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Episode 38—Philip Gerard Helps You Get Out of Your Head
147 Plays8 years ago
Philip Gerard, author of "The Art of Creative Research" stopped by #CNF HQ to talk about the serious research behind all great works of writing.
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Transcript
Introduction and Aspirations
00:00:00
Speaker
Sometimes, okay, most of the time, I find myself daydreaming. Like, what would it be like if I had a million dollars?
00:00:14
Speaker
Okay, so if I had a million dollars, I'd buy all my writer friends, or aspiring writer friends, a copy of The Art of Creative Research by Philip Girard. What a great read, and so, so valuable. As it doesn't just apply to nonfiction writing, it applies to fiction and poetry on that believable, authentic level.
Interviewing Philip Girard
00:00:41
Speaker
Naturally it was my great great pleasure to speak with Philip about the book but also about his journey as a writer and what a journey. He's the author of several books of fiction and non-fiction including the novels Cape Fear Rising and the patron saint of dreams. Non-fiction books like Secret Soldiers and Down the Wild Cape Fear
00:01:03
Speaker
and books on writing, like the art of creative research and creative non-fiction research and crafting stories from real life. He also teaches full time at University of Wilmington, North Carolina, and also in a couple different MFA programs. And he's putting out a music album. So if there's a more interesting man in the world, show me, because I think we corralled him for episode 38. And also, you know the drill.
00:01:33
Speaker
share this, subscribe on iTunes, or Google Play Music, like the hashtag CNF Podcast on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, and let's stay connected and keep encouraging each other. So, without further ado, here's my conversation with Philip Girard.
Philip Girard's Hobbies and Passions
00:01:50
Speaker
What I oftentimes like to start asking people about is
00:01:55
Speaker
Especially for someone like you who writes so much, writes about writing so much, fiction, nonfiction, teaches a lot. So how do you unplug from that? What are some of your hobbies that you're into that gets you away from a lot of the writing life that allows you to come back to it fresh?
00:02:14
Speaker
Well, as I tell my wife, Jill, I don't really have hobbies, but I have passions. And I got a guitar back here. I love music. I did my first album last year and toured it this summer. The first thing we did when we moved into the house was build a music room onto it. So I've got basically a music studio with a keyboard and pedal steel and all guitar hangers and what have you.
00:02:35
Speaker
That's it. The dogs were currently locked out of the office because otherwise they would take over the conversation, especially my Australian Shepherd Daisy Duke. She's my pal. So we go morning and run at the park and then sailing. Sailing has always been my passion.
00:02:51
Speaker
Now that I'm no longer sure of the department, I did some repairs in the boat this year, I'm hoping to get out and have a nice spring sailing season. So those things, you know, and then I tend to compartmentalize. So when I'm not working, I'm really not working. I mean, I know, relax. Otherwise you're just on, you know, and.
00:03:07
Speaker
You never get away from it. And there's always one more call to make one more email to answer, one more note to take. And so when I'm on, I'm on. But when I'm off duty, the lights go out. Yeah. How do you make that delineation? Is that something that's very concrete for you? These are the weeks or months out of the year that the switch goes off? Or is it more fluid?
00:03:28
Speaker
than that.
Current Projects and Music Journey
00:03:29
Speaker
It's really project driven. So now in addition to the Civil War book that I told you about I'm doing, I'm also doing a new edition of Creative Nonfiction. So I've been editing that and I'm in the process of turning music into a kind of a memoir. I did a magazine piece on the making of the album, American Anthem.
00:03:46
Speaker
last year and that was sort of the intro to, because it started with a list that I made when I was a kid. I put down 10 things I expected to achieve in my life. I'm writing a book, falling in love, going to Alaska, you know the usual stuff. And the last one on the list was making an album because that was just so, I thought that would be a dream. And in the old days you couldn't do that. You'd have to get with Atlantic Records or somebody and they'd have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in you.
00:04:12
Speaker
Nowadays, though, I found a local producer in town, does great albums, fully professional, full studio and the whole thing. And, you know, I'm a member of ASCAP now, we're selling stuff online, downloads, I'm doing concerts. And so I'm writing about that as the kind of culmination of a life in music that started when I was, you know, just
00:04:30
Speaker
12 or 13 years old. Wow. How is picking up and becoming proficient with the guitar and I assume singing too. Do you sing? Oh yeah. I do my best. Yeah. How has that informed your creativity at this stage in your writing career?
00:04:54
Speaker
It's really a great that going into the studio was a great process because it was like the graduate course in music. It was taking 15 songs completely apart, rewriting sections of them, writing bridges for them, doing new instrumentation, changing keys, changing tempo, and then teaching other people some of the parts because I had to have bass players and drummers and other keyboard players. And I did a lot of the instruments, but breaking it all down, putting it back together again in a really intense way.
00:05:22
Speaker
And in a place where, you know, if you're doing a live performance, kind of like doing a reading, if you make a mistake, if you bumble something, it gets lost in the ambience of the moment. And if people have a good time, who cares? If you grab a note, you know, a microphone in a studio, it's a crab note, and it doesn't go away. If you're off key, you're off key, and it doesn't go away. So what you really want to doing is concentrating in a really intensive way. And I found it very much like
00:05:49
Speaker
kind of going into the zone I'm riding where if I'm really into the zone and there's a knock on the door because you know you'll need something it's like being really literally being woken out of that dream that John Gardner used to talk about.
00:06:01
Speaker
And so that's what the studio was like. And I would come out of it both completely exhausted after maybe a two or three hour session, but also completely refreshed in a way that I expect people get from meditation maybe. So the analog for the creative process has been several things. One is working with a producer was very much like working with a great editor.
00:06:20
Speaker
who's constantly kind of coaxing more out of you, constantly helping you to find the truth in a line of the verse of your song, when you were kind of falling for a lazy rhyme, you know, because you hear on the radio a million times and he's pushing, no, no, that's not quite, we don't have it quite there. Or you put in vocals and then decide, no, no, that sounds too flowery, take it out again. You know, we don't need that harmony. And it's very much like a good editor who's really trying to bring out the best in your work on your own terms,
00:06:49
Speaker
rather than imposing their will on you. But the other thing was the intensity of the process was there's just no cheating. I said in the studio before, and this guy is old school, Jeff Reed, my producer at old school, and he's like, we're gonna have good mics, and that's it. We're not gonna put in all kind of fancy, what he calls magic dust, you know, these effects. We'll put a little reverb in your headphones so it sounds live because of course the studio is an anechoic chamber and it doesn't sound natural. All the sound just sort of dies. But you get the truth.
00:07:19
Speaker
You know, and it's very much like looking at a first draft and saying, OK, I'm not going to look for what I intended to be here. I'm not going to look for what I hope is here. I'm not going to look for stuff that strokes my ego. I'm going to look at what I actually wrote and how good it is.
00:07:35
Speaker
and be as brutally honest as I can be. And so I think it's a great thing. And in fact, I'm putting together a songwriting class for the MFA program here at Wilmington, just because I think it was so valuable to me. And the other thing I do with my music, I take a very large project like the Civil War project, for example, and I try to distill it down into a song or a couple of songs that really get at the thematic spirit of what I'm trying to do and kind of capture the DNA of the project.
00:08:04
Speaker
And of course, in songwriting, you're really limited. I mean, you've got a few bars, you've got two or three minutes, and you kind of have to do it all. And so you really get back to what's essential. You really do sort of find that essential mother lode of what you're really into. And then you can
00:08:22
Speaker
kind of relax out of that when you go back into a prose and you're writing an essay or a novel or whatever, and you can take it in all the directions you want to. But until you really get what it is at the essence, you're not going to be able to do that. So I think that things are extremely go hand in hand and are extremely useful back and forth.
00:08:38
Speaker
Yeah, that's an incredibly neat way that they can piggyback off one another. In a lot of ways, the process is the same, but it's exercising a different muscle. So you're coming at both works fresh, even though you're sort of working out a very similar congruent creative muscle, but you're not fatiguing your mind in a way that you might be if you were just solely dedicated to prose or solely dedicated to music.
00:09:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's really key. I tell all my writing students, you know, get out of your own head once in a while and do something. It's why a lot of writers paint, not because they're great painters, because most of them are terrible painters. But it does give them something that they have to do with their eye and their hand and not especially their mind. They just have to look and pay attention and then try to create something out of that. And it's a very different set of muscles, as you say.
00:09:32
Speaker
But you come back from it refreshed, and you get kind of a bank shot. It comes back into your own work in ways you don't expect. But it really is refreshing. The other thing is nobody expects me to be any good as a musician. It's kind of like a fish riding a bicycle. They kind of walk out of the stage like, whoa. You want them to perform with him in a concert we did with the woman who had produced the rock bottom remainders. And we were doing the rehearsal, and he said, oh my god, a writer who can sing? What's that all about?
00:10:01
Speaker
So the thing is you don't have to be great at it. You can really just be an enthusiastic amateur and it works. So the pressure is off in a way and it leads to you able to make all the discoveries that come with messing something up or failing at something until you get it right and that's a great lesson for a writer.
00:10:23
Speaker
You talked about reaching a sense of flow and a kind of that you go into the cave and you know, you come out tired, but you also come out refreshed. And how do you, how do you sort of nurture that and get into that flow state, whether it be writing or music and, you know, how do you, how do you cultivate that, that feeling and, and ride that wave when you're able to get there?
Creative Process and Writing Space
00:10:49
Speaker
Well, for me, it starts with defining a place. So in every house I've lived in since I was a graduate student, I defined a space for writing. And at one point, it was the kitchen table. At one point, it was a little desk in my bedroom. I now, for the last many years, have had my identity. You always buy a house that has an extra room to turn into a study. I built one at my last house, the same with the music room. So I come in here, I close the door. The books are all around me. My research stuff is here. The computer is here, typewriter, whatever I need.
00:11:19
Speaker
And so I'm here for one reason, and I've got the habit now that my body and mind kind of know that's what I'm doing here. So when I'm in here, I don't grade papers. I don't do lots of social media or anything. I'll check in with friends once in a while. But mainly when I'm here, I'm here to get into the zone and to write. And so I typically, I do a lot of planning in my life just because when your life gets busier, if you just let things sort of happen, everything, everything will hijack your time away from you.
00:11:49
Speaker
And so I put things on my calendar, you know, I'm writing for these hours and if it doesn't go well, then go well. But if I do this enough days in a row, probably I'm going to get there. And if I've got particular projects, like I'm revising something, I pretty much set out. Here's the chunk I'm doing today. Here's the chunk I'm doing tomorrow. And so I kind of know I don't have to do all that today. I'm doing this part of it.
