Transcript of Meet Pulitzer Prize-Winning Stanford Professor – Richard Powers

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, negotiating a lot of things.

But in terms of the psychic economy of that character, in the outer shell are the traits. He’s got a green shirt on. It’s got a little insignia, nice haircut. 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, 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—there’s a sensitivity.

DAVID PERELL: Of awareness that you must really have to have. And is that something that you’re cultivating?

RICHARD POWERS: I think it can be cultivated, because I don’t think I ever came by any of this naturally. If you’re talking about various distribution curves of people, some of whom have very high emotional intelligence, are immediately aligned with reading other people. And then other people—the cliche 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 to some degree with finding 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. A value has to be something like honesty or fidelity or perseverance. 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 traits. 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 them to the wall.

DAVID PERELL: Push them to the wall.

RICHARD POWERS: Yeah. So I’d say, you know, this guy is a good guy. He values honesty, but he also values fidelity. Now, put him in a place where he cannot have both.

DAVID PERELL: So now you got to make a choice.

Creating Dramatic Tension

RICHARD POWERS: Yes. 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. The scenarios are obvious. Your friend has just done something wrong. Do you go to him and say, look, man, you gotta pay for that. You have to own up to that. Or do you say, I’m a good, faithful friend. I’m just gonna support this guy.

DAVID PERELL: I’ll be with you no matter what.

RICHARD POWERS: Yeah. That’s the story. In fact, that’s 10,000 stories.

DAVID PERELL: 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.

RICHARD POWERS: 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, using very sexist language that would be called a man versus himself.

And that fundamental kind of interior instability, 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, I don’t want to have to choose between honesty and fidelity. I want to have both. Well, life doesn’t always let you have both. 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?

DAVID PERELL: Yes.

The Three Types of Conflict

RICHARD POWERS: Now I’m doing that, and David’s doing that, too. And here we are sitting in the same room. 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 what you’re voting for.

You see what I’m saying? Now we have interpersonal drama. Now we have the sociological novel or the political novel, where I can make you completely sympathetic to the reader and I can make myself completely sympathetic to the reader. But now the reader’s watching two people collide in a way where 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 gotta jump, gotta jump. Gotta put a vote in the ballot box.

DAVID PERELL: So you got person against themselves. Person against person.

RICHARD POWERS: Right.

DAVID PERELL: Is that it?

The Three Levels of Drama

RICHARD POWERS: 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 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.

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, I was reading especially contemporary novels in the 80s and in the 90s and even into the early 2000s. There were a lot of novels that were exceptionally good at psychology and 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 independent from everything else.

DAVID PERELL: Right.

RICHARD POWERS: And it seemed to me that can’t be right. I started to look at the history of literary fiction and then the history of world literature even before the novel. I was looking for that third kind of story. I saw great examples of it. I mean, if I said, tell me a book about man versus nature or man versus 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? What’s the latest kind of great book in the American canon that you think really concerned, took seriously the idea of man versus Nature?

DAVID PERELL: I have no idea.

RICHARD POWERS: You got to go back a way.

DAVID PERELL: Yeah.

RICHARD POWERS: And you got to go back to Moby Dick, or you got to go back to the American frontier novel.

DAVID PERELL: It’s been that long, huh?

The Disappearance and Return of Nature in Literature

RICHARD POWERS: Well, I mean, there are always exceptions, sure. But there’s a dip. There’s a real dip. From 1851, when Moby Dick’s published to 1914, at 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. It’s like Jack London. 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 genres became subordinate genres in the eyes of the people who wanted to be practitioners of literary fiction. But 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 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?

Developing Empathy for Trees

DAVID PERELL: As you were thinking about The Overstory and learning about trees and developing a kind of empathy for trees, I think of how big is the distance between you as the person and the, dare I say, consciousness of a tree. It almost felt like your mind and the consciousness of trees fused together. I know that in your research process you just spent a lot of time in the woods. 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.

RICHARD POWERS: 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. I’ve often said that young children are animists. They take seriously these magical creatures around us. I just looked at some crows flying past, I’m looking at these marvelous locusts out of the window, and a child could look at that and know 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. 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. It’s not just a question of giving trees voice. It’s a question of remembering those voices inside human beings that were suppressed by this cultural colonialism that said, “No, no, no, don’t pay attention to the world behind the curtain. It’s just us.” So to recover that amazement wasn’t a separate thing than to go deep into character for me, for the creation of that book. They became the same enterprise.

The Poetic Science of Trees

DAVID PERELL: 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. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. The trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warm kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks.”

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. I just need to understand how you did that.

RICHARD POWERS: 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, 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 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.

The Power of the Novel

DAVID PERELL: I didn’t grow up liking novels very much. I didn’t read novels. It just wasn’t super compelling to me. And reading this now, 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.”

It almost brings tears to my eyes. 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.

