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Episode 521: Giri Nathan Takes the Insider-Outsider Perspective
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"When I was writing the book, I used a lot of my interest in art criticism and nature writing to get cross pollinate into my sports writing. And I really try not to fall into a rut and just read only adjacent to my own subject or my own field," says Giri Nathan, author of Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis.
Today we have Giri Nathan (@giricube on IG), he is a staff writer/cofounder of Defector and the author of Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in the last couple years. It’s funny and voicey and if David Foster Wallace’s tennis writing made sweet, sweet love to John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, you get Changeover. How Giri is able to illustrate why Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner are so captivating and capable of inheriting the mantle held by Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, and Novak Djokavic (who’s still going) is a triumph. This book may very well be the future of sports biography in that access to principal figures is almost impossible so you have to approach your subject more with a critical eye, like an art critic, and we talk about that …
Giri Nathan’s work has appeared in New York Magazine, The NYT Book Review, The Believer, and National Geographic. He made the 2025 edition of the Year’s Best Sports Writing and The Best American Food & Travel Writing.
In this conversation we talk about:
- Him taking John McPhee’s CNF class at Princeton
- Art criticism and nature writing as influences for Changeover
- Losing fandom
- The relationship to personality and style
- Writing from contemporaneous excitement
- Writing the fun scenes
- The insider-outsider perspective
- And keeping a running list of adjectives so he doesn’t repeat himself
Really fun stuff here.
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Upcoming Events
00:00:00
Speaker
Oh, AC and Ephraim, is it really next week? The next live recording of the podcast will be Saturday, April 18th at 1 p.m. at Gratitude Brewing in Eugene, Oregon, with the mighty Lydia Yuknovich.
00:00:14
Speaker
She's the author of The Chronology of Water, Reading the Waves, and the editor of a new collection on menopause called The Big M. We do this event in partnership with the Northwest Review, the revived n w r It should be a rocking event. And if you're in Eugene or the surrounding areas, find the ah RSVP link in the show notes or my various social platforms to reserve a free ticket. You don't need the ticket to get in. You don't need to show anything. It's merely to get a headcount.
00:00:43
Speaker
And we're close to 30 RSVPs already with ah about 10 days to go. Well, by the time you hear this, it'll be like a week to go. It doesn't matter. Amazing. We just need that headcount.
00:00:55
Speaker
Hope you can make it. Definitely do not hold the cannon on a pedestal. like I've probably learned as much from anonymous users on like message boards as I've learned from, i don't know, John McPhee, with all due respect.
Meet Giddy Nathan
00:01:19
Speaker
It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to tellers their true tales about the true tales they tell. I'm Brendan O'Meara, the voice of a generation. Today we have Giddy Nathan. He is a staff writer, co-founder of Defector, and the author of Changeover, a young rivalry and a new era of men's tennis.
00:01:39
Speaker
It's one of the best books I've read in the last couple years. It's funny and voicey, and if David Foster Wallace's tennis writing made sweet, sweet love to John McPhee's levels of the game, you get changeover.
00:01:51
Speaker
How Giddy is able to illustrate why Carlos Alcarez and Yannick Sinner are so captivating and capable of inheriting the mantle held by Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, Novak Djokovic, who's still going, is a triumph. This book may very well be the future of sports biography, and that access to principal figures is almost impossible.
00:02:14
Speaker
What was social media and them controlling their messages? So you have to approach your subject more with a critical eye, thinking like an art critic. And we talk about that. Show notes of this episode and more at brendanamero.com. Hey, hope you'll browse the site and sign up for Pitch Club or Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. Pitch Club is on fire.
00:02:33
Speaker
And we've got some good ones coming down the pike. Just crossed 700 subs, and I want to hit 1,000 by the end of the year. And if i if I get out my Texas Instruments graphing calculator and hit the buttons...
00:02:46
Speaker
That is like we got seven months left. We need 300 more divided by seven. That's 42.9 noobs every month from here on out.
00:02:58
Speaker
It's all about platform. Platform is my only hope.
Writing Influences and Style
00:03:03
Speaker
Giddy's work has appeared in New York Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, The Believer, National Geographic. He made the 2025 edition of the year's best sports writing and the best American food and travel writing.
00:03:19
Speaker
Wide-ranging ah writer, super talented, super funny, super voicey. Great style. it Just pyro, man. Fucking pyro. and In this conversation, we talk about him taking John McPhee's creative nonfiction class at Princeton. Yeah, that happened. Art criticism and nature writing as influences for changeover, losing fandom, the relationship of a player's personality versus their style, playing style.
00:03:49
Speaker
Writing from contemporaneous excitement, writing the fun scenes, the insider-outsider perspective, and keeping a running list of adjectives so he doesn't repeat himself. Really fun stuff here, and I hope you stay tuned for a parting shot about my ongoing slump. But for now, let's queue up the montage.
00:04:05
Speaker
Riff.
00:04:13
Speaker
kind of hate it when people say that writing is fun. but every day is very much a pair of socks. And I love style. Don't get me wrong, but that style had better be adding something. Yeah, this could be good. This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
00:04:38
Speaker
What are you finding that ah people are very interested in now? What's drawing them to the the page in interesting ways? Yeah, it's ah the students are into a range of stuff. they ah Last class, we read a kind of classic essay by Annie Dillard about witnessing a solar eclipse that ah they seem to really respond to. And then I asked them about their own projects. and yeah they were They were all over the map.
00:05:07
Speaker
I'm trying to think if there's like any through lines that I noticed. But lot of them a lot of them were actually fiction students who were interested in taking this seminar, which was kind of cool. Yeah, the gist of the class is ah writing about experience. or So you know going out in the world, doing something, and then kind of returning home and trying to digest that.
00:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think, uh, John McPhee, one of his famous exercises in his class at Princeton was to just tell people to go out and like find a ah statue or something and like report that out and come back, kind of go out in the world and then ah try to metabolize it.
00:05:43
Speaker
Yeah. I was lucky to take that class and that's exactly what he has. Yeah.
Learning from John McPhee
00:05:49
Speaker
We went to, uh, look at this one statue on campus and then we all had to write about the same statue. Yeah.
00:05:56
Speaker
Oh, that's amazing. i didn't I didn't realize that you, that A, that you had gone to Princeton and then, of course, took tick took his creative nonfiction ah class. that's ah Yeah, it was a cool it was a very cool class.
00:06:07
Speaker
I imagine, yeah yeah. I was lucky enough to interview him nice a little while ago. I was able to get him as the the headlining like ah episode 500 of the show. I was able to feature him. so That's awesome. He's a kind of a hero of mine. because yeah I know he's famously, um I mean, he's he's a kind and generous reader, but he's also a pretty brutal editor yeah in that. So i'd always I've never been able to talk to anyone who has actually had that firsthand editing experience from him. So I'd love to hear you expand on what that experience was.
00:06:40
Speaker
I mean, one of the things that was most distinctive about it was just like the density of ink on the page, because ah when you're writing academic papers, you know, the feedback will tend not to be so much just like on the sentence level craft. And then when you're taking creative writing classes, it's often just like,
00:07:02
Speaker
a couple lines of kind of gestalt-y, vague feedback at the end. But in terms of like granular paragraph by paragraph, like clause by clause down to specific word choice, it's by far the most like, yeah, fine-grained feedback I ever got in any writing class. And it was really cool. And I often found myself realizing that I had made decisions on the page that I didn't even know I was making until he pointed them out to me
From College to Professional Writing
00:07:35
Speaker
with his feedback. I think it was a really good experience. actually remember, don't know if I was like the specific projects that I chose that semester or whatever, but I feel like my work wasn't really clicking and I still feel like he engaged with it, like with full attention and, uh,
00:07:58
Speaker
gave me good pointers on on how to improve. It was, yeah, his feedback is unreal. What did that experience with him in that class do for your confidence as a writer?
