Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers, approaches writing as a process of patient improvisation rather than structured planning, prioritizing vivid description and the mysteries of consciousness over plot, and teaches writers to slow down, observe the world pre-linguistically, and find their own aesthetic voice through deep attention and revision.
Writing as Improvisation and Observation
Paul does not write with outlines; he treats writing as improvisation, likening it to Buster Keaton walking across an unfinished skyscraper—stepping into open space and trusting the next girder will appear.
This approach mirrors the scientific concept of emergence: once a complex system (like a sentence) is set into motion, unpredictable properties arise that could not have been foreseen.
He teaches writers to develop the skill of pre-linguistic observation—slowing down, dropping received or habituated language, and seeing the world without the filter of clichés or pre-fabricated phrases.
He emphasizes that everyday language used to get through routine tasks does not work in good writing; writers must enter each scene without a pre-planned repertoire of words.
He models this thoughtfulness for students not to impose his method as normative, but to help them observe themselves as writers and discover what works for their own taste and temperament.
Patience as the Core Discipline
When asked what message he would put on his headstone for students, Paul says: “Slow down.”
Patience means really taking in what you are looking at, sustaining attention when something interesting appears, and not rushing toward symbolic meanings or predetermined messages.
He describes his process of writing the opening of Tinkers: starting with his grandfather’s hallucination of cracks in the ceiling, he followed the image literally—cracks widening, ceiling caving in, seeing wires and plumbing, then the roof collapsing, clouds falling, blue draining away, stars falling, leaving only black—arriving at the image of a funeral shroud.
That passage, which took shape through patient literal pursuit rather than symbolic planning, came out almost fully formed in one draft, though other passages took years of returning and recalibrating.
He writes roughly 1,000 pages to produce a 150-page book, treating revision not as punishment but as an insurance policy—chiseling away through process of elimination until the right expression emerges.
Building Character Through Description
Paul is less interested in plot and only halfway interested in character in the traditional sense; he is primarily interested in consciousness and description.
He uses Marilyn Robinson’s concept of co-extensivity—the idea that interiority and exteriority are not separate realms but one continuous fabric—so that describing the Boston Common in layers of color and light simultaneously renders a character’s inner life.
Description becomes character: the way a character notices, associates, and uses language reveals who they are.
Each character develops a repertoire—certain verbs, nouns, colors, and qualities of light unique to them—so that patterns of association distinguish one character from another.
He thinks of plot as Newtonian physics (mechanical cause-and-effect) and consciousness as quantum (instantaneous, associative, supra-luminary), and he wants his novels to move associatively rather than mechanically.
Reading Deeply and Ambitiously
Paul undertook ambitious reading as an undergraduate at UMass Amherst—The Sound and the Fury, Magic Mountain, War and Peace—with the goal of becoming a good reader, believing that writing can only be as good as the best stuff one has read and the depth with which one has read it.
He encourages students to compare their writing honestly to their favorite books, to feel the gap, and to work toward closing it—not out of humiliation but out of humility and ambition.
He distinguishes between being self-conscious about writing (fear of being accused of aspiring to Faulkner) and being self-aware (knowing you want to write a great book and giving yourself permission to try).
He wants his books to be as deep as the greats even if they are not as wide: his novels are around 200 pages, but he aims to make them “800 pages deep,” packing maximum density of meaning and lived experience into a short, lucid form.
Language, Dictionaries, and the Mystery of Words
Paul reads the dictionary every day—not for exotic words but for deeper understanding of ordinary ones, tracing etymology and historical shifts in meaning.
He discovered that the suffix -ly originally turned nouns into adjectives describing someone who inhabited the ideal version of that thing, and was never attached to words with negative connotations for its first centuries (so “happily” existed but not “sadly”).
He notes that temptation originally meant a true test of character (as in God tempting Abraham) and only later came to mean luring someone into bad behavior through deception.
He uses the Webster’s 1913 dictionary rather than modern online definitions, finding that older definitions have a poetic richness and dynamic range that contemporary usage has flattened.