00:12:12
Speaker
The pressure is often away, I've got a limited world to work with and I can just dive into it and get lost and do whatever it takes. It might be a question sometimes of taking one paragraph apart or one scene apart and putting it back together or doing one bit of research on one fact.
00:12:27
Speaker
that has been really elusive to find. And so you're on the phone, you're on the internet, what have you. But at the end of the day, you say, okay, I got that work done, checked that off the list and now I can go have a beer, play with my dog, whatever you want to do. So I find that planning kind of makes a difference because life is gonna interrupt. Yesterday my wife's car broke down, so I left my writing desk to go find her and pick her up and get her car towed. But I'll get that time back.
00:12:55
Speaker
You know, I'll say, well, okay, I lost two hours, but I'll buy it back over here. And so I'm always constantly making these sort of strange psychological deals with myself.
00:13:04
Speaker
But it's, you know, closing the door. The only person allowed in the writing room with me is my dog Daisy Duke. She's at the desk about every half hour, 45 minutes. She'll get up and put her hand on my leg. Like, come on, it's time to go out. I had a door that goes out onto the deck here. She'd go out in the backyard. We can go take a walk around and look at the pond or whatever, the back marsh here. So it's a matter of,
00:13:28
Speaker
you know, kind of their habits that we, we have the kind of psyched us into what we're supposed to be doing. Even when I'm on stage, I've got a little rug and it's my stage. So if I set that up in somebody's living room or on a concert stage, I've got this little five body rug. That's my performance space. If I've got 20 musicians around me, I might have just mute myself and my guitar, but that that's my stage wherever it is. And so when I enroll it, we're playing and that's what it's there for. So they're little,
00:13:55
Speaker
kind of little tricks that you do and just ways you create a habit and then you can go in and just relax into the work. And I wonder, when you were a kid, like eight years old or so, what did you want to be
Childhood and Career Reflection
00:14:09
Speaker
when you grew up?
00:14:11
Speaker
That's a good question because I think back on it. I didn't want to be what my dad was, and I wasn't sure what my dad was. All I know is he would put on a suit in the morning. He would either drive in or go to the stop to get picked up by the carpool, go into an office, the DuPont company, where he worked for, I think, about 46 years.
00:14:28
Speaker
And it was a great job, great benefits, and the whole thing, but I never quite understood what he did, and I went to work with him a number of times. At one point, I remember he was working with IBM computers back in the day when they were the size of this room, essentially. He actually took me inside the old UNIVAC computer. They were decommissioning. But I knew I didn't want to just do that kind of office work. I thought,
00:14:52
Speaker
There was nothing real about any profession in those days. I think I just thought I wanted to have a kind of an adventure in my life and I wasn't sure what form that would take. In college, I played a lot of music and I thought, gee, the thing to do would be to kind of be a session man and get in with the studios. But I wasn't good enough and I figured that out. I didn't want to be 50 years old and playing the holiday and hoping that I got enough tips to make it through the week.
00:15:14
Speaker
So I kept with the music, but I kept on looking for things and I started teaching accidentally. I was called into a classroom. On a Friday afternoon, the director of COP at Arizona called me up and said, would you like to teach a couple of sessions of freshman COP? We have a TA who quit. And I said, when do I have to be there? It was Monday morning. I think it was eight o'clock. So I had basically 48 hours and I walked into the classroom. I thought, you know,
00:15:39
Speaker
I kind of belong here. I can do this. And I really like the give and take. I like being in a room where people wanted to talk about writing and wanted to be smart about it. And especially if you're kind of living that solitary writing life where you spend a lot of time all by yourself in a little room, you know, staring at a keyboard and a screen. It's great to then go into a room full of people.
00:16:02
Speaker
smart people that really honor what you do and talk about it and discuss it and argue about it and, you know, all of that. So I kind of got to where I am as a teacher in a very sort of roundabout accident in a way. I figured I would end up being a journalist, which I'd been before I went back to get my MFA. And I've continued to do that as a magazine journalist, but not sort of hardcore daily deadline journalism.
00:16:26
Speaker
When you walked into that classroom, what was that feeling like when you looked at all those faces looking back at you at 8 a.m. on a Monday morning? Well, I had gone to a friend of mine who was an older TA who had been teaching before he came to the Graduate Program. And I said, do you have any advice? And he said, yes. He said two things. Before you walk into that classroom, check your fly and know the first thing that's going to come out of your mouth.
00:16:53
Speaker
First you gotta say, so I had a plan and I tended in those days to over plan and mostly abandoned my plan about halfway through, but I always knew if things got slow, I had something to fall back on.
00:17:07
Speaker
What I also realized was when you walk into a classroom, for better or for worse, people assume you belong at the head of the class. You belong at the head of the seminar table or whatever it is. And they don't know, are you a TA? Are you a tenor? Are you not? Are you a visitor? Are you an instructor? They really don't understand rank and they shouldn't. They don't have to. But they kind of grant you that initial authority and it's up to you to keep it. And so I was always of the position that every class was going to be about a lesson.
00:17:35
Speaker
whether it's a workshop or a freshman comp class or whatever, I always had something particular in mind that I wanted to aim toward. And if we got toward other things, great. But I didn't have like 56 things to do. I usually had one thing. I wanted to talk about beginnings or endings, or I wanted to talk about imagery, or I wanted to talk about how you take a dry fact like a statistic from a budget and turn it into an interesting, dramatic moment in a piece. Some particular thing, and then all the stuff around that would sort of coalesce like,
00:18:04
Speaker
almost like crystallizing around it. And you have this constellation of things. But at the core would be that. And I still do student manuscript workshops that way, where I've got something very particular I'm after. And I want to get to that, whatever else we do.
00:18:18
Speaker
How did you not maybe get intimidated by the big block of time that you had when you had to say one thing of focus? You're like, I'm working on beginnings today, but I've got 60 minutes. That can seem a little bit overwhelming. So how did you approach that as a young teacher and then as you've honed that over the years?
00:18:42
Speaker
Well, it's a good question. And I sort of do it the way I do an interview. When I go to interview someone, I never think of it as a list of questions. I think of it as a conversation. I think of it as I'm going to approach somebody who probably up to that moment is a stranger, doesn't know me. I don't know them. And I'm hoping that if we talk long enough, they'll tell me something that I really want to know and I can really use. And then in talking to me, they will feel some sense of fulfillment that they got to articulate something that's on their mind.
00:19:12
Speaker
So I want it to be a transaction. I don't want to just kind of suck all the knowledge out of their head. Thank you very much. Now you've bared your soul. But when I do it, I do in fact have a list of things that if
00:19:26
Speaker
there's usually in an interview one big thing I want to get to and then there are probably other things that if we have time I'd like to ding them on that and maybe go off in a different direction and certainly as they're talking I'm alert to what it is they're trying to tell me so that even if I thought the interview was about X it might turn out to be about Y and if if if they say something really interesting I have to be listening in a way that can help me take the interview in that direction so I've always got fallback stuff and
00:19:54
Speaker
I've always been of the opinion when you start an interview, it almost doesn't matter what anybody says. What matters is you start talking and that you talk in some way that helps you figure out who each other are. It turns out I've done some research on language and it turns out scientists have actually studied this. And some very large percentage of human conversation that they study is about absolutely nothing. It's what they call social grooming.
00:20:19
Speaker
It's just people talking about the weather, talking about having a nice day, talking about whatever trivial gossip is going on in their lives. And it's simply a way of saying, we're connected, you're my friend, we're acquaintances, we're neighbors, what have you. And an interview in a class both have been in common, I think. In a class I would go in and say, okay, we want to get the beginnings. But I also know that they've got some other concerns that are going to come up. And as the conversation goes on, I'm happy to let the conversation roam around a while.
00:20:46
Speaker
and go off on certain tangents and especially if we can provoke questions because I always want to be addressing what is on their mind and what my students think they need to talk about. But then I'll be circling on back to that first thing and very often you find out that the way to talk about beginnings is to start with an ending.
00:21:04
Speaker
or the way to talk about character is to talk about the situation that character is in, or to talk about how you make a dry fact out of a budget. You say, well, what exactly is a budget? Let's look at the budget as a dramatic thing that expresses hope and intention and a belief about how the future is going to unfold. And so we back off from it and create a paradigm of context and then move to the other question later. So the question, the one question always contains a kind of constellation of other questions and other concerns.
00:21:32
Speaker
And so there's always a few things in your back pocket to get to. And when you bring up the social grooming and a lot of those conversational things that a lot of kind of like routine type conversations that aren't very interesting on the surface. But what we ultimately want to do is get to what's very engaging and interesting and
00:21:56
Speaker
kinetic about somebody's life. So how do you penetrate that social grooming and get to the meat that makes for interesting and gripping narrative?
00:22:08
Speaker
There are a lot of ways to do it. One way is just to keep talking. I found out long ago as a young, I don't even think they used the word then, but I always felt I was a cub reporter because I went into the journalism with no training at all. But I would talk to people and I found that if I just hung out with them long enough, they would eventually tell me something interesting, often something that they didn't mean to tell me. Not because it was a big expose, but often because
00:22:31
Speaker
They either didn't think I cared about it or they've forgotten about it till the moment when I came up in the conversation or something triggered it in something else we talked about. That was one thing. Another thing is, you know, where, where are you? If you're in a sterile environment and sometimes you have to sometimes an airport lounge meeting between planes, that's all you're going to get.
00:22:50
Speaker
But if you can be in someone's home where they have a picture of their family or a diploma or a souvenir from some trip or whatever it is, every object in everybody's house has its own story and getting them to tell the story of why that object is on their shelf or why that painting is on their wall or where that Persian carpet came from or what have you. Those things often lead to really intimate moments, story moments where people are telling you all about themselves. When I interviewed
00:23:18
Speaker
World War II soldiers from my book, Secret Soldiers, one of the last questions I always asked them was, did you bring anything home from the war? And I tried, as often as I could, I interviewed them at their home, or in many cases at their studios, because many were artists, and they would all, you know, they would all light up and say, oh yeah, I forgot, I got this thing up in my closet, and they would go bring home a rifle, or they would, one guy brought down a box of ammunition, German machine gun ammunition, in fact, he gave me a round.
00:23:45
Speaker
Another guy went upstairs and I heard him clattering around and he comes flying down the stairs and he's beaming and he's dressed in his Class A Army uniform from 1945 when he was mustered out. And he said, look, it still fits. And it was delightful. But those moments you see people as they actually are. And I had so many people after an hour's conversation or spending half a day with them, you would end up with somebody in tears or with gales of laughter or with some
00:24:14
Speaker
you've just reached through and you know that whatever was artificial between you is gone and there's lots of hugging and lots of handshaking and a real encounter is taking place, one that you both feel good about. Yeah, when you get to that point, sometimes you forget that you're still in the process of trying to craft a story, too. So it's almost like you have to remind yourself and remind them that there's still this other thing going on.
