Amor Towles, author of A Gentleman in Moscow, Rules of Civility, The Lincoln Highway, and the forthcoming story collection Table for Two, discusses his writing process, the craft of description, pacing, outlining, the “tortured artist” trope, career paths, reading as a writer, editing, literary influences, manifestos, and New York City as a setting.
Descriptive writing and vocabulary
Towles builds descriptive power by absorbing vocabularies from different worlds — French aristocratic usage, baseball, finance, ethnic communities, technical and scientific language — and deploying them to evoke a character’s sensibility and historical moment.
In A Gentleman in Moscow, the Count’s French-inflected narration reflects the historical reality that the Russian aristocracy spoke French among themselves in the late 19th century; Towles weaves in whatever French he knows to sharpen that portrayal.
For The Lincoln Highway (set in 1954), he read four novels written within an 18-month window around that year — Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye — to reacquaint himself with the distinct vocabularies, semantics, and thematic concerns of that moment in American literature.
The goal of description is to make the reader feel present in the scene: vivid enough to orient, concise enough not to bog down, so the reader can “walk through the hotel themselves” as events unfold.
Towles balances spare and cumbersome description by adding and subtracting details in revision until a few key elements bring the space to life.
Pacing of a novel
Pacing is an editing skill distinct from drafting: the writer must reread coldly, asking “do I find this boring?” — if the author is bored on the third pass, the reader will be too.
Literary pacing is not the “page-turner” urgency of action-driven plots (e.g., Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels) but a sense of forward pull created by psychological interest, compelling phrasing, or the reader’s desire to understand a character’s next thought or move.
A novel may include deliberately slow passages; the art is knowing when slowness serves the work and when it stalls it.
Premise and outlining
Each novel begins with a simple premise — a single sentence that grabs him (e.g., “guy lives in a hotel for a long period of time”).
Within hours or days, the core elements expand: setting (Russia), character (aristocrat), conflict (house arrest in a luxury hotel across from the Kremlin), timespan (revolution to Cold War).
The idea for A Gentleman in Moscow came while Towles was staying in a hotel in Geneva; he recognized a man in the lobby from the previous year and wrote the key elements in about 90 minutes, then the scaffolding of major events over the next three days.
He then spends a couple of years filling notebooks with handwritten scene visualizations — not chronologically, but whatever scene compels him that day — imagining dialogue, setting, humor, sensory detail.
Only when he knows everything that happens and can visualize it all does he begin writing Chapter 1, drafting over roughly 18 months, then revising from beginning to end two or three times.
He outlines extensively in order to free the poetic, subconscious right brain during drafting: if the analytical left brain is solving plot/logic problems while writing, it dampens the poetic surprises (unexpected gestures, lines of dialogue, shifts of attention) that emerge when the writer can “go with instincts.”
The “tortured artist” trope
The trope traces to the Romantic tradition and figures like Van Gogh; it became a cultural script that suffering and dysfunction are prerequisites for great art.
Historical reality shows a broader distribution: Matisse, Picasso, and many others lived productive, enjoyable lives despite personal flaws.
Many accomplished contemporary writers Towles knows work regular morning hours (e.g., 8 a.m. to noon or 2 p.m.), treating writing as a discipline: “inspiration is what comes to them when they’re at their desk,” not something you wait for before sitting down.
The work gets done by showing up, producing material, then winnowing the good from the sloppy in revision.
Career advice
Towles wrote from childhood, published stories in his 20s, but spent 21 years in finance before Rules of Civility allowed him to write full-time.
There is no single right path: some writers start young (Colson Whitehead), some start later (Lee Child began in his late 30s after a layoff), some balance a career and art for decades.
The variables — financial need, temperament, family, satisfaction — differ for everyone; each person must decide what works for them.
What makes good descriptiveness
Good description exceeds what the mind would generate on its own; it creates a feedback loop: describe → see more → describe more deeply.
Avoid “landmark” clichés that merely signal time/place (e.g., “Birds Eye frozen peas, Frigidaire, The Beatles on the radio”). Instead, adopt the perceiving character’s specific perspective: a child in 1964 sees the frozen peas slide out as a brick, break over the pot, bounce across the counter, tastes a frozen pea — that is the scene.
Layer in unseen emotional undercurrents: if the mother discovered her husband’s infidelity that morning, or cheated herself, the child senses a shift in tone, tempo, vocabulary, behavior — though the child doesn’t know why. Later, the reader can reread and feel the truth was there all along.
This iterative process — observe accurately, write carefully, then build linguistic layers (word choice, rhythm, poetry) to suggest the larger emotional and historical truth — is the core of the craft.
Towles writes the first draft for himself, indulging whims, digressions, length; revision then flips the lens to the reader’s perspective, honoring the “covenant” of the reader’s time and money by cutting redundancies, clichés, boring passages, and self-indulgent asides to achieve “pure economy of the elements that belong in this story.”
