‘Inside UVA’: New York Times No. 1 Bestseller Amor Towles Talks Writing

Jim Ryan, president of the University of Virginia:
You said you were in first grade? I think I wanted to be a fireman when I was in first grade.

Amor Towles, novelist:
How’s it going?

Ryan:
Some days it feels like that’s my job.

Towles:
It is your job.

Ryan:
Hello, everyone. I’m Jim Ryan, president of the University of Virginia, and welcome to another episode of Inside UVA. This podcast is usually a chance to highlight the remarkable people who make UVA the institution it is.

Today, however, I’m excited to bring to you a special edition of Inside UVA. For the first time ever, our guest comes from outside the University. His name is Amor Towles. He is one of today’s most celebrated novelists, known for “Rules of Civility,” “A Gentleman in Moscow” and “The Lincoln Highway.” His latest work, “Table for Two,” is a collection of short stories and a novella.

Amor’s journey from studying literature at Yale and Stanford to two decades in finance to becoming a best-selling author illustrates, among other things, the lifelong pursuit of learning and creativity that we celebrate here at UVA. Amor, welcome to Inside UVA. I am thrilled to have you join.

Towles:
Thanks, Jim. It’s great to be here.

Ryan:
So first, let me provide a little bit of context to our listeners. Amor and I shared a stage at the Paramount in Charlottesville, having a conversation about his career and his writing back in October. It was hosted by the Virginia Humanities and the Brown Advisory Group and instigated by our mutual friend Andy Block.

I found the discussion so engaging that I wanted to bring a little bit of it to the podcast and share it with all of you. So, Amor, let’s get right to it. Why do you write?

Towles:
That’s a good, fundamental, essential question that nobody ever asks. I began writing fiction and really knew that I wanted to be a fiction writer in first grade. And so, a poet came to visit my first grade class. He was quite a well-known poet in New England at the time, a poet of juvenile poetry. He wrote poetry for the young. And I just remember sitting in the classroom and him reading his poetry from his book. And you know we were all gathered around, and then at the end, we were given copies of his books, which he signed. And I just thought everything about it was amazing, you know? I just thought that the way he used language was fascinating and fun. I thought that, you know, the rhyme schemes were fun. I thought that the way the nature of him as an observer of the world was terrific. I liked that. We were all gathered around listening to him. I loved the sign book. I love bringing it home.

Ryan:
You said you were in first grade? I think I wanted to be a fireman when I was in first grade.

Towles:
Yeah. And how’s it going?

Ryan:
Some days it feels like that’s my job.

Towles:
It is your job.

Ryan:
Did you share this news with your classmates or your teacher or your parents?

Towles:
No, I think it is a very, it’s a very internal thing, you know, and I think that’s true of a lot of artistic discovery in the young, is it becomes very private, very early.

So, what happens is that at that moment, writing and reading were fused for me. So, I began writing poetry like David McCord, like that night. But then you start to discover the new things that you’re reading, the short stories of Ray Bradbury, the science fiction writer, and then it’s, you know, Agatha Christie mysteries as you’re aging.

And each step along the way, I’m reading those books as someone who loves writing and wants to write and who wants to be a storyteller. And then eventually you’re beginning to write versions of what they were doing as a way of, sort of, gaining command of the craft. But then you get to be like 16, 17, and you’re beginning to study serious writing. I mean writing of a different depth, and it sort of opens up your eyes to what storytelling could be.

You get how exciting the Greek myths are. You get how exciting the science fiction short story is. You get how exciting some of the movies that you’re watching are. So, your narrative is there, your love of language is there. But you don’t really understand until you’re, you know, as I say, 15, 16, 17, when you start to read, you know, a novel of substance. You don’t really understand what storytelling is capable of, and that gets really exciting. And so, you know, going back to your question about, you know, why do I write? It begins with falling in love with every aspect of it as a very young person, and then, you know, holding on as tightly as I could, you know, in the decades that followed.

Ryan:
And this is a, in a sense, a follow-up question. What aspect of it do you find most fulfilling? Is it the craft piece? Is it the idea that you can share your ideas with your readers? Is it that you are doing something that is simply pleasing to you, or is it all the above?