Handling Sensitive Stories
00:24:44
Speaker
that you do intend to write about them, whether it be fiction or non-fiction. Non-fiction is the one that can be really bruising if you're not careful. How do you navigate that? Because when you have these conversations, there's an intimacy and a friendship that develops over time.
00:25:03
Speaker
But you're still ultimately, I hate to use the term, but kind of using them for a story, even though you're getting to a very friendly, intimate level with them. It is a transaction. And luckily, I guess for me, I'm not in the business of doing exposé books or exposé pieces where I'm trying to nail somebody for stealing the money or whatever. But it is true that people's private stories are really precious. And so, for example, the World War II soldiers
00:25:32
Speaker
They were telling me very intimate details about life, not just in the Army, but afterwards. And they were telling me many things that they had never even told their wives. And I had one guy breaking down at a kitchen table at the end of the interview, and he was in tears. And he told me that his last job as a combat engineer after they disbanded the secret unit was to be the bulldozer driver who was pushing bodies into mass graves at concentration camps.
00:26:00
Speaker
He had never told his wife this. She came into the room and said, what did you do? What have you done? And she had been hovering all through the interview in the next room. And he had sort of banished her to talk to me privately. And he finally said it's OK. And he was sobbing. But she said, and then he told her what he just told me. And she said, now I know why he hasn't slept the night through since the war. And they'd been married, I think, 60 years at that point or thereabouts.
00:26:29
Speaker
you get at these moments like that and there are things that never make it into a book or a piece. Where I can, I try to run things by somebody to say, especially if I'm not sure, if I'm not sure that they said a certain thing or if I'm not sure about a fact, I'll say, here's what I'm
00:26:45
Speaker
doing and I want it to be accurate. So is this right? I'll either read it back to them. In some cases, I'll show them copies of it. I'm not a hard news journalist. And so showing the copy of my news story isn't really that taboo. When you're writing a book, you can negotiate that. But I like to think that they know that I'm not doing a hatchet job. And I'm going to be honest and as fair and just as humane as I can be.
00:27:11
Speaker
And that's hard sometimes. One of the things I hate doing is describing people who are still alive. I'm going to read it because almost nobody is ever happy with the way you describe them unless you say, you know, she's beautiful. He's an Adonis, you know, guy, whatever. I was talking about, I was writing about a friend of mine one time and I said he had a Brooklyn accent and he was upset. He said, I don't have a Brooklyn accent. It's Manhattan. You don't know. I didn't know. I did to New York like one time.
00:27:41
Speaker
And people get upset when you say, oh, they're overweight or they're bald. They never get upset when you say they stole the money. It's always, you know. My hair's not really thinning. Yeah. When I was writing about my dad and tools of ignorance, I said he had a keg of a torso with ski pole legs. And he took issue. He's like, I'll have you know that a lot of people have told me I have great legs. I was like, dad, I don't.
00:28:12
Speaker
I'm like, that's not the issue here. I'm much more comfortable writing about historical figures because then you can really pull out the stops and you're going by photographs and descriptions of people that wrote at the time, but they're not going to call you up and get mad. Yeah. When you were coming up and developing as a writer, who did you imitate on your way to finding your own voice?
00:28:40
Speaker
I remember as a kid in high school, I think I was maybe a sophomore in high school, and I stayed up and watched the late show. The late show was a story called The Adventures of a Young Man, and it was based on Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. And Paul Newman actually played the battler, the punch drunk boxer, and there were lots of other stars in it. And I saw that it was based on those stories. I'd never heard of Hemingway. I walked into the university bookstore of my hometown in New York, Delaware, the next day, bought the Nick Adams stories, went home, read all of them,
00:29:09
Speaker
I thought, holy cow, these are real. And then I went out and pretty much bought every other thing Hemingway had ever written and began to read that. And then I branched off. And I thought, OK, what I can do here is there was clarity and there was a realness. It wasn't like reading Henry James or Silas Martin or all these things we read in high school, which felt like they belonged to England in some bygone era.
00:29:37
Speaker
And then I began, I discovered Joseph Heller, I discovered Ken Kesey, writers like that. And then later on, there were writers I met at Bredlof like Tim O'Brien, John Gardner, Ron Hansen. They were all just terrific writers. And so I began looking at a couple of things, wondering what they wrote about. And then I began looking at how they crafted sentences. So if you look at a guy like Tim O'Brien, I mean, God,
00:30:03
Speaker
His sentences are almost like he's punching at you sometimes. They're beautiful, but there's just such a power there. I've known Tim now many years, and I see just how relentless he is at revising his work. When he was bringing out the new edition of the things they carried,
00:30:23
Speaker
he decided that he'd use the word weird too many times. He went back through and edited the whole book again. I don't know, 20 years after it came out or what have you. So the lesson that I learned was that this stuff doesn't happen by accident. Hemingway always talked about, you know, the drafting and taking things out. And of course he had Ezra Pound looking over his shoulder to help him. But I began realizing that there was a significant amount of work that wasn't on the page, but that if he did it,
00:30:51
Speaker
it would be on the page because of, you know, what Hemingway's thing, the less is more, you know, what you did off the page shows up. And I think that's really true. It's kind of, you know, the analogy, I guess the sports would be, you know, in those spring training games when all you're doing is feeling one ground or after another, hitting the cutoff man 200 times in a row, you know, the pitcher's practicing the bunt, they're practicing the suicide squeeze from third. And then like five months later in the playoff game, somebody executes a bunt and it's perfect.
00:31:21
Speaker
That was because they did it 400 times down in Florida before they ever set a foot on a major league baseball field. The analogy with writing is the same thing. I learned it from those guys that if you look at early drafts of S. Scott Fitzgerald or other writers who are meant to be, you're taught are so elegant and so perfect, you realize how clumsy they were. I pulled, when I was in Chicago at the library, I pulled out a bunch of Ernest Hemingway's earliest stories when he was a high school kid.
00:31:49
Speaker
And they read like, um, dangerous Dan McGrew. I mean, there, you know, he, he jerked his hog leg and, you know, and, and the, and the, and it's the other guy thudding to the ground going, Oh my God, I've been shot. I mean, is that, it wasn't, I, that quoting, but that was the kind of stuff it was. That was just the worst kind of men's pulp fiction. And he had written through that and gotten to something else. And that's what I was trying to do, you know, to get past the lurid, get past the purple to get past.
00:32:17
Speaker
all that stuff that you have to do while you're learning and get to the thing that's clean and powerful and that actually says exactly what you're trying to say.
00:32:27
Speaker
Yeah, you allude to that a lot in your latest book when you spoke with Walt Harrington when he was writing his book on the Craftsman about how you do these dovetails over and over and over again. It just becomes internalized and it becomes a part of the muscle memory, but then it allows you to reach another level when that stuff becomes automatic, just that fundamental stuff. I think that's exactly where you're kind of getting at through that repetition of the most basic fundamentals.
00:32:56
Speaker
you're able to retire in higher levels of mastery and craft that separates the good from the great. Yeah, and it begins with really simple things that you don't think of as being part of the art, like something as dumb as common usage or punctuation. I had a woman in a class some years back and she was a professional public relations person, and she said, I have a confession to make.
00:33:20
Speaker
all these years, I've never known where columns belong. So I just look at my page and I kind of sprinkle them in like pepper, she said, so that they look sort of where they belong, but I'm never sure. And it caused her tremendous anxiety. Everything she wrote and sent out, she didn't know whether it was correct or whatever. And I sat her down and in five minutes said, well, here's some basic, the five rules that I use. And they pretty much cover about everything you're going to need. And she said, that's it. That's all I said. Yeah.
00:33:48
Speaker
And once she had those, and that was like doing the dovetails, you know, the commas are automatic, you don't even have to think about it. And then you can think about the stuff you really care about, and not whether the comma belongs there. And I think that's a lot of, I always say, every day in my life, I thank God for the Catholic nuns. I had in grade school, they had diagramming sentences, which is a wonderfully visual way of knowing language and knowing syntax and knowing how you actually craft a sentence on a scene.
00:34:17
Speaker
and just drilling certain things into you. It's like the times tables. You don't have to sit and think, now what is three times three again? And work it out in your head. You just want to know because now you can do something else. It might be designing a new room in your house or whatever and you're taking measurements. So you just have to know certain things and practice, practice, practice. All the great guitar solos in history come out of somebody knowing how to do a pentatonic scale on a minor scale and whatever other scales there are and they're just mixing up the numbers.
00:34:47
Speaker
You work with a wide spectrum of students, mid-career, early career, pre-career, you name it. And on that spectrum, there are a lot of different goals, I imagine. Some people want books or magazine, careers, freelance, this, that, and the other. And at some point in there,
00:35:10
Speaker
A writer has to sort of navigate between delusion and belief in oneself. And how did you approach that line? And how do you help people through that, between that delusion that you need to push through the dark times?
Balancing Confidence and Reality
00:35:32
Speaker
balanced with the belief that you have to keep going and maybe even push through some of those ugly drafts that Hemingway had. He had to have a belief, but he was at that point deluded. That's a great way of putting it. The first part of that is that you actually have to press people to say, what are your intentions for this? What is your goal? I say, look, when I do book reviews,
00:35:58
Speaker
You know, so I love reading the books, I love writing the reviews, but I don't want to spend my life editing them and going over the line edits again and again and again. I'll send it in. They can edit it any way they want to preserve the essential dignity of what I'm trying to say. I don't want them to change it, but if they need to cut a paragraph or space, so be it. You know, I've got other things I need to be doing. And I'm doing that because they give me a paycheck and maybe I like the notoriety of being in a certain publication. If I'm writing a book, you know, that I really love,
00:36:27
Speaker
that I'm doing, that's a work of love. And if I make money great, if I don't, great. If I'm writing something more commercial, then yeah, I want there to be a paycheck attached. I've done lots of script work and other kinds of work. So that's the first thing. Then you're navigating the two things that I think are essential to being a writer of any kind. And one is you've gotta be daring. You've gotta have that unshakable belief that you know what, somebody's gonna publish a book someday, it may as well be me. Somebody's gonna get into that magazine, it may as well be me.
