Richard Powers' Advice on Writing: The Pulitzer Winner Who Dictates His Novels

Richard Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for The Overstory in 2019. Fourteen novels, including Bewilderment, The Echo Maker, Galatea 2.2, and Playground. His work fuses literary fiction with science and the non-human world in ways few other novelists attempt.

His writing advice comes from David Perell's "How I Write" podcast, the Paris Review, The Smart Set, Literary Hub, and PBS NewsHour.

Voice Drives Character, Character Drives Drama

Voice drives character. Character drives drama. Drama generates form.

The opening line of The Overstory: "Each child's tree has its own excellence." Powers calls it a "registral trick" - it shifts between the ordinary and the exalted in seven words. That shift is voice.

Voice creates character because the way someone speaks reveals who they are. Character creates drama because our brains evolved to track hidden motivations: who is up, who is down, who holds a grudge, who is nostalgic for the road not taken. "We're all novelists in our own lives."

Powers teaches characterization using the Stanislavski method - building characters like an onion. Outside: traits, physical details. One layer in: mannerisms. Deeper: core values like honesty, fidelity, perseverance. The outer behaviors both hide and reveal the inner values.

Drama comes when you push a character to the wall. "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." That choice is a story. "In fact, that's 10,000 stories."

Three Kinds of Drama

Person against themselves. The psychological novel. "When I go out into the tumult of the world, my sense of self has to readjust."

Person against person. The sociological novel. "I can make you completely sympathetic to the reader and I can make myself completely sympathetic to the reader. But now the reader is watching two people collide." The reader has to decide who is right.

Person against the environment. The metaphysical novel. Human beings want a certain story about their lives. The rest of the world may be hostile to that story.

Powers noticed contemporary fiction had mastered the first two but abandoned the third. "We were getting extremely able in our ability to tell stories about humans but only as if humans were autonomous and independent from everything else." Then the climate crisis arrived. "There's a growing awareness that we didn't win. In fact, we're losing." The Overstory was his attempt to write all three at once.

Writing in the Dark, Dictating in Bed

Powers dictates his novels lying in bed. Covers up. Light off. Bare ceiling. He speaks.

"My composition process needs to remove the overwhelming stimulus of the world in order to create a richness in my own imagination." The sensory deprivation is deliberate. All the neural machinery that would process the visible world gets repurposed for invention.

"Authors have dictated their stories since Socrates." Milton dictated Paradise Lost. Henry James dictated to a secretary.

"I can write lying down. I can live above the level of the phrase." When typing, the fingers constrain the mind to the sentence. When speaking, the mind roams across paragraphs, scenes, and ideas.

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." He composes in isolation, then returns to the world to check whether what he has made is true.

Making Language Alive

From The Overstory: "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."

"The greatest science writers know that empiricism and the spirit aren't really combating programs. They actually depend on one another." The character Patricia Westerford uses vocabulary that is lyrical and spiritual, but "every claim that she makes has some kind of empirical backing in peer-reviewed journal articles."

Take scientific fact and render it in the language of wonder. "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."

Experiments show that people who read fiction involving emotional content become significantly more generous afterward - toward random strangers. "The smallest appeal to affect and to identification can make people do things that argument cannot."

Dialogue That Feels Alive

If you transcribed how people actually talk on a bus, "it would be terrible. Chaotic and incoherent." What we call "realistic dialogue" is actually "the dialogue that knows how to manipulate the conventional expectations that have been established for dialogue at this moment."

Say it out loud. "When we read, we subvocalize. You're hearing it subvocally."

He admires Anne Patchett, whose characters "you even forget are characters." He admires Don DeLillo, whose dialogue in White Noise is "crazy and highly artificial" yet captures "the absurdity of the way that we talk through each other." Both approaches work. The writer has heard the dialogue.

The Tension Graph

Story structure as a tension graph: hook, exposition, rising action, climax, denouement (from the French for "the untying").

"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."

"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."

Scheduling Around Nature

For his first 25 to 30 years, Powers wrote a thousand words every morning. Now his primary job is being in the world.

"The first thing I will do in the morning is check the weather report and ask myself what's going on out there, at what elevation, and where's the show, and where can I learn something."

He walks into nature. Sentences come. "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."

The writing has become "a supporting process for trying to keep me growing as a person in the world that keeps growing." The experience feeds the writing, not the other way around.

Key Takeaways

• Voice drives character, character drives drama, drama generates form. Start with voice.
• Push characters to the wall. Make them choose between two values they hold equally.
• Write all three kinds of drama: person vs. self, person vs. person, person vs. environment.
• Dictation frees the mind from the constraint of the phrase. Try writing by voice.
• Remove sensory stimulus to activate imagination. The dark, the quiet, the bare ceiling.
• Fuse science with spirit. Facts inform. Emotion transforms.
• Say dialogue out loud. The reader will hear it subvocally.
• Structure is a tension graph. Hook, exposition, rising action, climax, denouement.
• Go outside. The world is the material.

"The sled is only going to move when all the dogs are in harness and they're all pulling in the same direction."

Sources: Powers' How I Write episode, the Paris Review, The Smart Set, and PBS NewsHour. Athens is an AI writing editor.