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Episode 224: Patrick Radden Keefe's Atypical Path to Narrative Journalism, Writing Books and Making 'Wind of Change'
473 Plays4 years ago
"What can I leave out? And that point where I can start leaving things out becomes very liberating because then, in a way, the reporting continues, but it's narrowing," says Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer at The New Yorker, best selling author of Say Nothing, and host of Wind of Change.
Follow him @praddenkeefe and follow the podcast @CNFPod.
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Transcript
Introduction to Patrick Radden Keefe
00:00:01
Speaker
ACNFers, wouldn't you know I had the chance to speak with Patrick Raden Keefe, a staff writer for The New Yorker, the best-selling author of Say Nothing, a true story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland, and the host behind the incredible Wind of Change podcast. And they had to be like, no, no, no, that silence is gold. You know what I mean?
00:00:25
Speaker
Don't step on that silence, like let it play out. The awkwardness is good. Oh, yes, that's right. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Hey, and this is the creative nonfiction podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. Thank you, friend, for tuning in. We're going to have some fun today. All right.
00:00:54
Speaker
This one with Patrick was in the works for a long time and he was gracious with his time and his insights. I know you're going to dig it. He's at P. Raden Keefe on Twitter and you can find him at patrickradenkeefe.com as well for an archive of his work and other things, other goodies. Listen to this and go check him out.
00:01:18
Speaker
If you're like the only person under the sun who isn't familiar with this titan of narrative journalism A little bit of housekeeping, of course keep the conversation going on twitter, you know instagram facebook tag the show at cnf pod digital fist bumps Let me know what you think of this episode what you took away from it You can also head over to brendan amaro.com for show notes
00:01:44
Speaker
where you can leave the show of voicemail. Also, isn't that cool? And I'll answer your query on air as best I can. You can sign up for the monthly newsletter there as well. A curation of book recommendations, cool articles, and what you might've missed from the world of the podcast. First of the month, no spam. As far as I can tell, can't beat it.
Path to Narrative Journalism
00:02:08
Speaker
Patrick is here and we talk about him cracking the code of say nothing with his like office mate neighbor. This guy just, you know, David Gran, no bigs structure Patrick's relationship with his editor, editor, Daniel Zaleski, Patrick's atypical road to narrative journalism and how wind of change came about as a podcast versus a long magazine article or even a book.
00:02:37
Speaker
You'll also hear his bookshelf for the apocalypse, of course. I hope you'll stay tuned to the end of the show where I'll give my parting shot. A little thing I'm titling the cookbook mentality, but until then, just enjoy this conversation with me and perhaps my number one draft pick if there was a fantasy team for narrative reporters, Patrick, Red, and Keith.
00:03:09
Speaker
conversation with them in their outlet and play your most recent one anyway. It was so great about listening to you you guys talk. It was like you know watching baseball tonight when like A-Rod and Frank Thomas are talking hitting or something. It's like it was like that for me to be sitting in on these two pros talking shop. It was just really cool to hear you guys they hear you guys break it down. It was a really great conversation.
00:03:33
Speaker
I'm so glad to hear that. It was fun for me particularly because I've known Evan for years and years and we did an earlier long form podcast at a very different stage of my life and his life and our careers. It was so fun to pick up that conversation.
00:03:55
Speaker
It is a very nuts and bolts conversation. I mean, that's one of those ones that I think you really have to be interested in this kind of writing. But if you are, hopefully it's interesting.
00:04:04
Speaker
Oh, of course. Certainly anyone who listens to Long Form, even people who listen to this show, I do love pulling back the curtain a little bit, getting into some of those nuts and bolts in that vein, piggybacking on that sport metaphor, watching film and deconstructing what's going on. Sure.
00:04:25
Speaker
You know, like, who are some of those writers and journalist reporters for you? You put them on the game tape and you're like deconstructing them like, how's this guy or how's this guy or this woman doing this? And, you know, and trying to apply that to your own reporting and your own writing. Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, one of the things that is
00:04:49
Speaker
To be perfectly honest with you, still profoundly strange about my life is that a lot of those people for me when I was younger are people who subsequently I came to know and they became colleagues at the New Yorker. So there are people like Philip Garevich or Larissa McFarquhar or David Gran who
00:05:14
Speaker
I read when I was younger and really did try to deconstruct those pieces and think, how did they do this? How did they put these things together? And to this day, it's very strange to me that I now know them and work alongside them. I had this especially surreal experience with my last book, Say Nothing, where
00:05:39
Speaker
For a period of time, this is when the New Yorker was in the old office. The person who was in the office next to me was David Grant, and he would come into the office from time to time. And I mean, it was a little bit surreal, right, to think that I would hit a kind of a thorny narrative problem.
Discovering a Killer's Identity
00:05:58
Speaker
just a storytelling problem. You know, here's my dilemma. How do I dole out this information? How should I go about this or a reporting problem? And just the thought that it's like, well, you know, why not go next door and ask David Grant what he would do was, you know, kind of comical. To this day, I count my good fortune.
00:06:21
Speaker
Yeah, and when I had spoken to him a while ago when Killers of the Flower Moon came out, and speaking of narrative problems, what really cracked open that book for him was reading Faulkner's Ab Absalom and the three-pronged narrative structure, and that informed how he sort of cracked the code of Killers of the Flower Moon. Similarly, maybe when you were picking his brain, what narrative puzzles did he help you crack similarly?
