Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize winner for his 2017 novel Less, discusses his writing process, the role of comedy in serious fiction, and the practical realities of a writing career, revealing how intuitive first drafts and rigorous structural revision combine to create novels that feel both playful and emotionally resonant.
Editing by echo and rhythm
Greer’s first drafts are chaotic and intuitive; he writes vignettes out of order and later looks for repeating images — birds, porcupines, a fraud in Venice — to discover the book’s hidden architecture.
If a lovely scene doesn’t rhyme with anything else, it must go; a 250-page novel should feel like every element was necessary, the way a good storyteller makes the milkman matter.
The subconscious spills everything onto the table; the conscious mind then shapes it into theme and pattern, like solving a crossword puzzle where each filled-in clue unlocks the next.
He writes scenes as they arrive — sometimes 2/3 through the book first — and lets them connect organically, avoiding the nervous breakdown of over-planning or the sterility of over-calculation.
Swimming helps him design scenes: choosing point of view, foreshadowing, narrative distance, or skipping dialogue entirely (as Beryl Bainbridge does) to let the reader imagine more.
Old novels teach lost techniques: Colette ending Gigi with an ellipsis, Daphne du Maurier never naming the narrator of Rebecca, French novels using dashes for unknown names — tools that create suspense and reader participation.
Reading like a detective means stopping to ask “how did they do that?” — whether it’s McCarthy’s missing quotation marks, Saramago’s fused dialogue, or Proust’s colon-landing sentences — and stealing only what serves your own voice.
Building a narrator’s voice
Voice emerges from a “pile of books” Greer surrounds himself with; their combination creates a tonal target he writes toward through false starts (he rewrote the first 100 pages of The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells three or four times).
He knows he’s found the voice when pages flow easily and are a pleasure to write, even if they’ll be cut.
Less works because the narrator is smarter and funnier than Arthur Less; the narrator knows it’s a comedy, while Arthur suffers — comedy requires a perspective that things will turn out okay.
For Villa Coco, the narrator is an older man looking back at his 21-year-old self with empathy and simpler language, a different comic register.
He consumes only what feeds the current book — Bergman over Scream 7, secondhand bookstores over bestseller lists — to avoid sounding like his generation and to sound more like himself.
Character without backstory
MFA-style character dossiers feel like method acting; 19th-century novels built character through accumulated detail, but modern literary fiction demands instant vividness in a few sentences.
Characters either leap onto the page alive or never do; if they don’t, Greer uses craft — distinctive speech, thought patterns, physical details — to make them real for the reader even if they’re not real for him.
He observes people in bars, noting not just stories but gestures, clothing, the “bug eyes and mole” that encapsulate a person; that vitality transfers to any role — a 19th-century maid, a bartender.
Gruff, unwelcoming people are more useful than friendly ones; resistance creates scene tension, and background action (a cat crossing a bar) can carry a scene when dialogue stalls.
Surprise on every page — description, language, plot, character — keeps readers turning pages to reach the “blocks of poetry” they came for; a diamond heist delivers the wisdom.
Comedy from tragedy, timing from revision
Comedy comes from touching the hardest things: Less jokes about Arthur being “the first homosexual ever to grow old” because the generation above him died of AIDS; the humor distracts while leading the reader through fire.
Joan Rivers’ response to “that’s not funny” — “my mother was deaf” — captures comedy’s function: facing the hardest things together.
Timing on the page is grammatical: cutting the last 20 pages to 8, replacing “he got on a plane” with an ellipsis and “he stood at his house” to accelerate pace.
The funny stuff arrives in the first pass (Greer isn’t witty in life but has l’esprit de l’escalier at writer’s speed); revision spots the jokes he set up unconsciously and lands them — e.g., moving Arthur’s mushroom trip wake-up from a teepee to the “universe appreciation platform” he’d built earlier.
Comic models: Updike’s playful language, Roth’s rants, Bellow, Thornton Wilder’s farces, Nancy Mitford and Gerald Durrell’s gentle English comedy — writers who treated comedy as a normal part of serious literature.
The Pulitzer and the liberation of failure
After his fifth book (The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells) vanished without notice, Greer felt finished at 46 — which freed him to write Less as a private comedy, assuming no one would read it.
His British publisher (Faber) and 11 others rejected Less based on prior sales; a British edition appeared only the day after the Pulitzer, 10 months later.
He learned of the prize in Tuscany, training pugs to wear diapers for Margaret Atwood’s visit, with no cell reception; Michael Chabon called: “There is no downside, and now you can write any book you want.”
Michael Cunningham added: “Do not waste any time worrying about whether you deserve it” — the committee decided, not him.
The win felt like tenure: validation for a book written in despair, proving comedy can carry tragedy and that writing what comes easily (his “left-handed pitch”) is the only sustainable path.
Writing as craft, not magic
Artists’ residencies taught Greer to call himself an artist; painters talk about lacquer drying, paint texture, cheap turpentine — the daily technical grind that produces art.
Revision is technical: matching a donkey scene on page 30 with one 30 pages from the end, reconnecting threads, letting polished scenes “dry” before re-reading.
The artistic sensation is making the thing in your head as closely as possible — like Richard Dreyfuss building the mountain in mashed potatoes — madness to live with, but the only compulsion that matters.
Career pragmatism and travel writing as training
Writers must eat; Greer became a travel writer by dressing in loud colors to be memorable, getting introduced to an editor at Travel + Leisure, and waiting for the call.
Advice: get life experiences (jobs with stories, bars with a notepad instead of a phone), accept you may never earn from writing, and know there is no “champagne room” of VIP writers — just other writers doing the work.
Travel writing taught him to avoid cliché (AI is pure cliché) by finding the unexpected: a ski resort in Morocco, a boy selling pink-dyed chicks — details that are “utterly themselves,” neither cliché nor anti-cliché.
He records everything: the air-conditioner brand, the dog shuttled between kitchen and dining room, the parrot in a cage — human evidence that later seeds novels.
He is a plaintiff in lawsuits against AI companies and does not use AI.
Poetry as prose’s R&D department
Poets “go down in the mines and get the jewels”; Greer steals their narrative and language discoveries — condensation, line breaks, story-within-story structures (Matthew Rohrer’s The Others taught him how to embed the baronessa’s tales in Villa Coco without derailing momentum).
His poetry club reads one poem for months, aloud, examining resistance and delight; prose answers to prose problems live there.
The editor is the patient, you are the doctor
The editor feels the pain (“my arm hurts, it’s arm cancer”); the writer diagnoses and treats — the editor cannot know the cure because the book lives in the writer’s head.
Workshop advice (“cut the mermaid”) aims for mediocrity; the writer must ask “or more mermaid?” — commit to the strange element and build toward it.
His editor Lee Boudreaux wanted to cut Less’s revelatory ending to protect the comic tone; Greer kept it and rewrote the rest of the novel so the ending landed — her solution was easiest, his was right.