Towles:
It starts with a love of language and storytelling. But the love of language, I don’t need other people to witness it. I don’t need to have it affect other people. I just love it. I love words. I love the way they interact. I love the construction of sentences and paragraphs and the communication of meaning through language or beauty or, you know, or whatever, human emotion.

So, I just love everything about that, and I think, like most people who really love writing and want to be writers, is you do it for yourself, if you didn’t have an audience. And you’d be satisfied with a small audience, you know, if, well, that’s what you ended up with. That wouldn’t deter you from immersing yourself in the pursuit.

But, you know, part of storytelling, of course, since the beginning of time, is that it is a shared art form. We, you know, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” were originally oral stories that were shared, told to listeners, and that’s built in there too. So, I think that if you have that desire, the love of storytelling, it is bound up to some degree, in the interest in sharing the story and the impact that might have on the listener, either to entertain them or to change their views or to affect their emotions, or all of the above in sophisticated work. It’s this simultaneously inward-looking pursuit, the love of the art form itself, but an outward one, where storytelling demands a listener or seeks a listener.

Ryan:
We talked a little bit about this back in October. You have a very meticulous writing process, and I wonder if you can talk a little bit about it. And I didn’t ask you then, but I’m curious how, if at all, your process differs from others, that is, you must talk to other writers. Is your process unique, or do other writers follow it as well? Or were you following an example of another writer?

Towles:
You’re right. I do know a lot of my peers, and I do know, you know, aspects of how they approach their work. I also have read how the authors I admire approach their work in cases, and so what I can tell you is that everybody does it differently. You know, Ann Patchett and I are quite close, you know, the novelist Ann Patchett, and when we talk about how we approach things, we are the opposite in almost every respect, and it each shocks both of us, right?

Ryan:
How can you do it that way?

Towles:
Exactly? We can’t believe it, you know, in little things and in large things. So, I think you do have to discover what is a process that works for you.

So, you are right that I am kind of meticulous. And I think one of the reasons that you chose that word is because I’m, as a writer, very dedicated to outlining as an example. And this is tied to something else that you and I have talked about in the past. I did have an investment career for 20 years. I wrote fiction. I wrote my first novel while having a job and while we had young children, and so part of that life, one of the things you’ve asked me in the past is, “How do you write a book under those circumstances?” You know, how do you create art under those circumstances?

And I had to be very disciplined about how I used my time. And so that meant outlining was very productive toward that purpose. Because I would know what, what I knew, what I was going to write about, and I would spend, you know, a lot of time thinking in advance. What is each chapter going to be about?

And then knowing that I would only have a few hours on Saturday, a few hours on Sunday, while I had this day job, and while we had the kids. I would, all week long, I’d be preparing in my head to tackle the chapter that I already had designed through outlining, you know. And so, so the outline really allowed me to constantly zip back into the work, which to know where I was, to not waste time, precious time, trying to figure out, what am I going to write today, you know.

Yeah, which, which makes you miserable if you don’t know the answer, right? Because you’re sitting there and the clock is ticking, and you know that, you know you got to pick up the kids at 1:00 and you know, and on Monday morning, you’re back at the office, and so, and here it’s two hours are gone by and you haven’t done anything, you know.

So, for me, the planning aspect of an outline was very, practically speaking, productive. Now, while writing that book “Rules of Civility,” what ended up happening is I became a devoted outliner for artistic reasons.

Different novels are trying to achieve different things in their writing. They’re trying to achieve different things in different novels, but I am very interested in how the novel as an art form can take all these an array of components, hundreds and hundreds of components, images, actions of the characters, things they’re saying, you know, observations of the narrator, the motifs, you know, all the similes, the allegories, the illusions. There’s all these hundreds and hundreds of elements that compose a novel. I’m interested in how they work together, and ultimately, how they can, in essence, crescendo in the end of a novel, where all the pieces can kind of come together in, as events culminate, as the characters go through realizations, as the sequence of motifs pay off.