RICHARD POWERS: And that’s the great grace of the novel form. You could have come across those facts in a very well done popularization of the new forestry and all the discoveries about symbiotic relationships in a forest that have come out of 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. 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—it means to move, to move someone, to move through something. This has been verified in so many laboratories, using so many experiments. But the smallest appeal to affect and to identification can make people do things that argument cannot.

There are odd experiments that make you wonder how fragile and labile mankind is. They’ll have subjects reading different texts—a control text and a text about someone who does something good for someone else. Ostensibly, the experiment is about comprehension. So someone reads some data, someone reads a control neutral narrative, and someone reads a fictional passage that has the potential to move you, to break your heart and make you cry a little bit.

The ostensible experiment is “we want to test your reading comprehension. Please answer the following questions.” All three groups answer the questions. When you’re done, please take your exams down the hall and deposit them at this door. Meanwhile, a confederate is walking down the hall in the other direction, and they dump their pencils on the ground as if by accident. 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 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.

DAVID PERELL: 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 in order to create that effect in the reader.

The Elements of Fiction Craft

RICHARD POWERS: 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 of the concerns of crafting a novel are what I would call low level or very granular diction register syntax. And then 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? 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 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. People can come right out and say, “I’m a character guy. I just want to see if these people feel robust and vital and three dimensional.” The story—yeah, I’ll read for plot, but it’s basically, do I know this person? 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? 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.

DAVID PERELL: I like that. And descriptiveness.

RICHARD POWERS: Yeah. Because setting a scene, you know, even before there are human agents or non-human agents in that scene, for me, can be 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.

DAVID PERELL: Right.

The Relationship Between Voice, Character, and Drama

RICHARD POWERS: 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. 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.

DAVID PERELL: 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.

RICHARD POWERS: Yeah. 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.

DAVID PERELL: Huh?

RICHARD POWERS: Right. So I’ll do the first one first. Although typically I would try 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 what is the register of that word and what does that word mean? And to answer those questions is far from trivial.

DAVID PERELL: When you say the register of a word, what do you mean by that?

The Power of Word Choice and Register

RICHARD POWERS: So linguists will talk about the levels of speech that people use. And sometimes you’ll see three. Casual in the middle, formal above it, and down and dirty, slangy at the top. And sometimes you’ll see four. You know, 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.”

DAVID PERELL: “Hey, will you please pass that?”

RICHARD POWERS: Yeah.

DAVID PERELL: Completely different.

RICHARD POWERS: Yeah. And there are a dozen more. I mean, there’s no end, actually, to the ways that you can say that.

DAVID PERELL: Yeah. I mean, you can literally just say “yo” and then point at it.

RICHARD POWERS: 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 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, “Because you’re speakers of English, you have a kind of built-in bilingualism.” They 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 register and color effects.”

DAVID PERELL: Are you talking about Latin and Anglo-Saxon?

RICHARD POWERS: 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?

DAVID PERELL: Right.

RICHARD POWERS: I mean, back all the way at the beginning, they were the same thing. Maison and our English house were the same things. But 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.

DAVID PERELL: Right.

RICHARD POWERS: And so immediately, the words you use talk about your class.

DAVID PERELL: Yep.

RICHARD POWERS: 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 liberty becomes more audible.

DAVID PERELL: Right?

Sentence Structure and Emotional Effect

RICHARD POWERS: Right. So that’s the word level considerations for voice. The other consideration is the sentence level. 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 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, “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 mental state that the speaker is in or that the narrator wants you to be in, that the sentence starts participating 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. “He pointed the gun at his friend.” Right. There’s a kind of front loaded shock to that, Right?

DAVID PERELL: Yep.

RICHARD POWERS: You know, or “the gun exploded and a whiff of smoke exited the barrel.” You know, these are clauses that have the action up front, the main subject, main verb, get delivered like that. And then we see the consequences of those things.

Now that’s a very different thing than delaying the predication after a lot of modifiers. So if you want to put the reader into 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.

DAVID PERELL: Yeah, I was like, what are you going to say?

RICHARD POWERS: What are you going to say? What are you going to say? And that “she” doesn’t appear until the very end. So she is hidden from the reader in the sentence.

DAVID PERELL: Oh, wow, I did not catch that. Right, yeah.

RICHARD POWERS: In the same way that she’s hidden in the physical space.

DAVID PERELL: I did not catch that.

RICHARD POWERS: Wait for it, wait for it. Oh, there she is. Right. Now the third way would be to split that predication down the middle and basically start with your subject and put a bunch of stuff in the middle and then a verb, 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, 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 effect.

And 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 of a trailing sentence in a world suddenly stopping and changing that, changing it up. It’s like a key change in music or going to a different chord.

The Art of Descriptive Writing

DAVID PERELL: 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 ironwoods, fluted mussel.” 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?”

