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Episode No. 14—Glenn Stout on Combining the Things You Love, Effort, and the Poem That 'Knocked Him on his Ass'
238 Plays9 years ago
My guest is Glenn Stout, series editor for the Best American Sports Writing anthology, longform editor at SB Nation, and author of several books including Young Woman and the Sea and Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, A Championship Season and Fenway’s Remarkable First year. He talks about reading poetry in a baseball uniform outside Fenway Park while taking swigs from a two-liter bottle of bloody Marys. Yeah…it’s good. He also talks about his first writing assignment and also the ONE thing a writer can control. Hear about all that… and more …. on the next episode of #CNF.
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Transcript
Introduction & Gratitude
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the hashtag CNF podcast, episode number 14. Yowza. We're on a roll, people. You could say we're rolling. Or not. Anyway, thanks for listening. I've got to say, I'm thankful I get to talk to the kind of people who come on this podcast and listen to them share their insights and to what it means to write true stories and tell true stories. I love hearing about their processes and work habits, and it's always a thrill for me, and I hope it is for you.
00:00:34
Speaker
Episode 14 does not disappoint.
Meet Glenn Stout & His Baseball Background
00:00:37
Speaker
My guest is Glenn Stout, series editor for the Best American Sports Writing Anthology, long-form editor at SB Nation, and author of several books, including Young Woman in the Sea and Fenway 1912, The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway's Remarkable First Year.
00:00:56
Speaker
He talks about reading poetry in a baseball uniform while standing outside Fenway Park while also taking swigs from a two liter bottle of Bloody Mary's. Yeah, it's good. He also talks about his first writing assignment and the one thing a writer can control. Hear about all that and more on the next episode of Hashtag CNF.
00:01:22
Speaker
i i i understand you're on the radio this morning talking about uh... david price sorry i thought about david price time uh... uh... w b u r which is that one of the npr station pnpr news station in boston uh... i've been there red socks analyst for i don't know ten or twelve years so probably six or eight times a year when
00:01:46
Speaker
Something notable happens with the Red Sox. They call me up early in the morning and ask me about it, and I string a few words together and try to sound like I know what I'm talking about. Are the Red Sox your team? No. You're from Ohio, so probably Cleveland. No, I just tell people that I'm a baseball fan. Pittsburgh was my big team growing up. In Columbus, Ohio, the minor league team
00:02:15
Speaker
uh... with the columbus jets which were the pittsburgh triple-a party okay so that was my orientation but you know as an adult i i just kind of say i'm a i'm a baseball fan and uh... you know it i think nobody really that there has been able to figure out my allegiance which i think of the product of
Objectivity in Sports Writing
00:02:37
Speaker
uh... for the work that i've done that uh...
00:02:40
Speaker
You know, but I'm not a Red Sox fan. Everybody assumes that because I've written so much about them But you know, it's just because I was in Boston. I found them interesting
00:02:48
Speaker
Right. That's kind of the stance I've adopted with ball. I mean, I would say if I had an allegiance, it's to the Red Sox since I grew up an hour south of Boston. But being a competitive player for so many years and then just being a sports writer, I'm just more a fan of just the game. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I started playing again when I was 34 and played for 10 years. And that made me realize that I liked playing a lot more than observing. It also made me realize that I actually knew nothing about baseball.
00:03:17
Speaker
Because when you're young, you don't even think about it. When you're older, you realize how much you have to think about it. And then also when you're in the business, you know, the starry-eyed stuff goes away pretty quick. And you have to be clear-eyed and objective, no matter what you're writing about.
00:03:38
Speaker
One writer acquaintance say that he couldn't imagine ever writing about a team that he wasn't a fan of. And my response is almost the opposite. I can't imagine writing as a fan. Yeah. I mean, it's just not for the kind of work that I do, which is historical. You know, you're trying to find out what happened. And, you know, that's often
00:04:04
Speaker
Not the thumbnail story that has been passed down by history. And you have to, you know, baseball metaphor, call it like you see him. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. That's what you, you know, particularly when you're doing historical research, you can't, you know, you can't go in there and say, oh, I want to find this.
00:04:21
Speaker
Right. This is a conclusion I want to find. Let me find evidence that supports that and not look anywhere else. You can't do that. No, no. I mean, that characterizes 95% of baseball history, sports history, quite frankly. Yeah. Yeah. If you go in with such a narrow mindset, I mean, you just paint yourself into, to this corner. That's, you know, frankly, it's not even fun to be in. The fun is in the discovery. You don't learn anything. Right.
00:04:48
Speaker
You're just confirming what you already know. Yeah, and what fun is that? Yeah, exactly. Well, I really want to thank you for carving out some time in your morning here to come on the
Influence of Childhood on Glenn's Writing
00:04:57
Speaker
podcast. I really appreciate it. No problem.
00:05:00
Speaker
So what I wanted to start off asking you about was sort of the opening line to your essay in the Best American Sports Writing this year that you grew up a sick kid. And I was wondering like, how did that inform the person and the writer you became and what impact that had on your adolescence and then ultimately what you went into as an adult? Well, I mean I kind of, I think more about it now than I ever did then. So then I was just, it was just the way things were.
00:05:28
Speaker
And I don't want to overstate it. I wasn't like, you know, a cancer victim or something like that where I was on life and death all the time. I was just sick all the time and would get sick off and would have to, you know, I had breathing trouble and would have to be in bed and missed a lot of school and things like that. I think it just, you know, leads you to having somewhat of a more internal life.
00:05:50
Speaker
And that leads itself to books and reading. You know, I spent a lot of time in the hospital when I was really little. And in a weird way, I kind of think, you know,
00:06:03
Speaker
some of the normal bonding that often takes place, maybe didn't quite take place as strongly with me. So, you know, I found my bonds elsewhere, emotionally, and that would be, you know, in the imagination or the other things. I mean, I was, you know, this baseball obsessed kid from the time I could walk, nobody could ever really explain it.