00:36:56
Speaker
Not that it's easy, but if you said you want to be a dancer or a trombone player in a jazz quartet or a painter or any number of things, people would line up to tell you how impossible that is and all the better ways you could spend your life being a lawyer or something. But then you also have to have a kind of humility because it's the humility that helps you to learn. I can't tell you how many of the people I went to MFA school with
00:37:20
Speaker
who came in really good, I mean they're already publishing and so forth but they never really got any better, they never got beyond what they're already doing because they're already pretty good, some of them are already very good and they didn't stop and think well how do I get better and I always thought, I suck at this when I started, what a view was and I'm trying to write fiction and
00:37:42
Speaker
And so everybody that could teach me anything, I was all ears. I wanted to know. And so I just had that attitude toward it. But I also had that kind of unshakable conviction that persistence being the guy who keep on, as I used to tell my students, you went to the party, but there's writers all over America that stayed in their writing rooms tonight, and they're working on their novel. What are you doing? And like, OK, maybe I shouldn't go to that party. At some point, you do have to have a work ethic.
00:38:12
Speaker
and a resilience and a way of picking yourself up off the deck. My favorite conversation with John Gardner at Bredlow in 1982 was the last year he was there before he was killed tragically.
00:38:26
Speaker
We were working together, and he was looking at my stuff, and he goes, I think you've got the soul of a novelist. I think you can do this. And I thought, oh, man, he must be responding to my brilliant ideas and my lovely prose. And he said, no. He said, you've got the mentality of a peasant who will go out in the fields every day for 12 hours and just work and work and work. And you also, he says, you look pretty healthy. I think you can stand up to the work. I thought, well, talk about demystifying.
00:38:56
Speaker
Yeah, demystifying. But at the same time, it must have put a lot of gas in your tank to hear that from him at that time. Yeah, it did. And I always think, too, another kind of paradigm that seems to apply. I met a guy named Jenny Lai. We were doing a video shoot in Hong Kong years ago when the Brits were handing Hong Kong over to the Chinese.
00:39:17
Speaker
And we met Jimmy Lai, who lived on Victoria Peak, which is maybe the most exclusive address in the world, and he didn't just have an apartment, he had like a compound. He had pastries just walking around in ocelots and pens or whatever. And at the most gorgeous view of Victoria Harbor, he was rumored at that point to be the richest man in Asia. Well, he had come to Hong Kong, I think he was five or six years old, as a refugee from mainland China, an orphan.
00:39:41
Speaker
I think he either stole or somebody gave him a couple of t-shirts and he ended up selling them and using the money to buy more and then he ended up having a t-shirt stand and then pretty soon he had several then pretty soon he had a shop and then pretty soon he was actually making t-shirts and pretty soon he had factories in China which we visited and I said what's your business model? Who is your
00:40:03
Speaker
you know, mentor, who are you trying to emulate? And he said, well, he said, I, I was a kid and I knew nothing and I knew I knew nothing. And I, if I set out to be the best, I knew I could never be that. So he said, what I cautiously set out to do as a kid was every day, learn one thing that I could do the next day better. And then the day after that, another thing. And the day after that, another thing. And if I did enough of those days in a row, I would get better at this.
00:40:29
Speaker
And so over the years, yeah, he had gotten really, really got a lot better at it. And I think that his satisfaction came not from the money per se, but from being successful in the model of how he ended up doing things. And I always think about that if you could just get a little bit better works in music wonderfully. You can do one thing you couldn't do yesterday, then tomorrow you do one more thing and pretty soon you look around and say, I'm pretty good at this.
00:40:53
Speaker
Yeah, a friend of mine who I just, anytime I sort of doubt the utility of social networks, like I met this guy on Twitter, and then it kind of like brings me back to it, because otherwise I would have never met this guy. His name's Joe Ferrero, and he's a high school teacher, baseball coach, and he has this thing of being one percent better every day. You know, do that one little thing, and you know, for me, like I get a little,
00:41:19
Speaker
notification from dictionary.com on my phone every morning and it's the word of the day. So I write down that word every day and I just
00:41:26
Speaker
That's one little thing, makes the vocabulary a little better. And you come across cool words you never would ever come across, or reading a page out of Brian Garner's Modern American Usage, like just sharpening that saw just a little bit. I mean, you don't have to tackle the whole thing every day, but if you read a page or something out of it, like you said, that small incremental gain, you get a little bit better. And after five years, 10 years, you're gonna be pretty damn good if you just do that little bite every day.
00:41:56
Speaker
Well, sure, just imagine if you read one short poem every day, that means 365 poems. That means you've written, you know, that's probably five books of poetry you would read every year just by reading one short poem a day. Yeah, I think about all that. I also think that it's a great thing for a writer to, for anybody really, but for a writer in particular to get out of your comfort zone. And, you know, my kind of guiding ethic over the past few years has been I do projects that are interesting.
00:42:24
Speaker
And they're often interesting because it's something that I have never attempted. I remember the first time I was asked to do a video script. I'm like, yeah, that'd be great. And then I had to go back to my office and say, what the hell? What's that even about? And I had the entire wrong format and everything, but then I worked my way through it and ended up doing like 11
00:42:45
Speaker
And same thing, I did a radio piece, and it's like, how do you write a radio drama? Nobody even does that anymore. There's not even models out there. And when they called me to do the Civil War series for the magazine, I said, you got me mixed up with somebody. You want me to write about the Civil War for four whole years during the Sesquicentennial. But I've got friends that are great Civil War stories, and I rattled off a few names, and they said, no, no, we want somebody who's ignorant, essentially.
00:43:15
Speaker
was somebody to report something that they knew nothing about and find out about it fresh. And I said, well, I'm your guy because I know nothing about the Civil War, except there was one, you know, happened sometime back. And so it put me in a position of having to go out and get, there's a huge learning curve because the stuff that I found, you know, new and exciting was stuff that anybody who'd actually looked at the Civil War already knew about. So I had to go several levels beyond that and start finding stories
00:43:44
Speaker
that it somehow got lost along the way.
00:43:48
Speaker
Brian Koppelman, who's this screenwriter, wrote rounders, among other things, the show Billions right now, he has this great quote. It's, what unifies every part of my journey is I always lead with my curiosity, obsession, or fascination. And when I was reading and finishing The Art of Creative Research, that struck me as this, that must be what really drives so much of your work.
00:44:18
Speaker
Like what triggers your need to pursue a story with that sense? And I feel like that compliment quote kind of sums up your approach to a lot of your work. Yeah, curiosity is just so huge.
00:44:34
Speaker
I'm always completely at a loss when I have students or I meet friends or people who just are not that interested in stuff. My problem is I'm interested in everything. If I pass a work site and there's a guy using a saw or a jackhammer, I'm like, how do you do that? I want to sit and watch it for an hour. Everybody I see at a rest stop, I want to interview them like, where are you going? Where are you coming from? What's up with the dog?
00:45:00
Speaker
And I think that's it's a good thing but then you've got to choose among things that you're interested in and so What I tend to do is I I scuffle around in the dirt a bit with new ideas and say okay Well, that's interesting and then I think I start making notes and I'll do a little software search I'll go on the internet see what's going on, you know at certain sites with it and I'll start I'll try to make myself drill down like why do you care about this and
00:45:25
Speaker
You know, when I did my novel Cape Fear Rising, which is about a racial master here in Wilmington. I mean, yes, as a humane individual, I care about racial discrimination and especially a racial massacre. And but then the story got more interesting to me when the whole thing was focused around a newspaper editor, black newspaper editor named Alex Manley. So it was about a writer.
00:45:44
Speaker
And that was interesting, but then it got really interesting when it turned out it was really a kind of a coup d'etat. It was a failure of democracy. An election people didn't like and they overturned it by force of arms and nobody was ever called on the carpet about it. And I thought, okay, that's like three layers in. Now I've gotten to this thing that has to do with democracy and the rule of law and I really, really care about that. You know, I think that that's where we're seeing a lot of stuff now where that's being challenged.
00:46:09
Speaker
And so once I figured out my story is about the failure of democracy. My story is about people who want to pretend we didn't fight the Civil War and then want to go back to the way it was. And so a lot of it is figuring out why you're interested. And sometimes it takes writing the whole project till you get there. Other times it's now I'm kind of getting this. I'm writing about music now and I've always loved music and I get it, but now I'm forced to sort of
00:46:37
Speaker
come to terms with why? Why does it matter? And it matters for a lot of really good reasons. It matters as a way of connecting, you know, you walk into a room or a campsite or a town hall or, you know, anywhere with a guitar and all of a sudden you've got 50 friends. And that's interesting. But also the idea that
00:46:56
Speaker
You get to a certain age and everybody's telling you, well, for now on, it's downhill. You're going to have health issues. You know, your best days are behind you. And I don't really want to believe that. I don't accept that. And so doing something new and bringing to fruition kind of the dream that a nine year old kid had or something all of a sudden becomes a way of rejuvenating your life and a kind of
00:47:17
Speaker
a different paradigm for viewing what you're gonna do from here forward. So, yeah, I think it's figuring out where that passion lies and not just saying, hey, that's really cool, because pretty much everything's really cool. You look at them. Yeah, if someone gets interested in everything, which is great because all the ideas are out there and you can never say that there's a thing as writer's block, just look at the world. How do you finish things?
00:47:44
Speaker
If you're interested in everything, it's easy to get caught up in a new idea. So how do you tell people and how do you yourself, who's written so much and so extensively over many genres, how do you finish things before jumping to another project?
00:48:00
Speaker
It's tough because I generally have several things open at the same time. But I find that's good because there are times when you get to a point where you need a hiatus for something, you need to let something cool on the windowsill for a day or a week or a month before you go back to it. But I do, I've got a very kind of disciplined work ethic and probably once again, this is Sister Marie Jones and Sister Marie Michael and Sister Marie Bernadette, all the old Franciscan nuns and they were finished what you start.
00:48:29
Speaker
So part of it, I think, comes in, if you choose a project wisely and you do sort of that initial research and pay some attention to why you're doing it, then you know that it will sustain you over the long haul. What you don't want to do is get 40 pages into something. You go, well, now what? What is this? I have no idea where to go next. And so a little bit of after the initial enthusiasm to step back a minute before you commit and say, OK, where is this going to come out? What's what am I looking at? What structure might it have?
00:48:57
Speaker
Even what genre am I gonna be working in? So I think you have to do that. And then, you know, I'm a great one for putting things on a calendar. I mentioned that book, Cape Fear Rising. I took a year to research it, and I basically wrote on my paper calendar, begin research on a certain day, end research, start writing a novel on another day, on another day, finish novel. And I pretty much stayed by my calendar so that I could look at it and see whether I was kind of on pace to finish. And a recognition that
00:49:26
Speaker
How you end a thing really goes back to how you began it. What's the promise you made? What's the contract you made with the reader? What is the thing that's finally going? If you promised your reader we're going to take a road trip to LA, well, LA clearly is the ending point. And if you go somewhere else, it better be much more interesting than the LA destination that you promised. So part of it is just good old-fashioned work ethic and getting things done. And some of it is innately my personality.