RICHARD POWERS: Well, it’s okay. It’s okay to try hard because you always have an edit where you can make it look more effortless. 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 they’re too blocked out, but at least you know now what effects it is that you are after.

So think about that first draft as a note to yourself 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, 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 Westerford and saying there’s subtle little elements of anthropomorphism in that sentence, or pantheism or animism in those descriptions.

DAVID PERELL: The ironwood’s fluted muscle and.

The Art of Descriptive Writing

RICHARD POWERS: And now 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 tree is majestic. But read the first sentence again, because you’ll see a little registral trick there, too.

DAVID PERELL: Okay, tell me when to stop. Each child’s tree has its own excellence.

RICHARD POWERS: Stop. Were you expecting that word as the final word of that clause?

DAVID PERELL: No.

RICHARD POWERS: 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 excellence.

The beginning of a sentence and the end of a sentence are very powerful places to set a reader’s expectation and then to surprise the reader’s expectation. That each child’s tree has its own degree of excellence. The reader’s unconscious 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 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 spin.

DAVID PERELL: Exactly.

RICHARD POWERS: You got it. You can play off that expectation. You can set it in motion and then say, nope, this way, that way.

DAVID PERELL: 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, massed armies, imaginary cities more baroque with detail each year. Then wilder textures directly observed. The forest of hairs on a caterpillar’s back and the stormy weather maps in the grain of floorboards.”

The Evolution of Writing

RICHARD POWERS: 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 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 go, oh, the pencil dreams of boys.

DAVID PERELL: Well, what’s so cool about this is 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 8-year-old kid kind of messing around and sketching around and designing baseball this and football that. And that is, now that I’m rereading it, so much of what makes this resonate with me.

RICHARD POWERS: 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.

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.

DAVID PERELL: So how many times do you rewrite those sentences?

The Continuous Process of Revision

RICHARD POWERS: Oh, gosh, now with word processing, it’s hard to say 12, right? Or 14. 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, 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, 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 right. Because there’s no final right. I take this book that was published yesterday, I go behind the podium tonight, I start reading from it, I want to change it.

DAVID PERELL: 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?

RICHARD POWERS: Oh, they could be anything. It could be deafness, you know, or—

DAVID PERELL: Deafness.

RICHARD POWERS: 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 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. It’s definitely like surfing. For me, the craft tip here is relax, forgive yourself. 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, stand in front of a tree, breathe the air, drink the drink, relax. The perfectionism that says, I need to get this in a perfect, final state. Let it be process.

The Art of Beginnings

DAVID PERELL: I want to talk about introductions, just how you think about where these books begin. For Overstory, 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 Ta’aroa.” Why do you choose those? How do you think about that?

RICHARD POWERS: You’re revealing something that I probably had never consciously articulated about what I like in beginnings, but I see it clearly in both of these. I want to situate my stories in a mythological framework.

DAVID PERELL: Yes.

RICHARD POWERS: You know, but I also, I’m imitating a certain kind of cinematography too. Like great films that start with a really distant, wide establishing shot.

DAVID PERELL: Yep.

RICHARD POWERS: And then, you know, go to a mid shot and then go to a close-up. 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 characterizations are hinted at in a way that the reader can’t possibly see or anticipate.

DAVID PERELL: I mean, Romeo and Juliet, “Two houses both alike in dignity in fair Verona, where we lay our scene.” You get, I mean, just right at the beginning of that, yeah, two people, they’re very similar. But, oh, stuff’s about to happen, right?

RICHARD POWERS: “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, 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.

DAVID PERELL: You know, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

RICHARD POWERS: And these sort of linguistic play with the metaphysics of what’s being expressed. Well, that line actually comes from one of the last sentences that a dear friend of mine and a brilliant American poet 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? They couldn’t hear her, and they leaned in. She said, “First there was nothing, then there was everything.” And I thought, what a better way to memorialize the life and work of this brand than to take that and promote it to the start of this book.

DAVID PERELL: If I remember correctly, you wanted to be a poet, or you were very interested in poetry.

RICHARD POWERS: Still want to be a poet.

DAVID PERELL: You still want to be a poet?

The Structure of Tension in Storytelling

RICHARD POWERS: When I grow up, I may end up that way. I don’t know. But that’s the place where those of us who love language first can focus on that as the primary pursuit. I mean, 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. 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. 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? We’ve seen these three kinds of collisions. And in any collision, the primary variable is tension. 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 tension goes. So you are dialing in and out of something that most of us can read intuitively as the stakes. What we call tension is the realization on the part of the protagonists that the stakes are going up.

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? Of course, 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, what if. What if this guy said this to this guy?

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. It wouldn’t make any sense, and the finale being, and then he killed the easiest dragon in the country. It would never work like that.