00:06:28
Speaker
I spent so much time buried under quilts reading stacks of books with mindless television on the background.
00:06:41
Speaker
I think, you know, as I got older, slowly I also got healthier. I really wasn't sick too much once I reached junior high and high school, not nearly as much as I was before, because I was also very vigorous. I was a big kid, always doing sports. You know, it's not like, you know, I had extended periods where I couldn't do anything, but these would be weeks and two weeks, week-long, two weeks. You know, once I had mono and it was like six weeks,
00:07:11
Speaker
Um, but, um, you know, once again, it kind of, it made, you know, adolescence a little awkward because you don't feel totally comfortable with who you are because you in the back of your head, you think there's something wrong with you.
00:07:28
Speaker
in the back of your head, you think you're probably not going to live a long time? I mean, all these crazy kid thoughts that would go through your head. So all that informs it in a way and just led me to spend a lot of time in books and a lot of time reading and a lot of time imagining. And when you live in the interior world, I think you kind of become a little obsessed about how you express yourself.
00:07:54
Speaker
And at a certain point, when I was about 14, that kicked in with me. And I realized that's kind of what I wanted to do, the van I kind of wanted to work. The rest of my life. Right, and when you were 14 and that kicked in, was there a mentor or a teacher that... No, not really. I mean, you know, I've described the moment before, and there was an assignment in eighth grade
00:08:24
Speaker
basically cut pictures out of magazines and illustrate them with poems and For whatever reason my brother had an anthology at home My brother was four years older and it was Langston Hughes and I read this poem called suicides note That goes the calm cool face of the river asked me for a kiss. Hmm And you know, it's that image gazing into the water for whatever reason I saw that and
00:08:52
Speaker
It knocked me on my ass. I couldn't believe that something could do that. It almost makes me tear up every time I think about it, because it was. That's a Tory moment that pitched me sort of headlong into words in one way or another. Yeah, it kind of woke you up in a lot of ways.
00:09:14
Speaker
I mean, I was probably the only 14-year-old kid in rural Ohio who was reading the simple stories by Langston Hughes when they were 14 years old. But, you know, I read Hughes and then I read
00:09:26
Speaker
You know, writers related to Hughes and writers related to those writers and sort of on my own from the age of 14 to 18, worked my way through 20th century American literature, particularly poetry. And that was kind of without instruction except for this used bookstore in Columbus, Ohio called My Back Pages where these two hippies who ran it were really indulgent.
00:09:54
Speaker
me and would let me roam the bookstore for hours and it was a very big store. So I actually just contacted one of the guys recently and thanked him for that because it was such a transformative thing to be able to go somewhere where you could be surrounded by words and this like word life had some currency.
00:10:18
Speaker
What were those exchanges like with them? Did they just kind of, you know, figuratively take you by their hand and just kind of say, hey, you might like this? No, they looked like, you know, see what I was buying and like, oh, have you read this? Have you read this? You might like this. Just very, very, not very aggressive, you know, just, but they took me seriously. It wasn't, hey, kid, you know, stopping on over the books. Yeah. You know, so that was just very, very helpful at that time.
00:10:47
Speaker
Was that one of the earliest times that someone was taking you seriously and you're reading seriously? I think so. I had a wonderful teacher in high school who was barely older than we were and she was the journalism teacher.
00:11:06
Speaker
uh... you know when i was involved school paper we have to call the news magazine man and um... you know she really liked me she was basically let me do whatever i wanted to write as much as i wanted in you know there were times where you know i wrote almost every word in the newspaper so it seemed at that time and you know and that was just very important because you know she paid attention to me and she let me know that she thought i was talented at what i was doing
00:11:33
Speaker
And that made a difference, you know? And then gave me opportunity to do it. I mean, to this day, the only journalism class I ever took was in high school.
00:11:46
Speaker
So that was hugely important because even then I kind of realized what I was getting in class was relatively meaningless. The teachers didn't know very much. I realized I was better read than they were in 20th century American literature by the time I was about 16 because I'd asked them about people and they'd look at me like I was from Mars.
00:12:10
Speaker
uh... you know they might be able to talk about mark twain but it's pretty much stop there you know in the meantime i'm reading you know charles also jack karo acton you know william burroughs and you know just this a lot of crazy whacked up stuff for a lot of uh... uh... much more contemporary stuff yeah and that must have been a bruise to their egos i have no idea i think in most instances they didn't know what i was talking about yeah just brushed you off as some
00:12:41
Speaker
and didn't know who these writers were. Yeah. Yeah, they were just English teachers. They weren't like, you know, interested in writing. Particularly the words, it's just a job. They were fine people, you know, I'm not, you know, criticizing them. Yeah. Yeah, my wife's a teacher and it's like, hey, you can't, you can't do a thousand things, you know. Right. Right, now, why do you think you were drawn to sports as a backdrop for a lot of your writing?
Merging Passions: Poetry & Baseball
00:13:07
Speaker
i think you know that sort of happened by accident uh... i mean i went through college as a creative writing major and was uh... very heavily involved in writing poetry and uh... uh... after i got out of college i was involved in the poetry scene in boston uh... a bit and was really into that and you know you're always told to kind of combine the things you like and uh...
00:13:33
Speaker
Sort of on a lark, sort of for fun, I think it was like 1982 or 1983, I decided that on opening day, I would combine two things I liked, poetry and baseball. And I would go outside the Green Monster at Fenway Park on opening day, starting about 9 o'clock in the morning, the game started I think at 1, and I would read baseball poetry.
