TRANSITION Interview #10: NYT Bestselling Author and Novelist Amor Towles.

We discuss life's transitions, balancing the pursuit of passion and the need to make money, as well as his writing process.

Amor Towles is best known for his bestselling novels "A Gentleman in Moscow," "The Lincoln Highway," and his recent collection, "Table for Two," which includes six short stories and a novella.

"A Gentleman in Moscow" was adapted into an eight-part TV series on Paramount+, starring Ewan McGregor.

I reached out to Amor after learning that his novels allowed him to TRANSITION from a career in finance. I was curious about the details of this career shift.

As you’ll learn from our conversation, it’s a bit of a longer story and certainly an impressive one.

You mentioned having worked in finance until your novel "Rules of Civility" received some recognition. Were you writing throughout your entire time in the investment business?

Most but not all. I worked in the investment business for twenty-one years, at a single firm.

I started writing fiction as a kid, in the first grade and in college. After grad school, I moved to New York City to pursue writing, but I ended up joining a friend who was starting an investment firm because I needed a job.

Twenty-one years later, I was still working there.

For the first ten-years, I did stop writing. We were building the firm, but eventually I circled back and started again in my spare time.

Was being a professional writer something you envisioned for yourself during those twenty-one years? Was it part of a plan? Or was it more of a hobby, something you did in your free time?

Well, it took me seven years to write a book I disliked, and so I set that aside. After that I wrote "Rules of Civility," having learned a lot about novels from that failed project. When it became a best-seller, I retired. Left the firm.

To answer your question, the reality is that writing fiction was my dream. I imagined as a young person that one day I would write novels—novels that had a large following and might be viewed as literature.

What happens is that as a young artist, whether you're a writer, a painter, or a musician, half of you is saying, "You know, I think I can do this. I've read my peers, and I'm definitely better than them, and I've looked at my heroes, and I think I could do what they do."

The other half of you says, "There's absolutely zero evidence that I can write anything of quality. The idea that I can do anything well, is completely delusional."

And you have these two voices in your head, and most people go on like that for a while. Years maybe.

What happened for me, in college at Yale, a very accomplished writer named Peter Matthiessen agreed to teach a semester. You had to submit a piece of fiction to get into his class and anyway, I end up getting in, and every week, there was an assignment due, a new story to submit.

So, a few weeks go by, and one day, he asked me to stay after class.

He says, "Look, I don't know who you are or what you want from life, but based on what you've submitted, I think you may be gifted at this. I will take your time here seriously, and I hope you take it seriously as well."

So, that was a big turning point. That's where you start to feel a bit of confidence; you start to believe a bit more in the part of you that says, "I can do this."

Someone who's not your mother, not your high-school teacher, someone older than you, someone you respect.…. Singles you out, I suppose.

What a story. The meeting of two great American authors.

Well, (laughter) that's generous. I want to make sure I answer your question.

I ended up going to graduate school and continued to write fiction. I had a piece published in the Paris Review and decided to keep going - to move to New York.

Eventually, I needed a job. So, I joined my friend, and we started this investment firm. Little by little, the writing stopped.

What happens is that every year that goes by that I'm not writing or not making progress toward dream; there is a growing sense that this could go on forever.

Along the way, I kept up with Matthiessen. He was really disappointed with my decision to work on Wall Street.

He said, "You know what, Amor, the nature of Wall St. is that when people go, they never return. I think you should consider life as a writer over."

I think I was 28 when he said that. Not writing at the time.

That really had an impact on me, and it really motivated me.

I feared one day I would wake up and be fifty and realize I'd spent the better part of my life doing something that is not…. my gift, as Peter said.

That really resonates. So, eventually you do make it back to writing. Did you have to push back from your day job or re-position yourself at the firm? How did you manage writing and work simultaneously?

Well, it took me seven years to write the first novel, which, as I told you, I ended up disliking.

What made me do it was the fear of not doing it.

Good for you. And so as you're writing "Rules of Civility," did you have any idea, the success it would have? That it would lead to you becoming a full time author?

I’ve written since I was young, and not only that, I also read as a writer. I’ve done so my whole life.

As someone who's always wanted to be a writer, I read everything through the lens of a writer, if that makes sense.

So, in a way, by the first ten pages, I could tell it was worth the effort to keep going.

In "Lincoln Highway," we see the characters mainly through first-person point-of-view, except Emmet, who's shown through an omniscient narrator. How do you decide on things like that?

Sometimes it's instinctual, and sometimes it requires experimentation.

I'll ask myself, which should it be? I'll try different ways, and usually, one will present itself as correct.

I'm a planner. By the time I write anything, I've been working out an idea for years. In the case of "Lincoln Highway," I'd been thinking about the idea while writing "Gentleman in Moscow."

Very cool. That element, the differing points of view, does a lot for how you feel about the characters in “Lincoln Highway”, which I assume was by design.

Speaking of "Gentleman in Moscow," how has it been seeing your work on TV? Are you able to separate critiques of the show from critiques of the novel?

The show's not really me. How it’s received or what people think about it; itt doesn't really have a material impact on me.

It's annoying when fans write to me and ask, "Why is this like this, and why this?" It's like, "Don't ask me; I didn't make the show."

You know, you're very fortunate to have your work made into a series with a big budget, with Ewen McGregor as the star and all that. Of course, you think it's annoying when they change this or that, but beyond that, I'm grateful.

