were vacationing into the, they were staying as hotel guests. And so there's a weird dynamic when that happens of shifting characters and stories. And so I got that feeling when I was reading through this that it felt like that feeling that I once felt.

1:37:11So, which for me is an aspirational kind of feeling because I always loved the idea of living in a hotel. No, I'm jealous of your experience. I would have loved to have lived in the Hotel Chelsea for a while. It was fascinating, particularly your, You're like just a few years older than me. So it was a very good time in the 90s to live there. No, no, I remember it. I remember it. And I have one smaller question that's kind of a final question. But there's a lot of patience in your books. And obviously, as you described, the way you write it, I mean, some novelists write a book a year. Like a lot of thriller writers write a book a year.

1:37:53you know, it's, and it's not, and it's not a criticism. Their books are great. It's no criticism. Your process is a little different. You said you take like two, three, four years, maybe to set the characters and then to, to, um, start figuring out the plots and what's happening. And then you sit down and it takes you a year, year and a half to, to write the book. So there's a lot of patience and the books themselves, like again, a gentleman in Moscow, it takes place over a period of many decades. And so you have to, there's a certain patience with the reader kind of dives into this world, knowing he's going to be in there for, for, for many decades.

1:38:30And this is an odd question, but before you were writing these novels, you worked for, uh, uh, you know, financial asset management firm. And I took the liberty of looking at the portfolio of that firm in the 13F filings, your stocks, I'm not yours. Okay. And you're not involved with the company anymore. And I don't know, you haven't been for 10 years, but the, the portfolio picks are very patient. I mean, instead of being in the hottest new AI company, your biggest, the, the big, and again, it's not yours. The firm exists without you. It's, it's grown, but it's, it's a construction company is the large, is the largest pig in the portfolio.

1:39:09Like it's really like there's a patience to that portfolio. It's not the average portfolio. And is this like a reflection of your personality a little bit, the patience throughout all of these activities? Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, in the investment arena, we were very interested in, in essence, we had a research driven process and value bias. We focused on higher quality businesses. But if you summed it up, we were interested in arbitraging the short-term fluctuation in perception against the long-term excellence of a company. So, you know, stocks in a company can go up and down for all kinds of reasons.

1:39:55And they're not always necessarily even related to the long – certainly not related to the long-term prospects of the company. They may not even be related to the short-term prospects of the company. they were related to a shift in attitude or a change in the economy and all these kinds of things. So that's the beauty of the stock market is that it's constantly changing in the short term, the valuation of a business, which over the long term shouldn't vary that much, you know, from where it's headed. If it's a business that you can understand into the future. So that, you know, that's, patience is rewarded if you have the discipline to choose selectively and, in the investment business.

1:40:31And that's the way that we approached the art. In my writing, I never really thought about it as sort of the Canadian, but you're right. I think that I don't think I learned this from the investment business into my writing, but it is the nature of writing. If you think about it in your life, like if you have children, dealing with your siblings, dealing with financial decisions in your life, whatever else. If you pushed aside everything and you gave yourself like lots of time to how you're going to raise your kids or how you're going to respond to your mother or how you're going to, you know, deal with the situation that surfaced with your sibling or whatever the issues are, you would take that time to sort of think it all out and to prepare and to be judicious and to find the right attitude and say the right things.

1:41:26and you'd be a perfect person. But life's not like that, right? It happens at a pace where your best instincts and your best intentions are often overwhelmed by the sudden surge of the emotion or the mishearing or the whatever, the battle of the conversation. All these things that lead you or you're exhausted or you're exasperated or whatever the difference. So, well, writing is a world in which it's all slowed down, right? There is no, in the way that I approach it, right? I don't have to publish a book every year. So I don't have that. I can spend four years. I can spend five years. I have nobody who's asking me what's happening in it.

1:42:14Nobody knows what's happening in it. It's all to me. I don't share it with anybody. And what that allows, I have to have a certain amount of patience and endurance because I'm going to spend four years writing it. No one's going to see it. and I'm not going to know what they think about it. And, you know, I don't know if it's going to be successful, but that's fine. What I gain is that I can get myself down to, in a way, I could be my best self, you know, as a human being, which is that as I'm listening to the characters, as I'm drafting the characters, presenting the characters, as I'm creating this world, I don't have to fall on any sense of urgency or impatience or frustration or whatever.

1:42:55I can build it all on the pursuit of understanding reality and human nature in its finest form, and then to try to relay it in a fashion which is at its finest level. And so yes, the freedom of time in the writing process allows me to, I think, to achieve a better outcome. There's the freedom of time. I'm just curious, though, of the psychology of it. Like many people don't want the patience because they want the book to get out so they could know if people are going to like it. You're right. You're right. And I don't tell people what my books are about because they give you a dopamine that you don't, that is, it's kind of productive.

1:43:50Like if I have a great idea for a novel and I'm working on it and I went out to dinner and I said, oh yeah, this is what I'm working on. And I rattly off the story and they're like, oh, that's great. Dopamine surge. And I'm like, yeah, there we go. I made a little somebody happy with that. You do that 50 times and you're like, I'm not interested in the story anymore. So you have to kind of reverse it. And you have to say, okay, I'm going to get a big dopamine hit when this lands. And I am going to preserve a sense of internal urgency by deferring the smallest window of pleasure from this task until the last minute.

1:44:24And you just keep the discipline of deferring the potential for pleasure of eventually someone reading the story until I'm absolutely done. And that's very, that, that's, that, that looking forward to that moment helps me in a way survive the four years in silence. Well, thank you for being patient with all my questions. I really appreciate it. I mean, it's a pleasure to, to talk to an author like you and, and indulge myself in learning the, the process. Plus I just absolutely love the books. I did not expect to i'm i'm i really love minimalist writers i mean i hate categorizing writers at all some are you could be minimalist you could be maximalist it doesn't matter but i really tend towards um like let's say i don't know if you follow like a dennis johnson type of short story writer or uh uh i can name a dozen others but i absolutely loved every word in your novels i've read them out loud to my wife she really appreciated the scene when he first meets um you know his his lady friend and the dogs like yes yeah but she because she thinks that's how parents mess up with kids is not treating their dogs like that like so she's like really she said tell him when you talk to him i said that about that scene so i'm telling you thank you james has been a pleasure you're it was really, I appreciate all the thoroughness in which you've read my work.

1:46:02I appreciate what you had to say about it. I appreciate the nuances of your questions. Yeah, thank you. And good luck with both the release of Table for Two. Good luck with the launch of the show. And please, when your next book comes out, come on the podcast again. I'd love to chat. Thanks. It'd be my pleasure.

1:46:27Thank you.