00:13:57
Speaker
and so I got an old baseball uniform and a friend loaned me a little pig nose battery operated amplifier and I went out there with a binder full of poems and I read baseball poetry in uniform while drinking a massive two liter bottle of Bloody Marys. I sent out press releases ahead of time.
00:14:18
Speaker
And oddly enough, people profiled me, people interviewed me, and nobody hit me. I got cheered some, I got cheered some, but the response was actually pretty positive. And I ended up doing that for nine years. And a couple of times, friends of mine joined me.
00:14:43
Speaker
You know, I ended up on TV a lot, I ended up on radio a lot. I also ended up meeting people there. I mean, I met Bill Littlefield of NPR's Only a Game.
00:14:51
Speaker
Right when he was getting started because he did a story on me. I met the late George Kimball Sports writer for the Boston Herald that way I met some friends that way It was kind of a nutty kid crazy thing to do But you know it was the two things combining two things. I thought well, maybe there's something to this because
00:15:14
Speaker
And it wasn't long after that, a couple years after I started doing that, that I kind of stumbled onto this intriguing sports story about why the Boston Red Sox manager killed himself in 1907. I thought it was interesting. I worked at the Boston Public Library at the time. I could research the story in the old microphone newspapers, because we had them all. And at that time, there were eight or 10 daily newspapers in Boston. And I kind of sort of figured out what happened.
00:15:44
Speaker
I thought it was a great story. Well, what do I do with this? Well, I'll write a story about it. I'll try to sell it. How do you do that? I looked at a book that said how to be a freelance writer, okay? Just how you write a pitch letter, okay? Send it off to two places.
00:16:01
Speaker
You know, the Boston Globe Sunday magazine sent me a mimeographed rejection letter. I always tell people it was mimeographed because that places it in time because, you know, mimeographs are artifacts now of an earlier age. And Boston Magazine, the editor, asked me to come see him. And I've written about it a number of times when I went in and I talked to him for an hour and he decided to take the story on spec. And as I was leaving his office, he said, you can write, can't you? Because I had no clips.
00:16:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And I said I could. And, you know, about a week later after staying up, you know, I'm still working full time staying up nights and going in early and doing more research and then writing it out long hand four or five times. I went into the library, used the IBM Correctable Selectric typewriter because I'm not a touch typist, I'm still not. I just use a couple of fingers. I typed it up, I turned it in, they bought it and he said, what do you want to do next?
00:17:00
Speaker
And I've never been without an assignment. I realized then that this was kind of, it was a lane I enjoyed, kind of sports history, and that the kind of research I was doing, not many people were doing it. And I was able to kind of duplicate
00:17:18
Speaker
that story, that process over and over and over and over again and to a degree I still do because a lot of people don't want to put in the hours of research that this kind of that historical work needs. I enjoy it so it doesn't bother me but you know sometimes you sit in front of a microfilm machine for two
00:17:43
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think they're yeah, you know, I enjoy that
00:17:49
Speaker
Yeah, and I think there's also a fear that you can do a lot of research, maybe weeks and months of research, maybe more accurately as weeks, and come away with nothing. So you feel like you've wasted a lot of time too, and maybe people don't, there's such an urgency to try to get your work out there and get your work published that you almost don't, that people don't want to put in that initial pre-reporting, pre-research with that uncertainty. I just didn't know any better, I only knew one way to do it.
00:18:31
Speaker
and that's great
00:18:43
Speaker
And I tell that to people all the time now, nothing about doing this makes any logical sense. It doesn't. It didn't then, it doesn't now. Nevertheless, people continue to do it. Because when people say, should I try this? Should I go freelance? Should I do this? That's what I tell them. It doesn't make any sense. If you stop and think about it, it doesn't make any sense. But people do it all the time.
00:19:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think what you touched upon earlier too is when you were pitching your first couple assignments is that you had this full-time day job. And I think that's really important to note that it's not uncommon for people to have that.
Effort in Writing Career
00:19:23
Speaker
I get a little frustrated sometimes when I hear from younger writers who are 24, 25 who are frustrated that they haven't been
00:19:34
Speaker
don't have a full-time job doing this, that they're not pulling down $100,000 writing for somebody. I didn't write that first story until I was 27 years old. I was out of college five years. And I get people who are frustrated, who are 25, 26, and already have an arm's length worth of clips. And I try to tell them, you are so far ahead of me.
00:20:05
Speaker
It's unimaginable. There's something to be said for patients. And I never had a full-time job doing this until the last couple of years. That was never something I really thought of. And I have been extraordinarily lucky. There's no question about that. But the other thing, you can only control one thing.
00:20:32
Speaker
And that's your effort, you know, and, um, you know, I did work really hard. I have worked really hard. Um, you know, and, and, you know, sometimes people hear that and they go, Oh God, here we go. It's the old, you know, pull your old full foot by your bootstraps, bullshit. But it's like, there's one thing you can control and that's your effort. You can't control anything else. Anything else.
00:21:00
Speaker
So control what you can, and if the work itself to a point isn't the reward, you shouldn't be doing it anyway. If you need somebody to hand you a check to make sure you... I mean, when I say I didn't publish anything until 27, I didn't mean that I didn't write between the ages of 21 and 27. I wrote all the time.
00:21:27
Speaker
I wasn't writing prose, necessarily, but I was writing. No one was handing me a check. No one was telling me to do it. I had a group that would get together in my apartment once every couple of weeks, usually like a Wednesday night. And our only rule was you had to bring something to read, and it was better if you wrote it. And we would sit around and read stuff out aloud, mostly what we'd written ourselves. If not, we could bring something interesting that you wanted others to know about.