I love that in books, and it’s very hard, I think, to achieve that without planning. You don’t know where you’re going, and you’re just writing as you go. That can be very satisfying from a writing and a reading standpoint, but it’s unlikely to, sort of, have this converging quality. So that’s artistic mission, and that’s something that interests me greatly, and that I’ve tried to build into “A Gentleman in Moscow,” “The Lincoln Highway,” etc.

The second thing, which is a little more counterintuitive, is that, you know this is getting to soft science here, but you know that we roughly talk about the right brain and the left brain right? And we understand that the two hemispheres of the brain act differently or come to the forefront in our lives at different times to pursue and manage different things.

So, the left side of the brain is more analytical. It’s more precise. It’s for decision making, you know, processing, etc. The right side of the brain is more creative. It’s more tuned in, tied into the dream state, into, you know, the imaginative, to the metaphorical, and the two different parts of the brain, even as a writer, can come to the forefront, just as they would for any of us at any time.

And what I found for me is that if I were not outlining a book carefully, if I didn’t know everything was going to happen in advance, and if I hadn’t visualized it all, you know. And then when I outline, I know the characters, I know what’s going to happen to them. I know the settings. I know their backgrounds and personalities. I know the whole thing. So, if I did not do that, and I was starting chapter seven or whatever, what would happen is that the left side of my brain would have to take over, which is that decision processing thing, because we’d be okay.

What’s going to happen? What does the room look like? What does he say? Why does he say it? You know, what’s his name, you know, all this stuff. Whereas, if all that decision is done, and I have that already, you know, processed, that means that I can enter the chapter and allow my right brain to take over, just let the poetry and the imagery and the dream state take over. So that the events which have been pre-planned, and the characters who’ve been, you know, pre-discovered, as it were, I can allow the subconscious to really fill those pages with, you know, a stronger influence of the poetic, you know.

And I think that’s really what the richness of literature demands. And that’s, that’s one of the things that distinguishes, let’s say, suspense writing, which can be terrific and can be very high level, but a lot of suspense writing is less interested in what I just described, and more interested in moving the story forward. That is very satisfying for us as readers. But, you know, if you’re reading Tolstoy, it has a component of that, or Dostoevsky. But there’s this, is all this other stuff going on, you know, the human intelligence and the shifting of emotions and the moral implications and the poetry of the language itself. And so, for me to maximize that aspect, it’s, I think counter intuitively, outlining is a big help.

Ryan:
Or what’s going to happen next? And have you ever, in the course of writing, deviated in a major way from the outline? I mean, my guess is you probably do some little tweaks along the way. But have you ever surprised yourself with a move that you didn’t notice until you were writing and thought, oh, that’s actually not what this character would do? So, I need to think about it differently.

Towles:
I, you know, I think the ending of my books has never changed. Yeah, so I see the ending at the beginning, and it’s always been that’s where we’re headed and it’s how we get there that tends to evolve. As I’m writing any book, while I’m writing the first third of the book, the final third of the outline is getting increasingly intricate and is evolving. I’m learning from the writing of the third, first third, what the book is about, you know.

Ryan:
Oh, I see.

Towles:
And so, I’m getting a stronger sense of who the characters are and why they’re doing what they’re doing, and that may result in changing what they do. But also have a richer understanding of, oh, yeah, when they all meet at the, you know, at that dinner, it’s going to blow sky high, because, you know, she’s going to be mad about this, and he’s going to be wanting to achieve that, and, and the other guy is going to be, you know, envious, and, and you kind of begin to see it in greater granular material.

So, as I’m writing the first third, I’m constantly going to the back of the outline and expanding its intricacy, and which involves change. In terms of your specific question, can you get the big changes? Sure. And an example would be, you know, for those of you who’ve read “The Lincoln Highway,” that book is told from eight perspectives. It only takes place over 10 days. It’s about a bunch of 18-year-olds in 1954, in essence, on a road trip with a culminating series of events. The original design of that book all along, over a multi-year process of designing it was that it was going to be told from two perspectives, the two main characters, and you’d hear from the hero, Emmett. You’d see him going through events in the first day. You then hear from Duchess, who’s his friend, and you kind of get it from his perspective. You know, it might be the baton would be passed. You might be moving forward for the rest of the day, or he’d be commenting, or you might overlap. But nonetheless, it would go back and forth. And the whole book was designed to do this, and I got about a third of the way through that book, writing it in this format and back and forth between the two of them each day. And I suddenly realized, you know what? The other characters that are central to the story. I know them so well. They’re so interesting, and the reader will never understand them if we stick with Emmett and Dutchess.