00:06:50
Speaker
There were, I mean, the really big one was that I made this discovery very late in the game when I was working on Say Nothing. Almost by accident, I stumbled on the identity of the person who was the killer in this notorious 1972 murder that is kind of the basis for the whole book. And it was a jaw-dropping moment.
00:07:18
Speaker
I mean, honestly, it was for me and my reporting as well. And I hope it was in the book because in some ways, all I was trying to do was convey the shock I felt myself and hope that some of that resonated with the reader. But when I first made the discovery, it was this tricky thing where I had connected these dots and there were a series of questions I had about A,
00:07:44
Speaker
thresholds of proof. At what point is it acceptable in a book to name a living person who has never in any way been associated with a murder and say, I believe this is the murderer. When is it okay to do that? What quantum of evidence do you need? And then B, how do you tell that to the reader? How do you present it to the reader? And
00:08:13
Speaker
David was one of the first people I talked to. The big thing that he said was, you've got to go back to everybody you talked to already because now you have a theory of the case. It's sort of the Woodward and Bernstein thing, right? It's one thing to go and ask people open-ended questions. It's another thing to go to people and say, I know this. What do you have to say about it? And so I did that. I went back to Ireland.
00:08:37
Speaker
And I spoke to a bunch of people. I had to, I mean, I had to keep the circle somewhat small because I didn't want too many people to know that I'd figured this out, but there were key people who I wanted to go back to and present that to. And that ended up getting me to where I needed to be personally, to be comfortable naming this person. And also I hope to a point where I could persuade the reader
00:09:07
Speaker
At the end of the day, all I can say to the reader is I've done all this work and here's the conclusion that I draw, but let me show you the steps I took, the deductive steps. And so this was part of what came out of this conversation with David was the idea that if you, if you narrate that investigative process, it may be that there are some readers who are unconvinced, but you're doing it with a kind of transparency and good faith that won't run the risk of
00:09:35
Speaker
trying to stretch the available evidence into a theory, trying to take it to a place it doesn't want to go. Were lawyers essentially your copy editors at that point too?
00:09:50
Speaker
Yeah, and what was crazy about that was it was lawyers in New York, lawyers in Dublin, and lawyers in London, all of whom had different, because there were these three different jurisdictions that we had to think about. It was a pretty fraught process. But to be honest with you, I feel as though, for better or for worse, with the stuff I write about, lawyers almost always enter the equation. Right.
00:10:11
Speaker
And the way it was coming to a head in the book, too, and the way certain characters were always kind of resurfacing, whether through a different identity in the case of Brendan Hughes or other people, the identity of that third person, I was just waiting for the shoe to drop. I'm like, who is this? I know we know this person. And then it comes down and it's just like, holy fucking shit, that's who it was.
00:10:37
Speaker
and you just don't really get that that much narrative nonfiction sometimes and wow what a hammer.
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, and I should say I didn't go looking for it. It's funny because in a fair number of the reviews of the book, people characterized it as a whodunit. And I wrote pretty much the whole book, not thinking of it as that at all. My assumption was this is a story about a murder and its repercussions. I know the identity of a number of people kind of around that murder, but not the person who pulled the trigger
00:11:13
Speaker
And ultimately it doesn't matter. It's probably somebody who's not one of my characters. And because of the rules that I had created for myself in terms of how I wanted to write the book, my feeling was basically, I want to see this entirely through the eyes of this handful of people. And so if it's some other random dude, then it won't be all that interesting to me or to readers to say, oh, and there's this random gunman. And it turns out he's the guy who pulled the trigger.
00:11:40
Speaker
So it wasn't something I was looking for. The crazy thing is when I stumbled on it, it was really by accident. And then it turned out it was somebody who was one of my characters all along. And so that was the, like looking back on it, it takes on this Agatha Christie quality.
00:11:57
Speaker
But that was really only true once I made this discovery. It didn't feel that way during the almost four years I spent working on the project before I made that realization. Yeah. If I recall right from, I think it was when you were talking with Evan in the last episode of the long form that you did with him, it was just like you were on a very late pass of the notes you made of a certain transcript.
00:12:21
Speaker
almost accidentally stumbled on this thing you probably felt like you should have caught far earlier in the process and it's like it could have gone this could have gone to print and then you find out i mean it's the fortuitous nature of the timing of that couldn't have worked out better for you yeah but it is you're you're absolutely right that it's one of those um kind of self-exposing anecdotes that actually shows what a sloppy hack i am because it was only um it was only because i went back
00:12:51
Speaker
almost as an afterthought and just said, Hey, is there anything in this 30 page single spaced, uh, transcript that I might've missed? And I think it's a, you know, on the one hand, in terms of my own process, I am a big believer in the idea that when you, when you read through something the first time, the stuff that sticks with you on that first read is probably the stuff that you want to tell a reader. Like I, you know, I have colleagues who.
00:13:19
Speaker
obsessively go over their own notes from their own interviews, kind of trying to find things that had eluded them, whereas my philosophy is much more, in a way, I don't wanna go back to the notes at all. After I'd done a two-hour interview, I wanna think about the things that stick in my mind, and those are probably the things that I should use in the telling. But in some ways, that episode at the end of Say Nothing is an illustration of the limits of that particular approach, you know, to be completely kind of,
00:13:48
Speaker
off the cuff first impression, what grabs you right away is sometimes to ignore pretty important stuff that's hiding in plant site. Did that experience create some sort of internal anxiety for you now going forward in that like, oh my God, what else might I be missing if I don't go back and reread this thing or these notes?