00:21:57
Speaker
and we do that and we start drinking beer and start talking and that gave us an impetus to continue to write at a time when you're just out of school where you don't have an assignment anymore. Nobody's given you a check to do this, but if this is what you want to do, you find a reason to do it. And that was the reason to do it because he didn't want to
00:22:23
Speaker
You didn't want to stand up there, you know, with your pants down around your ankles with nothing to read from your friends.
00:22:30
Speaker
Yeah, it's like you said, the horizon is, you can never catch the horizon, so you have to be grounded in the work. If you get a piece published in The New Yorker or anything, it's not really gonna necessarily change anything, because you're just gonna keep riding on. So unless you're grounded in the process of the work and love process, then you're always gonna be miserable. It's just because there's- Yeah, exactly.
00:23:01
Speaker
something that's unattainable. Not everything I've done has been as successful as I've wanted it to be. Not everything has sold as much or made as much money or made as much an impact, but you can't control that. You can only control what you do. In a lot of ways, things that haven't done very well have been satisfactory to me.
00:23:30
Speaker
I mean, some of the things that I'm most happy with ever having written are things that have never been published. But this is what I do, and this is how I define myself in this world. It's through words.
00:23:53
Speaker
If someone shook you awake in the middle of the night and woke you up from sleep and said, what do you do? You probably say, I'm a writer. That's it, I write. Yeah. And that entails a lot of things. That entails writing books. That entails writing articles. That entails editing. That entails poems. I write every day and not like that.
00:24:19
Speaker
I'm not like a metronome and I don't follow a schedule, but this is what I do every single day. And when you were crafting those poems and then you stood outside the green monster and everything, did you throw down a hat or a bucket and did people give you dollar bills? Yeah, we did. We might make five bucks.
00:24:41
Speaker
over the course of four hours. That was gone with the first beer. Of course. Where do you think that industriousness came from? Because you said you sent out press releases and everything, and then that really fueled your freelancing. Being young and sort of cocky, glottin' for attention. I'm kind of funny.
00:25:11
Speaker
uh... i have no trouble like speaking publicly talking publicly put me apart a crowd of anybody i can't be able to apply i mean far less comfortable like one-on-one mhm like walking into a cocktail party having to find somebody to talk to yeah i have a role to talk i can do that for uh... other situations are not and that very socially adept uh... so you know that kind of fed into that if they say hey i can do this
00:25:43
Speaker
I can't talk to a stranger, but I can do this. It's kind of funny. It's still that way. So what needs to be in place for you to pursue a story, or what's your green light for you to, you see something and you're like, okay, this is something I really lean into and pursue with all your energy. Well, you know, are you talking about something that's for my own writing? Yeah, yeah, for your own writing.
00:26:12
Speaker
it's something i don't know anything about i mean that uh... uh... uh... that uh... uh... uh... or there's something i thought i knew about and now i realize that it's not sure i think it's not true so what really happened i think those two things i know nothing about this so i'm gonna find out about it or what i know about this is wrong and i want to find out the truth
00:26:39
Speaker
You know, that's basically been, I would say, probably a guiding force behind just about everything I've written, whether it's, you know, the baseball titles I've done, you know, Red Sox, hence Century, which exploded a lot of myths about the Red Sox. It was basically the first book to get into, to take race seriously with the Red Sox and to explore many of their myths, to
00:27:06
Speaker
You know, the oral history I did with the workers, the construction workers at Ground Zero, which, you know, if you still ask most people today, they think that that was primarily done by police and firemen. You know, it wasn't. The construction workers were there every day for nine months. Ninety-five percent of the police and firemen worked a two or three week rotation and were gone and never came back.
00:27:36
Speaker
You know, the construction workers bore the brunt of that. And then like the Gertrude Ederly book, you know, I stumbled across, why didn't I know, why hadn't I heard about her? Why hadn't I heard that in 1926, this 19 year old woman became the fifth person to Swim the English Channel and she broke the existing men's record by two hours. Why didn't I know that? I knew about Jackie Robinson.
00:28:02
Speaker
I knew about all these other pioneers, but I'd never heard about her. So I want to find out. You start poking around and you start talking to people. If there's people to talk to, you start reading everything you can about it. And you start constructing the narrative that previously did not exist.
00:28:27
Speaker
Specifically with Young Woman in the Sea, how surprised were you that nothing extensive had been, or nothing to the point that was satisfactory to you as a reader, was done on her and allowed you to go? You know, she's kind of a seminal figure. I mean, you can make women's sports before her and afterwards, and basically before her there isn't any.
00:28:53
Speaker
And after her is a flood, yet she hadn't been written about. And when I first kind of stumbled over her, she was still alive. She was well up into her 90s, but she was still alive and may have had a part to do with it, why no one had written about her. I don't know. She'd stayed out. She'd lived a very private life and stayed out of the limelight.
00:29:18
Speaker
Um, people just weren't looking backwards very closely. Um, you know, so I really don't know. Now, of course, as soon as I decided to do a book, two other people did too, which is always, you know, you always run into that too. But, um, you know, I just went ahead regardless.
00:29:37
Speaker
Right, and what was the, you know, I love how you started that book too with
Historical Context in Storytelling
00:29:42
Speaker
that sort of gripping scene of just, you know, these people who can't swim. A lot of people who drowned because swimming just wasn't something people did. You know, one of the reasons why that story had never been told is because it's kind of, you had to know a lot just to even tell it. And one of the things you had to know was that basically
00:30:08
Speaker
before the turn of the century is that people in the West did not swim. Very few people knew how to swim. A staggering few number. I mean, if you look at any picture of people on the beach at the turn of the century, the beaches are black with people and there'll be like 10 people in the water. No one knew how to swim.
