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Episode 163: Fred Waitzkin — How Writing a Book is Like a Love Affair
140 Plays6 years ago
"A great story for me is one that engages me emotionally. It's like a love affair," says Fred Waitzkin, author of several books, including his latest Deep Water Blues.
Fred Waitzkin comes by the show to talk about his love of writing, how he developed his knack for story, how his parents influenced him, and how breaking into other disciplines cracked the code of his latest book.
Support for this episode comes from Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction.
Keep the conversation going on Twitter by tagging the show @CNFPod, on Instagram @cnfpod and Facebook.
Party on, CNFers!
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorships
00:00:02
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CNF, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, greatest podcast in the world, sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. Goucher MFA is a two-year low-residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere, while on-campus residencies allow you to hone your craft with accomplished mentors who have Pulitzer Prizes and best-selling books to their names. Program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni.
00:00:27
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which has published 140 books and counting. You'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey. Visit Goucher.edu slash nonfiction to start your journey now, immediately. Take your writing to the next level. Go from Hopeful to Published and Goucher's MFA in Nonfiction. Coming in, coming in hot. Number two, batting, batting second in the lineup.
00:00:55
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Quality sponsor. Bay Path University, your story. Bay Path is the first and only MFA to offer a new residency. Fully you'll find small online classes and a dynamic and supportive community. You'll master the techniques of good writing from acclaimed authors and editors, learn about publishing and teaching through professional internships, and complete a master's thesis that will form the foundation for your memoir or collection of personal essays.
00:01:23
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Special elective courses include contemporary women's stories, travel and food writing, week-long summer residency in Ireland.
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Ireland? Ireland. With guest writers including Andre Debeest III, Anne Hood, Mia Gallagher, and others. Start dates in late August, January. And you're gonna find out more at baypath.edu slash MFA. Oh boy. What are you gonna do, CNFers? What are you gonna do? Plug in your axe, man, and let's jam.
Brendan O'Meara and Fred Waitskin
00:02:05
Speaker
Hey, I'm Brendan O'Meara, and this is my podcast, CNF. Creative Nonfiction Podcast, greatest podcast in the world, where I talk to badass tellers of true tales, whether they be writers, filmmakers, or audio producers, and I try to chart their journey while unpacking how they go about the work.
00:02:21
Speaker
Fred Weitskin is here. He's most famous for writing the memoir Searching for Bobby Fischer, which was made into a movie. But we don't talk about that one lick. That'll be for another pod. We talked about his writing career and his new novel based on a true story titled Deep Water Blues, published by Open Road.
00:02:43
Speaker
Honestly man, the pod goblins threw this one together. Again, I don't know how it happened. I kind of like black out for most of the week. Energy levels are all time lows. The yard and garden haven't been tended to in ages. My wife is the breadwinner by a pole, as we might say in horse racing, and she's burned out from working terribly long days.
00:03:06
Speaker
I'm burning out from working long days. By the end, after our bike commutes home, we're cooked. We're in bed by like 8.30, the latest. We can barely keep our eyes open to read. It's a mess. To quote my favorite band, it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of the tunnel is just a freight train coming our way.
00:03:30
Speaker
That's right. You subscribe to the show. Do it wherever. I don't need to tell you where, do I? Good. Head over to BrendanOmarra.com, hey, for show notes and to subscribe to the podcast newsletter. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat it, so they say. Keep the conversation going on Twitter, at BrendanOmarra, and at CNF Pod. If the show matters to you, and I know it does for some of you, maybe even a lot of you,
00:03:56
Speaker
Tag the show and link up to your various platforms. If I'm the fire, you're the Tinder baby. Swipe right. Alright, that's enough nonsense. I think you're gonna love this one. Fred's got such a passion for writing and he's written many great books. And I don't want to jinx it. But I think you'll want to come back.
00:04:17
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and we'll dig into his memoirs and other stuff.
Waitskin on Fishing and Inspiration
00:04:20
Speaker
He's one of those guys who really loves the task and the art of writing the work. Loves the work. You're gonna love it. I know it. Here's me and Fred Waitskin episode 163. Yeah, let's do it.
00:04:50
Speaker
That's a story in itself. I started, you know, I'm a fisherman. I've been a lifelong fisherman. You know, I have an old boat, 40 foot Hatteras, which is 40 years old. It's kind of like a member of my family. And I've been fishing in the islands, the Bahamian Islands, for my whole life. It's before I had my boat, my dad had a boat. And I've always been a fisherman, fisherman and a writer.
00:05:14
Speaker
About 25 years ago, we were exploring in the southern Bahamas, really off the beaten track, almost as far south as you can go before hitting the Turks and Caicos. When we discovered this island, it's just absolutely gorgeous. It was very unlike Bahamian islands, which are typically flat and arid. And this one had beautiful vegetation. And it was mountainous. And there weren't too many people. It had wild animals, wild animals.
00:05:44
Speaker
pigs and cows, more wild animals and people. And it also had a lovely tiny little marina on the south end, which hardly anyone knew about. It was mostly frequented by sportsmen that came from Florida. A lot of celebrity sportsmen like Mark Messier, the hockey player, Jackie Onassis used to go there. And it was pretty much unknown. It was just this tiny little place and 15 boats would show up and the fishing was insanely great. It was pristine.
00:06:15
Speaker
And I started fishing there. And then a number of years ago, a terrible tragedy happened around the island, a really gruesome, awful event that you've probably already read about in the book, but I don't think I'm gonna spell it out, but just a terrible thing for a lot of people. And after that, the island was cursed is the best way I can put it. I mean, just terrible things happened on the island. One thing after the next, and this beautiful,
00:06:44
Speaker
physically beautiful place, became kind of gnarled physically. The character of the people there changed. Very violent things started to happen. And the evolution of the place, coupled with my own personal involvement, because I loved it so much there, made it something that I thought I would write about.
Writing Techniques and Influences
00:07:05
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But it took me a while to figure out how to write about it. Anyway, that's how it began.
