REBROADCAST: Pulitzer-Prize winning author Anthony Doerr tackles the power of storytelling

Anthony Doerr’s last book, “All the Light We Cannot See,” told the stories of two different young people growing up in Europe during World War II and whose lives eventually overlapped. His newest book, “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” uses a similar template, but on a much more complex scale. This book follows five different characters whose storylines eventually meet up. The stories range from ancient Greece to sometime in the near future, but they all share something in common: a love for the power of storytelling itself. And for the people and libraries that keep stories alive. Anthony Doerr joins us in front of an audience of students at Grant High School in partnership with Literary Arts.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We are coming to you today in front of an audience at Portland’s Grant High School. It is an hour with a celebrated novelist, Anthony Doerr.

By 2014, Anthony Doerr had written a memoir, a novel and two short story collections that earned many awards and a lot of critical acclaim. Then he published his novel “All the Light We Cannot See,” an intricately plotted and exquisitely rendered portrait focused on two young people during World War II. It was a commercial and critical success that catapulted Doerr into international literary stardom. He followed “All The Light’' with “Cloud Cuckoo Land”, which was a finalist for the National Book Award last year. It spans hundreds of years, taking us into the past, the present and the future, around the world and even out of it. It’s a master class in storytelling that is also about storytelling. Anthony Doerr, I’m really excited to get to talk to you and especially to hear from the students in front of us. Thanks very much for coming to town.

Anthony Doerr: Of course, Dave, thanks so much for having me and thanks to the students here at Grant High.

Miller: I thought we could start with a question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?

Mari: My name is Mari and my question is what was the spark that gave you the idea to write a book such as “Cloud Cuckoo Land”?

Doerr: Thanks so much for the question. Well I’d like to try to disabuse you of the notion that there’s a single spark. It’s kind of like a series of sparks that ignites over time. But I had finished “All the Light We Cannot See.” As Dave mentioned, it came out in 2014. And I was traveling a lot, but I was searching around for my next idea. It was 2015, there was a presidential candidate going around the country, leading crowds in chants of “build that wall.” Do you remember this time? And I had just written a book. Seventy percent of “All the Light We Cannot See” is set in this little French town, a little walled French town called Saint-Malo. And Saint-Malo’s walls are maybe only about two kilometers, but it formed this tiny fraction of this crazy megalomaniacal project that Hitler had called to build the Atlantic Wall. It was like 1000, 2000 miles, all the way down the coast, all the way to the Franco-Spanish border, basically up through Denmark, this huge series of concrete fortifications. And every text that I would read about the history of the Atlantic Wall, not every one, but a lot of them would mention the walls of Constantinople, which apparently were like the pre-eminent defensive technology of the Medieval world. These crazy walls around the city and I knew nothing about them. My high school western history classes, we would get to like the fall of Rome around 300 AD, and then the teacher would take a sip of water and suddenly we’re like at DaVinci, we’re at like the Renaissance, literally in about five seconds. And I love to use my work as a way to kind of rectify various ignorances.

Being here in the library, in Paige’s library here in this school, is such a great place to come chase your curiosities and learn how to become a learner, lifelong. And so I just started reading, in my spare time, about walls and the history of walls. So that was the original spark. This idea of why are humans so emotionally compelled by walls? Why are crowds so into chanting this, like we’re under threat. What do walls represent in terms of like, family inside, strangers outside. Like us, inside we’re the people of a certain faith and other people are like infidels. There’s something about that that’s very human and a little frightening and really interesting to me. So in the novel, I tried to kind of in-wall, in a sense. Each of these five main characters are kind of trapped inside walls, both literal and figurative. But it all started with just reading about the walls of Constantinople.

Miller: When you were doing that, when you were excited for a variety of reasons, current political reasons, and a desire to fill in some holes in your own historical knowledge - and you started reading books about walls - at that point, if an interviewer had come up to you and said, “what are you working on, what’s your next book,” would you have said it’s about walls? Or was it more like an earlier stage of just learning about the world that may or may not turn into a book?

Doerr: Great question, Dave. Of course. It’s a ladder. You don’t have any idea if you’re gonna be able to pull off a book until it’s actually coming off the press. And even then you’re like, “I’m not sure if I really pulled this off or not.” Of course my agent would be like, “well don’t tell any interviewers what it’s about because you never know how much it’s gonna change.” But I get so interested in it that, of course, it’s really exciting to share this. I’m sure I probably did tell people it had something to do with Constantinople.

The wall stood for about 1,100 years. The walls around the city, there’s two sea walls and this big land wall, extraordinary, so triple walls. The outer wall was huge. It was like 20ft high. The inner wall’s like 60ft high, there’s a moat, it’s basically impossible to invade the city. And it allowed the Byzantine empire to accumulate insane wealth. The best example I can give is that there was gold mosaic in the ceiling of the Hagia Sophia that was three acres of gold. [It] was just up there. And of course amber and jewels and olive oil and slaves from all around the world. It was just possibly the largest accumulation of wealth to that point in human history.