00:30:32
Speaker
And part of it was cultural and part of it was moral, particularly with women, and women in particular didn't swim. So I felt the reader needed a lot of education just to realize how amazing this was and put it in the context of the era of when people were arguing that women couldn't run more than 200 yards, that you're a woman, you weren't even supposed to sweat.
00:31:02
Speaker
And here's this partially deaf 19-year-old, and she swims across the English Channel. Yeah. Kind of amazing. Yeah. So what's your approach to the research and the writing? Once you're into the story, what does your day look like as you go forward with a project? Well, I mean, if you have to go somewhere to do research, that's a different thing. Like if I have to go into
00:31:32
Speaker
you know boston to use the library of library or new york or somewhere else you know you go to these places and you go into the library or wherever with the research materials are you go in at nine a.m. and you come out at five and you do that because you have to make use of that time um... in general now if i'm working on a book you what i like to do is to do i like to work first thing in the morning for one and i like to put in several hours
00:32:02
Speaker
and then take somewhat of a break and then every time I go back to the material I always go like a couple of pages, maybe 500 words back to what I just written and I revise forward and that puts me back into the flow and then I continue to write. You know, myself, my pace, I think it's important that every writer learns how they work.
00:32:27
Speaker
It's useful to hear how other people work, but just because one person is so disciplined that they write 1,500 words by 549 every morning, and you don't do that, doesn't mean that you're not a writer. Neither does it mean if you don't stay up all night and write on your bed that you're not a writer or sit in a coffee shop like that, you find what works for you. And I found what worked for me, and for me it's like, hey, I can get 2,000 good words out of day. I can do more, and I have.
00:32:57
Speaker
But they're not going to be good ones. And in the long run, I'm going to have to go back and spend just as much time to get to the end. If I write 8,000 words in one day, that's going to take me three or four days to fix. If I do about 2,000 a day, that works. So you just, you know, you put your head down.
00:33:19
Speaker
You organize your notes in the way that you're comfortable with. I mean, you know, Wright Thompson has these elaborately organized binders. That's great for Wright Thompson. I got piles of stuff stacked all over the place. That's really efficient for Wright. My way is really efficient for me. It doesn't mean his is better. It doesn't mean mine's better. Find what works for you.
00:33:47
Speaker
and don't get hung up on how other people do things. Certainly if you find somebody does something that's useful to you and adopt that method, steal that idea, sure. Find what works for you, and then just go forward with it. For me, it's like you organize things in order by time, and you try to tell that story. Absolutely. Try to find the story in the mass of stories you have. Every story
00:34:18
Speaker
Yeah, and then it's just a matter of linking them, and then voila, you have narrative. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
00:34:36
Speaker
How do you decide which of those little stories might, isolated doesn't feel like it belongs, but in the grand picture, it makes sense? You know, for me, there's just an organic feel to it. I mean, you know, when you do a book proposal, you have to write an outline, and I do one. And generally, I never look at it again.
00:35:02
Speaker
I have a rough idea of what I want to do. And even if I do have an outline, if it's more than two pages, I've really been trying to impress somebody because it doesn't mean anything to me. But once the material starts coming together,
00:35:19
Speaker
I was talking to somebody about this earlier this morning. I can't think stories out in advance until I start putting it together on the page. That's the time when for me, and other people might be different, connections start being made. Start seeing what resonates. You start seeing what speaks to itself in the story. You start seeing a narrative come out.
00:35:42
Speaker
It might not be the exact one you thought that was there. That's fine. I think there's a lot to be said for making sure that you allow creative, organic discovery and evolution to take place, rather than trying to be this controlling dictator who's going to force a story to a place where it doesn't want to go. I talk to writers about that a lot. You always write what is. You don't write what you want.
00:36:11
Speaker
a lot of people get in trouble trying to write what they want rather than writing what is. I never have an issue with a writer who, uh, the story changes. And they say, you know, I thought it was going to be this, but when I got there, it's this. Is that okay? I'm like, that's, that's absolutely okay. The last thing I want is a story that you're making into something that it's not. So I mean, and that's kind of a feel thing from just practice is you, you, you,
00:36:38
Speaker
You've had that happen with stories, and you just start to detect the narrative, the important narrative. You know, it's like if you're a pitcher, you know, you've pitched a long time, you know when you can get away with that fastball right down the middle, because that's the last thing they're looking for, right?
00:37:00
Speaker
You know, it makes no sense to throw that pitch unless you've been pitching a long time and then it's a perfect pitch. Stories are the same way. You find the story. You intuit it before it's obvious. It's kind of hard to explain, but at least that's how it works for me.
00:37:21
Speaker
So you do realize that you're like a living saint among writers because of your editing prowess, don't you? That's a really nice thing to say. I'm doing the best I can. I haven't been doing this very long, but I've done it a lot in a short period of time. I've really enjoyed it. It's been really gratifying. It was an utter surprise to me.
00:37:50
Speaker
that, you know, like when I started doing this with SB Nation three and a half years ago, it was a real surprise to me how for really no known reason, except my name had been on that sports writing book for 20 some years, but it was an utter shock to me that people looked at me the way they, to discover people looked at me the way they did, because I'm just this guy up in Vermont, you know, I was out of the lot, out of the,
00:38:17
Speaker
you know, nobody was paying much attention to me. And my career was not going very far. I mean, the book business was really bad. And, you know, I was just trying to figure out what to do next. And then this kind of popped up. And, you know, I'll never forget, like I met, I went to a writing conference a little over a year after I did this, and a young writer who I really respected,
00:38:44
Speaker
who I was kind of like, wow, I can't believe I'm meeting him. And he just stops and he says, this is so surreal, you can't imagine that I'm sitting here talking to you and I'm going, what? I mean, I just, you know, I, it's really kind of gratified. I had no idea that, um, the book meant as much as it did to people. Just been doing, you know, I just been doing my thing and, you know, having some interactions with people, but not that
00:39:10
Speaker
I mean, I moved out of Boston in the Boston area in like 2001, 2002. And so not that I'm a total hermit up here, but, you know, I'm just kind of doing my thing. And then, you know, it was really gratifying and really surprising. And over the past three and a half years, I've had the opportunity to work with over 100 writers directly on stories and things. And I've enjoyed that with just about every single one. Some of them become friends.