00:08:10
Speaker
It's a great question. i think, you know, it's on the one hand, very empowering because he tells you how he, you know, the process by which he produced these great classic tomes of nonfiction writing. And then he brings by his friends who are also legends to you talk about their own work. But I think as i as soon as I got out of like the kind of bubble of, of college and, and, you know, writing in that universe and went out into the real world and was trying to do it myself, I realized
00:08:45
Speaker
how resource intensive and how yeah difficult it
Changes in Journalism and Publishing
00:08:51
Speaker
is to execute those kinds of projects. Part of it is just like the entire ecosystem of of writing and publishing has changed since then. so And part of it is just like, ah you know these are were he's working at a scale and at a cadence that is was just like you know maybe even unusual at the time, because if I remember correctly, they would like fill entire issues of the New Yorker with ah with his pieces.
00:09:20
Speaker
yeah He's so prolific also the course of his career. so the longer The more distance I have from that class, the more staggering I guess I find his achievement, and then also that golden age of journalism in which he was able to produce it too.
00:09:36
Speaker
It's a combination of you know, great talent and also cool context to be working in. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's, um it's almost, it's, it's like ah admiring his work and then wanting to replicate it or at least be do work inspired by it can be extremely dispiriting because the ecosystem doesn't really allow for that long reporting unless you're just going to really self subsidize the whole thing and then hope you can land it somewhere. Or maybe you're just doing it to creatively fulfill yourself because, know,
00:10:06
Speaker
you know the page just isn't there and the scope just isn't there to do that kind of ambitious writing and reporting yeah it's so true i mean if i were to take some tiny version of that and apply to my own life um you know when i i got some not life-changing some but at least some money in advance for my book and i was deciding you know how am i going to use this should i put this away and save it or should I um put it back into the book? And that was, ended up being the decision I made is to spend a decent chunk of that on the travel and then on being at as many tennis tournaments as I could in person. So try to make the observation and the writing ah feel as alive as possible.
00:10:53
Speaker
Yeah. And I know that some people ah meander their way into McPhee's class and they're not necessarily you writers or want to be writers or maybe they have like ah a fleeting interest in it.
Becoming a Writer at Deadspin
00:11:03
Speaker
But then some people go in and they're like, oh, yeah, hell yeah, i want to be ah you know a writer and journalist of that nature. i Just for you, like what ah you know at what point did you realize that you wanted to to be a writer? Yeah, that's a good question. It was definitely the main...
00:11:17
Speaker
hobby of mine in college. And it was like the through line throughout my education was like, that was the thing I kept coming back to. really enjoyed it because I also had a lot of other interests academically. But when I almost stumbled into it, I just like, I graduated and I was kind of like, I got some good feedback from teachers about my writing. i was like, why don't ah I at least try to have a go at this. And if I can if can become viable within ah few years, uh, maybe I'll, I'll, I'll try it. But my first job was as ah a fact checker at a magazine. And then, um, while I was there, I was pitching and trying to get a few freelance things placed. And then i got a job at Deadspin and then, I've been kind of working with those same people since now at Defector, since that's been blew up in a dramatic fashion in 2019. But yeah, more or less have been working on staff since then, which isn't another thing I'm very grateful for as a writer, um because I know those
00:12:21
Speaker
Positions are very scarce, but I have, yeah, it's almost like i didn't know I was going to be able to be a writer until I was a couple of years into
Blending Influences in Writing
00:12:30
Speaker
being one. And then you still never know because the ground can shift from underneath you at any time.
00:12:35
Speaker
But, um, I am, I am happy that at DeFactory we built something, uh, that seems to at least be pretty stable for the moment. So that's Yeah. What would you identify as an early win for you that it gave you something of a tailwind in, in journalism?
00:12:52
Speaker
um That is a great question. ah An early win. um
00:13:05
Speaker
I think, yeah, there was piece that wrote 2019 where was writing about in twenty nineteen where i was ah writing about a hot chili eating contest. And, uh, you know, I had been writing a lot of kind of blogger stuff and this is, I'd taken a week to, you know, go to this event and then we, we lined up a great photographer to shoot the event too. And then like,
00:13:37
Speaker
kind of worked it more of a feature pace i guess and i think it came out it was really satisfying and um i just ended up came out of that wanting to do more work like that and i feel like i was able to get away from my computer screen at my desk and like out into the world and that remains the kind of writing that i'm i'm most interested in pursuing and um you know, like I said, is is very, can be very resource intensive.
00:14:04
Speaker
Yeah. Once I had that initial taste, a lot of writers that I i liked ah said nice things to me about it. So that was, that was encouraging, but you know, that stuff can only take you so far. I think you have to be guided by your own interest too.
00:14:21
Speaker
Oh, for sure. And I i love your your voice on on the page and it has such a ah great pop to it. And you know our voices are a synthesis of a lot of our influences. So just for you, Giddy, what are some of the influences that got thrown into you know your blender before you threw it on high and mixed it all up? Yeah, that's ah it's a good question. Hmm.
00:14:44
Speaker
I think I'm always drawn to... yeah I'm very non-hierarchical, I guess, in ah in how I consume good writing. like I definitely do not ah hold...
00:15:01
Speaker
the like the canon on on a pedestal. Like I've probably learned as much from anonymous users on like message boards as I've learned from, i don't know, John McPhee, with all due respect. I just think there's a lot of value to reading at a lot of different registers and you know levels of professionalism and voice. If I go back and look at writers who are most influential to me, I think it could be so Things outside of nonfiction writing too, like um yeah the other rapper, Earl Sweatshirt, I always say is one of my favorite writers, the way he attends to sound when he's writing. And then even the way he talks you know off the cuff in interviews, I just feel like he's very precise and...
00:15:48
Speaker
kind of oblique at the same time in how he phrases things. So i take i take influence from um just whatever i've feels fresh and um unfamiliar. So yeah, those are those are, I think, like, the other thing I say is, like, a lot of my writing is influenced, I think, by, this kind of gets at what I just said, by art forms outside of writing, per se. Now, when I was writing the book, I think I use a lot of my interest in art criticism and nature writing to kind of get a, you know, cross pollinate into, into my sports writing. And i really try not to fall into a rut and just read only adjacent to my own subject or my own field. So I think as I go on the amount of the volume of sports writing that I read is probably tapering off, but even as I continue to write a lot of it, um, I just think.
Art Criticism in Sports Writing
00:16:44
Speaker
it So it's it's good to um to just get out of that your own wheelhouse. Yeah, to throw another name out there, and this is a writer that ah I taught last week to my students. that They really enjoyed too. um Annie Dillard's nature writing, I think, was... She's a writer I really enjoy just like on the level of the sentence. It's funny. It's trippy. It's... um pretty over the top a lot of the time, but often with intent. But yeah, what ah Jeff Dyer is another writer I really like.
00:17:16
Speaker
I like the kind of humor and the almost yeah self-effacing quality and like the... kind of downplaying the act of writing itself that you get by. He kind of demystifies the process in in a certain way just with with his approach, but it's still really beautiful and funny and and and well well honed. And then like the thing I enjoy most reading is, with which McPhee is so good at, is um someone taking a field that you're interested in but not an expert in and then just...
