Amor Towles
Novelist, author of A Gentleman in Moscow
Where to hear and read about Amor Towles1 episode or test
Amor Towles is the novelist behind A Gentleman in Moscow, Rules of Civility, The Lincoln Highway and the story collection Table for Two. The habit most worth learning is his two-pass method: plan the book fully so the first draft can be free, then cut it down as a debt to the reader.
I plan design and outline before I start writing
The Mindset Behind An Unforgettable Novel (Amor Towles Interview)
Amor Towles: the story and the lessons
1How Amor Towles became a novelist
A first-grade poet's visit made Towles decide to be a writer. David McCord, a children's poet, read his poems to the class and signed books. Towles says writing and serious reading began from then on and shaped each other.
He moved from the Hardy Boys, Bradbury and Ian Fleming to books of greater literary merit, always asking how a chapter or character worked.
Towles studied literature and learned to read like a builder. He always reads with a pen. At Stanford he studied literature and wrote essays on structure in Hemingway and the poetics of Melville.
That made reading an active, analytical act. He also took writing classes at Yale and attended a graduate writing program at Stanford, and says the most valuable part was being forced to hand work in.
Towles wrote young but took another path before committing. He wrote from childhood and had stories in The Paris Review in his 20s, yet followed another career.
He says that had he committed early he might have written 13 books by now instead of four or five, but there is no way to know. He believes each writer must decide for themselves when to go full-time.
2How Towles plans a novel before writing a line
Towles starts every novel from a premise that fits in one sentence. The sentence for his hotel novel was that a guy lives in a hotel for a long time. If an idea grabs him, he thinks it through at once and within a couple of hours knows a lot about it.
The idea came in a Geneva hotel, where he recognized a man in the lobby from the year before. Within minutes he saw it set in Russia, with an aristocrat under house arrest in a hotel near the Kremlin, spanning the Revolution to the Cold War.
Towles sketched the key elements of A Gentleman in Moscow in ninety minutes. He wrote the key elements in about an hour and a half in the Geneva hotel room, and the scaffolding of nearly every key event in three days.
Towles judges an idea by how many doors it opens at once. He calls it the opening of doors: like walking into a mansion where every door starts opening. He does not write any of it down, because the rush of possibilities tells him the idea can carry many layers, people and events.
The man trapped in a hotel gave him that feeling. He says the question a writer asks matters more than the answer.
Towles fills handwritten notebooks for about two years before chapter one. He visualizes each scene in detail, the room, the food, the talk, often while walking to work, then writes it by hand in whatever order grabs him that day.
The draft then takes about a year and a half, followed by two or three revisions from start to end.
Towles plans so the poetic side of his mind can work freely. If he had to solve the setting, people and plot while drafting, the analytical side would dampen the poetic side. Knowing the story in advance leaves room for surprises.
He says at least 90% of the passages readers love are things he would never say as himself.
Towles sits at his desk at the same hour every day. He notes that most accomplished writers he knows work at the same morning hour. His own hours are roughly 8 to 2.
He says inspiration is what comes to them when they're at their desk, and that you never make progress by waiting to feel inspired.
3Towles's two-pass method: draft for himself, edit for the reader
Towles writes the first draft for himself and carries every whim. In draft one he follows every whim, digression and vanity without regulating himself. Once it is in reasonable shape, he turns the lens around and reads it as a reader would.
Towles treats editing as a debt to the reader. In revision he removes redundancies, clichés, boring passages and anything that satisfies his whim but plays no role in the story as a whole. Much of the editing is taking things out.
He sees the reader's money and time as an investment he owes a return on, a covenant.
Towles rereads cold and treats his own boredom as a warning. He says writing and editing are separate skills. Editing means rereading your pages as if for the first time.
If a section bores him on the third read, a reader surely will be bored too. Slow parts are fine only when chosen on purpose.
Towles shows nobody a draft until it is finished. After that it goes to a handful of careful readers: his New York editor, possibly his London editor, his agent and about three friends who read closely.
Towles dials poetic language up and down across a novel. A purely poetic style over a whole novel would exhaust readers, since poetry can mean several things at once. He lets readers settle, then lures them into more dreamlike passages.
He points to Toni Morrison, whose sentences push toward poetry, as a novelist to learn the poetic sensibility from.
4How Towles writes description
Towles describes what a particular character would notice, not period landmarks. For a 1960s kitchen, a researching outsider lists frozen peas, a Frigidaire and the Beatles, which gives the reader only the era they already expected. Towles asks what an eight-year-old girl would see.
He lands on the frozen brick of peas sliding out of the box and the kid sneaking one to taste.
Towles writes the Count's best lines by asking what the Count would notice. The line about the coffee still being hot came from close third person tied to the Count's mind. The Count cares about cuisine, prompt service and people who do things well.