00:07:10
Speaker
So what was, or how were you able to crack the code to write about it in the way that was satisfactory for you? Well it was, you know, I've written a number of books and my last book was a lengthy novel called The Dream Merchant and you know I sat down to write this book very much in the same spirit in which I've written many other books and every time I tried it just it just wasn't coming out right it just
00:07:40
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it just lacked the power and the zest of the story itself. I was falling short and I, you know, I put it aside and, um, and I spent two years working on a screenplay, uh, which I'd never, I'd never written a screenplay before, but I, you know, I had friends that were movie producers and I came across a story that was very, very interesting to me. And I, I threw myself into this sort of this new medium and I learned how to do it. I worked with, uh,
00:08:08
Speaker
with a screenplay writing coach for a month or two. And I learned the basics of screenwriting. And after I finished the screenplay and put it out into the world, I decided to take another crack at the novel. And I realized that immediately how to write the novel after I'd written the screenplay, I realized that it was an adventure story. It was a fast and violent story. I had to write it in that spirit.
00:08:36
Speaker
no lengthy, no lengthy paragraphs, no complicated ideas. It had to be short sentences, no flashbacks. It had to just move like a great movie. And with that understanding, you know, it virtually wrote itself. I wrote it 10 minutes.
00:08:50
Speaker
I love that you stepped away from it in such a way that you and then tried a different discipline and that's what kind of that that's what freed you and I think it's so important for artists and writers whatever you whatever your discipline is to kind of
00:09:07
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get outside of your chosen trade and draw inspiration from a different kind of craft. And oftentimes it does. It recolors and re-inspires you and gives you that momentum to finish the thing that you were kind of stuck on, right? Yeah, I think it's true. And I mean, in my writing career, every time I finish a book, I kind of have a problem. It's hard for me to start the next book. And
00:09:37
Speaker
And I find that if I try to write a new book, like within a month or two of having finished the old book, I end up rewriting the book that I'd just written. And so I've learned that I have to sort of give myself space. And that's important because you want each book to have a new life. You want it to be alive, almost like a person. So I think that's how I relate to that idea.
00:10:02
Speaker
And so with this one, of course, you did the adjacent thing and worked on a screenplay for a while. What other artistic media do you like to sometimes consume as inspiration that helps inform your writing and make you a better writer? Well, you know, I'm a great lover of music. You know, I'm a jazz lover. I'm a hand drummer. So I've always been inspired by music. My mom was a painter. And I, in fact, if you were
00:10:32
Speaker
If we were looking at visual Skype right now, you'd be in my office in Manhattan. My office is surrounded by the sculptures of my mother. My mother was a great artist and sculptress in her works in museums all over the world. I love art. I guess I'm pretty much a lover of the arts. The odd thing I would suppose about my relationship to writing that might seem a little off the beaten track is that
00:11:02
Speaker
starting from a very, very young age, riding and fishing have always been linked for me. And I think the reason why that is is because when I was 13 years old, my mother put a copy of Life Magazine in front of me, which had the original version of Ernest Hemingway's Old Man in the Sea. And I read that when I was 13 years old, and I fell in love simultaneously with his prose style, the rhythm of sentences, and with this idea of going into the ocean and finding great fish.
00:11:31
Speaker
And so fishing in the ocean, I'm a boat captain. I've been a captain for most of my adult life. So that juxtaposition has always worked for me as a writer, which isn't to say that I've written about boating and fishing very much, because I haven't, but somehow it's baked into my lifestyle. When I work on a book to get away from my office, from the routine of writing every day,
00:12:00
Speaker
I get out of my boat, I go to sea, I fish, I come back, I go to work. So that kind of juxtaposition fuels me.
00:12:07
Speaker
Ian, your mother was a very committed artist too. She treated it like work in the research I've done. She was very strict about her discipline around her work and her painting and sculpting. And what did you learn from her, what it takes to be a disciplined, regimented artist to get creative work done? Well, she was very much, as you describe her,
00:12:37
Speaker
and exponentially so. And my mother believed that art was everything. She believed that, and we used to argue about it, because I have other interests, like I'm crazy involved with sports, I was a very hands-on father, I was involved with my kids, and my mother would always counsel me, forget watching jet games on Sundays, don't watch NFL games, work.
00:13:05
Speaker
If you want to ever get anywhere as an artist, you have to work all the time. She was brutal that way. And that's how she was. She worked from dawn to dusk. For the last 20 years of her life, she worked with polyester resin, making her sculptures, which is very toxic stuff. And she used to pour this resin molds and make incredible pieces of faces looking out of books. Books were her motif. She created books without words. And she used to
00:13:36
Speaker
pour this resin into molds. And then she put it at the foot of her bed so that when she woke up in the morning, she could see these faces with a fresh eye. But the problem was that they were toxic all through the night in her bedroom. Stuff probably killed her. But she was really, she was rigorous about the importance of the work. And it influenced me greatly without a question.
00:14:00
Speaker
And in a sense, too, your father, though, in a different trade, the Beethoven of fluorescence, as I think I read, he had a different kind of rigor as perhaps the greatest salesman of fluorescent lighting for commercial buildings in all of New York.
00:14:21
Speaker
So what did you learn from him and even just the interwoven nature of your parents' sort of vocations that led to you being a very, you know, a very successful writer? My parents were so mismatched. They were both brilliant at what they did. I love that you came up with the line, the Beethoven of fluorescence, which came out of my memoir, The Last Marlin, because that's how I thought of him. I mean, you know, when you say the Beethoven of fluorescence,
00:14:51
Speaker
It sort of sounds hilarious, doesn't it? Yeah. But that's what I believed when I was a kid. I mean, he was during his period of time in New York. For 12 years in New York, he sold more fluorescent lighting than every other lighting salesman in the city combined. He was rather remarkable. But in my mind, he was even bigger than that. I mean, in my mind, when you looked at the New York City skyline and you saw those lights, I thought it was my dad that lit the skyline.