But it wasn’t until I was about six months in that I learned that among that wealth, because of the continuity of resisting invasion and change over time, were books that the libraries of Constantinople allowed to survive. As the last copies of, say, Aristotle or Plato were decaying in North Africa, kind of falling apart because of whatever, weather or mold or worms or invasion. Those copies could be re-copied by hand inside the libraries of Constantinople, monastic libraries, Imperial libraries and there were private libraries too, rich people were able to accumulate books. So something like 20,000 copies. Inside this library that we’re in right here, in Grant High School. The Imperial Library, we don’t know that much about it, various iterations of it, through the 1,000 years in Constantinople. We know at one point it had about 120,000 handwritten volumes inside of it. This was a really substantial compilation of human wisdom that survived because of this old technology.

And then this new technology enters Europe called gunpowder and it really starts to change in the 15th century. The old walls start to fall all over Europe. And I’m really interested in when this confluence of technologies comes together. It’s such an interesting thing to study because we’re living in that time right now.

Miller: There are a lot of different kinds of libraries, physical and virtual. We can get to the virtual side in a little bit, in the book. But as you noted, we are talking in a library right now. What did libraries mean to you when you were growing up?

Doerr: First of all, Paige, your school librarian, is like a hero. You guys won’t realize that until you’re about 40, but it’s pretty special that you have somebody here who’s available to you. Outside the fact that the bells ring, there’s somebody here to help facilitate your curiosity and learning, around the idea that as soon as the bell rings, your learning isn’t over. That’s a really important thing. The world’s gonna keep changing really rapidly for you guys as you get older and you need to learn how to learn. It doesn’t matter if five years from now you remember “when was Ulysses Grant born?” or whatever they’re teaching at Grant High. It’s more important that you remember how to learn because you’re gonna need to keep doing that.

If a writer started work in, say, 1890 and worked till 1960, she probably worked on a device that looked the same, almost the whole way. A typewriter. And now that stuff is changing so quickly, like it’s very hard to imagine what office environments are even gonna look like when you guys are 35 or 45. Being able to be flexible, curious thinkers, is really facilitated by having a school library.

In my case, my mom was a science teacher in a high school for 40 years, something like that. And the library was really a third place for us between home and school. I had two older brothers and she would deposit us in the library, kind of like a de facto daycare almost. And librarians were like these second parents to me, but they were also really permissive. They just let me take out whatever books I wanted. And I was always trying to keep up with the reading habits of my brothers. You learn so many things, you learn how to care for common property, which I think is a really important lesson for humans. Like “don’t spill chocolate milk on your Snoopy book that you took out.” Actually a really important lesson. And like, “oh I’m in trouble, I didn’t return it on time.” I think those lessons are so important.

You start to learn that, especially in cities where it gets cold like mine, like it kind of is in Portland today, having an indoor space that’s warm and safe that is open to everybody, is just the most important democratic idea. Here we have the space where you can go study the work of the masters for free and it’s warm. You can use the bathroom without having to buy a latte or something, that’s enormously important. And that’s not why libraries can be useful. It’s really hard to say, apply for a job or interact with the government without a library, without an internet connection. But there’s also the beauty of learning. There’s something that can’t be measured by utility in libraries. And I think that’s something we sometimes miss, that you can get inspired, that you can choose to become a creative person because of some exposure you got in a library. There’s certain things that can really enhance the quality of your life that aren’t really measured in economic ways that libraries can provide communities and schools as well.

Miller: Everything you just described are libraries as we know them today and as we’ve known them for a while. But one of the sections of the book takes place on a spaceship pod hurtling through space, searching for a new inhabitable planet. On it, there is a version of a library. Can you describe who it is or what it is and how it works?

Doerr: Yeah, there’s five characters. I started with the two in the past, in Constantinople in the 15th century, Anna and Omeir, but I decided to not only have this book they save ricochet down into the present, to try to show the butterfly effect of one person’s action saving this old book. But I also decided to have two characters in the present, two in the past. I decided to have a character in the future, which is a scary moment when you’re like, oh my gosh, I think I’m writing science fiction right now.

Miller: Had you done that before?

Doerr: Sort of. I have a novella called “Memory Wall,’’ my third book that is set partially in the future, is about 10 years in the future in South Africa. I was playing around with some of that stuff, but this was a moment like that phone call with your agent. Like, “oh, I think there’s also a character in the future.” She’s like “what?” I’m like, “oh you’re breaking up.”

It was quite frightening, but I wanted to try to explore all these confluences of technology, right? We got the printing press in 1450-ish, and we have gunpowder arriving in Europe, and all these new navigational tools arriving too, like the sextant and the magnetic compass. So Europeans are exploring, “discovering,” aka decimating, the “new world,” at the same time. So that’s this amazing confluence of new things really disrupting existing power structures. And I feel like we’re living in that moment now. For sure, there’s so much change. Information technology has changed so much that I wanted to set the novel in a kind of a tripartite, a triptik idea.