Towles says he would not have thought to write the passage on his own. When it works he thinks well done, and calls the state flow.
Towles imagines being someone he is not to find his best passages. He imagines a person with a different background in a situation he has never been in, and the line arrives quickly.
He calls this one of the ideal states in narrative writing, where you watch it happen.
Towles lets hidden backstory change a scene's tone without explanation. In the kitchen scene, if the mother has just discovered an affair or just had one, the girl would not know. The language and tempo must still differ so she senses it without understanding it.
A reader who goes back later should find it was all there.
Towles laid out the hotel's geography early with just enough detail. Readers of A Gentleman in Moscow spend almost 30 years inside the hotel, so he made the key rooms vivid early. Once they know the space, they feel they are walking through it.
He adds and removes details until a few elements bring it to life. Too spare, and the place could be anywhere. Too specific, and it turns cold and cumbersome.
5What Towles reads and collects to feed his writing
Towles collects vocabularies from many worlds and applies them where they fit. He picks up the words of baseball, city streets, finance, physics and ethnic communities. For the Count he weaves in every scrap of French he knows, though he does not speak French.
Moscow society around 1900 spoke French among themselves, so it belongs in the Count's speech.
Towles collects manifestos for their energy. He loved them as a college student. Technically they are staccato and never bog down in examples, something like seven declarations in 14 sentences.
He names the Surrealist manifesto of Breton and the Communist Manifesto, and says a writer can use such a language in a domestic novel at the right moment.
Towles read four novels from 1954 before writing The Lincoln Highway. He read O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Chandler's The Long Goodbye.
He says he is not a research-driven writer. The reading only reminds him of the different sensibilities of the time.
Towles reads mostly authors who have survived decades of filtering. His book group of four friends has read about a novel a month for 20 years, and about 90% of it is by dead authors. History drops the mediocre over roughly 50 years.
They read projects of three to seven books by one author in order, to watch a writer evolve, as with DeLillo and Roth, and stop to read single paragraphs aloud.
Towles advises writing from many perspectives to learn craft by repetition. He says craft is mastered through repetition. Young writers should imagine other genders, ages, classes and places, such as a wealthy elderly Upper East Side woman or a boy from Chicago's East Side.
Each describes the same room differently, so the lesson is how to approach setting in new ways rather than one fixed way.
Towles starts stories from a small real moment and asks what if. About five of the six stories in Table for Two began this way. In The Bootlegger, a husband at Carnegie Hall realizes the old man beside him is recording the concert.
It happened to Towles with his wife. The first page is what really happened, and everything after is what he did not do: he spent the concert imagining going to security instead of hearing the music.
The Mindset Behind An Unforgettable Novel (Amor Towles Interview)
Towles explains how he plans a novel in handwritten notebooks for years so the drafting itself can be free and poetic, and how he describes a scene through what a particular character would notice. The habit worth hearing is his two-pass method: write the first draft for himself, then cut it down for the reader.
A first-grade poet's visit made Towles decide to be a writer. David McCord, a children's poet, read his poems to the class and signed books. Towles says writing and serious reading began from then on and shaped each other.
He moved from the Hardy Boys, Bradbury and Ian Fleming to books of greater literary merit, always asking how a chapter or character worked.
Towles studied literature and learned to read like a builder. He always reads with a pen. At Stanford he studied literature and wrote essays on structure in Hemingway and the poetics of Melville.
That made reading an active, analytical act. He also took writing classes at Yale and attended a graduate writing program at Stanford, and says the most valuable part was being forced to hand work in.
Towles wrote young but took another path before committing. He wrote from childhood and had stories in The Paris Review in his 20s, yet followed another career.
He says that had he committed early he might have written 13 books by now instead of four or five, but there is no way to know. He believes each writer must decide for themselves when to go full-time.
Towles starts every novel from a premise that fits in one sentence. The sentence for his hotel novel was that a guy lives in a hotel for a long time. If an idea grabs him, he thinks it through at once and within a couple of hours knows a lot about it.
The idea came in a Geneva hotel, where he recognized a man in the lobby from the year before. Within minutes he saw it set in Russia, with an aristocrat under house arrest in a hotel near the Kremlin, spanning the Revolution to the Cold War.
Towles sketched the key elements of A Gentleman in Moscow in ninety minutes. He wrote the key elements in about an hour and a half in the Geneva hotel room, and the scaffolding of nearly every key event in three days.
Towles judges an idea by how many doors it opens at once. He calls it the opening of doors: like walking into a mansion where every door starts opening. He does not write any of it down, because the rush of possibilities tells him the idea can carry many layers, people and events.
The man trapped in a hotel gave him that feeling. He says the question a writer asks matters more than the answer.
Towles fills handwritten notebooks for about two years before chapter one. He visualizes each scene in detail, the room, the food, the talk, often while walking to work, then writes it by hand in whatever order grabs him that day.