00:15:21
Speaker
And, um, and you know, the question you ask is so fundamental to who I am. Um, I don't know if your readers could relate to this or not, but you know, when I was, when I was going to college, one of my favorite writers was Thomas Mann. And, and he, he would, um, he, he would have these quote unquote artists figures in your short stories and his novels. And very often the artist figure was the, um,
00:15:49
Speaker
was the product of a gypsy, artistic mother, and a businessman father. And you know, Thomas Mann appealed to me in part because that's the way I grew up. And kind of like that literary tension, that push and pull between my parents was kind of like what made me. And as a writer, the whole idea of push and pull is very, very basic to me. You know, good is,
00:16:17
Speaker
is connected with evil in an intrinsic way. To make that more tangible, if I were to write about a hero, a character that's a good character, I would be very interested in exploring his bad side, his shadow side, because I think all of us have a shadow side. You won't find a hero in my book that's just unequivocally good. I don't believe in that, and I don't think it's terribly interesting either.
00:16:46
Speaker
Can you kind of see how that would relate to my parents? When my father broke all the moral rules, you know, I mean, he'd do anything to make the sale and my mother was an idealist, an artistic idealist. So I sort of came from that and my writing was greatly influenced by it.
00:17:01
Speaker
Yeah, I love that your mother, of all books that she chose to give you when you were a teenager, an impressionable teenager, she gives you Hemingway's Old Man in the Sea, and to me, Deepwater Blues really kind of harkens to that, though it's not like a book exclusively on the water and about fishing, necessarily, the way Old Man in the Sea is, but they seem to echo each other, if that makes any sense.
00:17:26
Speaker
Was that kind of your intent when you took on Deep Water Blues that this was going to echo back to that very influential book for you? You know, I don't think I was thinking about it in the forefront of my mind. But, I mean, on the other hand, it might have been somewhere in there because, I mean, that's where it began for me with that book. And I loved it so much. I thought it was so
00:17:52
Speaker
I don't know. I was so young. I mean, I've loved many writers since Hemingway. I mean, I, you know, I, I mean, I could give you a list of writers. We could go on and on talking about the writers, but I, but I guess when I think about the scene writing, I think about Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad, both of those guys. So I don't think I was specifically thinking about it, but I, I can certainly see how that book influenced, influenced this book and the pro style also.
Journalism and Storytelling
00:18:19
Speaker
Because as I suggested before, again, it wasn't something I was consciously thinking about. But if you were to look at the Pro Style, which I wrote this book, which was significantly influenced by screenwriting, by movies, it's different than my other books. Shorter paragraphs, shorter sentences, no flashbacks. I tried to keep it uncomplicated and wanted it to be an adventure story told as well as I could tell it.
00:18:46
Speaker
And as you were sort of developing as a young writer, eventually you come to struggling writing short stories. Eventually you come to doing long-form journalism, feature writing. And there was kind of a gap in my research idea. I couldn't find out quite how you got to journalism. So how did you get to the kind of journalism that you were doing and writing stories for New York Times Magazine and Esquire and everything? So how did you come to that?
00:19:16
Speaker
Well, let me, I'll tell you, but let me back up just a little bit, because it's kind of funny, at least it's funny to me. You know, when I, after graduate school, and then I taught for a couple of years in college, I decided that I'd devote some time to writing fiction. And my mother, you know, I'd been living on St. Thomas, the Virgin Islands, and I moved back to New York, and my mother loaned me a cold water painting studio where she stored her canvases. And I went up there every day attempting to,
00:19:47
Speaker
to write the great novel. And I would go to this office every day and sit down and try to imagine what fantastic plot my novel would have. I had it in mind, maybe it would be a great plot like Tolstoy might write, like Anna Karenina or War and Peace. And I went up there every day and I couldn't think of one goddamn plot.
00:20:12
Speaker
And then I spent a better part of two years trying to think of a plot, and I couldn't find one anywhere. And I started, it was very troubling. How the hell am I gonna be a, you know, an important novelist if I can't think of a plot? And, you know, I had friends, everybody has friends, and a friend of mine was writing for the New York Times Magazine. And she introduced me to an editor, and they gave me an assignment. And I wrote it, and they liked my work. And then I started writing regularly for them.
00:20:43
Speaker
And what I discovered when I was writing for the New York Times Magazine was that there were stories everywhere. I didn't think there were any stories. I mean, I thought I had to make up all these stories like fairy tales when I was trying to write the novels. But I realized earlier on, but I realized there were stories everywhere. You could find them in the subway. You could find them walking in the street. You know, you could be interviewing an NBA ballplayer and having a couple beers and then he'd tell you a secret. And you'd realize, oh my God, that's a fantastic story, is telling me.
00:21:13
Speaker
And so I really learned about stories, doing feature journalism for the better part of 10 years. And that really was a great training ground for me as a novelist. But to answer your specific question, I was introduced to an editor by a friend, which is often the case. I mean, how do you get started somewhere? Someone has to give you a chance. What was that first story, if you remember? The first story, this whole area, this is also
00:21:43
Speaker
This is also kind of a funny story. The first story was about being a sports fan. I was a crazy sports fan. I was, I was a fan of the New York Knickerbobbers and the New York Jets and the New York Mets, all of them, all of which mostly lose, right? But I was a fanatic sports fan. And, and I, I sold, I sold the mag editor at the magazine, the idea that it would be great to write about being a sports fanatic.
00:22:14
Speaker
And so they liked the idea. And I thought that I would base the article on my favorite athlete in the world, who was Walt Frazier. Are you a basketball fan? Yeah. And I'm familiar with Walt, too. Yeah. OK. So he was my favorite. I mean, he was just bigger than life for me. I just lived in dog for Walt Frazier. And so through the times, I'd arranged
00:22:44
Speaker
a phone interview with Frazier. And I was in my apartment one morning and he called up and he said, hello, this is Clyde. And I said, Clyde, this is Clyde. And he said, yeah, this is Clyde. This is Fred. And I was just so stunned that the same guy that brought the ball up the court so brilliantly, you know, and weave through
00:23:11
Speaker
Pete Marovitch and all these other guys to make the baskets, they called me up on the phone that I couldn't say a goddamn thing to him. I just couldn't say a word. And I bumbled around for about 45 seconds and he hung up the phone. And the article was a disaster. And honestly, in 12 years of feature journalism, I think it's the only article I ever wrote that didn't get published.
00:23:39
Speaker
because I was too tongue-tied to talk to Walt Frazier. Now so actually my first article, my first major article, I bounced from the Times to Esquire and I wrote a big article for Esquire and then I went back to the Times magazine and wrote for them a lot.