You needed their, you needed to hear their voice in order to really understand what’s going on, why they’re doing what they’re doing. And that I was convinced that if I was willing to do that, it would add incredible dimensionality to the tale. So, I stopped what I was doing, took the outline, and I asked myself, “Okay, if this was going to be told by more than two perspectives, how would you tell the exact same series of events?”

And so, the book was redesigned, and now still, day one is just Emmett and Duchess, and day two begins with Emmett and Duchess, but then things start to open up, and you start to hear from Woolly and Billy and Ulysses all these other characters. And there’s no question in my mind that what I ended up with is, I think, a profoundly better book than if I had stuck with the tennis game of two going back and forth

Ryan:
Yeah. Well, that’s a terrific book. So, you mentioned your career in finance, and I’m curious how that relates to or related to your career as a writer. Why finance? And was there ever a point during your finance career where you thought or worried, well, I’m never going to be a writer?

Towles:
Yeah, a lot of that. I went into the finance arena, in essence, to make a living at the age of 25 but I did so telling myself I am a writer. I’m going to be a writer. That’s my mission. It’s my dream, it’s my identity, etc. But then I stopped writing for almost a decade.

I had joined an individual, I was the first person to join, and we were building a company. And so, in that first decade, I really stopped writing, and I began to really fear that I would wake up at the age of 50 or 60, and having failed to fulfill my ambition, and that I’d be a miserable person, you know? And, and it’s kind of interesting, a sort of interesting lesson, in that writing was the thing I loved more than anything else, still is, and yet, during that decade, I wasn’t doing it.

And it turned out that the love of it was not enough to get me to do it. It was the fear of failing to do it, that ultimately got me started again, right? And you kind of dig your way back into the habits of it, and, you know, the sort of the open-endedness of it. And I started writing again at the age of around, you know, my early 30s. I spent seven years writing a book I didn’t like, so I set that aside. That book was not outlined. That was part of what prompted me, when I sat down to write “Rules of Civility,” really, to say, okay, I’m going to spend a year designing it before I write chapter one. And I wrote that, and it became a bestseller. And then I retired from the firm.

But there, over the course of that, from joining the firm to, you know, 20 years later, leaving the firm with where “Rules of Civility” had been out for only about a year, and at that point, I was in my mid-40s. There was, as I say, a decade where I was, there was the clear risk that I would have failed to fulfill my ambition. And, you know, I just, I thank God that I circled back.

Ryan:
Was there a moment in time when you felt that fear intensely? Did you wake up one morning and look in the mirror and say, oh my gosh, I’m not fulfilling my life’s ambition? Or did it happen over time? Or did someone come into your life and say, look, you keep talking about wanting to be a writer, but you’re not writing?

Towles:
And it’s sort of both things. I’ve carried the dread with me at all times. So, it’s what you are, it’s, you know, identity when you’re not writing and you’re in finance, you’re not telling everybody. Well, actually, I’m really a writer, because you’re not writing anything, so you never talk about it. It’s your own secret. And so actually, when “Rules of Civility” was sold, the vast majority of my New York City friends had no idea that I wrote fiction at all.

Ryan:
You’re kidding.

Towles:
No, they - none of them knew. You know I was because you just never talk about it, but so then what would end up happening? So, there you’re carrying the dread with you along that you’re going to fail to fulfill your dream. But yes, I had the good fortune of having a mentor who was a visiting professor, a visiting writer at Yale when I was an undergraduate named Peter Matthiessen, who’s a great American writer.

We worked a great deal together in those years. And when I stopped writing, he was very disappointed that I was working on Wall Street. And he eventually did say “Amor, you know, I think that your job is interesting enough and the money’s good enough, and most people go to Wall Street don’t come back. And I think that you should consider your life as a writer over.” And it was a very painful, you know, thing to hear from the person I admired, you know most as an artist, but he was shaking the tree, you know, he was right to do it. Yeah, that’s really where I got ratcheted up, you know, that’s where I went home. Was like, okay, you know, Peter’s right. I gotta do something. I gotta figure this out.