00:49:53
Speaker
As a writer, you have two kind of conflicting things. One is, especially in the long form, you have to be willing to live with a mess. And it's one reason I like a room to work in because I like to leave stuff spread out all over the place if I'm working. I don't have to put everything away at the end of the day, I just close the door and it's all here waiting where I left off. But I also like periodically to shelve everything, clean up the office, put paid to that and move on to something else. Mark Twain wrote something one time about
00:50:21
Speaker
the process after he finished the novel and about how, you know, he'd finish it, take the pages out, and then the maid would come in and tidy up and dust and get rid of all the garbage that had been accumulating, and that that was both a really happy day and a really sad day for him. But I find it, and it's both, but it's also the day when you think, okay, now I'm kind of clearing my palate for what comes next.
00:50:46
Speaker
And you write that to be a good writer you have to be an accomplished daydreamer. And I really love that line because I think it just speaks to the creative spirit and just having letting your impulses kind of, or letting those dreams sort of guide
00:51:04
Speaker
I just guide your vision and I wonder if even from a young age if you were always a daydreamer and that helped sort of inform the path that you went on as you got older. Yeah, definitely daydreaming is a big part of everything. I can remember one of the things my dad liked to do as a kid was to take us on weekends to visit historic sites so we'd go to Gettysburg or Fort McHenry or to
00:51:32
Speaker
valley forward of the daniel boom homestead of the amish country and i remember those long car trips this back in the day before air-conditioned cars and so you roll down the window and i just remember staring out the window for hours as we did these trips and just enjoying it just you know looking at the farms who lives there what's going on what's the story with that and kind of making up stories in your head and to some extent i still do that i mean i guess to a very much extent um
00:51:57
Speaker
I take the dog to the park most mornings and we run her and then we take a long walk together along the paths. And I'm not doing anything in particular. I'm just letting my mind wander, just letting whatever thought or image or impression comes into my mind. And often if I find myself stuck in a project, what I want to do is simply go sit up back and stare at the back marsh, take a walk, get on the bike and go do whatever. And you realize that all the crap gets flushed out of your head.
00:52:27
Speaker
And also new ideas just start to percolate and what ifs start to take shape and ideas of how to maybe solve a problem just sort of pop up like this little screen pop-ups, but you weren't really consciously thinking about it. And I think the advice the nuns always gave us again, they always said, you know, don't stay up late studying, close the books at your regular bedtime, whatever the exam is, and get up the next morning and take the exam, you'll be better off. And they're right.
00:52:53
Speaker
You know, the kind of all-nighter, and I guess, again, it's been borne out by scientists studying creativity. Apparently, it's really a bad idea to pull the all-nighter. Apparently, you are better off getting a good night's sleep and tackling it in the morning, partly because you're fresh and partly because you're, you know, your subconscious is actually continuing to work while you're asleep. And so you wake up and suddenly an image or idea
00:53:14
Speaker
is there that you never would have had otherwise. And you're not going to get it when you're all ragged out with 48 cups of coffee. Well, so much of the growth happens in the dead time. I think you probably noticed this while playing an instrument. It's just you hammer away for however long, and then you feel like you're not getting anywhere. And then the next day or two days later, you pick it up and you feel
00:53:40
Speaker
more proficient already, but what happened, you didn't even pick up the thing in the 12 to 24 hours. It's starting to come to you. It's in that dead space where you're passively subconsciously learning while just on a different level. You're resting, but something is happening underneath the skin. It's almost like it has to soak into your muscles somehow.
00:54:07
Speaker
It has to have that time to do it in the same way that if you do a hard workout, it's never the next day you feel bad. It's two days later that you feel all the effects of that. I think that's really important. It's not dead time. I think that there's a whole lot we don't know about how we learn to do what we learn to do and how the mind works and how the body works. We don't even know why we sleep.
00:54:32
Speaker
So I guess I have a generalized faith that if it's time to go for a walk or it's time to take a nap, you know, time to put the headphones on and listen to a Gordon Bach CD and just kind of let that flow over me, then it's time to do that. And good things will come out of it if I'm patient and I don't press.
00:54:49
Speaker
And it's one of the reasons I love if I'm doing a project where I can actually go somewhere, like we do in the Civil War project. I went to battlefield after battlefield, you know, the crater up in Petersburg or Gettysburg or the Fort Fisher down here. And for no particular reason, it's not like I'm taking notes on, you know, this particular position or trying to figure out where that regiment was. It's just kind of being there. You know, I remember walking the field of Gettysburg in dawn and
00:55:16
Speaker
you know, as the mist is sort of smoking up off of a field, and it's just a feeling that infuses you and you start to understand at a very different level, stuff that isn't, it's not informational in a traditional way, it's informational maybe in a kind of metaphysical or existential or emotional way.
00:55:35
Speaker
And that's just sort of from being there, it's in the air, it's from the effective, you know, feeling the steps in your feet as you walk Battle Road by Lexington and Concord and you realize, you know, how much you're actually climbing hills and coming down hills the whole time. And, you know, all that is really, for me, part of the excitement of research where you're just opening yourself to the world saying, okay, let me just let the world flow through me for a while. Let me just pay attention and be really present.
00:56:03
Speaker
and just see where that gets and see what comes up as a result of that.
00:56:24
Speaker
Uniformed army marching at you. It's just like whoa like talk about talk about pressure and and and facing that and like you probably couldn't Quite have understood that as well as you did until you immerse yourself and put your boots on the ground Yeah, it always in history books a lot of things look really quaint to us You know we look at an old movie with Errol Flynn sword fighting and go and that's really kind of neat you know then you realize that
00:56:51
Speaker
that for, you know, 300 years the sword was what every gentleman carried because there were no police and they were at a moment's notice ready to kill somebody who tried to take their purse away from them or whatever. And in the case of the musket that we were always taught at school, these things were sort of unreliable and they couldn't hit much. I'm here to tell you, man, they can hit a lot. They punch a hole in the sides of your thumb and
00:57:13
Speaker
And then you put the bayonet and you think, oh yeah bayonet, it's sort of an abstraction, you see them in these old paintings or whatever. And then you handle one and stick it on and you think, holy shit, this thing is 18 inches long. This'll go right through me and the next guy behind me. But it does, it makes it real in a way that it just isn't sometimes. When you're looking at books, and even the greatest video or audio
00:57:38
Speaker
It just doesn't bring it home completely. I still remember climbing up a Jacob's Ladder on the side of a ship in the Cape Fear River, and I've seen those ships for years and years. But having to actually step across that little gap between the rail of the tugboat and the Jacob's Ladder, hang on and climb up a couple of decks to get inside while this thing is swinging against, and the hull is really hot, you know, it's just such a, and then it's vibrating and it's moving fast in the water, and it's really, really big. It's like grabbing a building that's going by
00:58:07
Speaker
and you just sort of jerked off, your arms are hanging on and your legs are there and you're dangling. And you never think about a ship again the same way, you just realize these are gigantic man-made moving objects. They're on a scale that you just can't get from a video. Yeah. And it's funny, it's hard to believe, but 11 years ago, in a writer's chronicle, you wrote a piece, The Art of Creative Research,
00:58:35
Speaker
which I have the hard copy. I've had it all these years. And then I subsequently use that as a bookmark when I bought your creative non-fiction book about researching and crafting stories of real life. And now this new book, Art of Creative Research, came out and it's just great to see
00:58:55
Speaker
see this obsession unfolding and I wonder where your obsession with research comes from. Because you don't write about it this extensively unless it really just kind of gnaws at you and you love it and you just totally just geek out on this stuff. So I wonder where does that come from?
00:59:15
Speaker
I think I always have had an innate curiosity. That's part of it. And I've always wanted, I always had as my heroes, the great explorers of history, you know, the Captain Cooks and the Vasco da Gama's and the Lewis and Clark's and all the people, you know, Joshua Slocum sailing alone around the world. You know, those guys always excited me. And when I had out of college, I was very lucky to get a job at a very small newspaper, weekly newspaper,
00:59:42
Speaker
And actually my ignorance, again, I think was helpful. I didn't have any J school training. I didn't even had even taken a journalism class. I didn't know the first thing about interviewing. I didn't know about three sources and all that kind of stuff. But I did have colleagues who were pretty good and they taught me things. But what I really loved was they gave me this magical thing called a press pass.
01:00:03
Speaker
And so, if I went to an accident, the police would actually lift up that tape and let me near it. If I went to a show, they would let me backstage. If I, you know, I went to the rodeo and I said, Shprema Bulls, you know, the guy, went to the circus and got to perform at it. And I was like, holy cow, this is like my ticket into all that secret world behind the scenes. And I think, I always think a really great nonfiction book in particular, but a novel does it too, probably.
01:00:30
Speaker
lets the reader into the secret backstage world of whatever it is. And says, here's some cool stuff that you don't know. And it's just so cool. You got to come with me and I'll show you. And I always felt like all those people standing out front of the theater didn't get to go back into the dressing room and talk to the star. All those people who were at the circus for the matinee performance, they didn't get to see the elephants raising the big top at 5 AM the way I did. And all that stuff.
01:01:00
Speaker
is really, really, to me, exciting. And I think I always tell my wife that my dog has one job in life. It's to make me feel nine years old. And that's sort of what research does for me. I always have this reaction, how cool is that? Before I have a real professional and start saying, well, now let's talk about how you do that and what it means. But I always start with, how cool is that? That's kind of the place that gets me going.
01:01:28
Speaker
And so part is innate curiosity, and it was getting that early glimpse that you can go behind the scenes. And even at a press pass, mostly, if you just ask in a nice way, nine times out of 10, my experience has been, they'll say, OK, come with me, and off you go. Do you see a lack of rigor among a lot of writers these days not willing to do this type of footwork and legwork?
01:01:57
Speaker
We'll put it this way there. You can always tell when a writer's doing one or the other. Newspapers, for example, even on a little weekly paper, I was not really ever expected to be in the office except when I was actually writing a story. Nowadays, on a daily newspaper, mid-size, daily, you're probably gonna be in the office all day, because you're probably gonna have to do six or seven little stories every day. They're gonna be telephone quotes. They're not gonna be being able to go to a place and do the really,
01:02:25
Speaker
In-depth serious thing you're gonna do i think a lot of people who are writing in various genres and books are relying way too much on the internet
01:02:36
Speaker
which is a really problematic resource. On the one hand, it's magic. It can tell you things you need to know. It can point you in directions. But boy, you really gotta back check those sources and you gotta kind of pull the wiring and see where it leads because very often it leads to a feedback loop where you basically have something that's wrong. It's just being endlessly repeated and augmented in this sort of, well, essentially a feedback loop. So I think that's an issue.