00:39:43
Speaker
I could not be more surprised. I could not be more surprised. What do you identify most with, being an editor or a writer?
Synergy of Writing & Editing
00:39:59
Speaker
I think I kind of answered it before. I think it's all kind of the same thing. Because I went into this editing thing, my only
00:40:09
Speaker
thoughts going into it were, I'm going to try to do this the way I think it should be done. Um, cause I don't think I've ever particularly except from the, except at the very start, uh, ever had an editor per se who was worth anything.
00:40:27
Speaker
I've always graded against some parts of this process that I thought were bad and poorly done like this editing by committee that takes place at so many places or this kind of dictatorial editing. And I worked with some editors in the book industry who are quote unquote, supposedly some of the best in the business. I was just appalled by the way they work.
00:40:51
Speaker
the a
00:41:09
Speaker
So that's exactly what I did, because if it wasn't, and then I worked really hard, but if I would've been told you have to do this this way, I don't think I would've A, done it, and I certainly wouldn't have done it very well, and I can only thank Jim Bankoff at Vox Media for, I still don't know what was going through his head when he contacted me and asked me if I wanted to do this.
00:41:36
Speaker
I have no idea why I was asked. But I was. And I've enjoyed it. They seem to think I'm doing okay. Other people seem to like the work we come out with. You know, like I said, because I try to do it. I try to look at it from a writer's perspective. I don't want you to write like I write. I don't want our stories to all feel the same. I don't want to be telling you what to do.
00:42:11
Speaker
Right. So how many pitches do you feel per week?
00:42:24
Speaker
for whatever reason, all of a sudden, maybe it's because the holidays are kind of, wasn't getting any. And I was like, Oh my God. So I kind of like put this call out. And like, for whatever reason, and I've been like a little sick recently, this is a deluge just come in. And it's like, I got five last night. Oh, man. You know, so, um, you know, people say, well, what percentage do you, you know, use? You know, that can really vary too.
00:42:53
Speaker
You know, sometimes it's like, hey, if you're the only person that pitched me this week and you've got a good pitch, you've got a really good chance. If you've got a really good pitch and you're one of 10 people that pitched me this week, that's going to be tougher. And, you know, sometimes there's some serendipity in that. And sometimes people send me full stories. I get that too. And then I get a lot of queries that make me wonder
00:43:21
Speaker
what they're thinking. Hi, I'd like to write. These are the things I write about. Do you have anything for me? I get those every week. I often refer people to my website. I've got a section there called About SB Nation Long Form that tells you how to pitch a story. I actually link to something from, I think it's Stanford.
00:43:49
Speaker
or University of California, one of the two that's a real good guide to how to write a pitch because 90% of the writers who I interact with probably don't know how to write a pitch. It's generally, so I've been told, not taught in grad school. So people go through a magazine writing course in grad school or a whole program
00:44:21
Speaker
Hm. Yeah, that seems to be a real market inefficiency. Like, if you can get, if you can really hone your pitching, you're gonna just reel the cream rise to the top. Yeah.
00:44:39
Speaker
And then have me ask, well, do you have a contact over there? Well, no, but I think I can. It's like, I can't go on Think I Can, you know? Do just a little. Make sure you can get to the people you want to get to. Make sure you can get to the story. Don't tell me you want to write a story in France if you live in California. And you've never written anything before. I'm not going to send you to France. Look in your backyard.
00:45:09
Speaker
I advise people all the time, look in your backyard for stories. I mean, I live in here in remote northern Vermont. Right now, today, I know of two stories within 10 miles of me that if I was, if I needed to write a story, that I could write those stories today. Tracy Kidder made a career out of backyard narratives. Yeah, you know, you can do that. Or, you know, do what I did. Look at history.
00:45:37
Speaker
Because there's a market for history of all kinds in like regional and city magazines, that kind of stuff. Those stories are evergreen. There's always anniversaries coming up, things like that. There's lots of ways to get in here. The way not to get in is to write a story, is to write a pitch that isn't a pitch about a story you have no access to. I mean, even though I did that.
00:46:06
Speaker
Yeah, I've done that too. You know, but I mean I've ended up having great relationships with writers who wrote terrible pitches but I like their writing. You know, there's one of our writers who's identified with SB Nation pretty closely who wrote me probably the worst pitch ever.
00:46:35
Speaker
And, well, the pitch was not horrible, but the end was like, well, you're probably not going to be interested in this. I'm sorry. I probably shouldn't even bother. You know, thanks for picking. And I was like, I got an ad. I called him. I was like, what are you doing? Yeah. It's like someone trying to sell you a car and be like, you know what, actually, yeah, you don't want this car. And we did that story. And it did really well. Yeah. And this person has done really well since then.
00:47:04
Speaker
But why did I go after him? Well, one was he made me mad, but also in his pitch, just in the way it was written, his voice had a sound. It wasn't just words. He had a sound. And that's important to you. It's hugely important. Sound is a great biography of Jack Kerouac called, I think, The Sound is All.
00:47:34
Speaker
Mm-hmm sound is all And I fully agree with that So what people who are great reporters? Yeah can't write with any sound now now some writers who can write with sound who aren't very good reporters who can get away and they can get away with it because
Distinctive Voice in Writing
00:47:51
Speaker
of that but you know, ideally you want to have both, you know and and every writer is different you might start out and
00:48:01
Speaker
kind of with a sound and not have the skills to put a story together, or you might have all the reporting skills you need, but as a writer you don't have your sound yet. I see, you know, my goal is to get writers to a place where, you know, where they're operating in both arenas.