00:23:54
Speaker
That's hilarious with Clyde, with Clyde Frazier there. I know what you mean. Like sometimes you write a story about someone or you get access to someone you revere and you're hearing their voice. You know, you're so used to hearing them on TV. So you have that remove and then all of a sudden there, they are literally in your ear and it's, it's very, it's intimidating and you can totally, you can totally clam up. I can totally, I totally get it.
00:24:21
Speaker
I totally clammed up. I remember a few years ago I interviewed Tom Durkin, who's the iconic great race caller for decades for New York Racing Association and Triple Crown and everything. And just to hear that voice coming through my phone, I was like, this is so freaking cool that I'm hearing Tom Durkin coming through my phone.
00:24:44
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that's what it was like. Yeah. And so I loved there's this one part. You said that you're doing the doing journalism. You learned the importance of story in story. And I was wondering if you could elaborate on that because I really liked the ethos of what you're getting at there. Well, you know, I mean, when I started writing the short stories during that period of time that I was in my month, my mom's cold water flat.
00:25:13
Speaker
First of all, I couldn't think of any great stories. And secondly, I wasn't sure what a great story was. And I mean, the only kind of things that were occurring to me as stories during that torture time, working in that freezing cold place were my dreams. You know, I would have sometimes I would have these dreams and some of them were morbid. They were interesting to me. And I would write them up as little short stories and I would send them out to literary magazines like The Transatlantic Review and
00:25:43
Speaker
the Paris Review and very occasionally one of them, one of them was published, but for the most part they were rejected. And I couldn't figure out why, because I figured those were the stories that I had, but I, you know, but later on, starting from when I was writing for the magazines and then afterwards when I started writing my books, I realized how tremendously important stories are. And, and I think that, um,
00:26:12
Speaker
You know, occasionally I work with young writers, talented young writers, to help them along a little bit. And one of the things that I tell them is that having a great story is 80% of the game. Of course, you have to learn how to be a writer. There's a lot of things to learn about being a writer. But if you have a great story, I mean a really great story, you can be less than a great writer and it can still be a very good story. So finding a great story is very important. And what is a great story?
00:26:42
Speaker
Well, there are different elements, and a great story, you know, a great story for you, Brendan, might not be a great story for me. There might be a certain commonality. There probably would be. I mean, it would be a tale that would be intriguing, you know, that it would have a, you know, the ending might be a surprise. There would be something about it that would be gripping. It would have to be some characters that were very interesting and compelling. But really, and I think this is the key to it, a great story for me is a story that engages me emotionally.
00:27:12
Speaker
a story that I can fall in love with. Because it's like a love affair, writing a novel. I mean, you're with this book for, I don't know, the last one I wrote quickly, but the one before took me 10 years to write. So you're with this story for years. You've got to love it. You've got to be able to love it. You need to be able to dig deeply into it. If you don't love it, even though it might be a great story for you, if it's not a great story for me, it's just not going to work. So I mean, have I sort of answered your question?
00:27:43
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely, because I think the pitfall that some people get into – and this could be for anyone who, say, might be a fan of, say, David Foster Wallace or something, who has just pyrotechnics on the page. So sometimes people, I think, they want to maybe sound like that.
00:28:01
Speaker
and fall into that trap. But really, ultimately, what you need to do is find just a good story, write clean sentences, and get out of the way. So I kind of like the sense that, you know, it starts with story, and then you can build out from there. And like, that's what people want, even though there are some people like Adjuno Daez or David Foster Wallace, who can really just light up the page for you, regardless of what they're writing. Well, listen, you know, a great story can help you light up the page.
00:28:30
Speaker
In other words, a great story inspires you. And that's the other element in writing, which I think about a lot, which I try to teach when I talk to young writers. One of the questions I'm often asked is, do you write a detailed outline of your books? Do you outline the book from the beginning to the end? Do you outline your chapters carefully? Do you have intensely detailed notes before you write a chapter? And I say no.
00:28:59
Speaker
And I say, I know generally the story that I want to tell. You know, I might, when I start writing a chapter, I might have a three by five card with, you know, four or five points that I'm likely to hit. But I think the more important thing is to give myself room to discover the story that I want to write. Because I think that the story that exists beneath the story, the story that comes from a pre-analytic place in a writer is where the really exciting stuff happens. Hemingway, and I guess I read this in the Paris Review when I was a kid.
00:29:29
Speaker
said something like, every time he sits down to write, he tries to write better than he could write. And I didn't understand what that meant for many, many years. I think maybe I didn't understand it until five or six or seven years ago. And I think what he meant was just what I'm referring to, that if you are engaged in your story so deeply, that you're not thinking and worrying about what happens next and then what happens after next. If you're able to just sit down
00:29:58
Speaker
and you let yourself enter into the story in a kind of pre-analytic way and just write it, then you can discover things in yourself and in your story that you never dreamed
The Art of Crafting Stories
00:30:09
Speaker
of. But if you try to wedge yourself into a tight outline of everything that you're going to say, the greatness that you might have in you, you might never have a chance to actually access.
00:30:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of like that echoes something you said in an interview where you said there's a lot of alchemy in writing. You make a soup, put a lot of stuff in, but if it's really good soup, what comes out is sometimes surprisingly different than what you put in, and this is the coolest thing in writing. So that's kind of what you're getting at, kind of like you might have an idea, but it's just working with the muse and then something else comes to the surface that you had no idea was there. Absolutely. I mean, again, maybe it's frustrating to our listeners that I'm going to
00:30:52
Speaker
make this illusions without, you know, you know, putting meat on the bone. But like in the book that we're referring to, Deep Order Blues, the ending of that book, I didn't know what that ending was going to be until I was 30 pages out. And then all of a sudden it came to me. Oh my God. Now I love that. And that's happened to me before because if you, if you know, if you know what the ending is going to be before you even write it, then there's a chance that you're kind of crimping yourself.
00:31:20
Speaker
You're crimping your work to get to that ending rather than letting the work bring you to an ending, if that makes sense to you.
