The Bestselling Novelist Who Rewrote His Process

Before A Gentleman in Moscow sold millions of copies, Amor Towles was working at an investment firm in Manhattan. He graduated from Yale and earned an MA in English from Stanford. Writing was always the plan. But when he moved to New York at 25, he needed a job, so he joined a friend who was launching an investment firm. He stayed for over twenty years.

For the first stretch of those years, the writing stopped entirely. In a profile by Literary Arts, Towles said he had always thought of himself as a writer on the inside, but after a few years of not writing, “you can’t make that claim anymore.” When he eventually returned to fiction, he spent seven years writing a novel set in Stalinist Russia. It had five points of view and a series of complex events that had been roughly outlined. As an investment professional with two young children, the structure made his project punishing to work on. He put the manuscript in a drawer.

Rather than walk away from writing, Towles examined what had gone wrong. In a reading guide for Penguin Random House, he described the toll of the failed structure: “Every time I sat down to work on the book, I needed two hours just to figure out where I was.” Worse, on rereading later drafts, he often found the material from the first year was the best.

So he changed his entire approach. His next novel would use a single first-person narrator, every event and character would be imagined in advance, and the whole thing would be written in one year. He started Rules of Civility on January 1, 2006, and wrapped it up 365 days later. The first novel taught him everything the second one needed. When it was published in 2011, it became a New York Times bestseller and was named one of the best books of the year by the Wall Street Journal.

After Rules of Civility took off, Towles retired from finance in 2013 and turned to writing full time. A Gentleman in Moscow followed in 2016. The Lincoln Highway debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list in 2021. His novels have sold millions of copies and been translated into more than thirty languages.

Towles got there by studying what didn’t work, rebuilding his process, and holding himself to a structure that fit his life. That kind of diagnosis is easier alongside other writers, which is what our critique groups and Traction Lab are for.