Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

It was the last night of 1937.

Twenty-Six Chapters: In my late thirties and early forties, I wrote a novel that I ended up sticking in a drawer. It’s pretty depressing to work on something for seven years and dislike the outcome, so I took some time to reflect on what had gone wrong. That book had five points of view and a series of complex events that I had only roughly outlined. As an investment professional with two young children at the time, this structure proved hellish. Every time I sat down to work on the book, I needed two hours just to figure out where I was. Worst of all, in re-reading later drafts, I often found that the material from the first year was often the best. So as I prepared to launch a new novel in 2005, I decided it would be a distinctive first person narrative; all events and characters would be carefully imagined in advance; and the first draft would be written in one year. After months of preparation, I started writing RULES OF CIVILITY on January 1, 2006 and wrapped it up 365 days later. Here’s a weird fact: the book was designed with twenty-six chapters, because there are fifty-two weeks in the year and I wanted to write a chapter for a week, revise it for a week, and then move on to the next chapter, in order to keep my forward momentum. Not coincidentally, the book opens on New Year’s Eve and ends a year later. Over the next three years, I revised the book three times from beginning to end; but the original constraint of a twelve-month draft proved a much more effective artistic process for me than an open-ended one. As you might expect, given the success of RULES OF CIVILITY I followed a similar process with both A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW and THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY, although I needed a year-and-a-half to complete the first drafts of those two longer works.