And the third idea was that in the future, the confluences of climate chaos and artificial intelligence are gonna be really interesting for human beings. And so in some ways the book might be a little techno-skeptical but mostly I’m just trying to ask questions about what is that future gonna look like? So a long way to get around to answering your questions. This girl Konstance is yeah, she’s trapped in this space in the future, but she has access to what she’s at least sold as an infinite library. It exists, all you have to do is put on this thing and suddenly you have access to all the “information” that humans have ever compiled. Although of course that’s all curated and there’s holes, she learns later. There’s holes and to make an NPR joke, nothing can be all things considered, right? There’s always a gap. Some things considered.

Miller: How different, in terms of the way we think about the way we use it, is the library that she has access to, and that’s sort of the portal through this being called Sybil, and what we have right now with Google and the internet?

Doerr: Well I think Google would like to solve this, in the techno utopian days of the early Obama administration where we’re like, “text is going to solve a lot of problems and create less.” You solve some of our problems instead of create some. I think we did believe that like, okay, the internet is going to make everything else obsolete, including say, a physical library. That’s the worst, most annoying argument we’ll know. Why do we need libraries since everybody can just google stuff? Oh my gosh, I have to control myself after that one.

Miller: What’s wrong with that argument?

Doerr: Google is a for profit corporation whose job it is to increase the value of their shareholders. So growth above all else, and growth above economic growth above all else, is not necessarily a solution for making happy human beings. Those two things aren’t always in conflict, but they’re often in conflict. Of course, so many people who work for Google are just wonderful people, engineers solving incredibly interesting problems, but it doesn’t mean that they have the best interests of all human beings in mind. I think it’s really important to remember that, of course your search histories are tailored, it depends on what you’ve searched for in the past. Each of us google’s whatever, “boots in Wisconsin.” We’re all gonna get different results depending on our search history. So there’s a kind of algorithm steering us in certain directions. There’s not an impartiality to Google.

I love the idea of a collection of curated information, but I think we have to remember every time a book is curated, a piece of information is curated on the internet, somebody or something is making a decision about privileging what stories get told and what stories don’t get told.

Miller: There’s also the issue of going through the world, going on the internet, or Konstance going into this virtual library and being told, and sort of thinking, that all the things that are knowable are there? I mean, the internet right now can give you that sense. What’s wrong with that idea or living your life as if it’s true?

Doerr: So much of science, for example, comes from asking questions about the unknown and I think that’s the exact same thing for literature. You’re always trying to plumb. The whole idea of putting two buildings on a campus to say, “here’s your arts building and here’s your science building, now choose kids,” I think is a little bit artificial because they’re both ways of asking questions about what does it mean to be here? What does it mean to be alive on earth right now? And I think you can at least get to a sense of understanding some of those questions by entering either building and hopefully you’re moving back and forth between those buildings and those classes here at this high school all the time. I think asking and remembering that so much of the universe is totally mysterious to us is so important and this illusion that we’re ever gonna master everything, that we’re ever going to collect all the knowledge. It’s just a myth. And I think it helps us believe, maybe we have some control, but it doesn’t help us deal with our own mortality. It doesn’t help us understand our own ignorances. Yeah, life is full of the unknown.

Miller: As a novelist, what are the benefits of not knowing things to you?

Doerr: Oh man. Well, I just love to use my job as a way to pursue various curiosities. And I think that’s so wonderful about your job too. You get to learn every day. I hope students here today can remember that, like the real glory in life is to try to learn what you can before you’re gone. And it might seem like your great grandma is super old right now, if she’s in her eighties, but you’ll be there, so quickly. You’re so privileged to get eight decades on this earth. If you’re really lucky, you gotta get through a bunch of gauntlets to get there and that’s not much time. Like, will you ever get to see Indonesia, will you ever understand the history of Australia? Like go learn those things while you can.

Miller: Let’s go to another question from our group of students here. What’s your name?

Lillian: My name is Lillian and I was wondering how writing “Cloud Cuckoo Land” compared to writing “All the Light We Cannot See.” Specifically, how did you deal with intertwining the stories of so many more characters in “Cloud Cuckoo Land” than in “All the Light We Cannot See,” and did anything change in your writing process?

Doerr: Thanks so much for the question. Yeah, there were times. What changed was I basically laid on the carpet in despair many more times writing this novel. “Cloud Cuckoo Land” was so much more ambitious than “All the Light We Cannot See.” For folks who don’t know, it has two characters, Marie and Werner. And kind of like A-B, A-B back and forth, like a ping pong match, I moved pretty quickly back and forth between those points of views. Sometimes I break that pattern with another character. I’ll go back and forth in time. So there are some complexities to that.

But my main concern was that a reader would get whiplash moving back and forth, watching the kind of tennis match as the point of view moved between the two and they’re leaning together like two parallel lines that are just slightly inclined toward each other. I hope that a reader might anticipate their eventual intersection and that might keep her turning pages.

But yeah, “Cloud Cuckoo Land” has five characters. So I’m seeing like a penrose pentagon or a star shape and I’m trying to understand how I can keep all five plates spinning in a reader’s mind, which means sometimes you’re gonna have to go 40 or 50 pages without visiting each character. And you have to remember them spinning in the background, plus they’re living at different times. In “All the Light We Cannot See”, I’ve got Marie and Werner, they’re living in the same exact contemporary, contemporaneous situation. So it’s possible that they will intersect. But here you’re like, “how are these people gonna intersect, one’s 500 years before the other?” So I posed a really complicated challenge for myself and for the reader. And I just tried to make it as clear as I could with a lot of drawing. I would make a lot of maps and charts to try to understand how they would intersect.