00:31:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think too it's not having the ending in mind at the beginning. Like that can be stifling and crimping kind of like you said. But the minute you know where the ending is, to me, and this is a nautical metaphor that probably will appeal to you, is that it in essence becomes a lighthouse. And then you know you're riding towards something. And there's a kind of a sprint and a great momentum that comes in once you know what the ending is going to be.
00:31:51
Speaker
Is that an exciting pulse of energy for you when you figure out what that ending is and then you are just gunning for that lighthouse? I think you expressed it beautifully. I certainly couldn't say it any better. That's exactly how I feel. But again, I think the key to it, and I love the way you say sprinting to that lighthouse, but the key to it is, again, not having it in front of you before you start writing the book, because then you might be straining
00:32:17
Speaker
to get there rather than allowing the book to get you there.
00:32:36
Speaker
What was the dialogue you were having within yourself thinking like, should I tell this as maybe a piece of narrative journalism or should I tell this more as a novella that's just based on some pretty concrete things I experienced? No, I knew I wanted to write it as a novel because I knew I wanted to play with the story. I knew I wanted to take liberties with the story and what was interesting about it
00:33:04
Speaker
There were a couple of elements in the construction of the book that I think were at least fascinating to me. Having just read the book yourself, you'll know that there are two movements in the book. There's the history that takes place on the island, and then there's the voyage to the island that I take with these three guys that aren't experienced seamen, right? The latter of those two,
00:33:34
Speaker
weren't part of my construction in my mind before I started writing the book. What I knew was that I needed to go back to the island in order to fill out the story in my mind. In other words, I had a general idea of what happened there, the tragedies that took place, but I knew I had to go there again so that I felt it viscerally and that I understood fully the story that I wanted to tell. What I didn't understand was that the trip
00:34:03
Speaker
to the island itself would become a part of the novel. And that speaks to another element in story writing, at least that exists for me. Whenever I write anything, I always look for the second story. I think even if you have a great story, it can tend to flatten out if you just stay on top of it. If you just stay on top of one story for page after page after page, no matter how good it is, it can tend to flatten out.
00:34:31
Speaker
It's very hard to keep the energy of it alive. But if you're bouncing between two stories that kind of serpentine around one another, then you can develop a great synergy and something great can happen. And in this particular book, again, I didn't know what the second story was before I started writing the book. But once I took that trip to the island, the trip to the island was so filled with intrigue and ideas and danger that I knew that that juxtaposition would
00:35:00
Speaker
would be what made the novel successful. And the story largely takes place of course on an island and it got me thinking about the choice that you made for the setting of this story. And of course since it's rooted in some true elements then in a sense that was kind of dictated to you.
00:35:22
Speaker
Of course, you might have, you could have very well maybe just made this in Fort Lauderdale or something, or on one of the, a coastal city on the mainland. So I was wondering, like, since it takes place on an island, like, how does place and setting for you inform the story you're telling and become a character unto itself? It's very important. You know, I think that, I think that in fiction, this is kind of like a
00:35:51
Speaker
and obvious paradox. Truth is usually, usually important in fiction. Now in my last book, The Dream Merchant, the last third of the book takes place in the Amazon jungle. In a gold mining, you know, south of the city of Manaus in Brazil, there's a lot of illegal gold mining that's taken place over the last 30 years.
00:36:20
Speaker
And these gold mines in the jungle are extremely dangerous places, because, you know, vast amount of money are being pulled out of them. And there are bandits that try to take over. Each of these little gold mines have, like, a private army to defend them. And one army is trying to take over other armies. And these mining situations are in the middle of the dense jungle, and it's surrounded by jaguars and snakes. And, I mean, there's a million ways to die.
00:36:50
Speaker
in this part of the world. It's a very, very dangerous part of the world. And I knew in order to write it successfully, I'd have to go there. I traveled there with my son, and we spent five weeks in the Amazon, just smelling the place, listening to the jaguars at night, seeing it, taking notes about it. And then I knew the story that I wanted to write, but I had to feel the place in my fingers, in the smells, in the food. I had to feel it in order to write it. And similarly in this book,
00:37:20
Speaker
You know, that island is essential. I mean, the story takes place on this little island that was once so gorgeous and then utterly ruined, you know, decimated by hurricanes and violence. So I had to see that as well. So place is very important. I think if you, you know, if you're an author and you're trying to write a novel about the Antarctic and you don't go there and smell it and feel it, everyone's going to know you're faking.
00:37:47
Speaker
Everyone's going to know it's bullshit. It's very unlikely that it'll be any good. Have you run into the writers that you've worked with or even colleagues and peers that maybe they want to write that, say, Antarctic novel, just to use the recent example. Maybe they can't afford to get there. What advice might you have for that person who might have an ambitious world to build, but maybe they can't get there to tell it as true as possible?
00:38:17
Speaker
write something else. Yeah. I just think that, you know, a good reader will tell you can tell immediately that you're faking. I mean, and then you're beat before you even begin unless unless the idea of faking is baked into the novel, you know, that can happen too, right? You could write a novel about going to the Antarctic and the and the fraudulent nature of other could be baked in in some strange way. But I don't think I think that I think that in fiction,
00:38:47
Speaker
Faking is very, very apparent. One of the things that interests me, I was reading in the New York Times about a month ago, an interview with Thomas Harris, who wrote Silence of the Lambs, and he was talking about character in his books, because he has a new novel that's been out, I guess, for a couple months now. I haven't read it, and he made the point that
00:39:15
Speaker
he made the point that he never makes up anything. Every character that he ever wrote about, including Hannibal Lecter, he knew. Now, of course, obviously, he doesn't mean that he knew someone that ate other people, but he obviously knew someone that stirred him in a certain way that opened up the character of Hannibal Lecter. And a lot of great writers, some writers won't say that, but I think it's true about all the great writers.
00:39:44
Speaker
Ernest Hemingway, for example, in the first drafts of his books, in the first draft of The Sun Also Rises, he calls all the characters the names of his friends. Jake Barnes is called Hem for Hemingway. And other characters are named the friends of his. And then later drafts, he changes the names. And I'm sure that the characters evolved from the way they were in the first draft. But, I mean, novelists write about what they know about the good ones.