00:17:52
Speaker
over the course of a paragraph or two kind of you know just that really artful exposition that shows you how an expert might approach a difficult problem like another book i've enjoyed in the last few years was um dan charnas wrote a book about the hip-hop producer jay dilla and he despite me coming in with no real chops in music production he's able to take that world and make it legible and explain what was so innovative about Dill's production style you know within the this
Explaining Mastery to a General Audience
00:18:28
Speaker
universe. So I just say anytime you can really efficiently bring someone in and explain what makes...
00:18:34
Speaker
you know mastery impressive in that field, I always find that fun to read about. Yeah, and from ah from a craft perspective and approaching the writing, you know be it picking up a book on craft or you know listening to a interviews or various podcasts, what are things that you're particularly drawn to that yeah that that interest you that try to as you try to improve you know your your set of tools at your disposal? Mm-hmm.
00:19:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's tough. I think... um Yeah, part of it is is trying to push myself to write about... Because I think over the last few years, I've just been drilling into tennis primarily.
00:19:17
Speaker
I dabble in other topics too, but now that I've finished this book, I feel like kind of tied tied up that era. And now I end up wanting to read you know about other topics that's like photography or technology or just trying to... um understand how these writers prepare themselves to take on these topics, you know, with sports, perhaps a little more straightforward. You observe it for a while. You notice certain patterns, you, you know, listen to interviews.
00:19:52
Speaker
But yeah, I like seeing, especially, as you know, a writer who's wide ranging and seems to be pulling off all these different subjects with a similar level of command. Because you can tell immediately when someone's writing about something and they don't really know what they're
Writing on Unfamiliar Topics
00:20:10
Speaker
writing about. i mean, sometimes they'll like have fun with that and maybe the piece is kind of about them struggling to grasp ah the material. There's a lot of great examples of that. But unless that's what you're trying to do, it's like,
00:20:23
Speaker
it's not a very satisfying thing to read as a reader. So sometimes I feel self-conscious when I'm like entering a new project and um that's kind of outside of my usual zone. But I think ah ah in the future, I'm going to push myself a little harder on that.
00:20:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's like if someone coming outside, just to use tennis, for example, was saying like, oh, so-and-so was up 40 to 0, and someone's like, well, technically that's correct, but 40 love is the vernacular of of tennis. And like if someone put 40-0 and like said 40-0, you would you be like, oh, that they they're almost there. They don't quite quite get it. And then same in baseball. Be like, oh, yeah, they won by three points. It's like, no, it's runs. Technically true, but it's not the right language. So it's like, yeah, you really need to dig into the vernacular with some pretty deep study on these subcultures.
00:21:12
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great point. Like, ah that's kind of the when I talk about like reading democratically and non-hierarchically, I mean, i like reading how fans talk about their and participants in subcultures talk about the subcultures so that I don't end up having a tone deaf ear when i'm when I'm writing about them. So I think that's why it's really important to like just get into it and um talk to people, not just rely on yeah prestige accounts of what a certain thing or subculture is like.
00:21:46
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. There's um in the wonderful piece you wrote on Nadal and grief ah for Defector, you know, there there was one line in particular that really that stuck out to me, too, is like having been a lifelong sports fan and then being becoming a sports writer. You know, you were like by this juncture in my life, writing about tennis had denuded most of my genuine
Balancing Passion and Critique in Sports
00:22:05
Speaker
fandom. And I think like all sports writers hit that, they hit that moment where it's just like, oh, it's it's now a vocation. And then you kind of lose that that little like that little spark of something that drew you to it in the first place, that like that really kid-like love of it. And you know when did that strike you, at that particular moment where it was just like, yeah, you're more in it as an observer and a critic in some sense versus that that true fan that came to the sport? Yeah, that's a good, I think that's a good way of putting it, critic, right? Because ah on the one hand, there there can be the totally like ah mechanical approach where you're you're just trying to hit a deadline and you've truly lost all passion for what you're looking at.
00:22:48
Speaker
And then on the other side of the spectrum, there's the pure fan who's just in it, like, you know, enraptured by all the drama or whatever. But I think somewhere in the middle is like, yeah, like a ah critic who's trying to take what happened and ah digest it and offer context for it and hope maybe a little bit of a idiosyncratic point of view, hopefully shaped by their own history with the sport. So it's it's not always, i don't want to it's I don't think the spark has been completely lost, but it's maybe just been channeled into a more considerate approach instead of just the raw like passion of fandom, I guess. Because i would I would for sure stop writing about tennis if I still wasn't getting any enjoyment out of watching it. Because I just don't see the point, I think. um And the writing will reflect that too. You have to be writing from a place of some genuine emotional response, I think, to to get anything interesting on the page.
00:23:47
Speaker
As far as sports or other cultural phenomena are concerned. I mean, it can be a negative response too. It just has to be something. Yeah, I feel like once you make a certain, maybe you step out of those fan shoes, but then become more of a devotee to just excellence on display. And when you can lean into that, and you do so beautifully in Changeover and in your other writing as well, it's just like when you...
00:24:11
Speaker
fall in love with just excellence, no matter what that is, you can really start to find just a level of ah like pulse and energy to it. And then, you know, you convey that, you know, wonderfully. But I think, yeah, that, that draw to excellent, I'm drawn to people who are just so singularly driven and they just put that master, ah like put on a master class frequently, like, wow, we're watching something pretty special here. hmm.
00:24:36
Speaker
Yeah, there's a interest not only in the craft, but also in people that I think has helped me in my writing a lot where, um especially with a sport like tennis, which is an individual sport and personalities are so on display, you know not just in competition, but um yeah there is, it it lends itself to character study um and to profile type
Human Stories in Sports
00:25:03
Speaker
writing. And I think even when you get a little, let's say, um you know desensitized to the action on the court.
00:25:12
Speaker
There's entire human depth to these stories that is is fun to try to convey as well. So I think, um yeah, that's probably one of the main through lines is like, through most of my writing is like, I am very interested in people and I'm interested in like,
00:25:30
Speaker
but In tennis specifically, I'll say like the relationship between a person like personality and a playing style and like, you know, maybe a tension there or a congruity. But I feel like they're it's always fun to look at people in the same person in different contexts.
00:25:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah when you when you think about like the tension between personality and playing style, like I immediately just come to mind of like Troy Polamalu from Pittsburgh, the safety, who's just like such a soft-spoken guy. yeah But on the field, he was just an absolute monster. And like in the best possible way, like he wasn't a dirty player, but he turned into, you know, it was Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde kind of thing. And it's just like, but there's a tension there. But then there are some players who are aggressive off the court and aggressive on the field or whatever. And so, yeah, there are congruities ah and incongruities ah abound. And that's what that tension makes it really fascinating to as a character
The Joy of Writing Struggles
00:26:25
Speaker
study. Yeah, i it's it's one of the fun things about sports in general, but yeah, I think um the X's and O's interest me for sure. And I try to actually convey them in a digestible way because I think a lot of sports commentary is just way too vague and vibes-y. So I try to provide like eat your vegetables too over the course of ah you know a chapter or a piece of writing, but I'm also for sure interested in in these more human stories. Yeah, there there was a line in ah and Changeover where where Alcarez says, like, you have to find joy in suffering. And I highlighted that. I wrote, like, I write these one-page book reports, too, in a different kind of journal. And that was one that stuck out to me. And it's actually something I've posed to other writers on the podcast, too, because a lot of writing is suffering and having to, especially when you get beyond the honeymoon phase of writing something, you've got to get into the middle of the draft. Like if you don't lean into the suffering of it, you're going to be miserable and you're not going to finish. So in what ways do you just find the joy in the in the pain and the suffering of drafting something is especially something as ambitious as a book?