00:14:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there is some of
Research Anxiety and Story Structure
00:14:14
Speaker
that. And I think it's a, it can be a paralyzing fear, depending on the story, because, you know, I mean, in some instances, some of the stuff I'm working on entails, no exaggeration, tens of thousands of pages of court documents, for instance. And
00:14:36
Speaker
I think there's some degree of kind of neurotic compulsion that's really fruitful and productive in that kind of a situation, the thing that makes you keep going back to the pile and turning the pages and seeing what you might be missing. But it also, if you give into that too readily, I think it quickly becomes a kind of madness, right? Where you can just sort of endlessly report thinking that you're missing.
00:15:04
Speaker
you know, some particular gold thread that's eluding you. And at what point, if you're working on a long magazine feature in the case of the three books you've written and the one that you've got coming out next year, at what point are you starting to think about structure and that part of the narrative framework of a story so you can spin a good yarn?
00:15:26
Speaker
So this has changed pretty dramatically for me since I started writing longer feature pieces, about 15 years ago. And it'd be hard to pinpoint the moment where it changed, but because I tend to take a pretty research intensive
00:15:52
Speaker
approach to this kind of writing. I just do a ton of reporting and I like to report and it's always been most of my, it's 90% of the work for me. The writing is not an afterthought by any stretch, but it's the last thing that happens. The danger of that for me is that it just becomes an open-ended process.
00:16:17
Speaker
you're just gathering more and more stuff and every day you gather more and more stuff and you end up with this endlessly proliferating compost heap of material. And there's lots of interesting stuff in there, but I think at a certain point, at least for me, it's diminishing returns.
00:16:36
Speaker
there's an inflection point where you have to start thinking about structure. And for me, that, that point has come earlier and earlier, I think, certainly in recent years, which isn't to say that I'm, I'm cooking the books. You know, it's not to say that I, if there's one thing that I hate and it happens with every piece, it's when you get on the phone with somebody and they start out by saying, so what's your angle? And, you know, and I'm always like, I don't have an angle. Like let's talk and tell me what happened and I'll develop my angle later.
00:17:03
Speaker
So I do tend to think you want to follow the facts and sort of figure out the story they tell. It's not that I want to prefigure the narrative, but I do think that for me, it's really helpful at a certain point to say, who are the characters? Who am I focusing on here? What are the big beats in the story and what can I leave out? And that point where I can start leaving out becomes
00:17:28
Speaker
It's very liberating because then in a weird way, then the reporting continues, but it's kind of, it's narrowing rather than widening, if that makes sense. You're beginning to focus in more and more on the stuff that you really need to know, because you know it's going to go in. As opposed to just sort of, oh, this guy's interesting. Let's read his three books and figure out his biography and maybe he'll fit in the piece somewhere, which I think is a dangerous, at least for me, is a dangerous temptation.
00:17:57
Speaker
for sure, for sure. Yeah. People can, you can really, it's a productive way to procrastinate if you're not careful. It is. And you curse yourself because I think that the, and again, I think I've gotten a lot better about this over the years, but I think there is this tendency that a lot of reporters have.
00:18:14
Speaker
when you make a discovery that seems inherently interesting, and particularly if it was hard for you, if you worked hard to make that discovery, to then feel as though you have to shoehorn it into the story you're telling. And I think a lot of bad writing, or not bad writing, but a lot of writing that may lack the kind of focus and drive that it should have
00:18:41
Speaker
one of the pitfalls is that people are shoehorning in stuff that actually doesn't, it's interesting, but it doesn't belong in the story.
00:18:48
Speaker
And to that end, you can, of course, put that stuff in, then maybe rewrites it, starts coming out. And those are sometimes the dialogues you're having with an editor and a wingman. And Daniel Zaleski, is it Zaleski or Zaleski? It's Zaleski. Zaleski.
Collaboration with Editor Daniel Zaleski
00:19:03
Speaker
So you've been working with him for a long time, and he's just kind of a narrative whisperer, if you will. So many of the things that he's worked on and helps usher through are some of the most brilliant pieces that come out in The New Yorker. He's a brilliant reporter and a writer.
00:19:17
Speaker
So what's your relationship with him and how has he coached out the best in you over the years? It would really be impossible to do him justice. I think he's pretty much a one-of-a-kind brain in terms of a certain kind of heavily reported
00:19:43
Speaker
narrative nonfiction. And I first connected with him, it was 15 years ago. I freelanced for years before I went on staff at the New Yorker, but I worked with him starting with my first piece. And the relationship has evolved over the years, but he has an incredible sense of what is a story.
00:20:05
Speaker
And he has this amazing kind of roving intellect where we have these ideas meetings at the New Yorker where you come in and you sort of pitch three ideas, not necessarily for you, but just that the magazine should be thinking about.
