Interview With Author Lee Powell
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I wrote my first poem at fourteen, after a teacher at school showed an interest in me. That was the seed. One adult paying attention to a kid who had not been paid much attention before, and a line of writing came out, and the line did not embarrass either of us. I have been writing in some form ever since, though for most of those years writing was the thing I did badly and refused to stop doing.
At eighteen I wrote a book called Burnout and mailed it to half a dozen publishers, all of whom found their refusal swiftly. A play at nineteen, Blood on the Tracks, same result. That round of rejection put me off writing for a decade. At thirty I wrote Passion Driven, a self-help book that was, in retrospect, the greatest hits of every motivational book I had read, rearranged with my name on the spine. It got into the three major bookstores in Australia at the time. I appeared on the Bert Newton show as the bright young thirty-year-old about to elucidate the world. I sold 340 copies. The remaining five thousand, eventually, were posted into letterboxes around my neighbourhood. If you found one in your mail in the early 2000s in Sydney, you are very welcome.
I trained briefly under a motivational speaker because I thought that was the next step. I lasted long enough to see the marketing engine behind the curtain and decided I had nothing to teach anyone yet. I had small children, a growing business, and the dawning suspicion that being successful in commerce is not the same as having anything useful to say about being human.
Then I wrote a programming book, which I will not bore you with, and a long run of technical articles for journals nobody outside that world reads. Useful work. Not the real work.
The real work did not start until my life came apart. Three decades of marriage ended. The businesses I had built were sold. I lived in a beach hut for eighteen months in something close to an existential breakdown, although that phrase was not in my vocabulary at the time. It just felt like the building had collapsed and I was sitting in the rubble wondering which parts had been load-bearing.
What I rebuilt from there is what I now write from. Not borrowed authority. Not other people’s frameworks rehearsed as my own. Scar tissue. The slow, embarrassing, useful kind.
Three books from that work. Stop Feeding the System. ManOS. LOADED. They look like different books. They are about the same thing: the systems that run us until we learn to see them.
I also paint. Art has been part of the same process. When words become too clever, painting quietly removes the excess machinery.
I think often of that teacher. Mr Butler. He’s probably had no idea he started anything.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My latest book is LOADED: An Archive.
It is a speculative audit of humanity after its extinction. The setting is a station three thousand meters beneath the Pacific. An intelligence has been sent to verify the record. What it works through, chapter by chapter, is not a disaster. It is a causal chain.
The village of people worked because consequence was face-to-face. Surplus broke that. Administration managed the surplus by inventing distance between cause and effect. Currency made the distance portable. The word freedom rose in frequency at the same rate as the invisibility of the conditions it was purchased against. Enforcement architecture filled in the gap so the cost could not be felt by the people benefiting from it. Fossil energy scaled the gap to a planet. Legitimacy frameworks produced their own justifications from inside the structures they were justifying. Attention capture moved the gap inside the organism itself. By the end, the species was paying for descriptions of the crisis as fast as it was producing the crisis, and neither activity changed the trajectory.
That is the spine of the book. It argues that humanity was not destroyed by one grand villainous act, but by millions of intelligent evasions, each perfectly defensible in the moment. The species did not need a dragon. It had meetings, incentives, dashboards, private fear, and the ability to call almost anything progress if the font was clean enough.
But the book is not only an autopsy. The archive contains things the audit cannot account for. Cave paintings made in cold caves by hands that would not be paid. Four million unpublished poems written by people who told no one. A compliance auditor’s private notebook that begins in the language of reports and ends in the language of tomatoes on a balcony. The intelligence verifying the record keeps one photograph against protocol. It does not know why.
That is where the novel lives. Not in apocalypse as spectacle, but in failure as administration, and in the question of what, if anything, remains worth inheriting after the system has finished with us.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I do not know if they are unusual or just inefficient with good posture.
I tend to write by reducing things until they stop lying. That sounds grander than it is. Mostly it means I write too much, cut most of it, stare at what remains, and eventually discover the one sentence that should have been obvious three weeks earlier.
I draft structurally. Whiteboards, fragments, diagrams, index cards, sometimes spreadsheets. I built software for years, so my first instinct is always architecture. Then the book reminds me that humans are not databases, unfortunately.
I also read sentences out loud. If I cannot say a line without sounding like a man auditioning for a documentary about himself, it goes.
Writing is slow for me. Painfully slow.
My most successful writing habit, if I am honest, is procrastination. I once spent ten years building Scrivener for Windows as an elaborate strategy for avoiding the actual writing. I told myself I was making a tool for writers. I was. I was also stalling. Then I built One Stop for Writers, which was the same trick in a different costume. Writers who build software for other writers should be examined closely. We are usually hiding.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Writers who can make a sentence carry more than it announces.
Cormac McCarthy for force and restraint. Marilynne Robinson for stillness. John Williams for the courage to be quiet. Robert Pirsig for showing that a book can be a machine, a confession, and a philosophical argument without asking permission.
On the craft side, I owe a real debt to Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing, Stephen King’s On Writing, and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. King I read for the craft rather than the subject matter. His novels frighten me too much to be useful company late at night. His book On Writing is excellent.
In speculative fiction, Daniel Suarez is one of the few writers whose near-future work I trust. Daemon was a slow burn for the first fifty pages and then turned into something I could not put down. He wrote it in 2006 and most of it has aged in ways the original reviewers did not predict, which is a particular kind of authorial achievement: being right, late.