Teaching writing
Towles has not taught formally; he notes that many accomplished novelists (Michael Cunningham, Gary Shteyngart, Jeffrey Eugenides) do teach and would have better answers.
For him, practice — repetition — is the primary teacher: gaining command of craft elements (plot, setting, dialogue, tone, perspective, metaphor, allusion, allegory) by constantly writing stories that use them.
Workshops’ greatest value is the deadline: “you are handing something in” — it forces completion and exposes you to how others analyze your work.
He advocates writing from radically different perspectives (gender, age, class, race, nationality) to learn that craft elements like “setting” or “dialogue” are not monolithic: an 80-year-old wealthy woman and a kid on Chicago’s South Side describe a room differently. The meta-lesson is how to re-approach the same element in different styles to evoke different interior mindsets.
Consuming and deconstructing
Reading and writing developed simultaneously from first grade (a visit from poet David McCord sparked the desire to write).
Early reading (Hardy Boys, Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming) gave way to literary study in high school and college (Stanford), where he wrote essays on structure in Hemingway, poetics in Melville, etc.
He always reads with a pen; the line between reading and writing blurs — each influences the other profoundly.
Over time, a writer starts to “see through the book”: perceiving structure, narrative voice, stylistic choices, and learning from them.
For 20 years, Towles has participated in a reading group (three friends, one novel a month, often thematic projects: an author’s works chronologically, books set in the same place, etc.). They discuss strengths, weaknesses, narrative voice, style, and sometimes pause to admire a sentence or paragraph’s construction.
The group predominantly reads dead authors: history filters out the mediocre over ~50 years, leaving a higher concentration of rewarding work for limited reading time.
Examples: Don DeLillo’s early novels were uneven; White Noise and Underworld are masterpieces. Philip Roth grew stronger late (American Pastoral). Hemingway’s late work is unreadable; his best came before 30. The group reads uneven authors to understand their evolution and extract the masterpieces.
Editing drafts and getting feedback
Towles does not share the first draft. Once complete, he gives it to a handful of trusted readers: his editors (New York, London), his agent, and three friends who are thoughtful, careful readers (writers, editors, agents, literature scholars).
The reading group is separate — a long-term book club for discussion, not manuscript feedback.
Admired writers and sentence-level craft
The group often dwells on specific sentences: e.g., a Roth paragraph that fluidly shifts from one character’s perspective to omniscient to another character’s without disruption — a technical feat that expands narrative possibility.
Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler opens with a self-indulgent, hilarious first sentence that the group admires for its audacity.
Towles reads poetry (Whitman, Dickinson, T.S. Eliot) but believes poetic sensibility can be learned from novelists who tilt toward poetics (e.g., Toni Morrison).
In narrative, he dials poetic density up and down: pure poetry sustained over a novel would exhaust readers; the novel invites settling in, then lures the reader into more dreamlike, demanding passages, then returns to clarity — a rhythm of control and release.
Manifestos
Towles collects manifestos (Surrealist, Communist, Futurist); their energy — staccato, declarative, unqualified, pushing forward without bogging in examples — is a “language” a writer can absorb and deploy tactically, even in a domestic novel, to inject urgency and assurance at key moments.
The Futurist Manifesto’s “braggadocious arrogance” and bodily roar exemplify language tied to action, not description — a useful tool in the writer’s vocabulary.
Opening for doors / short story genesis
A writer’s mind constantly moves from a witnessed detail to what lies beyond: an Art Nouveau door suggests a world behind it; a couple at a restaurant suggests a story.
Table for Two (April 2024) contains six New York stories and a novella; most began with a small real-life observation and a “what if.”
“The Bootlegger”: at Carnegie Hall, the man next to Towles recorded the concert, ruining it; Towles fantasized about reporting him, the cascade of consequences — the story’s first page is the real event; the rest is what he didn’t do.
Larger projects feel like “opening doors” in a mansion: ideas fire like synapses, revealing many rooms, layers, characters, directions — a physical sensation of richness signaling the project has scope.
New York City as a setting
Rules of Civility (1930s New York) crystallized Towles’s view: New York is not just an ethnic/religious melting pot but a “melting pot of passions” — capital or co-capital of journalism, cuisine, dance, theater, architecture, finance, law, advertising, etc.
Each field draws a distinct type of person; the 25–30-year-old culture becomes a simultaneous pursuit of wildly different dreams in the same space, creating a strange, electric texture.
The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis (Maxfield Parrish mural, 100 years old) appears in Rules of Civility; the same room, different decades of dreamers — “musical chairs” of ambition.
The Lincoln Highway passes through New York; most stories in Table for Two are set there. It remains a rich, fun stomping ground.