00:40:12
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's the old adage, like write what you know. I think you have to get to a point that you know it, but it's probably a great place to start of writing what you don't know. That way you're always on like this sort of road of discovery and then you can apply that, you can develop a sense of mastery to tell it true. But it's, is that how you approach it? You see something that's kind of curious for you and then you go down that road and then you have the authority to write about it?
00:40:42
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, I'm not exactly sure how to answer that question. I just know that I wouldn't dare write about a character. I mean, I might take on a character that I don't know and learn about.
Character Development
00:41:02
Speaker
Maybe that's it. Like Lenny Bruce. Like Lenny Bruce, right. In The Dream Merchant.
00:41:09
Speaker
12 books on Lenny Bruce, I felt like I was Lenny Bruce before I wrote those sections. And likewise in that book, there's a character, it's a female character, her name is Ava. And Ava is a 26 year old woman. She's very, very beautiful, very sexy. She's been used by men. And she has a sense that she's very smart
00:41:40
Speaker
kind of like Marilyn Monroe, but not so cultured and is kind of burdened by the sense that there are things in the world that she doesn't know about and she wished she did. I knew this was the character that I wanted to write about, but I didn't understand deeply. And so I was talking about this with my son, Josh, one day, and he said, let me introduce you to someone. So he introduced me to this friend of his. She was a 26-year-old girl. She was an actress. She looked like Marilyn Monroe. She was beautiful.
00:42:10
Speaker
Just beautiful. I took her out to lunch, and I described this character that I wanted to write. And we sat in this restaurant. We talked for an hour and a half, and she wasn't giving me anything. And I figured this just wasn't going to work out. And I remember we were leaving the restaurant. This is a restaurant on 23rd Street called the East of 8th Avenue. It's no longer there, but it's a great restaurant. And there's a wrought iron staircase.
00:42:39
Speaker
outside that you have to walk up to leave the restaurant. And she was walking ahead of me and she turned around to me at the top of the stairs and she looked at me and her voice had changed and her character changed. And she said, I can do this. Believe me, I can do this. And the hair in my arms stood up because like in those few seconds, she was my character, Eva. And so for the next nine months or so,
00:43:08
Speaker
She would come to my office every three weeks, and I would have sent her a chapter that I'd etched out, or an outline for a chapter, and she'd come to my office and we'd block it out together. And by the end of those nine months, I wasn't even giving her the lines. She was giving me the lines. She had become Ava. So there's a lot of different ways to discover a character.
00:43:30
Speaker
One of my favorite characters in Deepwater Blues is actually Hannah, who kind of has a minor role, but she's kind of the old soul of the book in a lot of ways. She's just there.
00:43:45
Speaker
She's kind of trapped and kind of suffocated by and pulled into Bobby's orbit especially when he grows obsessed with his his rivalry and his rival and I was wondering like how did you how did you come to Hannah and and want to Tell her story as part of being on Bobby's wing You know, I'm really glad you mentioned Hannah because
00:44:14
Speaker
You know, I'm kind of smiling if you can see me on Skype right now because Hannah was truly an invention. You know, I mean, I can't think of another character that I've written recently that was so much a pure, you know, an invention of my imagination as purely as Hannah. I mean, you know, I have a dear friend that's Hannah and I used her name, but she's not at all like my friend Hannah. But I just imagined her, you know,
00:44:43
Speaker
I don't know. I don't think she was based on anyone in particular. I think it had to do with the juxtaposition to Bobby more than anything else. I wanted Bobby to develop from the character he'd been to the character that he is at the end of the book. And I needed for him to have a guide, and Hannah was his guide.
00:45:13
Speaker
Yeah, and without her, his pursuit and his obsession might feel kind of like noble and just very type A and driven. But with her, it gives ballast and makes him almost look like a man possessed and like a man who is being driven to a bad place by his obsessions.
00:45:40
Speaker
And without her, I don't know if you get that. You don't necessarily get how almost mad Bobby is driven towards the, you know, in the final quarter of the book or so. I think that's true. I think that's definitely true. But she also opens doors for him. I mean, Bobby is, you know, there is a real Bobby. And Bobby's an extremely charismatic and interesting guy, apart from the book.
00:46:10
Speaker
I think I draw him very much as he is. But he's a fascinating guy. But if he were sitting and talking to him, if he were interviewing Bobby, I think he would tell you flat out, I'm a pirate. And what he means by that is that he has a dark side. And I think Hannah opened doors for him. I think she showed him a way to live a different life and to aspire to values beyond anything he'd ever conceived of before he knew her.
Joy and Mentorship in Writing
00:46:38
Speaker
And where do you feel, and you can tie it into this book or any of the books you've written, where do you feel most alive and most engaged in the entire process of bringing a book from idea to its final ideal, if you will? The writing. It's something, again, that I talk to about with my young writer friends.
00:47:06
Speaker
I remember when I was, again, when I was in my mother's cold water studio and I was in my twenties and I was writing my dream stories and getting rejected left and right. You know, it's occasionally I would talk to a successful writer and I would talk about my fears about publishing and my young writer friends do the same with me now. And what I say to them invariably is like, when I think about
00:47:36
Speaker
Um, the high points of my career, it, and I've been lucky, you know, I've had, you know, I've had some, I've had some success in my writing and I've gotten, you know, some great reviews for very, very smart people and all sorts of stuff like that. I mean, I've been a lucky writer, but the joy of it is writing the paragraphs, no doubt about it, sitting down and writing those paragraphs, having things come out of me that I never dreamed were inside me.
00:48:05
Speaker
You know, working on the sentences until they really sing, the pleasure that comes from that for me, creating characters that I hadn't quite thought of before, like Hannah. You know, I'd never thought of a Hannah before I started writing her. That's where the greatness of it is for me. No question about it.
00:48:25
Speaker
Yeah, there's a great quote from this guy named Chase Jarvis, a photographer and he's founder of CreativeLive, the online learning site. And he has this line that just says, like, make it until you make it instead of fake it until you make it.
00:48:41
Speaker
And that just you saying like you would have never created Hannah had you would not just been in the grind and just churning through to putting in the hours putting your ass in the chair getting the work done and then some suddenly. You know a great turn of phrase happens or great character surfaces and.