So we have an intrinsic understanding which would actually merit some investigation as to why that makes absolute sense to us to stack tension as a rising thing, to think about that as a physiological thing, as part of this adaptive power that we have to intrigue other people with story. But a simple rising action isn’t really the most satisfying kind of story anyway, especially for long form. So you have to sculpt that tension graph in a way that does justice to your characters, does justice to your readers’ expectations, and keeps your readers intrigued.

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.

The Four-Part Tension Graph

I would teach the tension graph as having four parts:

1. A hook where at the beginning tension is just a little bit higher, artificially higher, in order to say, here’s what’s here. This is going to draw you into this world. There’s some stakes early on that you’re going to immediately be viscerally interested in.

2. 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 I would call the exposition. Who are they? What is the crisis? What are the stakes? Where are these people coming from? Getting everybody on stage. You’ve earned the ability to relax the tension and get everybody on stage because you’ve had that little bit of a bait and switch.

3. Once the reader is oriented in this world, once a certain amount of things have been exposed, then you can start to explore the instabilities of those people in that situation. Now we go back to drama. 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 the wall. You can’t raise the stakes any farther. You’ve reached the ultimate dramatic conflict. That’s the climax of the book.

4. 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 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.

The Art of Dialogue

DAVID PERELL: 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.

RICHARD POWERS: 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.

DAVID PERELL: It’d be terrible.

RICHARD POWERS: It would be chaotic and incoherent. We depend on certain conventions. 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.

You don’t have to go back very far to start leaving your comfort zone in dialogue. If you’re cutting your idea and you’re just living on fiction that’s been written in the last 10 years, and you’re shaping your ear on those conventions, and you go back 20 years or 40 years or 100 years, you might say, people don’t talk like that. But all you’re saying is, I’ve lost my context, my decoder ring for understanding how these dialogues were.

DAVID PERELL: 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?

RICHARD POWERS: 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.

To create dialogue that can elicit different kinds of emotions from people is always furthered, I think, by actually saying it out loud and testing it in the crucible of your ear. 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.

DAVID PERELL: 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?

RICHARD POWERS: There are practitioners that are amazingly varied. Like, you can get a writer like Ann Patchett whose characters—you even forget that they’re characters 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 DeLillo. And you could look at a book like White Noise, and you could look at the dialogue in that book, which is crazy 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, or away from each other. 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.

Quotes and Reflections

DAVID PERELL: 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.”

RICHARD POWERS: I mean, in order to move somebody, you have to use emotions. 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.

DAVID PERELL: “If you would learn the secrets of nature, you must practice more humanity.”

RICHARD POWERS: 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.

DAVID PERELL: “The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.”

RICHARD POWERS: 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. What sense does that make? That’s just crazy.

DAVID PERELL: “When you’re sure of what you’re looking at, look harder.”

RICHARD POWERS: Yeah, because when you’re sure, you’re not moving and reality is always moving. 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.

DAVID PERELL: 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.

RICHARD POWERS: Yeah. Attention is the most profound source of meaning that we can have. And before I wrote The 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 The Overstory, that path started to look like this: red oak, maple, hornbeam. And then as I got deeper into The 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. So the granularity, the particularity, the pleasure of the world depends on slowing down and looking harder.

The Fusion of Thinking and Feeling in Writing

DAVID PERELL: We have this sense that structure is inimical to emotion or that systems are inimical to individuals. 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.

RICHARD POWERS: 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, 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.

The Power of Solitude in the Creative Process

DAVID PERELL: I want to end by hearing about some of the time that you’ve spent writing in solitude. 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.

RICHARD POWERS: 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 one 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. 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 the amazing stimulus of the world. 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. 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 got to give up your solitude. You got to go back down into the maelstrom.

And I think so many creators talk about that boundary condition 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. And you have to play the one off the other.

Different Forms of Composition

DAVID PERELL: Well, it seems like you’ve really experimented with different forms of composition because you were just talking about speech, 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?

RICHARD POWERS: 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 think of it the way that a musician would use different instruments. 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 different, third kind of song. Or you might rotate, you might try different combinations in sequence or in parallel.

I think the same’s 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.

Daily Writing Structure

DAVID PERELL: 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 in there and letting your imagination wander. And do you set deadlines for yourself? How does that work?

RICHARD POWERS: 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 the maybe the first 25, 30 years of my life, knew that I was going to get best results if I had breakfast, if I minimized my interaction with the world, resisted the attempt to 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, as 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, I’ll be four miles down a trail and realize I got to get home as quickly as I can because I can’t hold it all in my memory anymore. So the writing now is a supporting process for trying to keep me growing as a person in a world that keeps growing.

DAVID PERELL: That was such a fun interview. Thank you so much for doing this.

RICHARD POWERS: Pleasure.

DAVID PERELL: It was great to meet you.

RICHARD POWERS: Thanks, David.

DAVID PERELL: Yeah, yeah.

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