01:03:03
Speaker
I actually have probably more trouble with the lack of really good editorial oversight. I read book after book that just has such sloppiness in it. And I think, wasn't anybody paying attention to this? The editor's not serving the writer by letting some of this stuff get in. And also, the editor's not serving the writer by asking questions like, wait a minute, how do you know this? You need to explain this better. Where did this come from? There's got to be an element of that.
01:03:30
Speaker
One of the surprising things you find out when you write books is that unlike magazines, book publishers have no fact checkers. They just expect that whatever you're giving them, if you call it nonfiction, until there's a lawsuit or until somebody outs you on a talk show or something, then it must be right. So I think the attention to facts and accuracy and to kind of the real truthfulness of what happened, what somebody said,
01:03:56
Speaker
how it played out in history. Those things have never been more important than they are right now, have been for the last four weeks. It's just so crucial to say, actually it does matter if
01:04:08
Speaker
there was this thing that happened. If there was no massacre in Bowling Green, that changes everything. It did not happen. You can't then craft national policy on something that's actually a lie. You actually have got it. And it also dishonors all those real people who have found themselves the victim of violence of one kind or another. It just wipes that down, and it equates everything to a rhetorical exercise. And people are flesh and blood. They're not rhetorical exercise.
01:04:37
Speaker
Something that I love that your book assumes is that a lot of other people have
01:04:44
Speaker
another job of sorts whether that's being a student or another just a full-time job and then you can kind of write these stories as a side hustle or as something supplementary like you know you say like make sure you get your time off from work or have these vacation days or or if you're going to an interesting place you know be sure to kind of kind of dig around for stories while you're there anyway and i wonder like uh... how did you come to that in this book is uh...
01:05:12
Speaker
as a way of giving people permission to create things even if it's not their primary vocation or if it's just another part of who they are. Like it's not, you're not like Tracy Kitt or just writing books or something. Like there are these other facets to your life. Sure and part of that comes from watching students over the years do these really remarkable projects and knowing that
01:05:40
Speaker
You know, some of them are going to make it as writers and want to. Others, you know, they really don't want to. They want to be a biologist or whatever. But in the meantime, they really have this cool essay they want to write about, you know, conifers or something. And so you have to, again, judge what their intentions are. But you're realizing that
01:05:56
Speaker
profession that is outside the mainstream that has to do with the arts that has to do with anything daring or unusual takes a while to get your legs under you unless you're very very lucky and right out of the box you know you hit a home run but typically even when it looks like people are of a nice sensation you don't see all the groundwork that they've done over the years to get there so part of it is a recognition that you may be starting on something that may take you a while to get to and
01:06:23
Speaker
But I've worked so much over the years with architects and doctors and lawyers and people who are working for public service in the State Department realm or something. They do have day jobs and they love their day jobs, but they also have a well of expertise that comes from their day job. Paul Austin, who I work with, is a wonderful writer. He's also an emergency room surgeon and a doctor.
01:06:47
Speaker
And he's not going to stop being a doctor because he loves it, but he's also really keen to write stories about what it means to be a doctor. And I think in many ways, those kinds of writers, to me, are the most interesting because they bring something to the work that is a whole separate expertise than just writing. And I say just writing, writing is a whole expertise on its own. But it does bring something to the party that makes a very interesting mind to spend time with.
01:07:16
Speaker
And you spend a lot of time in the book talking about the art of the interview and cultivating that experience. And I wonder, did you spend a lot of time there because you noticed a weakness among a lot of people that you want to see strengthen? And maybe as sort of a follow-up to that too, was that something that you saw as a weakness in your own research and reporting that you were looking to
01:07:45
Speaker
hone over the course of hundreds upon hundreds of these interactions? Yeah, I mean, my wife Jill would laugh whenever I say this, but I'm essentially an introvert. I remember being a reporter, and the thing I hated the most always, and I still hate it, is making a cold call.
01:08:03
Speaker
dialing the number of some stranger who you want to talk to. And when they pick up the other end of the line, you have about 10 seconds to figure out how to make yourself appear to them as someone they want to talk to so that they'll stay on the line. And it always felt to me like calling up girls in high school and like their father answers.
01:08:25
Speaker
There's never a good outcome. So part of it is that at some point you just have to knock on that closed door, you have to call that person up. I think it's much easier now when you can actually tickle somebody with an email or Facebook message or something and just say, hey, you don't know me but I'd love to talk to you because that can set the stage for kind of a soft entry into something and they can get back to you at their leisure.
01:08:48
Speaker
and then you can set up a time and that's a little easier than just the cold call. But sometimes you just have to go to a place and walk into a room or knock on a door or go into an office and say, hi, I'm here to talk to Mr. Smith or Mrs. Jones and they don't know I'm coming but I'd love to speak to them if they're here. So part of it is that I think it's a hard thing to do for many of us and therefore you need to recognize right up front that it's a really important thing to learn how to do.
01:09:15
Speaker
Because when you think about it, what's happening is these people are all your teachers. They know stuff. Very interesting stuff. Often stuff that only they know because it's private or personal or because they have a specialized expertise. And they are going to teach you what they know. They're going to tell you about it. So it's useful for that. It's also, I think, really important that we learn how to have conversations again.
01:09:41
Speaker
I love being in a room with smart people, whether it's a classroom, or around a dinner table, or my favorite bar, and where people are talking about ideas, and they're sharing work, and they're talking about a play or a movie they've seen, or they're talking politics, but not just us or against them. They're talking about political nuance, mixing in history, and what have you. And I think as a culture, and maybe the internet age has hastened this, but it feels like we often don't know how to have conversations.
01:10:08
Speaker
and so learning how to interview is essentially learning how to have a conversation which begins with you know respecting the person you're talking to you're not there to judge them and i think in uh... human interaction is really hard to do i've ever seen for the whole moonshiner who is the best cursor i've ever met my whole life and he would let me record of the most of it is so it a matter of lost it but he was also fiercely racist he was you know obama of got the stuff he said about obama and hillary and the rest
01:10:38
Speaker
And yet I wasn't there to talk to him about that. I was there to talk to him about how he made good corn whiskey, which he really knew how to do. And I tasted some of his corn whiskey, so I know. And he was funny. He told jokes. And so even though he's not the kind of guy that I would typically hang out with and maybe count him among my intimate friends, I'm really glad I met him. I probably seen him again. He invited me back to make a batch of moonshine.
01:11:05
Speaker
It's the interviewer has to say, I'm not judging you. We're talking. I want you to have your complete say and I'll push you to explain what you are saying. And I'll maybe go do a little bit. Maybe I'll ask you questions that are difficult to answer. Maybe I'll just let you talk and tell your story, but I'm going to hear it first before I do anything else.
01:11:25
Speaker
I'm not going to shut you down and judge you. And I think that is a huge lesson, kind of a life lesson for our civics lesson here. But I think every writer has to figure that out because you won't learn if you're constantly judging it through a narrow lens. And you may be right to judge. I mean, as a human being,
01:11:42
Speaker
You might be right to say that person is sexist or racist or that person is crude or what have you, but that's got no place in what you're doing in the interview, which doesn't mean, by the way, that you can't call them on certain things and ask them about it. You know, when you say this, some people would hear that as racist. What do you say to them? You know, you can push. You don't have to just sort of be namby-pamby about it. But you do have to learn how to have a difficult, sometimes
01:12:07
Speaker
enlightening conversation with a person, and I think that is a skill that requires a lifetime, and I still think about the interviews that didn't go well, the ones that looked great, how to do it better next time. Each time I go into a room, I always feel that kind of flutter of anticipation, that little bit of anxiety. Same as I feel, by the way, walking into a classroom, especially the beginning of the semester, and I always felt that if I didn't feel that little flutter anymore, I'd probably have to stop doing it.
01:12:34
Speaker
That flutter and that sense of nerves is something I feel before I speak to anybody, and it doesn't matter who they are, so even how long I've known them. There's an instance in your book, the artist says Ellsworth Kelly, am I getting that right? Ellsworth Kelly, yeah. Wonderful.
01:12:51
Speaker
Yeah, and you were parked in your car outside on the curb for 15 minutes because you were nervous about approaching him and talking to him about this, and you write about that in the book. How do you dance with that fear and dance with those nerves and overcome it and use it? How do you deal with that? Because that's something I think a lot of people wrestle with.
01:13:20
Speaker
Well, it helps to set up a habit or routine and say, every time I do an interview, here's what I do. Here's how I prepare. Here's what I wear. Here's the first thing I say. Here's the last thing I say. And to create a framework for yourself. I mean, with the newspaper, the great advantage of that was to say, hi, I'm here from the weekly post. And people said, OK, you're not Philip. You're this guy, you're a reporter. And I'm really talking to the newspaper. So if you have an institutional affiliation, that kind of breaks that ice
01:13:48
Speaker
So instead of that, I sort of decide, when I go to interview somebody, I'm not Philip Girard. I'm like Philip Girard, Incorporated. I'm working for the project, how every movie creates its own corporation. So this is for the project, Secret Soldiers, Incorporated, or whatever. And then I have a certain set of things I do in the same way that I come in and close the door and start writing, and I'm writing during the day.
01:14:14
Speaker
If I'm interviewing, I change all my batteries if I'm going to record anything. I make sure I've got fresh notebooks. I take more pens than I'll ever need because if one of them runs out of egg breaks, if I have to give it to somebody along the way or give it to my interview subject or whatever, I want to have an extra pen to pull out of my pocket. I do dumb things like that that are kind of like getting suited up for the game.
Meeting Strategies and Communication
01:14:38
Speaker
Putting your pads on or whatever.
01:14:40
Speaker
And again, I think of the first thing I'm going to say, I say, when I walk in, what am I going to say? And typically, it's easy. It's like, hi, so glad you could see me. It's very gracious of you to make time. It's just some kind of polite thing. And sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's different. But I always sort of know, you know, I kind of envision when I get there what it's going to be like.
01:15:01
Speaker
And often it's not. Often the people that you're most intimidated by turn out to be the easiest people. Bill Blass, I think I wrote about in the book. So famous, so guarded by so many layers of people who are there to insulate him from people that want things from him, which is thousands of people in those days. And walking in and finding the most gracious, easygoing guy in the world and sitting down and feeling like he was the uncle I'd known for 25 years.