00:48:59
Speaker
Over the course of your career, how have you gotten comfortable writing a lot of maybe bad words and bad paragraphs to get to that one that really cracks and not being hung up by doing bad work to get to good work? This might not seem like a brilliant answer, but I think there really is something into this. I really think this is something to this idea of the 10,000 hours.
00:49:27
Speaker
It's an idea if you work at something for 10,000 hours. Who was the nonfiction writer that posited that? I can't. Gladwell. Yeah, Gladwell. I think there's really truth in that. I mean, like, I have a friend. He's 24 years old. He's a brilliant guy. He went to, just finished a graduate degree at Oxford and he wants to write fiction. And he started showing me his fiction two years ago. And I mean, he was a great nonfiction writer.
00:49:56
Speaker
The reviews that he was writing at 21 and 22, they just knock his socks off. They were as good as better than I could do. They were just great. But his fiction was, he just didn't have a sense for what to do. He was lost. He was all over the place. And we talked about it. And, you know, I would make a suggestion here or there that basically I would just tell him to keep working at it. And he worked at it and worked at it. And, you know, he showed me two short stories this last week.
00:50:25
Speaker
and they blew my socks off. I mean, they were both great. I mean, they were just terrific. They were just filled with mystery and intrigue, and the prose was beautiful. And he didn't say too much, and he didn't say too little. And I thought back, oh, my God, the way he's developed in two years. But he spent a lot of time during those two years writing paragraphs. And I think that there's just, you just can't escape that. I mean, you could have the greatest
00:50:54
Speaker
writing teacher in the world. And you have to put those hours in. And for some of us, I wasn't good at having teachers. I mean, I was a blockhead in that sense. When people made suggestions to me about my writing, I tended to be very defensive, which probably hurt me in retrospect. But what didn't hurt me was spending a lot of time writing paragraphs and getting better at it.
00:51:21
Speaker
Yeah, and how important is it for you to mentor and coach younger writers? I don't know how important it is. What I mean by that is I don't formally teach creative writing courses. I might, and I might have, but I've chosen not to do that. But sometimes, from time to time, a writer comes to me and asks me for some suggestions, and I end up working with him for a while.
00:51:49
Speaker
You know, I'm working with a friend of my sons who's not a young writer. He's in his 40s and he's writing a first novel and it's brilliant. It's brilliant. And I'm so inspired by his development. And so, you know, it's a little bit like being a father, I suppose. I mean, sometimes I think I might've been a creative writing teacher and loved it. It just isn't my path, but it's very exciting when I do it.
00:52:14
Speaker
And earlier you mentioned that when you were coming up and kind of just, you know, kind of struggling, getting your toe hold and you had some conversations with who you deemed as successful writers. When you were coming up, who are those people and what kind of questions were you asking of them to develop yourself better? You know, I don't have a satisfying answer for this because like I, you know, I, I mean, I'll tell a story without, without naming a name because
00:52:42
Speaker
I just wouldn't want to do that. One of my favorite short story writers and I think he would be recognized as one of the greater short story writers of the 20th century. I admired him so and I wrote to him and one night we had dinner together at an Italian restaurant in the village and we talked for two and a half hours and we talked about writing and I was so excited to meet him and discuss writing with him
00:53:12
Speaker
Um, because I admire his story writing so much, but when we talked about writing, he seemed completely flat to me. You know, I, I, I, you know, we talked for two and a half hours and I didn't find anything that was helpful to me, but maybe this is me. You know, I mean, again, as I say, you know, like, I think some people are sponges for, for learning in that way and other people have to do with themselves, you know, in my writing career, I've always kind of played this game with myself.
00:53:41
Speaker
I mean, I live in New York. I mean, there's a gazillion writers in New York, famous writers, writers that haven't been so successful. And I've always sort of adopted the illusion that I'm the only one here writing articles and writing essays and writing books. It's very comforting for me to be that way. I never went to places like Yado and McDowell, although I'd been invited to
Creative Challenges and Inspirations
00:54:04
Speaker
go to them. I never went to writers' workshops and conferences. I've always sort of loved the idea of being kind of a hermit out there on my own.
00:54:11
Speaker
feeling like I kind of invented it for myself and I'm the only one out there doing it. That illusion always worked for me. I don't think that's the way to go. I don't think people should be that way. That's just the way I have been.
00:54:24
Speaker
Yeah, and how did you foster a sense of community even though you were telling yourself the story that you were on your own island, so to speak? That way, you know, you were contributing to something larger, but you were still playing a mind game with yourself that allowed you to get the work done. Well, you know, after, you know, after my years, you know, starting from my years in journalism, I've been lucky.
00:54:52
Speaker
You know, I was able to publish my work in very good places. And I, you know, and I had an, and I built an audience and I've had, and, you know, I don't, I don't mean, maybe I'm, maybe I've kind of misrepresented myself a little bit. I have a few friends that have been wonderful writers and I've, I've loved them. And, and we've talked about writing and we've been helpful to one another. Mainly what I'm saying is that I sort of didn't, I didn't enter the large pool of writer of, of writers and writer writing
00:55:22
Speaker
workshops and writing retreats that a lot of writers do. But I've had friends that are artists and writers, and I've been part of the community, at least on the edges of it. But I've mostly kept my own company in that respect.
00:55:36
Speaker
And what would you say you struggle with to this day? You've written millions of words, but I'm sure there's probably some things that you still struggle with that you have to work through every time you start a new book. So what are one or two of those things that you still kind of have to get over when you're writing a book? Well, you know, two things that I can think of. I mean, off the top. The first thing is the new book itself.
00:56:05
Speaker
Because as I mentioned earlier in our conversation, every time I finish the book, if I had an idea for a book, and I do have a couple of ideas that are kind of floating around, but if I started writing One Tomorrow, I think what I would start doing is, as strange as this might sound, is writing paragraphs very similar to the paragraphs that I wrote in Deep Water Blues, because that book is still running through my mind.
00:56:33
Speaker
You know, I get so deeply involved with the book that I'm working on. It's such a big part of me that it takes me a while to shed it. You know, I've always looked with confusion and envy at other writers that move from one book to the next. I mean, writers that publish a book every year or every two years and they know exactly what they're going to do next and they slide right into the next book. I'm not like that. I need a hiatus between books.