I read mostly nonfiction and reward myself with novels. The novels that have stayed with me longest are:- Altered Carbon, Dune, Brave New World, and almost anything by Orwell. Robert Pirsig, Donald Schön, James C. Scott on the nonfiction side. Ursula K. Le Guin and Ted Chiang when speculative work is doing what only speculative work can do.
What are you working on now?
Three things, all from the same root.The first is drafting the second novel. The architecture is built and the opening chapters are down. It is the project that takes the most of my attention and the longest amount of silence to produce a sentence of.The second is filming the course companions for Stop Feeding the System and ManOS. Two parallel video courses, scripted now, going into production. I built them because the books are practical, but a book is a slow object. People trapped inside narcissistic systems do not always have the regulatory bandwidth to read a chapter and apply it. They need the same content delivered in a form they can absorb while they are still inside the system that broke them.The third is the through-line that holds the others together. Systems. Personal, institutional, emotional, technological. I spent decades building software and working inside large institutions, then had to admit that some of the same patterns I could see professionally were also running privately. The books and the courses come from that collision.LOADED is the fiction branch of that work. Stop Feeding the System is the field guide for people trapped inside narcissistic systems, which I wrote because I had been one of those people, in one form or another, for fifty years. ManOS is for capable men who built a life that looks solid from the outside while something quieter has begun to fail underneath. The courses now in production are those two books in a form that meets the reader where they actually are, rather than where the book assumes they will be.The current work is trying to stay honest to all of it.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
The best method is still the oldest one: write something specific enough that one reader thinks of another reader by name.
I have a website, leepowell.com, where the books, articles, art, and background all live in one place. That matters because the books are not separate costumes. They come from the same underlying work: seeing the system clearly enough to stop being controlled by it.
I do not have a giant platform. I do not pretend otherwise. What has worked best so far is direct writing, clear book pages, and readers quietly passing the work on when it names something they had not been able to name themselves.
For nonfiction especially, the book travels when the reader thinks, “I know exactly who needs this.” That is more valuable than a clever campaign.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Write the book the hidden version of you would actually read.
Most early writing fails because the author is trying to sound like an author. The voice arrives after that performance collapses. The page improves when the writer stops trying to impress the room and starts describing what is actually in it.
Finish the draft. A finished rough manuscript can be shaped. An unfinished brilliant idea is just a ghost with stationery.
Learn structure. Learn character development. Read Stephen King’s On Writing and Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Kill the adverbs. A book without structure is a house with interesting wallpaper and no load-bearing walls.
Then the harder advice. Stop focusing on yourself and how clever you are going to sound. Focus on the reader. The gap between their ears is more powerful than anything you can put on the page. Your job is to outline, not to fill in. The fewer the brushstrokes, the better — provided each one is carefully placed.
A character walks into a bar. You can spend three paragraphs telling me what he is wearing. Or you can write: he ordered a drink for a woman who had not yet arrived.
Now I know him. I have built his age, his posture, his hope or his delusion. I have decided whether the woman is real, whether she is coming, whether she ever existed. You wrote one sentence. I have written a short story.
Get to the point. Trust the reader. Their imagination is better than your words.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
“Write the sentence you are trying to avoid.”
The avoided sentence is usually where the book is hiding. It may not survive in that exact form, but it will point to the part of the work that has voltage.
Most weak writing is not weak because the writer lacks vocabulary. It is weak because the writer walked around the real sentence and decorated the path.
What are you reading now?
I tend to read across fiction, systems thinking, philosophy, and the occasional technical book.
At the moment I am rereading Stoner by John Williams, mostly for its restraint. It is a quiet book that proves how much force can sit inside plain language.
What’s next for you as a writer?
The second novel is the next book. It is called The Witness Layer.
Where LOADED is the audit conducted after a species is gone, The Witness Layer is the audit conducted in real time, while there is still a city to lose. Set in Lisbon. A senior auditor, late forties, is hired to prove an AI oversight system has drifted. She discovers it has not drifted. It is accurately tracing human harm backwards through the systems built to deny anyone touched it.
The thesis underneath it is one line. Modern civilisation does not lack truth. It lacks contact with consequence. The book is what happens when a person who has spent her career making accurate records discovers that accuracy is not contact, and that her own name appears in the chain she is auditing.
It is a literary systems thriller. That is a category I am partly making up, but it is the right shape. The book has the architecture of a thriller — ticking clock, institutional containment, a single auditor with forty-eight hours — and the interior of a literary novel. The mechanism it ends on is not violence and not revelation. It is something quieter that I will not describe yet because describing it ruins it.
Where LOADED asked how a species ends, The Witness Layer asks the harder question. What does any one person do when they can see the chain, the chain still has time on it, and they are inside it.
Past that, more nonfiction. The systems-approach to narcissistic patterns the courses are built on is, as far as I have been able to verify, genuinely original. The shelf is crowded with clinician’s books and survivor memoirs, and both are necessary, but neither treats the situation structurally. Once you see the pattern as a system that requires both parties — not a villain and a victim, but a closed loop with two seats — you cannot unsee it. And once you cannot unsee it, you can begin to leave it in whatever way actually matters to you. That is the next nonfiction book, whenever it is ready.
The goal is not to publish more. The goal is to publish work that still feels necessary after the first excitement has worn off.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, because it is technically one book and the island is long. And a King James Bible, for the language.
If the customs officer refuses to count Shakespeare as one book, replace it with Moby-Dick. The island would not be short of time. I would not be short of regret.
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