Ultimately, what I’m trying to argue in the book is that a lot of things in life that don’t seem obviously connected actually, ultimately are. I think science has been really showing us that in maybe the past 10 years in particular. The easiest example I can give is that, at least when I was growing up, the metaphor of forests was that each tree is out there kind of competing against the others and the big trees win and they shade out the little trees. It’s a very capitalist metaphor. And in the last 10 years, we’ve learned that’s actually a really ineffective way to understand forests. Trees can be quite cooperative. They’re sending signals. They’re using the root systems and the fungus underneath the ground to support each other. Sometimes they’re diverting supplies to weaker trees. They’re learning about pests. There’s a much more complicated undergirding of interconnection and symbiosis in forests. I think we’re learning that in so many different realms, from the way you know melting ice in Greenland’s affecting the weather in Florida and the U.K., or the way say that the supply chain got all disrupted by COVID.

You know the phones that you guys have in your pockets? I’m gonna get the number wrong, but there’s components from like 90 different countries or something inside there. There’s such an incredible network of cooperation that is involved in making those things. I wanted to suggest a structure where, in the beginning you think, how are these people gonna be connected through all this time? Hopefully by the end, after 500 pages, you start to feel and sense those little filaments of connection between them.

In terms of how it changed my writing process, there were lots of days, I would have to say I’ve got to go work on . . . I’d been in the 15th century for too long and the paint would kind of dry up on some of the future sections. So lots of times by say, like Wednesday or Thursday, my work week, I would force myself to go work on Konstance’s section, just to try to keep the paint wet on hers. My subconscious might operate on that later in the day.

Miller: But when you were doing that, were there times, especially the first time you’d write some new sequence for any one of the characters, where you didn’t know where that was going to be in the final version of the novel? You’re moving that character along in their place and time and then assuming at some point you’d move that puzzle piece wherever it should be?

Doerr: Or just get rid of the puzzle piece. Lots of times you spend hours making these pretty little puzzle pieces and realize, “oh, this isn’t gonna fit in my final puzzle.” Maturity is about letting that go and that takes you decades to get used to, as an artist. The more mature artists I meet are the ones who are like, “yeah, I made six of these paintings, but they don’t go in my cycle. So I’m just putting those in the closet.” So I have lots and lots of things I spent a long time on that just never see the light of day.

I think we were talking about the unknown. You have to become really comfortable with the unknown. I think it’s a dangerous thing to think I’ve got this plan and I’m not gonna let surprises come in. It’s kind of like life. It’s kind of like your plans for college, like “I’m going to Yale and that’s what’s gonna happen” and “oh, it’s a pandemic and I’m not gonna be able to deal with that.” You always have to be flexible as an artist. And so, you think, maybe even at the beginning of one day, you’re gonna have Omeir leave home and make his way to the walls of Constantinople, but halfway through the day, he’s decided to take a detour and you’ve got to trust that. You have to allow for surprise and improvisation every time you think you make a plan for a long project like this.

Miller: Sitting at your desk in the morning, where does it feel like it comes from when Omeir, a character you’ve created, who you thought [is] gonna go to the wall, goes somewhere else. Where does that come from?

Doerr: It’s a great question. I don’t have an answer. It’s the accumulation of all the stories you’ve read, all these patterns you’ve taken in. You’re developing your taste over time. Often you’re toggling as a reader and writer, between being a reader and a writer. So halfway through the day you’re like, “what is a reader really gonna think?” Sometimes sleep is the most amazing part of creation because something like this took me seven years. You work on the scene, you think you’ve got it, you go to sleep, you read it in the morning and you’re like, “this is not nearly as good.” Maybe you felt this late at night, you’re a genius, you’re just like, “yes, like this is really good.” And then you wake up in the cold, brittle light of morning and you’re like, “this is not really all that good”. And that’s part of it. But sometimes you have to trust those instincts and over time and exposure to lots of different artists working from lots of different cultures. You start to get a sense of like “this is what works for me, this is the kind of artist I’m trying to be.” Then sometimes you get stuck and sad and down and you have to go read Virginia Woolf. And you read that and you’re like, “this is why this is the magic, this is why I got into this, this is the storytelling I want to try to imitate and make.”

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. Go ahead.

Hannah: Hi, my name is Hannah and I was wondering which perspective was your favorite perspective to write and which one was the hardest for you to write? And which character do you identify with the most?

Doerr: Thanks so much. Great question. That answer would probably depend on what day it is. There are certainly things I loved about all the characters and things that frustrated me about all five of the protagonists. Anna, she’s in an embroidery house, as you guys remember in the novel. It’s all women and girls in there and they’re asked to work basically from the time the sun is up, enough that they can see, until the time the sun goes down. There’s no electric lights at that time. You look at some of this Byzantine embroidery and you think like this is an incredible work of art and sometimes maybe they are expressing faith in a beautiful way, like their own faith. But I think a lot of it was just brutally difficult and that itch, that she has to fly out the window and go somewhere else, that’s me. I don’t want to be told what to do and I don’t want to sit there and just work all day. I get too itchy. I want to move around. So there’s so much of Anna, so much of me that it is that part of Anna. I really enjoyed working on her sections a lot, often.

