When Amor Towles was in Louisiana for the New Orleans Book Festival March 15-16, he took an hour to chat with Jan Risher. His books, "Rules of Civility," "A Gentleman in Moscow," "The Lincoln Highway," are all bestsellers. Towles' new book, "Table for Two" will be released April 2. The eight-part television series of "A Gentleman in Moscow," starring Ewan McGregor, debuts March 29 Paramount+.
Author Amor Towles is a writer's writer. He creates novels that many readers consider poetry.
There's a reason. Towles spends five years planning each book — an incredible process that involves starting with a kernel of an idea and a humble notebook. From there, Towles invents an entire world around that notion using pen and paper.
Author Amor Towles' 'A Gentleman in Moscow' has been turned into a TV series which begins March 29 on Paramount+.
"I begin with a concept, and then I start to imagine the events around the concept and it gets increasingly more detailed," Towles said. "Then I'm getting to the point where I know everything that's going to happen in the story. I know all the settings, I know the interactions. I know the events. I know the people and their backgrounds, their psychologies, their personalities."
During the design phase, he realizes the tone of the yet-to-be-written work and gets to know the characters.
He doesn't make a list of character attributes, including name, age, size, shape and weight. Instead, he says, the process is more in his head — getting to know the characters.
"You're listening to them or trying to hear them out or trying to imagine them in different situations," Towles said. "You just have to imagine the events that they're going through that are going to be in the book. And then suddenly, you get to an event that they're in and you say, 'Wait a second. They wouldn't do X. They'd do Y.'"
'To understand a human being'
Eventually, he understands the character and their complexities, including his or her duality.
For example, he says, a character isn't just shy — we are all shy under certain circumstances.
"The Lincoln Highway," by Amor Towles. (Viking/TNS)
"They're mean at some times, and they're generous at some times. They're smart sometimes and stupid other times. And so, it is for each of us," he said. "To understand a human being is partly to discover how they act. When do their advantages play to the strengths? When do they undermine them and when do they fail to show up? When are they suddenly heroic in a way that you didn't anticipate and why is that true?"
Somewhere in that process, the characters' names come to him — usually sooner rather than later. Sometimes he knows on the first day. Other times he struggles.
Towles says in "The Lincoln Highway," for example, the names Duchess and Woolly both came early in the process.
"Woolly, I think, is the perfect name for who he is," Towles said. "Because it comes from Wolcott, which is this sort of sophisticated, waspy name, right? But it's been turned into a nickname, which has a soft, vague quality to it. As soon as I thought of it, I was like, 'Oh yeah, that's the guy.'"
Interestingly, Towles does the research for his books after he writes the first draft — which, in the case of "A Gentleman in Moscow," led to an interesting discovery.
When naming the book's main character, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, Towles said, "I was like, yeah, Alexander Ilyich Rostov. That's perfect."
Halfway through writing "A Gentleman in Moscow," he went to check something in "War and Peace" and realized there was a reason he thought the name "Rostov" sounded so good. The family was one of the central families in the novel.
"A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles
Towles' reaction to this detail goes a long way in explaining why his work reads like poetry. He thought he needed to rewrite every sentence in the book in which that name appears.
"Because the cadence is totally different," he said, explaining with another example. "What if I go from Katie to Elizabeth? Well, that's totally different, a different number of words. The syllables are different. One is opening with a vowel instead of a consonant."
Thankfully, a stroke of genius saved Towles from the task of rewriting "A Gentleman in Moscow" despite using the name Rostov — he decided to make him a descendant of Tolstoy's Rostov family.
'Gentleman in Moscow' television series
On March 12, Towles and his family attended the premiere of the eight-hour television series "A Gentleman in Moscow" in New York, including dinner with the series' stars, Ewan McGregor and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the night before. The series begins March 29 on Paramount+.
Towles is pleased with the way the series turned out and says he believes readers will be excited about it.
"It's really good," he said, adding that McGregor and Winstead have great on-screen chemistry.
He said the experience of having his book turned into a series and the success of his books, in general, can be overwhelming.
"As a writer, for me, the writing is what you care about the most — so you do the writing. You write the book, and you're like, 'OK, this feels like this meets my own expectations of what I think I could achieve as a writer.' You then send it to the world. Your primary interest, at that point, really is that, that the book will have some life beyond the binding, but I mean like two friends talking about it over dinner."
Or perhaps a mother calling a daughter to say, "Did you read this?" Towles said — or perhaps someone writing out a passage because the words moved them and they want to keep them.
In essence, he said, a writer hopes that something in some little way changes the way someone sees the world.
"You know, this is what I mean. This is what you're really hoping as a writer, that it has this life out there beyond — where something's happening," he said. "The chemistry of it is living on and, you know, in a positive way, you hope."
Mission accomplished, Mr. Towles.