00:20:21
Speaker
And most of my ideas are kind of in my wheelhouse, like whether they're for me to be writing about or not. And the amazing thing is you watch Daniel and he'll have some, he'll have a pitch about some crazy cutting edge discovery and nanotechnology. And then his next pitch is about some obscure but brilliant composer who's just like on the cusp. And his next pitch will be about
00:20:49
Speaker
you know, some sort of behind the scenes intrigue in Washington. But what the through line, the DNA is that he has this extremely, this just kind of preternatural sense of story. And so I think you see that if you think about the writers that he edits. I mean, David Gran, Jane Mayer, Lawrence Wright, and on and on and on. I mean, a bunch of the greats and
00:21:17
Speaker
you see that kind of manifest in all of their work. And for me, you know, it's a steady back and forth in which we're talking about ideas on the front end and what would make a good piece and how I could do it. And then I go off and start reporting and often I'll check in with him along the way, sometimes just with excitement to kind of get somebody else in the foxhole with me and say, Hey, look what I discovered. But often with a sense of, you know, I'm trying to figure out where this goes or I've got this source who won't talk or
00:21:46
Speaker
I've just discovered this new thing and this may change the whole complexion of the piece. And then he's very, very involved once I submit a draft and all the way through to the closing at a kind of line by line, word by word, incredibly exacting level. But he's amazing and I feel incredibly lucky every day to work with him.
00:22:12
Speaker
Yeah, that's, it's so great. Everyone speak, anytime I hear his name brought up, it's brought up in the same- With reverence. With reverence, it is, because he kind of, what the great editors do is they just make the writer shine and get out of the way, and it's such a unique thing, and it seems like, and I've never spoken to him and I don't know him, but it seems very devoid of ego, and he's very happy to celebrate in the success of the writer, and that's gotta be its own gratification.
00:22:40
Speaker
I mean, it's crazy because you mentioned he's a writer and a reporter himself and has written these amazing profiles. And I'm still hoping one day I think there should be a book, they should put all of his profiles together in a book. Because if you look at them end to end, I mean, they're amazing. But yes, the thing that is so... I do think that there's a kind of selflessness to
00:23:00
Speaker
editors be they, you know, book editors, magazine editors, newspaper editors in which the metabolism of a big reported feature for me is, you know, I'll spend four or five, six, eight, 10 months working on something. And the final stretch is a couple of weeks in which Daniel is involved in a very intensive day to day way. And then we close the piece.
00:23:25
Speaker
And I basically get to sleep all weekend and then do a victory lap on Monday. And he starts, and he comes in on Monday and dives into that intensive process with somebody else's. I mean, this happened two weeks ago. I had a piece, it was a web piece, but a 5,000 word web piece heavily reported, lawyers involved,
00:23:49
Speaker
it was an intensive operation and he closed it, I think literally he closed it between closing a big piece by Jane Mayer and a big piece by Paige Williams. And they all came out within, they all posted within 48 hours for one another.
00:24:05
Speaker
And you had to have a pretty atypical path to narrative journalism. It doesn't involve J school or that track. You know, of course you went to Columbia and you got your JD at Yale and it's not what you would consider a typical path. So what was it about, you know, narrative journalism? Maybe what were you reading that kind of turned a light bulb on and said, you know, I kind of want to try this out. I
00:24:33
Speaker
I think the thing is I had always wanted to be a writer. I didn't know precisely what that would look like. So I had this, I think I was risk averse enough that I felt like I needed some kind of a cover story or a day job, particularly in college and immediately post college. I knew
00:24:57
Speaker
I knew certain people who would sit in cafes and meet people and tell them that they were a writer and say, I'm a writer. And I found the pose of that a little off-putting. So for me, it was much more, I'm going to keep this is going to be this secret thing that I nurture until it's real.
00:25:19
Speaker
And what that meant in practice is I went to grad school, I went to law school, I did all this other stuff. But I always knew that what I wanted to do was right. It just was taking me a while to figure out how to make it happen. And so even by the time I got to law school, I mean, I think I got the deal to write my first book at the end of my first year of law school. So at that point, it suddenly began to feel real.
00:25:47
Speaker
That's awesome.
Transition from Law to Writing
00:25:49
Speaker
You being under the water doing this, it just reminds me of when you say in Wind of Change the surfacing moment when the submarine comes up. That just hit me. It was just like, here's Patrick. He's surfacing with the writing career.
00:26:02
Speaker
Yeah, it was a little bit like that. It was a little bit like that, but I just think that there was a, you know, I mean, it makes me blush to think about it, but it's like I have friends who, back when I was in grad school, there's a friend who always gives me a hard time about this, but the, you know, about me, we were on a plane and like on an overnight flight to England and I, everybody else is just like hanging out and I whipped out my laptop and I'm typing away and
00:26:32
Speaker
And I was working on an article that I hoped would run somewhere. Of course, it never did, right? There was a lot of trial and error and a lot of rejection in those early stages. What gave you confidence during that era of rejection that allowed you to keep going in the face of it?
00:26:55
Speaker
I think it was partially a sense that this was this thing that I just really wanted to do. I would be lying if I said I thought I was all that good at it. It wasn't a sense where I was convinced I was a genius and the world just didn't understand. It was more, to me, the notion of writing big articles for the New Yorker magazine was just, I couldn't conceive of a better job than that.
00:27:23
Speaker
And so I think it was a stubbornness and then also a rapidly dawning appreciation of what a terrible lawyer I would make. You know, so I, so in some ways, like law school was a very useful exercise for me in a whole bunch of ways. And, you know, it's like an expensive and time consuming way to learn that you don't want to be a lawyer, but, but I, you know, that message was brought home.
00:27:55
Speaker
And over the course of your reporting and your writing, do you run into the nerves that sometimes come in when you're, maybe you've got a big source and a big interview ahead of you and now you've done all your research and maybe you feel like maybe you haven't done enough and you're, I don't know, I get a bit of a sort of chest tightness sometimes when I go into interviews, no matter how much research I've done, no matter how many times I've done this thing between us.