00:48:21
Speaker
Which of those two do you think is sort of the uncoachable fastball? Do you think it's... Do you think you can learn reporting? You can only coach that yourself. Yeah. And you only get that by reading and listening. I can't read and listen for you. Yeah. I can help you with reporting. I can help you with structure. I can't... I can't put the paint on the canvas.
00:48:49
Speaker
You know, you have to do that. You know, I can't play your instrument for you. You have to do that. And you only get good at that by, you know, that's why, you know, the first only and best advice to any writer is read. Read. Because it's like playing an instrument. Every time you read is going through scales.
00:49:15
Speaker
You gotta read, you gotta read, you gotta read, you gotta read. You have to know how words sound. You have to intuit that. You don't wanna be sitting at your laptop trying to decide what the grammar rule is. Okay, I don't know, to tell you the truth. I probably couldn't pass an eighth grade grammar test.
00:49:43
Speaker
But I know what words sound like. And I know when they sound right together. Yeah. You know when the guitar is in tune. It just comes from playing. Yeah. It just comes from reading. And you do it then without thinking. I play the bauran, which is a skin drum. I can't keep time if I'm thinking about it. But if I've practiced enough,
00:50:11
Speaker
Then I'm right there, and I start doing things that I'm not even thinking about. Because something internally is telling me what fits and what doesn't. So what brings you back, or what inspires you as an editor and a writer? Boy, you know, I keep it simple.
00:50:35
Speaker
And the goal of anything you write, the goal of anything you read is you want to read it again. You don't want it to be just something pleasant that goes by. You want it to be something that makes you lose yourself in it and read it again. That's the stuff.
00:51:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's...
00:51:33
Speaker
You know, you lose yourself in time with it. And it's timeless. I mean, I'll never forget there's a poem by Theodore Rutke, who's one of my favorite poets. And for whatever reason, I had heard that poem read first before I ever saw it on the page. And I'll never forget when I saw it on the page, just being stunned that it was like eight lines long.
00:52:02
Speaker
read aloud, it was, you know, it was timeless. I had no idea how long this poem was, because it took me someplace. It spit me out a different person. Yeah. And then I see it's just these, you know, eight or nine simple lines. Wow. And like, you're kidding me? You know, but that's the power, you know, that's what I... What's like that opening line for the Hughes poem, Kissing the River?
00:52:32
Speaker
It takes you out of this experience and brings you to this other experience, this other reality. Words do change things. Not much else really does.
00:52:48
Speaker
Right, and I wonder where, and you're kind of alluding to it right now, but I wonder where your optimism lies, with narrative and with this really unpredictable media landscape. Where do you? You just can't, no matter what happens, people are going to write. This is an impulse that is built in us from the start. We tell stories. That's how we connect with each other.
00:53:18
Speaker
we tell stories. Yeah. That's as old as the human experience. So just because those stories aren't being monetized right now in ways that are particularly easy for people to participate in, doesn't affect the fact that we tell stories. And at one point or another, you know, there will be forums for those stories.
00:53:47
Speaker
now maybe it's going to be you know are we getting a lot of people around uh... uh... uh... you know the uh... the fire in the king can in the backyard of some apocalyptic nightmare already tell stories mhm or it might be in some brand new media but all flashy and shiny that makes us wealthy we're going to be telling stories you cannot go through this world you can't yeah it's finally stories without listening to stories
00:54:17
Speaker
without participating in stories, without living a story. I mean, somebody earlier this week told me like, oh, you need to write a memoir. I was like, no, no, no, no, no. I don't need that kind of introspection personally. You had enough of that when you were growing up. If you write a memoir, then the story's over. You can't change it then.
00:54:41
Speaker
I can tell you the same story ten times. I can make it better every time. That's what editing is. You're just telling the same story over and over, making it better. When you finally publish it, it's kind of disappointing. Because damn, now it's this. And you always start out thinking, you want it to be the greatest thing this person's ever written. You want it to be the best thing you've ever worked on. You want it to be the best thing about the subject.
00:55:09
Speaker
You know, and then it's, you know, at a certain point you realize, you know, 99.9% of the time, it's not going to be that. Well, okay, well, you still have to make it as best as you can. But, you know, you have to remain aspirational. You know, I ask all my writers, I want this to be the best story you've ever done. Let's start with that.
00:55:34
Speaker
Yeah, and why not start there? Why not be ambitious? I'm gonna start with that. I mean, what do you want to do? Well, I want this to be, you know, the 60% best story I've ever done. No, no. You know, screw that, you know. I mean, and I understand we're not gonna make it all the time, but you know, god damn it, every once in a while we do. Yeah, it's like if you... That's really exciting. And then it's like, oh, once you've done something great, once, you wanna do better. Yeah.
00:56:02
Speaker
And you can see, even in this thing that everybody's telling you is great, that, oh, I could have done this, I could have done this, I could have done this. And all of a sudden, your end goal is at a different place than it was.
00:56:19
Speaker
You might have just been trying to get another contract. Now you're trying to do something else. In a contract night, I'm not diminishing how difficult it is to make a living in this business. I did it for 22 years without a job. And I know how hard it is. And it's not like, believe me, the best American sports writing does not pay a living wage, doesn't pay a minimum wage.