He believes language has been stripped of its contours by advertising and algorithmic social media, reducing nuance to the lowest common denominator.
Writing for Smart Readers, Not Everyone
Paul writes for what he calls “brilliant, big-brained and bighearted people”—readers who want to work for meaning and return to books multiple times, finding new layers each time.
He believes great art, unlike propaganda, does not give everything away at the beginning; it grows on you, rewards rereading, and functions like an “endless well” (he cites Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Moby Dick as examples).
He points out that literature is the only art form where people say “I read that book once”—nobody says that about their favorite album or movie—and he wants his books to be the kind readers return to.
He deliberately withholds plot information to avoid mechanical cause-and-effect, opening the first sentence of Tinkers with “Eight days before he died” so the reader knows from the start that no plot twist will save the character—the story is in the telling.
He tells students: when you write a sentence, billions of people stampede for the exits, but a dozen come down to the front row and say “What happened next?”—those are the readers you are writing for.
What Fiction Can Do That Essays Cannot
Paul’s novels do not have a thesis; they do not work by argumentation but by recognition—the reader says “I totally recognize that, I’ve just never seen anyone put it in words before.”
He wants every reader who enters his books in good faith to feel they have been paid the highest respect for the dignity of their soul, never belittled or exploited for the sake of the author’s cleverness.
He aims for universality: someone a hundred years from now in a completely different culture should be able to read a translation and recognize emotions like betrayal, elation, arrogance, or humiliation.
He does not explain or interpret for the reader; he describes experiences and consequences, trusting the reader to find meaning—comparing his work to portraiture, which depicts without explaining.
Revision, Precision, and the Drummer’s Ear
Paul revises obsessively: when Tinkers was reprinted, he made approximately 250 changes, mostly commas and rhythmic adjustments, treating prose the way a drummer treats time—removing an extra eighth note, shifting accents, finding the right beat.
His background as a touring drummer directly informs his writing: he thinks of sentences in terms of tempo, rhythm, dynamics, and pacing, often knowing how many beats a sentence has before he knows what it literally means.
He demonstrates this with a passage from Tinkers: “He tinkered tin pots, rod iron, solder melted and cupped in a clay dam. Quicksilver patchwork, occasionally a pot hammered back flat. The tinkle of tin, sibilant, tiny, beneath the lid of the boreal forest. Tinkerbird, coppersmith, but mostly a brush and mop drummer”—a passage he describes as “just drums,” using monosyllabic words and internal rhythm to give the character a swagger and funkiness the character wishes he had.
He cautions against making prose too sing-songy or symmetrical, aiming instead for something angular and choppy but with a heartbeat and sway.
Influences: Emerson, Melville, Shakespeare, and the Transcendentalists
Emerson: Paul’s favorite sentence in Tinkers—“Behold and be a genius”—is one he felt Emerson could have written. He admires Emerson’s sermons for their associative, non-argumentative structure and their luminous, numinous moments of beauty.
Melville: He read Moby Dick multiple times before recognizing its deep engagement with Shakespeare and the Old Testament; he sees Ahab’s whale and Faulkner’s bear as meditations on the Leviathan from the Book of Job, creating a telescoping chain of literary inheritance.
Shakespeare: He admires the democratic accessibility of Shakespeare’s art—written for both kings and groundlings—and the way every line means exactly what it says literally, while figurative meaning emerges from how lines are arranged, recycled, and juxtaposed.
Transcendentalism: Reading Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience was the first time literature “blew his mind” and activated something in his brain; he wants to do that for readers—to write in dialogue with the literary tradition, treating his novels as “literary MRIs of his imagination.”
He sees all these writers as his “aunts and uncles” and wants to be part of that tradition while adding to it in his own voice.
The Writer’s Life and Dark Nights
Paul describes the writing life as one of continually confronting your own limitations—every day sitting down and asking “How can I express that better?”—which means constantly running into brick walls and groping for a way through.
He acknowledges many “dark nights of the soul” but says the work is worth it, and his core advice remains: slow down, be patient, and trust the process.