00:27:30
Speaker
I definitely rely a lot on, you know, I said that it's important to write from a place of genuine excitement. And I think it's even more important, I would argue, to write from a place of like contemporaneous excitement. So I use a lot of, I take a lot of notes in real time when I'm at a tournament and then those become invaluable later. So you're not trying to reconstruct these scenes like, ah what was it that I saw there? Like,
00:27:57
Speaker
What was cool about that? I have very granular notes from, ah you know, specific matches, what the atmosphere was like at the tournament. And I think when you go back into those notes, like six months later, it's kind of, it's easier to, you know, revive that excitement. You know, it it feels like a little less of a slog. Cause you're like oh yeah, like all that stuff was really cool. And like, these details are kind of reactivating it in my head. Um, so I think.
00:28:25
Speaker
like heavy ah real-time note-taking is a big part of my process. Another part is just like allowing myself to write the fun scenes, you know, whenever I hit a block, um definitely do that. And then for this book,
00:28:42
Speaker
One thing that was very, very helpful for me instead of getting overwhelmed by... Because it was a pretty fast-moving project. I signed the contract and then delivered it like a year later, and it was about stuff that was happening in the interim. So it was yeah it was it was pretty fast. But the thing that really helped was like...
00:28:59
Speaker
I would type up my notes and then print out roughly what I wanted a specific chapter to cover. And then i would just write longhand in a notebook and not get too bogged down on sentence level stuff, which I often can if I'm writing on a computer because I want to futz around with the last paragraph or scroll up a page and then mess around with that one. So that was kind of freeing because it just kept the momentum going forward. I think there's also something interesting that happens where you like you start a sentence and you just kind of have to finish it. And you may sometimes surprise yourself with how you finish it as opposed to on a computer. if you start the sentence, you kind of maybe lose steam and meander and go do something else and then come back to it. And, um,
00:29:45
Speaker
The forward momentum of of longhand was very helpful for me. I knocked out many of the second half, much of the second half of the book that way. And then I go and retype it obviously and revise it. But just getting something out and having that something be in a medium where I'm less self-conscious was really helpful for me in a format where I was less self-conscious.
00:30:11
Speaker
How do you balance your note-taking and your reporting and using a recorder as well? Yeah, it's a good question. um The recorder, I'll keep handy if I'm specifically talking to someone, but I know a lot of writers like to just riff into the recorder, which I wish I was better at, but I haven't had that much luck. I think if I was really, had my hands full and I was like kind of moving around an event and There has been one or two moments where it's been helpful for me just be talking into into the recorder and recording conversations with it both. But for the most part, I just use it for interviews. And then I will just have a pen and notebook handy and just scrolling like the whole time.
00:30:59
Speaker
Yeah, and do you transcribe manually? Do you like upload to Otter or something too to get at least the bulk of the transcription
Transcription Tools for Writing
00:31:06
Speaker
done? Yeah, I use um the Otter transcription. It's not perfect, obviously, but it help it speeds things along by many, many hours. So that's it's kind of essential to my process this point. Yeah. Yeah, me too. i yeah I use Otter and it's just like I consider the transcribing now the cleaning up of the transcript. It still takes a while, but at least I'm not like threatening my wrist with carpal tunnel syndrome. Yeah. And, you know burning the backward button of my recorder, blah, blah, blah, like ah like back in the day. um But yeah, it's ah that's been an invaluable tool, but I'm amazed at what it gets wrong. I'm like, wow, that's that's how you interpreted that. Yeah, it is. It was always surprising.
00:31:44
Speaker
Sometimes the mistranscriptions are very funny. Like I have a couple of screenshots that are that are classic, but um yeah, that's, I'm very much a fan of um getting as much as you can into the notebook and then just leaving the recorder on and having conversations. And um in those, I might have have just a few notes open to, I don't forget to ask a question, but I like to just kind of flow with the conversation to not get too caught up.
00:32:11
Speaker
Yeah, with respect to interviewing, when I had Seth Wickersham back on the show, like he's very... Clinical's the wrong word, but he he bristles at the idea of like ah interviews being conversations. like he He likes to almost have the transaction pretty well up front. We know what we're here for. like I'm here to get a specific amount of information from you, and you know that I'm trying to get that information. And so let's not let's not stand on ceremony here, Mr. Wayne. Like Bane in the in the sewers of Gotham. But for you, how do you ah approach ah interviewing? So, you know, you're getting what you need and, ah you know, honoring the time with a particular source.
00:32:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's so tough with sports in particular where your subjects may be pretty high profile and their time just has so many demands on it, or more specifically, their agents make you feel like their time has so many
Press Conferences and Access Challenges
00:33:05
Speaker
demands on it. So I think then sometimes it can be super tactical, like how you plan ahead. And like maybe in this press conference, you really need this one detail to finish this one pair in this one chapter and like you have to get it there. It might have nothing to do with the match that was just played or the tournament or anything, but it might strike the player as kind of weird that you're thinking about that right now. But it's- Even thoughre even the press corps, they'd be like, what the, what like yeah what are you talking about? Totally. So I've definitely been ah guilty of that a few times. mean, not guilty. I have no guilt about it. It's like, that's the way to get the information now. If we lived in a different kind of media environment, which I write about briefly in the book, but um just like the...
00:33:51
Speaker
ways the The means by which we can learn interesting things and actually get to know these subjects as people, all those are kind of narrowing or crumbling. So um I will use whatever spaces are available to like get the information I need, and even if it leads to funny moments like that. Yeah, and that that like one- to two-page meditation that you have on sports journalism, you know kind of later in the book, I found just particularly riveting. And it's something you know that I struggle with, too, in trying to do unauthorized biography and even doing profiles on semi-diagnosed
00:34:29
Speaker
you know, prominent people. I try to cover more of the fringe sports, so you tend to get some better access. yeah But, you know you you know, you write in particular, and I have several things cut out here, but, you know, the membrane between journalist and player was more permeable back in the day, which I which i just long for, but it's gone. And then the notion of a player submitting themselves to the critical eye of a journalist for meaningful conversation was essentially, ah you know, nowadays unthinkable. So it's like, how do you navigate that now?
Access and Perspective in Sports Writing
00:34:58
Speaker
Yeah, it was there was a moment of crisis for sure when I first started writing the draft. And I think I was i was doing a writing residency and I was like going on these long runs and listening to an audiobook of Breaks of the Game. And yeah the level of...
00:35:18
Speaker
yeah um immersion in the that Blazers team that Halverstam had in the book yeah is absurd. like I'm pretty sure he's talking about even... He knows the custodian at the facility and about the custodian's family and his backstory, and it's just like...
00:35:35
Speaker
It is an entire different world. and like And then I had this crisis, like, do you need to be that immersed in these worlds to have something interesting to say about them? And I'm hoping the answer is no. And I think one of the very kind reviews about my book put it in a way that clarified it for me, but it's kind of like an insider outsider perspective. Like I am there, I'm around and I followed the sport for a while, but I'm not in you know, the inner sanctum after the devastating loss, like seeing how the coach is talking to the player. Right. So I, I'm as close as I can. I kind of have my nose up to the glass, but I can't quite see everything.