00:56:44
Speaker
But that is not something you live off of, believe me. So you have to do all sorts of other things and cobble it together. I know it's hard. Okay, but as I said before, you can control how hard you work. And you can try to do, tell the best story you can. Absolutely. All you can do, and you can look at the work at the end and then say, okay,
Validation & Connection Through Writing
00:57:10
Speaker
Now let's see, you know, if the world will meet me with this. I mean, I had an early writing teacher, Robert Kelly at Bard College, a poetry teacher there. He told us all not to worry about publishing anything. He says, well, you share it with people. He says, if it's good enough, it will end up published. Just, you know, you're not writing it and sticking to the drawer. Yeah. But share it with your friends. That's how I did. Yeah, Seth, it's funny you bring that up.
00:57:38
Speaker
and he also told us he said you know he said you're probably not going to write anything worthwhile until you're 30 he says but he says by the time you're 30 he says if you're still writing he says you're a writer yeah you know he says you're your next 10 years from 20 to 30 is going to determine whether you're a writer or not because you're going to have to learn to do this on your own outside of a structure of school where you're getting you know constant feedback and support your friends are patting on the back and all this stuff
00:58:07
Speaker
You know, you move into the work part of it, where you're there by yourself, you're asking the chair, doing it. And you do it one day, and then you do it the next day. And then you do it the next day. And it might be a year, or two years, or five years, or 10, until anybody tells you you're doing something good. Well, where was it supposed to be easy?
00:58:37
Speaker
you know you know i'm not trying to overstate i'm not trying to you know come off like you know i'm like uh... you know that you know nobel prize winner anything you know i'm a ham and ager guy man i'm a you know i'm a i'm a you know i'm a triple a outfielder there's the whole quote you know so but you know but you play
00:59:06
Speaker
Absolutely. You go out there, you do it. Yeah, exactly. There's no allusion to this. And I think it's beneficial for people to hear that it is work. You know, you don't just, you know, I did a lot of construction work when I was young. Okay. I got through college, so I poured a lot of concrete. And I tell people I learned as much about writing from that as from anything else. You know,
00:59:33
Speaker
Writing a book is hard. Writing a book is complicated. So is building an 800,000 square foot warehouse. Yep. You gotta put a lot of work into that. It takes a long time. But you do things incrementally. And god damn, after a year there's this building. God damn, after a year there's this book. Yeah. And. You gotta go in and punch the clock. You know, you get up with the sun.
01:00:02
Speaker
And you go out there every day. I mean, it's ridiculously simple and it's ridiculously simple in some ways. And I try to make the point that there is nothing really special about this. People go to work every day doing all sorts of things. This is not so precious.
01:00:26
Speaker
Right. It's nice to think that, and I think we all have at some point, and we like to think with the tortured artists and all this stuff. And one of the most poignant things I've ever read was a quote from Rambo, who gave up writing at age 20, and he said something like, and nobody's serious, it's 17.
01:00:52
Speaker
because he was nobody else was and then you know it's easy to feel that way and it's easy to feel shut off and that's easy for people to say well Glenn that's easy for you to say you can just that and the other thing but you know it's not believe me uh... there's a lot of staring at the abyss you don't know what's next and uh... you know steven king or somebody you got enough money you don't have to worry about it but uh... for the rest of us you know there's always the anxiety of what comes next and uh...
01:01:22
Speaker
It's really no different. Scary or a little now because I actually do know how hard it is. You know, when I was younger I was kind of oblivious. I didn't know it was as hard as it was.
01:01:34
Speaker
Yeah, that early success that you had, in a good way, polluted you. Actually, it was the validation you needed, and had you known otherwise, maybe you would have taken a different track. Five years later, I quit my job and said, well, I'll cash in my retirement and try to do this right. If it doesn't work, I'll just get another job. And I didn't really think twice about it. And when I think about that now, it's like,
01:02:01
Speaker
because I'm making really good money. What the hell are you thinking? But you know, you don't go through this world to, you know, to sit in your chair in the corner, right? Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that's, I want to be respectful of your time. I think that's a perfect way to end their conversation for today. Certainly, I'd love to continue it another time when your book comes out next year and we can talk about that too.
01:02:31
Speaker
I consider conversations like this, this is part of what I do too. Much of editing, I probably spend almost as much time talking writing as I do writing or editing with both people who are writing for me and other writer friends and this is how we
01:02:56
Speaker
connect ourselves, this is how we support ourselves, how we support each other. We tell stories, even when we're talking about stories. Yeah, and selfishly, this podcast, as humble as it is, I desperately need this to talk to people like Greg Hanlon, Joe DiPaolo, Kerry Hagan, you, all these people. I need to hear these voices.
01:03:26
Speaker
which the other it's not a very big try but it's a but it's a it but it you know at its core and at its heart it's a very uh... uh... it's a very very close try because uh... you know this is something which i think people outside writing don't understand you write alone you know and
01:03:55
Speaker
What we do is take that time spent alone and turn it into a story so we can be with other people. Yeah. Well, that's beautiful. Like I said, Glenn, I want to be respectful of your time and thank you so much for carving out an hour this morning. This is what I do, man.
01:04:17
Speaker
Well I'm glad it is what you do and I'm glad you continue to do it and you spend time with folks like me and others and talk and shop. So thanks again and let's do it again sometime. I enjoyed it as much as you do. Fantastic, thanks so much Glenn.
Conclusion & Call to Action
01:04:31
Speaker
Okay. Alright, take care. Thanks Brandon, bye bye.
01:04:35
Speaker
All right, that's a wrap for episode 14 of hashtags C and F. If you get a chance, give me a follow on Twitter, at Brendan O'Mara, and if you want, head over to my website, BrendanO'Mara.com, and subscribe to the email newsletter. It comes out every Tuesday, if and only if I publish a blog post or any links that pop up through my website. If I don't publish anything for that week, you don't get anything. No spam ever. So thanks again for listening, and keep in touch.