01:15:32
Speaker
And so there's that. But then I think you fall back on your training. The naval aviators have it right. They say you don't rise to the occasion. You think you will. What you'll do is default to the level of your training. And so I say, OK, I've done this before. What did I do right and wrong? OK, let's make sure I do that right this time. And here's how it usually works. And then I do another exercise. I always think, what's the worst that can happen?
01:16:01
Speaker
If this turns out to be a total fiasco, what will that look like? They'll throw you out. They'll throw a drink in your face. They'll scream at you. I haven't had all those done, but I've had people scream at me. I've had people shut the door of my face, slam it in fact.
01:16:19
Speaker
But if you're envisioning it ahead of time, then when it happens, you go, well, that happened. That was on the menu, so what's plan B, and then you move on. And it doesn't happen that much. Typically, you get a qualified success of some kind, and especially if
01:16:35
Speaker
You always say, hey, when I get home and look at my notes, I know I'm going to have been done some dumb thing and left something out. Can I call you or email your text to you? Or how would you prefer I get in touch with you? And most people say, oh yeah, sure, here's my number or whatever. Or don't call me on Tuesday, I'll be away. But on Wednesday, I'll be back. Or you know, they'll have their own thing. But it does leave the door open and takes the pressure off so you get home and realize, oh my god, I forgot to ask that crucial fact. How do I call up again and explain that? Well, they're ready for your call.
01:17:04
Speaker
They're not surprised when you call the guy, well, hey, good to see you again. What's going on? And you say, just one thing I wanted to clarify. And then it becomes a really easy kind of conversation. So again, it's those little tricks that just trick you into having the courage to do what you want to do. I mean, you really do want to talk to them. And usually three minutes into any interview, I'm loving and I'm having a great time. We're laughing and talking and sharing and all the rest of it. But that knock on the door, that first phone call, that first moment when you see them
01:17:35
Speaker
You gotta get past that and you gotta remind yourself that in the past you did get past that. My mother taught me a trick when I was a teenager and I'd be going through one trial after another. She sat me down one day and she said, okay, what you have to do is imagine this is over and you're looking back on it. You failed that exam or that girl dumped you or you lost the big game or whatever it was or maybe you won the big game. What's it gonna mean to you? How do you feel about it?
01:18:02
Speaker
And what are you doing in your life at the moment you're looking back on it? And it really helped me get perspective on a lot of things. So that if you're in a really bad moment, you think, well, OK, tomorrow morning, I'll be doing something different. I'll be over here with this other person, and it'll all be OK. Eventually, we'll get where we're hiking, and there'll be a shelter and a campfire, and I'll get warm and have a meal, whatever the case may be. And interviews are like that. If you're in excruciating silence, and it's like pulling teeth, and you're
01:18:32
Speaker
pitching every kind of subject you can imagine. And all you're getting is, yeah, no, maybe. Part of you goes out of your body for a minute and goes, well, waiting in hope for me is a bottle of single malt scotch and a beautiful wife and a dog and a kid. So that's where I'm going. I'm done here.
01:18:54
Speaker
And with recording, a lot of people are, I think, they're kind of polarized on voice recorders, digital recorders, tape recorders.
Recording and Technology in Writing
01:19:04
Speaker
I know John McPhee is notoriously against them, his whole career, because he thinks they distort. But I kind of see them as a catch-all and a guard against
01:19:18
Speaker
bad penmanship, especially with me, that's for sure. You defend them with rigor in the book. I wonder, how did you come to that and have you wrestled with that in the past, wanting to be like Tom French, who just uses Greg shorthand or just your own
01:19:39
Speaker
your own shorthand or whatever. How did you come to using and defending the recorder? I'll say I'm on board with it because I know myself and I know I need it. I wonder how you came to that. Well, I'll say about Tom French. He's a terrific interviewer and I know that his shorthand is really accurate because I've seen him do an interview and then heard him read back the transcript from his notes.
01:20:04
Speaker
But he came to terms with that because he really was after accuracy and his interviews tend to be pretty dynamic, pretty much in motion, where he's going to hang around the zoo all day and you can't keep a tape recorder going for 10 hours a day for how many months he was there. I think it's important, I think accuracy is really important and I think one of the problems is
01:20:29
Speaker
One of the first places where those little tricky fictional things enter the work, if you're doing non-fiction, is you hear the quote the way you wanted to hear it. It's a little bit more dressed up, it's a little bit cooler, and it's not like you're saying to yourself, I'm going to falsify this or distort it, but you do have a tendency
01:20:50
Speaker
in the same way when we come home and tell our husband and wife, partner, what went on today. I was at the motor vehicle. You would believe what this guy said. Well, it's not accurate when you're reporting what that guy said. You're reporting how you heard what he said. Yeah, and if there are like potholes in that street of what you were hearing, you tend to fill it in with the tar of your own vocabulary. Yeah, I think that's true.
01:21:15
Speaker
And I will say, when I hear that argument, and John McPhee is old school, and I have a feeling, if you came of age when tape recorders were very clunky things, weighed five pounds, and they were the elephant in the room, and he did a lot of dynamic work, you know, looking for a ship or being in a birch bark canoe or whatever, I think it probably was extremely difficult. Also, when you're doing immersion work, where you're with somebody day after day for months on end, I think it's very hard to just sort of
01:21:44
Speaker
grab a tape recorder to say, well, today we're recording, although there may be a place where you work that in for a more formal kind of interview about certain things. But I think often when I hear writers say, well, I don't interview, it kind of distorts the process. Sometimes what I'm hearing is they're kind of too lazy to do it. Just a little transcription and I get it. Transcription is just one of the most thankless things until it's not until at the moment I remember transcribing
01:22:12
Speaker
this guy, this veteran I interviewed, and we were at a coffee shop, which was not my first choice. But we were down at the Holiday Inn outside of Miami, and all of a sudden, in the kitchen, they were doing some work, and you're like, some kind of a tool. And he literally dove under the booth. And I hear this on the tape, and I'm remembering, yes. And then he launches into a story about being on the line during the Battle of the Bulge.
01:22:35
Speaker
And the way the Germans used to use the tracer bullets to get GIs to stick their heads up, and then the next machine gun would go low and saw them off. And it was a really big emotional moment in the transcript. And I was able to say, oh, wow. Not only did I get him, but I got this noise in the background, which was the trigger for it. And it really helped me understand it. And then there are other times, if you just write down and you know something,
01:23:00
Speaker
you don't get the context. I always show my students a clip from that movie of my cousin Vinny, I don't know if you know it. What's his name, Rob Machio, is in the police station and the guy's saying, and then you killed the clerk and he goes, I shot the clerk, I shot the clerk, and they read it back and forth, I shot the clerk, I shot the clerk.
01:23:23
Speaker
What's missing is you don't have the tape recording of it and the audio is everything because it tells you, was somebody being ironic? Were they being funny? Were they being serious? Were they being earnest? Were they lying to you? You can pick all that up in the tone and by the way, you'll hear all those things you didn't hear. You'll hear the bird song in the background. You'll hear the waitress calling an order and you'll hear
01:23:45
Speaker
somebody else at the next table talking about their marriage breakup or something. All these things that may or may not be part of your project, if you're a novelist, they may fit in beautifully, if you're working on non-fiction maybe or maybe not. But they do give you a much more three-dimensional picture than just the scribbles in your notebook. And I don't always use it, sometimes people will not let me use it, but when I can I try to.
01:24:10
Speaker
Yeah, I think I read an interview with John Krakauer. It's in the New New Journalism by Boynton. I think he views it. You have your recorder, but think of all these tools like a photographer having different lenses. It's just another aspect that you can use. Using a recorder,
01:24:33
Speaker
doesn't make sense a lot of the time but you know for instance like when I was like following a horse trainer around a shed row for like an hour as he's cooling out a horse it's like it helped to have a recorder and just following him around as he's talking and talking and talking but it's you can't be writing everything down so it's it's kind of like that you want to have it there in case you need it and it's just why not have every tool in your Batman utility belt. Exactly and it means that if the tape recorder is running
01:25:02
Speaker
then you don't necessarily have to take notes over all that. You can be looking around and kind of thinking about other things and taking notes about what they look like, the ambiance of the place, something else happening in the background, all the things that are going to be invisible of all you're doing is scribbling down kind of a transcript of what they say. So yeah, I think that's a good way to think about it. I'm trying to make that clear in the book that there are tools and
01:25:25
Speaker
Every job is going to require a different tool belt. Sometimes you're going to need a camera. Now we have smartphones. They've got pretty much everything built into them. So why not use what's built into them? You already have a camera. Instead of writing down the historical mark, we'll just take a picture of it. Do the things that help you. And always imagine that later on, especially in a long project, it might be
01:25:49
Speaker
six months before you open that interview again or look at those photographs or those notes on the place because in the meantime you've been busy out in the field doing other things and at that point you're gonna think oh man why wish my memory were just so much better than it is and
01:26:03
Speaker
It's like our driving. We all think we're better drivers than we are. Well, we sure all think our memories are so much better than they are. Our memories are like, you know, come on. They're really not that reliable. They're really reliable when you're in an emotional situation, usually for the first time. You're going to get the best, most serious impression. But, you know, if you interview 20 different people, it's hard keeping straight who said what in your memory. That's why you have notebooks and tape recorders and photographs and the rest of it.
01:26:31
Speaker
I was having just a couple more things and I'll let you get going, Philip, because you're being very, very generous with your time. I'm enjoying this. I appreciate it. Great, great. I am too. It's been a boatload of fun. I was speaking with a former ballerina a few months ago and I was like, I'm sort of obsessed with
Artistic Identity and Personal Growth
01:26:52
Speaker
People who have this singular focus on a craft, and ballerinas are so singularly devoted, bodybuilders too. I'm kind of obsessed with those people who have this monkish devotion. And I was talking to her because so many of them
01:27:09
Speaker
there are so many dancers and like how do you stand out how do you make it and uh... she said the ones who make it uh... tent they know who they are as an artist he's like they just uh... it's hard to define but they just they know who they are and they lean into those strengths and those are the ones that tend to make it and i was just so taken with that and i wonder like how did you how did you as an artist like come to your
01:27:34
Speaker
How did you learn to know who you were and then sort of lean into those strengths and develop as the artist and writer that you have become after years and years of that practice? I think that's a great question. I love that quote. I think that knowing who you are is probably why great lawyers are great lawyers and great architects are great architects.
01:27:59
Speaker
That is they put aside all the other things, the expectations of other people and the conventional ways of kind of getting approval and they really know in their own mind when they will have succeeded. I think for me it was incremental. It was the first part of that was learning, you know, as I said, oh, I like to be the guy going behind the scenes. Okay. That's interesting. I didn't know that about myself. I just wrote a piece about being on the road when I was a kid in college.
