Amor Towles' Advice on Writing: The Craft Analogy and Why Research Comes Last

Amor Towles is the author of Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Lincoln Highway. All three became New York Times bestsellers. A Gentleman in Moscow has sold over five million copies worldwide. Before becoming a novelist, he spent twenty years in the investment business. He did not publish his first novel until he was 46.

His writing advice comes from David Perell's How I Write podcast, interviews in The Writer Magazine and Writer's Digest, a UVA literary conversation, a Walker Dunlop talk, and essays on LitHub.

The Tennis Analogy

Towles compares learning to write to learning tennis. You do not learn tennis by playing matches. You learn it by practicing individual strokes. Forehand. Backhand. Serve. Volley. You hit each one thousands of times until it becomes instinctive. Then you play matches.

Writing works the same way. The individual elements are tense, point of view, pacing, metaphor, dialogue, and style. Master each one through deliberate practice. Write scenes focused solely on dialogue. Write passages focused solely on pacing. Write descriptions focused solely on metaphor.

Most aspiring writers skip this step. They jump straight to writing novels. That is like entering a tennis tournament before learning to serve. You might have natural talent. But talent without technique hits a ceiling fast.

This framing matters because it makes writing a learnable craft. Not a mystical gift. Not something you either have or you do not. A set of skills you can practice, improve, and eventually master. Towles is proof. He spent twenty years in finance, practicing writing on the side. When he finally published, the craft was ready.

The Multi-Year Design Phase

Before Towles writes a single sentence of prose, he spends years designing the story. He fills notebooks. He imagines characters, settings, scenes, and turning points. He creates a detailed outline of 25 to 40 pages. Only after the design is complete does he begin writing.

This is unusual. Most writing advice says to start writing and discover the story along the way. Towles does the opposite. He discovers the story through planning, then executes through writing. By the time he sits down to draft, he knows every major beat.

The advantage is confidence. When you know where the story is going, you can focus on the prose. You are not anxiously wondering what happens next. You are crafting how it happens. The what is settled. The how is the art.

Research Comes Last

This is Towles' most counterintuitive principle. He imagines the story fully before doing any research. He designs characters, plots scenes, and builds the world entirely from imagination. Only after the story is designed does he research the historical details.

Why? Because research constrains imagination. If you start with research, you write around the facts. The facts dictate the story. The story becomes a delivery vehicle for things you learned, rather than an experience you created.

When research comes last, imagination leads. You invent the scene you want to write. Then you check whether the details are plausible. If they are not, you adjust. But the core of the scene - the emotion, the conflict, the turning point - stays intact. The facts serve the story. The story does not serve the facts.

Towles revised A Gentleman in Moscow based on research about 1920s and 1930s Russia. But the research changed details, not structure. The hotel, the characters, the emotional arc - all of that came from imagination first.

Sit for Twenty Minutes

"If you start to write a scene, stick at that for 20 minutes, eventually the creative function takes over." Towles does not believe in waiting for inspiration. Inspiration comes from working. Sit down. Start writing. The first ten minutes might produce garbage. The next ten minutes will produce something real.

This echoes Pressfield's war against Resistance. The professional shows up every day regardless of how they feel. The amateur waits until conditions are perfect. Conditions are never perfect. Start anyway.

One Year, One Draft

Towles writes his first draft in about one year. He completes roughly one chapter per week. This pace creates momentum without sacrificing quality. Fast enough to maintain energy and continuity. Slow enough to craft each chapter carefully.

One chapter per week means the book stays fresh. You remember what you wrote last week. You can hear the rhythm of the previous chapter as you write the next one. Stretch the timeline to two or three years and you lose that continuity. Compress it to a few months and you sacrifice craft.

Revision Is Compression

"Revision is making what was already there more dense and economic." Towles does not revise by adding. He revises by removing. Three full revisions over three years. Each pass makes the prose tighter, the scenes more efficient, the language more precise.

This is the sculptor's approach. The story is already inside the block. Revision chips away everything that is not the story. If a paragraph can be a sentence, make it a sentence. If a scene can be cut without losing anything essential, cut it.

Three years of revision for a novel that took one year to draft. That ratio tells you where Towles believes the real work happens. Not in the first draft. In the compression that follows.

Make Art Every Day

Towles advises making art as many days of the year as possible. Interruptions of ten or more days make it hard to restart. The creative muscle atrophies quickly. Even a short session keeps it alive.

This is not about word counts or page goals. It is about maintaining the connection to the work. A novelist who writes every day lives inside the story. A novelist who writes sporadically has to re-enter the story each time. That re-entry costs time and energy.

Listen for Characters' Voices

Towles says he hears his characters' inner thoughts. He listens to how they think, even when those thoughts never reach the page. This is not mystical. It is practical. A character who thinks in short, clipped sentences behaves differently from one who thinks in long, meandering ones. The inner voice shapes the outer action.

Even if you never write the character's thoughts directly, knowing their inner voice makes their dialogue sharper. Their decisions more consistent. Their reactions more believable. The reader senses the depth without seeing it spelled out.

Key Takeaways

• Writing is a learnable craft. Practice individual elements like a tennis player practices strokes.
• Design the story for years before writing. A 25-to-40-page outline is not excessive.
• Research comes last. Imagination first. Let facts serve the story, not the other way around.
• Sit for twenty minutes. Inspiration follows effort, not the reverse.
• One chapter per week. Fast enough for momentum. Slow enough for craft.
• Revision is compression. Make what exists more dense and economic.
• Write every day. Gaps of ten or more days break the connection to the work.
• Listen for characters' inner voices. Even unwritten thoughts shape behavior.

Towles' revision principle - "dense and economic" - is exactly what AI editing with diffs helps you achieve. Each pass tightens the prose. You see exactly what got cut and why. Accept the compression that improves the sentence. Reject the compression that removes character. The tool shows the tradeoff. You make the call.

This post draws from Towles' appearance on How I Write, The Writer Magazine, Writer's Digest, and LitHub. Athens is an AI writing editor that helps you revise your book the way Towles revises: tighter, denser, more economic - with every change visible.