You wrote the forward for "The Sun Also Rises," a hundred-year edition or something. Is that right? How did that come about? Hemmingway is sort of a veteran favorite, it seems.

I'm he is.

They were re-issuing all of them since it's been about a hundred years since the originals.

They gathered a team of folks and each of them, the whole collection, "For Whom the Bell Tolls," all of them.

They probably felt my writing has an affinity with Hemmingway's or whatever the case might be, but it was an honor. To write publicly about your heroes - to be included in the volume. It was terrific.

That's really cool. Now that you've had success, are you still as motivated as you were in the first grade, when you knew you wanted to be a writer?

Yeah, you know I started so late. There won't be enough time in my life to write all the novels I'd like. So yes, I plan to keep going as long as I can.

The first time I heard your name, I had a buddy who took this job after the SEAL teams. Essentially riding around the world on a ship, hired gun in essence. Anyway, I asked him, "What do you do to pass all that time?"

He told me he reads about fifty books per tour, so I asked him what his top fiction title was, and he tells me, "A Gentleman in Moscow."

That's great. I get a lot of soldiers, sailors - that write to me.

"Gentleman in Moscow" in particular.

I had an officer from an aircraft carrier write to me and say he was coming home from a six-month deployment back to San Diego in March 2020. Right as they were supposed to dock, the Navy called up and said, "We're not letting anyone off the boat; you have to go back out for another six months!"

Families were all there waiting.

So, the guy tells me, you know, how he related to the Count being confined to the ship.

People come to books for all sorts of reasons.

Oh man. Sounds like something the Navy would do.

Given the disparate worlds you've written about, from hotels in Moscow to middle America, when does an idea become something worth your writing time? How do decide when to really work on an idea you might have?

That's a good question.

I suppose you have all these ideas, and what happens is, let's say you write down fifty of them on 3x5 notecards. You write something like, okay, kid comes home from prison, driven by the warden, and two friends are hiding in the trunk of the car.

For "Lincoln Highway", that was the original idea.

So then, for whatever reason, you add more to one note card than the other forty-nine.

Where would that be set? What year is it? Is it in the Midwest? Maybe the kid would have a bankrupt father….

I'm not writing it yet; it's all in my head. I'm writing "Gentleman in Moscow" while this is going on.

Then you realize that all this stuff no longer fits on a notecard, so you put it in a notebook and then in a Word doc.

So, it's effortless in that way. As a writer, you must be willing to bet - if it interests you, it will interest other people.

I observe veterans who leave the military, and you can tell they feel torn between a career with connection to their passions, their purpose, per se. and a career that's a bit safer, a utility of money if you will.

Obviously, the goal is to find something that does a bit of both, but what advice would you have for someone going through that decision process?

Well, before I ever quit my job, "Rules of Civility" was written, sold, and was actually a best seller by the time I left. I don't want your readers to think I made some big courageous decision.

I get asked to speak about this topic a lot, and it’s not the case that I came home and said, "Honey, I quit my job, and I'm going to write a bestselling novel."

Really all I can attest to is my story. In my version, I did the two simultaneously, and I think for the most part people can do that - hold a day job and create art.

It requires discipline, but there's no one, I'm assuming, with a military background that doesn't have a level of discipline.

Most people who fail at this lack discipline or don't know how to manage their time or how to work on Saturday and Sunday when they need to.

I'll tell you, in those days, we had young kids and full-time jobs. So, for a few years, we had a pattern.

On Saturday and Sunday mornings, we would all have breakfast together and then I would take the kids from nine to one. We'd go to the zoo, we'd have lunch, and then my wife would take the kids from one to five, and then we'd all have dinner.

The reason I'm telling you this, having free time is one thing, but having free time that you don't feel guilty about and your wife doesn't resent is another.

Anyway, the way I made this work, I'm planning all week, Monday through Friday. I'm walking to work, planning these chapters and various scenes, and researching everything I need to know to write come Saturday.

I'm writing it all down.

So, when those four hours come, I'm not staring at a blank page. I'm writing the entire time.

It's sort of trivial, but that’s an example of how you can have two separate lives and make the best of little time, with discipline and planning.

That's great. When this was going on, were you thinking about the business side of being a writer? It seems not that long ago, being an author was more based on merit, the quality of the writing. Now, when you talk to agents or publishing houses, promotion and social media presence almost feel like #1, and the writing is more of a nice to have. Would you agree with that?

Yes, there's some truth to that. In a way, that's always been true, but in the last twenty years, that part of it has increased.

A lot of this is the publishing industry's response to the increased volume of books being published nowadays. In the United States alone, just in fiction, 100k books are published per year.

So, the publisher says, look, we'll publish tons and tons of books, say one hundred. We'll pay a low enough advance, and if three of them succeed, we'll really back those three, really get behind that author, and make all our money back on those three.

If the other ninety-seven die. Frankly, that's fine.

So, in a world where all these books are being published, and most are on very low advance, the responsibility does fall on the author to do what they can to drive sales.

You're a decorator and you have 500k followers on Instagram? That's a huge advantage; they can pay a low advance, and the access to the consumer is already baked in.

The problem is, I have many friends, fiction authors who are very talented, and in this world I'm describing if they haven't invested in social media and haven't built some big following, their art, which might be fantastic, gets looked over. The publisher sees risk, even if the quality of writing is there.

Amor, I really appreciate you doing this. I have a ton of respect for you, and I've learned a lot - just in the last hour. Thank you.