Also, there were so many challenges in those two 15th century characters because you don’t know what’s on their feet, you don’t know what kind of food they’re about to eat. So you start learning about these markets in Constantinople, where they would sell songbirds on strings. They’re like songbirds, but they were kind of a delicacy to some people. I just love learning that stuff. Some humans were like, “let’s go get some thrushes on a string and eat them.” You know, like stewed thrushes.

Miller: And that means probably tastier and more flavorful than the poultry we get at the supermarket right?

Doerr: Probably, right. Of course.

Miller: Although smaller.

Doerr: Yeah, we’re so stuck on homogeneous. Like the milk always has to look the same. The french fries always have to look the same. But that’s not how food was.

Miller: This actually ties back to what you were talking about earlier in terms of the not knowing stuff. And clearly, I mean we can hear and those of us in the room with you can see your physical excitement as you’re talking about these things. You’re excited about learning things. But you could literally spend the rest of your days learning about any of these things. In the end, that would be a worthwhile way to spend a human life, but that’s not your endeavor. You’re gathering information, synthesizing it, creating new stories for us to read. So how do you just decide, “you know what, this very similitude, this exactness of what life definitely was like in Constantinople in 1452, I’m gonna stop this and I’m just gonna get on with my story.” What’s the balance for you?

Doerr: Good question, Dave. Yeah, you’re always toggling between. To make up stories, to make a dream, right? You’re knitting this dream and you don’t want your reader to wake up. So if one of you is an expert in Byzantine embroidery and I get some stitch wrong and they know that’s not a stitch of the 1600s, this book is garbage. I’m not gonna read anything else. The authority and author, the root is inside, and you don’t want to lose your authority because you want to persuade them that this dream is real. Just like when you’re in a movie theater, you don’t want to be sitting next to somebody who’s crunching their Junior Mints really loudly and they’re making out, right? Because you want to believe in this illusion up on the screen in front of you. That’s why typos and books are super annoying because they wake you up, they remind you that this is just black marks on a white page. It’s not this rich ribbon of color and image that’s coming through your head.

Out of paranoia and probably perfectionism, I’m trying to get as many details right as I can and sometimes I’ll spend way too many hours stuck in that micro universe. And I forget to lift myself up into the macro universe of story, because if you don’t care about those characters, if you don’t care about Anna’s predicament, it doesn’t matter if I got her shoes right or not. You have to believe that she’s going through emotions that you have shared in your own life. So you’re always moving like this toggle between macro and micro. I love that about my job. But sometimes yes, I do get stuck trying to get details right and that’s okay. I think you just have to forgive yourself and say, “oh yeah, well today I really only made it through four sentences but I think those four sentences are better than they were yesterday.”

Miller: Let’s take another question.

Atticus: First of all, I’m Atticus. How has “Cloud Cuckoo Land” changed over the course of writing it and how is your original vision different from what it ended up turning out to be?

Doerr: Thanks Atticus. Good question. Like anything you make, whether you guys wanna make quilts or you want to be in a band and write songs, you want to make movies, often the early visions of what it is are nebulous. But they’re really beautiful. You’re like, “I’ve got this vision of a cloud cuckoo land like a golden castle sparkling in the clouds and I want to make this thing.” But then when you sit down to actually make it, Atticus, you’re like, “oh, this is hard and it’s changing as I make it.” In terms of novel writing, you’re using these clunky, inexpensive things that are words to try to fumble after, big truths up in the sky and words are always approximations. When I say “tree,” each of you will imagine a tree maybe, but it’s gonna be a different tree and I can’t control your interpretation entirely. I can say “a silver barked green, 60 feet high with a treehouse,” and I might start to modify your image of it a little bit. But ultimately you’re still gonna bring in your own interpretation. It’s a cooperation between reader and writer, I think that’s kind of beautiful, but it also leaves this space that, as a perfectionist or a control freak writer, you can’t quite control and that can be a little scary. So often the initial fumbling attempts at making anything can be a little disappointing because you realize, oh, like “I’m not Jimmy Page on this guitar. I’m not exactly making this song the way I conceived the song could be.” I think that’s kind of a thing to embrace, that all art making is gonna somehow have a failure inside of it, if that makes sense. It’s somehow a way to say, “I can achieve this nebulous vision, but now I’m actually making something, so accept that it’s gonna change along the way.”

“Cloud Cuckoo Land”, I thought in the beginning, was gonna be just these two characters in Constantinople. Then I thought to show the effects of one person saving this old book from oblivion, I’ve got to show that book lands in the hands of a character who survives, who lives long after Anna and Omeir are gone. So then I’m like, “okay, now it’s getting a little more complicated. I think I’m gonna have characters in the present.” Then when I decided to introduce Konstance in the future, you don’t know all that on day one, so it’s always modifying. And then, how does it change late in the process? You’re still like, “what if I moved this paragraph earlier? What if I moved this one section earlier?” Sleep on it, read through it, see what you think. All those things are just this slow accretion of time. This book took me seven years to write and you’re still making changes right up . . . I think between the galleys, which they print, and send to reviewers and newspapers and stuff. The final version, I think I made over 5,000 changes, just in those few months before the final version came out.

