Tinker with Your Novel, Win a Pulitzer

Paul Harding's winning of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction wasn't expected. Not by him, not by his publisher. But he tinkered with the manuscript of his acclaimed debut novel (Tinkers) until it was tight and compelling reading.

After he'd written the book, he wasn't able to secure an agent or publisher and put it away for two or three years. Then a friend referred him to Bellevue Literary Press.

A small non-profit publisher affiliated with New York University's School of Medicine, Bellevue published the 191-page novel and began spreading the word. Great reviews and major endorsements poured in.

It's the careful re-writing that made Tinkers succeed. Here's Harding, in one of his many interviews, explaining the level of commitment required:

You're constantly trying to orchestrate so many things in any given sentence. The sentence almost has strata to it and you might get two or three of the strata right the first shot, but then you have to go back and find the layers inside. It's this process of exploring and re-exploring, because I'm an obsessive rewriter--I just rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.

What made Tinkers a winner:

1. The language. It's lyrical, poetic without being self-consciously so. Some of the sentences are nearly Proustian in their complexity, and as beautiful.
2. The subtlety and depth of emotion Harding evokes, always showing, never merely telling.
3. The sense of being inside the life and thoughts of another human being, especially when this doesn't derive from direct experience by the writer, but is rather fully imagined.
4. The intricacy of the detail, the care taken with every nuance of the natural and man-made worlds.

What was Harding's writing process? Harding offers a clue:

I just start writing. Eventually, I have to have faith in the process ... eventually everything ends up overlapping. ...When I wrote Tinkers, I don't remember the last scene I wrote but I do remember the phenomenon of finishing one particular day's writing and as I typed the last period on the last sentence realizing, ‘Oh, I'm done. I've got the whole book here.' Then, because everything is so scattered on notebooks and computers and on the backs of receipts from bookstores and stuff like that, I printed everything up and literally took scissors and tape and staplers and cut it all up; it was like a puzzle. I spread it all out on my living room floor and I put the whole novel into order, and it turned out that there was a chronological order and it all worked.

The quote above is from the transcript of a podcast interview, well worth checking out.