00:28:23
Speaker
Sometimes I get just that niggling anxiety. So I wonder if that's something you experience. And if you do, how do you work through it? Yeah, I mean, so two thoughts. One is that I think there is a there is a there are some there's some kind of standard social anxiety that on I mean, you know, I'm an old guy, I've been doing this a long time. And I really thought that I thought that
00:28:52
Speaker
I thought it would go away, you know? But I still get nervous picking up the phone to call a stranger. And, you know, not like cripplingly nervous, but I feel it on my chest. And I think what's strange is I look back to
00:29:10
Speaker
You know, I look back almost 20 years when I was working on my first book and I was a law student. I had a book contract, but I didn't have any affiliation with any newspaper or magazine. I'd never really written for a newspaper or magazine and I was calling people to ask them for an interview.
00:29:25
Speaker
And I felt like it was just so open-ended. It's like, hi, I'm this guy. You don't know anything about me. And to the degree that I can tell you anything, it's that I'm a law student, which shouldn't actually, I'm a student. It's not gonna command all that much respect. And at the time, I think I thought my nerves
00:29:44
Speaker
I thought like, oh, once you have a legitimate thing to tell people, I sort of thought that it's like when you can say, hey, it's Bob Woodward with the Washington Post. They're like, that's it. It's I, Hersh or the New Yorker that you would command.
00:30:01
Speaker
just natural confidence. And I don't think that's necessarily the case. On the preparation thing, it's a little different in the sense that for the kind of interviews you're doing, it wouldn't be much of a conversation unless you were prepared, right? And for me, it's not that I don't prepare, I do, but I also, I generally don't go in with a huge list of questions. I tend to prefer interviews to be pretty open-ended.
00:30:27
Speaker
Um, so I may have some specific things I want to hit, but I don't have a script. I also have this thing that I've gotten better at over the years, which is that I, I tend to find that the interview is much better if the person thinks I'm an idiot and I don't know anything. Like I used to, I used to have this desire to like prove that I, that I was hip and like show them how much preparation I'd done. Right. I guess to, I guess to win their respect or something.
00:30:54
Speaker
And I realized that that doesn't produce good answers. Like the reader hasn't done all that preparation, right? So it's better for the reader if what I'm presenting them as quotes from an expert who's talking as though they're addressing a 12 year old. You'll probably find that if you over-research in that way and trying to overcome some sort of insecurity, in a sense you might be answering questions for them instead of getting this tape. Yes, totally.
00:31:24
Speaker
And the worst is when they feel like, oh, well, clearly you've done your homework. I don't need to explain what the, and then pick the thing is, whatever this concept is. And those are actually the moments where it would be so much better to say, yeah, I'm not sure I really understand that. Can you explain it to me? And you kind of force them
00:31:51
Speaker
to do the exposition and it may be that in the end you're better at the exposition than they are, but it's worth giving them a shot because sometimes people are really brilliant at, you know, if it's a specialist, they've had a lifetime of practice of like explaining to relatives or whoever else, uh, what they do in simple language. Exactly.
00:32:10
Speaker
And so as you you're a print guy books New Yorker and then of course wind of change this story that's been you know chewing at you for over you know for close to 10 years when you when you will launch wind of change how does that become how does that come to the table and how does that become a podcast versus a narrative podcast versus maybe you know doing a long feature or even a book.
00:32:35
Speaker
Yeah.
Why Wind of Change is a Podcast
00:32:36
Speaker
So this was a thing I'd been thinking about for a long time. And a part of what I was thinking about was how do you tell the story? And I have a theory. And so this is, I mean, really, I think this is a Zaleski theory that I, I would say I borrowed it, but it was more that I was, I was forced to adopt it as one of his writers, that if you have a story that's a mystery and you want to do a 10,000 word magazine article, you'd better solve the mystery at the end.
00:33:05
Speaker
that there's something about telling a complicated story that's gonna take somebody the better part of an hour to read, where if they get to the end and you say, and we'll never know, but thanks for reading, they'll feel like they want their hour back. And this has kind of come up a million times because you pitch a piece and you say, oh, here's this interesting thing. And it's like, well, can you nail it? Can you solve the mystery?
00:33:35
Speaker
And if you can't, it's usually a pretty high bar. So that was the problem was that I always knew with the Scorpions and the CIA that either the CIA wrote this metal ballad or they didn't, but either way, it's gonna be very hard to come up with, to either prove the positive or prove the negative in a kind of definitive, dead to rights way. And so what that meant was that for years, this was kind of,
00:34:04
Speaker
was something I was really interested in, but I just couldn't figure out how to do it. And I was certain it wouldn't work as a magazine article. And then the big revelation for me was that it could be a podcast. And so it's funny, you might think with the podcast that the fact that it's all about music is the reason I wanted to do it in an audio form. And it's not the first, I mean, that was kind of a nice benefit, but the initial reason that it took that form was that there's something about podcasting
00:34:33
Speaker
where you get to the end of the first season of Serial and they say like, maybe Adnan did it, maybe he didn't. Thanks for listening. And actually, I think some people might have complained about the ending, but lots and lots and lots of people felt as though this was hugely worthwhile and totally interesting.