Miller: Wow, as an interviewer we often get those uncorrected proofs and I’ve always assumed that the only difference between the books I have and the books that will be published officially are typos. Is your process the norm? Is it common for writers to make that many changes?

Doerr: Probably not that many. Because the book was long, it was between the first and the second pass. So it looks typeset by a type, by a book designer, but…

Miller: It looks like a book.

Doerr: It looks like a book versus what comes off my printer. But I still had a long way to go. I think they started making those that would go to you in February and my final version was done in late July. The book came out in late September. So yeah, sometimes you should always read the finished version of the book, but I know it’s hard.

Miller: Let’s take some more questions from our audience. Go ahead.

August: I’m August McNeil. In class, we’ve been learning about using character traits to make strong characters. What strategies do you use to make your characters in both “Cloud Cuckoo Land” and “All the Light We Cannot See”?

Anthony Doerr: Thanks, August. Good question. Before he loses the mike, what is a character trait? I don’t even really know what that means. What’s a character trait?

August: Like just how they act, how they interact, interact with other characters. Someone’s aggressive, being aggressive as a character trait, being gentle. Things like that.

Doerr: Got it. Even though humans can be aggressive one day and kind of gentle the next. Yeah, I don’t think about writing down a list of traits like that ever. Usually it’ll be some kind of impulse shared within me. So I mentioned, say Anna chafing at being told what to do. Omeir identifies with animals almost more than he does with people in the novel. And that’s kind of me, like at a cocktail party, usually I get a little overwhelmed and just start petting the dog in the corner and not dealing with the human beings at the party.

Sometimes it’ll start with some deeper thing that I share and then I start working up on surface levels, like what does their world look like? In the case of Marie and “All the Light We Cannot See”, her main trait, if I think about it in those terms, is curiosity. She wants to learn stuff all the time. But on the surface, she’s incredible, she’s a French person. I’m not. She has a severe visual disability, which I don’t. So you start using research to fill in all those gaps, but you start with that kind of common core. I can see it almost like blue or gold that I share with this person and that deep curiosity really determines almost all of her decisions in the novel. Even if I don’t know, when I start the book - say, Braille books - how expensive Braille books are in 1938 for a girl in France. That’s the kind of stuff you can learn.

I would say, start with some things you identify with the most about a character and don’t worry if your character is a violin maker in 1700. You can go learn that stuff. But if it’s a violin maker who’s in love and you’re in love, that’s the kind of stuff that works, or feels neglected by his parents or her parents or feels lost and confused. Those are the kinds of things you can run through and then build the world through detail. It’s only through the great irony of fiction writing, it’s only through the individual can you achieve the universal, it’s only through the broken glass on the pavement that you can achieve the stars up in the galaxy, that makes sense. And lots of times I think student writers of whatever age will say, “well, I want to write about love.” And ironically, the best way to write about love is to write about one idiosyncratic person in like Beaverton, who’s in love, if that makes sense. And they’re always like, “well, I want to set it in any town.” I’m like, make it Beaverton, if you make it specific enough, some of that becomes any town.

Miller: Go ahead. What’s your name?

Anyanka: Hi, my name is Anyanka and you mentioned how you used maps and images and stuff to be able to organize the stories. Were there any other tools and programs that you used to organize such a sweeping, complicated story?

Doerr: Thanks so much for the question. Yeah, I have bulletin boards in my office. So I’m always pinning up images of oxen in the 1450s, and I’m using maps of Constantinople and putting those visual aids around me and then on my computer. I have multiple tools. There’s a timeline app, it’s called Aeon. I think that’s the name of it. And that really helps me kind of figure out what historical events are intersecting with the lives of my characters. And then I use this tool called Scrivener, which is this app that allows you to basically suck in a bunch of word documents into one space so each chapter can be its own little document. Then if you decide to rearrange the sequence of them, all I have to do is drag them back and forth. That’s quite easy and also really easy for me in that software to save stuff that I’m discarding. So I have these huge folders that start to balloon off all these things I’ve cut. So then if, maybe a year later, I had this scene with a thunderstorm in Constantinople, I can find that paragraph pretty easily through that tool. I do sometimes use newer technologies, even though the book itself is like this big tribute to the old technology that is a paper book.

Miller: Another question from the audience, go ahead.

Dominic: My name is Dominic. Between “All the Light We Cannot See” and “Cloud Cuckoo Land”, what do you do when you hit a creative block when you’re writing?