00:36:14
Speaker
And in that way, I'm like a, um, you know perhaps a more educated fan, I guess. And I think that can also be a fun perspective to have on the page. um you know That said, it would be amazing material to be even closer, have the subjects closer at hand. And I think for my future writing,
00:36:34
Speaker
I will prioritize projects where I can get a little closer to the heart of the matter. But um it was a fun, almost exercise in like constraint where, you know, I have to write this pretty timely and pretty um fast moving project about subjects whose agents don't seem that interested in opening the door.
00:37:02
Speaker
The way i mostly got around it was talking using history, talking to other players about those players. It's particularly like There are players who are extremely articulate and technical and you know are beautifully eloquent about the game who may not be like the most competitive top top players. right so you You will find amazing communicators um who can kind of unlock the stories for you, even if on the surface, you'd be like, why would that voice be important in the book?
00:37:33
Speaker
So I think that was a really good realization for me. It was like, you just go a cup a couple layers of remove and you can still find interesting things to say about the principal subjects. Yeah, and the benefit of having at least some insulation between those central figures, yeah, the benefit being is like the closer you get, sometimes they'll start to, they might try to block other people from talking. And if you're a few removed, you can, those people that are close enough can offer that degree of insight
00:38:03
Speaker
that still paints a good character study without getting too close to the sun. But then the other side of that is like, sometimes it can be hard to sell a book. Like, do you have access to Alcaraz and Sinner? And you're probably like, well, press conferences most likely. um But so there's that tension there. Like, well, an editor will be like, well, what's your access? Well, I don't have it. I have like one or two removed. So that's also the the the math you you got to play. Definitely. i think ah it was credit to my editor for like when I was having this this crisis about whether the project could be done. he was like, you know that's fortunately not what we hired you to do, is to like you know do the tell-all about these players. right We wanted your perspective and um your ability to like contextualize this ah transition happening in the game. Yeah.
00:38:57
Speaker
That did take a lot of the pressure off. Yeah, I started just looking at the overall landscape and yeah, as i as we've talked about, just like everything's changing and you've got to find ways to still tell these stories in interesting ways and hopefully still get at some core truths, even though a lot of the doors are closing.
00:39:19
Speaker
Yeah, i what as I was reading your book, I almost felt like this might be, at least at our moment, the the future of sports biography, in a sense, where you are coming at it from something of ah a remove, like not like writers in the 80s who like were flying on planes with the Celtics and was sat next to Larry Bird or something. But I felt like this this degree of, and when you brought up art criticism earlier, i kind of wrote that down and circled it because it does feel like you know you're close enough to be critical, but not so close that you you're hyper-reliant on the central figures for that access. But you know you're in and of that world to comment on it ah with authority. Right.
00:40:01
Speaker
yeah Yeah. The other reality is like, if you're 20, 21 speaking in your third language and, uh, and, and you are the person doing the amazing things and you don't necessari necessarily have the outside perspective to comment on those things, all of those factors can lead to like a relatively uninteresting interview yeah as well. So, and then also the bigger pressure I think is just, uh,
00:40:26
Speaker
the amount of care that is done had that these players take to like curate a certain marketable image. right So I think you won't get a lot of the candor that you might have seen in past eras too. Every stray comment on social media is being hyper-analyzed and someone might ask you about it about it at a press conference. So I think there's a lot of factors at play, but I think I came to understand that like yeah maybe...
00:40:54
Speaker
that sit down wasn't going to be all that interesting anyway. And I would see versions of them play out on TV or in documentaries and whatever. And I'd be like, it was good that I had to get resourceful and and try to write from
Critique of Sports Docuseries
00:41:07
Speaker
other angles. Because um if I was going to rely on that to you know be the whole material for the book, that wouldn't have been very interesting either.
00:41:14
Speaker
Yeah. And the other other thing you write about, too, is like, um you know, writing about the the math that they're calculating is like when your own time becomes so valuable, why give away access to your life story for free? There has to be something in it for them, too. You know, players with enough clout can even partake in another current pastime, the hagiographical docuseries, you know, when the player gets full editorial veto power. And it's like. Yeah, that's the unauthorized authorized bent. And, you know, if anyone who's well read enough, they know unauthorized is the way to go. But you can't get to those thornier narratives. Right. You know, if you're granting that degree of editorial gatekeeping from that central figure. But that might be the crux to get access to them, in which case I know I'm uninterested in that.
00:41:55
Speaker
I know I am too. So it is, ah yeah, you you hope that at some point the the sports fan becomes savvy enough to understand that the, yeah, the current invoke, I think we are even seeing the pendulum start to swing a little bit back because like some of the super curated, boring docuseries just haven't found traction because like, what are you telling them that they don't already know? And it just, it's like,
00:42:23
Speaker
press releases basically for, for, yeah for the players. Yeah. You're just going end up having like this Melania tripe out there. You know, that's not, ah that's not a documentary. That's a, that's an ad.
00:42:35
Speaker
Yeah, totally. So yeah, that's the thing. And a you you know, you also write like, again, I was reminded of sports writing and so much about, about tracing the truth as telling a story with a satisfying
Shaping Sports Narratives
00:42:45
Speaker
shape. And I think that's kind of what you really accomplished so well with the changeover is like, Yeah, you're like gave this transition from the old guard to this fine, finally two headed monster that can really take that mantle. And you gave it that shape and context, which made it such a breezy, just wildly great read.
00:43:03
Speaker
Yeah, I appreciate that. I think like if people enjoy it now, I'm very um grateful for that. But my hope is um you know if someone, a fan who didn't grow up watching the beginning of the era, maybe got into these rivals like towards the end of their careers and just wants to understand that transition and what a big deal it was, I hope that it kind of faithfully documented that. Because I think... um So many sports books are about endings and they have kind of this somberness and like a eulogy quality to them. But ah I love the excitement the excitement and the kind of messiness of the beginnings as well.
00:43:45
Speaker
And yeah that's kind of what I wanted to capture. Yeah, and I was someone who played yeah baseball fairly competitively and, you know, ah later
The Live Tennis Experience
00:43:54
Speaker
than most. And when I would um be up against people who were like a cut above, you know, and be like, oh, wow, that's that's a different freak altogether. And the way they hit the ball, the sound of the ball off their bat is different. Certain throwers and pitchers, the way the ball just has, as David Foster Wallace would say about a tennis ball, like that liquid hiss of the ball. It's just like, oh, you're just a different person. like You're just an alien. And you know it, you can close your eyes and know that that's someone who's different. And you wrote of Sinner, like sometimes it's better to trust the ears because when he was starting to hit the ball, it was like, you know, a shotgun going off. So like for people, you know, you've been, you know, in a stadium where these big hitters are playing or practicing, you know, take us there and like, what are you hearing? Because it is a different sound auditory experience altogether. Yeah. Definitely. i think ah that's also some of what I wanted to do is like a lot of the sensory pleasure of watching tennis is lost on the TV broadcast. So when I'm there, I'm definitely jotting down notes on yo similes to what it sounds like when this player hits a forehand. i'm observing the crowd, seeing how they're responding to it. I'm looking at how the player just behaves in between points, how they talk to the coach ah who's sitting in the player's box, um what they do during a changeover when they're just sitting in their chair having a snack or sometimes even looking at their notes. But I like to
00:45:29
Speaker
Take in like yeah all the texture and atmosphere. you know Things as simple as like when you're up close and you're watching a match on ah a clay or grass court in tennis, there's a lot of irregularities on the court surface that you wouldn't be able to observe, obviously, on TV. So you get another level of fidelity, I guess, to and understanding what's happening in the game. And then that's what I hope to transmit.