The draft then takes about a year and a half, followed by two or three revisions from start to end.
Towles plans so the poetic side of his mind can work freely. If he had to solve the setting, people and plot while drafting, the analytical side would dampen the poetic side. Knowing the story in advance leaves room for surprises.
He says at least 90% of the passages readers love are things he would never say as himself.
Towles sits at his desk at the same hour every day. He notes that most accomplished writers he knows work at the same morning hour. His own hours are roughly 8 to 2.
He says inspiration is what comes to them when they're at their desk, and that you never make progress by waiting to feel inspired.
Towles writes the first draft for himself and carries every whim. In draft one he follows every whim, digression and vanity without regulating himself. Once it is in reasonable shape, he turns the lens around and reads it as a reader would.
Towles treats editing as a debt to the reader. In revision he removes redundancies, clichés, boring passages and anything that satisfies his whim but plays no role in the story as a whole. Much of the editing is taking things out.
He sees the reader's money and time as an investment he owes a return on, a covenant.
Towles rereads cold and treats his own boredom as a warning. He says writing and editing are separate skills. Editing means rereading your pages as if for the first time.
If a section bores him on the third read, a reader surely will be bored too. Slow parts are fine only when chosen on purpose.
Towles shows nobody a draft until it is finished. After that it goes to a handful of careful readers: his New York editor, possibly his London editor, his agent and about three friends who read closely.
Towles dials poetic language up and down across a novel. A purely poetic style over a whole novel would exhaust readers, since poetry can mean several things at once. He lets readers settle, then lures them into more dreamlike passages.
He points to Toni Morrison, whose sentences push toward poetry, as a novelist to learn the poetic sensibility from.
Towles describes what a particular character would notice, not period landmarks. For a 1960s kitchen, a researching outsider lists frozen peas, a Frigidaire and the Beatles, which gives the reader only the era they already expected. Towles asks what an eight-year-old girl would see.
He lands on the frozen brick of peas sliding out of the box and the kid sneaking one to taste.
Towles writes the Count's best lines by asking what the Count would notice. The line about the coffee still being hot came from close third person tied to the Count's mind. The Count cares about cuisine, prompt service and people who do things well.
Towles says he would not have thought to write the passage on his own. When it works he thinks well done, and calls the state flow.
Towles imagines being someone he is not to find his best passages. He imagines a person with a different background in a situation he has never been in, and the line arrives quickly.
He calls this one of the ideal states in narrative writing, where you watch it happen.
Towles lets hidden backstory change a scene's tone without explanation. In the kitchen scene, if the mother has just discovered an affair or just had one, the girl would not know. The language and tempo must still differ so she senses it without understanding it.
A reader who goes back later should find it was all there.
Towles laid out the hotel's geography early with just enough detail. Readers of A Gentleman in Moscow spend almost 30 years inside the hotel, so he made the key rooms vivid early. Once they know the space, they feel they are walking through it.
He adds and removes details until a few elements bring it to life. Too spare, and the place could be anywhere. Too specific, and it turns cold and cumbersome.
Towles collects vocabularies from many worlds and applies them where they fit. He picks up the words of baseball, city streets, finance, physics and ethnic communities. For the Count he weaves in every scrap of French he knows, though he does not speak French.
Moscow society around 1900 spoke French among themselves, so it belongs in the Count's speech.
Towles collects manifestos for their energy. He loved them as a college student. Technically they are staccato and never bog down in examples, something like seven declarations in 14 sentences.
He names the Surrealist manifesto of Breton and the Communist Manifesto, and says a writer can use such a language in a domestic novel at the right moment.
Towles read four novels from 1954 before writing The Lincoln Highway. He read O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Chandler's The Long Goodbye.
He says he is not a research-driven writer. The reading only reminds him of the different sensibilities of the time.
Towles reads mostly authors who have survived decades of filtering. His book group of four friends has read about a novel a month for 20 years, and about 90% of it is by dead authors. History drops the mediocre over roughly 50 years.
They read projects of three to seven books by one author in order, to watch a writer evolve, as with DeLillo and Roth, and stop to read single paragraphs aloud.
Towles advises writing from many perspectives to learn craft by repetition. He says craft is mastered through repetition. Young writers should imagine other genders, ages, classes and places, such as a wealthy elderly Upper East Side woman or a boy from Chicago's East Side.
Each describes the same room differently, so the lesson is how to approach setting in new ways rather than one fixed way.
Towles starts stories from a small real moment and asks what if. About five of the six stories in Table for Two began this way. In The Bootlegger, a husband at Carnegie Hall realizes the old man beside him is recording the concert.
It happened to Towles with his wife. The first page is what really happened, and everything after is what he did not do: he spent the concert imagining going to security instead of hearing the music.