00:34:55
Speaker
And I'm still trying to sort out why that is. I think it has something to do with the voice in your ear or the identification you feel with the reporter. But somebody said of my show, Wind of Change, that podcasting is a very generous medium, and I think that's true.
00:35:14
Speaker
And I listened through it twice and it was one of those deals where it's basically the second time I heard it through. Part of the appeal of this whole thing again is just it's like a story about the search more than the answer.
00:35:33
Speaker
And there are enough footprints leading up to the goal line without scoring the touchdown that almost, it kind of answers it for you without really, you know, giving you the medicine, if you will. So I don't know. I don't know. Did it strike you like that? Cause that's kind of how it landed on my ear. Yeah. I mean, the, you know, part of what, um, part of what was interested in is ambiguity.
00:35:59
Speaker
Um, and weirdly enough to, it all kind of comes full circle, but my first book was about the national security agency and it was kind of a.
00:36:07
Speaker
It was sort of about, it was a book about my failure to write a book about the national security agency. And it seemed interesting to me that the biggest intelligence agency in the country, which has a huge impact on the United States and global affairs was totally unknown. And there was just a kind of a sense that,
00:36:32
Speaker
It's so secret that it's not really subject to democratic accountability or accountability by the press and what have you. And that to me was interesting. And so here too, I felt as though there are these mysteries and these things that sometimes you never will know.
00:36:47
Speaker
And I was interested in that, in interrogating that. And the metaphor that I really liked is my friend, a very good friend, Jonah Weiner, who's also a magazine writer, writes for the New York Times Magazine. And Jonah listened to the episodes as we were making them and was giving me notes. And he had this great image. He said, it's like you're, you know, the central mystery, it's like you're going up a spiral staircase. And the central mystery is the banister.
00:37:17
Speaker
And along the way, you keep pointing to these interesting pictures on the wall, but you always have one hand on the banister. And that was kind of the way I thought of it.
00:37:27
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, and there are those moments too, like if we bring it back to the whole surfacing thing, like you in the episode that really focuses on Doc McGee, you know, you've done a lot of your research and you go to him and he's thinking it's gonna be this one thing and then you even like comment on the fact that you're about to surface to us and then you surface to him and it's just like the tenor kind of changes and it's like you can't really pull that off in print and that was so perfect in audio.
00:37:58
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, this is for me a big part of the learning curve and the fun of doing this.
Using Silence in Audio
00:38:05
Speaker
And I should say, I mean, I was brand new to all this. I'd never done anything. I'd been a guest on podcasts like this before, but I didn't know anything about podcasting other than as a listener. But I was in incredibly good hands. I had these amazing producers, particularly Henry Malofsky. He was my partner on the whole thing and Joel Lovell was my editor. And
00:38:24
Speaker
They had coached me on how audio is just very different from print. And one of the big things that they said early on when I'd done, I mean, we did almost a hundred interviews for this thing. So it was a slow gradual learning curve for me. So much tape. Yeah, it was a ton of tape. But they said at a certain point that I had this tendency to rush in and fill the silence. So if I was talking to somebody and they were uncomfortable, I would
00:38:55
Speaker
my natural tendency just as somebody with some emotional intelligence, but also as a reporter who's always trying to put people at ease, is I'll rush in and fill the silence. I'll talk and try and, if I can hear discomfort in your voice, I want to talk you back from the ledge and make you comfortable. That's what I've done my whole career when I'm interviewing people. And they had to be like, no, no, no, that silence is gold. You know what I mean?
00:39:22
Speaker
don't step on that silence. Let it play out. The awkwardness is good. And by the time we went to see Doc McGee and then later Klaus Meine, I had learned that lesson. And I think it shows because I do think the awkwardness and the tension is effective.
00:39:42
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it was before that interview and before the Klaus Minor interview where you did express some sort of pre-game time jitters or nerves. And what's funny is, in this piece and you said earlier that you're kind of risk averse, but you've kind of like, through the course of your reporting, you kind of put yourself in these situations where our spy thriller mind would be like,
00:40:09
Speaker
Yeah, Doc McGee is going to close the windows. His team of goons is going to come in after you surface and he's going to take you out and bludgeon you. It's really funny when I was thinking of that, visualizing it. Well, that's great. There's a moment in the final episode where I talked about, at the very end of the show, where I talked about how
00:40:33
Speaker
You know, Henry and I were feeling super spooked, but at the same time, simultaneously, we were feeling really silly for feeling so spooked. And that was the thing I wanted to, that was the sensation I was hoping to bottle with the show. And so to the degree that the listener can vicariously feel any of that, I'm really happy. Like I'm happy to hear you felt that way. Cause that was, that was what I wanted to get across.
00:40:59
Speaker
Right. And through the course of the production of Wind of Change, this is kind of a two parter. In what way did, say, your, you know, your experience as a reporter and a writer kind of inform the podcast and then coming out of the podcast? How is that maybe, I don't know, just rewired you in a certain way that might be bleeding into your writing in a way that you would have never known had you not done Wind of Change?