00:45:53
Speaker
you know I definitely have moments where I'm writing ah based on my observations on TV, but um whenever possible, I'll try to get as close as possible and capture as much of the atmosphere as you can.
00:46:07
Speaker
Yeah, of so much of the great imagery you're able to paint in the book, you know, of note that stuck out to me was this one sentence where Sinner and Alcarez are playing. You're like, Sinner, somehow recovered from his trials, managed to pin Alcarez to the back of the court as a butterfly to a corkboard. And I i love that image. It's just a helpless person just like ah pretty much immobilized by what's what's ah coming at them, basically. Yeah. Yeah, I think ah it's fun to... I mean, it was a fun challenge also to describe the same two players over and over for like so many pages, right? And I think during my revisions, I would go back and like, okay, did I use that one before? i remember control effing specific verbs because I didn't want that to be... Unless it was an intentional repetition to like get at something thematic about the player, I really didn't want to beat the reader over the head with the same thing. But it was such a new challenge because I'm used to writing...
00:47:04
Speaker
at like 1200 words or 800 words. And like, you don't have the issue of repeating yourself because you just don't have the space even to do that. I ended up like one interesting thing that helped a lot was i kept like a running list of just adjectives or verbs or words that I thought were kind of fit into one player's temperament versus the others. And then I would draw on those ah reservoirs when I was like coming up dry in a sentence during my writing.
00:47:36
Speaker
And it was just like, oh, this is good to have handy because I'll need these later. And it was actually pretty useful. Yeah, when you read about Djokovic you early in the book, you like his genius was less showy than the others, others being Nadal and Federer, but more attritional, but just as keen. I yeah i love that. that that's you know I didn't have the vocabulary to impart on on Joker, but I was like, yeah, that that was his style. Even though I so i still ah i still lean Federer's the best, though he's objectively, yeah kind of he can't be considered the best anymore. He's been surpassed by...
00:48:09
Speaker
Certainly Djokovic, but maybe even Nadal. It's crazy to think. But yeah, attritional is not pretty, but it's winning tennis, and he's been doing it for 20 years. And he's still doing it, actually, even after outside the scope of the book. um you know The book is kind of concludes more or less that Djokovic has been phased out, and then he comes back and beats Sinner in Australia this year, and it feels like ah the changeover
Tennis in the Era of Legends
00:48:34
Speaker
is never complete. or it's It's reversing course. Yeah. And I love how you um describe the futility of having been born during the Nadal, Federer, Djokovic era of of this sort of these stages of grief in a lot of ways, like persistence, cluelessness, anger, despair, resignation and finally enlightenment. And I just that whole paragraph was just so brilliant. you know, like maybe you can articulate it in a few words of just like what that arc is for the poor sucker who's yeah born during that era. Yeah.
00:49:04
Speaker
So it was a great process of going through these interviews and transcripts of just like, okay, how do they talk about the challenge of playing these guys? yeah And how does that... go from like defiance to anger to denial to like something resembling acceptance and and peace. And ah yeah, you you did see the pattern play out pretty consistently across all different kinds of players in different eras just because it was that hard to beat these guys. And you'll even see it to this day, someone like Andy Roddick, who's a great storyteller, commentator on tennis now is his podcast. He just like, he goes back and revisits these battles we've had with him. And he's,
00:49:43
Speaker
he's There's some PTSD there, but there's also like, yeah, those guys were just too good. I accept that they were way too good. And in the more distance I have from them, especially to see Djokovic continuing to do it as he gets older and older, there i i accept ah my place in the pecking order of of the sport. Yeah. Well, and David Foster Wallace writes about that so great in the mid 90s with the Michael Joyce piece, which I'm sure. Yeah, that's one of my favorites. of It might be my favorite of his. Yeah, mine, too. I read it all. I reread it all the time. It's got my favorite kicker of all time. So three words and three syllables, how he brings that down for a landing for such a stylist to then end it with just like wish him well. And knowing that he's just categorically fucked for his career, no matter how good you are as the number hundred player in the world, you just the Sisyphusian battle of trying to even get through the qualies.
Self-Belief in Sports and Writing
00:50:34
Speaker
And then, oh, by the way, you get to run into Agassi and Sampras as a, as your reward for grinding through the qualies. Yeah. It's just, yeah, I don't know what I'm and getting at by saying that, but it's just, yeah, this idea of like they're even among the elite, there is elite. And it's like, what do you do with that?
00:50:54
Speaker
Yeah, totally. That you wrote that in pro sports, particularly individual sports, militant self-belief is a prerequisite for the job. And I wanted to extend that to to writing and kind of the the self-belief that you need to take on ambitious projects. Sometimes a delusion that's in place to see yourself through. Yeah, that's a good point. I think ah you either have to believe in, you either have to get some like basic understanding
00:51:29
Speaker
enjoyment out of doing the actual work, which i think I do get, or you have to believe in its importance and for some imagined audience, audience external audience. um If you can get both, that's that's the ideal, but um at least one or the other, I think can go a long way. But yeah, there's definitely, if you were to think, yeah I've definitely had thoughts during and after the book publishing process where I was like, um, I'm laboring over this one word in this one sentence. And like, I have no idea if even 10 people are ever going to encounter this sentence. Right. So yeah you have to, on some level be doing it for you or yeah no, it's a, it's a, it's a good question. It's like definitely a different form of confidence, but, and I'm sure writers in general are a less, uh, uh readily you know that don't quite have i feel like they they tend to harbor more doubts about their work than one of the athlete does but maybe uh when it comes to the actual moment of quote-unquote performance in both cases i think you really have to believe in what you're doing or it's it's not going to come out right
00:52:46
Speaker
Yeah, there's ah many a bad head has ruined like a great athlete you know if they can't get out of their own way. like the most and And I think similarly and in writing too that that it's it's a different kind of game and a different degree of talent because I'm sure we've all run across people, I know I have, who are like, you know you just see someone who is so brilliantly talented but they kind of
Conviction and Ethics in Journalism
00:53:11
Speaker
languish. And then there are other people who do like really well and get like really prominent bylines who are who have to like work at it a little more. And maybe they do have that, that delusional self belief that you have to just believe that you can, that you can do it because, ah i don't know if you can't believe it yourself, then you're not going to be very convincing of other people to believe in you. Yeah. Or convincing on the page also. Yeah. The, um, you at least have to have conviction to go for it whatever it is you're trying to do in your writing.
00:53:42
Speaker
Yeah, and ah there's um there's a moment too later later in the book where you're you're wrestling with how to, I think, approach the when Sinner gets popped for the the sort of PEDs in his bloodstream that, you know, whatever... yeah whatever ratio that is or however mistaken it was or not. You know you write, as a human being, I knew that was the worst moment of his professional life. As a journalist, I knew that I had a lot of questions. As a writer of this book, I felt I needed to play the long game, not to be the first of a thousand pests to needle him.