Doerr: Thanks Dominic. Great, very thoughtful question. I want to remind you that there’s moments when I can’t tell if a block is just a failure of nerve because it seems like it’s gonna be a really hard scene to write and I’m just afraid to write it, or if it’s like an actual block, like I don’t know what’s going to happen in here. Either way, the solution for me is to get outside, leave my phone somewhere and either exercise or just go for a run, or somehow get my kids away from their stupid phones and get outside. That’s somehow, I find it calms me down and it helps me sometimes at least accept that I don’t know what’s gonna happen next or how to solve this problem. But I get a little less anxiety about getting stuck like that. So ask yourself, if you’re feeling blocked sometimes. Is this a failure of nerve, where I need to just kind of push myself a little further, or do I need to be kind to myself right now, let myself recover, get outside?

The other solution is just to read, in my case. If it’s music for you guys or filmmaking, go watch a film you love. If it’s music, just go listen to a band you love. For me, I’ll go pick up whatever, J.M. Coetzee or Anne Carson. Some writer whose work is really careful, really reminds me why I wanted to get into this in the first place and often that will fill me back up with ideas and momentum to be creative the next day.

Miller: I want to turn to the power of stories. It’s an idea that animates so much of the book and it’s illustrated by the book. At one point, one of your characters says, “I know why those librarians read the old stories to you, because if it’s told well enough for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.” How much of storytelling for you is about avoiding death or forestalling death?

Doerr: Go Dave, awesome. I love it. Well there’s an argument that all art making really comes from death anxiety, that humans are trying to make something to help them deal with the fact that we won’t be here forever.

Miller: Does that feel true to you personally?

Doerr: Of course, yeah. The Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, I think he said like “that’s it, that’s why all humans make stuff because they’re afraid to die.” I think this book is always moving between the tension of erasure and oblivion and preservation and stewardship. And I’m thinking about it in multiple ways, in terms of the natural world, what kind of world are we going to hand down to our grandkids? I’m thinking about it in terms of book culture, what kind of stories survive and why?

And I’m also thinking about and asking questions about heroes. The Greek idea of a hero is this often male, almost always male slasher, like Achilles, somebody who’s slicing and severing things all the time and we still see that kind of hero elevated in storytelling today. Often, it’s the Bruce Willis who’s there, like if you have a big enough gun, you can solve the problem. What’s so interesting, in let’s say, the Iliad and the Odyssey, is that a lot of the female characters who often don’t get enough page time and are property in a lot of ways, are the opposite of severing, where they’re knitting or they’re weaving, they’re connectors. You can think of Penelope in the Odyssey, if you guys know that she’s weaving all the time, or Helen, the Trojan women are often weaving. And that tension between severing and connecting is quite interesting to me and I think I’m playing around with that quite a bit in the novel. Maybe the hero of the novel is this character named Zeno as some of you know. He’s not a very traditional prototypical hero in many ways. He’s a translator, he’s an old guy, he’s living, he’s a gay person at a time when really not allowed to be gay in this part of Idaho that he’s living in. So I am trying to invert this idea of librarians and translators as heroes through the novel, but I’m still playing with the same idea of a hero is somebody who can transcend death, who can momentarily become supernatural. And the whole idea of the Odyssey, this idea that a song about a return can be sung years hence after the players are gone, is this idea that a song can outlive an individual person’s life. And I think I’m in love with that idea. The idea that through storytelling we can, not necessarily defeat death, but we can kind of slip through death.

I was 14 when we read “The Diary of Anne Frank’' in school and it had this really profound effect on me, just because she was 14 when she was making that notebook and she had been eradicated from the Earth. And yet because she participated in this magic of putting words down in a notebook, her voice lives on and lives on really beautifully and distinctively. Her jokes are still there, and all she did was participate in this really inexpensive art form. So there’s something really beautiful about the idea and the act of writing and drawing. I think they’re just so simple and they’re so inexpensive and if you can feed yourself with $4 to $5 of note paper and a pen, you can participate in that and there’s a chance that the things you make would outlive you. It’s very fascinating and beautiful.

Miller: Going from the kind of individual understanding of mortality to a habitat-wide, ecosystem-wide one. What are the ways that you reckon with climate change right now as a fiction writer?

Doerr: I think the novel explores . . . could you guys feel some climate stuff in the book? In Konstance’s world, the real precipitating circumstance that I know you guys can relate to as Oregon kids . . . you remember why the kids are all in the library at the beginning working with Zeno, because there’s smoke everywhere, right? Did you guys have some pretty crappy smoke air quality days the past few years?

Miller: And you even say, it’s smoke that has come from Oregon fires. You say that in the book.

Doerr: Yeah, I blame it all on Oregon. Boise, where I live, is in a valley and we would get British Columbia smoke, Oregon smoke and California smoke. Sometimes they would be like, “we don’t even know where the smoke is from today” and it would just pool in the valley. And raising kids in that, it’s tough. You’re like, “I guess we’re gonna exercise indoors again today” and that’s really been our new reality.

It’s very interesting for me how localized some of the problems of climate chaos can be, where friends on the East Coast [are] like, “what are you talking about? What’s air quality”? And I check the quality every day on my phone. They don’t even think about that stuff. I worry about the empathy gap a little bit as we get inundated. The floods in Pakistan in September are so heinous and yet [as] we get inundated with these stories more and more frequently, we start to get inured and habitualized to them. And then maybe we’re not as readily empathetic to these localized populations that are dealing with various disasters, all brought on by our group participation in changing the climate of our planet. I think, like a lot of writers, I was grappling with how I can be responsible. I think it’d be irresponsible to tell a story, especially one that moves through the past, present, future, and not address the changes that we’re causing our atmosphere and our planet, life on the planet.