Ryan:
So, I imagine you’re asked this question from aspiring writers all the time, and I’m curious what your answer is. What advice do you give to people who are interested in writing as a career?

Towles:
First of all, right, you want to kind of separate, not in a negative way, but separate career and writing a little bit, right?

Ryan:
Okay, fair enough.

Towles:
I like to think of the parallel as musicians, right? It’s that to become, you know, the Rolling Stones or, you know, Yo-Yo Ma. Not that I’m like them, but, you know, to become like Yo-Yo Ma or the Rolling Stones. It’s an incredible, you know thing. But in America, there are millions of working musicians, right? They’re teaching music in schools. They’re writing, they’re doing the music in advertisements. They’re in the, you know, they’re in the back row of the orchestra. They’re playing in, in nightclubs that, you know, to crowds of 30 people. And, you know, so, so there’s all kinds of musicians.

And then you have people who are doing it, making music, not as a career, right, just as a hobby. So, so that within that giant world there is, there is a group, you know, who’s pursuing it with the hopes of pushing the art at the highest level that they can. And for them, it may be a career or may not be a career. They may make incredible music and have an incredible following, and may not ever become like, you know, make gazillions of dollars. But they could still be at the height of their art form.

And then you can have the weird hybrid, where it all comes together, where the person is expanding the art and is popular, and you know. So going back to your question, if you want to be art as a career, well, you can totally do that, right? As I say, that’s actually the vast majority of artists, they do have careers, right? Because they love teaching music to kids, let’s say, you know, or they love being in a session band. And you may even push back that and say, you know what, I don’t want to make a living at doing it necessarily.

Some musicians like, you know what if I have a job doing the art all day, you know, in a career sense, I’m going to be exhausted by the time I get home, you know. And so, each person has to kind of approach that balance differently. How do you make a living and how deeply do I want to pursue my art, and how, you know, in my own unique way? But so, advice, it’s going to be different for every person, right? But I do think it’s about trying to make art as many days of the year as possible. Because a lot of it is about immersing yourself in your work, because that’s when you begin to see it open up. And you begin to see, okay, I’m going to take this risk, and you have the greater command of that risk if you’re fully focused on it. And there’s something about interruption, like you just don’t write for 10 days; it’s hard to even start.

Ryan:
Yeah. Do you have a favorite among the books that you’ve written? There’s three parts. Do you have a favorite character? Did you just fall in love with one of the characters, like, maybe Eve? And did you ever have a character who, by the end, you were just sort of tired of like you just didn’t like?

Towles:
I don’t have a favorite book, you know I think I mean a little bit, your favorite, your favorite book is the one you’re working on right now. I don’t have a favorite character. What I think the valuable thing I could say about this, artistically speaking, is that, I think, for me, and maybe this is good advice for younger writers, I think you really need to fall in love with all of your characters. And the reason that’s true is because you fall in love in the way that, like you look at your childhood friends, and some of them are loyal, and some of them are charming and, you know, and smart, and you know, some of them are annoying, you know. And some you can’t even trust with a $10 bill, you know. But you still love them for some crazy reason, yeah, and you know them, and you appreciate them, even though you know they have these failings.

The other person’s saying, and that person’s too abrupt, that person’s too you know, they’re a little mean-spirited sometimes, and you know, but still, you love them. And so, it’s that, you know, it’s not, love all your characters in terms of making them all perfect. It’s love them in the way that you would love your childhood friends, in all of their failings and their intricacies, because you’re committed to them, you know. Because you’ve shared something at some point, and you show up for them, you know, even if they drive you crazy. And so, it’s the reason I say that’s important is because it’s very easy in writing, let’s say a novel where there’s a couple of main characters and you’re building the story around them, quite naturally, and you’re sharing a lot about them quite naturally. But there’s eight other people that make the story go and there’s, there’s a natural tendency, I think, to start to use cartoons.

