> [!cite]- Metadata > 2025-06-12 22:17 > Status: #secondary #podcast > Tags: [[5 - Atlas/Tags/Writing]] `Read Time: 5m 37s` > Paul Harding (born 1967) is an American musician and author, best known for his debut novel Tinkers (2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2010 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, among other honors. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston. Won the Pulitzer prize for his very first novel called "Tinkers Interested in describing the wonders and mysteries of life. Will teach us how to describe reality more vividly. - How to see - How to hear - How to feel One of the dangers of teaching is modeling what works for you as being normative. I'm modeling the thoughtfulness that's required and the self-awareness that's required to figure out what works for you. Buster Keaton stepping off the building and the girder just appears underneath your feet. This eventually leads to what physicists call 'emergence' which is the idea that any system of a certain amount of complexity will have unpredictable outcomes when set into motion. The power of observation is a skill that needs to be developed. Work it. Devoting the best quality of observation possible by dropping any kind of presumption. Drop all use of received, acculturated, or habituated language. The prefabricated, off-the-rack language that people are accustomed to using, I have to brush my teeth, put my shoes on, cordially conversational will not work. You have to approach writing with the mindset of "I know I'm attracted to this, but I don't know what I'm going to find." You should not approach it with language that you expect to deploy. Great observation is not about muscle memory or reflexes, it takes patience. Extended metaphors. You keep testing something until it gets to the endpoint. Cracks in the ceiling. Roof Caves in. Clouds Fall. Color of sky drains. Stars fall. Blackness. "Character is always being refracted through description." **COEXTENSIVITY** "Wasn't he the cleverest boy in class" "It's like learning every word in the dictionary and not having anything to say" Whitney Balliett of the New Yorker described Buddy Rich as a mere virtuoso. **SLOW DOWN** Prize winning is a really rowdy spectator sport. Very partisan. Author X wins the Pulitzer. That's it for art. We're dead. Writing and literature is the only artform I know where someone will say. Oh yeah I've read that book. Once. You don't say that about your favorite album or your favorite movie. I think writing can only be as good as the best stuff you've read. Aspire to be a good reader. Furthermore it can only be as good as the best readings you can give to the best stuff. Compare your stuff to theirs. The best. Your own personal cannon. You want to evolve from being self-conscious about your writing to being self aware about your writing. One of the ways self-consciousness precipitates is, people not wanting to be accused of wanting to write as well as Faulkner. Wouldn't you want to write a book that's as good as your favorite book? Melville was just trying to write a book as good as Hamlet. "I don't want you in my house while I'm building it." What a real writer would do is anything that it takes to get it on the page. Autodidact Counterpoint and Juxtaposition. "The essence of clouds is a vapor. What if they were stones." So much in narrative happens in verbs. "Clouds are silent. Barking Clouds." Riff. Could that work? "The stampede of clouds roaring across the sky." **RIFF** The reader: "I don't really know what that means." Again it's descriptive. The suffix -Ly turned nouns into adjectives that describe somebody or something inhabiting the ideal version of something. So the suffix -Ly was never placed on words with a negative connotation. Temptation used to mean a true test of character. God tempted Abraham. Now it means luring someone toward bad behavior. "I'm interested in character, and plot emerges out of character. I'm just interested in consciousness. I think of plot as Newtonian physics. It's mechanical. But I think of the mind, once you get into a character's mind and it's interior, I think of the mind as quantum. It's supra-luminary. It just moves instantly." Your mind can think of when you were 6. 26. and 36. in an instant. It can jump between memories and associations instantly. Supra-luminary. Insist on the idea that your brain is a fingerprint and find your own style. Maximum density and maximum clarity. My books are only 200 pages long. So I'll try to make them 800 pages deep. If someone reads my book and gets the point then they never have to think about it again. A lot of the time lessons and parables prove to be tautological. They are trivial. "Be Kind to Strangers." No kidding. I didn't need to read your book to get that. Pedantic. Received opinion. Right thinking. High Sentiment. Dilating perception. Dialogue. Leading the reader down into a hole and then saying "Look at this thing that I found." When curating a gallery you think of a person moving through the entire space. The journey. The way you persuade through poetry or aesthetic, fiction is through recognition. "Oh my god. This is absolutely true I've just never seen someone put it into words before." The idea that we know better than how we act. Having the character say "Here I go again. I know better." The minute I write a sentence down I can feel billions of people stampeding for the exits. Right. But then there's a dozen people who come from the cheap seats down to the front row and they say "yeah, what happened next?" Those are the people you are writing your book for. Great theologians. Great musicians. Great Writers. Take whatever idiom grabs them and push deeper into human experience **HUMAN EXPERIENCE** It's a little showy and a little stagey. and I was younger and a little bit of that 'look at me I'm the-" and then realizing that's about as interesting as the 8-year old's making you watch them do cartwheels. The teenager who wears Hot Topic. Pretty and Beautiful Rococo Bologna. What is beautiful in this that is attracting me to it? Time after time after time after time. If it adheres in the stuff itself, then my job is actually to write about it very precisely. I was afraid that If I leaned into it then it would turn into clinical, boring sounding stuff, and it didn't! How do you describe light? How do you add calculus to it so that the light moves? Obtain a botanists precision of description. Having faith that the world means itself. The idea that you can move the reader and they can find it interesting if you give them the thing itself. "To describe something is not to explain it, to know something is not to understand it." You don't have to know everything before you start writing it. One way to think about it is you are making portraits. You're writing portraiture. If you think of making a portrait of somebody, that's not explaining them. You don't have to understand them. You're just depicting them. Writing is not theoretical. You can't just think your way to becoming a better writer. People think of that as a prison sentence, but it's more like an insurance policy. It's like saying you're not going to get it right the first time. In order to get it right, you have to get it wrong in a particular way. Just be self-aware and self concious that you are going to write a lot of crappy prose. You just are. For a 150 page book. I'll write 1,000 pages. 1st page of the readers copy of Tinkers. "Le Corbusier. No one knows the size of my waste basket." FIDELITY Being an artist is one of the only professions where you sit down everyday and confront your limitations. --- ### **References** [How to Write Freakishly Well — Paul Harding](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roLRPQPQU58&ab_channel=DavidPerell)