There’s also a parallel crisis I’m addressing in the novel, which is the biodiversity crisis. We’ve lost so many wild creatures from this planet and I hope that you can feel, like the life of Anna and Omeir in the 15th century, they’re just surrounded by creatures. There’s so many animals in their lives. And then it’s a little bit of a poorer life with Seymour and Zeno, especially with this owl that Seymour connects to. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say this owl is removed from his life. And then by the time you get to Konstance, her only interactions with animals are through this virtual reality. There’s no creatures around.

Miller: Or one ant.

Doerr: One ant, which is called Dave.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience.

Liz: Hi, my name is Liz. I’m a junior. I guess my question is when you were writing the book, what emotion were you trying to have your readers feel?

Doerr: Okay, thanks, Liz. Well I hope it’s a series of emotions. Sometimes you’re feeling afraid for, say, Konstance, as her dad’s rushing her through this confusing virus that’s swirling around them. I hope other times you feel kind of excitement and intrigue and curiosity when you’re learning about, say, this big attack on the walls of Constantinople. So I think that should be a panorama and a spectrum of emotions that a reader feels as you turn pages. Even though the situation is quite bleak for almost all the characters at certain points in their life, I hope you do feel a kind of sense of hope though, if that’s the fundamental root of your question. Because I think I’m trying to suggest that, through stewardship, some stories can survive and stories can be this binding thread that link humans through time and can make us feel less alone on our journey from life to death.

Miller: I’m glad you brought up that word “hope,” because I saw a review of your two most recent books in the New Yorker. It was last year. The gist of it was you were sort of chided for being too optimistic or I think one of the words was, “too eager to soothe.” Do you think of yourself as optimistic?

Doerr: That’s why you don’t read reviews, interesting. Yes, I do. I think becoming a parent changed a lot of that and complicated a lot of that for me. I do have moments. Seymour, as those of you who read the book know, especially as he gets older and is about your age, is really interested fundamentally [in] reading about climate change all the time. And when I was working on those sections, I would get pretty hopeless. I started the book in 2015 and then scientists, writers are saying someday we might have million acre burns in the west. And then by the time of finishing it, you guys have one 20 million acres burned in Oregon. I think that’s right. So some of the predictions that climate scientists are often pretty reticent to make, scary predictions, and their worry of sounding like Cassandra’s, to use another Greek metaphor. You guys know that that sounds like the boy who cried wolf.

Miller: But there’s a wolf.

Doerr: But yeah, and the predictions are all coming true. A lot of them are coming through faster than people thought. So that stuff could lead me to a little despair of course. I think fundamentally watching your kids go through the world, seeing how capable they are. Already they’re at the age where they’re teaching me more about the world than I can teach them. I see this amazing human capability for learning, for mastering new situations and for flexibility. The fact that we cooked up a vaccine to this virus so unbelievably quickly is so exciting. So I don’t think technology will solve all of our problems. And I think we all need to start looking a little bit more carefully at how we’re connected with the systems that sustain us, with the food, with the bacteria in our guts, the food that feeds us. So it’s not always going to be technology that bails us out. But I do feel hopeful that humans have a massive capacity for innovation, for flexibility, for resilience.

Miller: I want to get at the end here. In both of your last two novels, after the climactic action is done, the books go on a little bit and some of your lucky characters, we get to see them late in life. The sense I get as a reader is that you don’t want to say goodbye to your beautiful characters. What is it like for you to do that, to get to the end, to make the end?

Doerr: That’s interesting. I’ve never been asked that. I think I like to see it like a 747, a novel. Sometimes I leave it on the runway too long before I take it off. And I think the readers like “take off the jet already.” But then I think I like to see it land and taxi it to a gate. I think I like the reader to feel that like, okay, this character will be safe. Something about the endings that I think I’d like to linger in at least for one page. I think that might be true.

Miller: Is it hard to leave these people you’ve lived with for seven years, six years?

Doerr: Of course. But then you’re always so excited to start working on your next project and then it’s months before the book comes out and then you can go to talk to people for whom, they’re just meeting Zeno. Like these students just met Seymour for the first time. So that’s always really exciting. They get to live on in other people’s heads and then they kind of live on in yours as well.

Miller: And as you said, if it works, then they keep living.

Doerr: Yeah. You hope so. Of course, students could be like, “I don’t believe in Seymour” and then he’s maybe not as an effective character. But you hope that your characters will live on and in other people’s imaginations. That’s the magic of books and readers.

Miller: Anthony Doerr, thanks so much for giving us your time. I appreciate it.

Doerr: Thanks, Dave. Thanks kids. Thank you guys so much!

Miller: Thank you as well to Olivia Jones Hall and Literary Arts and to Paige Battle and the rest of the folks here and especially the students at Grant High School.

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