And so suddenly you’ve got three real characters and a lot of stock characters surrounding who are just a part of the business of the story, and that’s not where you want to land. This happens to me often in the revision process, like, let’s say you write, you’re writing a story about a young girl, and the family is the focus, but, you know, at some point, you know the girl is in school, she’s a young kid, and she’s got a strict teacher. And, well, right away, strict teacher, you know, we all kind of can picture what that is. She’s got the glasses, the bun on her head, you know, whatever, but that’s a stock character, right?

And so when I’m revising, one of the things, I’ll start to ask myself, like, if she’s important enough to be here, who is she and so you start to ask yourself questions, and you say, maybe you know, what happens when she goes home at night? Maybe she’s alone, you know, maybe, maybe she never married, or her husband died. Maybe she’s a drinker, you know, and they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s kind of interesting. And what if the main character, the young lady, failed to hand in her homework, and the stern teacher gives her a reprimand for failing to turn in her paper, and, you know, whatever the reason is, and, and the young girl decides, all right, I’m gonna finish the paper and I’m gonna deliver it tonight to the teacher.

And so, she sees the teacher drinking, you know, but so my point being that it’s by beginning to build out the reality of this bit character’s inner life, that’s often what happens is that it prompts a whole, you’re like, oh, yeah, right. This could be a whole, another aspect of the story, right? And so then when the girl goes to see her, now suddenly this bit character is a real person in the story, and her influence on the life of the main character has just increased dramatically because they’re going to have an interaction which is honest and then maybe it turns out that the sketch of the character is her facade that she puts on the world, as opposed to the shortcoming of the writer.

Ryan:
So, you stay curious about your characters.

Towles:
You got t, that’s it. You got to keep saying, Okay, I know these five. What about those three? Either they have to be real, or they got to go. So, the last aspect to your question, I think you could anticipate my answer. The answer is no, because that’s the one you’re gunning to fix.

Ryan:
Yep, exactly.

Towles:
In a way, it’s a gift to have a character that you’re bored with or frustrated with, or whatever, because it’s a sign that that’s a big problem in the book.

Ryan:
So, Amor, I’ve got a million more questions than I could talk to forever, but I don’t want to keep you.

Towles:
It’s such a luxury to be on your podcast and be talking to the UVA community. I would feel bad if we didn’t talk for a minute about the role of Liberal Arts.

Ryan:
That was going to be my last question.

Towles:
Because, of course, because, of course, you know, I’m in the choir, I’m preaching, or I’m the preacher, preaching to the choir. You’re, however you want to put it right, you know, I mean, obviously I’m the product of a liberal arts education, but you know, I do think that, you know, there’s been a lot written in the last, even in the last couple of years, about the declining role of the liberal arts in colleges across the United States, and not at UVA, but, you know, but across the country, and that’s partly driven by student preference, right?

When you and I were in college, there was no business major in, you know, the major liberal arts colleges. You know, even the economics major was relatively small, and would tend to be people who love the science of it, as opposed to, you know, dream of working on Wall Street and, of course, the tech world was much smaller and, and I think that it’s been heartbreaking in a way to see the shrinking role of liberal arts in the education of many young Americans, because it’s so clear that that the liberal arts provide us with such a rich way in which to think, in which to communicate, in which to understand others, richer than you know if you were pursuing a business major, and nothing wrong with a business major, but in that realm, you’re not going to get the opportunity to explore some of the elements of what it means to be human and what it means to excel in ways that can be very beneficial to your career, whatever your career is, right? And I, you know, we go back when we were young, it was like Wall Street was filled with English majors and history majors.

Ryan:
I was just going to say, how much did your liberal arts education prepare you for finance? My guess is the answer is a lot.

Towles:
Hugely, I wasn’t a history major, but it’s so much like the study of history; it’s just been inverted. So, in the study of history, we’re looking at the Napoleonic War, his invasion of Russia, and to understand that we’re going to look at the big picture, what’s going on in Europe politically, what’s going on in terms of the economics of the nations.

Where are they, militarily speaking? But then you have to go down to the granular level and say, okay, what was the temperature in, you know, in Moscow when they invaded, how many miles do they have to go? How many men do they have? Do they have food? You know, there’s all this particular, if you’re a historian, to understand why Napoleon lost in Russia. You have to know the big stuff. You have to study the small stuff. You have to move fluidly between them, and you have to synthesize and analyze those components in order to start to draw your conclusions and to understand what was the cause of this loss, right?