00:54:16
Speaker
And that was really astute because if if you would approach him with that, i mean there's a chance that he just walls you off. like If you did it too soon in your process, but you're like, All right, when do i push on this? I have to be ready for this to be our last interaction maybe. Yeah, I mean, it kind of connects to the thing were talking about before where if we had if ah if I had some kind of established channel of communication and some trust, then maybe –
00:54:48
Speaker
this wouldn't be as crazy a thing to just like go up and ask about. right But because the few openings are so um sporadic and like unpredictable, you never know when the next one's going to be. It's just kind of like, oh, am I going to...
00:55:03
Speaker
use this one opportunity to just potentially blow up this relationship permanently or ah yeah, you just kind of have to be more tactful about it. And separate from that, though, it's definitely kind of gets at the ethical underpinnings of of all journalism where um yeah your responsibilities to the subject versus to your fellow human being, like subject of a piece of writing versus just another person that you share the world with. um
00:55:36
Speaker
And yeah, in that moment, I just think um chose a more low key route, just kind of said hi, and you know also selfishly looking for a material, looking for a scene in the book. um And I felt that I was probably going to get more out of just observing them from a little bit of a distance and making a brief hello than being super confrontational in that moment.
00:56:04
Speaker
Yeah. And you brought up doubt earlier with respect to you know the players or even the confidence on the page. When you're wrestling with just the you know the ugly middles of of drafts and everything, or yeah and sometimes i have like a 2 a.m. m voice that often wakes me up like it like it's the sun, and it's like ah all this worry comes into my head about being able to stick the landing on something, find sourcing. yada, yada, yada. um That's the doubt I wrestle with all all the time.
Engaging Sports Writing
00:56:31
Speaker
But I wonder for you, how do you maybe dance with it so it doesn't dominate you, but you do find a way to to cope with it so you can proceed?
00:56:40
Speaker
Yeah. they So we're talking about like those kind of messy middles of um the way one way that I look at it is like if, and this isn't strictly true, but like if you aren't enjoying at least some element of constructing the scene or why maybe think about whether it belongs in the chapter in the first place. And I think ah I tried some of the chapters felt like I was just trying stringing together a couple set pieces that I really enjoyed with just enough connective tissue to like for it to flow smoothly. And then i kind of slowly realized, well, you can kind of do that for large chunks of the book, perhaps not the entire thing because you just need some meat and potatoes, like you know exposition, explaining what's going on. But at least for a book like this, where a subject matter that lends itself to you know so a certain levity, this is not life or death stuff, I felt like in almost every page I was trying to have a little bit of fun and or at least set up some fun that we could have in an imminent page. So I think there were moments where I was just working with like
00:57:51
Speaker
the flow of how things should go. But in terms of like, yeah, I think I just read this for this particular project, I shouldn't say in general, I really just did enjoy writing it on ah on a sentence level. And I think there's definitely that's not always going to be the case in the future. And then I'll have to learn some more resilience then and I'll get back to you.
00:58:11
Speaker
I think we alluded to this earlier, but I'd love to expand on it a little more. Just this notion of the future of sports journalism and even biography you know that lot that maybe we grew up on. you know Given that so much is just flooded with you know just commentators and talking heads and the journalism wings of everything seems to be dissolving. And people are not yeah investing or even seemingly seeming to care about good investigative work, good reporting. um ah So just, you know, you're kind of on the vanguard of it with Defector and and certainly what you've written with the changeover. So just where do you see you know the future or or the watershed moment we're in with sports journalism?
00:58:52
Speaker
It's really interesting because even when I was writing the book, I was thinking to myself, like you know what percentage of sports fans engage want either currently engage or want to engage with their interest through text?
Future of Sports Journalism
00:59:08
Speaker
Because you have you have a whole universe of podcasts and you have all kinds of short form video or a longer video analysis like at your fingertips. You can...
00:59:18
Speaker
really sit on the toilet and watch like a pretty nuanced, whatever, 12 minute ah analysis of Carlos Alcaraz's new serve motion or something like that, right? So it becomes a question of like, what am I offering?
00:59:35
Speaker
on a page that's different than that um because you know we can't embed videos in my book. At least we do not yet have the technical. Although one very cool reader sent me a copy of the book that has RFID tags in it so you can like ah hold your phone up to them and then hyperlinks you to the exact moment being referenced in the book. So yeah maybe that's the thing in the future, but thinking about it and it's like, what can I do on the page that I, you know maybe is harder to do in those other mediums. And you know you can move backwards and forwards in time. You can offer historical context. You can um you know describe things in an enjoyable way. You can um ah draw the attention their attention to like different details. like they're
01:00:21
Speaker
i think there is still a lot of value to be had in engaging with sports through writing and reading. But I wonder if the appetite for that will last even as long as my hypothetical career in sports journalism will last because I just feel like things are not trending in that direction. yeah People do consume text, but it's usually in different formats like more in social media, more fast moving and not necessarily like
01:00:53
Speaker
a kind of very deliberately constructed like book length piece of writing, right? So I think um that's a big question I have, like how does, we're already we're already well underway in this transformation of um you know journalists or experts in these fields have decided that there are other or stickier formats to like communicate whatever it is they have to say um and moving away from to the whatever writing based craft like they kind of came up with so um i yeah sometimes i wonder if like there will be an appetite for something like this 10 years down the road like i've hypothetically talked about trying to circle back and write another book about this rivalry at the end of it um but
01:01:41
Speaker
I could be in a very different landscape with respect to people's individual attention and like just appetite for, for reading. And um if the other trends that we've talked about continue, there may be even less, less access to these people and you know, less of an opening to make interesting, tell interesting stories about them.
01:02:03
Speaker
Yeah. Well, excellent. Well, the book's amazing. I had so so much fun reading it, Giddy. And it was just, ah yeah, it was just yeah whimsical fun, deeply analytical.
Feedback on 'Changeover'
01:02:12
Speaker
And ah yeah, like i like you were saying, having fun on the page. like I had fun reading it. So you mission accomplished there. Thank you. I'm glad to hear it.
01:02:22
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely, man. And as I bring these conversations down for landing, i always love asking the guests for just like a recommendation of some kind for the listeners out there. cool. Just like anything you you're finding fun and cool out there that that you'd want to share.
01:02:35
Speaker
Yeah, ah that's great. i am Actually, would be definitely of interest to many readers of this podcast, but I recently read Susan Orlean's memoir, Joyride, which was ah both a a good...
01:02:52
Speaker
walkthrough of like her process as a writer and her shifting kind of approach to like the nuts and bolts of writing. And then also just a celebration of a great era of journalism, which you know hopefully we'll see a resurgence in the future. But I hope my last response wasn't too negative, but I don't quite see it coming back in the same way. But it's yeah, she puts things in perspective really nicely. It's not like she's kind of spiking the football and like, look at this amazing life and career I got to have. It's like... you know
01:03:22
Speaker
it Not everything that seems so dreamy in retrospect right in retrospect was actually so great to live through in real time, but like here are some of the amazing things I got to do, and like here are some of my anxieties about writing going forward. So I think ah it was very nuanced, and it was a good read. I think anyone who's listening to this podcast i think would would enjoy that one.
01:03:43
Speaker
Oh, for sure. Well, that's awesome. Well, well, Giddy, thank you so much for, you know, the work you've done and for carving out time to talk some shop on the show. So this was wonderful. And again, congrats on the book. And yeah, I can't wait for what you come up with next.
01:03:54
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah, this is great. Thanks for having
01:04:02
Speaker
Awesome. That was great.