00:57:03
Speaker
because I always want my books to be different. I don't wanna write the same book over and over again. And I think my books have been different. The other part of it is that at the beginning of each book, it's an enormous challenge because you start writing it and it's like building a house. You start with the foundation and you put one brick down and then another brick down and you look at it and you say, listen, am I gonna be able to pull this off?
00:57:32
Speaker
I mean, am I gonna really be able to build this whole house? Is this gonna work? Is it gonna fall apart? You know, you're trouble about that. I mean, I think, I don't know if all writers do, but I do. I mean, and then you catch a rhythm and you just go with it, you know? And it's, you know, it's like flying, it's exciting. But you know, you worry, can I pull this off, at least at the beginning of every book? It doesn't matter that you've written six books before, you still have
00:58:02
Speaker
You're still starting at the beginning and wondering if it's going to work. Do you have a morgue of stories or books you started and you're just like, ah, the foundation of this is too rickety. I don't think I can pull this off. Early, early stories. Not so much in the last 25 or 30 years. Pretty much everything I've tried to write in the last 25 or 30 years I've managed to write and finish.
00:58:32
Speaker
As I mentioned much earlier, I mean, this book, I worried about because I knew it was a great story, but I didn't know how to write it. And I had to put it aside for two and a half years. But then ultimately I began, I was able to write it. But no, the answer is basically no. Once I seize on an idea, I've pretty much been able to write it to the end.
00:58:56
Speaker
And through the course of your writing, you've been doing this for a long time. What still excites you and still surprises you when you're in the throes of a creative project? Just that stuff that gives you that grist for the mill, stuff that just keeps bringing you back to the page time and time again, probably for the rest of your life. What I said to you earlier, the discovery, a discovery is just
00:59:25
Speaker
is just a thrilling thing. It's like meeting a new friend, right? You have your circle of friends, what, six friends, and you love them, right? And it seems like as you get older, it seems harder and harder to really make a new intimate friendship. I don't know if you would agree with that, but that's my sense. And then you meet someone new, and you relate to him or her so powerfully, and it's just so alive.
00:59:55
Speaker
And it's like you're rediscovering yourself through this new person that you meet, right? And that's the exciting thing when you start a new book. It's like having a new love. It's kind of like what you once said where there are many ways to experience the girl in the elevator. You've really looked into my writing. That's exactly correct. That's right. There are many ways to experience that girl in the elevator.
01:00:20
Speaker
And that might sound weird to people who don't exactly know what that means, but there's a great story behind that. Maybe you could elaborate on kind of what that metaphor means. OK, so I have this friend, and at the time, he was in his 60s, I think, middle 60s. And he was feeling depressed about life. He was feeling a bit stale about his work, a brilliant guy.
01:00:51
Speaker
He was a great athlete, he was a triathlete, a golfer and a baseball player, but physically he couldn't do any more the kinds of things that he was doing. And he was feeling gloomy about his life. He was living in an Upper West Side apartment. And one day he was riding in the elevator and there was a woman in the elevator who was 15 or 20 years younger than him.
01:01:20
Speaker
and he'd noticed her before and she noticed him before and They started chatting a little bit. They had to go up to the 14th floor or something like that and She said to him Out of the blue in one of those moments in life uncanny moments in life, you know, you're so attractive to me and he was dumbstruck by this and she embraced him and they kissed in the elevator and
01:01:51
Speaker
And that was it. And it was an intoxicating moment for him. And he felt reinvigorated. And his life, it was just a shot in the arm for him. And his work became more creative. And his marriage became more creative. And he just felt good about the world. That's the story, right?
01:02:10
Speaker
That's it. Yeah, I love it. I just love that there's those different ways to experience the girl in the elevator to jump start your creativity or fill in the blank. But there are any number of ways to find that and to kind of kick you in the pants and to revitalize yourself. Yeah, there are. There's a lot of ways to find the girl in the elevator. I mean, for me, as I mentioned earlier in our conversation,
01:02:40
Speaker
Fishing is the thing. You sit in the office and the office is great, the city is great, but you go out on the Gulf Stream and you troll a couple lures and some 400 pound fish grabs the lure and leaps out of the water and you look at him and you think, oh my God, how could there be something in the world as beautiful
Conclusion and Call to Action
01:02:58
Speaker
as that? That's another girl in the elevator.
01:03:02
Speaker
Well, Fred, I want to be mindful of your time. This was so wonderful to get to talk to you about writing and your process and, of course, your wonderful new novella. So where can people get more familiar with you and your work if they're not already familiar with it? Well, you can read about my different books on my website, FredWeightskin.com. There are also essays about writing and interviews with me there. And to buy the new book,
01:03:31
Speaker
Deepwater Blues, I would say amazon.com. They offer it at a good discount and they've been very good to me. Amazon.com is a good place to buy my work. Well, fantastic. Well, I hope this is the first of many conversations because I think we could go down a lot of different rabbit holes, especially with respect to writing and writing memoir, even long-form journalism too. So I hope we can keep this conversation going in the future, Fred.
01:04:00
Speaker
I'd love to. I really enjoyed this talk. This was a great talk, Brendan. Thank you so much. You got it. Thank you and stay cool and take care. Take care. Bye.
01:04:14
Speaker
What did I tell you? What did I tell you? I love talking to people who love the work above all else. That's how we get satisfaction in this racket. It's by loving words, loving paragraphs. The rest is gravy. It's gotta be. I know we have to somehow make a living, but finding the satisfaction and the things we can control will yield more happiness. And money. Need money.
01:04:36
Speaker
Thanks to Goucher's MFA Nonfiction and Bay Path University's MFA Creative Nonfiction for the support. Remember, keep the conversation going on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, email. Share the show. This only grows if it matters to you. If you're feeling kind, consider leaving your view on Apple Podcasts. That's it. That's what we do here. Got any questions, concerns, you know where to find me. Ping me on social. You can email the show or email me. It's all going to the same place.
01:05:06
Speaker
You know what? That is gonna do it. That is it, everybody. Like I always say, if you can do interview, see ya!