01:28:28
Speaker
I would go on the road every summer, just take a few hundred dollars, stuff it in my pocket against emergencies and a backpack and a guitar and a hitchhiker around the country. And I wrote about how that really taught me a lot about who I was. It taught me that I could be patient, but I wasn't, so I had to cultivate patience because there was a lot of waiting time. It taught me that I had a quick temper and that was not going to get me anywhere with anybody and I better get rid of that fast. I learned that I could
01:28:53
Speaker
put up with a lot of hardship. I didn't mind being really hot. I didn't mind baking in the sun and being rained on and all the rest of it. I could take that. I was in pretty good shape. I had stamina. I didn't mind if I went a day without food as long as I had water. So I started to learn what my strengths were physically, emotionally, mentally, intellectually, whatever. I figured out who the people were that I most liked to be around, who I trusted because I didn't trust people innately. But once I trusted them, I trusted them all the way.
01:29:20
Speaker
I started kind of figuring out and maybe getting this thing that you don't even know till you have it, which is a kind of a confidence that you can go into a room full of strangers and you're going to be who you are. You're just not going to take on the coloration of the room, which most people do, frankly. I think they join a profession, they join a group, they join whatever, and they want to blend in. It's the most human thing in the world.
01:29:45
Speaker
But you you can blend in but also remain who you are So that's part of it learning as a writer then what I wanted to do and one of the things I want to do very early almost write books and So I said I'm gonna go somewhere where I can learn to do that because I thought the book was Was the kind of big thing was a way my mind worked It was the one place that was big enough where I could go in a lot of different directions and bring it all back The folk kind of organized it, but it wouldn't just be a short sort of short take and then out
01:30:13
Speaker
And again, I think who you are maybe, I don't know if it changes, but it certainly sharpens as you get older and you start figuring out what you're interested in. And I long ago figured out I was very interested in writing about community. Whether it's in novels, nonfiction, what have you, the communities of soldiers together in the war, the community on Hatteras Island, in that novel, the community here in Wilmington disrupted by the racial violence.
01:30:40
Speaker
And I think part of the reason that I figured that out was at one point, and I do this periodically, now I lay my work out literally on a table and say, what am I writing about? And how is it connected? And I just do a little kind of thought experiment and I say, oh, I guess I didn't realize I'm so focused on this. Looks like I'm obsessed, in fact, with this idea. I've always been very, very interested in the nature of heroism, especially when it's ordinary people you don't expect to do something extraordinary in a moment of crisis I wrote about
01:31:08
Speaker
two boys who were shipwrecking a sailboat going into Charleston Harbor in the middle of the night, swam from the jetty into Sullivan's Island, were found at 11 o'clock the next morning, having been in the water for, I think at that point, almost 12 hours, and they were still alive. They were just dying as they were found. And the coroner decided those boys could not have been in the water for 11 or 12 hours. They must have made the island
01:31:35
Speaker
rested and then gone back into the water searching for the one boy's father and the other boy's brother. And I thought if that's the case, and I wrote about this, what amazing heroism in the middle of the night for two boys, nobody would ever know the difference if they didn't do this. But if they in fact did that, which is what the coroner suggested that must have happened, then you got something that's extraordinary that goes to probably the biggest obsession I have, which is the mystery of human personality.
01:32:03
Speaker
who people are, why they do the things that they do, and how do you get to the bottom of a personality? You know, we're all so many different people during the course of the day. My students see me as a teacher, you know, to my wife, I'm a husband, to my dog, I'm the guy that gives the treats and takes it in the car, you know, and different people see you as different things, so how do you maintain an integrity and what's the key to doing that? So those are some of the things that I became obsessed with, and of course,
01:32:30
Speaker
One of the byproducts of having to figure out why you're writing about the things you're writing about is to say, well, who does that make me if that's what I care about? Who does that make me if I'm looking in the window seeing me watching this movie or reading that book or doing this hobby or whatever it
Finding Stories and Setting Deadlines
01:32:46
Speaker
is? What judgment would I make about myself and about my priorities and about my character and all the rest of it? And so you're constantly kind of moving to the outside and not constantly, but every so often you're moving from the outside and looking in.
01:33:00
Speaker
I always tell my students go to a place outside of your own house or apartment or whatever and look at it from a different perspective. If your neighbor lets you go up into their second floor and look over into your backyard or go across the street and look at your apartment house and your lighted window.
01:33:19
Speaker
You know, imagine what people are seeing when they're seeing you, and if that's who you want to be great, but if it's not who you want to be, then maybe you have to think about who you want to be and how to get there. And all that's mixed up in what you write, how you write about, and how well you write about. And what would you say is the biggest takeaway? You want readers and writers, whether they be poets, novelists, or nonfiction writers, what do you want them to take away from this book?
01:33:48
Speaker
I guess at the most basic level, what I would like is for somebody to read that book and say, well, I'm going to do it and just go out, interview somebody, go out to a place they haven't been before and write about it, go out and take notes watching someone do something interesting, just something that puts them out in the world, paying attention the way a writer pays attention and gives them that kind of the relief from the endless introspection.
01:34:12
Speaker
And it's what I, when I teach research class here, basically what I do is I send all my students into the field. They have assignments and then they come to report back what they found and share their ideas and their methods. And then they go out again and do some more. And that's what I want. I could get out of the office, get out of the classroom, you know, go out there into the world, wherever the world is and do something you haven't done before. Talk to somebody you haven't met before. Go to a place you haven't seen before and experience it and really be present for it.
01:34:39
Speaker
And you don't have to go far to get out of your own head. I think a lot of people think you might have to go to some exotic place, but jeez, you could call them backyard narratives, because there are so many stories that are quite literally in your backyard. Oh yeah, I think that's really important. And it also takes away an excuse, those people that say, well, I'd love to do a story, but I can't afford to do a John Krakauer do and go to Nepal and climb a mountain.
01:35:07
Speaker
So I guess I can't, but you can. I can go out in my backyard right now and 50 feet from the house, there's a great white heron still thinking the marsh. There's a great blue heron. There's a white ibis. There's a great horned owl that I heard last night across the way. So I could do a gigantic bird story without ever going off my front porch or back porch.
01:35:30
Speaker
There's every ecological story in the world is contained in the salt marsh that backs up to my house. That has to do with everything from what the Army Corps is doing, which takes you to the connection with the Army Corps in South Dakota and whatever. It's all here. All the threads come right back to your door, and you just have to decide how far down that thread you want to go. But it takes away the excuse. There's literally in your backyard, literally on your front porch, down the street at the local coffee shop, wherever it is. There's something interesting.
01:35:59
Speaker
that's worth a story. The fault is with you, not with the world if you can't find it.
01:36:13
Speaker
It's because you were talking about the sequential nature of one door opens another, each domino knocks over another one, and you write about this too. It's real easy to get bogged down in the research and there's kind of progressive, productive procrastination in that because you can just keep leaning into finding more information, finding more information. At what point do you say like,
01:36:38
Speaker
Enough's enough, it's time to get riding and start powering through this. You've done the work, now it's time to do the next level of work. Yeah, I always think of it like a steeple chase. All these riders are out in the woods, they've been chasing whatever all day, and then they're racing home. And the way they're doing it is by looking at the church steeple, which is the only thing they can see sticking up out of the village.
01:36:58
Speaker
And so they're racing toward it, and they're all taking a different path. They're going over hedges and through water and what have you. But if you can't look up and see the steeple, then you're sunk. And so every so often in my work, I try to look up and see the steeple and find out, OK, I went down this path. It's really cool and interesting. And I've spent five days on it. What's it got to do? Where's the steeple? Can I see it from here? So periodically, I check that.
01:37:23
Speaker
And then there's a point, you know, I'm a firm believer in setting deadlines for yourself. And so when I put down on my calendar, start writing the novel, start writing the book, that means you, you know, your research clock just ran out. Now that doesn't mean you're not going to maybe go back and do some supplemental research if you can, but really your budget just ran out for that. You know, now you're off the clock. If you do it, it's all on you. Now you're supposed to be writing. So that's another way to do it. And then I think there is a point at which,
01:37:52
Speaker
It comes to me in various ways in different projects. I'm thinking John Steinbeck always used to say that, you know, the journey, you said a journey out, the journey might be to go to California and back, but at a certain point, the journey's over and you know it. And if you continue on your preset, you know, itinerary, you're just going through the motions. And I think there's a point at which I almost feel like a sprung thinking,
Emotional Research Closure and Conclusion
01:38:16
Speaker
The journey is over on the research journey, which is a drama which usually leads to some kind of climactic discoveries and things that just blow your mind and then propels you to the next phase. There's a moment when you think this is done. For me, it was with secret soldiers riding back in the car from Florida and suddenly just being overwhelmed with
01:38:37
Speaker
this emotion that I wasn't gonna see these guys again. I'd written about guys that were, the youngest was 74, the oldest was 96, I think, at that point. And I thought, I'm never gonna see these guys again. And I was, and then I said, the other part of that was, well, I'd better go home and start writing then. Because I want them to see this before they die. And in fact, as soon as the book came out, virtually within weeks, I started getting one card and phone call after another from widows and sons and daughters saying, you know, so and so has passed away, but he got to read your book
01:39:06
Speaker
It was almost like many of them were waiting for somebody to know their story. So I always think there's a clock on a book. Commercially somebody else might do it before you, but really more important is you've kind of got to wear it. You really know it. It's time to write it. Stop fussing around when you find yourself endlessly sharpening your pencils and rearranging the stuff on your desk and time to dust that bookshelf. No, no, it's not. It's time to sit down.
01:39:33
Speaker
Awesome. Well, Phil, thank you so much for carving out some time to talk shop. This was a whole lot of fun. This has been great. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much, Brendan. You're welcome. We'll be in touch. Take care, Phil. OK. Bye bye.
01:39:46
Speaker
Hey, what's this? An outro? Yeah, that's right. Thanks for listening, everybody. If you need it this far, all I ask for you is to share the episode, subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music, like the hashtag ZNF Podcast page, and follow me on Twitter. That's actually a lot of stuff, and if you could do a quarter of it, I'd be happy.
01:40:09
Speaker
But also, do you know someone who wants to be on the show? You got a good guest idea? Do you want to be on the show if you're a writer of non-fiction? Just email me. Also, since you made it this far, I'm happy to give you a free editing consult. Just email me. I didn't tease that out on purpose. It's that simple. And lastly, a quote from my favorite all-time movie. Stay cool. Stay cool forever.