Supporting the Podcast
01:04:05
Speaker
Thanks to Giddy Nathan for coming on the show, talking some shop. The name of the book again is Changeover. And if you go to brendanamara.com, you can read the show notes and then you might also want to check out patreon.com slash cnfpod to throw in a few bucks to help support this enterprise and you can also follow along the show at creative nonfiction podcast on instagram so the thing with rejection is you really know where you finished in the grand scheme of the rejection like i entered a flash essay contest with one of the better things i've ever written and it did make the cut you know whatever
01:04:45
Speaker
That's the nature of subjectivity in this fucking mess.
Dealing with Rejection and Career Trajectories
01:04:49
Speaker
There were something like more than 300 submissions and only three slots for finalists. Okay, so yeah, odds are really stacked against you. And I got the form rejection, as is the norm.
01:05:01
Speaker
But was it summarily dismissed on the first read, or was it a toss-up between number three and number four? Like that not knowing is where confidence goes to die.
01:05:13
Speaker
It can sting if you know you were that close and didn't get selected, but being that close means you're pretty damn good and not a delusional piece of shit. So yeah, I've got this yeah major book proposal rejection of late and no real clarity on what to do next. That's kind of coming into better picture of what I might be doing next. And then I got this essay rejection, and I have another essay in the hands of an editor at Long Reads that, if I'm being honest, I don't feel great about, and I'm pretty sure they're going to pass on it.
01:05:43
Speaker
It's a good idea, but I just don't think I did well enough with it. I have a a source pitch email out, and I don't know how that's going to go. you know If I get no's on all this shit, I might have to reevaluate my game, go to the game tape, and see if my form is off.
01:06:01
Speaker
Hire a coach. Maybe I'll subscribe to Pitch Club.
01:06:07
Speaker
Here's the other thing about slumps. like You have to put that rejection behind you. You can't carry that mood of a rejection into the next at-bat. Swing away. Keep shooting. Hitters hit. Shooters shoot.
01:06:20
Speaker
You can't snap out of a funk by sitting on the bench. You might have hit the shit out of a ball and hit it right at the shortstop. Or maybe you struck out feebly. Each new submission is a chance to prove that the others were wrong.
01:06:35
Speaker
That's having the right mindset. Now, I'm not entirely, I'm not exactly what you would call Mr. Sunshine, and I tend to give up way too easily. But by the time you hear this, I will have resubmitted that essay somewhere.
01:06:49
Speaker
I don't know where, but it'll be back out there. i have faith that it'll get picked up. It's 250-word essay, so it's like, if going to get rejected again, it should be quick.
01:07:01
Speaker
Oh, and by the way, I spoke with my agent about the book proposal. And um she encouraged me, for one, to reach out to my editor for the frontrunner and I'd get a download from him and maybe talk about what he might see as a good fit for me going forward or at least consider why there's no urgency to what I proposed.
01:07:19
Speaker
Or maybe it needs a totally reframing. And after talking with Susan, i i got really inspired by a ah particular way to reframe it that is kind of exciting, ah but I don't know if it'll be enough.
01:07:34
Speaker
But we also talked about other book ideas, and I threw two at her, and she really liked both of them, which is encouraging. She wanted me to think harder about the trajectory of my book writing career. Like, what do i want to be known for?
01:07:46
Speaker
you know, she said I'm a great storyteller, which was nice of her to say. ah So maybe be thinking more along the lines of just pure narrative nonfiction, can like my first book, you know, Six Who Can Saratoga.
01:07:57
Speaker
Everyone seems to forget about that one. Like even Susan. She's like, you've really got to be careful what you choose for your second book. like, well, my second book is the frontrunner. It's our first big book, but still the second book anyway.
01:08:08
Speaker
So maybe be thinking along the lines of pure narrative nonfiction, not just biography. She wanted me to find my boys in the boat kind of story. Do I see myself writing more books? As I see it, it's my preferred medium.
01:08:21
Speaker
and She said I don't have to stay in sports. In fact, it'd be... Better to be more of a generalist than that. I'm not a necessarily a name sports writer for yeah ESPN and the athletics. So me as like a major sports writer is not ah an easy sell.
01:08:38
Speaker
and These are the things of like crafting a brand, if you will. It's kind of icky to say that, but it's really kind of almost be thinking in those terms, right? So I'm both excited and a little discouraged because I kind of have to go to the go on the hunt again and source up for a new story to tell. And that machine takes a long time to move.
01:09:00
Speaker
But I am excited for the potential of that new story. But again, it's finding the arc, the why now, what's new, the why me of it all. The other book idea she said was a ah good one for me is um a craft book on nonfiction based on the podcast.
01:09:17
Speaker
yeah Think of all the hundreds of hours of wisdom then to still that down into a craft craft book that I've tentatively titled The Hitchhiker's Guide to Creative Nonfiction. But do I need another narrative book under my belt to give me more authority that I put all this stuff into practice? And I i know I've done that already, but, ah you know, three published books feels better than two or maybe I'm bullshitting myself. i don't know. You know, a book on writing has little bit more heft when you've done the thing. And sure, I've written two, published two, but ah a third might give me more gravitas.
01:09:51
Speaker
Gravitas for a craft book. On top of curating more and more guests going forward. It'll be like Tim Ferriss' Tools of Titans, but for writing nonfiction. Anyway, ah she really liked that idea for me. Her eyes kind of lit up on that one. So I have to get her a bunch of comp titles so she can kind like i kind of look at the market there. So I'll be doing that too. And the thing is, I want to earn some dough.
01:10:18
Speaker
you know So maybe I can free my wife from her job. and yeah know It's killing her and she's only hanging on for the health insurance and she's in very intensive physical therapy after her total knee replacement surgery. So it's like, still need that health insurance. And we have decent health insurance and dental. So it's like, ah how do you give that up?
01:10:36
Speaker
Who has comparable insurance out there? And she's been so trapped as the breadwinner in our relationship forever. And I'd love nothing more than to give her the gift of time to get her nervous system out of the red line and for her to perhaps find something that's not killing her, you know?
01:10:53
Speaker
And I can only do that if I secure a big book or a book and some saucy features. Yeah, maybe i need to hustle more. Maybe I need to monetize the podcast more aggressively. Like maybe i need to treat it like a NASCAR car and slap a big-ass sponsor or two on the body.
01:11:09
Speaker
But then it's not as punk rock. It's kind of a selling out kind of thing. and But I also need to make that paper. And my long goal is that the podcast gives me platform and authority that I can leverage for book contracts. And that was like kind of my strategy through the front runner. And my last failure seems to have dented that armor and introduced faults into my grand plan. Now, is that merely a setback or is my plan fundamentally flawed?
01:11:33
Speaker
yeah The ground underfoot is moving too much. Too many ideas, too many rejections, too many options, too much uncertainty. Do I need to get a job as a barista or a cashier at a grocery store so I can at least get an employee discount at like Trader Joe's or something?
01:11:49
Speaker
I don't think they're hiring because everyone loves working there. you know that's what happens when you reach a certain age and you're not a great freelancer and you can't secure another book deal and you don't teach.
01:12:00
Speaker
I don't know what to do anymore. In this slice of time, you never know that in one week or one month or one year, all this will feel quaint and things could be good. It's almost like being in a maze.
01:12:12
Speaker
You know, you're looking around and you're taking one or wrong turn. You don't know if the the turn you're taking is leading you to the exit or if you're just getting deeper into the into the labyrinth.
01:12:24
Speaker
Who moved my cheese, damn it? Stay wild, CNFers. And if you can't do interviews. See