Influence of Wind of Change on Future Writing
00:41:24
Speaker
Oh, it's interesting. I, you know, I don't know. It certainly my the the podcast was very much a
00:41:33
Speaker
In some ways, it grew naturally out of the work I've done over the years, even though most of that work is somewhat different, particularly tonally. Tonally, it was very different for me. So it was this weird thing where, on the one hand, it was kind of a departure. And for me, it was this fun thing that I did between my book about war crimes in Northern Ireland
00:42:02
Speaker
book about the opioid crisis in the United States. The idea that I got to spend a year
00:42:08
Speaker
you know, interviewing crazy ex-spies and like guys from Skid Row and run around going to rock concerts and just having fun. It was great. It was like, it was just a, I loved it from start to finish. As for how it changes things moving forward, I don't know. I mean, I don't have any immediate plans to make another podcast. I'd like to, but I think I don't want to do one just to do one. So it would really have to be the right
00:42:39
Speaker
the right story. Yeah. And, you know, in terms of my writing, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see if it. If it influences it. I've done something I've done on the side for years and years is screenwriting the end. I realize in the last few years that my screenwriting has actually really affected my the way I write nonfiction. So it'll be kind of interesting to see if something similar happens with podcasting, but nothing discernible so far.
00:43:09
Speaker
In what way is the screenwriting influence your narrative writing?
00:43:15
Speaker
mostly in terms of edits, like when you get into a scene and when you get out of it and then juxtaposing scenes. I mean, it's mostly about kind of bringing in some new piece of information at the end of a scene. And then I think the natural tendency would be to unpack it and explain it. But in the language of screenwriting, right? It's like, I'll cut away.
00:43:41
Speaker
cut away to something else. Knowing that I've just gotten your attention because you want to know about whatever this thing is that I've just dangled and that then buys me time to tell you about something else for five pages in the hopes that you'll stick around because you want to see what's going to happen with that thing. It's sort of the oldest trick in the book in terms of
00:44:08
Speaker
you know, movie edits. And it's one that I find, it kind of snuck into my writing before I consciously realized where it had come from. And I like to, at the beginning of Wind of Change, how you essentially narrate how a through line of your stories is secrets and secret worlds and uncovering things I'm not supposed to know in a conviction, as you go on to say, that the real story lies in whatever room we're locked out of.
Intrigue with Secret Worlds
00:44:37
Speaker
So where does that come from? Of course, we're all intrigued by secrets, but I think with you, you take it another step further because you're pursuing such stories that are just so gripping. I have no idea. I don't know. And I think the really strange thing is in that little speech at the beginning of Wind of Change,
00:45:00
Speaker
It was only retrospectively where I was forced. I'd been asked a handful of times, you know, what, what's the through line here? Like, how do you connect all these random stories? And that was the best thread that I could come up with. It's not like there's some formative childhood experience of some, some locked room or whatever. Uh, and it's definitely not that, um, I have any kind of a formula for.
00:45:28
Speaker
what seems worth pursuing, it's all in the gut. It's all just this sense of, oh yeah, that feels like something I want to explore. But I don't know. Honestly, I have no idea. Some of it is probably a slightly juvenile sense that the thing you tell me I'm not supposed to know is immediately going to become the thing I want to know.
00:45:54
Speaker
And I love how you, I think you tie it up really nicely at the end, of course, because we know, spoiler alert, we don't really know in the end, though you can surmise that it's something that the CIA could have cooked up. But at the end, it's this nice thing after you talk with Klaus Meiner in Hanover, and he's at the bar, and he's just talking with a local there, and you don't approach him again.
00:46:20
Speaker
but you start to think that maybe that seed that you had you would plant it a seed in his head that maybe this had happened or maybe he knew all along and then you end this thing of just saying like you know what if and I think it just I think it's just like the perfect little grace note that that maybe Klaus is thinking about it and of course we're thinking about it so that was just a great piece of writing and of course you know performative reading that you leave that hanging and it just feels really satisfying even though the mystery goes unsolved
00:46:50
Speaker
Oh, I'm glad to hear you say so. Yeah, I mean, it was a, you know, as you can imagine. So we didn't know how this we didn't know what class is gonna do. We didn't know, you know, we honestly we thought that this could have ended with class minor like flipping over the table and like shrieking, you know, go fuck yourself and walking out, right?
00:47:09
Speaker
Um, I was pretty certain it wouldn't end with him being like, you know, you got me like finally like the truth has caught up with me. Um, but we just didn't know and so he
00:47:24
Speaker
For my purposes, short of a full confession, it was the perfect ending because he was so great and willing to go through the whole thing, but also he was so enigmatic. So in a weird way, if you wanted to preserve the ambiguity,
00:47:41
Speaker
I mean, it's just hilarious because I've had so many people get in touch with me. I've had tons and tons of people get in touch with me and say like, you know, when I got to the last episode, I listened to Class Minor talking and it was plainly obvious to me that like the CIA had nothing to do with this song and he's just totally confused. And this whole thing has been a wild goose chase. And then I've had so many people get in touch and be like, like,
00:48:01
Speaker
Klaus is totally in on it. It's so obvious and pointing to particular moments and it's a kind of perfect Rorschach where different people hear different things. And so from a purely narrative point of view, he was very obliging.
00:48:20
Speaker
And as we bring this airliner down for a landing, Patrick, I'd love to ask you this little thing's kind of a goofy way of asking what's really influential books for people. I always call it the sort of bookshelf for the apocalypse. A few books that you just keep in your knapsack that are taking the place of some canned goods that could very well nourish you, but these things nourish you in a different way. And I was wondering maybe what some of those books are and then maybe why they're so important to you.
00:48:45
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, it's funny. You mentioned that you would ask me this and I thought about it and I kind of surprised myself because they're mostly novels and I don't read nearly as much fiction as I used to. Um, I used to read a lot more. I still do read fiction, but not, not as much as I used to. And so strangely, they're mostly novels from a time when novels just had a huge impact on me.