So, as I say, the investment world is taking the entire thing and inverting it. You have to have the same set of skills. You have to look at the big picture. How the world is changing, what’s happening in technology, finance, consumer behavior. You then got to go to the granular stuff. Who’s this company? Who’s running it? Who are the people? What’s the product like? How do customers use it today? And you’re doing all that, not to predict, not to understand a cause from five, you know, 100 years. It’s to figure out what is going to happen five years from today. And so, and that’s, and if you can do that, by the way, you can get rich, you know, that’s what Warren Buffet does, you know. And yes, and he doesn’t do it a lot. He does it a handful of times a year, you know. And that, and that’s the path to riches for him, you know. And but, but it is about taking these skills and, of course, don’t get me started on the whole, the writing and communicating factor. Anybody who’s interested in entering the finance world, there’s so much need in that realm for someone who can articulate while making this investment, who can interview subjects effectively and understand where they are to who has the high EQ as well as a high IQ and that’s all stuff that that is being fostered in the English departments.

Yeah. So anyway, Yes, I do think moving throughout the humanities, of course, is extremely valuable to the development of the young mind and the young heart and the sort of the more exposure that the individual can get throughout the humanities circle, I think the stronger they will be professionally as well, as you know, potentially, the happier they could be as an individual, right?

Ryan:
I agree. You know, it’s interesting. You often hear that universities should be preparing students for careers, and then you also hear that we can’t even predict what the careers are going to be 10 or 20 years from now. And so that makes me think, well, we should be giving them the skills to adapt to different careers. And I think the skills that you acquire through the liberal arts are incredibly adaptable to different circumstances, because, in a sense, you learn how to think, you learn how to analyze, you learn how to communicate, all of which are going to be relevant to careers, and all of which, well, for the moment, are largely computer proof.

Towles:
I think you’re right. And I’d go, you know, and make another observation related to that, which is, I think that, I went to Yale, you know, to graduate school at Stanford. And I love both of those, you know, those universities. But I think that that they and if you look at the top 100 liberal arts colleges in America, I don’t think they did a very good job of communicating to young people that what you just said. In the 80s, in the 90s, in the early 2000s the humanities departments and the humanities leading schools just sort of assumed what we do matters. Of course, it matters, but they weren’t really making a case.

Ryan:
Yeah, it’s a very fair point. It was almost anathema to think about the career-related aspects of the skills you would acquire in liberal arts like that was you just shouldn’t even go there. And so, there was a missed opportunity to say, you know, if you want to work on Wall Street, that’s great you could, and maybe should be a history major.

Towles:
We can get you there through the history department. Yeah, exactly. Because meanwhile, the kids are seeing, they’re seeing the nature of success in technology and finance on television, in the newspaper, you know, in the magazines. So that’s making its own case for you.

Ryan:
Yeah, and you can, and you can acquire specific skills that are related to that particular arena. But that’s not the only path. So really, I should let you go, but I have to ask, are you working on something new right now? And are you allowed to talk about it?

Towles:
You’re always working on something new, Jim. I’m working on my next novel, and it begins in Cairo at the end of the second World War, and it ends in New York in 1999, and that is all I will tell you about it.

Ryan:
All right, any idea when you’ll be finished?

Towles:
What are you, my mother?

Ryan:
I’m gonna hold you to it. What are you doing talking to me? You should be writing.

Towles:
That’s right, it’s true.

Ryan:
Amor, thanks so much. As always, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, and I really appreciate your taking the time.

Towles:
Thank you so much.

Ben Larsen:
“Inside UVA” is a production of WTJU 91.1 FM and the Office of the President at the University of Virginia. “Inside UVA” is produced by Kaukab Rizvi, Benjamin Larsen, Mary Gardner McGehee, Matt Weber, and Jaden Evans. Special thanks to Maria Jones and Jane Kelly. Our music is “Turning to You” from Blue Dot Sessions. You can listen and subscribe to Inside UVA on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll be back soon with another conversation about the life of the University.