00:49:06
Speaker
And so the ones that I, you know, the ones that I often go back to and think about, so they're, I mean, probably Virginia Woolf, probably to the Lighthouse, which I read in college, but was one of those books that just kind of, just sort of changed the way I saw the world and saw writing.
00:49:20
Speaker
And then a bunch of like, um, I mean, another one again from that sort of same era, but a book that I revisit, well, I mean, it's a bunch of Nabokov. I read a ton of Nabokov in college and the, um, I mean, I don't know if it'd be pale fire or panine, um, would probably be my favorites. And then weirdly a,
00:49:39
Speaker
A genre book that I read my first year of law school, that again just kind of changed the way I thought about writing, was Presumed Innocent by Scott Toreau. Kind of like a legal thriller, but I think of a very high literary order. I thought it was fantastic. And I go back to that one a lot. Another one that sort of fits in that
00:50:02
Speaker
that wheelhouse should be The Secret History by Donna Tartt, which I also go back to a lot. And then the last, I think to round it out, one of my favorite novels ever. And I got to know the person who wrote it later, which was wild. But Helen DeWitt's book, The Last Samurai, which I read, I was living in England in grad school and I read that book and it was just
00:50:28
Speaker
You know, I mean, I think as with those others, it's those moments, the books that really register with me are the ones that are both kind of completely absorbing on a
00:50:38
Speaker
page by page basis but also just sort of just kind of change your sense of what a book can do. Isn't that kind of why sometimes we kind of get into this racket too because you read those books and they do something to you, rewire your brain and make you just think of things differently and entertain you in such a way and then you know if you dare to have sort of that audacity of spirit if you will to step into that arena
00:51:04
Speaker
that maybe if you're humming at full capacity, maybe you can have a similar effect on somebody else. I mean, yeah, I think so. I think the thing that was really strange for me when I thought about it is that I wouldn't, is that I, you know, truly, if it's like the desert island thing, like I wouldn't bring Robert Caro or, you know, I mean, like the sort of, I mean, there's any number of great nonfiction books that mean a lot to me. But yeah, I think it's and it's strange kind of looking back to these
00:51:33
Speaker
formative reading experiences that happened 20 years ago or more. But it is strange to me that the visceral sensation that you have as a reader, I can describe the almost physical reaction to reading The Last Samurai in the year 2000. That to this day is a more vivid
00:51:59
Speaker
reading experience than some terrific book that I read two weeks ago. That's awesome. Well, Patrick, I need to be mindful of your time, of course. I've been just a Titanic fan of your work for a while, and this is such an honor and a thrill to get to speak to you about it and about your approach and everything. For people who might not be familiar with your work or where to find your work, where can they find you online and get more familiar with your work if they aren't already?
00:52:28
Speaker
So probably I have a website which is just PatrickRaddenKief.com and I'm on Twitter at P.RaddenKief. What a voice, right? It's got a great voice.
00:52:48
Speaker
Unbelievable writer and reporter. Thanks so much to Patrick for the time and for you of course for listening and being part of this CNF and community. Don't forget that if you need an editor or a coach to hold you accountable, I can be that guy for you and I would be honored to be that guy. To see things you can't see.
00:53:11
Speaker
Sessions with me include Skype calls, transcripts of those calls, that's cool, detailed critique of the work, email support, and the peace of mind knowing that you've got me in your corner. Email me to start a dialogue, brendan at brendanomerra.com. Dot com.
00:53:30
Speaker
Lately, I've been swollen with dread. I don't know what it is. I've been waking up in the morning and nothing seems possible. I come up with what I think are good ideas and I start to think, well, if it was any good, somebody else would have done it already. Then I get into this frame of mind that success is for other people and that people like me, it's not an option. Been dealing with that.
00:53:57
Speaker
You ever deal with that? It's a crummy place to be, let me tell you. I don't know what to do. Maybe try to journal the shit out of it. Maybe it'll die on the vine. I don't know. But I got to thinking this week, too, about cookbook authors. And this is that thing I was talking about earlier at the top of the show about cookbook mentality. And what are cookbook authors and chefs doing? What are all the famous chefs doing? They're giving away recipes.
00:54:22
Speaker
They are telling you how to cook like them, even putting down the stuff they make in their restaurants. On their menus, sometimes it is right in those cookbooks. They're not worried about secrets. They're giving the secrets away and saying, here, I made this for you to try. And with a little rigor and some technique and some good little kitchen gadgets, whatever.
00:54:46
Speaker
You can have it at home, too. It's something I've taken the calling, like I said earlier, a cookbook mentality, which is to say, be generous, don't hold back, don't hoard secrets or techniques. If something works really well for you, share it. Why not? Other people can substitute different ingredients for what they want, you know? Swap something out, see what works.
00:55:08
Speaker
But having a cookbook mentality is the mindset I think we should all strive for. I have nothing to really offer you at the moment. You think I would be like, all right, you know, here's this thing. Why don't I offer you something? But I don't know. I don't have anything to share that I haven't already shared. Figured I'd at least share this sentiment. That's something.
00:55:29
Speaker
But you know what else is kind of sad? We'll end this show on a real bummer, okay? I just realized, I haven't written a feature in over a year. Makes me think that if you can do interview, see ya.
00:56:20
Speaker
you